PARTISAN REVIEW
With the single exception of the Civil War, our political struggles
have not had the kind of cultural implications which catch the
imagination, and the extent to which
this
one conflict has engaged
the American mind suggests how profoundly interesting conflicts of
culture may be. (It is possible to say that the Cromwellian revolution
appears in every English novel.) For the rest, the opposition between
rural and urban ideals has always been rather factitious; and despite
a brief attempt to insist on the opposite view, the conflict of capital
and labor is at present a contest for the possession of the goods
of a single way of life, and not a cultural struggle. Our most fervent
interest in manners has been linguistic, and our pleasure in drawing
distinctions between a presumably normative way of speech and an
"accent" or a "dialect" may suggest how simple is our national no–
tion of social difference.* A..nd of recent years, although we grow
more passionately desirous of status and are haunted by the ghost
of every status-conferring ideal, we more and more incline to show
our status-lust not by affirming but by denying the reality of social
difference.
I think that if American novels of the past, whatever their
merits of intensity and beauty, have given us very few substantial or
memorable people, this is because one of the things which makes
for substantiality of character in the novel is precisely the notation
of manners-that is to say, of class traits modified by personality.
It is impossible to imagine a Silas Wegg or a Smerdyakov or a
Felicite of
A Simple Heart
or a Mrs. Proudie without the full docu–
mentation of their behavior in relation to their own class and to
*
Lately our official egalitarianism has barred the exploitation of this in–
terest by our official arts, the movies and the radio; there may be some social
wisdom in this, yet it ignores the fact that at least certain forms and tones of
the mockery of their speech habits are a means by which "extraneous" groups
are accepted. - Mention of this naturally leads to the question of whether the
American attitude toward "minority" groups, particularly Negroes and Jews, is
not the equivalent of class differentiation. I think it is not, except in a highly
modified way. And for the purposes of the novel it is not the same thing at all,
for two reasons: 1. it involves no real cultural struggle, no significant conflict
of ideals, for the excluded group has the same notion of life and the same
aspirations as the excluding group, although the novelist who attempts the
subject naturally uses the tactic of showing that the excluded group has a dif–
ferent and better ethos; 2. it is impossible to suppose that the novelist who
chooses this particular subject will be able to muster the satirical ambivalence
toward both groups which marks the good novel even when it has a social
parti pris.
1276
