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PARTISAN REVIEW
interracial marriage can be as crucifying as the public hanging or
the secret rape. This panic motivates our cruelty, this fear of the dark
makes it impossible that our lives shall be other than superficial; this,
interlocked with and feeding our glittering, mechanical, inescapable
civilization which has put to death our freedom.
This, notwithstanding that the avowed aim of the American
protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. They are
forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence
they do to language, whatever excessive demands they make of cred–
ibility.
It
is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to
approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written
and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of
society coming before niceties of style or characterization. Even
if
this were incontestable-for what exactly is the "good" of society?–
it argues an insuperable confusion, since literature and sociology are
not one and the same; it is impossible to discuss them as if they were.
Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led
to an unforseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a break-down of
meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control
the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we
whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions. The "protest" novel,
so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of
the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so
necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent,
titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it
is
safely en–
sconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with
anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from
the fact that we are reading such a book at all. This report from the
pit reassures us of its reality and its darkness and of our own salvation;
and
"As
long as such books are being published," an American liberal
once said to me, "everything will be all right."
But unless one's ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed,
hard-working ciphers, one can hardly claim for the protest novel the
lofty purpose it claims for itself or share the present optimism con–
cerning them. They emerge for what they are: a mirror of our con–
fusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison
of the American dream. They are fantasies, connecting nowhere with
reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as
