EV E RY BOD Y'S PR O TEST NOVEL
583
The Best Years of Our Lives
or the works of Mr. James M. Cain are
fantasies. Beneath the dazzling pyrotechnics of these current operas
one may still discern, as the controlling force, the intense theological
preoccupations of Mrs. Stowe, the sick vacuities of
The Rover Boys.
Finally, the aim of the protest novel becomes something very closely
resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover
the nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of
Jesus and thence into slavery. The aim has now become to reduce
all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy
named Joe.
It is the peculiar triumph of society- and its loss- that it is able
to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the
reality of this decree; it has the force and the weapons to translate
its dictum into fact, so that the allegedly inferior are actually made
so, insofar as the societal realities are concerned. This is a more hid–
den phenomenon now than it was in the days of serfdom, but it is
no less implacable. Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first with–
out, then within, by the nature of our categorization. And escape is
not effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as though
this very striving were the only motion needed to spring the trap upon
us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of real–
ity bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our
dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. Society
is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth,
coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void,
within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foun–
dations of society are hidden. From this void-ourselves-it is the
function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown
selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save
us-"from the evil that is in the world." With the same motion, at
the same time, it is this toward which we endlessly struggle and from
which, endlessly, we struggle to escape.
It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor
are bound together within the same society; they accept the same
criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the
same reality. Within this cage it is romantic, more, meaningless, to
speak of a "new" society as the desire of the oppressed, for that shiv–
ering dependence on the props of reality which he shares with the
