524
PARTISAN REVIEW
speaks of the commonplace, which was the almost obsessive object of
his
literary faith. "The commonplace? Commonplace? The common–
place is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which [the novelists]
have never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who
could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would
have the answer to 'the riddle of the painful earth' on his tongue."
We might go so far as to grant that the passion of this statement
has a kind of intellectual illumination in it which commands our
respect, but we in our time cannot truly respond to it. Weare lovers
of what James calls the rare and strange, and in our literature we
are not responsive to the common, the immediate, the familiar, and
the vulgar elements in life. Or at least we have a most complicated
relation to these elements. In our poetic language we do want
something that has affinity with the common, the immediate, the
familiar, and the vulgar. And we want a certain aspect or degree
of these elements in all our literature- we want them in their ex–
tremity, especially the common and vulgar. We find an interest in
being threatened by them, we like them represented in their ex–
tremity to serve as a sort of outer limit of the possibility of our daily
lives, as a kind of mundane hell. They figure for us in this way
in
Ulysses,
in
The Waste Land,
in Kafka's novels and stories, even
in
Yeats, and they account, I believe, for the interest of comfortable
middle-class readers in James Farrell's
Studs Lonigan.
In short, we
consent to the commonplace .as it verges upon and becomes the rare
and strange. The commonplace of extreme poverty or ultimate bore–
dom may even come to imply the demonic and be valued for that–
let life
be
sufficiently depressing and sufficiently boring in its com–
monplaceness and we shall have been licensed to give up quiet des–
peration and to become desperately fierce. Weare attracted by the
idea of human life in, as it were, putrefaction, in stewing corruption
-we sense the force gathering in the fermentation. But of course
Howells' kind of commonness suggests nothing of this. The early
objection made to his work was that it was drab and depressing, the
point of comparison being fiction of plot and melodramatic incident,
what Howells called the "romantic"; but after a time the objection
was to his tame gentility, the comparison being then with Zola.
Howells admired Zola enormously and fought for his recognition,
but he eventually thought that Zola failed
in
realism and sur-
