William Barrett
AMERICAN FICTION AND
AMERICAN VALUES
Suppose we approach the literary production in America
during the last decade in a thoroughly American spirit. As Americans
we know that the problem of production involves such factors as labor,
capital investment, energy, brains and the mastery of technique, and
that success in production is nothing but the product of all these quan–
tities together.
If
we carry through this kind of calculation for our
literary enterprise, we should be startled to think that America is not
now producing the greatest body of literature in the history of the
human race. Certainly, there are now more typewriters tapping, more
paper soiled by expectant writers, more brains cudgeled and sweat
poured; more writing courses, writing conferences, writing fellowships,
critical symposia, critical schools and critical organs; more money made,
spent, or lost from writing or matter that resembles writing; than at any
time in the past. Reflect on all these varied details in our pursuit, aid,
and abetment of literature; realize thus that We Americans expend
more energy
in
the production of literary works than did Periclean
Greece, Elizabethan England, or nineteenth-century Russia; and then
reflect that within these past ten years America has not produced an
Oedipus,
a
Hamlet,
or a
Brothers Karamazov.
This must be a very
painful and embarrassing situation to all Americans whose patriotism
is not self-deception, and it calls for a serious effort at explanation.
There are probably many reasons for
this
literary failure. Some of
these we have been discussing for a long time, almost
ad nauseam:
the position of the writer
in
American society, the newness of our cul–
ture and its lack of tradition, the morass of mass culture, and all the
other sad and true things that the reader of this magazine must be
tired of hearing by this time. It
is
time we moved on to something
deeper. No doubt, one fact
to
balance our literary bookkeeping above
is that not all this prodigious quantity of energy currently expended in
America is directed toward the real thing. Our mass media consume
millions of words daily, which nobody but a few misguided hacks
would
think
of preserving in books. This distinction between writing and
