352
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
III
a sentence--so
I
can get on with the story, but more important,
with my life.
I
have only so much time to read;
I
work eight hours
a day, teach one night a week, and have to paint, play husband, enter–
tain myself, etc. the rest of the time."
Thus along with speed we have a changed sense of the value of
time--one obviously relates
to
the other-as a second clue to the
datedness of our fiction. Painters seem to have felt this before other
artists; one line now suffices for the delineation of a form where once
there would be much detail, etc. But as significant as our changed
time-sense and its effect on our sensibilities, in accounting for the
tediousness of fiction, is another factor: the unprecedented variety
of our mental lives. "My mind is like a kaleidoscope," one writer said
to me--and then he went home and tried to write a more or less
traditional story. No wonder it bored him and everyone else who
read it.
Let us publicly acknowledge what we have all experienced: our
minds are fantastically active, and speculate as a matter of course
about things that are without precedent. The extent, pace and
"strangeness" of our daily thoughts-the mind examining and specula–
ting about itself, for example--ranges far beyond what is recorded
in past literature.
Now it stands to reason that a fiction which doesn't imagina–
tively project a variety, speed and awareness compatible with our
mental life is going to be regarded as academic by us. Our imagina–
tions, both as individuals and artists, build on the materials at hand:
the fantasies that people nowadays take to psychoanalysts have to
be
incorporated in our fiction, literally or by tone, to give that fiction
a relevance to our mental lives. Do not think that by this
I
mean
the Kafka-type fantasy, "modern" as that is compared to the antique
fiction we have been getting. The materials of contemporary American
life are what our minds play with and it is out of that tension that
an enormously pertinent and exciting fiction can be built.
We can take a hint of the kind of fiction we could have from
the recent probers into so-called popular culture in America. Here
is a "new" kind of criticism which appeals to our minds because it
joins the kinaesthetically exciting physical environment of our waking
lives to our complex and keenly felt variety of ideas. We have read
this kind of criticism with an eagerness and
participation
that we used
to get from reading new American fiction. This is because it has an
immediate pertinence to our lives: it lifts the mass culture to our
own level by seeing it with our entire arsenal of new ideas. Thus the
