POETIC NATURALISM
0471
While these statements apply primarily to
The Man Who Was
Not With It,
I believe that this novel is more representative than not,
and that there is an analogous dialectic in many of the poetic-naturalist
fictions. A more tricky version of the same views can be found in that
novel still much favored by sensitive undergraduates, Salinger's
Catcher
in the Rye.
Here the sensitive adolescent, like most contemporary heroes,
sees through all the "phonies" that run society and make the surface
values. (He also insists on his own awareness-as do our authors-by
a mannered colloquialism, obscenity and roughness which distinguishes
his from the polished ways of the phonies.), But the sensitive hero also
finds that his difference and rebellion lead to madness and sickness,
which, all the modern sages assure him, is neither mature nor practical.
Besides, things are so very complicated these days.... So the hero goes
back to what he was doing (Salinger's hero is young enough so that his
yearnings can be left muddied and his rebellion won't have any im–
practical consequences, though many of the problems posed to his
awareness are beyond youth and such an easy lack of consequences–
thus the basic double-play of precocity). That he is doing what every–
one else is doing, however, is not to be seen as the ordinariness of the
hero; he isn't really ordinary because of his memory and knowledge of
extremity as a secret badge of his sensitive uniqueness. Or, as the whole
child-cult of sensitivity suggests, none of the ordinary are really ordinary
because naked awareness shows the ordinary as fantastically unique,
though the un-naked pretend that it isn't so.
Thus it may be suggested that what has happened in much of the
American novel is that the materials usually associated with literary
naturalism, and even many of its values of social criticism, moral revul–
sion and rebellion, have become poetically subtilized and stylized. But
one of the main tenets of naturalistic literature, that brute social forces
determine individual destinies, has not really been modified by the
complication of language, form and feeling. Nor is it essentially changed
by ironic self-awareness. While there is certainly nothing wrong in alley
cats becoming literary leopards, nor in a self-conscious artifice of lan–
guage-after all, that is what literature is-the carnivorous actuality
of the ordinary rather than the unique is the essential fact here. Some–
times the choice of poetic artifice, rather than the artifice of straight–
forward clarity, seems to
be
a device to obscure the basic naturalism
which is now in critical disrepute. On the weird assumption that life,
and therefore literature, is more complex-it is simply harder, which
is not at all the same thing-there has developed an elaborate fictional
hyperbole. Confronted with this metaphorization of the mundane, we
