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PARTISAN REVIEW
almost forget that the ordinary is often not complex and extreme but
just flatly ordinary.
The poeticization of fiction has undoubtedly been influenced by
the modem poetic renaissance of the recent past and its learned and
persuasive critics. It may also be a result of more general forces of cul–
tural sophistication and of the ironic rhetorical complexity of certain
humanistic
(not
naturalistic) European novelists. Is the elaborate styli–
zation of what was once presented more simply and directly, organic?
Perhaps style in many of these works is not, despite the novelist's de–
sires, so much a reflection of personality as of intellectuality. And is
sophisticated intelligence, and the loss of more primitive vitality, one
of the causes of that peculiarly conservative dialectic that comes out of
even the most rebellious and romantic of these novelists? But however
much intelligence is self-consciously at work in contemporary poetic na–
turalism, the art still centers on that traditional American faith in which
harsh actuality is given lyric exaltation as the most meaningful and
ultimate knowledge. Perhaps, given the nihilistic force of the Ameri–
can scene, it cannot be otherwise.
