422
PARTISAN REVIEW
in
what I am tempted to call the unimproved version of
Crime
and Punishment.
From which it will not be concluded, I hope, that a drop in our
standard of living is needed
in
order to provide novelists with ex–
treme or vivid situations. I am merely trying to suggest that in read–
ing contemporary fiction one sometimes feels that the writers find
themselves in situations like the one I have here fancied for Dos–
toevsky.
II
Let us assume for a moment that we have reached the end of
one of those recurrent periods of cultural unrest, innovation and ex–
citement that we call "modern." Whether we really have no one
can say with assurance, and there are strong arguments to be mar–
shalled against such a claim. But if one wishes to reflect upon some–
the interesting minority-of the novels written in America during
the past 15 years, there is a decided advantage in regarding them as
"post-modern," significantly different from the kind of writing we
usually call modern. Doing this helps one to notice the distinctive
qualities of recent novels: what makes them new. It tunes the ear
to their distinctive failures . And it lures one into patience and charity.
That modern novelists-those, say, who began writing after the
early work of Henry James-have been committed to a peculiarly
anxious and persistent search for values, everyone knows. By now this
search for values has become not only a familiar but an expected
element in modern fiction; that is, a tradition has been established
in which it conspicuously figures, and readers have come, somewhat
unhistorically, to regard it as a necessary component of the novel.
It
has been a major cause for that reaching, sometimes a straining
toward moral surprise, for that inclination to transform the art of
narrative into an act of cognitive discovery, which sets modern fic–
tion apart from a large number of 18th and even 19th century novels.
Not so frequently noticed, however, is the fact that long after
the modern novelist had come to suspect and even assault traditional
values there was still available to him-I would say, until about the
Second World War-a cluster of stable assumptions as to the nature
of our society.
If
the question, "How shall we live?" agitated the
novelists without rest, there was a remarkable consensus in their an-
