POST-MODERN FICTION
423
swers to the question, "How do we live?"-a consensus not so much
in explicit opinion as in a widely shared feeling about Western society.
Indeed, the turn from the realistic social novel among many of
the modern writers would have been most unlikely had there not
been available such a similarity of response to the familiar social
world. At least some of the novelists who abandoned realism seem
to have felt that modern society had been exhaustively, perhaps even
excessively portrayed (so D.H. Lawrence suggests
in
one of his let–
ters) and that the task of the novelist was now to explore a chaotic
multiplicity of meanings rather than to continue representing the
surfaces of common experience.
No matter what their social bias, and regardless of whether they
were aware of having any, the modern novelists tended to assume that
the social relations of men in the world of capitalism were established,
familiar, knowable.
If
Joyce could write of Stephen Dedalus that
"his destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders," that was
partly because he knew and supposed his readers to know what
these orders were.
If
Lawrence in his later works could write a new
kind of novel that paid as little attention to the external phenomena
of the social world as to the fixed conventions of novelistic "char–
acter," that was partly because he had already registered both of
these-the social world and the recognizable solid characters-in
Sons and Lovers.
The observations of class relationships in the earlier
novels are not discarded by Lawrence in the later ones; they are
tacitly absorbed to become a basis for a new mode of vision.
Values, as everyone now laments, were in flux; but society, it
might be remembered, was still there: hard, tangible, ruled by a
calculus of gain. One might not know what to make of this world,
but at least one knew what was happening in it. Every criticism that
novelists might direct against society had behind it enormous pres–
sures of evidence, enormous accumulations of sentiment; and this,
one might remark to those literary people who bemoan the absence
of "tradition," this is the tradition that has been available to and
has so enriched modern fiction. A novelist like F. Scott Fitzgerald,
whose gifts for conceptual thought were rather meager, could draw
to great advantage upon the social criticism that for over a century
had preceded him, the whole lengthy and bitter assault upon bour–
geois norms that had been launched by the spokesmen for culture.
