424
PARTISAN REVIEW
That Fitzgerald may have known little more than the names of these
spokesmen, that he drew upon their work with only a minimum of
intellectual awareness, serves merely to confirm my point. The ra–
pidity with which such criticism was accumulated during the nine–
teenth century, whether by Marx or Carlyle, Nietzsche or Mill, en–
abled the modem novelists to feel they did not need to repeat the
work of Flaubert and Dickens, Balzac and Zola: they could go
beyond them.
Between radical and conservative writers, as between both of
these and the bulk of non-political ones, there were many bonds of
shared feeling-a kinship they themselves were often unable to no–
tice but which hindsight permits us to see. The sense of the banality
of middle class existence, of its sensuous and spiritual meanness, is
quite the same among the conservative as the radical writers, and
their ideas about the costs and possibilities of rising in the bourgeois
world are not so very different either.
If
one compares two American novelists so different in formal
opinion, social background and literary method as Theodore Dreiser
and Edith Wharton, it becomes clear that in such works as
Sister
Carrie
and
The House of Mirth
both are relying upon the same
crucial assumption: that values, whether traditional or modernist,
desirable or false, can be tested in a novel by dramatizing the rela–
tionships between mobile characters and fixed social groups. Neither
writer felt .any need to question, neither would so much as think
to question, the presence or impact of these social groups as they
formed part of the examined structure of class society.
In
both
novels "the heart of fools is in the house of mirth," the heartbreak
house of the modem city; and as Carrie Meeber and Lily Bart make
their way up and down the social hierarchy, their stories take on
enormous weights of implication because we are ready to assume
some
relationship--surely not the one officially proclaimed by society,
nor a mere inversion of it, but still some complex and significant re–
lationship--between the observed scale of social place and the evolv–
ing measure of moral value.
It
is this assumption that has been a
major resource of modem novelists; for without some such assumption
there could not occur the symbolic compression of incident, the
readiness to assume that
X
stands for
Y,
which is a prerequisite for
the very existence of the novel.
