POST-MODERN FICTION
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Beset though they might be by moral uncertainties, the modern
novelists could yet work through to a relative assurance in their
treatment of the social world; and one reason for this assurance was
that by the early years of our century the effort to grasp this world
conceptually was very far advanced. The novelists may not have
been aware of the various theories concerning capitalism, the city
and modern industrial society; it does not matter. These ideas had so
thoroughly penetrated the consciousness of thinking men, and even
the folklore of the masses, that the novelists could count on them
without necessarily being able to specify or elaborate them. In gen–
eral, when critics "find" ideas in novels, they are transposing to a
state of abstraction those assumptions which had become so familiar
to novelists that they were able to seize them as sentiments.
Part of what I have been saying runs counter to the influential
view that writers of prose fiction in America have written romances
and not novels because, in words of Lionel Trilling that echo a more
famous complaint of Henry James, there has been in this country
"no sufficiency of means for the display of a variety of manners, no
opportunity for the novelist to do his job of searching out reality,
not enough complication of appearance to make the job interesting."
I am not sure that this was ever true of American fiction-the en–
counter between Ishmael and Queequeg tells us as much about man–
ners (American manners), and through manners about the moral
condition of humanity, as we are likely to find in a novel by Jane
Austen or Balzac. But even if it is granted that the absence of clear–
cut distinctions of class made it impossible in the nineteenth century to
write novels about American society and encouraged, instead, a spe–
cies of philosophical romance, this surely ceased to be true by about
1880. Since then, at least, there has been "enough complication of
appearance to make the job interesting."
Nor am I saying-what seems to me much more dubious–
that the presumed absence in recent years of a fixed, stratified society
or of what one critic, with enviable naivete, calls "an agreed picture
of the universe" makes it impossible to study closely our social life,
or to develop (outside of the South) human personalities rooted in
a sense of tradition, or to write good novels dealing with social man–
ners and relationships. That all of these things can be done we know,
simply because they have been done. I wish merely to suggest that
