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PARTISAN REVIEW
certain assumptions concerning modern society, which have long
provided novelists with symbolic economies and dramatic conven–
iences, are no longer quite so available as they were a few decades
ago. To say this
is
not to assert that we no longer have recognizable
social classes in the United States, or that distinctions in manners
have ceased to be significant. It
is
to suggest that the modern theories
about society-theories which for novelists have usually been present
as tacit assumptions--have partly broken down; and that this pre–
sents a great many new difficulties for the younger writers. New
difficulties, which
is
also to say: new possibilities.
III
In the last two decades there has occurred a series of changes
in American life, the extent, durability and significance of which no
one has yet measured. No one can. We speak of the growth of a
"mass society," a term I shall try to define in a moment; but at
best this is merely a useful hypothesis, not an accredited description.
It is a notion that lacks common consent, for it does not yet merit
common consent. Still, one can say with some assurance that the
more sensitive among the younger writers, those who feel that at
whatever peril to their work and careers they must grapple with
something new in contemporary experience, even if, like everyone
else, they find it extremely hard to say what that "newness" consists
of-such writers recognize that the once familiar social categories and
place-marks have now become as uncertain and elusive as the moral
imperatives of the nineteenth century seemed to novelists of fifty years
ago. And the something new which they notice or stumble against
is, I would suggest, the mass society.
By the mass society we mean a relatively comfortable, half wel–
fare and half garrison society in which the population grows passive,
indifferent and atomized; in which traditional loyalties, ties and as–
sociations become lax or dissolve entirely; in which coherent publics
based on definite interests and opinions gradually fall apart; and in
which man becomes a consumer, himself mass-produced like the
products, diversions and values that he absorbs.
No social scientist has yet come up with a theory of mass so–
ciety that is entirely satisfying; no novelist has quite captured its still
amorphous symptoms--a peculiar blend of frenzy and sluggishness,
