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PAR TIS A N REV lEW
10) The pressure of material need visibly decreases, yet there follows
neither a sense of social release nor a feeling of personal joy; instead,
people become increasingly aware of their social dependence and
powerlessness.
Now this is a social cartoon and not a description of American
society; but it is a cartoon that isolates an aspect of our experience
with a suggestiveness that no other mode of analysis is likely to
match. Nor does it matter that no actual society may ever reach
the extreme condition of a "pure" mass society; the value of the
theory lies in bringing to our attention a major historical drift.
If
there is any truth at all in these speculations, they should
help illuminate the problems faced by the novelists whose work be–
gan to appear shortly after the Second World War. They had to
confront not merely the chronic confusion of values which has gripped
our civilization for decades. In a sense they were quite prepared for
that-the whole of modern literature taught them to expect little
else. But they had also to face a problem which, in actually com–
posing a novel, must have been still more troublesome: our society
no longer lent itself to assured definition, one could no longer as–
sume as quickly as in the recent past that a spiritual or moral dif–
ficulty could find a precise embodiment in a social conflict. Raskol–
nikov, fellowship in hand, might still be troubled by the metaphysical
question of what a human being can allow himself; but Raskolnikov
as a graduate student with an anxious young wife and a two-year–
old baby-what was the novelist to make of him? Something fresh
and valuable, no doubt; but only if he were aware that this new
Raskolnikov had to be seen in ways significantly different from those
of the traditional modern novelists.
How to give shape to a world increasingly shapeless and an
experience increasingly fluid; how to reclaim the central assumption
of the novel that telling relationships can be discovered between
a style of social behavior and a code of moral judgment, or if that
proves impossible, to find ways of imaginatively projecting the code
in its own right-these were the difficulties that faced the young
novelists. It was as if the guidelines of both our social thought and
literary conventions were being erased. Or as a young German writer
has recently remarked:
There's no longer a society to write about. In former years you knew
