POST-MODERN FICTION
429
where you stood: the peasants read the Bible; the maniacs read
Mein
Kampf.
Now people no longer have any opinions; they have refrigera–
tors. Instead of illusions we have television, instead of tradition, the
Volkswagon. The only way to catch the spirit of the times is to write
a handbook on home appliances.
Taken literally, this is close to absurd; taken as half-comic hyperbole,
it reaches a genuine problem.
The problem, in part, is the relationship between the writer and
his materials. Some years ago Van Wyck Brooks had spoken of the
conflict between the life of the spirit and the life of commerce, and
had called upon American writers to make their choice. Most of
them did. Almost every important writer in twentieth century Amer–
ica, whether or not he read Brooks, implicitly accepted his statement
as the truth and chose, with whatever lapses or qualifications, to speak
for the life of the Spirit.
But was the conflict between spirit and commerce, between cul–
ture and society still so acute during the postwar years? Was not a
continued belief in this conflict a stale and profitless hangover from
the ideologies of the Thirties? Might there not be ground for feeling,
among the visible signs of our careless postwar prosperity, that a
new and more moderate vision of society should inform the work
of our novelists? It hardly matters which answers individual writers
gave to these questions; the mere fact that they were now being seri–
ously raised had a profound impact upon their work.
Those few who favored a bluntly "positive" approach to Ameri–
can society found it hard to embody their sentiments in vibrant-or
even credible-fictional situations. The values of accommodation
were there for the asking, but they seemed, perversely, to resist crea–
tive use. For almost two decades now there has been an outpouring
of "affirmative" novels about American businessmen-Executive
Suites in various shades; but I do not know of a single serious critic
who finds these books anything but dull and mediocre. At least
in
our time, the novel seems to lend itself irrevocably to the spirit of
criticism; as Camus has remarked, it "is born simultaneously with
the spirit of rebellion and expresses, on the esthetic plane, the same
ambition."
But what has been so remarkable and disconcerting is that those
writers who wished to preserve the spirit of rebellion also found it
extremely hard to realize their sentiments in novels dealing with
