POST-MODERN FICTION
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Field of Vision
Wright Morris moves not backward in time but side–
ways in space: he contrives to bring a dreary Nebraskan middle-class
family to a Mexican bull-fight so that the excitement of the blood
and ritual will stir it to self-awareness. And while, on the face of it,
Saul Bellow's
The Adventures of Augie March
is a picaresque tale
about a cocky Jewish boy moving almost magically past the barriers
in American society, it is also a kind of paean to the idea of per–
sonal freedom in hostile circumstances. Bellow's most recent novel
Henderson the Rain King
seems an even wilder tale about an
American millionaire venturing into deepest Mrica, in part, the
deepest Mrica of boy's books; but when he writes that men need
a shattering experience to "wake the spirit's sleep" we soon realize
that his ultimate reference is to America, where many spirits sleep.
Though vastly different in quality, these novels have in common
a certain obliqueness of approach. They do not represent directly
the postwar American experience, yet refer to it constantly. They
tell us rather little about the surface tone, the manners, the social
patterns of recent American life, yet are constantly projecting moral
criticisms of its essential quality. They approach that experience on
the sly, yet are colored and shaped by it throughout. And they gain
from it their true subject: the recurrent search-in America, almost
a national obsession- for personal identity and freedom. In their
distance from fixed social categories and their concern with the meta–
physical implications of that distance, these novels constitute what
I would call "post-modem" fiction.
But the theme of personal identity, if it is to take on fictional
substance, needs some kind of placement, a setting in the world of
practical affairs. And it
is
here that the "post-modern" novelists run
into serious troubles: the connection between subject and setting can–
not always
be
made, and the "individual" of their novels, because he
lacks social definition and is sometimes a creature of literary or even
ideological fiat, tends to be not very individualized. Some of the best
postwar novels, like
The Invisible Man
and
The Adventures of
Augie March,
are deeply concerned with the fate of freedom in a
mass society; but the assertiveness of idea and vanity of style which
creep into such books are the result, I think, of willing a subject onto
a novel rather than allowing it to grow out of a sure sense of a
particular moment and place. These novels merit admiration for
defending the uniqueness of man's life, but they suffer from having
