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PARTISAN REVIEW
ciety with forms, requirements, burdens, injustices, duties and pleas–
ures; but that in the space of the novels themselves we can only
find a series of distraught and compulsive motions. The themes of
what I have called "post-modem" fiction are reflected in the San
Francisco writers as caricature and symptom; for if you shun con–
sciousness as if it were a plague, then a predicament may ravage
you but you cannot cope with it.
Where finally does this leave us? In the midst, I hope, of the
promise and confusion of American writing today. No settled ending
is possible here, because the tendencies I have been noticing are still
in flux, still open to many pressures and possibilities. But it may not
be too rash to say that the more serious of the "post-modem" novel–
ists-those who grapple with problems rather than merely betraying
their effects-have begun to envisage that we may be on the thresh–
hold of enormous changes in human history. These changes, merely
glanced by the idea of the "mass society," fill our novelists with a
5ense of foreboding; and through the strategy of obliqueness, they
bring to bear a barrage of moral criticisms, reminders of human
p0-
tentiality, and tacit exhortations.
The possibilities that appear to them are those which struck
at T.E. Lawrence when he returned from Arabia and discovered that
he did not know how or why to live. One such possibility is that we
are moving toward a quiet desert of moderation where men will
forget the passion of moral and spiritual restlessness that has charac–
terized Western society. That the human creature, no longer a
Quixote or a Faust, will become a docile attendent to an automated
civilization. That the "aura of the human" will be replaced by the
nihilism of satiety. That the main question will no longer be the con–
ditions of existence but existence itself. That high culture as we
understand it will become increasingly problematical and perhaps
reach some point of obsolescence.
But before such prospects-they form the bad dreams of thought–
ful men, the nightmares our "post-modern" novelists are trying to
exorcise-the mind grows dizzy and recalcitrant. It begins to solace
itself with rumblings about eternal truths, and like the exacerbated
judge in Faulkner's
The Hamlet,
cries out, "I can't stand no more
... This
case is adjourned!"
