42
LESLIE FIEDLER
Europe already committed to the novel as the prevailing modem
fonn. Not only in the United States, though pre-eminently there,
literature has become for most readers quite simply prose fiction;
and our endemic fantasy of writing "the Great American Novel"
is only a local instance of a more general obsession. The notions
of greatness once associa,ted with the heroic
poem
have
been
transferred to the novel; and the shift is a part of that
"Ameri–
canization of culture" which some European intellectuals con–
tinue ritually to deplore.
But is there, as certain continental critics have insisted, an
"American novel," a specific sub-variety of the fonn?
If
we tum
to these critics for a, definition, we come on such terms as "neo–
realist," "hard-boiled," "naive," and "anti-traditional"-tenns
derived from a standard view of America as an "anti-culture,"
an eternally maintained preserve of primitivism.
This
view (no–
toriously exemplified by Andre Gide) ends by finding in Dashiell
Hammett the same values as in William Faulkner, and is more a
symptom of European cultural malaise than a useful critical
dis–
tinction. While America is, in a very real sense, a constantly
re–
created fact of the European imagination, it is not only, or even
pre-eminently, that. It is tempting to insist on the pat rebuttal
that, far from being an anti-culture, we are merely a branch of
Western culture; and that there is no "American novel," only
local v.ariants of standard European kinds of fiction: American
sentimental, American gothic, American historical romance, etc.
Certainly no single sub-genre of the novel was invented in the
United States. Yet the peculiarities of our variants seem more
interesting and important than their resemblances to the parent
forms.
There is a real sense in which our prose fiction is
immedi–
ately distinguishable from that of Europe, though this is a fact
that is difficult for Americans (oddly defensive and flustered in
its presence) to confess. In this sense, our novels seem not primi-
