650
HAROLD ROSENBER6
objective time. Following the theories of Bergson and the great
experimental novel of Proust, these novelists tried to treat time
in
a personal way. What remains today of these extraordinary at–
tempts? The drab technique of the flashback. It is typical of the
modern British novel's ossification that
all
these attempts to find
a more truthful treatment of time have been left without a
sequence."
America in its businesslike moods disregards the problems of
form altogether; when it wants to "get the facts," it turns to eye–
witness reporting and to the social sciences; the daily and weekly
press and studies like
Middletown
or
The Organization Man
give Americans a strong, even bitter, sense of being in touch with
the real thing. Actually, of course, news .and surveys contend
with fact in accordance with forms of their own.
The effort toward fact is the most intense problem of
American literature today. "Nothing, I submit," testifies a writer
in answer to a question on the special needs of writing today,
"nothing is more difficult than deciphering what the citizens of
this time and place actually feel and think. They do not know
themselves; when they talk, they talk to the psychiatrist; on the
theory, presumably, that the truth about them is ultimately un–
~peakable.
. . . The writer trapped among a speechless people
is
in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has
IlQ
mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; .and this means
that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him."
It is interesting that the author then draws the currently
popular conclusion regarding artistic spontaneity. "What the
times demand," he goes on, "and in an unprecedented fashion,
is
that one be-not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical,
That one be thoroughly disciplined-as a means of being spon–
t~meous.
That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures
placed on one to lie about one's own experience. For in the same
way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he
has never been needed more."
How will being outrageous, anarchical, disciplined andspon-
