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STEVEN
MARCUS
to the spirit of the society ostensibly being protected seems likely.
However we regard the Cold War, there should be little need
to buck ourselves up with pride in it. Since the effect of the Cold
War has been to syphon off a considerable amount of critical intel–
ligence for the struggle against Communism and in defense of our
own system, then there should be little wonder over the failure of
criticism to produce, in Arnold's phrase, "a current of ideas in the
highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power."
And there should be equally little wonder over the present state of
the novel. American novelists, unfortunately, cannot be expected to
write novels which are critical of the Soviet Union. Rastignac looks
down on his own Paris-not a foreign capital-and says, "It's war
between us now" and then descends to conquer those corrupt splen–
dors which are in turn to destroy him. And the dilemma of 1984 was
that it
had
to be about England. For the novelist's quarrel is by its
nature with his own society, as is the critic's- and their function, like
that of all frustrated lovers, is to prosecute that quarrel. When that
quarrel is, for whatever reason, suspended, diverted, or thwarted,
there will inevitably follow, to use the words of a great American
critic, the failure of
distinction~
the failure of style, the failure of
knowledge, the failure of thought.
It is certainly true that the current state of the novel and of
critical thinking originate in conditions which long antedate the last
fifteen ur twenty years; the history of their distress is depressingly
rich and complex. The Cold War has in all probability served mainly
to intensify and accelerate earlier tendencies, a development which
might not in any event have been stopped. Nor am I saying that the
contemporary situation is monolithic; my effort has been to describe
a certain general tone and tendency. Seen from the inside any culture
is apt to resemble gang-warfare, and as far as ours is concerned it is
becoming apparent that the uneasy truce of the last fifteen years is
in the process of suffering minor violations.
At one point, however, the Cold War has acted upon the novel
directly. To put it simply, the Cold War is cold, it freezes things
up, it fixes them in place. In particular it tends to freeze ideas, and
(witness the work of David Riesman and Norman O. Brown) one
of the ideas it has stopped dead in its tracks is the idea of the future.
Under the conditions of the Cold War we perforce think of the
