Morris Dickstein
BLACK HUMOR AND HISTORY:
Fiction in the Sixties
It
was axiomatic a few years ago to assert that the electronic
media had entirely displaced the printed word , that young people in
the sixties didn ' t read , let alone write; that all the most talented of
them went into film, or politics , or rock; that those who did write
novels simply turned away from the gaudy carnival of contemporary
life (as Tom Wolfe said in
The New Journalism) ,
"gave up by de–
fault," leaving the way clear for the hip new journalists and rhetori–
cians. According to Wolfe , novelists became "Neo-Fabulists" who
were entranced by myth and parable understandable only to them–
selves and lost interest in reality.
Today the enthusiasts of fiction are far less likely to be on the
defensive, for the creative impulses in the novel have proved more
durable than facile McLuhanite explanations of cultural change. But
there is more than a grain of truth in Tom Wolfe 's simplistic account.
The sixties were a moribund period for the realistic novel, and per–
haps in consequence the commercial market for fiction declined
precipitously. Novelists who did sustain a realist method, such as
Updike , Bellow, and Malamud , were weakest on the topical subjects
where Wolfe 's journalists were strongest-when they dragged in
blacks or hippies , or worried abour the war , or unisex , or the future
of the moon . Yet the journalists themselves, not only Wolfe but
Capote and Mailer, insistently invoked the prestige of the novel to
validate their work, much as the early novelists of the eighteenth
century had coyly rejected the idea of fiction and masked their work
as journals or case histories . The eighteenth-century novelist had to
insist that he was artless ; the sixties journalist had to prove he was an
NOTE: A different and longer version of th is essay will appear as a section of a forthcoming
book,
Gates of Eden: Amen'can Culture in the Sixties,
which Basic Books will publish in the
late fall,
