MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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esque metaphors for certain states of mind , peculiar world-historical
anxieties. Nor is Heller's
Catch-22
really "about" World War II,
though it does contain a good deal of amusing (but marginal) satire
on the McCarthy period (such as the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade and
the scandal of "Who promoted Major Major? Who promoted Major
Major?"); the book's imaginative center is elsewhere.
The imaginative ambitions of these novelists keep them from
any sustained social commentary; they illuminate society less through
their content than through their experiments in form, by which I
mean not simply technique but the pressute of individual vision from
which new technique must flow . Critics who use literature as social
evidence tend to treat its content as documentation, ignoring the
subtle ironies and modifications to which raw life is subjected within
an imaginative work. Instead we should be looking for analogies
between social change and changes in the
forms
of the arts. Form can
be seen as a structure of perception, a deep-seated rhythm of exper–
ience and sensibility, by which the individual work (like the individual
self) partakes of the social whole willy-nilly, without having to allude
to it directly. The conservative form of the novel in the 1950s, which
is reflected in Saul Bellow's comment that "realism is still the great
literary breakthrough," mirrors the conserving and inward-turning
character of the age. Likewise the surge of modernist and experimen–
tal fiction in the early sixties is subtly related to the new feelings of
social malaise and reformist zeal that set in during the late fifties,
gained impetus from the urgent, high-spirited tone of Kennedy's
campaign for the presidency, and burst forth during his administra–
tion with precious little concrete progress to keep it going.
In
those
early years of the sixties there was a scent of change in the air, a sense
of things opening up, of new possibilities. This was not without its
dangerous side, for, by the iron law of rising expectations, forces were
aroused in society that soon overshot their prescribed bounds. The
New Left and the civil rights movement did not develop under
Eisenhower, when things were at their worst, but under Kennedy,
when inchoate promises and possibilities were in the air. And they
died under Nixon , who recreated an atmosphere of utter futility and
himself embodied the vengeful spirit of middle-American backlash
(as
if
the election of 1960 were at last undone, the sixties rolled back) .
To try to relate the social atmosphere of the early sixties to the
