MORRIS DICKSTEIN
195
their feeling for politics , held a profoundly ironic and adversary view
of the historical process. Typically, " progressive" literature is muck–
raking literature : a ferreting out of abuses so that the system can
function according to its original ideals . Sixties literature , on the
contrary , has an anxious, dead-end feeling about history , a paranoid
fear about how it all holds together, a restless bafflement before the
puzzle and complexity of it all. One way this attitude gets expressed
is in the mock-historical novel, such as Barth's
Sot-Weed Factor,
Berger's
Little Big Man ,
and one or two of the historical sections of
Pynchon's
V.,
chapters which read like pure Camp . Rather than
finding a form of their own to express this sense of historical irony,
these books or sections settle for pastiche or anti-novel , for tongue–
in-cheek imitation of an earlier genre , such as the eighteenth-century
picaresque novel, the Wild West novel, or the international spy
novel. Without developing their own sense of history, they merely
parrot or parody the historical sense of the books they attach them–
selves to . Though they are loving recreations , the Barth and Berger
books especially miss the robust spirit of the forms they imitate and
settle for an easy if not dismissive irony. Though highly indicative of
the new feeling for history that followed the private concerns of the
fifties , and full of a kind of imagination alien to the fifties, they are
basically a literature of latecomers to the feast of the muses, what
Barth himself once called a "literature of exhaustion, " of self-con–
sciousness: " novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author
who imitates the role of Author."
In the pages that follow I'd like to look more closely at the work
of Heller, Pynchon , and Vonnegut , and especially at two representa–
tive black-humor novels of the early sixties,
Catch-22
and
The Crying
ofLot
49. These books are neither antiquarian nor excessively literary ;
in a complex way they develop a striking and unusual sense of history
that in the end tells us less about history than about the cultural tone
of the period when they were written. Vonnegut and Heller return to
World War II not for purposes of historical recreation , not simply
because it was their own great formative experience , and certainly not
to provide the vicarious thrills of the conventional war novel. Rather ,
it's because the unsolved moral enigma of that period and that exper–
ience most closely expresses the conundrum of contemporary life
fifteen years later . Earlier writers had been able to approach World
