Vol. 44 No. 1 1977 - page 72

72
PARTISAN REVIEW
context Anderson's de-emphasis of technique sounds somehow fresh. The
time seems ripe to look again at the work of those writers whose ideas
Anderson echoes in his own way, those writers whose efforts constitute the
movement for American literary realism .
For three decades realism has been of little critical interest. This is
most obviously so because the work of the realists, with its technical
weakness, its intellectual parochialism, and its failure to anticipate the rich
infusion of European modernism into American literature and life, has
seemed oppressive and oppressed. Dreiser's animal vitality, his undeniable
power, has withstood repeated critical attacks; but the surface of his work
has seemed so mesmeric and so uncomfortably cluttered with the banal stuff
of the popular period stories which he told, that his work has seemed either
above or below our ability to talk about it. His power seems so much the
result of sheer density and bulk that the mass of his material alone is
off-putting. The voice ofMark Twain's Huck has remained alive as a device
which opens again and again some essentially wonderful experience of
American life. But the novel for which Huck is the voice is flawed and
Twain's work as a whole has come
to
seem increasingly unfunny and
fatigued . Howells now enjoys some respect as a serious man who was a
skillful observer and creator of plots, and whose production of over forty
novels and countless articles and reviews constituted the backbone of the
literary life of his time. But, no less problematic than he ever was, Howells
no longer provokes even the antipathy which he was once famous for
arousing. He is taught but not read .
Indeed, with the exclusion ofHenry James, the work ofall the writers,
major and minor, associated with realism, even at its best seems somehow
dull. Their work endures and will endure, but it does so by virtue ofa power
which holds and draws the reader on long after the reader wishes the work
were finished . American realism is muffled by its affirmation of a time–
bound, period piece, self-consciously minimal idea of what is "real," a
notion of reality that seems dreary not simply because it reflects the
subdued color of the lives about which the realists wrote, but dreary because
it indicates a limited conception of the imagination itself.
Yet the realists wrote within imaginative structures because they were
involved in an effort to overcome the attitude toward art which they found
prevalent in turn-of-the-century America. In his own time Henry James
best understood this cultural attitude . He saw that for the common reader
fiction was to be either "instructive" or "amusing": the former meant
didactic, the latter frivolous, and neither left room for the free play of
serious art . In his essay "The Art of Fiction" he wrote that '''Art,' in our
Protestant communities, where so many things have got so strangely
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