MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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rarely stayed where he was, but leaving home sharpened his
perspective on the world that had formed him, and it brought
him in closer contact with the disruptive forces which would
soon overrun the life he had known.
For many decades the culture of New England was the
equivalent of a national culture. But between the 1880s, with the
weakening of the genteel tradition, and World War II, which
changed America more drastically than the first world war,
America had no national culture: the urban literature of New
York and Chicago were regional literatures which. had no
greater hold on the national imagination than the literature of
the South, of the rural midwest, or of California. Yet a predomi–
nant theme in fiction is the passing of the traditional way of life,
the transition from a premodern to a modern society. This is
beautifully conveyed in the opening pages of
Sister Carrie
in
1900, as the young country mouse arrives in Chicago and, full of
wonder, takes in the lights and the scale of the big city. Needless
to say, the "modern" morality that eventually helps Carrie get by
proved too much for contemporary readers to stomach.
Paradoxically, though the city is the engine and the locus of
change, a regional writer like Faulkner has an advantage the
urban writer lacks. Often the city seems out of control, the
diversity too great, the life too anonymous; unless the writer
deals with a small ethnic or neighborhood enclave he feels
unable to master it, any more than he can master modern life in
general.
Sister Carrie
makes the anonymity of city life part of its
theme, but a lesser writer like Norris in
McTeague
must trans–
pose his characters to the pure allegorical space of Death Valley
to enable them to play out the morality of their fate.
The scale of Yoknapatawpha county gives Faulkner a
microcosm of society as a whole. The pressures transforming
America at large (and the South in particular) are played out
against the background of a traditional way of life, and express
themselves more minutely within an insular and self-contained
world. After the war it becomes more difficult for a writer to find
a part which represents the whole. O'Hara's Gibbsville is still a
microcosm, but pettier and more marginal; Updike's Olinger is
less a kernel of society than a remembered locale, a setting the
