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PARTISAN REVIEW
In any event , the modernist heritage as well as that of the
avantgarde has been to downgrade the importance of the subject and
to elevate literary experiment and the depiction of states of mind . It
is true that Mann, Kafka , Proust, even Joyce, were not without a
subject. But they were more interested in social behavior than in
social forces , and their treatment of society was largely in terms of
the human condition. And even though most of the great moderns
have been described as naturalists, theirs was a mythical version of
naturalism, and the message of modernism, in painting as well as
writing, has been conta ined in its emphasis on the properties of the
medium .
To some extent , our view of the modernists has been colored by
our wanting to distinguish between their monumental naturalism
and the homespun realism of later fiction. As compared with the
sexual, psychological , and physical banalities of existence that fill the
popular novel today, the modernists would seem to be almost as
pure as the symbolists , and as removed from actual experience.
This, of course, is an extreme view . But it is the view that apparently
inspired the reaction against conventional narrative by such writers
as Barth and Pynchon . And it is the belief that modernism is still
alive in the form of experimental, non-popular, seemingly subject–
less fiction that is largely responsible for the novel that uses language
to create atmosphere and a complex of meanings. For those who
wanted to hold on to the ideology of modernism, this was an attrac–
tive position, despite the fact that much of the writing that grew out
of it ignored the tragic concerns and terrible conflicts of
contemporary life. Nor was one disposed to admit that most of it was
boring.
There are of course notable exceptions , such as Marquez ,
Naipaul, Milosz, Mailer, Lessing, Bellow, Malamud, who are
essentially, as Mary McCarthy put it, writers who deal with ideas,
and are drawn to the large social and human issues of the time. But
much of current fiction is either narrowly following the estheticism
associated with modernism or it is comfortably engaged in what
Gide called the horizontal portrayal of modern life. Writers like
Irving and Updike, some of the black novelists, many of the femi–
nists - all have this in common: in their different ways they are
involved in the little disturbances of man. These disturbances
usually have to do with sex or personal relations or social habits, and
rarely with our major political conflicts. Suffering is thought of in
personal terms and fate is conceived as a failure of self-realization .
