American Fictions 1940-1980 [antikvár]

FOREWORD The Alps neglect their Curtain And we look farther on! EMILY DICKINSON, "Our Lives are Swiss" The American novel since the Second World War is, obviously, that fiction which came after 1945; but it is also more than a body of work in chronological sequence. In attitudes, recognitions, ideologies, disturbances, and techniques, it is a fiction that molded itself to post-atomic ideas and responses and reached out to become something new. We have an era, really sustained for the first time, of what we may broadly call "American modernism,"* the rough equivalent in fiction of abstract expressionism or action painting, of the nouvelle vague in cinema, of the post-Pound-Williams era in poetry, of serial and electronic music, of increasing forms of abstraction which have characterized all the arts. On the stage, where our cultural •Postmodernism, tabulation, Gothicism, the antinovel, the post-antinovel novel, the self-reflective (or self-conscious) novel, Nabokovian discontinuities, Borgean fantasies, as we shall observe, are all derivatives of modernism, either developments, expansions, or reductions of the original impulse. Because modernism came relatively late to American fiction, critics have been eager to relabel what are impulses from a movement that never dissipated its original energies. In the prewar novel, only Faulkner and Dos Passos, among major novelists, assimilated European ideas of modernism and even there in limited quantities, and certainly without establishing any equivalent American movement. ideals are visualized more directly, the bare, abstract, symbolic look is part of this general movement. Theater manifested the perfect expression of the era in Beckett's Waiting for Godot—in language, characters, themes, staging, even clothes. In all its diversity, the postwar novel has striven for precisely this achievement: to defamiliarize the familiar, to make the reader reinvent the world, and while moving human experience to the margins, to move the margins toward the center. Several studies of this period have attempted to categorize its fiction. Each characterization is an effort to convey coherence to a massive body of very individualized work. It has been called a "city of words" (by Tony Tanner), a "waste land beyond" (Raymond Olderman), a literature "after alienation" (Marcus Klein), a period of "radical innocence" (Ihab Hassan), in part a "world elsewhere" (Richard Poirier), a literature of "disruption" (Jerome Klinko-witz), the inheritor of an eroticism based on "love and death" (Leslie Fiedler). Most of these diagnoses are ingenious, and some are quite useful as critical tools. They all fall short, however, of being sufficiently inclusive, and nearly all neglect both patterns and details of the larger culture. Although American Fictions is primarily an inter- Foreword xi