Realism in the Post-War American Novel

After the Second World War, the three decades, mark a blistering section of America’s literary history. One may judge it first by the state of the novel which together with the short story, became firmly entrenched as the leading literary genre of the century. Both renowned prosaists and newcomers continued to succumb to the dream of writing the great American novel and hoped to repeat the success of An American Tragedy, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath. But the American literature reflects the intensifying crisis in bourgeois consciousness, a noticeable loss of integrity and vividness in the artistic experience, the growing doubt in the adequacy and effectiveness of arts- these and many other socio-political factors characterize the epoch and at the same time express the immanent logic of human logical development. The absolute identification of literature and life professed by most American writers in the early twentieth century was followed by a more modest assessment of the expressive possibilities of art, a tendency to alienate the object depicted and to employ conventional subtle devices. The kaleidoscopic post-war literary climate, with an almost total absence of truly outstanding works of genius and the eroded boundaries of aesthetic movements, gives the impression that the American novel is short of breath. Still it would be unfair to say that the novel as a genre capable of expressing social changes and the national character of the American people:

contrived with a cunningness of technique virtually decadent; it has been purely self-reflexive and respondent to its own development. And the novel has died.” 1 This snapshot of contradictory and at times paradoxical trends in post-war prose belongs to Marcus Klein, one of the most eminent scholars in the field. While one can agree with certain of the critic’s observations, one must definitely reject the notion that the novel is a dead genre. For Klein the history of the contemporary American novel is first of all “a series of losses and creative defeats”. 2 “Landscapes of nightmare “do to a great extent define the panorama of the post-war American novel which was significantly influenced first by existentialism and then gave prominence to works of black humour as a distinctive offshoot of the aesthetics of the absurd. Still critical realism remained the heart of American prose, as in the years of its second flowering in the era between the two world wars. For in all its wealth of form and the variety of individual talents the literature of critical realism refused to become reconciled to the social and moral evils of the times. Struggling to reproduce reality not only by imitating life but by reflecting essential inner relationships, the realistic writer by the very nature of his chosen creative approach is consistently obliged to perform a twofold task; he must as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, view the world with double vision. Apart from criticizing abnormal, senseless aspects of social structure and human psychology which continue to block the path of history, he is entitled to reflect upon an ideal that is feasible and accessible to his contemporaries, upon the harmonization and humanization of all forms life. In the thirty years that follows the last war we witness the further development and struggle of two views of history and contemporary events, opposed in the central genre of the twenties and thirties at which time it reached its highest artistic level. Based on pessimism and a lack of faith, these works that dealt with social protest were often steeped in sorrow and despair. Van Wyck Brooks, the elder of liberal-democratic criticism, noted in 1941 that:

But after the war the social reality of the United States still based on the bitter antagonism and the opposition of class forces undergoes substantial changes; the facets of social and personal life from which literature draws its material become increasingly more complex and at times ambiguous. Many writers of the older generation were simply lost in the new environment and could never develop new systems of social and moral evaluations. Any criticism of the bourgeois structure fraught with countless threats to the human personality must have a constructive basis lest the writer’s work become permeated with despair and nihilism which in turn become apathy and spiritual bankruptcy. The literature of naturalism the novels depicting violence with their hoarse hysterical, sickly intonations are challenged by a more thoughtful balanced literary approach to the depiction of reality. Rejecting neither criticism nor the expression of heartfelt sympathy; saddened by the darker side of life. Overcoming the deeply rooted positivistic dogma of social and psychological predestination instinctively choosing the true course amid a chaos of viewpoints, the contemporary American literature of critical experience with the cumulative spiritual and moral wealth of humanity. Following in the footsteps of William Faulkner who in his Nobel Prize speech refused to acknowledge the imminent destruction of mankind these prose writers affirm the desirability and possibility of social progress where a simple American will be able to actively determine his own fate. The war novel does not so much depict the war as the American army. But it would be a mistake to abide by the rigid classification made by Charles Eisinger in his monograph The Fiction of the Forties. Where this literary-historical phenomenon is reduced to two categories: novels which neglect the American war machine and novels which affirm it. The nihilistic protests against all violence and any army in Robert Lowery’sCasuality.

Disillusionment in the power of social theories to analyze the cause and effects of historical development led to an increased interest in the concrete facts of daily life and brought many of the younger generation of novelists into camp of those who favoured the aesthetic views of naturalism. Whatever its subject- be it war, peace, former ghetto dwellers, or the middle class- the main theme of the twentieth century classic American novel is the problem of man and circumstances. The conceptions of social and biological determinism which from the kernel of the naturalistic view of life were to a great extent inherited by the war novelists. Naturalism has many faces; in post-war America it is manifested in the complex factual novels of many writers. The best of the war novels cannot be classified as unadulterated naturalism for apart from rigidschematism in the choice of various motivations, they also express acute distress at man’s problems and a readiness to share in and alleviate his sufferings; this marks a break with naturalistic impassivity. The lives of Americans moved along acourse marked by fatality and doom: “He was feeling a deep and familiar bitterness; everything turned out lousy for him sooner or later. His mouth tightened. No matter what he tried, no matter how hard he worked, he seemed always to be caught. The bitterness became sharper, flooded him for a moment. There was nothing he wanted, something he could feel and it was always teasing him and disappearing”. 5

assume various artistic forms, many if them, it goes without saying, will not lead to an aesthetic of realism. Theoreticians and artists for the avant-garde of this period rallied behind the literary banner of the absurd, new amorality, the novel of destruction and black humour. In the complex epoch of sixties when traditions were brokenand foundations were shaken, The American artist was faced with a dilemma. He could either show a world turned inside out, a world in a total opposition to all that exists, or he had to seek a complex synthesis of the actual problems of the day. After meeting the challenges of the black humourists, writers of critical realism were obliged to defend the integrity of their ideological and artistic position, first in an internal polemic with those who like Herbert Selby and John Rechy represent the new wave of naturalism and then against the so called popular literature that feeds like a parasite on the living tree of realism. The general crisis of the American mind has noticeably lowered the interest in the abstract, metaphysical-existential problems of black humour; once again literature connected with the traditions of angry thirties has come to the foreground. The entire group of young writers have experienced the beneficial influence of the realistic art developed in the periods between world wars. The novelsof the time reminds us that poverty, misfortune and social conflicts are still alive and painful. In her novels Joyce Carol Oates has tried to show the true life situation of America’s working people and to present a faithful picture of the indefinitely complex socio-psychological reality in which the present generation of Americans suddenly found itself and this discovery was almost too sudden.

1. The American Novel since World War II, ed. By Marcus Klein, Greenwhich, Fawcett, 1969, p. 9. 2. Ibid. p. 16. 3. Van Wyck Brooks, On Literature Today, N.Y., Dutton, 1947,pp. 14-15. 4. J. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars, N.Y., McGraw-Hill, 1957, p. VIII. 5. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, N.Y., A Signet Book, 1948, pp. 9-10. 6. J. Aldridge, The Devil in The Fire, Retrospective Essay on American Literature and Culture 1951-1971, N.Y., Harper and Row,, 1972, p. 77.

Assistant Professor of English, SD College, Ambala Cantt