The Columbia History of the American Novel

the beatniks as 'hipsters,' whose life on the existential edge approached the degree of authenticity that Mailer (with little racial sensitivity) thought 'natural' to African Americans. Mailer compounded the error of his racial primitivism in An American Dream (1965), where a white male's search for personal integrity seemed to depend on his sexual violence against women. Mailer finally acknowledged the limitations of radical individualism in his masterpiece, The Armies of the Night (1968). Here, combining the techniques of nonfiction and the novel, he satirized his own persona as existential hero to suggest that although true political activism might arise in conjunction with individual rebellion, it could never result from it.

In voicing reservations about postwar conformity and the attendant loss in moral intensity, the literature of individual rebellion stood as one of the few audible protests from a generation otherwise preoccupied with maintaining the status quo. Its fervor carried over into the more radical decades that followed, and figures like Kerouac, Kesey, and Mailer were hailed as precursors and mentors by the youthful rebels of the late 1960s. Yet the very individualism of this critique worked against its ability to translate intellectual rebellion -493- into practical reform. The existential hero confronted his fate alone, and discontent was expressed not through revolution but through transcendence and acceptance.

A more wide-ranging social change was effected, ironically, in narratives superficially more traditional. Throughout the postwar years appeared what might be called 'novels of identity,' works that explored the new conditions of modern life. These novels were not always politically self-conscious or even technically sophisticated. By shaping its audience, this literature functioned as an agent of social control, reconciling its readers to the oppressive stereotypes of the age's political and sexual conservatism. Yet for all their traditional character, these works played as well an important transitional role in the literature of social change. In speaking to an audience already established but as yet unrepresented, even the most conventional of these accounts were liberating. Through their concern with the particularity of cultural experience they introduced into the novel facts and scenes that had not before been deemed sufficiently important for literary treatment. The interests of specific minority groups became acceptable subject matter for fiction, and the environments of the home and the workplace received more attention than they had since the mid-nineteenth century. But most simply, in writing on such special concerns, this literature fostered a sense of group identity, a spirit of community lacking in the more individualistic novels of rebellion. And the rebirth of group identity begun in these novels paved the way for the possibility of group activity that characterized later decades.

The most sophisticated novels of identity were the works dealing with problems specific to a particular race or ethnicity. All minority writers confront the debate between particularity and universality. Postwar critics, however, tended to judge work focused on a single cultural group as too narrow to embody general human truths or values. This conservative aesthetic evaluation had its practical side as well. Minority writers addressing the widest audience often had to compromise the very subcultural specificity they sought to portray, while those attending closely to the details of community existence confused (even lost) many readers unfamiliar with these cultural traditions. Political considerations as well governed the narratives. Within minorities, it was hotly debated how much the general readership should be told about the community, and particularly how -494- much of their people's flaws should be paraded before an audience not predisposed to admiration. Those fearing that accurate representation would reinforce stereotypes urged writers not to wash the community's dirty linen in public. Even so apparently sympathetic a literary device as the imitation of speech patterns through dialect could be read by insensitive readers as a mark of a group's ignorance and inferiority.

Such debates were less pronounced in those works, like the African American and the Jewish American novels, that built on longestablished literary traditions. Yet here too authors made their peace with the universalizing literary standards of the time. African Americans had to confront the powerful but problematic influence of their immediate predecessor Richard Wright, whose best-selling Native Son (1940) was both the most celebrated black novel of the age and the one least likely to appeal to New Critical sensibilities. Ralph Ellison met the challenge with his prize-winning Invisible Man (1952), a novel as ambiguous and verbally inventive as Wright's is direct and visceral. Arguably the finest American novel of the postwar period, and certainly one of the most technically accomplished, Invisible Man followed an unnamed protagonist's picaresque search for identity in a racist culture with a symbolic intensity recalling the best work of Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Conrad, Dostoevsky, and Dante. Even as he annexed the techniques of modernism to the African American literary tradition, Ellison never lost sight of the political underpinnings of his racial protest. Yet the very range of his literary references allowed readers to distance themselves from that critique and to admire the poetic qualities of the narrative apart from the political project that underwrote it. Unlike Wright's polemic, Ellison's multifaceted representation of the African American experience inspired in its white audience admiration and even guilt, but never fear.

Other writers responded differently to the conflicting demands of their white readership and of the post- Wright literary tradition. Chester Himes began very much in imitation of Wright, with his protest novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). Yet in such later works as The Real Cool Killers (1959), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), and The Heat's On (1966), Himes adapted accurate and brutal depictions of the Harlem community to the generic conventions of the hard-495- boiled detective novel of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Such African American 'mysteries' allowed him to portray negative aspects of uptown culture without charges of racism; the detective story had since Poe been preoccupied with the lurid. Moreover, the popularity of detective fiction afforded Himes an audience that might not otherwise have been attracted to so un-universal a depiction of a minority subculture.

James Baldwin, like Himes, wrote primarily in a neorealist mode. Yet Baldwin's identification of an audience was complicated by his doubly disenfranchised status as a black homosexual. Early in his career he addressed these issues separately. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), dealt exclusively with familial strife within the context of black pentecostal preaching. His second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), examined white expatriates in the gay subculture of Paris, in imitation of the 'lost generation' motif of Hemingway and, to a lesser extent, of Wright and Himes. Later works — especially Another Country (1962) and his final novel, Just Above My Head (1979) — treated more ecumenically the pressures that generated both racism and homophobia. Adopting the prose rhythms of the Beats to characterize the variety of bohemian experience, Baldwin presented differences of race and sexual preference as forms of a more general cultural alienation that he sought to overcome. The assimilationist urge that in Ellison occasionally resulted in a tension between style and content surfaced at times in Baldwin as a contradictory advocacy for racial separatism and universalizing love.

The postwar novels of African American women seemed not so informed by the conflicting demands of black politics and white readers. Although favorably reviewed, their work was less well marketed and, after a first flurry of sales, frequently passed out of print, only to be republished in the feminist revival of the late 1970s and 1980s. This relatively slim chance of commercial success may ironically have afforded female writers greater freedom of expression; denied a wide audience, they escaped the concomitant fears of inaccessibility and overparticularity. Ann Petry's The Street (1946) depicted ghetto experience in terms of a naturalist determinism recalling Native Son. Yet despite the novel's apparently neorealist account of the environmental factors leading inevitably to murder, Petry did not reproduce in her heroine the individualist search for identity characteristic of -496- male authors like Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin. Instead she presented, in chapters largely constructed out of interior monologues, fully realized members of a community, seeking for the practical means to achieve their already well-defined goals.

Although lacking the sociological detail of Petry's novels, Maud Martha (1953), the sole novel of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, developed further the interior life of its protagonist. As critic Mary Helen Washington has remarked, the novel's very structural innovations — its brief chapters, discontinuous narrative, and elliptical prose — imitated structurally the silencing that Maud Martha experienced sociologically, and that previous authors had represented thematically. Responding explicitly to the richness of Maud Martha's consciousness, Paule Marshall in her Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) combined Brooks's psychological subtlety with Petry's sense of place to depict the coming-of-age of a Barbadian woman in Brooklyn. Her characterization of the West Indians' aspirations to middle-class status, epitomized in the ownership of house and land, distinguished her work from the customary focus on ghetto experience. Yet the very particularity of her interests permitted Marshall to introduce into that tradition a cultural specificity and density less evident in the more universalizing work of the males.