A Mirror in the Roadway

[Dave Monroe]

--- Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dickstein, Morris.  A Mirror in the Roadway:
>    Literature and the Real World.
>    Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007.
> 
> http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7984.html

   "At the simplest level, it had to do with language.
 We were encouraged from mnay directions--Kerouac and
the Beat writers, the diction of Saul Bellow in The
Adventures of Augie March, emerging voices like those
of Herbert Gold and Philip Roth--to see how at least
two very distinct kinds of English could be allowed in
fiction to coexist.  Allowed!  It was actually OK to
write like this!  Who knew?  The effect was exciting,
liberating, strongly positive.  It was not a case of
either/or, but an expansion of possibilities." (SL,
"Intro," p. 7)

>From Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The
Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002 [1999]), Ch. 1,
"Introduction: Culture, Counterculture, and Postwar
America," pp. 1-20 ...

   "A more cosmopolitan America was coming into being,
a good deal more open to social differences yet
resistant to political dissent and social criticism. 
Outsider groups such as blacks, women, and Jews, even
working-class and rural Americans, having seen
something of the world, were not about to return to
the  kitchen, the ghetto, or the emneial jobs to which
they had been confined." (p. 3)

   "The arrival of these outsiders in the mainstream
of American society had a close parallel in the arts. 
Just as the needs of the economy opened professions
previously closed to Jews, the needs of a newly
cosmopolitan culture, born in the shadow of
unspeakable wartime carnage, opened up literature and
academic life to Jewish writers.  Specialists in
alienation, virtuosos of moral anguish, witnesses to
the pains and gains of assimilation, they had a timely
story to tell....  Black writers too had a tale to
tell ....  Thus began the stream of outsider figures
who would do more than anything else to define the
character of postwar writing ...." (p. 4)

   "Another radical turn of the forties and fifties
was the explosive emergence of youth culture....  At
the heart of the nnew counterculture of the 1950s, the
balance between civilization and its discontents was
shifting, as theorists like Herbert Marcuse, Norman O.
 Brown, and Paul Goodman would soon try to show.
   "In fiction this took the form of picaresque novels
of flight and adventure loosely based on Mark Twain's
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, including Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye, Ellison's Invisible Man, Bellow's
Adventures of Augie March, and Kerouac's On the Road. 
In each of these books the first-person voice, with
its vernacular ebb and flow, conveys the dreams and
frustrations of the youthful protagonist.  All were
written in nervous, jazz-like riffs veering
unpredictably between the colloquial and the literary.
 The mixed background of these writers ... contributed
to this creative crossing of styles, which had a huge
influence on the writers of the next decade, including
Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.  'At the simplest
level, it had to do with language, Pynchon later said
in Slow Learner ....  But if the sixties writers
resonated to the lingustic freedom of their
predecessors, especially their fresh, innovated
rhythms, tehy were also invigorated by their
losse-limbed forms, which reflected the quest of their
protangonists.  All these young heroes ... are
searching for freedom, eager to escape the convntional
and oppressive social roles that others have foisted
on them." (p. 10)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72330


 
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