Finally, of course, there has been the influence of the highly charged and competitive literary atmosphere in which we live, an atmosphere that has conditioned us to the idea that our productive power in the arts must be at least equal to, if not indistinguishable from, our huge industrial and scientific potential, and that on all fronts we ought to be moving ahead with vigor. The embarrassing fact, however, is that on the novelistic front we have only given the appearance of moving; we have merely wished ourselves into the illusion of movement. It is true that we have had a good many talented and interesting writers and any number of solid, well-wrought novels, of which a few, a very few, might even be expected to make some difference in the way we interpret our lives. But we have generally lacked the kind of arresting largeness and intensity of vision that, in view of our high cultural pretensions and, above all, the sincerity of our cultural caring, we feel we deserve. And what is worse, we know, whether or not we admit it, that we have been subsisting for years very largely on the creative glamour of previous decades, taking unlawful pride in the recitation of famous names and titles that we have no right whatever to claim. With all our confidence and technical know-how, in spite of the fuss we make over every vagrant spark of originality that blows our way, we are well aware that we have still not managed to produce genuinely major talents of our own to meet the competitive standard set by the twenties and thirties. (p. 62 – Notes on the Novel / II )

… As a result, our position today is frustratingly ambiguous. On the one hand, we feel jealous, resentful, and vaguely frightened of the past; on the other, we feel knowledgeable enough and dedicated enough to advance beyond it. We have managed to develop powerful institutions for the critical study of literature and the teaching of writing, institutions in which the workings of the creative mind would seem to have been shorn of their mystery and brought at last under expert control. A whole complex academic and cultural enterprise has grown up around the widespread interest in the modern classics and the desire to produce talents comparable to them. Yet the talents somehow have not proved to be comparable, and the very complexity of the enterprise mocks us with our failure. (p. 63 -- Notes on the Novel / II )

Interestingly enough, but not at all surprisingly, the writers whose works are most often cited as authorities in contemporary intellectual discussion are still, for the most part, the traditional classic figures of the modern age. In the novel, Dostoevski, Proust, Kafka, James, Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway; in poetry, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Auden; the great creative theorists and philosophical writers, Freud, Jung, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus--these are the men who continue to provide the basic terms for our essential comprehension of life. When we ask why this should be so, it is conventional to say that because some of the best of them were the first on the scene of the twentieth century, and others were products of the intense revolutionary period between the wars, they were able to proceed naturally to formulations of the most primary and vital kind about the nature of modern experience. They had, in a sense, first choice of the fundamental philosophical and imaginative materials of our time at the moment when these materials were just beginning to become available. They were the first to do what no one had been privileged to do before, and as is so often the case in philosophy and art, they were the last to do it really well.

Whether or not this is true, it seems to be a fact that the emotional and imaginative responses of a good many American intellectuals have become arrested in the work of some of these men. No one who has written since has touched them half so deeply; no later work has made anything like the difference in their lives that The Waste Land or Main Street and The Great Gatsby --to name only the most obvious-- were able to make. ...
It is not at all surprising that some of them--or more correctly and honorably, some of us--should trace not merely our first but our last really vital response to literature back to that period, or that the modern classics should in effect have taken the place of experience in our minds, have seemed so powerfully right in their formulations of the basic truths of modern reality that we have unconsciously revised and even altogether reconceived such experience as we have had to fit the portraits of experience they have given us. In a very real way those great works have done our imagining as well as our living for us, and we have very little sense of being engaged with life that is not somehow connected with the profoundly moving images of life with which they first seduced and enslaved our imagination. ... (p. 79, 80 & 81)

"... To be sure, we do not all relive the legendary pattern , or even believe it; but we have been unable to imagine our choices in any other image."

That is the crucial point: we have been unable to imagine our choices in any other image. We may recognize the literary formulations of the modern classic past as the stereotypes and platitudes they have now become. We may even be convinced that they have blinded us to the changed realities of the present and forced us to plod endlessly round and round in a ring of wishful daydream and sentimental self-delusion. But because they have helped to determine the very structure and content of our consciousness, we cannot reject them without rejecting a vital part of consciousness itself. ... ( p. 82)



Novelists in fact are suffering from the same smothering sense of stereotype and platitude that afflicts the intellectual. And in their efforts to break free of it, they have to often been forced to deal with materials, and to adopt methods of treating those materials, that may be original enough in themselves but are so private and idiosyncratic, evocative of so little beyond the personal experience of the author, that they can scarcely be expected to seem exciting or particularly meaningful to even the most sympathetic reader, except perhaps as displays of verbal or technical skill.

There are of course novelists , usually the less talented and intelligent, who seem to have succeeded in remaining unaware of the difficulty altogether, and who, as a result, have continued to write as if nobody, including themselves, knew very much about anything, as if life were essentially as barren of complication as it seems to have been for Dreiser and Farrell. Others like William Styron seem to have tried to make history repeat itself by using the standard effects of the modern classics, apparently without realizing that these are precisely the stereotypes and platitudes from which their more discriminating contemporaries are struggling to escape. (pp. 85 & 86) ...

Obviously, what the age demands is just what the intellectual more or less instinctively holds out for: a group of writers with minds powerful enough to recognize the stereotypes and platitudes for what they are but able to function originally in spite of them--or, even better, able to incorporate them into their vision of experience, so that the knowledge that, in lesser minds, has proved to be crippling, would become for them an important adjunct of vision. This is perhaps to say that our most urgent need at the moment is for a genuinely intellectual fiction, but intellectual in a new and robust sense. Certainly, there is no hope left in the various stances and poses of anti-intellectualism in which American writers of the past have found energy and comfort, and in which far too many continue to hide out today, quite deliberately confusing mindlessness with vitality, the most elementary emotions with the most significant experience, as if they had vested interests in preserving the novel as a last stronghold of freedom from thought.

Nevertheless, there are many people who believe that what is wrong with the novel is that it is much too intellectual already, that contemporary writers generally think too much before they feel and in the process think feeling away. It seems to me that the novel is not nearly intellectual enough, that contemporary writers generally think too little to be able to feel. For to think inadequately is finally to feel unvigorously; and in art, a defect in the power to communicate emotion is finally a defect in the power to understand emotion. The novel has been devitalized up to now not by consciousness but by inadequate consciousness and by self-consciousness. It has yet to discover, for the uses of our time, consciousness as a form of emotional vitality, as the very mode of passionate and original vision.

Consciousness in this form was carried to a certain point of literary development by Proust, James, Joyce, and Eliot, but no one has since been able to carry it significantly beyond that point. That in fact is one of the great perplexities: the failure of the modern artistic sensibility to build upon the foundations laid down by its pioneer minds, the curious abortion of intellectuality in art at just the time when the need for increased intellectuality has become almost a matter of artistic life or death. ... It (EN: i.e.artistic sensibility) has remained arrested or frozen in a view of experience that is now being revealed as vastly too simple for our present ( EN: 1964) sophistication, has continued to tell us perpetually less than we know, perpetually less than we have already, as educated moderns, discovered for ourselves, and immeasurably less than Proust, James, and others had already discovered many decades ago. In fact, the distance between the level of perception to be found in the average serious novel and the level at which most of us habitually perceive has grown so wide that reading novels has become a process of willfully suspending not only our disbelief but whole functions of our intelligence.

There may, as I have suggested, be all sorts of convincing reasons why this should be so, but the fact remains that it is so. And because it is, the novel has become virtually as alien to the real instincts and needs of the intellectual as it has to those of the middlebrow. For if it has ceased to be a vehicle of middlebrow experiences, it has also clearly failed to become a vehicle of both intellectual experiences and consciousness, and this in spite of the fact that at its best it has unquestionably grown more intellectual than it used to be and has captured the attention of intellectuals in a way that it has never done before. But the experiences of which the intellectual is most intensely aware, the experience of ideas, the drama of consciousness in an age of almost unbelievable complexity and ambiguity, the drama, above all, of retaining one's hold on consciousness in an age in which it is becoming daily more difficult to (and perhaps more futile) to retain one's hold on sanity--none of this has yet found adequate reflection in the novel. And of course it will not so long as novelists lack the courage and strength of mind to recognize it as their main hope for escape from the impasse in which they now find themselves trapped. (pp. 87, 88 & 89 from Notes on the Novel / II )