Tradition or innovation in the “new” American novel

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, 11. º 7 ( 2000 ), pp. 85 -102 TRADITION OR INNOVATION IN THE «NEW» AMERICAN NOVEL: 1960-1990* JAVIER COY Universitat de Valencia l The American novelists who emerge to their artistic consciousness after the political and sociai fracture produced by World War Il, and who will reach their creative maturity in the 1960' s and 1970' s,are influenced in their view of the universe and of their own trade by a number of externa! and interna[ facts which may be useful to try to enumemte in order to put them into an appropriate context,and identify, at the sume time, a possible starting point for their study. Obviously, it is not the intention of such an exercise to turn artistic creation into an unavoidable and mechanic al consequcnce of objective or subjective r ealities, which would turn it into a * The original i<lea to atlcmpt the study of sorne aspects of the contcmporary novel in the United Statcs as conta in e<l herc, was sug gest ed to me years ago by a dear and rcmcmbered friend, Enrique Gar cía Díez. He asked me to participate in onc uf thc scssiuns of study which he or ganised here periodically and hinte<l al this subject which had becn thc matlcr of many of our conversations. Sorne of these ideas,thcreforc, wcre included in the proceedings of un e such meeting and the paper was published in Enrique García Dícz, editor. Am erican Studies in Spain, Valencia, Universitát de Valencia-Tiran! lo Blanc Llibres, 1988. TI1e text here present ed has suffcrcd, though, so many changes, including extensiun,as to makc this a new piece: aft cr ali this is still an open and unfinished work. I wish to renew here the exprcssion of my grat itu<l e to and my affection for a colleaguc and a fricnd, widely remembercd and misscd by many who dcvotc our efforts to the study of American culture. 86 Javier Coy deterministic attempt that would be both short-sighted and unfair. Nevertheless, those facts can be deemed meaningful enough as to find it worth our while to review them even though it be briefly and of necessity, superficially. Just as, for example, it is necessary or at least extremely useful, to take a good look at the social, economic, and political transformations occurring in the English eighteenth century, in order to understand the birth of the novel at the time, and its development from Fielding and Richardson to the surprisingly «modero» title, The Life and Opinions of Tri stram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, which will seem to take this new genre («new», at least, as it concems the realm of English culture) to its last consequences. Of course, this would be just an example among so many similar cases that can be brought to mind to illustrate this fact in the course of history. First of all, from a strictly literary point of view, some of the young authors of the SO's and 60's feel what simplistically articulated could be defined asan inferiority complex when faced with the weight of the achievements of the great masters of the period between the wars, the modernist writers such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Do s Passos or Fitzgerald, to mention just a few of the most relevant o ne s. Through an analysis based on a somewhat superficial approach, as has just been sai d, they come to the conclusion that the above novelists have exhausted the genre, have Jefl nothing new to add to what has already been done; in short, have brought the novel to exhaustion. Accordingly, they think they must look for new forms. Along this line, they will announce once again the death of the novel, repeating something proclaimed almost fifty years earlier in other cultural spheres. In bis 1967 essay, «The Literature of Exhaustion,»1 John Barth, although not the only one to vo ice this feeling, will do it in the most precise and unmistakeable way. Sorne fifteen y ears later Barth himself will recognise the simplification of his assertion, and will qualify his pessimistic forecasts when faced with the fact of a genre that is not only not exhausted, but more lively and thriving than ever. On a later essay, «The Literature of Replenishment,» he will admit that if there is anything that is exhausted, it is not the genre but the aesthetics of modernism .2 Anyhow the controversy is there: if the novel is dead, then a new name must be found to define what these new writers are doing. Barth speaks of «irrealism,» others of «s u;:ierfiction,» «s urfiction» or «metafiction.» A well known historian and critic, specially devoted to the novel of the South, will express his ironic remarks on this matter in an essay entitled «The Curious Death of the Novel: or What to Do about Tired Literary Critics.» His fable, as he calls it, tells about a time past when lhere was a group of writers known as modero nov elists, who wrote books known as modern novels. And then along carne other writers called critics who said to themselves: now we know what the modern novel is. As time went by, other wiiters carne in turn, young beginners who thought their books were modern novels, but who were told by 1. John Barth,«The Literature of Exhaustion.» Atlantic Monthly, 22 0 (August, 1967).pp. 29- 34. lncluded in Raymond Federman, ed.,Surjiction: Fiction Now wul Tomorrow, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1975, pp. 19 -33. I quotc from lhis last volume. 2. John Barth, «The Litcralure of Replenishment,» Atitmtic Momhly, 245 (January, 1980), pp. 65-71. Tradition or Jnmwatíon in tlze «N ew» American Novel: 1960-1990 87 the critics that the rnodem novel was what the rnodern novelists had written, and what they were writing now didn't look at all as the real thing. Quite puzzled they asked how their creations should be called, since those modern novelists had a l! died. And thus replied the critics: lhe modern novelists are indeed dead and, therefore, the modem novel is dead, so we do no longer read what is being written at present; accordingly, we do not know what that is to be called. And he concludes with this morale: «Nothing is quite so dead as a dead definition, unless it is a dead critic.»3 In spite of this starting point with which he qualifies his critica! stand, he does admit that the difficulty I rnentioned above is real. So, when studying so rn e new writers of the South, he calls his essay «The Difficu!Lies of Being a Southem Writer Today: or , Gelting Out from Under William Faulkner»4: «getting out from undeI>> is according to hirn,the key sentence lo the young nov elists of the South in their effort to solve their crealive bewilderrnent. Simultaneously, as a reinforcement of the experimental impulses wherein the writers of this trend (those called, in a rather imprecise manner, «post-modernists» )S look for originality, sorne of them become aware of the new notions about the un iverse thal the recent scientific and technological discoveries suggest. After Einstein 's relativi ty theories other forrnulations emerge that the scientific world regards as well as revolutionary: the forrnulation of the principies of quantic mechanics (with its notion of enthropy so intensely ass umed by Thomas Pynchon), the dizz yi ng development of atomic physics, Me Kenzie' s theory of chaos or one of its by-products, Benoit Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, deeply upset or alter the vision of the world, and of man' s place on it (is not Gml'ity 's Rainbmv, after ali, an attempt to discover the nature of individual identity within this new concept of en vironment?)6 Such influences of the sciences on the process of artistic reflection have not yet ceascd, as is clearly illustrated by sorne recent novelists,and have even become part of popular literature: wi tness to that are, among other novel s. Michael Cr ichton 's Jurassic Park. and Tom Clancy's The Sum of Ali Fears, both of 1991 , although in these texts the appropriation of the above concepts is undoubtedly carried out in a less subtle way, as if superimposed on the story.7 3. Louis D. Rubin. jr ., The Curious Deafh of the Novel. Baton Rou ge, Louisiana State Un iversity Press, 196 7, pp. 3 a nd 4. The emphasis is Ruhin's. 4. Ibí dem , pp. 282-293. 5. For a description of the term «post-rnodernisrn» and an attempt to find a useful dcfinition, ~ce Maria Eugenia Díaz, «La novela post - modern ista noneame ricana: una aproximación general.» A1/antis, IX, ( 1987), pp. 83-93, cspecially 83 and 84 . 6. These facts, here rncrcly suggestcd, ca n be more thoroughly expl ored in the followi ng works: for Pynchon a nd his Graviry's Rai11 boll', Paul Scott Dcrrick, Tlrí11kí11f? for a Clumge: Gravity"s Raínbow anti Symptoms off/re Paradigm Shíft in Occidemal Cult ur e, Universitat de Valencia.Anejo nº V 11 I of Cuadernos de Filología. Valencia 1 994 . For a perusal of the application of sc icnce to literaturc, thcre are two quite useful books. both edited by Francisco Collado Rodrlguez. Del mito a la ciencia: la 11oi•e/a nor/eamericarw co111emporá11ea . Universidad de Zaragoza, 1990. and Scie11ce . Líterature cmd /n/erpretatio11: Es.rny.1· in Tll'elltieth Ce11tury Líferature and Critica/ Tlreo1y. Universidad de Zaragoza, 1991. 7. Michael Crkhton. Jara.uic Pwk ( 1991 ).London,Crcsset Editíons, 1993 and Tom Clancy. The Sum of Ali Fears, Ncw York, Putnam. 199l. 88 Jal'ier Coy In the 1950's the global risks rcprescnted by the Cold War became apparent together with the threat of nuclear holocaust. The conflicts and tensions unwinding in thc field of intemational politics and the clash between the two great powers will clearly show their reflection on their own respective environments, as shown by the diverse attempts to impose ideological and moral unifonnity and conformity through authoritarianism, and the persccution and repression of the «different.» The most notorious agent of those rcpressions. albeit not the only one, was possibly represented by thc work of the «House Un -American Activities Committee,» whose most conspicuous endeavors, carricd out within the Hollywood motion picture industry, reached their peak in 1947, as is well known, with the notoriously in famous «black listings» of dozens of artists and technicians in that field of creativity. This would be followed, in the early l 950's, by the investigations in wider areas of the country's life of a Senate committee , the socalled «Government Operations Committee.» lts Chairman between 1952 and 1954, the Senator for Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy, brought it to extremes that outraged public opin ion and the v cry institutions he belonged t o. His actions were mainly aimed against numerous officials of the State Department and the Department of the Army whcrein, according to him , without proof and irrelevantly as well (although to many it didn't seem so in the chronological and geographical context), hundrcds of members of the Communist Party had infiltrated those institution s. The strong reproof of these methods first by President Eiscnhower, and then by the very Scnate, finally did away with the prestige and the power of th is senator, who lost his credibility in his violent and destructive crusade against communism. Ali these facts will shade and modify the artistic and intellectual activity of other crcators in the many fields of the human intellect.as is to be relevantly appraised from the metaphorical dcnunciations in the works, maybe ephemeral but undoubtedly significant, of the so-called «bcat» writers of the Pacifi.c coast, who will assert their very right to be «different», and their subsequcnt rebelliousness in the way of life they adopted. Mcanwhile. motivated by causes more exclusive ly belonging to the social and political context of the United States. the ensuing upheaval will reach so deeply into its t cxture that it b eco m es difficult to make even a summary: the civil right s movements. and the attempts to really guarantee the basic human rights of the American blacks or other minority ethnical and cultural groups; the opposition to the Vietnam War as a question of principie, anda matter ofjustice and freedom; the livcly and fertile activity of women in various fields of cxperience; the exploration of space and its scientific and technological consequences, togethcr with the spectacular and dizzying progress of the computer sciences and the new concept of cyberspace; and nex.t to these huge areas we find a number of smaller cvents, maybe of a lesser scope, but with an undeniable impact on the collective mind and sensitivity: the political assassinations in the 1960' s, the mass suicides, and so on. Each and every onc of these cvents will cause or suggest new literary expressions or the recovery of traditional ones, if with their own particular differences. Among ali these factors there are sorne of them that specially stimulate the ar ti stic imagination: the literature by the so-call ed ethnical minorities arises with Tradition or Jmwi'ation in t/Je «New»American Novel: 1960-1990 89 unexpccted sttength, taking those worlds and those cultures out of the ghettos into which they had been pushed until World War JI by the prevailing WASP environment. That is what happens with the novel of the Jewish-American and African-American communities. Later on we can begin taking into account the literature written by t hc native American Indians, more scarce at the beginning, and by the people coming from the migrations from the Southern or the Pacific borders (Chicano, Asian- American, etc.). Another corpus of literature that is likewise going to grow in personality and intensity, in an overwhelrning development as has already been suggested, is that of women writers belonging to al! layers of the social and ethnical American panorama and that we could cal!, in accordance with Elaine Showalter's terminology, «female» literature or perhaps post-feminist literature .s The vehiclcs of expression that ali these imaginative worlds used to realize thernselves implied the creation of new narrative methods and styles, or the recovery of rnodified traditional ones: the attempts to devise new techniques with which to replace the interior monologue as the instrument tlu·ough which to examine th e stream of consciousness of the characters; the sometimes almost revolutionary updating of sub-genres such as the historical novel; or the emerging of another genre that intends to be, and looks like, something new, the so-called «non-fiction novel,» that is still giving spectacular fruits in the unmeasurable work achieved by Norman Mailer, the most irnportant among many others that could be recalled here. These are literary rcalities that the facts just mentioned or suggesled can help clarify and make better understood. The deep turmoil in the contemporary North American novel, of amazing artistic and intellectual richness, and technical and thematic variety. could thus start being put into contcxt, and would thus face one of the constant features in the history of literature in this country (although admittedly, it is not something unique to this na tional literaturc): a very deep and immediate interconnection of art with the historical and social contemporary context. This can be observed from its first utterings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to become consolidated on a pcrmanent basis in the nineteenth century. Parallel to this fact we need to underline a significan! characteristic of a very positive nature: the intense and penetrating critica! sense with which very often thc American novelist or intellec tu al observes and analyzes his own national reality. The steely criticisms th at the anti- American feeling which spreads throughout many European and non-European countries after World Wm· II will produce due to política!, economic, or ideological reasons, are nothing if compared lo those which the North American intelligen ts ia and 8. Elaine Showaltcr. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelísts from Bronte to Lessing, Princeton. N.J.,Princeton Universily Prcss.1977. Thc author shows thc progrcss of womcn's emancipation in lctters, through three different stagcs: the first onc, whi ch she calls «fcmininc,» adopts the male cultural pattcrn.and among íts charactcristics wc havc thc use of mal e pscudonyms,as in Gcorge Eliot's case. Thc sccond one, «feminíst,» a stagc of protest that dcvclnps ;írnultancously with thc mi litant suffragcttc · s movement.occasíonally lcading to pamphlct. And fí nally thc thi rd onc. «fcmalc,» whose authors rcjcct hoth imítation and protcst,and crcatc an autonomous writing rootcd in the cxpcricnce of womcn. 90 Jav ie r Coy its artists themselves are going to express in a systematic ma nner to point out the vices and follies of their in stitutions, or to condem n specific action s t aken by tho se in s ti tutions, which in the most extreme cases will reach tme ruthlessness. But the origin of ali these contemporary movements must indeed be searched for in the great masters writing in the years between bo th world wars in the twe ntieth ce ntu ry. 2 One of the means History uses to set its different stages, to fix its limits and officialize or almost verbalize the great changes thus implied, has been to drop onto the peoples huge destructing cataclysms whic h, in modem times, have been mostly wars. The fact comes to mind quickly that conventionally the real start of th e twentieth century has been fixed after one of those c.li sasters, after World War J: this cataclysm will cause a dramatic change in the prevailing intel!ectual and artistic situation. The modernist writers are going to acutely feel it, and their work is to a certain exte nt th e resu lt of their grief and anger when faced wi th their perception of the resulting c ha os, es pe cially plain in John Dos Passos' novels and Eliot's a nd Pound's poet ry. Ju st two decades afterwards the world will be witness to a n ew fracture, at least as intense and tragic as the previous one, caused by Wo rl d War JI . This conflict will cut in two the reality of our society and, putting an end to t he previous world, it will give way to the one we have lived in until t hi s de ca de. True enough, this world has not remained static, but although subject to imp or tan! chang es and modifications, these have been gradual and have not entirely transformed it s personalit y. Finally, this time segment has reached its high po i nt with the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent dismemberment of the Soviet Empire, that seemed to mark the end of the «Cold War» and the beginning of a new stage. This stage, the so-called «New World Order ,» in an unfortunate expression that so und s to the independent minc.l as an unconscious sarcasm, or at least an ironic counterpoint to reality as we see it, will make itself perceptible in all its effects, political, social, cultural, and artistic, only in the next few decades, although right now we can already identify sorne signals th at hint to its future characteristics.9 Restricting our a tt en tion to the U.S. realit y, the abovc considerations still apply. If we conce nt rate our focus on that part of rea li ty that is the subje ct of literature while 9. One of !hose hi nts. however superficial and irrelevant, can be found in the transfonnation undcrgone by the intcrnational thriller or the li terature of spies, wherc the «good guys» and lhe «bad guys» are no longer Americans and Ru ssians respectively. The most recent novels rcílect it on the ir search for new villai ns whom the hero must fight. Thus. the more than 300 h un dr ed page long jo ke devised by John Le Carré. in The Tailor <!f Panama ( 1996); or the novcls by Rob en Ludlum, Frede ri ck Forsyth. a nd Tom Clancy (h is mosl recent one, Rai11bow Six, 1998, lak in g lh c 1hrca1 lo humankind wilhin his own United States, lo apocalyplic extremes) and ali published aflcr thc fall of the Berlin Wa ll. Trudition or J1111omtio11 in the «New» American Novel: 1960- 199 0 91 being, at the same time, its essence, it can be likewise obse rved that those cracks or fractures are as operative here as in wider historical or soc ial perspective s. In quite a superficial and simplified way (which can neverthele ss reach any level of depth required when inform ed by the proper clarificalions) the reason is that, as usual, literature finds itself conditioned in whatever measur e, by the extemal r ea lity of its creators, among other facts that shape and define it. This is reílected in various ways by the great masters of Modemism. Br ie íly looking at the work of the writers of the first part of the twentieth ce ntur y we w ill find that their great topics, peculiar a nd different though their treatment of them may be, are but a list of sorne of the great constant themes in the history of literatur e, explored from severa! points of view, from different critica! stands, shaping a wide panoramic view of human experience, deep and rich in its extent even if not absolutely comprehensive. Sorne of those themes are: Inno ce nce versus Experience, analyzed by William Faulkner in a number of wo rk s. Among them we ca n highlight Go Down , Moses, where lke McCaslin is de scrib ed as if hav ing been born old , « be came st ea dily young er and younger until, past seventy himself and at least that many years nearer eighty than he ever admitted anymore. he had acquired something of a young boy's high and selfless innocence.» io Thi s is an image of the myth of the yo uth and innocence of the nation and its population that D. H. Lawrence already applied to James Fenimore Cooper 's Natty Bumpo, almost literally making his a more general formulation voiced in theore ti cal terms by Emers on in hi s essay «Nature. »1 1 The myth of Eden a nd Utopía , possibly the first ever to take shape in the American mind, since it is based on the wishful hop es of the Pilgrim Fathers that travelled aboard the Mayílower in 1620, analyz ed in Faulkner 's as well as in F. Scott Fitzgerald's work. The role of the Se lf and its place within the Family or social environment th at they probe into from the character 's m ost intense subjecti vi t y, in their paradoxical search to attain the greatest objectivity that ca n be achieved, Lhrough the various ways they will create or up gra de . It must be stressed here one of the technical devices used in works of this nature: the development of the interior monologue technique that allows Faulkn er (in The Sound and the Fwy and As 1 Lay Dyíng, for instance), and D os Passos (particularly in the «Ca me ra Eye» sec ti o ns , in V.S.A .) and others to examine their character s' stream of consciouness. Nature and its presence in History, bound to be destroyed in th e nam e of a selfproclaimed id ea l of progress, with Faulkner as a representative figure but attracting as JO. William Faulkner, Go D ow n, Moses, New York, Rand om House, 1942, p. 106. l l. D. H. Lawrencc:the novels of th c «Leatherstockin g» series are in sorne way the crea ti ons which first gi vc voice to that myth, and they c mb ody it in Natly Burnpo and olher cbaracrers, who «go backwards. from old age to gol de n youth. That is t hc true myth of Ameri ca . She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And thcre is a gradual sloug hi ng of the old skin, towards a new youth. Jt is the myth of Amcrica» (St11dies in Clussic American Litera/l/re. NewYork, Viking, 1961, p. 54). And Jet us li st en to Ra lph Wa l do Emcrson,in his essay «Nature»: «In the wo o ds too, a man casts off his years,as the snake his slough.and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetua! youth» (Essays ali(/ Lectures, New York. Thc Library of America. 1983, p. 1 O). 92 lal'ier Coy we ll the attention in some kcy texts of He mingway 's and Do s Passos'. The independent Indi vi du al versus the Institution 's authoritarianism, w hi ch the former tries to separate from and reject when he fi nds it unfair and crippling, Dos Pa ssos and Hemingway once again being prominent exam pl es . lnjus ti ce and Oppression, be the y political, social, racial, or even religious in nature, represe nted above ali by Faulkn er and Steinbeck. La ck of communication and the re sulting loneliness, against the ne ed to share one's experience an d feelings: main worry of the pr ecursor and somehow master of the modemist writers, Sherwood Anderson, w hi ch manifests itself as we ll in Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Lastly. th ough the above <loes not exha ust the cata logue of tapies a nd tech ni qu es cultivated by the se a utho rs, the realization of the fragility of th e «American Dream» my th , which they will explore from ac utely cr itica! standpoints to come to the conclusion that this «drcam» is more often a «nightmare,» as refle cted in sorne of t he works by Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Stei nb eck . I consi de r these suggestions as eloquent enough to illustrate the point without th e need to go into more dctail, which would lengthen this pap er unnecessaril y. Thc important work ( or the importan! part of the work) of most of these authors will be done in the tw o decades between tbe wars. There are two kinds of exceptions: on the one side Fitzgerald, among the youngest, will see hi s work definitely cut short by death in 1940. The same happens with Nathanael Wcst, an author not mentioned before but an inci sive cri ti c of men' s follies and stupidities, whose work has fallen in to somewhat unfair oblivion. Among those who wil\ go on with their creative activity after World War II. in my opinioo on ly a few re ach any significan! achievements within th eir whole artistic production. Probably Faulkner's case is che most valuable une, with the last two parts of his trilogy about the Snopes famil y, The Town and The Mansion, in 1957 and 1960 respectively. among other works of this period: Intruder in the Dust, 1948; Knight 's Gamhit, 1949; Requiem for a Ntm, 1951 ; and The Reivers, 1962. These works make up an imaginative corpus that would be enough on its own to keep Faulkner in the place that he in all fairne ss has achieved io the canon m ost widely accepted by critics and readers. The techniques and forms sway in a rich catalogue of options ranging from traditional realism to its most age-specific variations, overlapping sometimes within a work or an author: from the preservation of subtle naturalistic references, such as in Anderson and Faulkner. to the reaching of a symbolic realism in some works by Do s Pa ssos and Hemin gway on occasion , the latt er inc orporatin g it to his form of «romance» parodically used. The development of the interior monologue already mentioned with special regard to part of Faulkner's work a nd al so perhaps in a lesser degree, of Dos Passos' wo rk . The fictional biography, the more inwardly explored the b ette r, used sometimes by Fitzgerald with a treatment that sub limate s its autobiographical resources; and also practiced, with deep poetic touches, by John Do s Passos, who adds to ita s well some autobiographical eleme nt s ofmetaphorical value, fruit of his personal aestheticism, thus achieving the universa li zation of experiences that would otherwise be kept to the realm of the merely anecdotical. And finally, the occasional appearance of exprcssionism should not be forgotten, although this will be cultivated more intense ly in the drama: obviously in so rn e plays by Eugene O'Neill, Tradition or Imwvution in the «N ew» American Novel: 1960 -/ 990 93 in cluding sorne part of his work extending beyond World War II; and also in Arthur Miller and his Death of a Salesman. But it too will flicker every once in a while in prose fic tion, as it is shown in individual passages of, for instance, Dos Passos and, maybe more often, in Nathanael West. As far as the premise or basic metaphor used by many of these authors as the slarting point of their conception of the world and of mankind is concemed, we could point out that stated by the somehow precursor and for many a young creator, undeniable ma ster, Sherwood Anderson, when asserting in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) that «everyone in the world is Ch1ist and they are ali crucified.» 12 Thus the essence of lhe human condit io n is seen from a certain, almost fixed and constant perspective: man as a victim of pain. injustice and suffering, who is nonetheless a ble lo li ft himself abovc his misfortunes in order to stale the triumph of his personal dignity and authenticity. This attitude can be found in the excellent «political» works (in the best sense of the adjective) by John Dos Passos, Three Sold ie r.; (1921) or the monumental U.S.A. (1930: 42nd Para/le/; 1932: 1919; 1936: The Big Mone y). Or in the parodie, desolate and bitter «romances» created by Hemingwa y, in bis obs ess ion for encountering one's own self that will bring man pe rs ona l, inner peace. It is a search that will lead him, as early as 1927 in his novel The Sun also Ris es, to find out that this search needs to be an inner search if it is to be anything at ali: «going to another country doesn't make any differ ence .... You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. »13 This is the expre ssion of a perva din g mo od in which ot her kinds of li terature, the so ca lled «low-brow», also participate. In the detective novel, Rec oil (1953 ), by Jim Thompson, when the protagonist is offered a <leal by t he crim in al (to no t give him up to the police) promising him a fortune so that he can get away to s tm t a new and comfortable life, the an sw er is as rotundas it is conclusive: «'I don 't thi nk so,' I said. 'A man can't get away from himsel f. ',,14 This is an atlitude shared by the poet from Saint Louis, by the Mississippi River, T. S. Eliot, who will express it wi th identical precision when refcrring to the in terior forces that operate in another yo un g traveller, Huckleberry Finn. When the teen-ager, bom and grown up by this very «old man river,» remarks that his last rcsource is «to light out for the territory,»15 Eliot advises him not to foster too many hopes because, in thc end, «The river is within us .»1 6 12. Sh crwood Anderson. WinesburJi, Ohio, Ncw York, Peng ui n ( «The Viking Cr itica] Library» ), 1966, p. 57. 13 . Erncst Hemingway, The Sun a/so Rises, New York, Scribner's, 1954, p. 11. 14. Jim Thomps on , Recoil, Berkeley, Creati ve Arls, 1985, p. 1 73 . 15. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Film, N ew York and Evanston. Harper and Row, 1931, p. 405. 16. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets , London, Faber and Faber, 1963,p. 36. It might be added hcre, by the way, that Hemingway's well known statcment of 19 35, in the sense that «Ali modem American literatu rc comes from one book by Ma rk Twain calted Huckleberry Finn,» is shaded by a sharp warning about thc true ending of the novel: «you mus! stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the hoys. That is thc real end. The rest is cheating.» Green Hills of Africa, Ha rmondsworth, Penguin. p. 26). This qualification may have been one of the reasons that gave rise in the 1 950's to the long critica] controversy about Twa in 's book ending. Leo Marx, fo r instance, believes that the hurlesq ue endi ng bet rays ils intended seriousness and transcendence: on the contrmy, Eliot and Tri ll ing defend thc end in g as it is . This co ntroversy carried on over the 60's and 70 's a nd even lat er . 100 Javier Coy In a very much quoted lecture about the problems rai sed by the question of «Writing American Fiction,» Philip Ro th said in 1960: « the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full trying to understand. describe a nd then make credible much of Am er ican reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own m eagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almo st daily that are the envy of any novelist. »J4 In one way, this assertion points to the hand li ng of a part of American reality not yet explored in an intendedly exhaus ti ve manner. Now the writers th at make up the worlds of minorities, be they ethnic, sexual, religious or otherwise (a nd all of them having valuable predecessors) will try to describe this reality from their interiorized firsthand knowl ed ge of it. Th ey star t rebellin g against the role of victims of discrimination, persecution or in jus tice impo sed upon them by the society in general , and th eir anglosaxon pro test ant paradigms , as prevaili ng canon s of be havior and values. Far fr om being satisfied with dissolving and integ ratin g themselves into th e so -called «melting poi,» which has been proved to be a com plete fallacy, they refu se to accept the subordinatc role they have been traditionally assigned in order to profe ss and cxpress their pride in t heir ethnic , cultur al, and lig ui stic o ri g ins, in th eir differences. Accordingly, they will try and carry out an int ense , deep, and hon est explora tion of their particular worlds in order to newly define the ir own and tru e identit y, bearing witness rhe reof , with their own moral and aesthetic weapons. In spite of everything, we find in the end that thcy are embedded in th e traditi on deeper than they think , for as was sa id before , She rwood Anderson had alr eady concluded that «everyone in the world is Christ and th ey are all crncified»; then, when we l ea rn later on that for Bernard Malamud «ali men are Jews »3\ and for Rich ard Wright, similarly formulated though shaped to serve his own imaginative inter ests, «the Negro is America's metaphor ,»36 we see that it is not really that o ri ginal, and originality must be looked for in the pa rti cu lars rath er than the generalities. As late as 1994 thc idea is go ing to be re-formulated, in a somcw hat new and more inclu sive manner; the speaker, it must be strongly emphasized, is a black man and the novelty is easily perceived, with a new call for solidarit y, this time making express reference to the differences because of race that should disappear: « An y man be an lndian no ma tter how he 's born.»37 So that, perhaps for the first ti me , there is an a rti stic formulation trying to unite ali races in the one and only human race. Ali in ali, the research into, and the expression of man's dignity in his suffering due to intolerance, injustice, opression, whether he is African American, Jewi sh 34 . Philip Rolh, «Writing Ameri ca n Fictio n,» Reading M ys~lf and Others, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 75, p. 120. 35 . Quoled by A ll en Gu t tm ann, Tli e J ewislz Novel in Am eri ca. Ncw York. O xfo rd Universicy Pr css . 1971 , p. 1 18, so urce no! mcntioncd. 36 . Quo t ed by lhab Hassan, Colllemporary American Litemt ure. 1945-1972, New York , Ungar, 1973, p. 74 , source not mentioncd. 37. Wy nt on Mar sa li s, Blo od on the Fields, Ne w Yor k. Son y Music Enl e1 1ainment. 1997. Traditúm or Innovation in the «New» American Novel: 1960-1990 101 American, Chicano, Asian-American or whatever, becomes one further metaphor (with its particular features) of the destiny of mankind, of the misery and the greatness of the human condition. This circumstance is what in the end grants these writers the universality they certainly don't lack tuming their stories into mere works of art, that would only be unfairly distorted and narrowed in their scope by any restricting or conditional labels. Roth's observation points also to a more obvious meaning encompassing such evenls as the political assassinations watched in T.V. (sometimes even live, as in Lee Harvey Oswald's case for example, in 1963, or Robert Kennedy 's in 1968); the coldblooded murders photographed by joumalists that happened to be in the right place at the right time (such as the Viet-Cong guerrilla murdered by a Viet-Namese general, the chief of police in South Vietnam in 1968. that gave intemational fame to the photographer from Associated Press Eddie Adams); the account ofthe mass suicide of hundreds of Reverend Janes' followers in Guiana. Or in a different context. the amazing scientific aml tcchnological progress in the fields of nuclear energy, space rescarch, or the possibilities, that we can only start glimpsing, created by computer science and its various applications, which could dramatically change so many aspects of man's life in a not so distant future. In light of ali these facts, we cannot however conclude that those stimuli rnay have caused amazement, outrage, wrath. admiration or terror in a greater degree than that caused by past technical findings, crimes or honors in the corresponding readers or audiences. It would be a fairly na·ive assumption, and it would mean igno1ing a fact that. as such, is hard to question. (As John Adams said a few centuries before:«This is a fact and facts are stubborn things in opposition to speculation.» px The human bcing's capacity of emotional reaction is not nccessarily weighted by the more or lcss objeclive magnitude of his stimulus, but by the limits and conditions of man' s own nature. Thus, nobody can say that President Kennedy's assassination stirred up deeper emotions, of one kind or anothcr, than Abraham Lincoln's; or that the invention of the telephone surprised and marvelled the people at that time less than the landing on the rnoon did our contemporaries. Thcreforc, thc question is not whether our present world is more violent, more astounding or crueller than in the past. At any ratc, this would be a futile discussion hased on sheer speculation impossible to prove. The question is that while the actual cvcnt in the past. whatever its nature might have been, was distant from the citizen, and only available thruugh the fill er of literature (whcther journ alistic or not), nowadays, in this world permeated by the explosion and far-reaching range of the mass media, it is quite oftcn rcadily availablc to thc hand and the eye of the ordinary citizen. The consequence is then that when refen-ing strictly to fact, the literaturc of war cannot compete with television as far as immediacy and vividness are concemed. Likewise, to have a murder recounted is not the same as watching the images on 38. John Adams, The Wvrks of Jvhn Adams: with alife ofthe autlwr, by his grandson Char le s Francis Adams.Boston.Little Brown and Co . .1850- 56 , vol IX,p. 470. Which scntcncc could be just a re fo1 mulation of the old aphorism of Scholasticism, «Contra facta, non sunt argumenta». 102 Ja vi er Coy te lcvision in our own living-room. But deep down in human consciousness t hat trui sm does not sc em sufficient cause to undcrstate the imponance of art in all its forros. Toda y's world seems thus a stage wh ere a numbcr of eve nt s are being represented thal go beyond thc novel ist' s imagination, for which hi s capacity of invcntion is no match. That's why they feel compelled to look for new ways of awakening and stimulating the reader 's interest, by pro ced ures other than invention. Since real it y is prodigally producing flamboyant, mteresting, and amazing events, many writcrs turn to it in order to make a1tistic sluff of what initially seemed lo belong to the rca lm of fact, by applying to ita tr ea tment that used to be reserved for fiction. This is ali true ami perhaps obvious, but in no way does it exhaust the view if wc must be fair and balanced The contemporary American novel, the art in general, is not to be limited in such a dramatic, narrow, ri gid way. Tra dition is not exhausted, its various components still allow for new combinations that give original, fresh, new results. As Eli ot said. those results are influenccd by the tradition lhey belong to in as much as thcy modify and e nr ich such a tradition: «Thc cxisti ng monuments form an ideal order among themselves. which is modified by the introduction of th e new (the really new) work of ar t among t hem . The existing ordcr is complete bcfore the ne w work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelly, th e whole ex isting order musl be. if e ver so sl ightly, altered: and so t he rel atio ns, proportions. valu es of cach work of art toward th e whole are readjusted; and th is is conformity between t he old and the new .»3 9 Banh se em s to approve of this i dea when he uses Jorge Lu is Borgcs' quotation as the epigraph of one of hi s already mentioned text s: « The fact is that every writer creates his own precursor s. His work modifies our conception of th e past. as it will mo dif y the future.»4º And man's own experie nc e, his behavior and his reactions, his vices and his virtues, still c ontain uncxplored depo sits a nd unprecedcn tcd r eso urces within themselves. as befits the endless str ea m. the unpredictablc road upon which he treads and which constitutes at the same time his own nature. 39. T. S. E li ot, «Tradition and the Individual Talen!,» Th e Sacred iVciod, Lo ndon and N ew York. Mcthucn/Barncs & Noble. 1966, p. 50. 40. fohn Bai1h, «T he Literature uf Ex hau,tion ,» Raymond Fcdcrman. editor. op. cit .. p. 19.