The Postwar Novel: Self, System, and Doubt

The idea

The thirty years after nineteen forty-five produced a fiction about people who cannot locate themselves inside systems they did not build, and the period's formal experiments follow from that. The material conditions were new: soldiers entering college on the GI Bill, the first graduate writing programmes at Iowa and Stanford, a suburban prosperity with its house and car and television, and a Cold War that shaped what could be said. Ellison's unnamed narrator lives in a cellar lit by stolen electricity and states the period's sharpest formulation, that he is invisible because others, blinded by prejudice, will not see him. Baldwin, an essayist before a novelist, carried a preacher's cadence into prose and argued from Paris for an end to separation between the races. In the South, O'Connor put violent comedy at the service of an orthodox Catholic belief and gave her killer a stated objection to Christ raising the dead, while Welty kept a humane wit and McCullers arrived at twenty-three. The nineteen fifties produced a literature of unease inside apparent satisfaction: Cheever and Updike on the suburb, Bellow and Malamud and Roth on Jewish communities in the old world and the new, Salinger's Caulfield walking away from school, Kerouac's beatniks driving after a communal dream. Then the nineteen sixties turned outward and the fiction turned reflexive. Metafiction made the writing itself the subject, Barth worked to keep readers out of the illusion, and Pynchon built plots that his characters and his readers had to decode, with entropy for a metaphor and paranoia for a mood. Vonnegut and Heller finally wrote the war as absurdity two decades after the realists had written it straight.