Premises

Readers of Morris Dickstein's newest book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, should find it an agreeable survey of the cultural expressions of the 1930s that reveals how the Depression years were portrayed and understood by those living through them. Readers of Dickstein's previous books will recognize its method, a fastidious interrogation of novels, films, and other works of art for their historical resonances and mutual assumptions, their ability to show how an entire culture at a particular time is "thinking." Readers less interested in Dickstein's signature critical approach or in the context his earlier books provide nevertheless could easily enough from Dancing in the Dark be made aware of "Depression culture" in a coherent and often insightful way. Dickstein's painstaking scrutiny of texts for their clues to cultural developments can occaionally get bogged down in some turgid writing, but that he can be an acute analyst of these texts within the framework of a consistentently applied historical criticism is undeniable.

While I don't find this sort of historical criticism invalid--there is ultimately nothing wrong with situating a work of art or literature in its period and cultural mileu, as long as the limits of this strategy as a way to "understand" the work are acknowledged--I do find Dickstein's relentless pursuit of the strategy frequently tedious and finally not much service to literature, although Dickstein often assures us it is. Since a great deal of his criticism has been focused on post-World War II American fiction, I think that Dickstein has especially done some misservice to contemporary fiction, my own critical bailiwick, distorting its achievement and finally reducing it to a function as barometer of the cultural and political changes that have taken place in the United States between 1945 and the present.

I make this criticism regretfully, as Dickstein's 1979 book, Gates of Eden, was probably more responsible for setting me on a path of study of contemporary fiction than any other critical book I read or any course I took. It introduced me to the work of experimental writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme, of whom I don't think I'd ever heard at the time, and although I could sense even when reading the book as a undiscriminating undergraduate that Dickstein didn't entirely approve of their fiction, especially the Barthleme of the late '60s and after, just the suggestion that Barthleme was "radical" (Dickstein meant to associate him with the decadent, Weatherman phase of 60s radicalism) was enough to make me want to read his books posthaste.

Actually, much of Dickstein's analysis of the fiction of the 1960s still holds up, as I disovered when I recently re-read the book, even if the tacit impatience with postmodernism seems more apparent to me now. (The term "postmodernism" is never used, however; Dickstein in 1979 preferred to identify writers like Barth and Barthelme as modernists, emphasizing the continuity between the formal experimentation of modernism and that which came to be called postmodernism. Dickstein thinks that late modernism radicalized itself beyond redemption in the work of writers such as Rudolph Wurlitzer, but while I can't agree that the experimental impulse inevitably leads to an aesthetic impasse, his implicit suggestion that the adventurous writing of the 1960s and 1970s was really a second flowering of modernism usefully emphasizes that "postmodernism" was first of all a phenomenon of literary history, not a reorientation of history itself.) Above all, his recognition that the fiction of the 1960s represents a significant achievement still seems audacious:

In a topsy-turvy age that often turned trash into art and art into trash, that gaily pursued topical fascination and ephemeral performances and showed a real genius for self-consuming artifacts--an age that sometimes valued art too little because it loved raw life too much--novels were written that are among the handful of art-works, few enough in any age, that are likely to endure. It's a bizzare prospect, but the sixties are as likely to be remembered through novels as through anything else they left behind.

Dickstein finds much that is praiseworthy in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and even Barth and Barthleme, despite his judgment that they ultimately take things too far. However ambivalent his reaction to the most adventurous of adventurous fiction, and however much attention he gives to writers whose work will not, in my opinion, "endure," such as Bellow and Mailer, Dickstein's consideration of the experimental fiction of the sixties inspired me at least to take this fiction seriously and to discover for myself whether it produced work "likely to endure."

Unfortunately, the very passage I have quoted, I now see, also signals the real limitations of Dickstein's approach, of the assumptions about fiction's utility as a clue to culture. The last sentence arguably implies that the novels of the era will endure because they are the best way to "remember" the sixties. For those who lived through the era, they will continue to evoke it; for those future readers who did not, they will still enable a cultural "remembering" that will likely allow us to get a glimpse of the kind of "topical" and "ephemeral" attractions Dickstein describes in the rest of the passage. These novels will be "left behind" for scholars and others interested in that "topsy-turvy age" to recreate it, either critically or imaginatively. Fiction is ultimately of value, especially fiction particularly attuned to the social wavelength of its period, as a window onto history. It perhaps enlivens history in a way that straight historical narrative or cultural criticism, cannot, but otherwise it remains an adjunct to the study of culture in its historical manifestations.

My own initial response to Gates of Eden demonstrates that it is possible to read the book as an illuminating appraisal of American fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, but turning to Dickstein's other writing on postwar fiction only confirms that ultimately his purpose seems to be to pin postwar writers down as specimens of their time and place, at best figures in a procession of "tendencies." In the essays "The Face in the Mirror: The Eclipse of Distance in Contemporary Fiction" and "Ordinary People: Carver, Ford and Blue-Collar Realism" (both reprinted in A Mirror in the Roadway, Dickstein's explicit defense of realism), he extends his survey of postwar fiction into the 1970s and 1980s. In the first, he notes a shift in the 1970s toward novels "built around characters who are the very self and voice of the author," exemplified by Philip Roth, William Styron, and John Irving. In the second he discusses the rise of minimalism in the work of Raymond Carver, as well as the subsequent move away from minimalism to "a more expansive, more full-bodied fiction" in the work of Richard Ford and Russell Banks. In the latter he predicts a further shift to "some transformed and heightened version of the social novel." Clearly Dickstein is most interested in contemporary fiction as an opportunity to chart developments in fiction's way of registering social realities. Chronicling the rise and fall of trends in fiction is not necessarily a trivial activity, but in Dickstein's case the single-minded manner in which he pursues the task does threaten to make criticism an intellectual version of fashion journalism.

Leopards in the Temple (2002) is probably Dickstein's summary statement of the historical progression of postwar American fiction. Subtitled "The Transformation of American Fiction 1945-1970," it again focuses on the 1950s and 1960s, this time treating only fiction but otherwise covering much of the same ground scrutinized in Gates of Eden. The biggest change in approach to the fiction of this period is a considerable narrowing of the the terrain on which Dickstein is willing to cast his critical eye, leaving experimental or postmodern fiction out of view almost completely. He instead devotes most of the book to discussions of well-publicized mainstream writers such as Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Mailer, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, John Updike, Bellow, and Roth, although there are a few welcome considerations of Paul Bowles, Nabokov, Heller, and Vonnegut. Dickstein's implicit dismissal of experimental fiction is perhaps best exemplified in his discussion of John Barth's End of the Road, which Dickstein calls "Barth's best novel" and is included in Leopards in the Temple in the first place mainly because it illustrates the "road" theme Dickstein traces from Kerouac to other writers of the '50s and early '60s. His attitude toward Barth's later metafiction, truly his most important achievement, well beyond End of the Road, is surely encapsulated in his observation that "In Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera Barth's genial narrators soon grow as heartily sick of [their] self-consciousness as we do."

One can legitimately find the work of John Barth and other metafictionists not to one's liking without distorting the fact of its prominence during the period Dickstein is examining. It is hardly credible to suggest that the 1960s are most appropriately represented by Bellow, Malamud, and James Baldwin, which Dickstein does in his final chapter by highlighting their work rather than the postmodern writers, whose work rebelled against the quiescent realism preferred by the gatekeepers of literary culture, much as others rebelled against the constraints of conformity and established practice in other arts and in politics during this time. A survey of the "transformation" of American fiction after World War II that willfully excludes this work is finally hard to take seriously.

Leopards in the Temple posits a postwar literary history that begins with war novelists, proceeds  through the early fiction of certain writers who first came to public attention immediately after the war, such as Vidal and Capote, further through sensation-causing writers such as Kerouac and J.D Salinger, and, with some pauses along the way to acknowledge a few other noteworthy authors, winds up affirming the centrality of culturally sanctioned novelists such as Bellow, Baldwin, and Mailer. Another history of postwar fiction is possible, however, one that begins with, say, John Hawkes, emphasizes Nabokov's work beyond Lolita, carefully considers William Gaddis, includes James Purdy and Thomas Berger along with Joseph Heller, and takes as the apogee of the period the work of Pynchon, Barth, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme. Dickstein's history is a history of American culture as reflected in his chosen authors and books; the alternative history is more properly a literary history of the years 1945-60, one that focuses on the response of writers to the legacy and the challenges of modernism by extending that legacy through fiction that continued to challenge readers' expectations and that, in my opinion, more accurately encompasses the writers whose work will still likely be read once this period more firmly recedes into literal history.

What now alienates me the most from Dickstein's critical method, however, are the grand generalizations he makes about the practice of fiction, generalizations that interpose great distance between the critic and the texts he/she ostensibly tries to illuminate. He writes, for example, that for novelists of the 1940s and 1950s

They were obsessed more with Oedipal struggle than with class struggle, concerned about the limits of civilization rather than the conflicts within civilization. Their premises were more Freudian than Marxist. . .Auschwitz and Hiroshima had set them thinking about the nature and destiny of man, and relative affluence gave them the leisure to focus on spiritual confusions in their own lives.

How does Dickstein know what "they" were thinking? How can "they," as opposed to individual writers, be thinking anything except insofar as the critic has self-selected a few of "them," invested them with "premises" and speculated about "their" social standing ("relative affluence") and the state of their souls ("spiritual confusions")? Occasionally Dickstein does offer an interesting critical reading of a particular text, as when he observes of Catcher in the Rye that "Holden's adventures in New York are really a series of Jewish jokes, at once sad, funny, and self-accusing," but the overwhelmingly dominant impression left by Leopards in the Temple, and by Morris Dickstein's books as a whole, is that fiction is most worthwhile as a leading indicator not just of just of writers', but an entire culture's temporal obsessions. If I thought this was the foremost reason to read novels, I'd probably never read another one.

ADDENDUM Morris Dickstein has responded to this post in the comment thread below.

Comments

[Frances Madeson]

You're ever so late to this tea party, Daniel. I believe the subject at hand is Morris Dickstein's credibility as a critic? Well, I'll do my best to keep the word count to a minimum. I had the biggest larf of my literary life, barring none, not one but two summers ago when he published the ironically titled essay, Fiction and Political Fact (or, as I think of it, Faction and Political Fact) in Bookforum. http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2458

I wish I could tell you, but I cannot because it would be a big, fat, whopping lie to say so, that Morrie wrote the essay in full ignorance of the existence of Cooperative Village (which, as you know is prescriptive to the absence he names in the essay in the same degree as, oh, I don't know, let's say, Jonas Salk's serum was to that other crippling disease—polio). Shall I make a list of the characteristics and attributes of the ideal political novel as called for by the Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, my alma mater, and provide corresponding proof from my novel? Is that fully necessary, because I am prepared to do it? Is there anyone out there who doubts that I can?

I sent Mo-Dick an inscribed copy with a personal note when my book was published in Spring 2007. He was in the first wave of opinion makers to whom I sent copies. But unlike founder and chairman of the Open Society Institute, George Soros; Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi; or his colleague, Rachel Brownstein, author of among other fine works, Becoming a Heroine, Professor Dickstein did not acknowledge its receipt, or even wish me well. One could perhaps argue that he was under no such obligation to respond to a gift from a stranger. But I was not, am not, a stranger to Dr. Dickstein. Our paths have crossed professionally and socially many, many times. In point of fact, he once interviewed me for a job as his assistant at The Center for the Humanities (presumably having vetted my intellectual and professional qualifications). Furthermore, we have mutual friends in Herb Leibowitz, founder and editor of Parnassus Poetry Review and Susan Yankowitz, novelist and award-winning playwright (her gorgeous play Night Sky is among her more oft-produced and translated plays, but I digress). In addition, when I was Program Officer of the Steven H. and Alida Brill-Scheuer Foundation there were other occasions of convergence around the moment of publication of Serge Klarsfeld's French Children of the Holocaust, which Steve and Alida's generosity made possible—a simply stunning book.

The effrontery of his attempted effacement of my contribution to American letters compelled me to write in protest to the editors of Bookforum alerting them to the grave omission in his essay. As a courtesy, I cc'd Mo-Dick on the correspondence.

It was via my own experience that I unambiguously received the knowledge like a sucker punch to the solar-plexus that 1) we were not in Kansas, 2) any notion of a literary meritocracy was completely risible, and 3) that the fix was most definitely, certainly, and completely in.

As my friend Paul Allman reminded us in his excellent play about Dan Rather, ambition, weather, and Donald Barthelme, I beg of all of you to consider:

What is the frequency?

[Dan Green]

I feel your pain, Frances, although your comments don't really much address the points made in my post.

[Shelley]

Back to the 1930's: that's the era of my work, and although I agree that Dickstein's book can be a bit dense, for me there were a couple of points where, out of all the data accumulated, he cuts straight to the heart of the matter: damn, I can't find the quote in all my notes right now, but there's one passage where he talks about--I believe it's an excerpt from a West novel, and it's a character who has just been pushed to the absolute limits of endurance so that it's almost freakish, and reading it, you don't know whether to laugh or cry because the situation is just so devastatingly discouraging...that's the 30's.

[Morris Dickstein]

I appreciate your close and careful reading of my work, Daniel. I'm delighted you were first turned on to some wonderful fiction writers by GATES OF EDEN. My own excitement about the work of metafictionists like Barthelme, Barth, Vonnegut, and Pynchon certainly is a key part of that book, but it's also true that their succeeding books, including Nabokov's last books, began disappointing me soon afterwards. I thought they were repeating themselves, playing increasingly sterile games, and losing their purchase on the larger world their greatest books were about. I also became much more attracted to the realist tradition that had, of course, always engaged me in its 19th-century incarnations, and that shift is reflected, as you rightly say, in my later books. But LEOPARDS IN THE TEMPLE was also written, in its original form, as part of a large volume of the CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, in which another critic, an excellent one, Wendy Steiner, was assigned to cover metafiction, as she did superbly. So this took me off the hook, even as it accorded with what I then preferred to do. Where I differ with you is in the notion that I somehow neglect the purely aesthetic power and pleasures of the works I write about. If that were true, if I didn't take an exquisite delight in those books, if I weren't deeply moved by them, I couldn't write about them. I've always tried, perhaps not always successfully, to balance off the social or culture meanings of literary works and their essential character as works of art. (This is what I meant by the term "double agent" in my book on criticism.) I particularly appreciated Adam Kirsch's review of DANCING IN THE DARK for making this point.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2009/reviews.html.

The books I left out of DANCING IN THE DARK, such as Dos Passos's U.S.A., invariably were those that simply didn't reach me as writing. On the other hand, I did deal with daringly original writers I love, like Nathanael West, whose books could be seen as momentous forerunners of metafiction. They certainly were not fully appreciated till much later. For the record, I take cultural criticism and aesthetic criticism to be inseparable. Great works of art give us greater insight into the mind and feeling of an era than those that merely document the times. The latter hold little interest for me. They seem stillborn on the page, or just irretrievably dated. They're "history" in the worst sense of the term.

[Dan Green]

I'm grateful to Morris Dickstein for responding to my post. Readers can now balance my critical comments in the post with Professor Dickstein's rejoinder.

[mitch Hampton]

The correspondence between Dickstein and Green is redolent of a kind of spirit that seems to be vanishing, alas: a spirit that puts value at the center rather than mere utility, to risk a rather crude formulation. Doubtless Green would argue that there is much utility at work in the EFFECTS of a given style, the question of value has a certain independence for, as Dickstein points out, we should struggle to maintain a part of culture where the distinction between "history in the worst sense" and art in the best sense is taken most seriously.

[veg]

It was gracious of Professor Dickstein to respond to Dan's post.

However, the particular questions that Dan asked still remain largely unanswered.

Here are two of Dan's questions:

(1) "How does Dickstein know what 'they' [certain writers] were thinking?"

(2) "How can they,' as opposed to individual writers, be thinking anything except insofar as the critic has self-selected a few of 'them,' invested them with 'premises' and speculated about 'their' social standing ('relative affluence') and the state of their souls ('spiritual confusions')?"

Here are some polemical answers:

We cannot claim to know what authors are thinking unless we have documentary evidence of their views (interviews, articles, letters, visual media, etc).

Really good literary history ought to teach us about how we handle sources, claims, and evidence.

To that end, good literary history should not group a few authors together and claim that their purported views are indicative of an entire generation's ideas.

Good literary history is informed by the following:

(1) documentary evidence of each authors' views;

(2) documentary evidence of collaborative understandings among authors, and if the critic does not have such evidence, then she or he should say so, and if the critic bases her or his views on similar formal maneuvers within several writers' works, then the critic should say so;

(3) documents that suggest societal views, norms, trends, and changes (like news articles, reviews, government records, interviews, letters, photographs, broadsides, and the list goes on and on); without this evidence the critic has no competitively valid basis for her or his claims about how cultural trends influence literature (and visa versa).

Without this methodological and formal rigor, we get the following abuses and misuses of so many literary and cultural histories:

- cultural pronouncements without documentary evidence;

- psychologizing about authors' thoughts, feelings, and beliefs without documentary evidence;

- superstitious spiritual pretenses without any rational evidence.

Professor Dickstein's work is frequently extraordinary because he understands the formal work of literature and he writes in an accessible manner that is unlike much of post-60s jargon-filled literary studies. He was also one of the first arguably mainstream literary critics to highlight the importance of writers like John Barth.

However, sometimes Professor Dickstein's method is sometimes NOT rigorous in the way that I sketch here.

(Sometimes it IS.)

Dan's questions expose a few of the deficits in the good professor's methods--namely, the manner in which his claims sometimes rest on poorly evidenced conjecture about author's intentions and too-easy generalizations about arguably hastily grouped-together authors' work.

In so many ways, Dan's questions are haunted by New Criticism. (WiseGeek has an acceptable précis of New Criticism for the uninitiated: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-new-criticism.htm)

I DO think we can "close read the culture of the times" as well as "close read the literature" and make connections between these two kinds of work. But, to make these connections we had better darn sight have the following:

(1) deep analyzes of the actual language on the page and its constructions and formulations;

(2) actual documentary evidence of authors' views; or, open caveats that announce that we are surmising intentions based on textual maneuvers;

(3) voluminous and carefully gathered and vetted documentary evidence of cultural attitudes, trends, and changes.

Why is this important?

Because there is a difference between literary criticism on the one hand (which ought to be about texts' constructions and documentary evidence more than anything else) and literary opinion on the other hand (which is very rarely worth our eyes and ears).

Lastly, there are such things as misreadings--that is, analyzes and conclusions about texts that make mistakes about the formal maneuvers.

Thank you for reading my view.

[Finn Harvor]

Is Morris Dickstein by any chance related to the politician Samuel Dickstein? I ask because the latter, though usually forgotten now, was an important figure in the politics of the 1930s, and pivotal to understanding some of the stresses that existed at that time.

[Dan Green]

I don't believe so.