3 - The End of Traditionalism

Summary

At the beginning of the 1970s, “serious” American fiction was defined in terms of two predominantly male camps: Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, John Hawkes, and other “High Postmodernists” on the one hand, and such literary traditionalists as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Philip Roth on the other. The most obvious difference between the two groups was that the experimentalists worked on two levels — the fictive and the metafictive — spinning out stories that were simultaneously the stories of those stories. The traditionalists, though their protagonists were often writers, valued the level of the primary fiction above any musings about it and held up this involvement as a sign of their humanism, their commitment to values. They explored the psychology of class and ethnicity: the self-absorption of Bellow’s Herzog, with his perpetual writer’s block; the failed dreams of Mailer’s early characters; the desperate, doomed attempts of Updike’s “little man” in the Rabbit novels to escape his meaningless life; the scandals and boredom of Oates’s suburbs or Cheever’s small-town America; and the hilarious degradations of the second-generation American Jew, Roth’s Portnoy. The novels were mostly male in outlook and authorship, masterful in style but never calling attention to this mastery, and extremely appealing to their audience. This writing represented popular educated taste in 1970. It is surprising how dated much of it now appears.