568 The American Century: Literature since 1945writers. So, too, could an equally simple, seminal declaration made by Lee – “You
must sing to be found,” he has said, “when found, you must sing.”Public and Private Histories
Documentary and dream in prose
“Our history has moved on two rivers,” Norman Mailer (1923–2007) wrote in
The Presidential Papers (1963), “one visible, the other underground; there has been
the history of politics which is concrete, practical ... and there is the subterranean
river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of
ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.” That may sound like a
reformulation of a perennial American dialectic: the clearing and the wilderness,
fixity and fluidity, the structures of society and the subversive impulses of the self.
If it is, then it was certainly given additional impetus in many prose texts in the
three decades or so after World War II, when writers struggled to negotiate what
they saw as an increasingly baffling and bizarre world. On the one hand, there were
those who subscribed to forms of realism to try to catch the grainy, visible contours
of American life. And, at its most extreme, the devotion to the concrete led to styles
of scrupulous meanness, the new journalism and dirty realism. As one dirty realist
put it, “in these overwritten times ... it is enough to write the facts in a clear hand:
it is a mistake to embellish or improve upon the fantastic actuality.” On the other
hand were those who submitted themselves to the secret, subterranean life of
America, who believed that only literary forms that maneuvered their way above,
below, beyond realism could cope with the nation’s fantastic actuality. So, Vladimir
Nabokov described himself and his contemporaries as being “faced by the task of
inventing America”; and his own work, he said, was “a subjective specific affair”
“set in a dream America.” Fabulators, fantasists, beat writers and surrealists, some
of them appropriated the language of popular culture. Some of them viewed
language itself as their subject, since it circumscribed their world, constituted all
that was the case for them as Americans. Some of them drew on forms and genres
that could perhaps feed the hidden streams of the national life into literature: auto-
matic, instinctive writing, say, the cut-up method, collage, or the strangeness of
Gothic or science fiction. As Mailer himself intimated, these two strategies were
not mutually exclusive. Since both rivers carried into American history, both
streamed into American circumstance and consciousness, they could, in turn,
both percolate in American writing, shaping the character of individual texts by
creating a dialectic. At one extreme, it may be, were the creators of the nonfiction
novel, wedded to fact; at the other were the creators of fictive space, lexical playfields,
married to the elusive, desirable substance of dream. But, in between, were the
many American writers who saw it as their project to weave their way between
these extremes, to work in territory bordering both: to show, in short, the interde-
pendence of the “two rivers.”GGray_c05.indd 568ray_c 05 .indd 568 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM