Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Prose since 1945

The first two—and only two—atomic bombs were exploded in Japan in August 1945; their effect was so horrific that a strategy of geographical “containment” emerged as a military policy. 2261

In the years following World War II the U.S.S.R. had assumed a stance considered adversarial to Western interests. Ideologically, the opposition was between Western capitalism and Soviet state socialism; militarily, the contest exhibited itself in the West’s rebuilding of Germany and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) versus the Soviet Union’s influence over Eastern Europe’s nations by means of the Warsaw Pact. Geopolitically, the U.S.S.R. sponsored the formation of socialist governments in what became known as its satellite nations of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, separated by what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill characterized as an Iron Curtain inhibiting contact with the democracies of Western Europe. 2262

By the end of the 1970s some characteristics of the previous decade’s countercultural revolt had been accepted in the mainstream, including informalities of dress, relaxation of sexual codes of behavior, and an increased respect for individual rights. The 1980s experienced a call for traditional values, which were interpreted not as a / return to community and self-sacrifice but as the pursuit of wealth. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan incomes rose while taxes fell; the Sixties’ distrust of government mutated into a defense of personal acquisition. 2264

Economically, American boomed, but in new ways: manufacturing dominance was replaced by service efficiency . . . 2264

[writers wanting to be like Hemingway] Hence the desire to write what was called “the great American novel,” a major work that would characterize the larger aspects of experience. Ambitions were not simply to write a war novel, for example, but the war novel; not just a work about corporate big business, but something that generalized the subject for all times. Regionalism could remain an interest, but only if it provided deeper meaning; here the example of William Faulkner encouraged the belief among younger writers that dealing with the American South meant grappling with monumental issues of guilt and the inexorable power of history. 2265

The first such challenge was the “death of the novel” controversy, sparked by some writers’ sense that social reality had become too unstable to serve as a reliable anchor for their narratives and fueled by certain critics’ conviction that fiction had exhausted its formal possibilities. The short story and the novel, it was argued, demanded a set of fairly limited conventions; these conventions, such as characterization and development by means of dialogue, imagery, and symbolism, however, relied on a securely describable world to make sense. 2265

As boundaries of time and space were eclipsed by television, air travel, and an accompanying global awareness, the once essential unities of representation (time, space, and action) no longer provided ground on which to build a work of literary art. 2265

A parallel development in literary theory posed another great threat to conventional literature. Known as “Deconstruction” and brought to American shores from France by means of a series of university conferences and academic publication beginning in 1966, this style of criticism questioned the underlying assumptions behind any statement, exposing how what was accepted as absolute truth usually depended on rhetoric rather than fact, exposing indeed how “fact” itself was constructed by intellectual operations. 2265

New Journalism, which held that characterization, imagery, symbol, and the like were no longer the exclusive province of fiction but appropriate tools for an improved journalism. One of Deconstruction’s / claims was that there is no absolute objectivity; every author, journalist or not, writes from a point of view whose perspective carries with it any number o colorings and biases. Why not capitalize on that perspective—be honest about it, and report not so much the event as the writer’s place in it? 2266

The second development involved not transposing the conventions of fiction to another medium but discarding them as completely as completely as possible. The beginnings of this movement involved rejecting the principal convention of traditional fiction, the suspension of disbelief that enabled an invented story to be presented as factual. By emphasizing their own presence as creators of the tale and making their main subject the procedures by which their narratives were brought into being, writers of Metafiction (as the form was called) sidestepped objections from both the Deconstructions and the Death of the Novel critics. There were no false illusions in Metafiction; what you saw was what you got, a literary work representing nothing other than itself. The value of such work lay in the author, not the tale: how interesting the writer could make the process, how much evidence of imagination and intelligence and creative personality showed through. 2266

Consider the approaches taken to a common figure, the salesperson, by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman (1949) and David Mamet in Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). The older playwright poses his character struggling to articulate his identity as an antihero, fighting to keep his head above water in a world so powerful as to overwhelm him. Four decades later, David Mamet’s sales staff is awash in a tide of language, their slick talking managing to submerge all traces of reality in a realty world built on illusive premises; as long as a character can talk, he survives. 2267

Challenged by new understanding of how reality is constructed, literary realism is transformed. John Cheever’s The Swimmer takes recourse to the magical to express what in an earlier time might have been a sociologically and psychologically inclined story. 2268