The Turbulent But Creative 1960s

The alienation and stress underlying the 1950s found outward expression in the 1960s in the United States in the civil rights movement, feminism, antiwar protests, minority activism, and the arrival of a counterculture whose effects are still being worked through American society. Notable political and social works of the era include the speeches of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the early writings of feminist leader Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), and Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), about a 1967 antiwar march.

The 1960s were marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage that has carried through the present day. Novelist Truman Capote (1924-1984) -- who had dazzled readers as an enfant terrible of the late 1940s and 1950s in such works as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) -- stunned audiences with In Cold Blood (1965), a riveting analysis of a brutal mass murder in the American heartland that read like a work of detective fiction.

At the same time, the New Journalism emerged -- volumes of nonfiction that combined journalism with techniques of fiction, or that frequently played with the facts, reshaping them to add to the drama and immediacy of the story being reported. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe (1931- ) celebrated the counterculture wanderlust of novelist Ken Kesey (1935-2001); Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) ridiculed many aspects of left-wing activism. Wolfe later wrote an exuberant and insightful history of the initial phase of the U.S. space program, The Right Stuff (1979), and a novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), a panoramic portrayal of American society in the 1980s.

As the 1960s evolved, literature flowed with the turbulence of the era. An ironic, comic vision also came into view, reflected in the fabulism of several writers. Examples include Ken Kesey's darkly comic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel about life in a mental hospital in which the wardens are more disturbed than the inmates, and the whimsical, fantastic Trout Fishing in America (1967) by Richard Brautigan (1935-1984).

The comical and fantastic yielded a new mode, half comic and half metaphysical, in Thomas Pynchon's paranoid, brilliant V and The Crying of Lot 49, John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy, and the grotesque short stories of Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), whose first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, was published in 1964.

This new mode came to be called metafiction -- self-conscious or reflexive fiction that calls attention to its own technique. Such "fiction about fiction" emphasizes language and style, and departs from the conventions of realism such as rounded characters, a believable plot enabling a character's development, and appropriate settings. In metafiction, the writer's style attracts the reader's attention. The true subject is not the characters, but rather the writer's own consciousness.

Critics of the time commonly grouped Pynchon, Barth, and Barthelme as metafictionists, along with William Gaddis (1922-1998), whose long novel JR (l975), about a young boy who builds up a phony business empire from junk bonds, eerily forecasts Wall Street excesses to come. His shorter, more accessible Carpenter's Gothic (1985) combines romance with menace. Gaddis is often linked with midwestern philosopher/novelist William Gass (1924- ), best known for his early, thoughtful novel Omensetter's Luck (1966), and for stories collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968).

Robert Coover (1932- ) is another metafiction writer. His collection of stories Pricksongs & Descants (1969) plays with plots familiar from folktales and popular culture, while his novel The Public Burning (1977) deconstructs the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage.

Thomas Pynchon (1937- )
Thomas Pynchon, a mysterious, publicity-shunning author, was born in New York and graduated from Cornell University in 1958, where he may have come under the influence of Vladimir Nabokov. Certainly, his innovative fantasies use themes of translating clues, games, and codes that could derive from Nabokov. Pynchon's flexible tone can modulate paranoia into poetry.

All of Pynchon's fiction is similarly structured. A vast plot is unknown to at least one of the main characters, whose task it then becomes to render order out of chaos and decipher the world. This project, exactly the job of the traditional artist, devolves also upon the reader, who must follow along and watch for clues and meanings. This paranoid vision is extended across continents and time itself, for Pynchon employs the metaphor of entropy, the gradual running down of the universe. The masterful use of popular culture -- particularly science fiction and detective fiction -- is evident in his works.

Pynchon's work V (1963) is loosely structured around Benny Profane -- a failure who engages in pointless wanderings and various weird enterprises -- and his opposite, the educated Herbert Stencil, who seeks a mysterious female spy, V (alternatively Venus, Virgin, Void). The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a short work, deals with a secret system associated with the U.S. Postal Service. Gravity's Rainbow (1973) takes place during World War II in London, when rockets were falling on the city, and concerns a farcical yet symbolic search for Nazis and other disguised figures.

In Pynchon's comic novel Vineland (l990), set in northern California, shadowy forces within federal agencies endanger individuals. In the novel Mason & Dixon (1997), partly set in the wilderness of 1765, two English explorers survey the line that would come to divide the North and South in the United States. Again, Pynchon sees power wielded unjustly. Dixon asks: "No matter where...we go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves?" Despite its range, the violence, comedy, and flair for innovation in his work inexorably link Pynchon with the 1960s.

John Barth (1930- )
John Barth, a native of Maryland, is more interested in how a story is told than in the story itself, but where Pynchon deludes the reader by false trails and possible clues out of detective novels, Barth entices his audience into a carnival fun house full of distorting mirrors that exaggerate some features while minimizing others.

Realism is the enemy for Barth, the author of Lost in the Funhouse (1968), 14 stories that constantly refer to the processes of writing and reading. Barth's intent is to alert the reader to the artificial nature of reading and writing and to prevent him or her from being drawn into the story as if it were real. To explode the illusion of realism, Barth uses a panoply of reflexive devices to remind his audience that they are reading.

Barth's earlier works, like Saul Bellow's, were questioning and existential, and took up the 1950s themes of escape and wandering. In The Floating Opera (1956), a man considers suicide. The End of the Road (1958) concerns a complex love affair. Works of the 1960s became more comical and less realistic. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) parodies an 18th-century picaresque style, while Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is a parody of the world seen as a university.

Chimera (1972) retells tales from Greek mythology, and Letters (1979) uses Barth himself as a character, as Norman Mailer does in The Armies of the Night. In Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), Barth uses the popular fiction motif of the spy; this is the story of a woman college professor and her husband, a retired secret agent turned novelist. Later novels -- The Tidewater Tales (1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), and Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994) reveal Barth's "passionate virtuosity" (his own phrase) in negotiating the chaotic, oceanic world with the bright rigging of language.

Norman Mailer (1923- )
Norman Mailer made himself the most visible novelist of the l960s and l970s. Co-founder of the anti-establishment New York City weekly The Village Voice, Mailer publicized himself along with his political views. In his appetite for experience, vigorous style, and a dramatic public persona, Mailer follows in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway. To gain a vantage point on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Vietnam War protests, black liberation, and the women's movement, he constructed hip, existentialist, macho male personae (in her book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett identified Mailer as an archetypal male chauvinist). The irrepressible Mailer went on to marry six times and run for mayor of New York.

Mailer is the reverse of a writer like John Barth, for whom the subject is not as important as the way it is handled. Unlike the invisible Thomas Pynchon, Mailer constantly courts and demands attention.

A novelist, essayist, sometime politician, literary activist, and occasional actor, Mailer is always on the scene. From such New Journalism exercises as Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), an analysis of the 1968 U.S. presidential conventions, and his compelling study about the execution of a condemned murderer, The Executioner's Song (1979), Mailer has turned to writing such ambitious, if flawed, novels as Ancient Evenings (1983), set in the Egypt of antiquity, and Harlot's Ghost (1991), revolving around the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Philip Roth (1933- )
Like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth has provoked controversy by mining his life for fiction. In Roth's case, his treatments of sexual themes and ironic analysis of Jewish life have drawn popular and critical attention, as well as criticism.

Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), satirized provincial Jewish suburbanites. In his best-known novel, the outrageous, best-selling Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a New York City administrator regales his taciturn psychoanalyst with off-color stories of his boyhood.

Although The Great American Novel (1973) delves into baseball lore, most of Roth's novels remain resolutely, even defiantly, autobiographical. In My Life As a Man (1974), under the stress of divorce, a man resorts to creating an alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, whose stories constitute one pole of the narrative, the other pole being the different kinds of readers' responses. Zuckerman seemingly takes over in a series of subsequent novels. The most successful is probably the first, The Ghost Writer (1979). It is told by Zuckerman as a young writer criticized by Jewish elders for fanning anti-Semitism. In Zuckerman Bound (1985), a novel has made Zuckerman rich but notorious. In The Counterlife (1986), the fifth Zuckerman novel, stories vie with stories, as Nathan's supposed life is contrasted with other imaginable lives. Roth's memoir The Facts (1988) twists the screw further; in it, Zuckerman criticizes Roth's own narrative style.

Roth continues wavering on the border between fact and fiction in Patrimony: A True Story (1991), a memoir about the death of his father. His recent novels include American Pastoral (1997), in which a daughter's 1960s radicalism wounds a father, and The Human Stain (2000), about a professor whose career is ruined by a racial misunderstanding based on language.

Roth is a profound analyst of Jewish strengths and weaknesses. His characterizations are nuanced; his protagonists are complex, individualized, and deeply human. Roth's series of autobiographical novels about a writer recalls John Updike's recent Bech series, and it is master-stylist Updike with whom Roth -- widely admired for his supple, ingenious style -- is most often compared.

Despite its brilliance and wit, some readers find Roth's work self-absorbed. Still, his vigorous accomplishment over almost 50 years has earned him a place among the most distinguished of American novelists.

Southern Writers

Southern writing of the l960s tended, like the then still largely agrarian southern region, to adhere to time-honored traditions. It remained rooted in realism and an ethical, if not religious, vision during this decade of radical change. Recurring southern themes include family, the family home, history, the land, religion, guilt, identity, death, and the search for redemptive meaning in life. Like William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, 1929), who inspired the "southern renaissance" in literature, many southern writers of the 1960s were scholars and elaborate stylists, revering the written word as a link with traditions rooted in the classical world.

Many have been influential teachers. Kentucky-born Caroline Gordon (1895-1981), who married southern poet Allen Tate, was a respected professor of writing. She set her novels in her native Kentucky. Truman Capote was born in New Orleans and spent part of his childhood in small towns in Louisiana and Alabama, the settings for many of his early works in the elegant, decadent, southern gothic vein.

African-American writing professor Ernest Gaines (1933- ), also born in New Orleans, set many of his moving, thoughtful works in the largely black rural bayou country of Louisiana. Perhaps his best known novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), reflects on the sweep of time from the end of the Civil War in 1865 up to 1960. Concerned with human issues deeper than skin color, Gaines handles racial relations subtly.

Reynolds Price (1933- ), a long-time professor at Duke University, was born in North Carolina, which furnishes the scenes for many of his works, such as A Long and Happy Life (1961). Like William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren, he peoples his southern terrain with interlinked families close to their roots and broods on the passing of time and the imperative to expiate ancient wrongs. His meditative, poetic style recalls the classical literary tradition of the old South. Partially paralyzed due to cancer, Price has explored physical suffering in The Promise of Rest (1995) about a father tending his son who is dying of AIDS. His highly regarded novel Kate Vaiden (1986) reveals his ability to evoke a woman's life.

Walker Percy (1916-1990), a resident of Louisiana, was raised as a member of the southern aristocracy. His very readable novels -- by turns comic, lyrical, moralizing, and satirical -- reveal his awareness of social class and his conversion to Catholicism. His best novel is his first, The Moviegoer (l961). This story of a charming but aimless young New Orleans stockbroker shows the influence of French existentialism transplanted to the booming and often brash New South that burgeoned after World War II.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 890