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An image to reflect in accelerating expectations, to judge by the' Ragged Dicks and Tattered Toms it favored during the first great age of mass literature in America. Alger’s stereotype of struggle-and-success, and others like it, resonated with the dreams his readers dreamed; and behind those dreams was a latch in worldly success as a measure of individual humanity that reached back past the puritans’ doctrine of the calling to the Faustian core of Protestant ethics itself. But by the time the crash of 1f29 imposed its reality on the nation, a tradition had emerged among serious novelists that set them in imaginative opposition to the stereotype of struggle-and-success. Those who published the decisive works of the twenties and thirties—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Scott FitzGerald, John Stein- beck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—a1l of them took on in some significant measure the task of demythification.</br> | An image to reflect in accelerating expectations, to judge by the' Ragged Dicks and Tattered Toms it favored during the first great age of mass literature in America. Alger’s stereotype of struggle-and-success, and others like it, resonated with the dreams his readers dreamed; and behind those dreams was a latch in worldly success as a measure of individual humanity that reached back past the puritans’ doctrine of the calling to the Faustian core of Protestant ethics itself. But by the time the crash of 1f29 imposed its reality on the nation, a tradition had emerged among serious novelists that set them in imaginative opposition to the stereotype of struggle-and-success. Those who published the decisive works of the twenties and thirties—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Scott FitzGerald, John Stein- beck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—a1l of them took on in some significant measure the task of demythification.</br> | ||
They struggled and, in true American fashion, they succeeded. They succeeded so thoroughly that only the grossest hacks find rite old stereotype a challenging target anymore. But if the example of Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins arrests to rite success of the stereotype’s enemies, it also raises a question about its obvious persistence in the popular imagination. Has the dream of success become a reflex of the mass psyche, a subliminal myth that no longer needs to be established or nourished in the public imagination? Is it somehow infused soon after, birth, or even passed on genetically, along with stronger teeth anal longer limbs?</br> | They struggled and, in true American fashion, they succeeded. They succeeded so thoroughly that only the grossest hacks find rite old stereotype a challenging target anymore. But if the example of Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins arrests to rite success of the stereotype’s enemies, it also raises a question about its obvious persistence in the popular imagination. Has the dream of success become a reflex of the mass psyche, a subliminal myth that no longer needs to be established or nourished in the public imagination? Is it somehow infused soon after, birth, or even passed on genetically, along with stronger teeth anal longer limbs?</br> | ||
Such conjectures seem mild when compared to the hypothesis Norman Other broaches in his own bout with the stereotype, An American Dream. Here, a witty variant of the young man on the make is thwarted in an urban gothic melodrama that verges on vaudeville: stock characters and tacky extras abound, and the style is slaphappy with significance. Like all potboilers, it was intended to exceed the expectations of its readers, and judging by the critical response it stimulated, it was almost unanimously successful. "Mailer’s novel is bad,” wrote Stanley Edgar Hyman at the time it was published, ”in that absolute fashion that makes it unlikely that he could ever have written anything good.”' Other critics held back from this extremity, but even Mailer’s defenders were forced to the conclusion that An American Dream was a parody. For it is in many ways a shoddy and cynical performance, hacked out on schedule for serial publication, littered with barbarisms, and drastically over-motivated. It is easily dismissed on technical grounds: told in the first person, the novel relies on its hero’s rhetorical mysticism for both its narrative play and its thematic overplay. Since the ironies are at his expense, he must tell us more than he can plausibly know, which embarrasses the dream without its disguise. It also undercuts the authority of Mai1er’s hypothesis at its source. This is too bad because it’s one of his gaudier conceits that the stereotype of struggle-and-success is actually an archetype in disguise.</br> | Such conjectures seem mild when compared to the hypothesis Norman Other broaches in his own bout with the stereotype, An American Dream. Here, a witty variant of the young man on the make is thwarted in an urban gothic melodrama that verges on vaudeville: stock characters and tacky extras abound, and the style is slaphappy with significance. Like all potboilers, it was intended to exceed the expectations of its readers, and judging by the critical response it stimulated, it was almost unanimously successful. "Mailer’s novel is bad,” wrote Stanley Edgar Hyman at the time it was published, ”in that absolute fashion that makes it unlikely that he could ever have written anything good.”' Other critics held back from this extremity, but even Mailer’s defenders were forced to the conclusion that An American Dream was a parody. For it is in many ways a shoddy and cynical performance, hacked out on schedule for serial publication, littered with barbarisms, and drastically over-motivated. It is easily dismissed on technical grounds: told in the first person, the novel relies on its hero’s rhetorical mysticism for both its narrative play and its thematic overplay. Since the ironies are at his expense, he must tell us more than he can plausibly know, which embarrasses the dream without its disguise. It also undercuts the authority of Mai1er’s hypothesis at its source. This is too bad because it’s one of his gaudier conceits that the stereotype of struggle-and-success is actually an archetype in disguise.</br> | ||