The American Dream and the Popular Novel

Elizabeth Long

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351589970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This title, originally published in 1985, examines conceptions of success and the good life expressed in bestselling novels – ranging from historical sagas and spy thrillers to more serious works by Updike, Bellows, Steinbeck and Mailer – published from 1945 to 1975. Using these popular books as cultural evidence, Elizabeth Long argues that the meaning of the American dream has changed dramatically, but in a more complex fashion than has been recognised by that country's most prominent social critics. Her study presents a challenge to prevailing social-scientific views of contemporary American culture, and represents, both in theory and method, an important contribution to the study of culture and social criticism.

1

Introduction

The story of America has been the story of success. From the time of Poor Richard’s Almanack, individual enterprise has been our national anthem, and our achievements as a nation have seemed its mirror and collective manifestation. Only three decades ago, few would have disputed the description of America as ‘the achieving society,’ and of America’s mission as the dissemination of the entrepreneurial gospel to less fortunate nations around the world.

Indeed, the end of World War II marked the beginning of what has been called the American quarter-century - a time of clear global hegemony for our country and unprecedented affluence for millions of its citizens. Yet the period when the American Dream seemed closest to fulfillment was, paradoxically, the first time when the limits and contradictions of that dream became widely apparent. Widespread affluence, and the very conditions that permitted its attainment, increasingly set the entrepreneurial ideal at odds with the realities of aspiration, achievement, and the experience of the successful life. Structural trends towards economic concentration, bureaucratization, service sector growth; rising consumer credit, new attitudes towards work and leisure; and the vast migration to the suburbs - all challenged older values of entrepreneurial independence, thrift and self-discipline, and cast doubt on the old equation between material and social advance.

These structural changes were accompanied in American life by a reexamination of traditional concepts of success, a broad- based and many-voiced attempt to characterize what differentiated post-World War II America from the more distant past. Both affluence and success - keystones of the American Dream - have been central categories in this discussion, and their meaning for both the nation and its people has been at issue.

From the time of the Korean War - when American troops and especially prisoners appeared demoralized - through the late 1950s, pundits and politicians debated whether Americans had ‘gone soft,’ mourned the decline of the small businessman and farmer, and discussed the ill-effects of affluence on the national purpose. Kennedy’s famous inaugural speech reaffirmed that purpose, Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programs attempted (echoing the New Deal) both to open opportunities for affluence to all Americans and, at the same time, to move the definition of social success and purpose away from the entrepreneurial mode. Many of the minority groups vocal during the 1960s excoriated success as a mystificatory, even dangerous, ideology, while variously attempting reform, revolution, or ‘counter-cultural’ alternatives to a social system they perceived as being founded on a hypocritical or soullessly materialistic definition of success. The material hardship of the 1970s brought back an ideal of competitive individualism and corporate, if not entrepreneurial, success. Yet in the wake of the sixties, which had unsettled traditional social forms and mores - from the Presidency and the executive branch of the federal government to the inmost manifestations of individual sexuality - the tone and texture of both individual and collective ‘success’ felt different from what people remembered of the past.

In the 1980s, questions about personal and national purpose were asked with new insistence. Different groups proclaimed widely different models of the good life. President Reagan’s image of the ‘city on the hill’ invoked a quasi-mythical past; gurus resettled their followers on communal ranches in Oregon; popular writers told their audiences how to dress for success or negotiate the crises of adult development; management consultants urged Americans to follow the Japanese example, and political interest groups offered first principles ranging from biblical literalism to solar power.

The very diversity of such responses testifies to the urgency of a common plight: an ideal that once gave people direction, and bound their individual endeavors to a broader sense of American mission and progress, has lost its resonance and its power to inspire. The promise of the early postwar years has dissolved into a period of cultural confusion and volatility - a time that offers, along with doubt and dismay, at least the hope of reframing our basic goals and values so that they will be more fruitful for us as people and as a civilization.

To gain some purchase on the present, it is crucial to elucidate what has happened to the American Dream in the years after World War II. This book contributes to that task by examining how popular novelists have written about the dream of success in the period from 1945 to 1975, three decades that witnessed the onset of extraordinary affluence, the working out of its social and personal consequences, and the beginning of its erosion. Not surprisingly, these issues are central to the work of many novelists writing at the time, and their work provides a major source of information about widely held cultural assumptions, attitudes and beliefs, a remarkable opportunity to explore the processes of cultural change.

Novels are an especially fruitful mode of access to the subjective dimension of collective life in part because they explore the meeting-places of self and society, of inner desires and external constraints. They are preeminently stories of individual lives. Novelists discuss their heroes’ and heroines’ inner lives, family backgrounds, motivations, hopes and dreams, beliefs and actions, and the personal, moral, and social consequences of those actions. They show their characters developing over time through complicated series of perceptions and decisions and, often, through an equally complex dialogue with various aspects of their internal selves. Novels thus provide an unparalleled mode of access to an experiential world of finely shaded ‘innerness.’

As a literary form, novels are also remarkable because they depict society with complexity and particularity. Although an individual, or several individuals, provide the narrative focus for most novels, the individual is seen as most explicable, or ‘readable,’ in the terms of novelistic conventions, when acting within networks of personal and social relationships and in a variety of institutional settings. In a sense, novels detail the many levels of interplay between the subjective and the objective world. They describe how individuals take the world in; how it subtly and unknowingly shapes them; how they, with various levels of accuracy or illusion, perceive the world; and how the world presents them with choices and constraints. They also illuminate, in turn, how individual desires, fears, and dreams impinge on the lives of others and stretch or tear the moral fabric of the social universe. Moreover, novels show an awareness that even these private yearnings and despairs may imply the social in their innermost parts. Thus novels provide fictional representations of the very interrelationships - between inner aspiration and action in the world, between the personal and the social - that have both fascinated and eluded anyone who is trying to understand how modern America has changed.¹

Moreover, novels and especially popular novels, operate within the conventions of literary realism, so they are built in part on a set of perceptions about the world that are shared with their audiences. This does not mean that novels provide a mirror of the external world, or should be judged as useful cultural evidence according to how accurate a reflection of the world they generate. But novels imply a community of shared meaning.

Not only the author’s own perceptions of the world, but the perceptions of the hypothetical audience to whom the author writes, are implicated in every novel. As one thinker who has studied the linkages between fiction and the social world says, there are connections between the ‘authorial audience’ (the audience authors have in mind when they write) and the beliefs of actual readers, shared meanings indicated not only by how the author describes characters and their motivation, but by what the author leaves unsaid, as well. For instance, audiences in our culture understand that certain physical descriptions connote beauty, and that a certain ending is to be taken as ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy.’²

If we grant with interpretive social thinkers like Clifford Geertz or Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann that the social world is not a simple reality, but a web of significance built in part on our perceptions of the world, then the novelistic conventions of realism point to areas of commonality between the imagined world of the novel, and perceptions of the world held by real people in the audience - perceptions that form an important part of the social world beyond the world of novels. Moreover, these perceptions and evaluations of the world - beliefs, values, taken-for-granted assumptions - lie at the heart of the American Dream. Realism, then, provides a set of conventions that make a country’s literature a fruitful source of evidence about its cultural ethos.

Bestselling novels are particularly important cultural artifacts because they are primarily a social rather than a literary phenomenon. Although they are books, their status as ‘bestsellers’ is socially constituted. Two implications of this fact, both related to their advantages as cultural evidence, are particularly important.

First, bestselling novels are defined by their success in finding audiences, or, to put it another way, are defined by audience demand, however distorted by the influence of large advertising budgets or a narrow choice of novels on the market. While it is impossible to tell exactly who reads each novel and what each reader gleans from a certain book, problems I will explore in more detail in Chapter 2, bestsellers become bestsellers because they have found resonance with large segments of the reading public. They are themselves successful books; and they achieve success in the marketplace because they are in tune with popular demand.

Thus, bestsellers are important cultural evidence because of their link to the social world of readers and their reading, not because of their literary merits, or lack thereof. The roots of cultural-literary studies in the field of literature have often made it difficult to separate issues of esthetic evaluation from those of cultural or social importance. Often, cultural analysts have conflated the two, assuming that the essence of a given culture of historical period could be best understood by analyzing its few great books or great ideas. This position, problematic for several reasons, seems particularly unsuited for examining a complex and fragmented society in which the hegemony of traditional cultural elites is uncertain, and the cultural hierarchy itself is under challenge. Similarly, popular novels have often been characterized as ideological or stereotypic and dismissed accordingly. If they are, however, then surely they are an appropriate source for investigating widely held beliefs about the world and their relationship to social change.³

Second, the wide popularity of bestsellers suggests that they are finding resonance with broad segments of the reading public, rather than appealing only to certain subsections of the audience. They run the gamut from ‘mass’ to ‘high’ culture, which assures various levels of sophistication in thematic presentation and also permits discovery of similarities and differences between novels that probably appeal to different groups - discoveries that may point to trends within the audience that are relatively generalized. The bestseller lists also include representatives of different literary genres, from war novels to historical romances. In looking at bestsellers, one can see not only whether the generic ‘mix’ among the most popular novels changes over time, itself an interesting cultural fact, but also whether thematic changes emerge across generic boundaries over the years. If this is the case, such shifts, once again, point to general cultural developments. In other words, I am arguing that bestsellers are a particularly useful source of evidence precisely because they represent a sort of common denominator of our literary culture. If, on the whole, they are relatively conventional stories (and may not be on the horizon of this era’s novelistic vision), this makes them the more likely to be in tune with the values and attitudes of middle-class Americans. And if, as is the case, most bestsellers are not only conventional but relatively ephemeral in influence, this quality, too, is a positive one for my purposes, since it makes them an especially interesting source of data for investigating the complexities of short-term sociocultural change.

The annual lists of ten hardcover bestselling novels compiled by The Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information provided the sample of books for analysis.⁴ These lists are compiled under the auspices of the R. R. Bowker Company from industry sales figures exclusive of book club sales, and have attained preeminent status within the publishing industry. Because of Bowker’s unofficial position as information-gatherer and arbiter of the book world (it serves libraries as well as publishers), its lists are the most accurate ones available to retail booksellers, librarians and researchers alike.⁵

In spite of the obvious centrality of the theme of success and the good life in American society, my research became focused on it primarily because of the attention it was given in the books under study. Even a superficial reading of these texts reveals that success is a recurrent concern and a matter of almost obsessional importance in bestselling novels. The novelists’ preoccupation with success directed my attention to definitions of success, its social location, patterns of reward and sanction, the importance of success to plot and character, and how these factors changed. An understanding of success from a sociological perspective raised questions of motivation, social structure, and the relation of achievement to gender, ethnicity and class - all issues that are implicit in the novelists’ construction of a fictive universe rather than an explicit focus of their narratives.

It is in a sense not surprising that bestselling novels, themselves successful books, often produced by authors also in search of success, should manifest a concern with success, but I want to emphasize that in this research I did not turn to novels with that theme on my mind (thus forcing them into my own Procrustean framework). Rather I found myself, in the course of examining novels in search of quite different themes and issues, confronted with the striking centrality of success in many of the narratives, and with the patterned nature of the taken-for-granted assumptions about success and its meanings for individuals and the social world even in novels in which it was not the central narrative focus. This study is, in turn, most centrally focused on novels whose themes concern success, its consequences, or its lack. Yet almost every novel under study is predicated on certain views about success, motivation, and social mobility, so I have drawn on the entire sample in order to analyze various components of the social worlds ‘described’ by their authors.

Textual analysis was holistic and inclusive. Questions of narrative structure, character development, setting and novelistic tone were all considered relevant. In some cases, I have used a group of novels to elucidate thematic parameters and variations; in others, I have concentrated on one particularly effective and representative fictional statement and merely indicated examples of similar views or novelistic presentation.

Since novelistic perceptions of success did undergo dramatic change during the thirty-year period, it seemed useful to have a flexible typology to characterize emergent patterns of success. For example, at the beginning of the period, I refer to an ‘entrepreneurial’ conception of success that unites individual and social amelioration. Later, as the sense of limitless expansion fades, what I have called a ‘corporate-suburban’ pattern emerges: work and family-centered leisure are seen as conflicting priorities. Later still, there is a significant shift from concern with occupational success to the personal rewards it brings. At this point, as heroes venture into the wilderness of ‘success as self-fulfillment,’ some continue the search for success, but less as an end in itself than as a means to attain very private goals of domestic happiness or immediate sensual gratification. Others equate achievement with an inner voyage of self-discovery marked less by worldly success than by a felt sense of creativity or experiential intensity. By the end of the period, both achievement and its rewards seem deeply problematic, and heroes confront individual and systemic failure to an unprecedented degree. With the American Dream in disarray, even an informal typology of success does not exhaust the material under analysis.

If success and its vicissitudes provided grist for the mills of popular novelists during the decades after 1945, social scientists were also captivated by the phenomenon of American affluence, and questioned what its consequences might be for values like individual achievement. Indeed, the amount of attention sociologists have given to achievement and success suggests that the novelist’s preoccupation with success is just one manifestation of a generalized social concern. Even before World War II, sociologists enshrined achievement as the keystone in the overarching cultural value system, and either condemned the ideology of success, or attempted to unearth its intrapsychic dynamics to foster motivation, revealing beneath the multiplicity of their views a deep professional fascination with success.

In the years since 1945, social scientists have examined changing cultural assumptions about success as an important social-psychological concomitant of the dramatic institutional and occupational developments that have transformed American society. Like popular novelists, they have identified success as a key component of American identity. Like many Americans, they have identified its changing cultural meaning as a valuable indicator of the ‘main drift’ of modern American society.

As early as the 1950s, this concern was reflected in the work of David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and William H. Whyte. More recently, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Richard Sennett have extended the discussion. Each of these thinkers lays claim to different territory. Riesman, for example, speaks of social character; Sennett, of the erosion of public life; Lasch, of the culture of narcissism. Their theoretical projects and conceptual predispositions also differ. Nonetheless, all are attempting to get hold of the subjective and cultural manifestations of more easily quantifiable social developments in modern society. And, despite their differing terms and theoretical perspectives, all are coming to terms with the effects of affluence on the meaning of success.⁶ Because of their concerns about our society, I refer to them as social critics, though ‘humanist social thinkers’ would be as appropriate a term. Their work, which I discuss in Chapter 6, provides an important counterpoint to novelistic perspectives on success.

Social thinkers, like novelists, write about the complex interplay between individuals and their social milieux, but, unlike novelists, they base their work on systematic studies of social life. Ideally, explicit canons of conceptual and evidentiary validity govern both their writing a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Success in bestselling novels: the social context of thematic content
• 3 Bestselling novels 1945-1955: from entrepreneurial adventure to corporate-suburban compromise
• 4 Bestselling novels 1956-1968: the varieties of self-fulfillment - the goal achieved
• 5 Bestselling novels 1969-1975: the failure of success
• 6 The social critics
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index