Literature is legitimizing.
Some figures in literature are evocative. That means the figures are placed in a situation and then come into their own kind of existence and will do what they will, whether by their natures or their preferences, making their impressions on their worlds and it is up to the reader or the audience or the viewer to make some sense of them, to appreciate them or to blame or praise them, though only rarely to do what Aristotle said happens in tragedy, which is to go beyond praise or blame and just achieve an acceptance of what is. Then there is no longer a need either to bemoan or praise characters. Audiences do not need to admire or hate Oedipus. He is what he is, as are the rest of us. Such figures are given to us and we tussle with them. A literature that goes beyond morality is very liberating because it opens possibilities to consider how people have been willed into being and how strange is human existence.
Then there is a very different kind of existence for literary figures. They are the ones who as characters legitimize a kind of person rather than exist only as trends or other social facts. They become part of the world order even if they had never existed as such before. These might seem lesser figures because they may seem not to stride so strongly on the stage, but they are the ones to which their creators demand, as Linda Loman says in “The Death of a Salesman”, people should be paid attention. That is very different from Greek drama and it becomes central, I think, in Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, where a creature lacking in nobility or dignity, is raised into importance through the craft of the author , however much that narrator is ironic about heroic pretensions. Take heroes with a grain of salt but they are nonetheless heroes who imprint themselves, and the Wife of Bath is memorable because she is shown as having the different motives and circumstances of women in the stages of life. She is now a type of life, however mundane her concerns are, and so is also elaborated into being like a creature in a tragic life, part of the texture of the social universe, a singular thing and so also beyond morality.
I think Chaucer was a breakthrough because “Beowulf” remains in the prior mode of heroism, the protagonist imprinting himself onto the world despite the narrator being ironic about heroism itself, while the Wife of Bath is not heroic except as implication, impressing herself for her ingenuity and cleverness so that she too counts. That is very different from Shakespeare who, despite his innovation of breaking from unities of time and place, retains the tragic structure that whether despicable, like Iago, or intemperate, like Hamlet, the figures stride across the stage, rather than the author announcing that this is a person worth recognizing.
The literary art of the Fifties was not elevated in that it was legitimizing rather than evocative, certainly in comparison to the Modernists of a previous generation, or even earlier, Dostoevsky and Kierkegard, the religious existentialists who showed people in agony over things like killing an innocent, which seemed to both of them about the nature of things rather than simple cruelty, such as the demand to sacrifice Issac. Existentialism was imported from Europe, and most of the writers of the decade who seemed to have depth were not home grown. Nabakov was a Russian and the I. B. Singer in his early work wrote about Jewish life in Poland, he moving having been told that there would be no ghosts there, as he disproved, from his later novel about Holocaust survivors, entitled, everyone having ghosts.
Albert Camus was particularly attractive to American intellectuals, more so than Jean Paul Sartre, the other major Frternch atheist existentialist, who was nihilistic and for open sexual relations and phenomenological, trees stripped bare of their constraints that made life comfortable and left as ugly, gnarled things that could spook you. Rather, Camus was upstanding moral, his image of the myth of Sisyphus an emblem of the time, people heroically pushing a stone upward until it would inevitably fall back, that an image of the human condition, people persevering in what was hopeless. If that isn’t depressing, people in their nature struggling against what could not be, then what was? But what I interpret as the American version of Camus is much more positive. Everyone can see themselves as heroic because they struggle against an obstacle and persevere or try once again, whether with a difficult boss or a difficult spouse. Everyone ordinary is elevated into becoming heroic, which is the Fifties resolution for literature that I have discussed in a previous post.
J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” was very popular with young people and still on junior high school reading lists, last I looked. Salinger was known for his distinctive style but not for much in the way of meaning, according to serious critics, but I think otherwise. Salinger was, like an existentialist, a minimalist in that he wanted to get down to essentials, or to an essential, and that meant to him, as an American, to identify a social rather than a psychological feature. That meant being not a phony, which was to be authentic, what you really are, rather than a poseur. Holden Caulfield’s boarding school roommate was a phony because his razor was not cleaned despite him being socially prominent. His teacher was a phony because he may or may not have made sexual advances on him. A girl he knew showed off her butt in her skating costume and that showed she was scheming. No one escapes condemnation and so the world is bereft of heartfelt feelings. What a sad condition in America.
But that kind of emotion can also be a false ideal. The opposite of phoniness is authenticity which is what David Riesman in “The Lonely Crowd” imagines as a gyroscope which keeps you steady despite social fashions. But as Lionel Trilling and others said in the Sixties, authenticity is nothing more than sincerity and that is a cheap commodity. Everyone is able to claim it. A hypocrite can be sincere in believing what he really does believe while pretending otherwise.
Another example of American legitimization of a trend or type is “Rebel Without A Cause” a popular movie along with such movies as the young Brando in “The Wild One'' was trying to understand juvenile delinquency, which at the time in social problems texts was included with homosexuality and mental illness as dysfunctions to be addressed rather than juvenile delinquency as the opposite side of the youth culture that had been extolled since the Twenties as a liberation from fuddy duddy constraints: looser clothing, fewer sexual constraints and popular singers, like Frankie. This particular movie was based on a best selling therapist who probed why young people should be so aggressively contrarian, perhaps anarchistic, in the present affluent society, just as I wonder why there are so adamant Trumpists when things in America are going rather well. But James Dean scowled and was angry with life as if it was in the nature of things as they were in the world and not just a pique but not centering on what might be existential conditions, such as the fact of death or disease, as was shown in Ingmar Bergman, or even in racial discrimination, as shown in movies, but only, in the case of Brando, because his father hit him, which is indeed a social problem rather than in the nature of things. Dean and Brando are legitimated because they have to be if they are to be taken seriously. “Beowulf” doesn’t have to be made legitimate because there are real monsters.
Also the Fifties weren't just about Jews.The Fifties were a time of amnesia about the Holocaust. Yes, people knew about it but did not weigh its significance. There had been the creation of Israel, in part as a reparation for the Holocaust, and Germany provided reparations to Israel, a kind of blood money which they needed at the time, but the purpose of Zionism predated the Holocaust. Its purpose was to settle a European type nation into the Middle East so that it was like France, an ethnicity with a nation, or as David Ben Gurion, a Russian Socialist with no religious beliefs who came to Palestine said, the thieves and prostitutes among Israeli citizens should be Jewish thieves and prostitutes. Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism'' had been influential since it was published in 1950, refashioning the political spectrum so that far left and far right merged, but the specific issue with the Holocaust took off as an issue during the Sixties, at the time of the Eichmann trial and Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem “ which created considerable controversy because Eichmann was a person of banal rather than diabolical instincts, no Miltonian Lucifer, and that the Jewish organizing groups had tragically tried to appease the Germans because, after all, they wouldn’t kill all of us and we had survived other pogroms, both of these points reasonable at that moment.
There was afterwards a big splash on the Holocaust. There was a tv miniseries in the Sixties and the introduction of Holocaust awareness in the schools, even to the point where children were asked how many gilders Anne Frank had if she spent three of her ten. Schools always follow cultural trends. In my predominately Jewish public school, I had been taught in the fourth grade about Hyam Solomon, the Jewish financier in Revolutionary New York who had propped up the value of the Revolution’s currency by adroitly buying and selling the money. So I am not surprised that, afterwards, there is a big push on Black and Latino heroes and, even after that, into gay and trans books even if some parents find that outrageous to point out that there really had been slaveholders.
The Fifties were also about gay people. Writers that were otherwise significant published early in their careers so as to legitimize gay life by portraying their lives in novels. These included Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin, but notably not Tennessee Wiliams who alluded to it but only that in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, where why the hero will not have sex with his wife is not explained. Each of these writers legitimizes gays and gay life by just portraying it and merely allowing the protagonist to be who is what he is, living as he can under his constraints. It is not surprising that generations later some parents would oppose allowing “Heather Has Two Mommies”. included in school libraries. Their reason is not the offered one that it is not age appropriate, because no one is in favor of that, but because the book and its ilk normalize or legitimate what is presented as normal behavior and so includes same sex families as morally acceptable when they are believed to be an affront to nature. There weren't, however, objections a few decades before to Ezra Jack Keats’ child literature on inner city black youth, where they were the protagonists. That progress of legitimation was regarded as inevitable while gay legitimation seemed reprehensible. Literature counts and so people take sides on what to suppress.