The Activists

• Published in: Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass.) Vol. 92; no. 2; pp. 238 - 249
• Main Author: Stevenson, David L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston American Academy of Arts and Sciences 01.04.1963
• Subjects: Bellows; Denouement; Determinism; Fate; Fiction; Love; Men; Moral character; Novels; Self; The Novel Today; United States/US; World War II
• ISSN: 0011-5266; 1548-6192

'A special kind of novel has emerged out of the serious US fiction written since the war, with a distinct & definable identity of its own. A reasonably accurate label for it is `activist' fiction because its major concern is with the active self-consciousness -the active self-awareness -of characters full of high energy who are intellectual migrants from the norms of domestic morality & ambition in a closed, moneymaking society.' It is at its most representative in the work of S. Bellow, W. Percy, H. Gold, B. Malamud, M. Engel, J. Baldwin & P. Roth. The characters of this activist fiction investigate the excitements & the turmoil in their emotional relationships with others during a series of time segments, with no sense that one episode in time has a traditionally novelistic, formal & progressive relationship to the next one. The hero does not seek for conclusive, irreversible outcomes from specified predicaments. He is rather involved in a nearly aimless search through the endless clutter of everyday existence for a sense of a privately satisfying identity or self. The characters exist in the broad daylight of the postFreudian world, sinless, guiltless unless they are ill, psychically determined, wholly concerned with their own special & private irritations, their own erotic needs. A new tragic view is foreign to this new post-war fiction, which is an artistic revelation of our post-Freudian concern with the individual self, highly conscious of agency, let loose to wander in a psychol'lly & physically determined environment. E. Weiman.