Lore and Encyclopedias: Reflecting Fifties Culture

Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. xii + 242 pp. $16.95 paper.

W. T. Lhamon Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. 1990. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. xxxix + 286 pp. $18.50 paper.

Rhetorically, encyclopedias are a bit odd. They allow hundreds of researchers and thousands of entries to speak with one, consolidated voice, regardless of the diverse opinions expressed, resulting in a lengthy document that gives the impression that it was more carefully edited for tone than for fact (see, for example, any mid-1960s entry on "Vietnam"). Initially written as an entry for The Cambridge History of American Literature (1993), Morris Dickstein's book-length expansion, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970, still retains that authoritative rhetorical position upon which encyclopedias depend, even though, given the recent decade's changes not only in the literary canon but in the notion of canonicity, the tone is likely to seem at best anachronistic.

Such a tone is perhaps apt, however, for a book published on the cusp of the twenty-first century that can barely acknowledge the significance of women writers, whom Dickstein dismisses with a pat on the head: The "major figures in postwar fiction," he explains,

for more than two decades were nearly all male, with rare exceptions, such as Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eurdora Welty in the South; the brilliant and brittle Mary McCarthy, who emerged from the bosom of the New York Intellectuals; New Yorker writers like Jean Stafford, Hortense Callisher, and Shirley Jackson; and Grace Paley. . . . It was not until the sixties sparked a revival of feminism that women reclaimed their vital position in the American novel.

(24-25)

(To be fair, I should point out that O'Connor receives three full sentences and the "brilliant and brittle" McCarthy is mentioned in parts of three sentences located, respectively, in extended discussions of Mailer, Nabokov, and Roth.) In light of the fact that the period Dickstein studies encompasses that time when, he asserts, women "reclaimed their vital position," the omission seems even more queer, especially when he stretches his time frame to 1978 to include Going after Cacciato or even to the 1990s to discuss the later works of the men he likes, while omitting even the novels that Toni Morrison and Joan Didion wrote before 1978, to name two of the women arguably as important as Tim O'Brien or Ron Kovic or Michael Herr.

Were there a museum of higher education that placed old syllabi under glass, Leopards in the Temple might be the Cliffs Notes for that museum's 1970 syllabus for "The Post-War American Novel." It takes us back to that time when too many professors were still willing to pronounce, with the tone of encyclopedic verity, that women could not write great novels because they had never been to war. (Hence O'Brien but not Morrison? Herr but not Didion?) Thought of as a museum piece, Dickstein's book in fact helps us understand the relationship between the encyclopedia and the traditional museum, both dedicated to the authoritative solidification of values.

From this perspective, Dickstein's book could not be more antithetical to W. T. Lhamon Jr.'s Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. Ostensibly about a similar topic—the transformation of American culture initiated in the fifties—Deliberate Speed does not attempt to explain why the sky is blue but to demonstrate how one plays the blues, that is, how one engages in the infinite possibilities (to use Ralph Ellison's phrase) that a racially, intellectually, and electronically integrated society produces and reproduces. Focusing on the cultural echoes surrounding the year 1955, Lhamon sets out to prove that "[c]ontemporary circumstances became conceptual as a usable present about 1955...