The Story Underground

Abstract

Much experimentation in the twentieth-century novel has concentrated on diminishing the importance of narrative. In part this course of action reflects the artistic necessity to do things differently, but more significantly it represents artistic response to the intellectual currents of the time. Specifically, philosophical and scientific challenges to traditional concepts of chronology, of cause-and-effect, of the limits of powers of perception, of the relationship between conscious and unconscious states of knowing have made discernible impressions on the novelist's management of his materials. The total effect has been to enhance his sense of being master of the world he creates, a gamesman for whom not truth or even verisimilitude is of first importance but the delight of the game, the pleasure in virtuosity.