The Age of The Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America

Concerned with the fundamental question “What is man,” Mark Greif chronicles this line of inquiry in the American context from 1933 to 1973. The period, as he identifies as “midcentury,” witnesses the failure of Enlightenment values, the disbelief in humanity after two world wars, and the ideological confrontation between American individualism and Soviet collectivism. Discourses on crisis emerge: the crisis of the liberal state, the crisis of capitalism, the crisis of the political world system, etc. Among them, “The threat was now to ‘man.’ ‘Man’ was in ‘crisis.’” (3) Greif stresses the significance of the discourse in its redefinition and rehabilitation of humanism. “Man became at midcentury the figure everyone insisted must be addressed, recognized, helped, rescued, made the center, the measure, the ‘root,’ and released for ‘what was in’ him.” (8) Then, pivoting on the genesis and contestations of the discourse of the crisis of man, Greif attempts to reconstruct the trajectory of American intellectual history, aiming at a new philosophical history of midcentury. In Greif’s argument, the discourse of the crisis of man came into being in the 1930s, strengthened in the 1940s, weakened and was transmitted in the 1950s, and metamorphosed and exploded in the 1960s.

Greif’s historiographic project of the discourse of the crisis of man during midcentury America situates squarely within the intellectual historians’ field of study. By placing the question of “What is man” as a point of departure, it shares a similar path with the historical studies of the debates on humanism from the European continent to America, from atheism to existentialism, and from homegrown philosophers to émigré theologians in developing a humanistic worldview of the time. Meanwhile, the book intervenes greatly with the literary studies for its inclusion of a series of American canonical writers and their works – Saul Bellow and Dangling Man, Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man, Flannery O’Connor and A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Thomas Pynchon and V. Greif terms his approach as “maieutics” that preserves the philosophical impulse while eschewing the theorizing it tends to inspire. “Maieutics are shoulds in discourse or within the intellectual life to help to say what must be addressed or talked about, what stands up as a serious or profound question or contribution, regardless of its ability to solve or determine an inquiry.” (25) To Greif, the discourse of man is meaningful only to the extent it is unresolved. Thus, he privileges the novel as an innovating mode of thinking over traditional modes in philosophy for two reasons. Firstly, fiction writers think in vernacular talk and character, providing a break from academic abstractions by the use of language from everyday life. Secondly, unlike the theorists’ answers to the question of man, novelists’ accounts are tested against lived experience, undermining the universal pretensions of the discourse precisely on matters of difference.

The book chapters are connected by the rise and fall of the discourse of the crisis of man. The first section spends three chapters to delineate the origins of this discourse, encompassing texts by various and diverse theorists, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Mannheim, Franz Boas, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt. Next, shifting its focus thoughts to fictions, the second and third sections reviews the endeavors American novelists undertake in their works to address the question of man. In Grief’s view, Ernest Hemingway’s and William Faulkner’s later works fail to meet the standard of the maieutic form for its overtly humanist tones and grandly allegories. Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow address the essential emptiness characterizing the existence of the abstract and universal “Man.” Flannery O’Connor creates a satire of the discourse from her engagement with the problem of faith. Thomas Pynchon responses the crisis by revealing the fragmentation of the subject in the world of material circulation. The book’s final section describes the decline of the discourse. And the conclusion looks into the late 1960s and early 1970s, offering a new account of the rise of theory in America.

Overall, Grief’s mission is a worthy one. Well-organized, Grief’s book synthesizes five decades of thought with an expansive new framework, inspiring its readers to re-read the midcentury America cultural texts from a different point of view. Although the book deals with a historically precise philosophical problem, it still can serve the political needs of the present day. While writing back and forth between literary texts and philosophical thoughts, chapter eight offers an impressive reading of Pynchon’s two earlier works, V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), in relation to technology within the crisis of man. Grief’s analysis of Pynchon sheds lights on a critical bridge between the two disparate disciplines, humanities and sciences. Grief makes two important arguments. Firstly, he pinpoints that instead of the widely discussed high-technological, scientific and engineering concepts in Pynchon’s writing, it is the technologies of mundane, ordinary life that reveals the novelist’s suspicion to the expression of the discourse of the crisis of man as a literary project and the transformation of this discourse foreshadowed by technology. “‘Man’ as a being and concept is put into jeopardy for Pynchon,” as Grief explains, “by the use of ordinary materials and the creation of mundane objects – the changing status of the parts of men, and the insertion of inanimate things into their bodies and daily habits.” (229-30) In Grief’s view, Pynchon sees the discourse of the crisis of man not moving forwards, but circling back, “it is no longer the objects produced, nor uses and ways of consumption, nor organizing forms that matter about technology but ‘cycling’ and recirculation.” (230) Grief uses one of the subplots from The Crying of Lot 49 to support this recirculation. The bones of American soldiers killed and dumped by Nazis, failed to be acknowledged, and entered the American commercial system of raw materials: sold for fertilizer, warehoused and then ended up in cigarette filters. Secondly, Grief argues that Pynchon answers the old question of man by pointing out the subject in question has changed. The problematic subject is not the man misorganized in totalitarianism, nor the man overmechanized in industrial fears, but man too much confused with material that does not belong to him, and furthermore, man through material-immaterial circulation, becoming too many men with too little control of each. “It is the sense of multiplicity,” as Grief contends, “then division, breaking apart the idea of abstract man itself, that became an aspect of the breaking apart of the discourse of man in the 1960s.” (252)

However, the interdisciplinary approach of combing thoughts and fictions has its drawbacks. To start with, the textual analysis of the literary works is primarily for the support of the author’s arguments on intellectual history, which results in its lack of scholarly dialogue with other literary critics of writers studied here. The chapters on Bellow, Ellison, O’Conner, and Pynchon could be more insightful and convincing by an acknowledgement of the large critical literature that has built up around these figures. Also, there’s not enough explanations on standards in selecting the major novelists and their works here. Both the novelists and their works are very canonical, which on the one side do reflect the thoughts at the time, but on the other hand, seem too dominant and mainstream that neglect underrepresented authors and their works. Occasionally the author will cite a historian or sociologist but few literary critics in his augmentation, and therefore the book is better understood as a work of history as opposed to literary criticism, though the book’s title gives equal weight to the two. In terms of actual reading of each novel, the analysis tends to operate on the level of plot, with few close readings of the chosen text. Meanwhile, unlike the parts on philosophical thoughts tracing the travelling of ideas from Europe to America, the parts on literary criticism lacks the consideration of the influences outside the United States. Next, not including other disciplines into the study of the discourse of the crisis of man, appears inadequate. Among the wide range of the intellectual sphere during midcentury America, Greif only ponders on the historians’, sociologists’, and novelists’ thinking of the universal ideals regarding to the question of man. What will happen to the historiography drawn by the author if the disciplines of American Studies and cultural studies are added to the picture? Besides, the clear cut between theory and fiction as two modes in understanding the discourse, limits the author’s project to incorporate other possible narratives and analytical forms that may equally contribute to the construction and deconstruction of the discourse of the crisis of man.