résumés are the key to the essential work of art, whatever that
catch phrase may still mean; and they are everywhere embedded
in a context of more general or theoretical explications.

The experience of a work of art is, as everyone seems willing to
grant without pondering the implications, unique and untranslata-
ble; to suggest that one has captured it in an analysis is, therefore,
to falsify and mislead. The best criticism can hope to do is to set
the work in as many illuminating contexts as possible: the context
of the genre to which it belongs, of the whole body of work of its
author, of the life of that author and of his times. In this sense, it
becomes clear that the "text" is merely one of the contexts of a
piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less im-
portant than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropol-
ogical, or generic. The contextual critics desires only to locate the
work of art, to point toward the place where his contextual circles
overlap, the place in which the work exists in all its ambiguity and
plenitude.

Ideally, of course, an object of critical attention should be set in
all its relevant contexts; but this is the never-completed communal
task of criticism as a continuing institution, and no one critic is
able to do more than a small part of the whole job. With both the
goals and limitations of contextual criticism in mind, I have at-
tempted in the present study to emphasize the neglected contexts
of American fiction, largely depth-psychological and anthropologi-
cal, but sociological and formal as well. Certain other approaches
and insights, well-established in textbooks and in the classroom, I
have not touched on at all, assuming them to exist in the minds of
anyone who would be led to read this book. My own contributions
I consider not as alternative to standard ways of reading but as
complementary to them; I find no greater pleasure than in remind-
ing myself that my interpretations are as partial as those which
bore me the most. I trust that in the end my own insights will,
without themselves coming to seem dishearteningly satisfactory,
make more established ways of understanding our fiction appear
pat and inadequate.

Nothing (I know, as all writers suspect and any teacher is aware)
will drive some readers back from the certainties of textbook ex-
planations to the difficulties of the work of art itself; but others,
less resolutely insensitive, will, I hope, be troubled enough by
suggestions of new possibilities in old works, so that (whether ulti-
mately they accept my views or not) they will never again be able

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