Wilder's famous play—a triumph of sorts, in its absolute exclusion of any feeling except that of nostalgia—illustrates another convention of the small-town genre, the exclusion of incident. Nothing happens in our town. The play's three acts are entitled "Daily Life," "Love and Marriage," and "Death." Static, timeless, universal, the small town has no history. Accordingly the story of the small town can never become a story in the strict sense (unless it is the story of exile and aborted return). It has no plot, no conflicts, no resolution, no characters, and certainly no character development. Those things are ruled out by the dreamlike atmosphere of nostalgic reminiscence. Even "reminiscence" is too active a term to catch the mood evoked by this genre. Memory calls up actions and events; it seeks to reconstruct what happened. A world where nothing happens—where people are born, fall in love, marry, and die—cannot serve as a source of memories, loving, painful, or otherwise. Anyone who has ever come to a small town as a stranger, even if he has lived in similar towns before, knows that such towns are not interchangeable and that what the outsider finds hardest to penetrate, when he comes to a new place, are not its customs but its memories, its lore, its highly particularized narrative history, its hotly contested accounts of'that history, its feuds and factions, its smoldering enmities and apparently irrational alliances. These are what unavoidably exclude the outsider and unite the insiders in spite of the most bitter disagreements. It isn't his alien manners but his lack of access to a common fund of memories that marks him as an outsider.

But the central significance of memory is just what is missing, most of the time, in the romance of the village, which in its insistence on the timeless recurrence of birth, marriage, and death has more in common with sociology than with historical narrative. Wilder's subheadings recall those of Middletown: "Getting a Living," "Making a Home," "Training the Young," "Engaging in Religious Practices," and so on. Sociological studies of the small town—an important genre in their own right—provide a kind of counterpoint and critique of the small-town romance, one that inverts its judgments but presents a similarly static view of the subject matter.

The only form of conflict, still unproductive of dramatic incident, that is allowed to enter the small-town story, in the words of a study of magazine fiction in the I930s, is the "typical conflict ... between the essential

-104-