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16466 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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5 / 1989 |
2,207 Words |
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James W. Tuttleton
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Leave it to David Reynolds to remind me of a glaring omission. He is quite right to point out that the American romance rises not only out of European models but out of the native American subterranean literary currents in which our authors were immersed. His massive new study, Beneath the American Renaissance, is a treasure trove of popular, sub-literary, and subversive elements that were reworked by our classic authors into memorable high art. I, for one, am glad to know about these hidden sources of The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick--especially the whaling story in Uncle Sam. But until Kenneth Lynn shows me manuscript evidence to the contrary, I'll still hold to Stewart's altogether plausible argument that Melville's intention, while writing Moby Dick, changed as the dark elements of Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and Dante coalesced in his imagination. Lynn is quite right, however, that "facts do not disappear" as Melville grows more symbolic; I never meant to suggest that they did. In fact, Melville quite consciously packed the book, even overloaded it, with cetological data--all for a purpose:
"So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the [whale] fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory."
Equally intolerable to me is the idea that American social life exhibits a bland, classless sameness. Audrey C. Foote has usefully identified the social novels that feature class antagonism, only to remark that our serious writers--like their European models--tend to punish the arrivistes for their aspiration to make it into the sacred circle of the elite. Some of these matters are discussed in my The Novel of Manners in America, which makes the case (more clearly than my essay) that I do not buy into the Chase-Trilling view that the romance is the American version of the novel. (Mea culpa for misleading Chilton Williamson, Jr.) But it is perhaps worth observing here that our serious writers do seem to want to correct our misapprehension about the cost to the spirit of the process of effecting vulgar social ambition--a cost blithely ignored in popular fiction like that about, say, Horatio Alger. Anyone who believes that the only difference between the rich and the rest of us is that "they have more money" has simply not thought through the effect on consciousness (and on styles of self-expression) of the freedom, beauty, grace, and ease--evident in a true haut monde--that money, brilliantly translated, may represent. Certainly Hemingway never thought it through, nor did Isabel
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