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Literary Lights From the Void
| Article
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16489 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
4,482 Words |
| Author
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David S. Reynolds
David S. Reynolds is professor of English at Rutgers
University (Camden) and author of Beneath the American
Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson
and Melville. |
Professor Tuttleton has with admirable range, concision, and insight identified several distinctive characteristics of the American novel. His emphasis on the darker elements of the American literary imagination--nightmares, freaks, devils, metaphysical absences--is not totally new (one thinks, for instance, of such studies as Harry Levin's The Power of Blackness or Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel), but is here detailed with a remarkable breadth of scope that convincingly encompasses such assorted writers as Melville and Burroughs, Twain and Vonnegut.
Tuttleton is right to question the old assumption about America's so-called thinness and American writers' resultant choice of the romance over the novel. Even Henry James, the father of this idea, was ambivalent on the issue. Although James' biography of Hawthorne contains an oft-cited passage about certain European literary materials absent from the American cultural landscape, it also betrays a keen interest in possible indigenous sources of Hawthorne's fiction, an interest made explicit in James' statements that "the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep" and "it needs a complex social machinery to set the writer in motion."
The social density James sensed but did not elaborate upon has begun to be illuminated by recent critics influenced by the "new historicism." While the dominant critical schools of the past four decades--the New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction--naturally favored the romance theory because of their belief in the alienation of literature from social and personal life, today's vanguard critics are reestablishing the links between American literature and its social backgrounds. Tuttleton expresses well the spirit of the times when he writes, "Sufficient richness and complexity, range and variety, and an adequate density of American cultural experience were there in Hawthorne's time, equal for the purposes of the novel, and have been ever since."
The cultural phenomenon that Tuttleton singles out as specifically American--what he calls literary "exceptionalism," or the revolutionary impulse to make it new, to reject the traditional--has indeed been a prime mover among our leading writers. America's exceptionalist fascination with the new, the bizarre, was noted as long ago as 1835 by Tocqueville, who noted that writers in America, unrestrained by the inhibitions of aristocratic societies, "inflate their imaginations and swell them out beyond bounds, so that they achieve gigantism." They flout all conventions of style and literary decorum; they "create monsters, … immense, incoherent images,
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