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Realism and the American Novel
| Article
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16490 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
1,629 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth S. Lynn
Kenneth S. Lynn is Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of history at
Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Mark Twain and
Southwestern Humor, William Dean Howelss: An American Life,
and Hemingway. |
Although James Tuttleton is deservedly known for his penetrating essays, I am not persuaded by the generalizations he offers about the American novel.
A make-it-new urgency, he argues, has forever driven our writers of fiction toward imaginative extremism. In their portrayals of character, for instance, their flight toward the peripheries of human experience has manifested itself in a fascination with unstable identities, abnormal states of consciousness, and behavior bordering on the insane if not the incontestably mad. Deformations of the face and body have also contributed to the arresting strangeness of the dramatist personae of American fiction, to the point where Tuttleton feels it appropriate to speak of a veritable gallery of "physical freaks." As if mental and physical disabilities were not sufficiently harrowing in and of themselves, these misfortunes have often stood for a spiritual loss of humanity to satanic forces. "I can't think of another national literature," Tuttleton writes, that has been "so preoccupied with identifying the Devil with man himself."
The centrifugal impulses that allegedly motivate American novelists are even more clearly reflected--we are told--in the antirealistic realms in which they have repeatedly set their work. Bored by society, disappointed as well by the natural universe, a host of our significant writers have been wont to substitute "invented worlds," most of which are hellish places. While here and there a lost Eden or a lost utopia has been fashioned, we are asked to believe that Dante's Inferno has been the "major model" for our literary malcontents.
The weakness of Tuttleton's thesis begins with the fact that it is built in large part upon references to the work of literary pygmies: John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Robert Coover, et al. The paragraph in which the essayist acknowledges the existence of "a number of compelling American social novels" constitutes a stacked deck of another sort. A third-rate novel by James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed, makes the list, as does John O'Hara's trashy Ten North Frederick, but the array of omissions from it include Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright's Native Son, John Dos Passos' U.S.A., Willa Cather's My Antonia, Ellen Glasgrow's Barren Ground, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stpehen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Henry Adams' Democracy, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age and William Faulkner's chronicles of Yoknapatawpha County. And while Tuttleton
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