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The Literature of Negation
| Article
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16491 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
2,058 Words |
| Author
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Josephine Hendin
Josephine Hendin is professor of English at New York
University. She is the author of The World of Flannery
O'Connor and Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction
Since 1945, and is working on a book on violence in American
fiction. |
Professor Tuttleton has written an eloquent statement of the tendency of American novelists to resist the claims of verisimilitude and realism. He charges contemporary writers in particular with racing at ever-increasing speed to produce characters who are insane or grotesque inhabitants of an unreal America in chaos. Although Tuttleton points out the European inspirations of this race, he attributes its prevalence and direction to seduction by that distinctively American Muse, the Siren of Newness, whose major talent appears to be luring writers away from the purposive, socially cohesive world around them toward the rocks of fantasy and fragmentation.
Tuttleton's defense of realism is in itself in the American vein. As Lionel Trilling said of Vernon L. Parrington's preference for realism over romance in "Reality in America," "Parrington still stands at the center of American thought about American culture because he expresses the chronic American belief that there exists an opposition between reality and mind and that one must enlist oneself in the party of reality." Tuttleton excludes our writers on the grim side from membership in the party of the real.
Although I believe the compulsion to write, read, and respect fiction of common life is in better health than Tuttleton claims, no one can deny the strain of literary individualism erupting in the demonic magnificence of Ahab, or the grotesqueries or sufferings of characters in the throes of psychological dissolution. The question is what such "extremism" means. Is it the "waste of talent" Tuttleton claims or the product of tendencies as yet imperfectly understood? I differ with Tuttleton primarily on the meaning of imaginative negation of common life in our literature and on his exclusion of unstable selves and apocalyptic visions from the house of the real.
What does the existence of a literature of negation signify? Surely its most basic meaning originates in the fact that reality cannot, as Tuttleton assumes, always be captured by verisimilitude. Nor must praise of social stability always be contained in representations of stable societies. Although Tuttleton is surely correct in pointing out that our fiction is not coterminous with our history, he overlooks the fact that its obsessions frequently return to the issue of origins, forsaking historical detail for an analysis of the impulses leading to action. Hawthorne's "My Kisnman, Major Molineux," with its nightmarish town in insurrection against its British "ruler" and its hellish, deformed, and grotesque inhabitants, conforms to Tuttleton's definition of the unreal and aberrant. Nevertheless,
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