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The Literature of Place
| Article
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16494 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
1,060 Words |
| Author
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Virgil Nemoianu
Virgil Nemoianu is professor of English and comparative
literature at the Catholic University of America. Among his
books are The Taming of Romanticism (Harvard, 1985) and A
Theory of the Secondary (Johns Hopkins, 1989). He and Robert
Royal have just edited a collection of essays, Canons at John
Benjamins (Amsterdam and Philadelphia).
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James Tuttleton's thoughtful and incisive essay touches upon some truly central features of American fiction writing over the last two hundred years. For some Europeans, a feeling of emptiness and artificiality has been the first and most shocking experience derived from reading American novels. The frequency of monstrous and coutopian constructs--images, societies, characters--vividly illustrated by Tuttleton, is also an essential feature of American fiction. The ambivalent relationship toward religious values mentioned in the essay is no less striking.
True, in many ways, romantic extremism incorporates subjective consciousness, alternative paradises, and substitutes for religious values, as Tuttleton rightly points out. But a perfectly satisfactory course of lectures on the history of American literature could be organized around the themes of grace and damnation. The presentation of no other national literary history (be it Russian, English, or Italian) could be grouped around a similar topic. The religious absence that Tuttleton so convincingly delineates is perceived by the authors themselves, and it is often the source of their anxiety and despair, or at least of their earnest wrestling with a perception of God. It is interesting to note that the works of three outstanding novelists of the realist school (there is an equally powerful experimental school now flourishing in America), Walker Percy, John Updike, and Saul Bellow (in More Die of Heartbreak and elsewhere), are steeped in religious meditations.
One important question remains. It is similar in nature to John Stuart Mill's respectful critique of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I agree to all you say, Mill wrote in 1840, but I wonder whether your remarks apply not to a national/continental experience, but rather to a social-historical one. Did not Tocqueville list the features of middle-class societies in general rather than the unique features of American character, Mill asked. We may ask ourselves whether a posture of romantic extremism is not a consequence of a mode of human existence toward which the West (or perhaps even human society as a whole) is advancing, an advance that Americans--for better or worse--may have anticipated. Such a mode of existence appeals to consciousness and self-consciousness; it is stepped in the overwhelming multitude of disembodied and unconnected information items, is passionately inorganic, transactional, artificial, and without a real sense of the past. This is perhaps the future dawning on us all, one toward which Americans have just been stepping more resolutely and faster than others. Hence their novelistic
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