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Introduction: Looking for the Good: Ideals in American Literature
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20639 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
846 Words |
| Author
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Raphael Falco
Raphael Falco is visiting assistant professor at the
University of Oregon. |
Perhaps the most vexed and enduring question of literary tradition remains whether literature should instruct or delight, or both. Two thousand years ago the Roman poet Horace, in a sentence that spawned volumes of exegesis, suggested what appears to be a simple formula:
Poet wish either to instruct or to
delight, or to speak
words at once pleasing and
appropriate to life.
A balance between instruction and delight, however, has always been difficult to strike, and the conflict has persisted to the present. Taste, conviction, sensually, entertainment, ethics--all have been marshaled in accusation or defense. Indeed, the conflict itself may have become a fundamental literary ideal.
In American literature the conflict has found considerable resonance. Insofar as our literary tradition is grounded in the biblical rhetoric or prophecy, the magnetism of our celebrated voice in the wilderness owes much to the charisma of the didaskaloi, the teachers of Jesus' message. Any conflict between the message and its form--between the instruction of a tale and the delight of its telling--confirms our literary artifacts as quintessentially American. Indeed, artfulness and integrity, sensuality and self-denial, are the good and bad angles at the heart of the Puritan agon.
Of course, ideals abound in American literature. And, undoubtedly, the ideal of conflict, however seminal to the national imagination, is more of a structural fact of life than a particularized literary aspiration. In contrast, the ideals that we carry away from our most memorable books or poetry tend to promise resolution, or at least idiosyncratic American conflicts.
In spite of the grand failures of American literature, from Ahab to Dick Diver, from Hester Prynne to Prufrock, the language of individual loss and desperation is rarely final, rarely absolute. The gleam of an ideal is seen to appear even in the most debased moral terrain. Indeed, it is a mark of the best American writing that the zenith is never out of sight from the nadir. Even when the object of desire turns out to be false ideal, nevertheless the concept of the ideal remains intact, immemorial, and--under altered circumstances--recoverable.
For Americans, this gleam of an ideal, even an ideal
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