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Reassessing the Abnormality of American Literature
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16493 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
2,420 Words |
| Author
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Chilton Williamson, Jr., is senior editor for books at
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. His latest book is
The Homestead, a novel published last year by Grove Weidenfeld. |
I was most interested in "Tracking the American Novel into the Void," as I am interested in everything James Tuttleton writes. I do think, however, that in his attempt to trace a connection between the "romantic American extremists" of the first half of the nineteenth century and those of the present day, and then to describe the line connecting them as representing the backbone of the American novel as it has evolved through history, he has succumbed to the critics' demand for a greater and more subsuming order than that which actually exists in the intellectual world--in particular that portion of it devoted to the "most elastic of literary forms…so flexible that every a priori attempt to define it or to constitute its characteristics was bound to meet with defeat." He has at best, I think, demonstrated two tendencies somewhat related in their results, though separated from one another by almost a century and a half in which a wide variety of unrelated developments have arisen. The similarities he cites are worth attention, I agree--but so are the dissimilarities produced by profoundly unlike intellectual and social circumstances.
The American novel, I believe, has been shaped chiefly by the modern age, in which by accident of history it was fated to develop; and by the modern aesthetic, which may conveniently be described as demanding "art for art's sake" and which, in practice, has produced an increasingly concentrated art form. From the rapidly modernizing world in which it evolved, the American novel adopted sequentially that "transfer of the world into consciousness" that Emerson identified as being central to the romantic mind: an interest in "abnormal states of unconsciousness" and psychological disintegration that fascinated Poe, and was the expression, probably, of the decay foretelling the eventual collapse of
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