PENGUIN BOOKS FROM PURITANISM TO POSTMODERNISM Richard Ruland is a professorof English and American lit- erature at \Washington University in St. Louis. He has lived and lectured abroad as-a Guggenheim fellow, and taught at the University of Leeds and, as a Fulbrighr fellow, it the universities of Groningen and EastAnglia. His books include The Rediscouery of American Literatrit, Premises of Critical Taste, 1900-7940, America in Modern EuropeanLiterature: From Image to Metapltor, and a two-volume collection with commentary of theories of Americanliterature from the sev- enteenth to the twentieth centuries,Tbe lrlatiueMuse andA StoriedLand. Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatisr, Trd professor of American Studies ar the University of Easi 4lgliq. His novels include Eating People Is \wrong (L959); The History Man (1975), which was made into a iajor Tv series; Rates of Exchange (1982), which was shortlisied for the Booker Pfize; and Doctor Criminale (1992), Critical works include TheModern American I'louel (revised edition, 1992), l{r, I'lot Bloomsbury (L987), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1989) , and Dangerous pilgrimages: Trans- atlantic Mytbologiesand the l,loiel (1996). U. Iru, edited Modernism (I97 6), An Introduction to American Studies (1981), The I'{ouel Today(revised edition , 1990),and The Penguiru Book of Modern Short Stories (L987). Among his television successes is an adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue,which u/on an InternationalEmmv Award.
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FROM PURITANISM TO POSTMODERNISM
Richard Ruland is a professor of English and American lit- erature at \Washington University in St. Louis. He has lived and lectured abroad as-a Guggenheim fellow, and taught at the University of Leeds and, as a Fulbrighr fellow, it the universities of Groningen and East Anglia. His books include The Rediscouery of American Literatrit, Premises of Critical Taste, 1900-7940, America in Modern European Literature: From Image to Metapltor, and a two-volume collection with commentary of theories of American literature from the sev- enteenth to the twentieth centuries, Tbe lrlatiue Muse and A Storied Land.
Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatisr, Trd professor of American Studies ar the University of Easi 4lgliq. His novels include Eating People Is \wrong (L959); The History Man (1975), which was made into a iajor Tv series; Rates of Exchange (1982), which was shortlisied for the Booker Pfize; and Doctor Criminale (1992), Critical works include The Modern American I'louel (revised edition, 1992), l{r, I'lot Bloomsbury (L987), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1989) , and Dangerous pilgrimages: Trans- atlantic Mytbologies and the l,loiel (1996). U. Iru, edited Modernism (I97 6), An Introduction to American Studies (1981), The I'{ouel Today (revised edition , 1990), and The Penguiru Book of Modern Short Stories (L987). Among his television successes is an adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue,which u/on an International Emmv Award.
PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin GrouP
Penguin Books USA Inc.,
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 vrights Lane, Londgl \7s 5TZ, England
P"enguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 382
Penguin Books (N.2.) Ltd, I82-t90 \Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Haimondsworth, Middlesex, England
" dirrision of Penguin Books USA Inc., I99I
Published in Penguin Books L992
9 1 0
A11 rights reserved
AS Follo$trs:
ISBN 0-670-83592-7 (hc.)
L. American literature-History and criticism. I. Bradbury,
Malcolm. 1932- II. Tit le. PS88.868 rggr
810.9 - dc20 9t'20944
Printed in the United States of America Set in Simoncini Garamond
Designed by Victoria Hartman
this book is sold subiect to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or othenrise,
be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding ot .o'o.t other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition- including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent Purchaser.
These are the Gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name .
-\il7rrl.rAM CunEN BnyANT
Why should nor we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
. America is a poem in our eyes. . . . -RerpH \WeLDo EvrnnsoN
And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guirar.
-\TaLLACE SrEvENs
P R E F A C E I X
Part I The Literarure of Brit ish America 1 . T H E P U R I T A N L E G A C Y 3
2 . A \ U T A K E N I N G A N D E N L I G H T E N M E N T 3 3
Part II . From Colonial Ourposr to Cultu ral Province
3 . R E V o L U T T o N A N D ( r N ) o T p E N D E N C E 6 t 4 . A M E R I C A N N A I S S A N C E T o 4
t . y E A - s A y r N G A N D N A y - s A y r N G r l 9
Part III ' Native and Cosmopolitan Crosscurrents: From Local color to Realism and Naturalism
6 . s E C E S S T o N A N D L o y A L T y r g r 7 . M U C K R A K E R S A N D E A R L Y M o D E R N S 2 T g
Part IV ' Modernism in the American Grain 8 . o u r L A N D D A R T s A N D H o M E M A D E \ u r o R L D S 2 3 g
9 . T H E s E C o N D F L o \ r E R r N G , 6 9 1 0 . R A D T c A L R E A S S E S S M E N T s 3 1 6
1 1 . S T R A N G E R E A L I T I E S , A D E Q U A T E F I C T I o N S $ g
I N D E X 4 3 r
PREFACE
A , z\ t the start of his book A Homemade World: The American Mod-
F \
L \\ ernist lVriters (L975), the American critic Hugh Kenner per- forms a characteristic and flambo yant act of critical magic. He links fwo elements in the history of the modern world that areindependently celebrated, but not usually seen to be connected. One is thl flight of the Vright brothers at Kitty Hawk in L903, the first real powered flight and yet another demonsration of the wayAmerican technological know-how u/as rapidly changing the twentieth-century universe. The other is a work of fiction started the next year, in which the arrist is portrayed as a modern flier, Stephen Dedalus. The book is, of course, James Joyce's Portrait of tbe Artist as a Young Man, about a Modernist artist who soars on imaginary wings into the unknown arts, breaking with home, family, Catholic religion and his Irish nation in the process. \7e usually consider Joyce one of the great rootless, expa6 iate artists of an art of modern rootlessness, which u/e call Modernism. In fact one of the marks of modern writing, George Steiner has said, is that it is a writing unplaced and "unhoused." But Kenner has a different point, and suggests that Modernism did actually find a happy home. Linking American technological modernity and intern ttonil Modern- ism, he sees a new kind of kinship being constructed. He says of the \X/right brothers: "Their Dedalian deed on the North Carolina shore may be accounted the first American input into the great imaginative enterprise on which artists were to coll aborate for half a centu ry." The \Trights set the new century's modern imagination soaring; when it landed agatn, it landed in America.
Preface
As Kenner admits, the Modern movement did not at first shake
the American soul. But a collaboration between European Modernists
and American Moderns did eventually develop-first in expaffiate
London and Paris during the years before the First World \War, then
when American soldiers and fliers came to Europe to fight it, then
agaLn in the expam Late Paris of the I920s. As Europ ean avant-garde
experimenrs and America's Modern expectations joined, the point
came when it was no longer necess ary for Americans to go to or depend
on Europe. Gertrude Srein said that Modernism really began in Amer-
rc^ but went ro Paris to happen. Extending this bold act of appro-
priation, Kenner argues that, as an American renaissance flowered at
iro*., a distinctive American Modernism grew up. Modernism's "doc-
trine of perception seems peculi arly adapted to the Ameri can
weathef,i he ,.yr, adding, "which fact explains .hy, from Pound's
early days until now, modern poetry in whatever country has so un-
misiakably American an impress." The idea that all Modern literature
is Ame rican,whether it is or not, extends through Kenner's fascinating
book. On European soil, he is saying, the Modern movement was
born, but it appeured unrooted. In the United States it found what it
needed, a "homemade world," where it could grow in what l7illiam
Caglos \ililliams called "the American grain." Then it could be re-
exported to its origins as an approved f\r/entieth-century produ ct.Later
history reinfor..J this exchange, as Modernist writers, painters and
musicians fled to the United States from Nazism in the 1910s. So
Bauhaus became Our House, or at least our Seagram Building, Pablo
Picasso somehow translated into Paloma Picasso, and when somethittg
called Postmodernism came along everyone thought it was American
-even though its wrirers had names like Borges, Nabokov, Calvino
and Eco. This appropriation of the new and innovative in art into an idea
of American literature is not new. Silhen the eighteenth-century Bishop
Berkeley wished to celebrate the potential of colonial Amerrca, he told
it that the arts naturally traveled westward: "\(/estward the course of
Empire takes its way." A similar assumption dominated the thought
of American thinkers in the years after the American Revolution. In
Pierre (IS1.2), Herman Melville saw Americans as history's own avant'
garde, advancing into the world of untried things. \7hen a hundred
Preface . xi
years ago \Valt Wlhitman inroduced later editions of Leaues of Grass with his essay "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" (1889), h. emphasized that since the United States was the grear force of material and democratic change in the world, it therefore must create a great modern literature: "For all these neu/ and evolutionary facts, -."rritrgs, purposes"' he explained, "new poetic messages, new forms and expres- sions, ate inevitable. " Gertrude Stein similarly declared the United States-with its historyless history, its novelty and innovarion, its space- time continuum, its plenitude and its ernptiness-the natural home of "the new composition." This \Mas not simply an American idea: Eu- ropeans held it too. Philosophers from Berkeley to Hegel to Sartre to Baudrillard, poets from Goldsmith to Coleridg. to Mayakovsky ro Auden, novelists from Chateaubriand to Kafka and Nabokov, painters from Tiepolo to Picasso felt it. As D. H. Lawrence insisted d Studies in Classic American Literature, published in 1923 when nor just Amer- icans but Europeans were rethinkirg the American 6aditio1,
Two bodies of modern literature seem to me ro come to the real verge: the Russian and the American. . The furtherest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of exffeme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, \Xftiiman reached. The Europeans were all trying to be exrreme. The great Americans I mention just were it.
The idea that American literature was destined to become not only an expression of American identity but the great modern literarure-and therefore more than simply an American literature-has long had great power.
The maffers u/ere never so easy. Just two hundred years ago, when Americans had just completed their Revolution and were pro.tdly feel- ing their identity as the First New Nation, when the Romantic revo- lution u/as developing across the $7est, and when with the French Revolution the calendar itself seemed to begin again, there was Amer- ican writing, but there was no American literature. $flhat existed, in those fervent years when Americans began to contemplate a great historical and transcontinental destiny, uras a desire for one-a novel literature that would express the spirit of independence, democ racy
xii ' Preface
and nationhood. "America must be as independent tn literature as she
is in politics-as famous for arts as for Arms," announced Noah \X/eb-
ster, the great American diction aty-m ker and patriot, expressing a
powerful popular sentiment. But other voices sounded caution-nsf
rtr. least of th.- Philip Freneau, 4 poet-patriot who had fought in the
Revolution and celebrated the "Rising Glory of Ameri ca." He warned
that political independence from Europe was not the same thing as
artistic independence: "the first was accomplished in about seven years'
the latter will nor be compietely effeeted, perhaps, in as many cen-
turies. " A hundred years ago,a hundred years after Noah \Tebster's hope-
ful appeal to the coming of American literature was another revolu-
tionary time; the ends of centuries, including our own, often are. The
modern Indusgial Revolution that had begun in the wake of the other
revolutions a hundred years earlier was transforming all values, reli-
gious, scientific and political. A sense of modernizing change swept
itt. \festern world; in fact, this is the moment from which we can
best date the modern revolution in arts and ideas, from the emer-
gence of scientific principles of relativity, technological developments
ihut generated neu/ power systems like electricity and new commu-
nications systems like the streetcar and the automobile, new intellectual
sysrems like psychology. Ibsen and Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Zola,
Freud and B.rgror were transforming fundamental \Western ideas.
Now the great ranscontinental and indust nahtzed United States was
in an imperial mood, outsripping the production of Germany and
Great Britain combined and looking confidently forward to the role
of world power and rechnological superforce in the coming rwentieth
cenrury, which many were already naming "the American Centuty."
Like \Webster before him, \Valt \Whitman declared that in this neu/
world "new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, ate inevi-
table." But where were they? Berween 1888 and 1890, Edmund Clarence Stedman and E. M.
Hutchinson compiled their eleven-volum e Library of American Liter-
Atrtre, from colonial times to the present. It appeared comprehensive,
and the contents made it clear what its editors considered American
literature ro be. It was nothing like the view we have of it today; indeed
ir was, as Longfellow had called it, a branch of English literature. Its
Pre/ace . xiii
major authors were Washington hving, James Fenimore Cooper, Wil- liam Cullen Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, \Thittier, Oliver \Tendell Holmes, a largely New England pantheon. Melville-he died in 1891-was all but forgotten. Whitman-he died in 1892-was granted small recognition. Poe was a morbid castoff of German Romanticism, Hawthorne wrote rills from the town pump, Thoreau was a misan- thrope. The realist and local-color movemenrs which had dominated American writing since the Civil \War urere hardly acknowledged. \ilZhat was seen as American literature was effectively wh at came to be called "the Genteel Tradition." \ilZhat, then, lay beyond the Genteel Tradi- tion? In 1890 \X/illiam Dean Howells, the "Dean" of American leffers, having just moved to New York from Boston where he had edited the magisterial Atlantic Monthly, published his novel ,4 Hazard of l,{ew Fortunes-a very '90s title. Henry James published Tbe Tragic Muse, and his brother, William, the Hanrard philosopher and p.ug-atist, produced The Principles of Psycbology, exploring many o? 11,e ideas about the importance of consciousness that would preoccupy modern minds. Thought, consciousness, James explained, Jid nor function in a logical chain and therefore needed to be described in a new language: "A 'river' or a 'sffe am' are the metaphors by which it [consciousness] is most naturally describ€d, " he u/rote, and so gave us a notion, a "sffeam-of-consciousness," u/hich would help unlock our understand- itg of the modern fiction that was to come. William James wrote exultantly to \X/illiam Howells: "The year which shall have witnessed the appafition of your Hazard of I'Jew Fortr,tnes,of Harry's Tragic Muse, and of my Psychology will indeed be a memorable one in American literature." His words seem prophetic now, for the 1890s saw, in America as in EuroPe, a fundamental change of mood. But srill there uras no certainty about the direction of that eagerly awaited literature.
So we must look later yet for the coming of that imperial confi- dence By the of the
about American literature that informs Hugh Kenner's book. First World \War there was sdll searching doubt about the value American past or indeed of the American literary present. "The
present is a void and the the past that survives in
American writer floats in that void because the common mind is a past without living
value," complained the citic van \x/yck Brooks in 1918; "Bur is this the onlv possible past? If we need anorher past so badly, is it incon-
xiv ' Preface
ceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?"
This invention of the American literary past was a significant enterprise
of the !920s,when American writing went through a remarkable mod-
ern flowerirg and made its international imp act. Not only D. H. Law-
rence but rnury American writers and critics undertook the task of
devising a viable American literary tradition. The past that they con-
structeJ was a very different one-not a "Genteel Tradition" any
longer (that was the enemy), but a literuture that indeed went to the
"real verge." Once-major writers became minor, and once-minor writ-
ers like Melville, Hawthorne and "our cousin Mr. Poe" became major.
Writers seeking a new tradition, a fresh ABC of reading, as Pound
called it, looked everywhere, at the American) the European, the
Chinese and Japanese past and present. As the very American T. S.
Eliot explained in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) , tta-
dition cannot be inherited; "if you urant it you must obtain it by great
labour." Constructing a usable liter ary past for contemporary writers be-
came one of the great projects of American fiction-making-and
America's fiction included American criticism. During the 1930s, for
obvious reasons in a time of political activism, it was chiefly the so-
cioeconomic past of American literature that critics reconstructed. In
the 1940s, as urar came and American ideals had to be reener gized,
books like F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) and Alfred
Kazin's On l,latiue Grounds (Ig4D began to insist increasingly that
there was an encompassing American tradition made on American soil
which had passed beyond inherited forms to construct a novel Amer-
ican imaginarion. In the L950s, in the ^geof rising American confidence
as its role as urorld power increased, works like Henry Nash Smith's
Virgin Land (1950), Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Lit'
erature (1953), R. \7. B. Lewis's Tbe American Adam (1955), Richard
Chase's The American I'louel and lts Tradition (1957) and Leslie Fied-
ler' s Loue and Death in tbe American I'louel (1960) sought for distinctive
American themes, myths, languages and psychic motifs with the means
of modern criticism and the conviction that there was a major ffadition
to be recovered and explored. As American writers grew famous across
a world that sought to understand American values, a very American
literature rose from the interpretation of American beliefs and Amer-
Preface
ican dreams, American theologies and American democratic ideologies, American landscapes and American institutions, American ideas of mission and destiny, the achievements of what was now seen as un- mistakably a "homemade world."
These, of course, were versions, critical myths. Leslie Fiedler de- scribed his Lo ue and Death in the American I.Jouel asitself an American novel, and so it a fine one. All literary histories are critical fictions. But, because the needs of the American present have so often dictated the interpretations of the American literary past, to make it "usable,,, American literary history is more fictional than most-one reason, perhaps, why the Modernist spirit with its own sense of being history- less in history found America such a nafiffal home. As the critic percy Boynton obsewed in L927: "Criticism in America is implicitly an at- tempt by each critic to rnake of America the kind of country he [now we would add "she"] would like, which in every case is a better counrry than it is today." At present there is somethirg closely resemblini chaos again-creative chaos, we may hope. $7e live or have lately lived in an age of Postmodern deconstructions, in which more energy has been put into demythologi zLng interpretive myrhs than constructing them. Earlier canonizations…
Richard Ruland is a professor of English and American lit- erature at \Washington University in St. Louis. He has lived and lectured abroad as-a Guggenheim fellow, and taught at the University of Leeds and, as a Fulbrighr fellow, it the universities of Groningen and East Anglia. His books include The Rediscouery of American Literatrit, Premises of Critical Taste, 1900-7940, America in Modern European Literature: From Image to Metapltor, and a two-volume collection with commentary of theories of American literature from the sev- enteenth to the twentieth centuries, Tbe lrlatiue Muse and A Storied Land.
Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatisr, Trd professor of American Studies ar the University of Easi 4lgliq. His novels include Eating People Is \wrong (L959); The History Man (1975), which was made into a iajor Tv series; Rates of Exchange (1982), which was shortlisied for the Booker Pfize; and Doctor Criminale (1992), Critical works include The Modern American I'louel (revised edition, 1992), l{r, I'lot Bloomsbury (L987), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1989) , and Dangerous pilgrimages: Trans- atlantic Mytbologies and the l,loiel (1996). U. Iru, edited Modernism (I97 6), An Introduction to American Studies (1981), The I'{ouel Today (revised edition , 1990), and The Penguiru Book of Modern Short Stories (L987). Among his television successes is an adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue,which u/on an International Emmv Award.
PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin GrouP
Penguin Books USA Inc.,
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 vrights Lane, Londgl \7s 5TZ, England
P"enguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 382
Penguin Books (N.2.) Ltd, I82-t90 \Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Haimondsworth, Middlesex, England
" dirrision of Penguin Books USA Inc., I99I
Published in Penguin Books L992
9 1 0
A11 rights reserved
AS Follo$trs:
ISBN 0-670-83592-7 (hc.)
L. American literature-History and criticism. I. Bradbury,
Malcolm. 1932- II. Tit le. PS88.868 rggr
810.9 - dc20 9t'20944
Printed in the United States of America Set in Simoncini Garamond
Designed by Victoria Hartman
this book is sold subiect to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or othenrise,
be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding ot .o'o.t other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition- including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent Purchaser.
These are the Gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name .
-\il7rrl.rAM CunEN BnyANT
Why should nor we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
. America is a poem in our eyes. . . . -RerpH \WeLDo EvrnnsoN
And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guirar.
-\TaLLACE SrEvENs
P R E F A C E I X
Part I The Literarure of Brit ish America 1 . T H E P U R I T A N L E G A C Y 3
2 . A \ U T A K E N I N G A N D E N L I G H T E N M E N T 3 3
Part II . From Colonial Ourposr to Cultu ral Province
3 . R E V o L U T T o N A N D ( r N ) o T p E N D E N C E 6 t 4 . A M E R I C A N N A I S S A N C E T o 4
t . y E A - s A y r N G A N D N A y - s A y r N G r l 9
Part III ' Native and Cosmopolitan Crosscurrents: From Local color to Realism and Naturalism
6 . s E C E S S T o N A N D L o y A L T y r g r 7 . M U C K R A K E R S A N D E A R L Y M o D E R N S 2 T g
Part IV ' Modernism in the American Grain 8 . o u r L A N D D A R T s A N D H o M E M A D E \ u r o R L D S 2 3 g
9 . T H E s E C o N D F L o \ r E R r N G , 6 9 1 0 . R A D T c A L R E A S S E S S M E N T s 3 1 6
1 1 . S T R A N G E R E A L I T I E S , A D E Q U A T E F I C T I o N S $ g
I N D E X 4 3 r
PREFACE
A , z\ t the start of his book A Homemade World: The American Mod-
F \
L \\ ernist lVriters (L975), the American critic Hugh Kenner per- forms a characteristic and flambo yant act of critical magic. He links fwo elements in the history of the modern world that areindependently celebrated, but not usually seen to be connected. One is thl flight of the Vright brothers at Kitty Hawk in L903, the first real powered flight and yet another demonsration of the wayAmerican technological know-how u/as rapidly changing the twentieth-century universe. The other is a work of fiction started the next year, in which the arrist is portrayed as a modern flier, Stephen Dedalus. The book is, of course, James Joyce's Portrait of tbe Artist as a Young Man, about a Modernist artist who soars on imaginary wings into the unknown arts, breaking with home, family, Catholic religion and his Irish nation in the process. \7e usually consider Joyce one of the great rootless, expa6 iate artists of an art of modern rootlessness, which u/e call Modernism. In fact one of the marks of modern writing, George Steiner has said, is that it is a writing unplaced and "unhoused." But Kenner has a different point, and suggests that Modernism did actually find a happy home. Linking American technological modernity and intern ttonil Modern- ism, he sees a new kind of kinship being constructed. He says of the \X/right brothers: "Their Dedalian deed on the North Carolina shore may be accounted the first American input into the great imaginative enterprise on which artists were to coll aborate for half a centu ry." The \Trights set the new century's modern imagination soaring; when it landed agatn, it landed in America.
Preface
As Kenner admits, the Modern movement did not at first shake
the American soul. But a collaboration between European Modernists
and American Moderns did eventually develop-first in expaffiate
London and Paris during the years before the First World \War, then
when American soldiers and fliers came to Europe to fight it, then
agaLn in the expam Late Paris of the I920s. As Europ ean avant-garde
experimenrs and America's Modern expectations joined, the point
came when it was no longer necess ary for Americans to go to or depend
on Europe. Gertrude Srein said that Modernism really began in Amer-
rc^ but went ro Paris to happen. Extending this bold act of appro-
priation, Kenner argues that, as an American renaissance flowered at
iro*., a distinctive American Modernism grew up. Modernism's "doc-
trine of perception seems peculi arly adapted to the Ameri can
weathef,i he ,.yr, adding, "which fact explains .hy, from Pound's
early days until now, modern poetry in whatever country has so un-
misiakably American an impress." The idea that all Modern literature
is Ame rican,whether it is or not, extends through Kenner's fascinating
book. On European soil, he is saying, the Modern movement was
born, but it appeured unrooted. In the United States it found what it
needed, a "homemade world," where it could grow in what l7illiam
Caglos \ililliams called "the American grain." Then it could be re-
exported to its origins as an approved f\r/entieth-century produ ct.Later
history reinfor..J this exchange, as Modernist writers, painters and
musicians fled to the United States from Nazism in the 1910s. So
Bauhaus became Our House, or at least our Seagram Building, Pablo
Picasso somehow translated into Paloma Picasso, and when somethittg
called Postmodernism came along everyone thought it was American
-even though its wrirers had names like Borges, Nabokov, Calvino
and Eco. This appropriation of the new and innovative in art into an idea
of American literature is not new. Silhen the eighteenth-century Bishop
Berkeley wished to celebrate the potential of colonial Amerrca, he told
it that the arts naturally traveled westward: "\(/estward the course of
Empire takes its way." A similar assumption dominated the thought
of American thinkers in the years after the American Revolution. In
Pierre (IS1.2), Herman Melville saw Americans as history's own avant'
garde, advancing into the world of untried things. \7hen a hundred
Preface . xi
years ago \Valt Wlhitman inroduced later editions of Leaues of Grass with his essay "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" (1889), h. emphasized that since the United States was the grear force of material and democratic change in the world, it therefore must create a great modern literature: "For all these neu/ and evolutionary facts, -."rritrgs, purposes"' he explained, "new poetic messages, new forms and expres- sions, ate inevitable. " Gertrude Stein similarly declared the United States-with its historyless history, its novelty and innovarion, its space- time continuum, its plenitude and its ernptiness-the natural home of "the new composition." This \Mas not simply an American idea: Eu- ropeans held it too. Philosophers from Berkeley to Hegel to Sartre to Baudrillard, poets from Goldsmith to Coleridg. to Mayakovsky ro Auden, novelists from Chateaubriand to Kafka and Nabokov, painters from Tiepolo to Picasso felt it. As D. H. Lawrence insisted d Studies in Classic American Literature, published in 1923 when nor just Amer- icans but Europeans were rethinkirg the American 6aditio1,
Two bodies of modern literature seem to me ro come to the real verge: the Russian and the American. . The furtherest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of exffeme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, \Xftiiman reached. The Europeans were all trying to be exrreme. The great Americans I mention just were it.
The idea that American literature was destined to become not only an expression of American identity but the great modern literarure-and therefore more than simply an American literature-has long had great power.
The maffers u/ere never so easy. Just two hundred years ago, when Americans had just completed their Revolution and were pro.tdly feel- ing their identity as the First New Nation, when the Romantic revo- lution u/as developing across the $7est, and when with the French Revolution the calendar itself seemed to begin again, there was Amer- ican writing, but there was no American literature. $flhat existed, in those fervent years when Americans began to contemplate a great historical and transcontinental destiny, uras a desire for one-a novel literature that would express the spirit of independence, democ racy
xii ' Preface
and nationhood. "America must be as independent tn literature as she
is in politics-as famous for arts as for Arms," announced Noah \X/eb-
ster, the great American diction aty-m ker and patriot, expressing a
powerful popular sentiment. But other voices sounded caution-nsf
rtr. least of th.- Philip Freneau, 4 poet-patriot who had fought in the
Revolution and celebrated the "Rising Glory of Ameri ca." He warned
that political independence from Europe was not the same thing as
artistic independence: "the first was accomplished in about seven years'
the latter will nor be compietely effeeted, perhaps, in as many cen-
turies. " A hundred years ago,a hundred years after Noah \Tebster's hope-
ful appeal to the coming of American literature was another revolu-
tionary time; the ends of centuries, including our own, often are. The
modern Indusgial Revolution that had begun in the wake of the other
revolutions a hundred years earlier was transforming all values, reli-
gious, scientific and political. A sense of modernizing change swept
itt. \festern world; in fact, this is the moment from which we can
best date the modern revolution in arts and ideas, from the emer-
gence of scientific principles of relativity, technological developments
ihut generated neu/ power systems like electricity and new commu-
nications systems like the streetcar and the automobile, new intellectual
sysrems like psychology. Ibsen and Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Zola,
Freud and B.rgror were transforming fundamental \Western ideas.
Now the great ranscontinental and indust nahtzed United States was
in an imperial mood, outsripping the production of Germany and
Great Britain combined and looking confidently forward to the role
of world power and rechnological superforce in the coming rwentieth
cenrury, which many were already naming "the American Centuty."
Like \Webster before him, \Valt \Whitman declared that in this neu/
world "new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, ate inevi-
table." But where were they? Berween 1888 and 1890, Edmund Clarence Stedman and E. M.
Hutchinson compiled their eleven-volum e Library of American Liter-
Atrtre, from colonial times to the present. It appeared comprehensive,
and the contents made it clear what its editors considered American
literature ro be. It was nothing like the view we have of it today; indeed
ir was, as Longfellow had called it, a branch of English literature. Its
Pre/ace . xiii
major authors were Washington hving, James Fenimore Cooper, Wil- liam Cullen Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, \Thittier, Oliver \Tendell Holmes, a largely New England pantheon. Melville-he died in 1891-was all but forgotten. Whitman-he died in 1892-was granted small recognition. Poe was a morbid castoff of German Romanticism, Hawthorne wrote rills from the town pump, Thoreau was a misan- thrope. The realist and local-color movemenrs which had dominated American writing since the Civil \War urere hardly acknowledged. \ilZhat was seen as American literature was effectively wh at came to be called "the Genteel Tradition." \ilZhat, then, lay beyond the Genteel Tradi- tion? In 1890 \X/illiam Dean Howells, the "Dean" of American leffers, having just moved to New York from Boston where he had edited the magisterial Atlantic Monthly, published his novel ,4 Hazard of l,{ew Fortunes-a very '90s title. Henry James published Tbe Tragic Muse, and his brother, William, the Hanrard philosopher and p.ug-atist, produced The Principles of Psycbology, exploring many o? 11,e ideas about the importance of consciousness that would preoccupy modern minds. Thought, consciousness, James explained, Jid nor function in a logical chain and therefore needed to be described in a new language: "A 'river' or a 'sffe am' are the metaphors by which it [consciousness] is most naturally describ€d, " he u/rote, and so gave us a notion, a "sffeam-of-consciousness," u/hich would help unlock our understand- itg of the modern fiction that was to come. William James wrote exultantly to \X/illiam Howells: "The year which shall have witnessed the appafition of your Hazard of I'Jew Fortr,tnes,of Harry's Tragic Muse, and of my Psychology will indeed be a memorable one in American literature." His words seem prophetic now, for the 1890s saw, in America as in EuroPe, a fundamental change of mood. But srill there uras no certainty about the direction of that eagerly awaited literature.
So we must look later yet for the coming of that imperial confi- dence By the of the
about American literature that informs Hugh Kenner's book. First World \War there was sdll searching doubt about the value American past or indeed of the American literary present. "The
present is a void and the the past that survives in
American writer floats in that void because the common mind is a past without living
value," complained the citic van \x/yck Brooks in 1918; "Bur is this the onlv possible past? If we need anorher past so badly, is it incon-
xiv ' Preface
ceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?"
This invention of the American literary past was a significant enterprise
of the !920s,when American writing went through a remarkable mod-
ern flowerirg and made its international imp act. Not only D. H. Law-
rence but rnury American writers and critics undertook the task of
devising a viable American literary tradition. The past that they con-
structeJ was a very different one-not a "Genteel Tradition" any
longer (that was the enemy), but a literuture that indeed went to the
"real verge." Once-major writers became minor, and once-minor writ-
ers like Melville, Hawthorne and "our cousin Mr. Poe" became major.
Writers seeking a new tradition, a fresh ABC of reading, as Pound
called it, looked everywhere, at the American) the European, the
Chinese and Japanese past and present. As the very American T. S.
Eliot explained in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) , tta-
dition cannot be inherited; "if you urant it you must obtain it by great
labour." Constructing a usable liter ary past for contemporary writers be-
came one of the great projects of American fiction-making-and
America's fiction included American criticism. During the 1930s, for
obvious reasons in a time of political activism, it was chiefly the so-
cioeconomic past of American literature that critics reconstructed. In
the 1940s, as urar came and American ideals had to be reener gized,
books like F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) and Alfred
Kazin's On l,latiue Grounds (Ig4D began to insist increasingly that
there was an encompassing American tradition made on American soil
which had passed beyond inherited forms to construct a novel Amer-
ican imaginarion. In the L950s, in the ^geof rising American confidence
as its role as urorld power increased, works like Henry Nash Smith's
Virgin Land (1950), Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Lit'
erature (1953), R. \7. B. Lewis's Tbe American Adam (1955), Richard
Chase's The American I'louel and lts Tradition (1957) and Leslie Fied-
ler' s Loue and Death in tbe American I'louel (1960) sought for distinctive
American themes, myths, languages and psychic motifs with the means
of modern criticism and the conviction that there was a major ffadition
to be recovered and explored. As American writers grew famous across
a world that sought to understand American values, a very American
literature rose from the interpretation of American beliefs and Amer-
Preface
ican dreams, American theologies and American democratic ideologies, American landscapes and American institutions, American ideas of mission and destiny, the achievements of what was now seen as un- mistakably a "homemade world."
These, of course, were versions, critical myths. Leslie Fiedler de- scribed his Lo ue and Death in the American I.Jouel asitself an American novel, and so it a fine one. All literary histories are critical fictions. But, because the needs of the American present have so often dictated the interpretations of the American literary past, to make it "usable,,, American literary history is more fictional than most-one reason, perhaps, why the Modernist spirit with its own sense of being history- less in history found America such a nafiffal home. As the critic percy Boynton obsewed in L927: "Criticism in America is implicitly an at- tempt by each critic to rnake of America the kind of country he [now we would add "she"] would like, which in every case is a better counrry than it is today." At present there is somethirg closely resemblini chaos again-creative chaos, we may hope. $7e live or have lately lived in an age of Postmodern deconstructions, in which more energy has been put into demythologi zLng interpretive myrhs than constructing them. Earlier canonizations…
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