[ A thread which winds through her entire work- like the old traces through the wilderness in the pioneering days- through the ‘forest’ of the satire, parody, fable, allegory, theatrics and burlesques of American humor- is ‘the argument we have with ourselves themselves’: unavailing attempts to master the circumstance of defeat and break through to a fresh lease on life and to achieve a subtler wisdom than is contained in the purely retrospective view expressed in the trifecta of the Yankee, Backwoodsman and Negro character types and their various composites; to find human warmth pressed towards emotion fully expressed in a dramatic, tragic form. Only Henry James comes close, by examining the American character in Europe only , with starts and intimations by various authors such as Sinclair Lewis and later-day poets. The concluding paragraphs of her masterpiece follows.]
Humor has been the fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. It’s objective – the unconscious objective of a disunited people – has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type. But a society has not been palpably defined either in life or in literature. If literature is a gauge, only among expatriates has its strong semblance existed, without genuine roots, and mixed with the tragic. The other social semblance which has come into common view is that of Main Street.
Nor has a single unmistakable type emerged; the American character is still split into many characters. The comic upset has often relaxed rigidities which might have been more significant if taut; individualism has sometimes seemed to wear away under a prolonged common laughter. The solvent of humor has often become a jaded formula, the comic rebound automatic – ‘laff that off’ – so that only the uneasy habit of laughter appears, with an acute sensitivity and insecurity beneath it as though too much has been laughed away. Whole phases of comedy have become empty; the comic rejoinder has become every man’s tool. From the comic the American has often moved to a cult of the comic. But a characteristic humor has emerged, quiet, explosive, competitive, often grounded in good humor, still theatrical at bottom and full of large fantasy. The note of triumph has diminished as the decades have proved that the land is not altogether an Eden and that defeat is a common human portion. Humor has moved into more difficult areas and has embraced a subtler range of feeling; exaltation of the common American as a national type has been deflated. Yet what must still be called a folk strain has been dominant; perhaps is still uppermost; the great onset of a Negro art, the influence of Negro music, and popular responses to the more primitive aspects of Negro expression suggest that the older absorption in such elements is unbroken. If the American character is split and many-sided at least a large and shadowy outline has been drawn by the many ventures in comedy.
A consistent native tradition has been formed, spreading over the country, surviving cleavages and dispersals, often growing underground but rising to the surface like some rough vine. This ruthless effort has produced poetry, not only in the sense that primitive concepts are often poetic, but keeping the poetics strain as a dominant strain. Not the realistic sense, which might have been expected of a people who call themselves practical, but the poetic sense of life and of character has prevailed. With all the hasty experiment this tradition has revealed beauty, and wry engaging human twists. It has used subtle idioms, like the quieter Yankee idiom; it has contained the dynamic serenity of Whitman and the sensitive discovering genius of Henry James. With all the explosions its key has often remained low; this tradition has shown an effect of reserve, as if in immediate expression and in its larger elements something were withheld, to be drawn upon again. It has produced two major pattern, the rhapsodic and the understated, whose outline may be terraced through the many sequences of popular comedy and through American literature; regional at first, they have passed beyond the regional.
Clear courses have been drawn, yet these have been full of vagaries that come from complex experiment. New themes have often been upturned and penetrated only in part. The epical promised has never been completely fulfilled. Though extravagance has been a major element in all American comedy, though extravagance may have its incomparable uses with flights and inclusions denied the more equable view, the extravagant vein in American humor has reached no ultimate expression. The comedy of Rabelais provides a gauge, or that of Ulysses. On the other hand little equability has appeared, only a few aspects of social comedy; and emotion remains, as earlier, submerged, or shaded and subtle and indwelling. T. S. Eliot has voiced an insistent mood.
Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon gray and smoky, evening yellow and rose,
Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
While the smoke coming down above the housetops,
Doubtful, for quite a while
Not knowing what to feel or if I understand . . .
Set against this self-consciousness and disillusionment are further primitive elements in American life, showing themselves in the continuance of the cults, in lodges, parades, masquerades, as in earlier years, in shouts like “Hallelujah! I’m a bum!” and in a simple persistent self-portraiture not unlike that to which the American was first given. He still envisages himself as an innocent in relation to other peoples; he showed the enduring conviction during the Great War. He is still given to the rhapsody, the monologue, the tales, in life as in literature. Of late has come one of those absorptions in homely retrospect to which the American minds has periodically been devoted; common and comic characters, pioneers, orators, evangelists, hoboes, hold-up men, have come to the fore with a storm of old story and song, often engaging the same Americans who turn to Eliot or Robinson or Henry James.
These oddly matched aspects of the American character are often at variance. Together or separated, they have found no full and complete expression. Who can say what will bring fulfillment? If it comes it may be conditioned by many undetermined elements in the national life and character, by outside impingement even- since Americans are acutely aware of these like that which weighed heavily in earlier years, the burden of British opinion. Its effects are are still not altogether resolves; it has been noted that the sharp critiques offered in an earlier day by visiting foreigner are now defined by Americans, often as though they had merely borrowed the attitude. The involvement with the older countries is genuine, and the task looms for literature of absorbing traditions of the older world as part of the natural American heritage. The alliances must be instinctive or the fabric will be seamy. In general the American creative mind has leaked the patience and humility to acquire them, or it has been fearful of alienation from Americans sources.
Against full use of the native tradition many factors are set. That nomadic strain which has run through all American life, deeply influencing the American character, is now accented by the conditions of American life, and the native character seems to grow more generalized, less specifically American. Within the space of a lifetime Henry James saw something of a kind happen; in later year he remarked of the heroine of Pandora’s Box that she could no longer ‘pass for quaint or fresh or for exclusively native to any one tract of Anglo-Saxon soil.’ Yet the main outline of the American character still persist; American types can be found far from their native habitat and unmistakable in outline, the homeless Yankee in Nebraska or frontiersmen in Monte Carlo, and others who may show an erosion due to alien places so that the original grain has grown dim, but who show that grain.
For the creative writer the major problem seems to be to know the patternings of the grain; and these can hardly be discovered without understanding of the many sequences of the American tradition on the popular side as well a on purely literary levels. The writer may know, as Eliot said, ‘the mind of his own country – a minds which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind.’ A favored explanation for the slow and spare development of the arts in America has lain in the stress upon the forces of materialism. But these have existed in every civilization; they have even at times seemed to assist in the processes of art. The American failure to value the productions of the artist has likewise been cited; but the artist often seems a less of critical persuasion and sympathy than an unstudied association with his natural inheritance. Many artists have worked surely well with little encouragement; few have worked without a rich traditional store from which consciously or unconsciously they have drawn.
The difficult task of discovering and diffusing the materials of the American tradition – many of them still buried- belongs for the most part to criticism; the artist will steep himself in the gathered light. In the end he may use native sources as a point of radical departure; he may seldom be intent upon early material; but he will discover a relationship with the many streams of native character and feeling. The single writer- the single production - will no longer stand solitary or aggressive but within a natural sequence.
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