Showing papers in "American Literature in 1968"

A Re-Examination of "Benito Cereno"

Abstract: D ALPH ELLISON, in analyzing the portrayal of the Negro in nineteenthand twentieth-century American fiction, once remarked that the former, not the latter, grappled squarely with "the basic moral issue centering around Negroes and the white American's democratic ethics."' He suggested that many twentieth-century writers have rejected American society and turned their art toward re-creation of a highly personal individualized myth, rather than "recreating and extending the national myth"2 and expressing the fundamental problems of American national life.

Form in The Blithedale Romance

Abstract: C RITICS WHO HAVE SEEN The Blithedale Romance as a work of art and tried to pacify skeptical readers by explicating it have found it an eni,gma wrapped in a riddle. Certainly attempting to find form in it-aside from consistent themes, tone, and meaning-has been unrewarding. Plot, which gives form to most narratives, is a paramount problem in Blithedale. What is the reader to do with Old Moodie, the interpolated legends, the Veiled Lady, and Coverdale's confession of love for Priscilla at the end of the book? Central focus is another problem of form. The narrator is biased, unreliable, unlikable, and he distorts his characters. Hawthorne compounds these problems by building into the book obvious structural features. He clearly divides the book into halves; he threads the book with irony, satire, and recurrent motifs. Most of the unfavorable criticism of Blithedale has centered on these problems of form. This criticism usually sees Blithedale as a "satire" of Brook Farm and holds that because Hawthorne could not maintain the satiric point of view, the book fails structurally.' Other critics, however, take an approach that helps make the form of Blithedale a unified whole. Their understanding is that Coverdale is central to the meaning and form of the book-that the actions and opinions of the characters (including Coverdale) must be seen as reflected off Coverdale's mind and not Hawthorne's. The form through which Hawthorne works in Blithedale, therefore, is entirely dependent on the very restricted point of view of Miles Coverdale, not on the omniscience of Hawthorne. Some critics have rejected this understanding because of the autobiographical overtones of the book.2 Yet the critics who see Coverdale as the book's central focus agree that Hawthorne detached himself

The "Dominating" Symbol in Hawthorne's Last Phase

Abstract: T IS A COMMONPLACE to say that in many of Hawthorne's best stories a "dominating" symbol functions as an important unifying element. Entries in Hawthorne's American notebooks testify to the importance of key symbolical objects in the evolution of his stories. The presence of a single dominating symbol is especially important in each of his romances because such a symbol brings into a single focus a large number of conflicting and interacting minor symbols. The Pyncheon House, for instance, incorporates the garden, Alice's harpsichord, and the Colonel's portrait; the Scarlet Letter relates the forest, the town, and the scaffold; while the city of Rome encompasses a variety of symbolical art works and settings. In Hawthorne's best romances this dominating symbol is equated to the permanent and universal values of the human heart. The Scarlet Letter, the Pyncheon House, and St. Peter's Cathedral are explicitly referred to as "hearts," and these symbols become what we might call "time-filaments" which join all men-past and present-who are capable of experiencing these heart-felt values into a single "magnetic chain of humanity." To the extent that the universal and timeless truths of the human heart are revealed to characters through the Scarlet Letter, the Pyncheon House, Blithedale, and Rome, and to the extent that these symbols pattern and synthesize the sensibilities of characters, Hawthorne's romances succeed as complete and unified works of art. As we view Hawthorne's romances in chronological order, each successive dominating symbol appears to be a more inclusive or powerful "time-filament" than the previous one. The Scarlet Letter and the Pyncheon House extend two centuries into the past of New England, about the time that Hawthorne's ancestors first arrived in America. The Bloody Footstep, which Hawthorne contemplated before he wrote The Marble Faun, reaches into Elizabethan times and possibly a century before. The history of Rome

Winesburg, Ohio and the Rhetoric of Silence

Abstract: N A LETTER TO WALDO FRANK, Sherwood Anderson wrote in November, I9I7, of the clamor and stridency which he felt had come to typify American life. Recalling his own boyhood in Clyde, Ohio, he remarked: "I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big, empty plains. It has taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet. It affected their whole lives. It made them significant."1 Anderson's recollections of these still townsmen of a stiller town, his condemnation of verbosity and noise as somehow symptomatic of what had gone wrong with America, his equation of personal meaning with a kind of inner quietude-these are more than bardic, voice-from-the-cornfield pronouncements to an admirer from among the Eastern intelligentsia. To the reader familiar with Anderson's work, these judgments indicate a central tension with which he was engrossed throughout his career. His misgivings about the drift of modern America, his concern about the isolation of man from nature and from his fellow man, his aversion to noise-and especially the noise of words and talk-are set in uneasy balance against his preoccupation with, and reverence for, the psychic states associated with the natural world, with pastoral life, and with silence as a measure of inner significance. Indeed, in many ways Anderson seems to mirror the larger image which Americans have historically had of themselves-clear-eyed Jeffersonian yeomen, free from the pestilential grip of cities, men of deeds and not words, disdainful of fancy talk and palaver. Of course the image is no more true of twentieth-century Americans, crowded into cities, subjected to barbaric yawp, than of Anderson, the city-held artist, committed to a life of words. But even from our vantage-point beyond innocence it is still necessary to meet Anderson on his own ground, to realize that he is the sort of writer who cannot be dissociated from his idealized image of either himself or

Henry James's Idea of Consciousness

Abstract: QN A NUMBER OF OCCASIONS, Henry James indicated what he believed to be the essential subject matter of fiction. One of the most important of these pronouncements occurs in "The Future of the Novel" (I899). In that essay, he wrote: "The novel is of all pictures the most comprehensive and the most elastic. It will stretch anywhere-it will take in absolutely anything. All it needs is a subject and a painter. But for its subject, magnificently, it has the whole human consciousness."' While James was conspicuously concerned with the phenomenon of consciousness in all of his writings, he never defined it. Perhaps this was because it seemed an extremely difficult phenomenon to define. Even William James, who approached the subject philosophically and scientifically, admitted of great difficulty in this matter: "When I say every thought is part of a personal consciousness, 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of philosophical tasks."2 Henry James's idea of consciousness has to be harvested, for the most part, from a widely scattered crop of metaphors which surround his use of the term. For example, in an essay on Balzac, he drew the following relationship between literature and life: "Literature is an objective, a projected result; it is life that is the unconscious, the agitated, the struggling, floundering cause."3 Through his description of "life" in this passage, together with the antithetical structure of the statement, the reader is invited to infer that James regarded "literature" as somehow bound up with the phenomenon of consciousness. He does not say that literature is conscious, but

Transcendentalist Catalogue Rhetoric: Vision Versus Form

Abstract: W< yHITMAN'S CATALOGUES are a most salient feature of his poetry, and certainly the most neglected. It is tempting to skip over them as we read. "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft," etc.-why bother with the rest? After all, we can predict what the next sixty lines will say. And so we pass quickly by the redundant images to follow the "movement" of the poem, whatever that is, so as to be able to come up with a theory of structure which will satisfy our struggling students, and our own rage for order. Dawdling among the catalogues only slows us down. Still, when we allow ourselves to "loafe" awhile, we may be struck by Whitman's art in such passages, which at first seem the very antithesis of art. Sensitive discussions of Whitman, like Randall Jarrell's, show that other readers have felt the same way;' and the impact of catalogue rhetoric upon poets is certainly attested to by the tradition in American poetry which, following Whitman, employs it, not to mention the long antecedent tradition of prophetic 1 See Jarrell's essay, "Some Lines from Whitman," in Poetry and the Age (New York, I955), pp. IOI-I20. Several more scholarly though less sensitive studies of Whitman's catalogues have been made. Mattie Swayne, "Whitman's Catalogue Rhetoric," University of Texas Studies in English, XXI, I62-I78 (July, I94I), is illuminating on the underlying purpose of the catalogue but confines its discussion of the style itself mainly to the characteristic grammatical patterns used by Whitman. Detlev W. Schumann, "Enumerative Style and Its Significance in Whitman, Rilke, Werfel," Modern Language Quarterly, III, I7I-204 (June, I942), is chiefly valuable for general comparisons and contrasts among the three writers. Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., "'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry': A Note on the Catalogue Technique in Whitman's Poetry," Modern Philology, LI, 225-232 (May, I954), defends the artfulness of the catalogue as a structural device in terms of a particular example, as I attempt to do in the first section of this paper. Especially stimulating is Coffman's discussion of the progression of tone and idea within and between the two principal catalogues in "Brooklyn Ferry." Harry R. Warfel, "Whitman's Structural Principles in 'Spontaneous Me,'" College English, XVIII, I90-I95 (Jan., I957), detects unity and movement in the apparent randomness of another catalogue. All four scholars relate Whitman's use of the catalogue to transcendentalist idealism, and their observations-though quite brief, except in Miss Swayne's case-should be compared with mine below, as should Roger Asselineau's interpretation of catalogues as "spiritual exercises" in The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Book (Cambridge, Mass., I962), pp. I02-I03.