Showing papers in "American Literature in 1970"

Studied Ambiguities: Arthur Mervyn and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator

Abstract: S 0 MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the debt of American fiction 3to the tradition of the romance that critics have either overlooked or been hesitant about claiming too much for the realistic strain. Charles Brockden Brown, for example, is generally treated as the ancestor of later romance writers like Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, and Faulkner. Following Richard Chase,' Leslie Fiedler has observed that Brown's work belongs to "the mythopoeic novel" in which "realistic milieu and consistent character alike are dissolved . . . giving way to the symbolic landscape and the symbolic action."2 But this generalization does not hold true for Brown's Arthur Mervyn, a novel in which social milieu is very much a real environment conditioning its characters in a very immediate way. Arthur Mervyn is not only a pre-Freudian portrait of a character whose experiences reveal clear Oedipal feelings, but he is a young man who is moved by the ambitions and anxieties fostered by the American myth of success. The novel exists in two parts. The first part appeared in i799, and the second part in i8oo. In between Brown brought to completion and published Edgar Huntley. The full possibilities of the narrative's social and psychological realism seem to have occurred to Brown in the midst of composition. From a simple demonstration of the ways in which a virtuous young man resists temptation, Brown shifted to an attempt to convey the ironic interplay between Arthur's conscious and unconscious motivation and the sense of bewilderment that results from the ambiguity of appearances. Moreover, Brown responded to the technical demands of his content. His new vision led him to experiment with the techniques of multiple perspective and the device of the unreliable narrator.

Pudd'nhead Wilson: A Parable of Property

Abstract: THE STRIKING LACK OF AGREEMENT about the merits of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson is unquestionably related to the equally striking disagreements over interpretaton of the novel, related in the crucial sense that all the thematic analyses so far presented leave important aspects of the novel unaccounted for. The result is that those who are inclined to praise the novel dismiss certain parts as finally inconsequential evidence of Twain's predictably careless technique, while those who have serious reservations about its merits stress its lack of coherence, its lack of an action adequate to embody what appear to be the author's chief concerns. Although interpretations vary widely, ranging from the view that its theme is the conflict between appearance and reality to the assertion that it has "no clear meaning,"' two interpretative emphases are most common. First, there are those critics who stress racial themes, especially slavery and miscegenation, and second, those who argue for the centrality of the theme of environmental determinism and see slavery as simply a metaphor for Twain's more general concern with the influence of "training" on the individual.2 Although both these approaches yield valuable insights, both are finally unsatisfactory because they leave too many important questions unanswered-except by alluding to Twain's uncertain artistry.

The Oregon Trail.

Abstract: On April 28, 1846, Francis Parkman left Saint Louis on his first expedition west. The Oregon Trail documents his adventures in the wilderness, sheds light on America's westward expansion, and celebrates the American spirit.

Man and Wife: The Dialogue of Contraries in Robert Frost's Poetry

Abstract: T HE VOLUME OF ROBERT FROST'S POETRY entitled Complete Poems (1949) covers his varied production from before the turn of this century up through his poetic drama, The Masque of Mercy (I947). Even a casual reading shows that Frost's poetry is not homogeneous in form and subject matter. The self-conscious lyrics of A Boy's Will (1913) give way to the dialogues of country folk in North of Boston (I914) and the urbane and witty poems of the following years. Critics have shown alarm in dealing with the poetry of Frost as a whole, for many fail to recognize any line of continuity in this varied collection. Thus Frost has been accused of lacking a consistent point of view and of rejecting out of hand all firm systems of human value. George W. Nitchie compares him unfavorably on this point with his contemporaries Yeats and Eliot.

A "Shade of a Special Sense": Henry James and the Art of Naming

Abstract: TN RECENT YEARS students of Henry James's fiction have noticed ll many examples of suggestive naming. Scholarly comments run all the way from Dorothy Hoare's brief generalization, "James' names are always odd,"' to Quentin Anderson's lengthy theory that Milly Theale is an anagram of a Greek word.2 The attention given to names arises naturally as careful readers become increasingly aware that practically everything in James is deliberate and serves some artistic purpose. What needs examining now is the length to which he carried symbolic naming and how such an unrealisticin some writers even allegorical-device functions in his work. James's most explicit statement on appropriate naming appears in Partial Portraits, where he deplores Trollope's tendency to go too far and strain credulity. "A Mr. Quiverful with fourteen children (which is the number attained in Barchester Towers) is too difficult to believe in. We can believe in the name and we can believe in the children; but we cannot manage the combination." However, James added that when Trollope was "content not to be too comical, his appellations were fortunate enough," and names such as Mrs. Proudie and Gatherum Castle he felt were "rather able to minister to illusion than destroy it." In the same essay James says that "Thackeray's names were perfect; they always had a meaning, and (except in his absolutely jocose productions, where they were still admirable) we can imagine, even when most figurative, that they should have been borne by real people."3 For James, then, credibility demanded exercising some slight restraint so as to avoid complete burlesque but did not exclude even the most blatant of connota-

Fifteen modern American authors : a survey of research and criticism

Abstract: Praise for the earlier edition: Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains.--American Studies An indispensable research took (has) maintained and even increased its indispensability. No reference department of any college library should be without this latest revision.--Choice

Jack London's Use of Carl Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious

Abstract: I N HIS INTELLIGENT CHARACTERIZATION of naturalism, Donald Pizer identifies a central thematic tension in naturalistic fiction between "the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomforting truth which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenthcentury world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise."' For Jack London, certainly, this was the dynamic tension behind his intellectual life and fiction. In London's language, there was a struggle between "white logic" (the "antithesis of life") and "the sane and normal order of truth . . . that life must believe in order to live."2 Like Martin Eden, his autobiographical hero, his literary. mission was to avoid reductive portrayals of man as either a "clod" or a "god" while admitting both human limitations and heaven-sent possibilities.3 His protagonists would challenge a stultifying environment and discover "things wonderful."4 Since, for London, science had dislodged idealistic concepts of man, his temperament insisted that affirmations of the human condition, too, have a scientifically justifiable rationale. Early in his career, for example, he had used his enthusiastic reading of Haeckel, Darwin, and Spencer to evoke "the stinging things of the spirit" in his famous Alaskan fiction. A few years later he used "scientific" Marxism to dramatize the energy of "the people" in his socialist stories. It is not generally recognized, however, that in the last year of his life Jack London wrote a group of short stories whose scientific authority derived from his reading of Carl Jung's Psychology of the

The Rhetoric of Communion: Voice in The Sound and the Fury

Abstract: XW HO iS the narrator in the fourth section of The Sound and the Fury? Most of us, stunned perhaps by encountering what seems like conventional narration after charting our course through the tortuous monologues of the first three sections, take the fourth speaker for granted. Others, while recognizing a presence, have unintentionally demonstrated the inadequacy of existing critical terms to describe it: omniscient, objective, semi-omniscient, third person objective, omniscient third person, objective omniscient, and so on.1 Apparently most of us feel sufficiently reassured by the speaker to relax in his presence. But why is he there ? Is he there to tell us the Truth, to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps of some coherent statement about the universe or the South or the Compsons? If so, one feels it was a failure (as Faulkner himself claimed). The fourth section provides no summing-up, no final interpretation, no further insight into the apparent center of the book, Caddy, no essential truth we can hold in our heads as we walk away from the novel. Even if one agrees with Hagopian's skillful analysis of the last section as providing us finally with a nihilistic comment on life,2 one must admit that this interpretation derives from the structure