The Tradition and Destiny of American Literature
By Christopher Dawson
The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier
of language. Modern internationalism attempts to eliminate this by
the techniques of simultaneous translation but this is an
unsatisfactory solution: indeed nowhere is one more conscious of the
curse of Babel than in an international conference in which a hundred
different nations are discussing the same subject in a dozen
different languages. In order to understand the mind of another
people it is necessary to hear them thinking aloud, not arguing with
us, and the best way to do this is still to read their books: the
books that they have written, the books that they read and the books
that they love.
Unfortunately modern education with all its advantages does little to
help us here and the average man leaves college without much
knowledge of any language or literature except his own -- and
sometimes not much of that. That is why I regard the existence of two
literary traditions within the frontiers of a single language as one
of the most precious possessions of the English-speaking peoples.
Here are two literatures, two distinct fields of historic and
aesthetic experience, two spiritual worlds open to all of us on both
sides of the Atlantic at no trouble or expense. We have, most of us,
taken this privilege so much as a matter of course that we have
failed to appreciate its full value. When we have read a literature
all our lives -- in the nursery, in the schoolroom, at college, for
relaxation in leisure hours, and as a subject of serious study -- we
are apt to forget that it is not our own: we see only the particular
book or author and overlook the profound differences of national
tradition and culture that lie behind them.
It is true that earlier American writers wrote under the eye of the
European critic and were not averse to being accepted as citizens of
the European republic of letters; but for all that they remained
essentially American, and even expatriates like Henry James were no
less preoccupied with the American theme than were the official
spokesmen of the American way of life. It is this preoccupation which
is the distinctive note of American literature. American writers are
concerned with America in an entirely different way from that in
which English writers are concerned with Great Britain. No doubt it
is impossible to conceive of writers like Fielding or Trollope or
Surtees being anything but English even in their sleep, but they
never try to define their Englishry or to ask what England means. But
in America it is just the opposite. Every writer is highly conscious
of his Americanism and he feels, as Santayana said, that "to be an
American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a
career."
It is easy to see the reason for this. Unlike other peoples the
United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate
self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American
has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative
act. Nor was it enough for the Americans to assert their independence
from the Old World: they had also to impose their will on a virgin
continent, to fell the forest and plough the prairie and burst the
barriers that separated them from the Western Ocean.
A Tradition of Public Oratory
Now the American writer had little share in this achievement. He was
left behind on the coasts of New England and New York in the old
colonial atmosphere. The new nation had no time to write books.
Nevertheless it was one of the most literate nations that has ever
existed and nothing impressed foreign observers like de Tocqueville
more than the way in which the men of the log cabins who owned
nothing but an axe and a gun were assiduous readers of the
newspapers, which somehow followed them into the wilderness. Thus,
though the Americans were not a people of writers, they were a people
of readers and still more of speakers. The eighteenth century
tradition of public oratory which played such a great part in the
Revolution continued to flourish in the new world beyond the
Alleghenies and produced its typical representatives through the
nineteenth century from Henry Clay in Kentucky to Bryan in Nebraska.
These were the real spokesmen of the new culture. The men of letters,
the artists and contemplaters held a somewhat peripheral and insecure
position in American society and were sometimes isolated and
neglected in the triumphant forward march of American democracy. Yet
for all that they all felt themselves to be deeply involved in the
American situation and sometimes as charged with a charismatic
mission to the American people as its teachers, prophets or
interpreters.
This no doubt has its roots in the history of American culture. From
the beginning the Bible was the basic classic for all Americans, and
the spread of higher education in the West was mainly the work of the
denominational colleges whose primary function was the training of
the ministry. The American writer was the natural heir of this
ministerial tradition. In the case of Emerson the vocation was
literally an hereditary one; and it would be tedious to name all the
writers who were the sons or grandsons of ministers. In any case this
sense of mission which sets the writer apart from his fellow citizens
has always been characteristic of the American literary tradition.
But it expresses itself in two different ways. On the one hand there
are the writers like Emerson and Walt Whitman who consciously accept
the prophetic role; and on the other there are the critics and
questioners, like Thoreau and Herman Melville and also Henry James
and Henry Adams who were disturbed by the prevailing trends in
American society and who tried to maintain or restore a certain
standard of moral or civilized values.
These tendencies are not explained entirely by the spirit of the age
which produced writers like Carlyle and Ruskin and Matthew Arnold on
the eastern side of the Atlantic. The tendencies are more than that,
since their influence is to be seen as clearly among American writers
of the present age. There are still sons of the prophets among them,
even though, like Robinson Jeffers, their message may be one of
unrelieved denunciation and doom: and in the other direction the
critical examination of the American conscience has never been so
stringent and far-reaching as it has been during the last thirty
years.
This is due in part to a change in the conditions of American
culture, to the intensive study of literature in the universities and
to the growth of a new learned class of professional scholars. (It is
remarkable how many of the younger American poets and critics are
professors or teachers of literature in the universities.) No doubt
this has tended to accentuate the separation of the American
intellectual from the rest of society which, as we have seen, has
been characteristic of American letters from the beginning; and it
may even lead to a sharp revulsion against the American theme, as
with Karl Shapiro who has denounced "the synthetic myth of the
Emersonian and Whitmanian bards" and speaks of "America" as "the word
that is the chief enemy of modern poetry . " But on the whole the age
of criticism has led not to a turning away from American themes, but
to a deeper and wider understanding of them.
This is to be seen most clearly in the case of the new Southern
literature, the origins of which are closely related to the
contemporary critical movement of the Southern agrarian group. This
literature makes a special appeal to the English reader since it
resembles his own literature in its consciousness of the past and of
the inescapable burden of social tradition, while at the same time it
gives him a new experience -- an invitation into a world which is
intensely real and yet utterly different from anything that he has
known.
This strangeness is due above all to the racial dualism of Southern
culture -- the existence of an underworld of culture with its own
social and spiritual traditions. This racial and cultural dualism is
one of the dominant issues of the age which confronts us alike in
Africa and in Asia, but it is only in American Southern literature,
and especially in the writings of William Faulkner, that we can feel
the full impact of the problem in its incarnate reality. Moreover
this exploration of the depths of the social consciousness has also
given the Southern writer a remarkable gift for understanding and
interpreting the different worlds of spiritual experience that still
exist under the superficial uniformity of modern secular
civilization: not only the racial underworld of the Negro, but the
economic underworld of the peasant and the religious underworld of
the Protestant sects. There are few aspects of American culture more
difficult for the English observer to comprehend, than the way in
which the familiar forms of traditional English Protestantism have
undergone a change and speak a language that is strange and
disconcerting. Wesley we know and Whitfield and even Asbury, but who
are these? Now American literature in general does not help us here.
The Elmer Gantries only increase our mystification, and even so
civilized and sympathetic a writer as Thornton Wilder in his masterly
picture of the salesman saint in <Heaven's My Destination> writes
from outside with humorous detachment. It is only in a Southern
writer like Robert Penn Warren that we seem to hear an authentic
voice from the forgotten world of popular religious experience.
Nothing is more difficult than for a novelist to write convincingly
or even inoffensively of supernatural or paranormal religious states
and experiences. Bernanos attempted it again and again with great
force and eloquence, but his work is marred by its sensationalism and
literary bravura. But Warren's story of the poor mountain mystic
Ashby Wyndham (in <At Heaven's Gate> ) never strikes a false note and
carries conviction in spite (or perhaps partly because) of the
handicap of its unfamiliar vernacular idiom.
A Strong Regional Literature
No doubt types like Ashby Wyndham are archaeological survivals in the
modern American world, and the same may be said of many of Faulkner's
most convincing characters. It is as though the social backwardness
of the South was a necessary condition of its literary fowardness.
Yet this only means that one cannot have a strong regional literature
without a relatively stable background of social and historical
tradition. New England had this in the past and New England produced
a rich literary harvest. But the great Western area which is the
heart of modern America has never had it, because it has never ceased
to change. Its writers, like Mark Twain, have written of the West
that they knew, but it had already ceased to exist. The West had
become a myth before it had achieved full social reality.
It is true that this Western myth had an epic quality which might
well have found literary expression if it had been allowed to mature.
But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes
became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to
get to work on them.
The literature of the modern West from <Main Travelled Roads> in 1891
to <The Grapes of Wrath> in 1939 had no contact with this legendary
past. It is a literature of disillusionment. Today there is perhaps a
tendency for writers to go back to the old Western themes in a more
literary spirit, following in the steps of historians like Bernard de
Voto and poets like Stephen Benet. But this is a nostalgic mood like
that of MacLeish's <Conquistador> which also strives to evoke
another. older. Western theme:
Old . . . an old man sickened and near death:
And the West is gone now: the West is
the ocean sky....
When a European reads American literature and still more the popular
historians of literature like Dr. Van Wyck Brooks, he is surprised
to find that the tendency to romantic nostalgia is even stronger in
the New World than in the Old. But perhaps this is the inevitable
result of the speed with which American culture has developed. There
has been no time for the development of a central common American
literary tradition. In the course of a single century America has
leapt from the old rural regional cultures of Thoreau's New England
and the Old South to the super-urban technocratic mass culture of the
mid-20th century. Such a situation imposes an almost intolerable
burden on a man of letters since this new mass civilization seems to
demand new literary forms that have yet to be created -- unless
indeed its only expression is to be found in the new non-literary
media of mass communication. All the literatures of the past,
including that of the United States during their first century, have
been the work of a small educated class and have been addressed to a
relatively restricted public. It is only in the present century that
we find societies of more than a hundred million that are almost
entirely literate and in which the writers do not belong to any
definite social class or milieu.
It is true that one great American writer of the past, Walt Whitman,
was fully aware of the "massive" continental character of American
culture and spent his life celebrating its glories and infinite
possibilities. But he did not see the America that was growing up
under his eyes. He envisaged a great spontaneous unbuttoned open-air
democracy, after the pattern of the Western armies of the Republic in
the Civil War. He did not see Main Street and Middle Town and the
endless expansion of the great urban agglomerations. Above all he
did not realize that a democratic mass civilization imposes a
stricter discipline on the individual than any of the feudal or
peasant cultures of the past. There has been no lack of novels about
business life or discussions of the tensions that arise from the
pressure of modern mass society on the individual personality. But
the writer, unless he is a professional journalist, is not really at
home in this new world. His art of its very nature is so highly
individualized that he cannot become fully integrated in a business
civilization. Consequently the writer tends either to turn back and
re-explore the depths and undercurrents of the folk mind and the
regional traditions, or else to write of the present predicament of
the individual in a mass society, and especially to make himself the
spokesman of the inarticulate and maladjusted types -- alcoholics,
delinquents and neurotics - who are furthest removed from the
patterns of social conformity.
This literary schizophrenia between the nostalgic acceptance of a
vanished tradition and a defiant revolt against the conformist
pressure of a managerial order, can hardly be more than a transitory
phenomenon. No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the
forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are
more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be
faced.
American literature has never been content to be just one among the
many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be
the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World. The
adventure of Western Man which created America has now come full
circle and the geographical New World is becoming merged in an
historical new age which is global or universal.
Now American literature since the time of Melville and Whitman has
been taught to face these universal issues and meanwhile it has
become the organ of one of the most cosmopolitan and manifold
societies that has ever existed. Consequently on both counts it seems
to me that in the long run no literature is more fitted to deal with
the new themes of the new age.
(First published in "THE CRITIC", Nov. 1957 issue)
This article was taken from "The Dawson Newsletter," Fall 1994, P.O.
Box 332, Fayetteville, AR 72702, $8.00 per year.
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