AmLit – Lecture notes

COOPER and the frontier experience

The frontier was the great theme of Cooper’s life, standing always at the
forefront of his imagination. Though the frontier theme can be seen in
virtually all of his books, it rose to major prominence in his Leatherstocking
Tales for which he is chiefly remembered.

The Prairie, which Cooper wrote in 1826-1827 in Paris, was the third book
in the Leatherstocking saga which chronicled the adventures of Natty
Bumppo, a forest hunter and frontiersman. It was apparently to be the third
and last volume of a trilogy which was artfully structured.

The first volume, entitled The Pioneers, Cooper had published in 1823. It
introduced Natty Bumppo as "Deerslayer," a relatively old man who, in
killing a deer on judge Temple's estate, violated civilized law and was
punished. From the beginning, it was clear that Natty Bumppo had a past
consisting of adventures with the Indians in the forest wilderness, and going
back beyond the Revolution to the French and Indian War. Cooper thus
placed his major character just beyond the middle of life. In so doing, he
began his epic classically in medias res.

The next volume, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), is a flashback that
pictures Natty in the prime of life. The Prairie, written right on the heels of
the previous book and suggesting that Cooper was rapidly spinning out the
conclusion to his woodsman's odyssey, is clearly a grand finale for
AmLit – Lecture notes
Leatherstocking, now an old man well past 80, and waiting serenely for
death out in nature beyond the reaches of civilization. From a point just past

the center of his hero's life, Cooper had thus flashed backward and forward.
He had, through the medium of Leatherstocking, told the story of frontier
America.

Critics, busy with criticizing Cooper’s stilted language, tend to miss the
subtlety with which the trilogy is structured. Over all three books hangs a
cloud of mortality, of inevitable death and change with its inescapable
sadness and elegiac tone. In the first book, the deer is killed, the trees are cut
down and the forest is rapidly disappearing. Mighty Deerslayer himself is
tried and convicted of the humiliating crime of poaching, and hence suffers
spiritual death at the hands of Judge Temple, the agent of civilization.
Leatherstocking's day, like that of the wilderness he loves so much, is clearly
past.

The Last of the Mohicans, a story of Leatherstocking's prime years, also tells
a tale of dying and thus sustains the tone, if not the theme of the first book.
This time the victim is the noble Uncas, last of his tribe which had been
virtually wiped out by vicious New Englanders years before. Thus we have a
sequence of doom: first the Indian, then the forests, then the hunter.

The Prairie is the last in this somber sequence. It is entirely a novel of death,
but appropriately enough, death and resurrection, for it ends on that
ambiguous Easter note of sadness and hope. It chronicles the death of one
way of life and the birth of another which is not altogether bad.
AmLit – Lecture notes
At this point, Cooper had created a subtle structural masterpiece; then, as
D.H.Lawrence astutely perceived, Cooper began the "sloughing of the old
skin." He went back in 1840 and 1841 and wrote two more books in the

Leatherstocking series, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, which took

Natty Bumppo back by successive stages through young manhood to youth
and the beginning of his career. The spell of death was broken. In a different
sense, another resurrection had occurred, and Leatherstocking once again
roamed the forests. These books made clear to the reader just what the
attractions of the unspoiled wilderness had been. They also recalled the
pioneering exploits of an older heroic generation that had given hard birth to
the country and which was in danger of being forgotten.

Cooper's five Leatherstocking books sustained themselves on the magic

level of story and character down through the years when Americans lost
their self-consciousness in a preoccupation with work, industrial
development, and the growth of great cities where the forest and the log
house once stood. They outlasted the dime novel and hundreds of imitations
which blossomed into a whole new genre called "westerns."

But since 1950, at least, with the work of Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land,
The American West as Symbol and Myth, literary critics and students of
culture have begun to see the larger meaning of Cooper's work. Cooper now
stands forth clearly as the great novelist of changing America, and at the
heart of his work stands the ambivalence and paradox that are central to the
American historical experience. Cooper, along with many other Americans,
could never make up his mind whether he preferred nature or civilization.
AmLit – Lecture notes
Nature was God's pure handiwork. It was beauty, the vast, silent sublimity of
forest and lake and prairie. It was innocent and noble and free. It was
America's one great spiritual and material resource, a crucial element of
national self-identification. On the other hand, nature was crude, lawless, the

home of violence, danger, and terror. Most of all it stood in the way of
progress. Over and over again in his Leatherstocking tales, Cooper posits the
contrast between nature - time stood still - and progress - the relentless, and
in many ways inviting, wave of the future. The problem was to tame nature
and bring it under control for good without degenerating into the callous
over-civilization of Europe. This was the mission of America, to create a
new society, efficient and orderly and civilized, but based closely upon the
beneficent laws of nature and hence free. So Cooper, like most Americans,
while always aware of the nature versus progress dilemma, invariably had it
both ways.

In his books he celebrated both nature and civilization; time and progress
stood still. The Leatherstocking saga catches all of this so perfectly because
it is a story of heroic proportions that chronicles the emerging historical
identity of the American people. Cooper knew that individual and collective
identities can only be derived from history. His great achievement was to
render the historical process of change during a period of cultural genesis
somehow timeless and permanent while at the same time capturing all of the
ambiguities, dislocations, and anomalies of a culture in the throes of a
process of acceleration more rapid than any ever seen before.

The Prairie, as befitting the final act of a great drama, has most of Cooper's
symbolic characters onstage in a vastly greater panorama than any of his
other books. The tone and many of the characters in the book are
AmLit – Lecture notes
reminiscent of Shakespeare's valedictory play, The Tempest. The landscape
is a "bleak and solitary place" with "bruised and withered grass", colored by
the "hues and tints of autumn." Leatherstocking, wrinkled and old, appears
as a nature god about to pass from the face of the earth. More important than

his powers, however, are his values for they denote what he represents in
Cooper's myth of America's beginnings. The twin keys to Leatherstocking's
values are freedom and a reverence for nature. Leatherstocking does not
violate nature's laws, and, embodying Cooper's basic ambivalence in this
matter, he does not entirely scorn civilization's laws. He declares, "The law-
tis bad to have it, but I sometimes think it is worse to be entirely without it.
Age and weakness have brought me to feel such weakness at times. Yes-yes,
the law is needed when such as have not the gifts of strength and wisdom are
to be taken care of."

Here Cooper gets at the heart of his theme, the role of law and order which is
synonymous with the best aspects of civilization in that it provides justice
and protection for the weak. The good law is, by implication, Jeffersonian
law which is in harmony with nature, indeed derives from it, but which
nevertheless allows a man to be as free as possible without injury to his
fellow creatures. It depends fundamentally upon tolerance and mutual
respect.

There is a scientist in the book, Dr. Bat, who embodies Cooper's comment
on science and the validity of the abstract scientific view of nature as
opposed to Leatherstocking's common-sense intuitive outlook. Dr. Bat sees
nature only in the abstract. He is a collector out of context, a systematizer, a
classifier. As such, he does not know true nature and he never learns, which
is the worst kind of ignorance, beyond redemption. In Cooper's imagination,
AmLit – Lecture notes
the "two cultures" stood unalterably opposed: one could not arrive at truth
through science, but one could do so in the most profound sense through
history, the literary imagination, romance, and myth.

It’s an equivocal situation in which all that Cooper is sure of is that things
are deteriorating. The cycle obsesses him, as it was to obsess William
Faulkner a century afterwards. Each feels the compulsion to dig back into
the past, in search of explanation and also of an elusive original perfection.

Cooper sums up in literature the spirit of that idealistic, somewhat crude

democracy which established the United States. He fixed the current heroic
traditions of his day more firmly to actual places. He supplied so many facts
to the great legend of the frontier. In addition, by means of his books, Native
Americans could now take their place in the world of the imagination,
sometimes idealized but more often credibly imperfect.
AmLit-lecture notes

WASHINGTON IRVING

The American public, even 40 years after the Declaration of Independence,

still tended to assume that books by American authors could not be very
good. It was Irving who made clear that Americans were competent not
merely to organize a state, but also to produce literature. His literary
pioneering was a matter of setting the example for others to follow. He
suggested lines of approach.

By 1820 the acute sense of the barrenness of the American scene was
turning the attention of the American writers to history - a tendency
encouraged by the example of Sir Walter Scott, with whom Irving discussed
literary strategy while preparing The Sketch Book. Irving, Cooper,
Hawthorne, and others draw on history for picturesque material and
gradually develop a tradition of American romance and in the process often
give poetic or mythical, if not precisely historical, meanings to portions of
the American past.

To fully appreciate that, one has to imagine what it was like to grow up in a
country relatively devoid of native monuments and works of art, of
traditional rituals and symbols, long established institutions and customs, of
a meaningfully formulated history, a country in which practical
considerations were apt to undermine cultural aspiration. Cooper,
Hawthorne, and Henry James were also to speak explicitly of these
hardships the American writer had to face.

As a reaction to the tendency to judge literature by strict moral and

utilitarian criteria, there is a resulting avidity for sentimentalism which
suggests a national need for relief from the pursuit of success and fear of
failure, from tensions and anxieties known not only to Irving but to such
writers as Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. The haunted characters of these
writers who refuse or are unable to settle down, who leave home, who waste
their lives in a lonely futile quest or who simply withdraw from life are not
very different from the emotions which generated the sentimentalism of
American literature in this period.

In this context, Irving’s Sketch Book (1820) appears as the work of a

somewhat self-mocking sentimentalist. This may be the first expression of
what came to be the escapist attitude toward literature dominant in the
AmLit-lecture notes

United States after the Civil War, an attitude which tries to resist the growth
of realism and naturalism.

The only unity in The Sketch Book (34 tales) comes from the alternating
moods and the preoccupation with mutability. The nostalgic impulse, the
concern with transience can be seen in Irving’s preference for plots out of
the past, something colourful, whimsical, a little melancholy, something that
hinted, not too sternly, at change and alteration. (paradisal skepticism)

The subdued, quietly whimsical and self-mocking voice of Geoffrey Crayon

made The Sketch Book a success. It is a familiar style, formal but not
academic or complex. It is symmetrical and natural, neither pretentious nor
overly rhetorical. Irving’s comic perspective is largely responsible for the
success of "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which
mark the beginning of the short story as a separate literary form. Though
derived from German legends and tales, these American stories are rooted in
the landscape and customs of the Hudson River Valley, which is their
setting. Given local habitation, the characters in them begin to seem human
even while they remain to a degree legendary. And Irving's half-comic, half-
pathetic tone, leaving the reader uncertain whether to laugh or feel sorry
gives the figures of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane slightly mythic
overtones.

MERITS
Irving made use of existing generic forms (allegory, Gothic romance, novel,
18th c. narrative essay) & also created something of his own.
He takes folklore as subject-matter - German model of situations
• grounds traditional German folktales in Am. settings
• provides legends with sophisticated 18th c teller (emphasis on own
impression of what he narrates), rather than anonymous storyteller
of folktales (no intrusion of teller’s personality).
Focus on tone, mood (not incident)  emphasis on the teller

No notions of structural compression (“in the shorter writings, every page

must have its merit” – Poe), but rather how to make the ‘instruction’ he
offers more palatable to a story-telling and a story-reading age.

Irony, paradox: the virtues Irving’s prose praises are shown to be

disappearing – joviality and decorum, harmony between social classes,
piety, contentment, serenity)  the 1st Am. writer of international fame
AmLit-lecture notes

should be anti-progressive, adhering to values unlike those of the Am.

pioneer myth  skepticism, search, failure

Nota bene
1810-1840: “The Knickerbocker Era” of AmLit.
Interest in the local history, “local color”
In AmLit, characters change place to mask their inability to cope with time.
Regionalism deals with time and change and exorcises them by freezing
time and regressing it to an initial mythical period.
Difficult to “write romance about a country without a shadow, antiquity,
mystery” – recreating a non-existent folklore and thus satisfy the need for a
meaningful tradition.
In its materialistic early years, America needed something to satisfy the
sense of history, an imaginative way of relating to their land, humanizing the
land, endowing it with a set of legends.
Building the new nation’s soul by recreating history and giving it
imaginative life.

Affiliations
18th c. essayists + early Romantics (Scott, Burns, Byron). From Wordsworth
he learns how to “startle the reader into moral awareness” by disclosing the
impressive story behind a banal subject  conservatism of attitude (methods
and technique: order, symmetry, restraint)  the reader is a kind of armchair
traveller with his eye on fixed manners and customs: tranquil outlook (unlike
Poe, Hawthorne, Melville)

Weird intensity (Poe) vs. benign disposition (Irving)

Common desire: to make the reader look intensely at the ordinary (Irving), at
the bizarre (Poe) > concentrate the reader’s gaze.

Realistic setting for stories of fantastic turn + further distancing by use of 2nd
persona who takes responsibility for the tale  fictional persona who links
disparate subjects (> Addison)  Rip van Winkle was ‘found’ among
D.Knickerbocker’s papers.
Pose of amateur writer  claims to accurate research  truthfulness of
reports (cf Defoe).
Paradoxically, the impression of ‘real stories’ is given by those tales with the
strongest element of unreality > principle: framing (realistic + supernatural
 romance) realistic frame serves to increase the mystery of the material
frames + feeling of intimacy with lives remote from the reader’s own.
AmLit-lecture notes

Rip van Winkle

by Washington Irving

Leslie Fiedler - Love & Death in American Literature (1959): Rip van Winkle
(RvW) marks the beginning of modern American literature.

innovation: union of traditional folktale with individualized narrator 

interest in events of story + subjective interest in the story’s point of view
(tone)

Use of localized teller who helps to displace stories from their legendary roots
towards social reality and satire without losing sense of idealized / projective
dream reality.

Depicts American cultural conflict between the sleepy old Dutch world of
early settlers and the bustle of Yankee capitalism and democracy, contrast bet.
Am. manners and lethargy of Dutch past (political satire).

The story begins with leisurely descriptive passage unmarked by any tension
 manner and style of a travel sketch (Kaatskill Mountains.), beckons the
reader into an enchanted landscape where dreams comes true (classic story of
wish fulfillment).

Rip – sleeps for 25 years, moves from childhood to a 2nd childhood, awakens
to the new world of Am. society as an aged man who preserves the old world
in the only way possible, i.e. in the imaginative realm of stories.

Stylistic strategies that embellish the theme (wit and grace): paradigmatic,
vertical rather than the advance of plot (sustained action, syntagmatic,
horizontal).

Rip’s unconscious reconciles the disparity between wish and reality by

bending the latter  Rip can’t get out of critical rite of passage, that’s why
his emergence from sleep is comic.

Traditional folktale elements are denied:

• perilous journey (RvW-not heroic, shrew)
• supernatural (RvW-Henry Hudson’s Dutch crew)
• disguise and recognition scenes (Rip-disoriented man pleading his
case)
AmLit-lecture notes

Special brand of protagonist: the little man (Gogol), non-hero, anti-hero

Rip’s loss of identity (construction of identity is a major issue in regional
lit.) + becoming a storyteller  constructs his identity though storytelling

Escape – from the determining, conditioning force of the system, society

Where?  nature, sleep, space, time
Coleridge: “enslaved by another man’s system”

Irving detaches story from essay (‘talk of the town’ – 18th century)
Diedrich Knickerbocker – more like the 18th century town talker

Combination of attitudes (style of Addison and Steele’s essays + subject

matter of German romanticism)  the formula of the Am. Short story
(realistic + romantic)

Values: “the play of thought and sentiment and lg.; the weaving in of
characters … the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life;
and the half-concealed vein of humour that is often playing through the
whole.”

Attention to realistic detail + overt moral element

Emphasis on locale entails the lowering the narrative interests (fiction
overwhelmed by documentary)

Symbolic level: Rip’s enslavement by his wife = America’s colonial past

‘awakening’ = condition of new U.S.
happy ending = optimism for future

Use of 2 narrators to defend the tale’s credibility

Initiation ?!  Rip is confused, bewildered, not enlightened
Allegory (moral dimension) + symbolism , ambiguity

Irving vs. Hawthorne (stripped stories of allegoric and moralizing import)

Irving vs. Poe (destroys place restrictions, landscape = symbolic sign of the
psyche)

Yvor Winters (New Criticism) - “alternative possibilities”: history vs.

fiction: fictionalization of history in dream-like atmosphere, “imagined”
history”.
AmLit – lecture notes

HAWTHORNE

Hawthorne's theory of the romance is based on his pictorial analogies for his
verbal art. These recurrent analogies call to mind the neoclassical conception ut
pictura poesis (art of fiction as picture) which is fully operative in his fiction. This
has an important relation to his treatment of character because, looked at
individually, Hawthorne's people do not satisfy us. They seem abstract, allegorical;
they are imperfect, mutilated, incomplete. His strength however lies in his total
conception of the art of fiction as picture, in which individual characters function
not as individuals, but in relation to each other and to his total design. Taken
together, as parts or colors of the picture, as shading and contrast, they make up a
design.

The romancer may, says Hawthorne in his Preface to The House of the Seven
Gables, "so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights
and enrich the shadows of the picture."  the chiaroscuro effect.
Like Verlaine later on in France, Hawthorne's description aims at: "Pas la couleur,
rien que la nuance.”

The obliquity of Hawthorne's gaze - “the secret of his power lies in the great art
with which he reduplicates and re-reflects the main idea of the tale from the
countless faces of his imagination, until the reader's mind is absolutely saturated
by it". (Richard Holt Hutton)

Through the interplay of light and shade, Hawthorne was able to create a total
ambiguity that would enable him to achieve the freest possible interplay of
substance, identities, and physical, moral and psychological realities. Darkness is
a shield that protects us from the outside, fully lit world. We often have the feeling
of not being insulated enough, of not attaining faceless anonymity.
AmLit – lecture notes

Hawthorne's position in matters concerning art and literature can be identified in

3 types of sources: the first is represented by the Prefaces in which he expressed
his opinions directly, the second includes tales and novels where characters
become engaged in conversations about the subject under discussion, and the third
comprises his literary texts considered as illustrations of his theory.

In art Hawthorne looked for a substitution of nature by "something that may stand
instead of and suggest the truth." What the artist substitutes for nature or external
reality is imaginative or spiritual reality obtained through a process of idealization.
For Hawthorne, idealization was not merely a beautifying process, but rather a
means to gain access to the depth of reality and extract the inner meaning from
the actualities of life. Similarly, imagination is an "inward eye" which perceives
objects not visible to the physical eye.

This idealized/spiritual reality is more real than material reality, the imaginative
work of art" is regarded as "Natural, yet superior to Nature in that it embodies
Nature's essence.”

For example, The Scarlet Letter,

“... for all its multiplicity of meaning and complexity of symbolism, [it] has a
setting which is both precise and solid. The town and the Puritan society are
described in such concrete detail that one finds them completely credible. This is
also true of the characters, which, though full of moral and symbolic meaning, are
by no means deficient in verisimilitude.” (Gupta)
AmLit – lecture notes

SCARLET LETTER

Themes

Sin, Knowledge, and the Human Condition

Hester and Dimmesdale contemplate their own sinfulness on a daily basis and try
to reconcile it with their lived experiences. The Puritan elders, on the other hand,
view sin as a threat to the community that should be punished and suppressed.
Their answer to Hester’s sin is to ostracize her. Yet, Puritan society is stagnant,
while Hester and Dimmesdale’s experience shows that a state of sinfulness can
lead to personal growth, sympathy, and understanding of others. Paradoxically,
these qualities are shown to be incompatible with a state of purity.

The Nature of Evil

The characters in the novel frequently debate the identity of the “Black Man,” the
embodiment of evil. Over the course of the novel, the “Black Man” is associated
with Dimmesdale and little Pearl is thought by some to be the Devil’s child. The
characters also try to root out the causes of evil: did Chillingworth’s selfishness
in marrying Hester force her to the “evil” she committed in Dimmesdale’s arms?
Is Hester and Dimmesdale’s deed responsible for Chillingworth’s transformation
into a malevolent being? This confusion over the nature and causes of evil reveals
the problems with the Puritan conception of sin. The book argues that true evil
arises from the close relationship between hate and love. As the narrator points
out in the novel’s concluding chapter, both emotions depend upon “a high degree
of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent . . . upon
another.” Evil is not found in Hester and Dimmesdale’s lovemaking, nor even in
the cruel ignorance of the Puritan fathers. Evil, in its most poisonous form, is
found in the carefully plotted and precisely aimed revenge of Chillingworth,
whose love has been perverted. Perhaps Pearl is not entirely wrong when she
AmLit – lecture notes

thinks Dimmesdale is the “Black Man,” because her father, too, has perverted his
love. Dimmesdale, who should love Pearl, will not even publicly acknowledge
her. His cruel denial of love to his own child may be seen as further perpetrating
evil.

Identity and Society

After Hester is publicly shamed and forced by the people of Boston to wear a
badge of humiliation, her unwillingness to leave the town may seem puzzling. She
is not physically imprisoned, and leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony would
allow her to remove the scarlet letter and resume a normal life. Surprisingly,
Hester reacts with dismay when Chillingworth tells her that the town fathers are
considering letting her remove the letter. Hester’s behavior is premised on her
desire to determine her own identity rather than to allow others to determine it for
her. To her, running away or removing the letter would be an acknowledgment of
society’s power over her: she would be admitting that the letter is a mark of shame
and something from which she desires to escape. Instead, Hester stays, refiguring
the scarlet letter as a symbol of her own experiences and character. Her past sin is
a part of who she is; to pretend that it never happened would mean denying a part
of herself. Thus, Hester very determinedly integrates her sin into her life.

Dimmesdale also struggles against a socially determined identity. As the

community’s minister, he is more symbol than human being. Except for
Chillingworth, those around the minister willfully ignore his obvious anguish,
misinterpreting it as holiness. Unfortunately, Dimmesdale never fully recognizes
the truth of what Hester has learned: that individuality and strength are gained by
quiet self-assertion and by a reconfiguration, not a rejection, of one’s assigned
identity.
AmLit – lecture notes

Motifs

Civilization versus Wilderness

In The Scarlet Letter, the town and the surrounding forest represent opposing
behavioral systems. The town represents civilization, a rule-bound space where
everything one does is on display and where transgressions are quickly punished.
The forest, on the other hand, is a space of natural rather than human authority. In
the forest, society’s rules do not apply, and alternate identities can be assumed, it
permits greater honesty and an escape from the repression of Boston. When Hester
and Dimmesdale meet in the woods, for a few moments, they become happy
young lovers once again. Hester’s cottage, which, significantly, is located on the
outskirts of town and at the edge of the forest, embodies both orders. It is her place
of exile, which ties it to the authoritarian town, but because it lies apart from the
settlement, it is a place where she can create for herself a life of relative peace.

Night versus Day

By emphasizing the alternation between sunlight and darkness, the novel
organizes the plot’s events into two categories: those which are socially
acceptable, and those which must take place covertly. Daylight exposes an
individual’s activities and makes him or her vulnerable to punishment. Night, on
the other hand, conceals and enables activities that would not be possible or
tolerated during the day—for instance, Dimmesdale’s encounter with Hester and
Pearl on the scaffold. These notions of visibility versus concealment are linked to
two of the book’s larger themes—the themes of inner versus socially assigned
identity and of outer appearances versus internal states. Night is the time when
inner natures can manifest themselves. During the day, interiority is once again
hidden from public view, and secrets remain secrets.
AmLit – lecture notes

Evocative Names
The names beg to be interpreted allegorically. Chillingworth is cold and inhuman
and thus brings a “chill” to Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s lives. “Prynne” rhymes
with “sin,” while “Dimmesdale” suggests “dimness”—weakness, indeterminacy,
lack of insight, and lack of will, all of which characterize the young minister. The
name “Pearl” evokes a biblical allegorical device—the “pearl of great price” that
is salvation.

Symbols

The Scarlet Letter

The scarlet letter is meant to be a symbol of shame, but instead it becomes a
powerful symbol of identity to Hester. The letter’s meaning shifts as time passes.
Originally intended to mark Hester as an adulterer, the “A” eventually comes to
stand for “Able.” Finally, it becomes indeterminate: the Native Americans who
come to watch the Election Day pageant think it marks her as a person of
importance and status. Like Pearl, the letter functions as a physical reminder of
Hester’s affair with Dimmesdale. It helps to point out the ultimate
meaninglessness of the community’s system of judgment and punishment. The
child has been sent from God, or at least from nature, but the letter is merely a
human contrivance. Additionally, the instability of the letter’s apparent meaning
calls into question society’s ability to use symbols for ideological reinforcement.

The Meteor
As Dimmesdale stands on the scaffold with Hester and Pearl in Chapter XII, a
meteor traces out an “A” in the night sky. To Dimmesdale, the meteor implies that
he should wear a mark of shame just as Hester does. The meteor is interpreted
differently by the rest of the community, which thinks that it stands for “Angel”
AmLit – lecture notes

and marks Governor Winthrop’s entry into heaven. But “Angel” is an awkward
reading of the symbol because in this narrative, symbols are taken to mean what
the beholder wants them to mean. The incident with the meteor obviously
highlights and exemplifies two different uses of symbols: Puritan and literary.

Pearl
Although Pearl is a complex character, her primary function within the novel is
as a symbol. Pearl is a sort of living version of her mother’s scarlet letter. She is
the indicator of a transgression, yet she is also a blessing. She represents not only
“sin” but also the vital spirit and passion that engendered that sin. Thus, Pearl’s
existence gives her mother reason to live, bolstering her spirits when she is
tempted to give up. It is only after Dimmesdale is revealed to be Pearl’s father
that Pearl can become fully “human.” Until then, she functions in a symbolic
capacity as the reminder of an unsolved mystery.

The Rosebush Next to the Prison Door

The narrator chooses to begin his story with the image of the rosebush beside the
prison door. The rosebush symbolizes the ability of nature to endure and outlast
man’s activities. Yet, paradoxically, it also symbolizes the futility of symbolic
interpretation: the narrator mentions various significances that the rosebush might
have, never affirming or denying them, never privileging one over the others.
AmLit – lecture notes

Hawthorne (notes)

• Degradation of American progressivistic assumptions (paradisal

skepticism)
• Central issue: the problem of the artist who tries to find meaning in the
sterile, fruitless tradition  sympathy with failure
• Position vis-à-vis Puritan heritage:
Sobriety, piety, energetic, moral
Gloomy, ascetic, intolerant, reluctant to enjoy life

Hawthorne’s preoccupation with guilt and sin, Puritan suppression of pleasure

in life + isolation from humankind is wrong (pride, hypocrisy: Wakefield) 
estrangement, solitude, frustration.

His characters need to establish a relation between their imagination and the
external world  they are confident of finding the source of
sin/evil/knowledge in something (place/person) external to themselves (don’t
recognize these are inherent to human nature).

Devil – “false guide”, encouraging people to extend partial truths into

erroneous truths.
Final irony: by rejecting the evil of the outside words, protagonist commits
himself to the evil of his own mind  total depravity, destruction

Allegory and symbolism are perfect tools to render the reality of man’s mind
and spirit.
AmLit – lecture notes

“Alternative possibilities” (Yvor Winters) – Hawthorne’s fiction is always

on the frontier between reality and dream (like Kafka): dealing with factual
history in a dream-like atmosphere, emphasizing the subjective/speculative
basis of the narrative process

My Kinsman, Major Molineux

• Initiation into the nature of the real world, the town is a miniature Vanity
Fair.
• Power should emanate from a man’s self  parable of American
colonies on the verge of war.
• Robin’s laughter: recognition of his false position / disillusionment
(ironic) / acknowledgment of the fall of a super ego figure.

3 kinds of revolt against authority:

-political authority
habitual waking rationality
-familial control
Bizarre, carnivalesque atmosphere, pagentry (disguise, irreverence for
authority, sardonic Dyonisian laughter)

Repeated nightmarish assaults on Robin’s supposedly ‘shrewd’ rationality

and his progressive estrangement from familial and support and authority.

Revolt against his own conceptual ordering of experience  only after he
yields to irrational elements of dream/fantasy does he undergo revolt against
familial authority.
AmLit – lecture notes

ROMANCE AS A GENRE

In the 17th century the rise of empirical thought, rationalism, a theology

based on analogy to the natural world and the advent of the bourgeois mode
of realism made Romance disappear as a force in literature.

However, in late 18th c., as the Sacred threatened to disappear from culture
under pressure of naturalistic explanation, of industrialization and
urbanization, romance arose again, first in the guise of Gothic romance,
which specialized in the symbolic exploration of the unconscious through
the strange, the haunting, and the irrational. The American Gothic was
adapted to local conditions; far example, the cave came to replace the
European dungeon, the haunted forest was used instead of the haunted
castle, nature becoming the incarnation of evil.

But curiously enough, the fascination for the bizarre, for the individual
peculiarity, seems to have led at the same time to a fictional discovery of the
true depths of human nature because it freed the minds of readers from direct
involvement of their superego and allowed them to pursue daydreams and
wish fulfillment in regions where inhibitions and guilt could be suspended.

Hawthorne defined the romance in opposition to the novel as a place of more

mystery, less specific description of concrete reality, a place where both
elemental and spiritual forces could be put in play in a landscape that was
full of symbolic, allegorical potential.
AmLit – lecture notes

• Romance - has "a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and

material," and although it must never “swerve aside from the truth of
the human heart," it has "fairly a right to present that truth under
circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or
creation.”
• Novel - based on “minute fidelity, not merely to the possible,
but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience.”

The root meaning of romance in America remaining fiction as opposed to

fact, the same duality holds true in the theory of romance when deviant
imagination is opposed to normative actuality. The romancer can therefore
ignore material reality, idealize facts in an effort to delineate universal
human experience.

So, the romance displays a degree of freedom from the ordinary novelistic
requirements of verisimilitude, development, and continuity. Hawthorne’
static romances make use of the allegorical and moral, rather than the
dramatic. The characters, rather two-dimensional types, are shown in an
ideal relation--that is, they share emotions only after these have become
abstract or symbolic. They do become profoundly involved in some way, but
it will be a deep and narrow, an obsessive type of involvement. Where the
novelist would arouse our interest in a character by exploring his origin, the
romancer will probably do so by enveloping it in mystery. Character itself
becomes somewhat abstract and ideal.
AmLit – lecture notes

E.A.POE

Poe is particularly alien to the American experience, for his contrived

cosmopolitanism is antithetical to the nationalism of his day, in which
domestic matters, though screened through European tastes, were the chief
concern. In an age dominated by admiration of Irving’s mannerisms and
Cooper's adventure stories, Poe's insisted on using the themes and voices of
madness, sin, and death. One of his collections was called Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque, and by its title alone the book shrieks its
idiosyncrasy.

On the other hand, by being the most alien of all, Poe was perhaps the more
"American," a perpetual nomad of the mind who expressed his genius by
inhabiting a bizarre region of the mind, concocted out of memory and
imagination, and blurred by the dimness of that state which exists between
sleep and consciousness. His stories; as Baudelaire noted, show “absurdity
installing itself in the intellect, and governing it with a crushing logic.”

They fall roughly into two kinds: those of horror (such as The Black Cat',
`The Cask of Amontillado', ‘The Fall of the House of Usher', and `Ligeia')
and those of `ratiocination’, including `The Gold Bug', `The Purloined
Letter', aso. The distinction is not precise, stories like `The Murders in the
Rue Morgue' combine horror with the intellectual parable and a rage for
order.

His boycott of the western frontier cuts him off totally from the brotherhood
of American letters. The 1840 Tales is completely lacking in any material
AmLit – lecture notes
alluding to the greatest of American experiences. The only frontier that
interested him was the perilous outpost of the nearly sane.

At a time when America was looking westward, Poe kept his back to the
frontier, as if to deny the existence of that terrifying immensity, that raw,
unimaginable territory where great forces were locked in combat. He seems
to have abhorred the idea of pure, unlimited space.

Space consciousness fills the literature of the American Renaissance. The

idea of space for Poe's contemporaries was somehow linked to the opening
country, to the westward movement of empire, to the staggering breadth of
land that was America's promised destiny. With the exception of Hawthorne,
who shared with Poe an interest in the inner territory, most American writers
saw space as an endless opening up of possibilities. They may have viewed
it with fear, like Melville, caution, like Cooper, hope, like Emerson, or
exultation, like Whitman, but they saw it always as expansiveness, breadth,
infinity.

Poe saw space otherwise. Though he kept his back to the frontier, he could
not ignore the ocean, and a number of his stories and his only novel, Arthur
Gordon Pym, are seaborne. Poe's ocean is always a gigantic helix, drawing
the voyager toward some central maelstrom. It is an ever-closing space, a
claustrophobic phenomenon much like the pits, descending pendulums,
walls, coffins, and masonry of his other tales.

Poe attempted to come to terms with the idea of pure space, and the
implications of his theory of the universe have direct equivalents in his art of
fiction. Poe's theory of unity, of oneness, unlike that of Emerson and the
Transcendentalists, was a theory of dissolution, of ultimate annihilation,
AmLit – lecture notes
claustrophobically realized. Having sprung from nothingness, the universe
would return to nothing.

In his stories Poe uses architectural metaphors, suggesting that the incidents
in a plot are like building stones, each participating in the general structure
without calling particular attention to itself. This variation on the organic
theories of Coleridge is significant, considering Poe's emphasis on
architecture in "Fall of the House of Usher," probably the best demonstration
in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque of his spatial theory.

Poe wrote by the rule of two. Along with claustrophobia, it is the secret of
the concentric energy, the compressed, closed-in quality of his art. There is
always in the stories an air of hushed urgency, the confession of author to
reader, of dark secrets imparted in a tense, slightly mad interview. Author
and reader are the basic two, the couplet which is the foundation of the pairs
to follow.

The reuniting of the pairs, body and soul, matter and spirit, result in
annihilation for both, for duality is but oneness exemplified and oneness is
death. The rule of two is the rule of separateness, of falling apart, of echo.
And yet, it is the principle of joining, of multiples, of paradox welded into
completed irony. The closing of the circuit electrocutes, because absolute
unity is a circle of nothingness, is death. Only by keeping the pairs diffused
can life go on. Togetherness is annihilation.

Again it is a matter of twos, commencing with the narrator and his former
schoolmate, Roderick Usher, and concluding with Roderick and his twin
sister, Madeline, who die in one another's arms, a deathly union which
brings their ancestral house crumbling down. The "house," at once a
AmLit – lecture notes
physical structure and a symbol of the Usher family, is pictured in terms
which prophesy the dreadful outcome of the tale. Set in a wasteland of gray
sedges and white, decaying trees, it stares down into the dark tarn by which
it is surrounded with "vacant eye-like windows."
Still entire, still standing, the building nonetheless has "a barely perceptible
fissure . . . extending from the roof . . . in front" and making "its way down
the wall in a zig-zag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the
tarn."

This condition of universal decay and imminent collapse is shared between

the house with the "eye-like" windows and its inhabitant, Roderick Usher,
whose physical frame and mental control are declining rapidly. Overcome
with a constant terror of the future, an apprehension of his own imminent
destruction, Usher attributes his condition to the effect upon him of the
building, convinced that "the mere form and substance of his family
mansion" has had a destructive effect "over his spirit" - matter over mind,
body over soul.

Dwelling on the duality of his self and his decaying house, Usher paints
abstractions of luminous, subterranean passageways, and has written a
poem, "The Haunted Palace," in which the human mind is depicted in
architectural terms. One recalls again the "eye-like" windows which stare
into the tarn. Roderick Usher suffers from the terror that the walls of his
house, unified as they are by decay and the overspreading fungus, possess a
sentience, a life of their own.

The House of Usher finally collapses into its own reflection, worlds collide
into nothingness, for the sum of two is one, the unity that is a void,
AmLit – lecture notes
compounded of parts equally, and held apart only by the will of the artist, be
he God or Man.

Poe's narrator ceaselessly endeavours to correct former virtual

misunderstandings and misrepresentations, to adjust his perspective as
appropriately as possible to reality. One's perspective upon an object can
become objective through gradual "correction" which refers to a successive
set of positions adopted by the viewer in relation to the viewed object until
an ideal one is attained. The underlying assumption is that human
subjectivity corrupts reality {history} and eventually turns into false
representation (fiction).
 POE – Fall of the House of Usher (notes)

Followed the example of Romantic poets to demythologize old ballads and

folktales and remythologize them by presenting them as basic psychic processes.
Chsaracters are both social personae (realistic fiction) and symbolic projections
(romance fiction).

Structure of stories: depends on the interaction between a character

metaphorically transformed by his obsession and a realistic character who
unsuccessfully tries to recuperate the metaphoric figure.

What the narrators fail to do within the story (that is, understand Usher), they
succeed in doing in discourse.
Narrator: watches and describes (but does not act)

R.Usher = ultimate Romantic artist who cuts himself off from external reality and
lives within the realm of pure imagination  loss of self

Sentience of house = metaphor of Romantic aesthetic of organic unity

R.Usher lives within the artwork (house + his obsession)

Fabula = R.Usher’s aesthetic obsession
Discourse = account of R.Usher’s transf. into a figure of imagination who
vanishes into pure subjectivity

fissure – disintegration of House + human psyche (“scientist of the Romantic

abnormal mind” - Lawrence)
mirrors, reversals (House: dull and dark  radiant gleam; soundless
 tumultuous shouting), inversion + return to original dark and silence,
imminence of fall)  sense of doom

Mechanical quality of his technique – “things play a more important part than
people” (DH Lawrence), “analytic fantasies”  interest moves from the heart to
the head, passion to idea, drama to denouement

Single effect: uniformity of setting, character, action, theme  description of

the house predicts collapse + Roderick cadaverous - imminent dissolution
His description is in turns applied to the house and vice-versa

Effect of totality, all parts of the story are interlocked, fusion of all components
of the tale – suggests termination: sense of ending
Sense of closure, terminal aura: preconceived effect

Limits of Poe’s theory of effect: more calculation than inspiration, no flexibility

Uncertainty of sensory perceptions adds to the ambiguity  deficient knowledge

--< limitations of human knowledge
The story is a tissue of repetitions, parallels but also of metaphoric motifs  a
paradigmatic structure.

Rip, Young Goodman Brown, Roderick Usher = imaginative statements of the

American experience.
AmLit – lecture notes

THOREAU

Thoreau's two-year experiment of living at Walden Pond from 1845 to

1847 was a deliberate and sustained attempt to test his philosophical
idealism in the concrete world. His novel, Walden, or Life in the Woods,
was published in 1854 and it is considered one of the all-time great books.

The writer's chief emphasis is on the simplicities and enjoyment of life

now. The book has a broad appeal from several perspectives:

1. a nature book;
2. a do-it-yourself guide to simple life
3. a satirical criticism of modern life and living
4. a literary achievement;
5. a spiritual book

In the chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Thoreau wrote, "Men
esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star ...
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and
places and occasions are here and now. God himself culminates in the present
moment ... And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble
only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds
us."

By living intimately with nature at Walden, Thoreau attained to higher truth.

“Look at the world like a child, in wonder, seeing it as if for the first time …”
AmLit – lecture notes

Civil Disobedience (1849)

Bartleby, the Scrivener - metaphor of passive resistance

Refusing to pay poll tax, Thoreau was sent to jail. This influential essay is the
result of that gesture. Its message is simple and daring - he advocates "actions
through principles." If the demands of a government or a society are contrary
to an individual's conscience, it is his duty to reject them (= upholding moral
law as opposed to social/government law). The law is not to be respected
merely because it is the law, but only because it is right and just. If unjust laws
exist, civil disobedience is an effective way to oppose and change them.

Inspired by Thoreau's message, Gandhi organized the resistance of Indians

against the British occupation in the early 20th century. Thoreau's words
have also inspired Martin Luther King, the peace marches and the
conscientious-objectors to the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

It would be risky to judge Thoreau's political philosophy by present-day

standards. His political philosophy was based on the premise that
individual conscience is the only true criterion of what is politically right
and just.
AmLit – lecture notes

Transcendentalism

The emergence of Transcendentalism took place during the late 1820s and
1830s. T. is not a unitary movement but rather a fluid and often elusive
collection of eclectic ideas about literature, philosophy, religion, social
reform, and the general state of American culture. It was more a spirit and an
attitude of mind than a consciously reasoned-out theory of the world.

Transcendentalism represented a complex and incredibly influential

response to the democratization of American life in the early 19th c., it
marked a major paradigm shift in epistemology, in conceptualizing how the
mind knows the world, the divine, and itself.

Transcendentalism is hard to define as a doctrine, a creed common to all

transcendentalists, because of its intensely individualistic nature.
Transcendentalism was, at its core, a philosophy of naked individualism,
aimed at the creation of the new American, the self-reliant man, complete
and independent. What follows is a grouping of certain important concepts
shared by many of them.

Basic Assumption:
The intuitive faculty, instead of the rational or sensical, became the means
for a conscious union of the individual psyche (known in Sanskrit as Atman)
with the world psyche also known as the Oversoul, life-force, prime mover
and God (known in Sanskrit as Brahma).
AmLit – lecture notes

Basic Premises:
1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual
can be found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself.
2. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the
individual self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge. This
is similar to Aristotle's dictum "know thyself."
3. Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a
living mystery, full of signs - nature is symbolic.
4. The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-
realization - this depends upon the reconciliation of two universal
psychological tendencies:
a. the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to
embrace the whole world - to know and become one with the
world.
b. the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to
withdraw, remain unique and separate - an egotistical existence.

Influences:
a. From Plato came the idealism according to which reality subsists beyond
the appearances of the world. Plato also suggests that the world is an
expression of spirit, or mind.
b. From Kant came the notion of the 'native spontaneity of the human mind'
against the passive conception of the 18th c. empiricism (also known as the
philosophy of ‘sensationalism’ of John Locke and David Hume; the concept
that the mind begins as a tabula rasa and that all knowledge develops from
sensation).
AmLit – lecture notes

c. From Coleridge came the importance of wonder, of antirationalism, and

the importance of individual consciousness.
d. From Puritanism came the ethical seriousness and the aspect of Jonathan
Edwards that suggested that an individual can receive divine light
immediately and directly.

To sum up, Transcendentalism is not concerned with a metaphysics that

transcends our daily lives but rather with a new view of the mind that
replaces Locke's empiricist, materialistic model with one emphasizing the
role of the mind itself in actively shaping experience. The mind can
apprehend absolute spiritual truths directly without having to go through the
detour of the senses, without the dictates of past authorities and institutions,
and without the labor of ratiocination.

The word “transcendental” came to be applied, in New England in

particular, to whatever in man’s mental and spiritual nature is above the
experience of the senses. Innate, original, universal, a priori, intuitive —
these are all words which convey the larger meaning of the term.

Transcendentalism centers on the divinity of each individual, but this

divinity could be discovered only if the person had the independence of
mind to do so. Transcendentalists were idealistic and optimistic, they
believed they could find answers to whatever they were seeking. As
Emerson says, when they learn to translate, through intuition, the external
symbols of nature, they can read the underlying spiritual facts, they
"transcend" the apparent confusion and chaos of the world and see order in
nature's design. The important thing is to allow our inner voice—our
intuition—to correctly and creatively interpret the sensory input.
AmLit – lecture notes

For the Transcendentalists, the human soul is part of the Oversoul or

universal spirit (or "Float", Whitman). The soul of each individual is
identical with the soul of the world, and contains, latently, all that that larger
soul contains. God can be found in both nature and human nature (Nature,
Emerson stated, has spiritual manifestations, God and Nature are merely
two aspects of a single spirit, Nature is the embodiment of spirit in the world
of sense).

Miracles are all about us - the whole world is a miracle and the smallest
creature is one. "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger quintillions of
infidels." – Whitman

More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for
this life - "the one thing in the world of value is the active soul." – Emerson.
Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. "Give me one world at a
time." – Thoreau

Transcendentalism declared meaning in everything, and all meaning was

good, part of and connected by divine plan. Emerson refuted evil, insisting it
was not an entity in itself, but simply the absence of good. If good is
introduced, evil dissipates. Light is more powerful than darkness because
one ray of light penetrates the dark.

Emphasis on self-reliance and an insistence that true reform comes from

within.
AmLit – lecture notes

However, anti-transcendentalists declared such optimism naïve and

unrealistic. They reflected a more pessimistic attitude, focusing on man's
uncertainty and limited potential in the universe: Nature is vast and
incomprehensible, a reflection of the struggle between good and evil.
Humans are innately depraved and must struggle toward goodness. In fact,
goodness is actually attainable only for a few. Sin is an active force, not
merely the absence of good. Finally, because nature is the creation and
possession of God, humans cannot interpret or understand any symbolism it
may contain. Intercession between the common man and higher authority is
required in heaven and on earth.

The Transcendental Movement dramatically shaped the direction of

American literature. It meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and
forms in favour of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the
new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense
of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.

Many writers were and still are inspired by Emerson and Thoreau in
particular. Walt Whitman was not the only writer to claim that he was
"simmering, simmering, simmering" until reading Emerson brought him "to
a boil." Emily Dickinson's poetic direction was quite different, but she too
was a thoughtful reader of Emerson and Fuller.

Other writers would deliberately take their direction away from

transcendentalism, toward realism and "anti-transcendentalism" or "negative
Romanticism"; Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville found
extraordinarily creative ways to object to many aspects of their
transcendental contemporaries, even as they incorporated others. Few
AmLit – lecture notes

American writers since have been completely free of the influence of

Emerson’ essays and Thoreau’s Walden, whether in reaction or imitation.

Taken together, the body of Transcendentalist writings implies a theory of

language. As often, the most influential formulations are in the works of
Emerson. In his little treatise Nature (1836), Emerson posits language as
originating in names for natural objects which, through the doctrine of
correspondences, have intrinsic spiritual and symbolic significance. Thus,
every word was once a poem, or, more specifically, a metaphor, since it
combines a sensory meaning with a more intangible or psychological one,
the "natural fact" conveying a corresponding "spiritual fact." But the sensory
component of language begins to fade through use, as language entropically
drifts towards abstraction.

The truly creative writer is one who can "pierce this rotten diction and fasten
words again to visible things," liberating us from the most pervasive and
imprisoning of cultural forms, i.e. the categories of ordinary language.

This aesthetic of deconstructing conventional language to open the doors of

perception, of using fresh concrete description that at the same time has
symbolic resonance, was internalized by writers who reject any trace of
Transcendentalist metaphysics like Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos
Williams ("No ideas but in things"). It particularly shaped American poetry,
especially when joined with Emerson's rejection of traditional poetic forms
in favor of each utterance creating its own appropriate form, "a metre-
making-argument. . . a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit
of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own.", Walt Whitman
and Emily Dickinson, though in widely different ways, both created poetic
AmLit – lecture notes

forms that are an extension of content. Between them they helped modern
poetry find its most compelling subject in its embrace of the common, in
grasping the immediacies of our lives with a visionary intensity so that
“facts flower into truths”, in Thoreau's phrase.

Both this privileging of direct experience over coherent system-building and

this evaluation of philosophical propositions not by their truth value but by
how best they help us live were to be developed later in the century by
William James and John Dewey in America's most crucial contribution to
philosophy, Pragmatism. Both Transcendentalism and Pragmatism articulate
and conceptualize peculiarly American dispositions towards knowing, as
Daniel Boorstin writes:

"We sometimes forget how gradual was the 'discovery' of America; it was a
by-product of the occupation of the continent. To act, to move on, to explore
also meant to push back the frontiers of knowledge; this inevitably gave a
practical and dynamic character to the very idea of knowledge. To learn and
to act became one."

The Transcendentalists and Pragmatists viewed knowledge and cultural

forms not as perpetual truths but as temporary constructions, and insisted
that all such constructions be open to the tests of continuing experience, that
we put more faith in the mind's ability to order the world moment by
moment than in complete and self-enclosed systems.

For this reason Transcendentalism remains in American life less as a specific

doctrine-- no one now calls themselves a "Transcendentalist"-- than as a
presiding spirit behind many movements that resisted the dominant culture.
AmLit – lecture notes

Based on the foundational American assumption that the future can be better
than the past through imagination and effort, the Transcendentalists
envisioned a culture that would foster further acts of culture-making, a
community that would also liberate the individual, a way of thinking that
would also become a way of doing.

Transcendentalism posits a distinction between "Understanding," or the

normal means of apprehending truth through the senses, and "Reason," a
higher, more intuitive form of perception. According to Emerson, reason is
"the highest faculty of the soul--what we mean by the soul itself; it never
proves, it simply perceives; it is vision." By contrast, "The Understanding
toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighed but strong-
sighted, dwelling in the present, the expedient, the customary".

Transcendentalism, like other romantic movements, proposes that the

essential nature of human beings is good and that, left in a state of nature,
human beings would seek the good. Society is to blame for the corruption
that mankind endures. Transcendentalism also takes the Romantic view of
man's steady degeneration from childhood to adulthood as he is corrupted by
culture: "A man is a god in ruins."
AmLit – lecture notes

EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson, lecturer, essayist and philosopher, is recognized as the

most influential propagator and champion of Transcendentalism.

Considered the philosophical “constitution” of Transcendentalism, Nature is a

systematic exposition of Transcendental philosophy. Emerson explains how every
idea has its source in natural phenomena, and that the attentive person can "see"
those ideas in nature. Intuition allowed the transcendentalist to disregard external
authority and to rely, instead, on direct experience.

In The Transcendentalist, Emerson explains that Transcendentalism is "Idealism

as it appears in 1842." He also links it with "the very oldest thoughts" such as
Buddhism. Speaking of Kant, he says:

“[Kant] showed that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative
forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was
acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them
Transcendental forms."

The term "Transcendental" comes from the Critique of Practical Reason (1788),
in which Kant states, "I call all knowledge transcendental which is concerned, not
with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a
priori" (that is, independent of experience).

• The American Scholar - “our intellectual Declaration of Independence”

• Self-Reliance - “trust thyself”
AmLit – lecture notes

• The Over-Soul - in each manifestation of God, man could discover in

encapsulated form all universal laws at work. What was required for this
perception was not an intellectual insight (received or rational), but a more
mystical intuition capable of sensing truth and morality in the various tangible
expressions of the divine, including human endeavor.

The Transcendental emphasis on the oneness of individual souls with nature and
with God gives dignity and importance to human activity and makes possible a
belief in the power to effect social change in harmony with God's purposes.
AmLit – lecture notes

REACTIONS TO TRANSCENDENTALISM

Herman MELVILLE
Melville believes that the modern authoritarian society divides a person's
responsibilities and reduces his ability to interact with himself, nature, and
his community. This belief closely follows that of Emerson, who judged
modern mechanized society to be the downfall of humanity because it
rendered individuals insensitive to the range of capabilities they are naturally
endowed with. Think of Bartleby, the Scrivener - Melville portrays his
characters as "half-men" who are victims of a society which stifles their
natural ability to feel and act according to their romantic role as an
individual in society.

American romantics have a unique view of the role of the individual in

society. For them, the wellbeing of the individual is paramount to the quality
of the society they build. Emerson details the relationship between the
individual and society in The American Scholar. He points out that nature
and simplicity are more authentic than the hierarchy and divisions of modern
society. Divisions and subdivisions of society caused by the mechanization
of industry and commerce alienate people from the potential richness of the
full range of emotions, experiences, and senses that everyone is capable of.
Each man is forced to reduce himself to a single function, devoting all of his
energy to that one task. He relies on the rest of society to provide for him the
rest of the necessities and luxuries of life in return. As a result, people
become unable to see beyond their immediate time and place.

With these criticisms of modern society, Emerson implies that the first step
towards returning to simplicity is returning to the self. Only then can the
AmLit – lecture notes
spiritual dialogue between man and nature begin. And as a result of this
closeness with nature, the "self" is improved, thus improving society as a
whole. Emerson describes society as "undefinable" because the souls of its
individuals have been replaced with a single purpose: "this original unit, this
fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, so minutely
subdivided that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered." A society of
content and self reliable individuals is naturally better than one whose
members are consumed with themselves and their small daily tasks.

In Bartleby, both the narrator and Bartleby possess romantic characteristics

that seem compatible with each other. In a world that supports romantic
values, the narrator and Bartleby would naturally help solve each other's
problems. Bartleby's inexplicable irrationality and self-motivated actions (or
rather, inaction) would shed light on a new aspect of humanity that the
narrator had previously avoided or been sheltered from. The narrator's
natural "attraction" to Bartleby's peculiarities would foster a strong curiosity
about a man who resists every aspect of modern life, he would be more
motivated to help Bartleby, which would give him, presumably for the first
time, a sense of accomplishment. In turn, Bartleby would be saved from his
own misery, having learned the importance of adapting to survive, perhaps
even finding pleasure in some things.

Melville makes it clear that Romantic values are doomed in a world where
people are only worth what they produce for it. The mechanization of
society and the trend towards authoritarianism are incompatible with
romantic values because they split the role of the individual in society into
two: one to make decisions, and one to follow them.
AmLit – lecture notes
This bleak world that Melville renders exemplifies his, Emerson's, and other
romantics' fears of society's trend towards endless divisions. Of course,
readers may be inclined to read Bartleby as a romantic character who falls
victim to a society that rejects his values. But Bartleby does not represent a
complete portrait of a romantic individual. He is the product of the fission of
humanity caused by the modern, mechanized, authoritarian society that has
divided his soul and parceled it out to those around him.

Melville’s best-known novel, Moby-Dick, is also concerned with many of

the issues that dominate 19th century thought in America. The relationship
between the land and the sea echoes the conflict between adventure and
domesticity, between frontiersman and city-dweller.

For Moby-Dick he chooses a South Sea voyage in a whaler. Thus anchored

to actuality, Melville can let his imagination run free and, as a result,
metaphysical inquiry comes out of physical fact, and not vice versa, as in
Hawthorne. The novel has tremendous power. It moves through alternations
of excitement and ease to the almost intolerable tension of the three-day
chase of Moby-Dick, the White Whale, and the inevitable disaster when the
whale kills Captain Ahab, and smashes his ship, the Pequod. The voyage,
the seamen, the ship, the captain, the whale itself, are all tangible: they
possess weight, dimension, colour.

Main Themes:
Ahab as a Blasphemous Figure:
A major assumption that runs through the novel is that Ahab's quest for the
great whale is a blasphemous activity. This blasphemy takes two major
forms: the first type of blasphemy within Ahab is hybris, the idea that Ahab
thinks himself the equal of God. The second type is a rejection of God
AmLit – lecture notes
altogether for an alliance with the devil. Melville makes this point explicit
during various episodes of the novel, such as the instance in which Gabriel
warns Ahab to "think of the blasphemer's end" (Chapter 71: The Jeroboam's
Story) and the appraisal of Ahab from Peleg in which he designates him as
an “ungodly man” (Chapter 16: The Ship).

The idea that Ahab's quest for Moby Dick is an act of defiance toward God
first occurs before Ahab is even introduced during Father Mapple's sermon.
The lesson of the sermon, which concerns the story of Jonah and the whale,
is to warn against the blasphemous idea that a ship can carry a man into
regions where God does not reign. Ahab parallels this idea when he
compares himself to God as the lord over the Pequod (Chapter 109: Ahab
and Starbuck in the Cabin). Melville furthers this idea through the prophetic
dream that Fedallah tells Ahab that causes the latter to conclude that he is
immortal. Nevertheless, Ahab does not merely believe himself omnipotent,
but aligns himself with the devil during his quest. Ahab remains in
collaboration with Fedallah, a character rumored to be the devil himself, and
when Ahab receives his harpoon he asks that it be baptized in the name of
the devil, not in the name of the father.

The Whale as a Symbol of Unparalleled Greatness:

When Melville, through Ishmael, describes the Sperm Whale during the
many non-narrative chapters of Moby-Dick, the idea that the whale has no
parallel in excellence recurs. Melville approaches this theme from a variety
of standpoints, whether biological or historical, in order to prove the
superiority of the whale over all other creatures. During a number of
occasions Melville relates whaling to royal activity, as when he notes the
strong devotion of Louis XVI to the whaling industry and considers the
whale as a delicacy fit for only the most civilized. In addition, Melville cites
AmLit – lecture notes
the Indian legends of Vishnoo, the god who became incarnate in a whale.
Even when discussing the whale in mere aesthetic terms Melville praises it
for its features, devoting an entire chapter (42) to the whiteness of the whale.
The theme of the excellence of the whale serves to place Ahab's quest
against Moby Dick as, at best, a virtually insurmountable task in which he is
doomed to failure. Melville constructs the whale as a figure that cannot be
defeated at all.

The Whale as an Undefinable Figure:

Melville refuses to equate the whale with any concrete object or idea. For
him, the whale is an indefinite, inscrutable figure, whose essence cannot be
described through its history or physiognomy, as best shown in "The
Whiteness of the Whale" (Chapter 42). He defines the whiteness as absence
of color and thus finds the whale as having an absence of meaning.
By allowing the whale to exist as a mysterious figure, Melville does not pin
the whale down as an easy metaphorical parallel, but instead leaves a
multiplicity of various interpretations for Moby Dick.

Moby Dick as a Part of Ahab:

Throughout the novel, Melville creates a relationship between Ahab and
Moby Dick (despite the latter's absence until the final three chapters)
through the recurrence of elements creating a close relationship between the
two. The most significant of these is the actual physical presence of the
Sperm Whale as part of Ahab's body in the form of Ahab's ivory leg. The
whale is a physical, literal part of Ahab in this instance. Melville also
develops this theme through the uncanny sense that Ahab has for the whale.
Ahab has a nearly psychic sense of Moby Dick's presence. This theme
serves to explain the depth of emotion behind Ahab's quest for the whale; as
AmLit – lecture notes
a living presence that haunts Ahab's life, he feels he must continue on his
quest no matter the cost.

The Contrast between Civilized and Pagan Society:

The relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael throughout the novel
generally illustrates the prevalent contrast between civilized, specifically
Christian societies and uncivilized, pagan societies. A recurring theme
equates non-Christian societies with diabolical behavior, particularly when
in reference to Ahab who specifically chooses the three pagan characters'
blood when he wishes to temper his harpoon in the name of the devil, while
the most obviously corrupt character in Moby Dick is Fedallah, whom the
others believe to be Satan in disguise. With the exception of Queequeg,
equating the pagan characters with Satan does align with the general
religious overtones of the novel, one which presumes Christianity as its basis
and moral ground.

The Sea as a Place of Transition:

In Moby-Dick, the sea represents a transitional place between two distinct
states. Melville shows this early on in the case of Queequeg who represents
the transition from uncivilized to civilized society unbound by any specific
nationality, but on the whole this transitional theme relates to the precarious
line between life and death. Queequeg prepares for death and in fact remains
in his own coffin waiting for illness to overtake him, but it never does
(Chapter 110: Queequeg in his coffin). The coffin itself becomes a
transitional element when the carpenter converts it into a life-buoy and it
thus comes to symbolize both the saving of a life and the end of one
(Chapter 126: The Life-Buoy).
AmLit – lecture notes
Harbingers and Superstition:
A recurring theme is the appearance of harbingers, superstitions and
prophecies that foreshadow a tragic end to the story. Even before Ishmael
boards the Pequod, the Nantucket stranger Elijah warns Ishmael and
Queequeg against travelling with Captain Ahab. Fedallah also has a
prophetic dream concerning Ahab's quest against Moby Dick, dreaming of
hearses (although he misinterprets the dream to mean that Ahab will
certainly kill Moby Dick). The purpose of these omens is to create a sense of
inevitability. Even from the beginning of the journey the Pequod's mission is
doomed by Captain Ahab, and the invocation of various omens serves to
endow this mission with a sense of grandeur and destiny. It is no suicide
mission that Ahab undertakes, but a grand folly of hybris.
------------------------------------------------

So where does all this leave us in relation to Transcendentalism?

Moby Dick and Captain Ahab both refute the Transcendentalist principle
that there is no evil, there is only love. Melville believes that man has the
potential to be either good or bad. Moby Dick is portrayed as evil in the
story as Ahab tells of how he lost his leg to the white whale. After that, he
creates himself as the "race-hero"; moving against the presence of evil, he
vows to kill the source of evil. Ahab, therefore, unconsciously casts his own
evil onto Moby Dick. The whale personifies the evil that exists within Ahab.
The evil Ahab possesses is the result of his obsession with extinguishing the
evil in the whale. The very evil that exists in Ahab is that which the
transcendentalists deem to be non-existent. Melville is therefore attacking
the ideals of the Transcendentalists.

Ahab also seeks to control nature, which goes against Transcendentalist

views that man and nature are equal before God. The Transcendentalist
AmLit – lecture notes
principle that nature is good and rational is countered by the Anti-
Transcendentalist ideal that nature is indifferent, unforgiving, and often
unexplainable. As a result, nature is not portrayed as a wonderful, rational
thing, but as an indifferent, unforgiving, and unexplainable wonder.

Hawthorne feels that all excess is to be deplored; Melville, with a more

generous sense of human potentiality, insists that virtues and vices alike
depend upon a certain excess. Ahab then, is both hero and villain, dooming
others too, not just himself. From an opposite perspective, Ahab can and has
been presented as a daring and creative individual, pitted against the full
forces of nature. He is in some ways a machine without recognizable
emotion. He claims himself a God over the Pequod, but instead may be a
Satanic figure through his blasphemous quest for the white whale.

The lesson that can be learned can be summed up in one sentence: don’t
become too focussed and obsessed with one goal to the point that you
exclude everything else. This lesson is represented with Ahab’s peculiar
obsession with hunting and killing the whale. Like any other tragic hero, he
chooses moral singularity. By setting this as his most significant goal in life,
he begins to ignore more important things such as the lives of his crewmen,
and eventually his own life.

His tragic monomania is an indirect commentary on the feelings of

disillusionment in mid-19th c. America and on the idea that the single-
minded pursuit of an ideal is both vain and self-destructive.

Of the multi-layered qualities of this epic novel, storytelling deserves special

attention. For 28 chapters Ishmael is the narrator of Moby-Dick (“Call me
Ishmael.”). Then for three chapters it is clearly not Ishmael's story - he
AmLit – lecture notes
cannot be aware of the soliloquies of others - and though the novel reverts to
Ishmael's narration, it frequently dispenses with him. Melville, it would
appear, is undecided who is in charge of the book, or what kind of book it is
to be. His efforts at Shakespearean soliloquy can be construed as an attempt
to enlarge its scope, and rescue it from Ishmael's necessarily limited
approach.

Ishmael is also the most prominent reader and critic of the novel. For
instance, in quite a number of memorable situations he deals with books and
written documents of all sorts, which trigger responses from him as a reader,
a researcher, and a critical reviewer. In several episodes of the novel, he
plays the role of observer and critic of non-verbal forms of art, such as
paintings, illustrations, and drawings. He often intermixes the description of
images with the notation of his own response to what he sees. In other
words, he remains an audience figure of distinct personal contour, and the
process and effects of perceiving are as much his topic as the substance of
the perceived.
AmLit – lecture notes

NATURALISM
EXPRESSIONISM, IMPRESSIONISM

STEPHEN CRANE

Crane has been called a naturalist, an impressionist (“He is the only

impressionist and only an impressionist" – Joseph Conrad), an expressionist,
and a symbolist, but none of these disparate labels denotes the range and
complexity of his art.

Critics see him as the legitimate successor to Henry James insofar as Crane’s
main concern was also to delineate, though in a completely different manner,
the character of the American sensibility. The combination of enthralling
romanticism & racy, hard-boiled cynicism - typical of the journalist, makes
him unique, foretelling the advent of the likes of Hemingway on the
American literary scene. His view of the world is that of a chaos whose only
consolation lies in the fellowship between man and man, a moving
testimony to the tenderness of which men are capable. Like Whitman and
Thoreau before him, and Hemingway later, Stephen Crane too tested himself
in complete isolation, in unfamiliar contexts. He too had the point of view of
an athlete, believing in effort and suffering, paying the price, standing up for
a value, developing and fighting for an ideal, even though losing. The result
is a lack of compassion for the egotistical self, doubled up by total
compassion for the suffering of others.

Typically for Crane, this “national blending”, painfully needed in the

aftermath of the Civil War (1861-1865), is forged as a result of extreme
circumstances and limiting contexts – e.g. war or by placing different kinds
AmLit – lecture notes
of men in closely confined situations (a small boat on a rough sea, a
snowbound hotel).

For him, war is the essence of human condition: 1. view of life as a long war
which we seek and challenge in fear and controlled panic 2. view of man as
damaged and alone in a hostile, violent world  forecasting Hemingway.

However, Crane takes sides with Melville, who says: “all wars are boyish
and are fought by boys”, producing, especially in his “The Red Badge of
Courage”, a satire of the traditional American novel of initiation.

Going back to Crane’s naturalistic inclinations, his (novel) Maggie, a Girls

of the Streets (1893) is regarded as the first American specimen of literary
naturalism. On a surface reading, the novel appears to merely dramatize the
naturalistic precept that human beings are inexorably moulded by
environmental and biological forces. A closer reading, however, reveals that
the inhabitants of the Bowery (NB. low-class district in New York City at
the time) are somewhat complicit in their fates.

Overall, Crane's work embodied many of psychologist William James's

ideas about the nature of reality and truth. Like James, Crane rejects the
concept of a block universe and subscribes to the belief that in the fluid,
ever-changing world that human beings inhabit, there are many provisional
truths, rather than absolute, everlasting Truths.

Like James and C. S. Peirce, and later John Dewey, Crane shared the belief
that experience – not "Truth" or "Reality – is the starting point and the
culmination of philosophical reflection. For these pragmatic humanists, we
confront realities instead of Reality; and because experiences, in part,
AmLit – lecture notes
constitute realities, the worlds of spectators and participants are not just
different, they are often incompatible. Given Crane's suspicions about the
existence of "Truth" and "Reality" and his insistence upon the legitimate
standing of multiple perspectives, his metaphysics forces readers to question
the existence of a comprehensive scheme, just as his epistemology casts
doubt on ultimate answers and final assessments. The only certainty is that
direct experience of life is to be privileged over any mediated action (the act
of reading included – sic!) as the true generator of meaning.

Crane was preoccupied with the perils that accompany the human search for
self-realization. He recognized that reality is too vast and heterogeneous to
be encompassed by any individual intelligence, that the beneficent and
instructive Nature of the romanticists and transcendentalists has no soothing
message for humanity, and that human beings are less absurd and pathetic
(and may even rise to a measure of grandeur) when they see life from
multiple points of view.

However, Crane's obsessively mathematical protagonists find themselves

forever unprepared for life's unexpected irregularities. The point is that
squares, like heroic ideals, exist perfectly only in the mind. In the real world,
the best we can do with our materials - stone and wood, love and courage - is
approach the ideal in the stoic awareness that in this world we are doomed to
fall short of the mind's extravagance. And in the next? Here Crane is
adamant. There is nothing beyond the veil of appearances. The universe is
spectacle, pure spectacle. To ask for more is to invite painful
disillusionment.

As a result, his protagonists achieve their best effects by finding patterns of

significance in the humblest elements and events of their common
AmLit – lecture notes
experience, transubstantiating them into symbols of uncommon power. Like
Conrad, Joyce, and other founders of the modernist tradition, Crane assumed
the universe to be devoid of significance. However, the mind yearns for
pattern. At the same time, the mind gives endless examples which
demonstrate that experience is patternless because Nature is neutral and
unbiased, or as Crane puts it in "The Open Boat," "indifferent, flatly
indifferent." But not so indifferent as to overlook equipping us with pattern-
seeking minds.

In "The Open Boat," the theme of brotherhood coexists with and seriously
modifies the prevailing vision of a stark and indifferent universe. Man
figures, contradictorily, as heroic, enduring, self-destructive, absurd, and
locked into contingency. Almost without fail, Crane's characters see their
limited field of vision through distorting lenses, and often they act from
subliminal urges that they never fully understand. However, Crane builds a
view of human action and an ethic of social solidarity which are explicitly
humanistic. He stresses the value of human effort and the importance of
human solidarity in an indifferent universe, that of genuine comradeship
born of joint effort.

His characters do not begin by having an understanding of nature, they only

gradually come to it by coming to an understanding of themselves first,
having new knowledge of themselves and respect for others = the “subtle
brotherhood of men”. So, the evolution is from a general definition of nature
to man’s relationship to nature, to man’s relationship to man: a form of
ceremony, something sacred.

With respect to Crane’s de-mythologizing treatment of the frontier, his

(short story) "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" has been read as a satire on
AmLit – lecture notes
the passing of the Old West brought on by Eastern influences such as New
York-made clothing and trains carrying outlanders. The symbolism of names
or objects (Potter, Scratchy Wilson, Yellow Sky, Scratchy's funnel-shaped
tracks) has been commented on extensively, as has wildman Scratchy's
sudden pacification by gentle-hearted, guilt-ridden, newly married Sheriff
Potter.

More often than not, the story has been treated as myth (straight or ironic)
with ritualized roles, converting a potential tragedy into a comic scene of
deflation and inaction: reversing the intention or, more precisely, defeating
the reader's expectation over and over again.

"The Blue Hotel", on the other hand, displays a masterfully hard-edged,

unsentimental objectivity. There is a broad range of views, from the purely
literary (e.g. Crane's language and style, the identity of the Swede, the
Easterner, and the cowboy) on through the philosophical and theological
(e.g. what is meant by "square"? how many are really guilty of the Swede's
death? what is the Easterner's final speech concerning grammar, group guilt
and individual punishment all about?), the psychological (e.g. why do the
characters act as they do?), the ideological (e.g. what do we make of Crane's
treatment of abstract morality and group judgment?), to the artistic/aesthetic
(e.g. why does Crane structure the story as he does?).

Throughout his fiction Crane depicts the pathos and comedy attendant upon
the civilizing pressure Eastern commerce exerted on the anarchic West of
the 1890s. Crane suggests that the constructed world is fraught with whim
and caprice, whereas events in the natural world have sufficient regularity
and enough loose play so that human actions can make a difference.
AmLit – lecture notes

The Frontier Hypothesis / the Turner Thesis

A Wisconsin historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, gave his frontier statement in a

paper on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" read before the
American Historical Association at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in
1893. Turner's statement revolutionized American historiography and eventually
made itself felt in economics and sociology, in literary criticism, and politics.

Turner's central contention - "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous
recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American
development." Turner maintained that the West, not the pro-slavery South or the
anti-slavery North, was the most important among American sections, and that the
attitudes and institutions produced by the frontier, especially through its
encouragement of democracy, had been more significant than the imported
European heritage in shaping American society.

Turner put forth the concepts of ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’ that he used to define
the central factor of the frontier. His frontier is explicitly "the meeting point
between savagery and civilization". From the standpoint of economic theory the
wilderness beyond the frontier, the realm of savagery, is a constant receding area
of free land. Free land tended to relieve poverty and fostered economic equality.
Both these tendencies made for an increase of democracy. Turner was convinced
that democracy, the rise of the common man, was one of the great movements of
modern history.
AmLit – lecture notes
In 1893 Turner said that "democracy (is) born of free land," as well as in his
celebrated pronouncement made twenty years later: "American democracy was
born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia,
nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came stark and strong and full of life out of
the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new
frontier." ( > Henry Nash Smith)
AmLit – lecture notes

Regionalism and Local Color Fiction

Local color or regional literature is fiction/poetry that focuses on the characters,

dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region.
Between the Civil War and the end of the 19th century this mode of writing became
dominant in American literature. "In local-color literature one finds the dual influence
of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life
to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a
sense of fidelity and accuracy of description" (Oxford Companion to AmLit: 439).

One definition of the difference between realism and local color is: "Economic or
political power can itself be seen to be definitive of a realist aesthetic, in that those in
power (say, white urban males) have been more often judged 'realists,' while those
removed from the seats of power (say, Midwesterners, blacks, immigrants, or
women) have been categorized as regionalists." (Eric Sundquist)

Critics argue that this literary movement contributed to the reunification of the
country after the Civil War and to the building of national identity toward the end of
the 19th century. According to Brodhead: 121, "regionalism's representation of
vernacular cultures as enclaves of tradition insulated from larger cultural contact is a
fiction... its public function was not just to mourn lost cultures but to purvey a certain
story of contemporary cultures and of the relations among them."
In chronicling the nation's stories about its regions and mythical origins, local color
fiction contributed to the narrative of unified nationhood that late 19th century
America sought to construct.

Characteristics
Setting: The emphasis is frequently on nature and the limitations it imposes; settings
are frequently remote and inaccessible. The setting is integral to the story and may
sometimes become a character in itself.
AmLit – lecture notes

Characters: Local color stories tend to be concerned with the character of the district
or region rather than with the individual: characters may become character types,
sometimes quaint or stereotypical. The characters are marked by their adherence to
the old ways, by dialect, and by particular personality traits central to the region. In
women’s local color fiction, the heroines are often unmarried women or young girls.
Narrator: The narrator is typically an educated observer from the world beyond who
learns something from the characters while preserving a sometimes sympathetic,
sometimes ironic distance from them. The narrator serves as mediator between the
rural folk of the tale and the urban audience to whom the tale is directed.
Plots. It has been said that "nothing happens" in local color stories by women authors,
and often very little does happen. Stories may include lots of storytelling and revolve
around the community and its rituals.
Themes: Many local color stories share an aversion to change and a certain degree of
nostalgia for an always-past golden age. A celebration of community and acceptance
in the face of adversity characterizes women's local color fiction. Thematic tension or
conflict between urban ways and old-fashioned rural values is often symbolized by
the intrusion of an outsider or interloper who seeks something from the community.

Techniques
Use of dialect to establish credibility and authenticity of regional characters. Use of
detailed description, especially of small, seemingly insignificant details central to an
understanding of the region. Frequent use of a frame story in which the narrator hears
some tale of the region.

Function
Demythologize and satirize
 The White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett

Jacques Lacan

By entering into language we have to conform to the norms imposed from the
outside. Language itself is functioning by laws established by an authority
outside ourselves, the “Father” (> Lacan). Hence, in the Symbolic order, the
Law of the Father will govern.

The Real is associated with a place where the subject is free from any desire or
demands. Moreover, the norms of language don’t apply here, so the Real cannot
be put into words, since it “resists symbolization” (> Lacan).

This is exactly what leads to ‘trauma’ = the encounter with the Real, or rather
the missed encounter, since the Real doesn’t exist in discourse, so it cannot be
arrived at.

The order of the Real is what constitutes the traumatic element due to its
unattainability. What has become conscious cannot go back to being
unconscious, it is impossible in the same way as it is impossible to achieve the
totality of the Real. The separation from the mother, the entering into language,
the apprehension of a separate self are all traumatic events, which the subject
cannot overcome.
AmLit – lecture notes

THE AMERICAN HERO: INVOLVED vs DROPOUT

We have looked at various American literature configurations which present

patterns of similarity and contrast. The terms that would usefully characterize
such configurations are involved and dropout. To be involved is to be
committed to the society, to the establishment - conforming to it or seeking to
exist within it or to reform it. To drop out is not only to question the relevance
of the answers of society, but to question the questions too, to make a radical
and total break. The antithesis is not new: we may in fact argue that a
characteristically American experience, as reflected in literature, consists of an
original condition of involvement, a radical dropping out, and a return, sadder
and wiser, to involvement in society. And it is equally characteristic of
Americans, whether they have stayed within the establishment, whether they
have dropped out, or whether they have dropped out and returned, at once to
idealize and to be wary of the dropout and his way of life.

In American literature the dropout is usually portrayed as youthful and his

sanctuary is often pastoral (Rip, Sylvia), sometimes even primeval, and
invariably remote, distant in time or space. The protagonist who accepts
involvement is generally more mature and his habitat usually urban (with the
notable exception of Bartleby).
The important thing, however, is not the setting or the age of the protagonist. It
is the process of rejecting the original situation for an alternative, then
reconsidering the decision of rejection in the light of the experience provided by
the alternative, and then deciding whether to adhere to the alternative or to
return. The third phase with its elements of choice is what differentiates the
American pattern from archetypal journeys such as Dante's descent into the
Inferno. Traditionally, the hero's descent into Hell results in his return to the
world matured and enlightened. In the American version the choice is not
always so clear-cut. Sometimes the world has become so corrupt and disordered
AmLit – lecture notes

that the protagonist rejects it categorically. Sometimes Hell is so soft and

enticing that he chooses to remain. Sometimes he is himself inadequate, though
not necessarily as a result of some fault of his own. The price he pays, the
punishment for dropping out, is immaturity or death.

As Pilgrim Fathers and Founding Fathers, William Bradford and Benjamin

Franklin respectively, were establishment figures and involved. Bradford in Of
Plymouth Plantation assumed that his history of the founding of the Plymouth
colony was fundamentally an account of man's progress, through heavenly
grace but with occasional errors, toward the predestined achievement of
spiritual salvation. Franklin’s Autobiography is exemplary of the committed
life.

Soon, however, time and space brought an end to the vision of innocence and
newness. America was moving west, and conflict inevitably arose at the point
where the advancing frontier and the wilderness collided. It is from the
opposition of city and country, of civilization and the wilderness, of the restraint
of custom and the freedom of the Western expanses that the American hero-
quester emerges. What the hero did when he could no longer retreat into the
womb-like world of Thoreau’s Pond, but had to step into the breach between the
new and the old set the pattern for the American literary experience to the
present day.

Rip Van Winkle and Leatherstocking Tales, the literary creations of America's
first major men of letters, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, are
more subtle, more richly complex. In Irving's tale, Rip runs away to the Catskill
Mountains to escape his familial responsibilities. He meets a stranger, drinks a
potion and sleeps for twenty years. When he awakens and returns, in keeping
with the third phase of the pattern, he is a childish old man, unsure of his
identity. He lingers on, living on the fringes of a society that has passed him by.
In the Leatherstocking saga we follow the career of a partially Indianized white
man, constricted by the laws of society and requiring the spiritual sustenance of
AmLit – lecture notes

nature, and who moves ever westward ahead of the line of settlements. We see
him finally in The Prairie, an old man silhouetted against the western sunset. In
the weakness of his declining years, a context which is significant, he professes
a need for the social laws he has spent a lifetime trying to evade, a late gesture
of commitment. How curious that the two most notable characters of the first
cycle of American literature should respond so ambiguously to American
civilization, should drop out, and should return in so reserved a fashion.

So, William Bradford and Benjamin Franklin were by definition involved, but
still they all broke with the British establishment. Irving's Rip Van Winkle runs
away from the obligations of society and eventually returns, but his return is
qualified by the fact that while he was away a revolution had taken place and
the country had changed. Leatherstocking is another dropout who eventually
makes a return of sorts. He lives out his last years in a wilderness setting, finally
admitting to the need for civil laws, maintaining his racial integrity, and
adhering to his natural Christianity.

To indulge his excessive artistic sensibility, Roderick Usher of Poe's The Fall of
the House of Usher withdraws from the world into his stone-walled mansion.
The setting, in a phrase Poe uses elsewhere, is "Out of Space-Out of Time." We
recognize it as appropriate to Roderick who is a dropout, too. Here he remains
until his fantasies and projections grow to such proportions that he is
overwhelmed by them and ends in madness and death.

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises concerns American expatriates and uprooted
Europeans in France and Spain, yet the setting is much more immediate than the
symbolic landscape of the House of Usher. Badly hurt by a "dirty war," they
behave with a mixture of irresponsibility, self-pity, wit, and style. All these
characters are unable to learn how to function within the limitations of the
human condition, they are "cases of arrested development." Hemingway called
the type the "American boy-men."
AmLit – lecture notes

In Faulkner's The Bear, the boy Ike McCaslin undergoes at 16 an initiation into
the social order of "men, hunters, with the will and the hardihood to endure and
the humility and skill to survive." He learns at the same time that his personal
inheritance and, by extension, his society, is tainted. When he legally comes of
age, he renounces it. He earns his livelihood as a carpenter and the respect of
the community for his skill as a hunter. But the woman he wanted to marry
refuses him because he will not accept his legacy. We see him, finally, an old
man of almost 80, childless but known as "Uncle Ike" to the sons and grandsons
of the men who taught him to hunt. In renouncing his legacy, Ike shows a sense
of moral responsibility but he is also renouncing his society and stepping aside
from it. He is dropping out, and he fails to return. His is a private act, somewhat
selfish and evasive.

A vein of selfishness and evasion, in fact, characterizes these dropouts. They

focus inward upon themselves rather than outward toward the community and
the future. Roderick Usher, the introverted artist, destroys himself, he is in
effect a suicide. Ike McCaslin, who understands what he must do to cleanse
himself (and his society) as instinctively as he understood what he had to do in
order to see Old Ben, the bear, cannot bring himself to do it and thus cannot
completely return, and spends his life in an agony of frustration.

In contrast are the affirmations of those who dropped out and returned, returned
without reservation or qualification. Two examples: the personae of Thoreau's
Walden and Whitman's Song of Myself. Both are autobiographical accounts of
men who deliberately turned inward, separating themselves from society, in
order to learn how to live more completely within society. Both center upon the
self, but in a way that ultimately extends outward toward the universal.
Though fundamentally alike, they still differ in important respects. The main
difference is that Walden is factual and down to earth, while Song of Myself is
mystical, an observation which is not intended to diminish the symbolic import
of the facts of life in the woods or the firm validity of the rhapsodic insights of
Song of Myself. The difference is more one of tone, of approach.
AmLit – lecture notes

"When I wrote the following pages," Thoreau begins, "I lived alone, in the
woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house I built myself . . . At present I am
a sojourner in civilized life again." The emphasis is on regeneration and return.
Thoreau was a sojourner at Walden Pond in order that he might become "a
sojourner in civilized life again." In his solitude he came to realize his
commitment to society.

Whitman was a visionary who could write a mystical poem with the exalted
title, "Song of Myself." I celebrate myself, and sing myself," his Dionysian
incantation begins. An ecstatic flight takes him first inward into the solitude of
self, but ultimately the movement is "Outward and outward and forever
outward." From the self he reaches out to touch, to embrace, and then to
embody and fuse. The climactic vision is one of "form, union, plan." This
mystical union is presented as sexual union, for Whitman saw in the sexual act
the essence of both selfishness and mutuality. The mystical element is rendered
substantial by embodiment in flesh; the flesh can be spiritualized because,
rendered guiltless, it has returned to a state of original innocence. Whitman's
journey begins in withdrawal and ends in return, in an affirmation both of the
individual identity and identity with all other selves, and in a mystical union of
the body and soul that permits the retention of the integrity of each.

The quest of the hero is a search for something that has been lost or taken away
from him, something that ought to have been his birthright. He encounters
fabulous forces and wins a decisive victory. The successful completion of this
search reveals to the hero the secret of his true identity and enables him to
return from his mysterious adventure and take his rightful position in society.

As the picture of the American hero changes so does the imagery associated
with the forest. No longer a place of communion, the forest becomes a place
where things are tested out, a place of exile where initiation is undergone and
from which return must be made. Located firmly in a world burdened by time
and experience, the ambiguous setting of the forest becomes a place of moral
AmLit – lecture notes

choice. In the shaping of the American character the forest is the central image
of the American Dream. The image is of the endless expanse of western
wilderness where one could always dream of starting over. America’s mythic
destiny — a place of second chances — is confirmed in the dream. As a literary
symbol, the forest became the metaphoric space where the American hero-
quester undergoes his initiation. For the American hero the choice of whether
to enter the wilderness or not becomes a decision of whether to confront reality.

What generalization can be derived from this? What does this tell us about the
American national experience and the national character?
Americans are committed to freedom not only as an end, but as a means of
achieving social responsibility. They recognize rejection of the establishment as
a normal phase of growth, of the educative process. In literature this phase is
associated with a movement backward into childhood, inward into the self,
faraway into the physical spaciousness of the western frontier or the psychic
spaciousness of the Old World. At the same time, Americans are fearful that the
dropout may not choose to return, to accept the responsibilities and demands
and uncertainties of society. So, the response to the dropout is ambivalent.
Americans revere the Founding Fathers and find inspiration in Thoreau and
Whitman because, in their fashion, they dropped out and returned. The
adventures of Leatherstocking and Rip Van Winkle they remember with
affection and nostalgia, but do not take seriously because their return was only
partial. Poe somehow frightens them with the dark implications of his tales of
those who did not return. In conclusion, they have all chosen the risk of freedom
in order to attain maturity and responsibility, but it hasn't been an easy choice
and sometimes their uneasiness shows.
AmLit – lecture notes

THE AMERICAN ADAM

RWB Lewis, 1955 - The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in
the Nineteenth Century > name comes from Emerson’s Journals: “the plain old
Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world.”
Lewis formulates national identity in Adamic terms and defines the
myth of the American Adam as the central American myth.
The American Adams are instantiations of the "new man", from the
Crevecoeur’s enlightened farmer to the Romantic hunter, deer-slayer,
pathfinder, and frontiersman whose archetypal hero is Natty
Bumppo. Then comes the poet-prophet, the artistic self who shapes the
world anew by the power of his imagination and consciousness, the
pioneer soon to be replaced by the pilot, sailor and captain - the various
Billy Budds, Ahabs, Pierres and other Romantic idealists, who in turn
give way to Hawthorne's artists, James' Americans and Twain's
innocents abroad - preeminently the Adams of consciousness. The
figure of the boy hero becomes an almost ubiquitous and ever-recurrent
prototype of the American self. From Twain's Huck Finn, to Faulkner's
Ike McCaslin, and continuing through the heroes of later twentieth-
century Bildungsroman, such as Hemingway's Nick Adams, or J. D.
Salinger's Holden Caulfield, the favorite characters are boys awaiting
initiation into maturity. Adamic traits are to prevail from Henry
Adams' autobiographical self to the postwar "radicals": outsiders, rebels
without a cause, beatniks, dropouts, eccentrics and postmodern
champions of contemporary fiction.

A totalizing myth - the Adamic metaphor functions as a nucleus of

interrelated fables and narratives that account for the myth's pervasive
AmLit – lecture notes

influence in American culture and literature. It deploys a set of opposing terms: nature
and civilization, innocence and experience, the "I" and the other, nature and
spirit, utopia and reality, as well as hope and disillusion.
Psychologically, it articulates the ritual passage and initiation into maturity
and becomes the symbol of all processes of psychic transformation and
inner growth.
Lewis understood the bipolar unity of the Adamic myth, arguing that the
earliest literary formulations of the myth contained both Adam's rise as
well as the seeds of his fall. The Adamic paradigm contains the ideal and
the desecration of the ideal, Adam's rise and fall, his apotheosis as well as
his ruin. The Adamic myth encloses its own dramatization in antithetic,
paradoxical terms. It celebrates Adam's dualistic nature as vanquisher and
vanquished, man-God and fallen man. It contains both the vision and its
critique, the utopian dream and its eventual undoing. The myth functions as
a paradoxical, symbolic totality that embodies the myth of America.

American fiction dwells on the motif of the Edenic garden and the new
dawn of a second Genesis, this time made in history, under man's eyes, and not
in a distant immemorial illo tempore.

Melville, Hawthorne and Poe expose the dangers of the Adamic ideal.
Emerson and Whitman had ruled out evil and serpents from the garden, but
Poe, Melville and Hawthorne were eager to expose them in a doctrinally
optimistic age. The godlike Adam falls by virtue of the darkness he bears
within. Hawthorne's "dark necessity" and Melville's "power of darkness,"
Poe's "the imp of the perverse" reassert Adam's tragic condition; he becomes
again an outcast and exile in the midst of an unreachable Eldorado.
AmLit – lecture notes

Lewis explores 19th century American writings to show that "the American
dialogue" has largely been about notions of American innocence, about whether
the American self is Adamically new, fallen into the corruption of history.
American identity has long been predicated on the absence of class-conflict.
Cultural myths such as the ”American Adam” have been blamed for the
specifically American refusal to examine class-conflict that is sometimes called
"American Exceptionalism" since "the simple genuine self against the whole
world," to use Emerson's phrase, is by definition a being without class
affiliation. Critics of Lewis insist that myths of American innocence narrow the
American horizon of expectation, specifically excluding political conflict,
segregating politics from literature.

In this context, Lewis is "ahistorical" as his study of the American dialogue pays
no attention to 19th century controversies such as the slavery debates.
America was perceived not as paradise regained, but as the original paradise, a
world starting up again, a second chance for the human race. American tradition
arises out of the notion that Americans were truly the chosen people destined to
fulfil the promise of Eden so clumsily handled in the old world of Europe.
This sense of beginning anew gave rise to a new type of hero. He had shaken off
the baggage of the past and could be seen standing at the threshold of
experience, looking hopefully out at the westward future which lay before him.
Characteristic of the new hero is his innocence, identified most readily with - as
R.W.B. Lewis observes in his American Adam - Adam before the fall. He is self-
reliant and self-motivated: the Emersonian figure, “the simple genuine self
against the whole world.” This view of the innocent American hero is best
represented in the works of Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. Heroes in their
own works, their quests took them into garden-like places where they sought to
preserve the vision of America’s destiny.
AmLit – lecture notes

Ihab Hassan (Radical Innocence, 1961) - the American Adam reincarnated in an

existentialist, alienated postwar world. Hassan sees the oppositional nature of
the American protagonist as essentially "radical", he appears as a social outsider.
His innocence is the innocence of a Self that refuses to accept the immitigable
rule of reality, including death, an aboriginal Self (NB. identity prior to law and
politics) the radical imperatives of whose freedom cannot be stifled.
========================

THE MYTH OF THE GARDEN

Peculiar to the American garden is the fact that it has a frontier rather
than walls. Both pastoral and biblical gardens are walled in, conceived
as static enclosed spaces. The American garden has no apparent
confines, but a westward moving frontier, which is responsible for the
energetic nature of the Adam who inhabits it. To Henry Nash Smith, the
first theorist of Americanness, the westering garden with its open
frontier is the metaphor of the American continent.

Leo Marx (The Machine in the Garden, 1964) - the American garden is the
garden of the middle-ground, the place of encounter between order and
chaos, a hybrid between wilderness and civilization, two terms that
define and qualify Adamic space.
Adam has to mediate between community, institutionalized life and the
anarchic claims of nature. The frontier makes available the purifying
virtues of nature, channeling the chaotic energies of the wilderness into
the garden. Thus, it acts as a perpetual source of freshness, a safeguard
against the perverting constraints of culture.
The ethics of the new garden are predicated on defiance of any authority and law
other than the individual's own conscience. The garden-frontier becomes the
zone of self-reliant, self-subsistent selfhood., a metaphor for unlimited
AmLit – lecture notes

individualism, and the man in the garden is the cultural incarnation of absolute
freedom.
Like Adam, the garden itself presents its own ambiguities. Just as Adam
contains in his apotheosis the seeds of his defeat, the symbology of the garden
encloses both Edenic features and elements of darkness. In its happier
beginnings, the garden was declared free of snakes, yet Whitman readily
introduced the felling axe; later, Hawthorne was to resent the presence of the
encroaching railroad, while Henry Adams bewailed the dynamo, and soon the
telegraph was to deface the landscape.
The meta-narrative of progress and the dream of material satisfaction spoil the
idyllic garden. The ’machine’ is the historical consequence of fulfilled utopian
aspirations. Scientific technology, development and industrialism introduce
elements of alienation, fragmentation and mechanization into a world that loses
its ultimate teleological significance. Finally, science itself will empty the
garden of its transcendental meaning and reduce existence to mechanic
meaninglessness.
Critique of American ideologies such as that of the American Adam because
they “help to mask the real problems of an industrial civilization”.
American Renaissance writers employed pastoral fantasy to escape social and
political conflicts that endangered their sense of artistic detachment.
Writers, instead of being concerned with social verisimilitude, with manners and
customs, have fashioned their own kind of melodramatic romance in which they
carry us beyond everyday social experience into an abstract realm of morality
and metaphysics.

American literary mythology has often been used as an escape from the clash of
the world as it directs our attention to the problems of the individual rather than
toward the obligations of the individual to the community or any sense of group
affiliation, a narcissistic adversity toward the fallen world of political reality.
AmLit – lecture notes

=======================
Richard Slotkin (Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the
American Frontier, 1600-1860, 1973; Fatal Environment etc.) – what the
literary critic must do: "We can only demystify our history by historicizing our
myths, that is, by treating them as human creations, produced in a specific
historical time and place, in response to the contingencies of social and personal
life."
The earthly paradise was carved out of the wilderness by acts of violence
and plunder. De-romanticized, the narrative of the New World became a
chronicle of Indian massacre, and the story of the innocent peopling of the
romanticized garden was exposed instead as the violation of that space by
rogues, adventurers, gold-rushers, land speculators. Slotkin identified the
"mythical," self-reliant Adamic heroes with the man on-the-make type, a
ruthless plunderer of his neighbors' garden. Their heroic exploits were in
direct proportion to their destruction of land, men and animals. The
Adamic hero translates his self-assertions into acts of violence against
the garden and man, and the earthly Eden is transformed into a
wasteland.
Am Lit – lecture notes

THE LOST GENERATION

Generally, the term is used for the generation of young people coming of age in
the United States during and shortly after World War I. For this reason, the
generation is sometimes known as the World War I Generation or the Roaring 20s
Generation. In Europe, they are most often known as the Generation of 1914,
named after the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many
expatriates settled, they are called the Génération au Feu, the Generation of Fire.

As a historically circumscribed minset, the "Lost Generation" defines a sense

of moral loss or aimlessness apparent in literary figures during the 1920s.
World War I seemed to have destroyed the idea that if you acted virtuously,
good things would happen.

With regard to literary history, the phrase "lost generation" was coined by
Gertrude Stein ("you are all a lost generation" Stein to Hemingway  epigragh
to Fiesta - The Sun Also Rises) to describe the intellectuals, poets, artists, and
novelists that rejected the values of post World War I America, who
congregated in Greenwich Village in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco,
determined to protest and intent on making a new art. Others went to Europe,
living mostly in Paris as expatriates, to live a bohemian lifestyle. Out of their
disillusion and rejection, out of their vocal rebellion against established social,
sexual, and aesthetic conventions, these writers created a new literature, seen
as a vigorous attempt to establish new values, seen as reflecting their
perspective of the chaotic modern world, which was very impressive in the
glittering 1920s and the years that followed.

’Lost generation’ writers gained a prominent place in the landscape of 20th

century AmLit for three main reasons. First, they led the way in expressing
Am Lit – lecture notes

the themes of spiritual alienation, self-exile, and cultural criticism. Thus,

their mark on intellectual history is distinct. Secondly, these writers
attempted to express their critical response in new ways. Their literary
innovations challenged traditional assumptions about writing and expression,
and thereby paved the way for subsequent generations of avant-garde
writers. And lastly, myth surrounds the lost generation and perpetuates its
popularity as a countercultural entity who abandoned Romantic clichés for
extreme realism or for complex symbolism and newly-created myth.

Traits
The "Lost Generation" were cynical, disdainful of the Victorian notions of
morality and propriety. It was fairly common among members of this group to
complain that American artistic culture lacked the breadth and depth of
European work, that all topics worth treating in a literary work had already
been covered/exhausted. Nevertheless, this period saw an explosion in
American literature and art, which is now often considered to include some
of the greatest literary classics produced by American writers. This generation
also produced the first extraordinary expressions of jazz music, arguably the first
distinctly American art form.
AmLit – lecture notes

SCOTT FITZGERALD

In This Side of Paradise, his novel of 1920, Scott Fitzgerald summarized his
generation’s approach to life: "Here was...a new generation, dedicated more than
the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success, grown up to find all gods
dead, all wars fought, all faith in men shaken."

THE GREAT GATSBY

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 20th-century story of Jay Gatsby's quest for Daisy
Buchanan, examines and critiques Gatsby's particular vision of the 1920's
American Dream. Written in 1925, the novel serves as a bridge between World
War I and the Great Depression of the early 1930's. Although Fitzgerald was an
avid participant in the stereotypical "Roaring Twenties" lifestyle of wild partying
and bootleg liquor, he was also an astute critic of his time period. The Great
Gatsby certainly serves more to detail society's failure to fulfill its potential than it
does to glamorize Fitzgerald's "Jazz Age." More often than not, however, the
illusion of happiness hides a sad loneliness.

Fitzgerald's social insight in The Great Gatsby focuses on a select group:

privileged young people between the ages of 20 and 30. In doing so, Fitzgerald
provides a vision of the "youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves".
Throughout the novel Nick Carraway, the narrator, finds himself surrounded by
lavish mansions, fancy cars, and an endless supply of material possessions. A
drawback to the seemingly limitless excess Nick sees in the Buchanans, for
instance, is a throwaway mentality extending past material goods. Nick explains,
AmLit – lecture notes
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures
and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it
was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had
made".

Part of the mess left in the Buchanan's wake at the end of the novel includes the
literal and figurative death of the title character, Jay Gatsby. Certainly, his murder
at the hands of a despondent George Wilson evokes sympathy; the true tragedy,
however, lies in the destruction of an ultimate American idealist. The idealism
evident in Gatsby's constant aspirations helps define what Fitzgerald saw as the
basis for the American Character. Gatsby is a firm believer in the American Dream
of self-made success: he has, after all, not only invented and self-promoted a whole
new persona for himself, but has succeeded both financially and societally.

In spite of his success, Gatsby's primary ideological shortcoming becomes evident

as he makes Daisy Buchanan the sole focus of his belief in "the orgastic future".
His previously varied aspirations (evidenced, for example, by the book Gatsby's
father shows Nick detailing his son's resolutions to improve himself) are sacrificed
for Gatsby's single-minded obsession with Daisy's green light at the end of her
dock. Even Gatsby realized the first time he kissed Daisy that once he "forever wed
his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again
like the mind of God".

For the first time in his wildly successful career, however, Gatsby aspires to obtain
that which is unattainable, at least to the degree which he desires. As the novel
unfolds, Gatsby, described by the narrator as having “… an extraordinary gift for
AmLit – lecture notes
hope, a romantic readiness…”, seems to realize that his idea and pursuit of Daisy
is more rewarding than the actual attainment of her. Gatsby recognizes that - as he
did with his own persona - he has created an ideal for Daisy to live up to. Although
Gatsby remains fully committed to his aspirations up until his death, he struggles
with the reality of when those aspirations for his American Dream are either
achieved or, in Gatsby's case, proven inaccessible. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in
1924, while working on the novel, "That's the whole burden of this novel -- the loss
of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don't care whether
things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory".

THEMES
The Decline of the American Dream in the 1920s
On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man
and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger,
less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months
during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area in the
vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic
meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the
American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.

Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values,
evidenced in its cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless
jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music - epitomized in The
Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night—
resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream, as the unrestrained
desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals. When World War I
AmLit – lecture notes
ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became
intensely disillusioned, for them the Victorian social morality of early-20th-century
America was just empty hypocrisy. The rise of the stock market in the aftermath of
the war led to a sudden, sustained increase in the national wealth and a newfound
materialism, as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A
person from any social background could, potentially, make a fortune, but the
American aristocracy - families with old wealth - scorned the newly rich
industrialists and speculators. Additionally, the Prohibition, which banned the sale
of alcohol, created a thriving underworld designed to satisfy the massive demand
among rich and poor alike.

Fitzgerald positions the characters of The Great Gatsby as emblems of these social
trends. Nick and Gatsby, both of whom fought in World War I, exhibit the
newfound cosmopolitanism and cynicism that resulted from the war. The various
social climbers and ambitious speculators who attend Gatsby’s parties evidence the
greedy struggle for wealth. The clash between “old money” and “new money”
manifests itself in the novel’s symbolic geography: East Egg represents the
established aristocracy, West Egg the self-made rich.

As Fitzgerald (and as Nick Carraway, the narrator) saw it, the American dream was
originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In the
1920s depicted in the novel, however, easy money and relaxed social values have
corrupted this dream, especially on the East Coast. The main plotline of the novel
reflects this assessment, as Gatsby’s dream of loving Daisy is ruined by the
difference in their respective social statuses, his resorting to crime to make enough
money to impress her, and the rampant materialism that characterizes her lifestyle.
AmLit – lecture notes
Additionally, places and objects in The Great Gatsby have meaning only because
characters instill them with meaning: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg best
exemplify this idea. In Nick’s mind, the ability to create meaningful symbols
constitutes a central component of the American dream, as early Americans
invested their new nation with their own ideals and values.

Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to the green light
at the end of Daisy’s dock. Just as Americans have given America meaning
through their dreams for their own lives, Gatsby instills Daisy with a kind of
idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor possesses. Gatsby’s dream is
ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American dream in the 1920s is
ruined by the unworthiness of its object - money and pleasure. Like 1920s
Americans in general, fruitlessly seeking a bygone era in which their dreams had
value, Gatsby longs to re-create a vanished past - his time in Louisville with Daisy
- but is incapable of doing so. When his dream crumbles, all that is left for Gatsby
to do is die; all Nick can do is move back to Minnesota, where American values
have not decayed.

The Hollowness of the Upper Class

One of the major topics explored in The Great Gatsby is the sociology of wealth,
specifically, how the newly made millionaires of the 1920s differ from and relate
to the old aristocracy of the country’s richest families. In the novel, West Egg and
its inhabitants represent the newly rich, while East Egg and its inhabitants,
especially Daisy and Tom, represent the old aristocracy. Fitzgerald portrays the
newly rich as being vulgar, ostentatious, and lacking in social grace and taste.
Gatsby, for example, lives in a monstrously ornate mansion, wears a pink suit,
AmLit – lecture notes
drives a Rolls-Royce, and does not pick up on subtle social signals, such as the
insincerity of the Sloanes’ invitation to lunch. In contrast, the old aristocracy
possesses grace, taste, subtlety, and elegance, epitomized by the Buchanans’
tasteful home and the flowing white dresses of Daisy and Jordan Baker.

What the old aristocracy possesses in taste, however, it seems to lack in heart, as
the East Eggers prove themselves careless, inconsiderate bullies who are so used to
money’s ability to ease their minds so that they never worry about hurting others.
The Buchanans exemplify this stereotype when, at the end of the novel, they
simply move to a new house far away rather than condescend to attend Gatsby’s
funeral. Gatsby, on the other hand, whose recent wealth derives from criminal
activity, has a sincere and loyal heart, remaining outside Daisy’s window until four
in the morning (Chapter VII) simply to make sure that Tom does not hurt her.
Ironically, Gatsby’s good qualities (loyalty and love) lead to his death, as he takes
the blame for killing Myrtle rather than letting Daisy be punished, and the
Buchanans’ bad qualities (fickleness and selfishness) allow them to remove
themselves from the tragedy not only physically but psychologically.

MOTIFS
Geography
Throughout the novel, places and settings epitomize the various aspects of the
1920s American society that Fitzgerald depicts. East Egg represents the old
aristocracy, West Egg the newly rich, the valley of ashes the moral and social
decay of America, and New York City the uninhibited, amoral quest for
money and pleasure. Additionally, the East is connected to the moral decay and
social cynicism of New York, while the West (including Midwestern and northern
AmLit – lecture notes
areas such as Minnesota) is connected to more traditional social values and ideals.
Nick’s analysis (Chapter IX) of the story he has related reveals his sensitivity to
this dichotomy: though it is set in the East, the story is really one of the West, as it
tells how people originally from west of the Appalachians (as all of the main
characters are) react to the pace and style of life on the East Coast.
Weather
As in Shakespeare’s work, the weather in The Great Gatsby matches the
emotional and narrative tone of the story. Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion begins
amid a pouring rain, proving awkward and melancholy; their love reawakens just
as the sun begins to come out. Gatsby’s climactic confrontation with Tom occurs
on the hottest day of the summer, under the scorching sun (like the fatal encounter
between Mercutio and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet). Wilson kills Gatsby on the
first day of autumn, as Gatsby floats in his pool despite a palpable chill in the air—
a symbolic attempt to stop time and restore his relationship with Daisy to the way
it was five years before, in 1917.

SYMBOLS
The Green Light
Situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s
West Egg lawn, the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the
future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter I he reaches “trembling”
toward it across the Sound, in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his
goal. Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American
dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. In Chapter IX,
Nick compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have
looked to early settlers of the new nation.
AmLit – lecture notes
The green light is a multi-faceted piece of symbolism in the book. It's most obvious
interpretation is that the light is symbolic of Gatsby's longing for Daisy, but that is
too simplistic. Daisy is part of it, but the green light means much more. Gatsby has
spent his whole life longing for something better. Money, success, acceptance,
and Daisy. And no matter how much he has he never feels complete. Even when
he has his large house full of interesting people and all of their attention, he still
longs for Daisy. He created in his dreams for the future a place for her, and he will
not be content to have that gaping hole. So the green light stands for all of
Gatsby's longings and wants. And when Nick talks about the green light at the
end of the book he says "It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will
run faster, stretch our arms out farther...." . He connects the green light to all
people. Everyone has something that they long and search for that is just off in the
distance. That is the green light.
The Valley of Ashes
First introduced in Chapter II, the valley of ashes between West Egg and New
York City consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of
industrial ashes. It represents the moral and social decay that results from the
uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich indulge themselves with regard for
nothing but their own pleasure. The valley of ashes also symbolizes the plight of
the poor, like George Wilson, who live among the dirty ashes and lose their vitality
as a result.
The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted
on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. They may represent God
staring down upon and judging American society as a moral wasteland, though the
novel never makes this point explicitly. Instead, throughout the novel, Fitzgerald
AmLit – lecture notes
suggests that symbols only have meaning because characters instill them with
meaning. The connection between the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and God
exists only in George Wilson’s grief-stricken mind. Fitzgerald uses a lot the word
“careless “ in describing most of the people and events in this book. There seems
to be no fear of consequence, of judgment. They are placed near Wilson's garage
because that is where some of the most selfish acts take place: Myrtle's death,
Tom's affair. All of these crimes go unpunished. So the eyes look on and remind
the characters of the guilt that they forget to feel for what they have done. This lack
of concrete significance contributes to the unsettling nature of the image. Thus, the
eyes also come to represent the essential meaninglessness of the world and the
arbitrariness of the mental process by which people invest objects with meaning.
Nick explores these ideas in Chapter VIII, when he imagines Gatsby’s final
thoughts as a depressed consideration of the emptiness of symbols and dreams.

Gatsby's house: This image serves as a key symbol of aspiration, reflecting both
Gatsby's success as an American self-made man and the mirage of an identity he
has created to win Daisy's love. Gatsby follows his American Dream as he buys the
house to be across the bay from Daisy, and has parties to gain wide-spread
recognition in order to impress her. Someboyd compares Gatsby's mansion to a
house of cards, muttering "that if one brick was removed the whole library was
liable to collapse." Ultimately, the inevitable collapse occurs, as Gatsby loses
Daisy and dies (with the exception of Nick) absolutely friendless, prompting Nick
to refer to Gatsby's mansion as "that huge incoherent failure of a house".

The colors white and yellow have special significance in the novel. White is a
symbol of purity and goodness, while yellow is the color of corruption and greed.
AmLit – lecture notes
This illuminates the character of Daisy, who is named after a flower that is white
on the outside and yellow in the center.
The name Gatsby is a close homophone of the French verb gaspiller: to waste.
AmLit – lecture notes

HEMINGWAY

Hemingway had an important role in doing away with the florid prose of the 19th
century Victorian era and replaced it with a lean, clear prose based on action.
Hemingway also employed a technique by which he left out essential information of
the story in the belief that omission can sometimes strengthen the plot of the novel
(less is more).

This is probably clearly seen in his first (and arguably, best) novel,
THE SUN ALSO RISES, which is a powerful exposé of the life and values of the
Lost Generation. The unfortunate members of this lost generation are estranged from
their mother countries, they feel as if society has led them astray They seek a new
peace and a permanent escape route from the cruelties of living, hoping to find,
usually in Paris and Spain, a niche where they can exist happily and successfully,
although - as one of Hemingway’s protagonists says - "you can't get away from
yourself by moving from one place to another."

The group of "untouchables" includes Jake, Brett, Cohn, Bill, and Mike. They form
a camaraderie that brings them security and companionship in a cruel world. They
fully realize their estrangement from society and recognize others in the same
situation. For example, Brett says of Count Mippipopolous, "He's one of us, though.
Oh quite. No doubt. One can always tell."' They form a sort of freemasonry, with a
private, joking conversation-slang of their own. A key-word is “aficionado”, applied
here to those who know a great deal about bull-fighting. This code of behavior,
though rarely made articulate, is extremely important to Hemingway; as Lady Brett
AmLit – lecture notes
says, ‘It's sort of what we have instead of God.’ Obedience to the code, and
departures from it, give shape to most of Hemingway's writing.
Understatement is the rule: Hemingway has a weakness for some Englishmen who,
like Harris in Fiesta and Wilson, the big-game hunter in ‘The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber’ - are inarticulate as well as competent (Hemingway seems most
at home with characters who say little).

Despite their fast-living, European lifestyle designed to numb their emotional and
spiritual pain, they continue to suffer. Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s mouthpiece in the
novel, says in a moment of painful reflection, "It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled
about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” Once the bars and
the restaurants shut down for the night, no more distractions exist to prevent the
onslaught of memories and painful thoughts. Jake says at a later time, " There is no
reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is
light. The hell there isn't."'

Although they are "lost", the members of Hemingway's Lost Generation long for a
group to which they can belong. They realize that society has cast them out, but Jake
and his friends continue to fear complete ostracism from the world. They yearn to
be a part of a society that has closed its doors on them. Bill pleads, "Don't you ever
detach me from the herd, Mike" in a moment of complete insecurity, demonstrating
the fear that lingers in his mind of being severed from society, with no lifeline. He
and the others are wandering without knowing their destination. Fate has cut the ties
that bind humans to one another and to society, and has left them to form a new herd
and discover their own means of survival. The idea of being "lost" is a demon that
lurks in the shadows of both the novel and Hemingway's mind. Hemingway
AmLit – lecture notes
expresses his fears of the consequences resulting from being an expatriate through
the insight of his characters.

A scene that Jake observes in Spain is significant in this respect.

"In the square a man, bent over, was playing on a reed-pipe, and a crowd of children
were following him shouting, and pulling at his clothes. He came out of the square,
the children following him, and piped them past the cafe and down a side street. We
saw his blank pock marked face as he went by, piping, the children close behind him
shouting and pulling at him."

This image of the pied piper leading the children blindly is analogous to the
situation of Jake and his friends, who see themselves as victims led like sheep
during the war by their homelands. They blindly follow orders and society, and
suddenly find themselves on the outskirts of a world that they once thought they
knew. Now they are without a country and without a purpose. These expatriates
are groping in the dark shadows of this world for some semblance of morals or
values. Jake and his fellow outcasts are living in a world comparable to Plato's
allegory of the cave, where they are trapped, kept out of the light, and the only
world they know is what they see reflected by the shadows. They have no success
in the realm of emotion or spirituality. Even though they continuously thrust
themselves into the fires of experience, they are still isolated from the world in
which they long to be.

Themes:
The Lost Generation
AmLit – lecture notes
Jake epitomizes the Lost Generation; physically and emotionally wounded from the
war, he is disillusioned, cares little about conventional sources of hope -- family,
friends, religion, work -- and apathetically drinks his way through his expatriate life.
Irresponsibility also marks the Lost Generation, as Jake rarely intervenes in others’
affairs, even when he could help (as with Cohn), and Brett carelessly hurts men and
considers herself powerless to stop doing so. While Hemingway critiques the
superficial, empty attitudes of the Lost Generation, the 2nd quote in the epigraph
(from Ecclesiastes) expresses the hope that future generations may rediscover
themselves.

Emasculation and impotence

One of the key changes Hemingway observes in the Lost Generation is that of the
new male psyche, battered by the war. Jake embodies this new emasculation; most
likely physically impotent, he is dominated by Lady Brett, as is Cohn, who is also
abused by the other women in his life. Jake is even threatened by the homosexual
men who dance with Brett in Paris. Though a veteran, Jake now works in an office
and wastes away his time with superficial socializing; he admires bull-fighters so
much, and Romero in particular, because they are far more heroic than he is or ever
was. Though Romero's appearance is more feminine than Jake's, he fulfills the code
of the Hemingway hero, commandingly confronting death as a man of action, with
what Hemingway has called "grace under pressure." Jake, on the other hand, has
returned from his confrontation with death feeling like less of a man, physically and
emotionally.
AmLit – lecture notes
Sexuality and bull-fighting
Hemingway draws numerous parallels between bull-fighting and Brett's sexuality.
Early in the novel, Brett tells Jake she cannot commit to him, as she will "tromper"
him; while this means "to be unfaithful to," it also means "to elude," and it makes
sense why she is attracted to Romero: as a great bull-fighter, he is the consummate
eluder, deceiving the bulls into thinking they are close to him, then pulling away,
much as Brett does with men.
Nature and regeneration
Hemingway depicts nature as a pastoral paradise uncorrupted by the city or women.
Each time Jake ventures into nature, especially on his fishing trip, he is rejuvenated.
While fishing with Bill, they bond and are unafraid to be intimate with each other;
They also enjoy camaraderie with the Englishman Harris, in a departure from the
competitive relationships with women that develop when women, especially Brett ,
are present. In San Sebastian, Jake undergoes a symbolic baptism while diving in
the water. Even the characters' excessive drinking is given greater significance
during the fiesta; they return to a spiritual sense of ritual and generosity while
partying, a distinct comparison to the spiritually bankrupt, competitive rituals of city
life.

Hemingway's journalistic style

Hemingway's spare, laconic prose was influenced by his early work as a journalist,
and he has probably had the greatest stylistic influence over 20th-century American
writers. The key to Hemingway's style is omission; we usually learn less about Jake
through his direct interior narration, but more through what he leaves out and how
he reacts to others. For instance, we understand him much better through his
thoughts on Cohn, who shares many of Jake's traits. As an example of how much
AmLit – lecture notes
Hemingway omits, Jake never even fully describes his war injury, leaving it
somewhat open to interpretation. Also, there is an almost jarring silence on the war
itself, which is rarely spoken about by the characters, but whose scars are evident
with every scene.
Hemingway provides a good outline of his own style when Jake describes Romero's
bull-fighting style: "There were no tricks and no mystifications." Like Romero,
Hemingway moves close to his subject, but rejects flashiness in favor of honest,
authentic writing.

For Hemingway, defeat is a more interesting condition than victory. All men, sooner
or later, go down to defeat: it is how they face the ordeal that determines their status.
The ultimate test, for him as for Stephen Crane, is death. In war, badly wounded,
Hemingway had felt its presence so close that nothing else afterwards could ever
seem as real. He must push nearer and nearer to whatever truth its proximity had.
For this reason the bull-fight, in which the skirmish with death is ritualized, holds a
particular prominence in his imagination.

French critical reactions

Le mythe de Hemingway: l'homme agressivement viril, se réfugiant dans les
jouissances du moment = solution temporaire de compensation, des sédatifs, des
palliatifs qui se substituent à l'espoir de l'éternite.
AmLit- lecture notes

William FAULKNER
and the American South

Like Thomas Hardy's Wessex, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County

embodies the major experience of modern Western civilization: the historical
differentiation of a new society of history and science from an older order of
myth and tradition.

Faulkner thought of himself as being at once literary artist and "clerk,"

storyteller and prophetic voice in a vast historical transaction involving every
aspect of past, present, and future. He shared in the large body of writing,
imaginative and critical, which for four centuries has recorded the drama of
differentiation - the conquest of the older community by the modern order-and
which in so doing has come to constitute a large, many-faceted secular myth,
the literary myth of modern history. The modern writer participates in this myth
both as its author and as actor. Faulkner's involvement in this myth is the major
aspect of his career.

Significantly, he had a lifelong devotion to Moby-Dick, the largest and most

complicated treatment of the disjunction of the sacramental world of medieval
Christendom from the modern world, and also Keats was a permanent, shaping
force, who helped Faulkner to understand his own imaginative capacity. Like
Keats, Faulkner grasped the problem of the imagination in the time between
boyhood and manhood. "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature
imagination of a man is healthy," Keats says in the Preface to "Endymion," "but
there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in ferment, character
undecided, the way of life uncertain …” Faulkner endeavored to comprehend
the nature of this "space between."

Faulkner recapitulated in his own experience the literary experience of the

differentiation of the historical from the traditionalist - mythic or sacramental,
AmLit- lecture notes
mode of consciousness. His work suggests that the literary imagination in
general is imprisoned in a world in which all the sacramental attitudes toward
human existence are becoming historicized. As a result, there are tensions in
Faulkner's imagination which are to do with his awareness of the demarcation of
is from was; of being in time from not being. The tensions also include the
impulse to restore the sense of cyclical wholeness - of mythic or cosmic time
which the historicizing process destroys.
“I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world … I'm
trying to say it all in one sentence, I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is
to keep on trying in a new way. “

Faulkner seeks a way to dramatize and explore the relation of self, history, and
art in a society divested of the sacramental. Taken symbolically, his compulsion
"to put all mankind's history in one sentence" ties in with the motive of Joyce in
Ulysses; that is to say, through the strength of art to make a novel which is an
intricate metaphorical perception of the differentiation of the historical self from
a mythic-traditionalist community.

Like Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner intuited in the American microcosm of the

Western society of history and science a profound intimacy between self and
history. Like Poe, Mark Twain, and Thomas Wolfe, he intuited that this
intimacy assumed its typical form, an internalization of history in the self, with
a singular intensity in the microcosm of American culture, the South.

The South is a society which has harbored an illusion of itself as a perpetuation

under New World conditions of European traditionalism. As expected, modern
history would not tolerate such an illusion; and the Civil War killed the South,
leaving it to live its death in history - an experience of which the First World
War is an integral part. In this society, in which the self is not only isolated in
history but in which history is isolated in the self, the connections among
individuals give the impression of being assumed and formalistic, of being
unspoken save in the public voice of the orator and storyteller. But they are in
AmLit- lecture notes
truth deeply personal, for each person in the Southern society experiences his
existence as a story that must be told.
"But then, everytime any character gets into a book, no matter how minor, he's
actually telling his own biography - that's all anyone ever does, he tells his own
biography, talking about himself, in a thousand different terms, but himself."

Within seven years Faulkner wrote the five greatest Yoknapatawpha novels:
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and
Absalom, Absalom!. Each of these works is distinctly marked by its character as
an autonomous experiment in novelistic composition, yet each finds its focus
and movement in characters who, directly or indirectly, tell their own
biographies. In each novel, it is to be noted, there is one character who serves to
some degree as a surrogate of the authorial figure: Quentin Compson in The
Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying,
Horace Benbow in Sanctuary, and Gail Hightower in Light in August. Both as
participant in and observer of the biographical movement of a given novel, the
surrogate serves not so much as a voice of the author, but as eyes through which
he looks at the inside of his story. Then, he also suggests that there is an
authorial self, a literary artist, a controlling authorial presence in the story, an
assertion that a self-conscious, poetic, historical, perhaps prophetic imagination
is intrinsically existent in Yoknapatawpha.

• Yoknapatawpha is a microcosm of the universal, a fictional yet a timeless

structure of reality created by the literary artist.
• Yoknapatawpha is the story of the artist and his struggle against modern
history. In this struggle Faulkner followed the Joycean dream of
sacramentalizing the role of the artist by means of grace self-bestowed.
• Yoknapatawpha is more an unself-conscious traditionalist culture. Pursuing
meaning in human history through the biographical mode, Faulkner adhered
to a major source of the post-Civil War culture, the biblical sense of history,
especially as this is expressed in what Erich Auerbach in Mimesis terms the
"biographical element" of the Old Testament. Unlike the heroic or epical
mode, Auerbach observes, the Old Testament charges the lives it records
with "historical intensity." Even when a life is no more than a fragmentary
legend, even when a life is plainly a composite of different legends, it
becomes historically credible in the context of other biblical stories.
AmLit- lecture notes
As a composition, the Old Testament is incomparably less unified than the
Homeric poems, it is more obviously pieced together - but the various
components all belong to the one concept of universal history and its
interpretation. The greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the
stories and groups of stories in relation to one another, compared with the Iliad
and Odyssey, the stronger in their general vertical connection, which holds them
all together and which is entirely lacking in Homer. Each of the great figures of
the Old Testament, from Adam to the prophets, embodies a moment of this
vertical connection.

Faulkner's sensibility of history imposed on the evolving Yoknapatawpha saga a

structure resembling the vertical structure of the Old Testament. As the biblical
characters respond to the will of the hidden God, the Yoknapatawpha people
respond to the artist's will to make history yield its meaning in the intensity of
their lives. In their inward images of themselves as historical beings, in the
historical images other characters make of them, and those the author himself
may make of them, they become moments in the perspective, the unifying
theme, the vertical connection of the great Yoknapatawpha novels.

The climactic moment is the Quentin Compson of Absalom, Absalom!. In this

novel the biographical mode is brought into full play as Miss Rosa Coldfield,
Mr. Compson, and Quentin tell the biography of Thomas Sutpen, and in the
telling tell their own biographies. As the talking proceeds, wandering around
and around, it discloses with the force of fate the burden of Yoknapatawpha's
history: the introverted illusion of itself as a representation of the old, familial,
corporate, sacramental community.

The truth that Sutpen embodies comes out: the origins of Yoknapatawpha (and
of the South) lie in the ruthless drive of the modern historical ego, which,
unleashed from all societal bonds, has founded a modern slave society in a
wilderness; and yet in its isolation seeks to emulate, not the substance, but the
appearance of the old community. Witnessing the incredible struggle of Quentin
to assume the whole burden of the South's psychic history, Shreve McCannon,
AmLit- lecture notes
the Canadian interrogator and commentator, exclaims, "The South .... Jesus. No
wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years." And
Quentin says, "I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died."

Time
Faulkner explained in 1957 that he subscribed to the "mystical belief that there
is no such thing as was ... no such thing as will be. That time is not a fixed
condition, time is in a way the sum of the combined intelligences of all men
who breathe at the moment."

Style
Faulkner talked about the philosophy of his long sentences: "There is no such
thing as real as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman,
and every moment ... And so ... a character in a story at any moment of action is
not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him, and the long sentence is an
attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does
something."

“I created a cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God, not
only in space but in time too. The fact that I have moved my characters around
in time successfully, at least in my own estimation, proves to me my own theory
that time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary
avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.”

For Faulkner, the key-word is ‘doom’. There is a Faulknerian ‘code' which, like
Hemingway's, has to do with courage, honor, duty. But if Hemingway is
tongue-tied about his code, Faulkner in some of his books is still less explicit.
We perceive gradually that the code operates as a compulsion. Though many of
his characters behave stupidly, obscurely, evilly, they have no hesitation. Their
gestures are willed, positive, firm, even when they are negative. There is indeed
a curious combination of violence and passivity, a frozen passion, in Faulkner.
AmLit- lecture notes
At their most heated moments his characters are apt to behave mechanically, as
though agents rather than actors in the drama.
It is a part of Faulkner's method to plunge the reader into the scene and leave
him to find out what everybody is talking about. As such, the reader is in the
position of an inexperienced judge, hearing a case of some intricate wrong-
doing, in which the evidence is thrown at him at random, in which some of the
witnesses refuse to speak at all, and in which he feels that no verdict is feasible,
since those involved have a different set of moral scruples from his own. The
law, if any, lies in the complex of experience in Faulkner's imagined county of
Yoknapatawpha. Its furthest basis in time is the land, the wilderness evoked in
his long story ‘The Bear’. Closest to the land are the Indians, of the period just
before the white man drove them out. But they are degenerate at this stage, with
their slaves and their ill-run plantations. Man has begun to destroy the
wilderness, and has implanted upon it the curse of slavery. All else follows, as
Faulkner would say, ‘implacably’: the inordinate pride, the distorted chivalry,
the lost war, the mean commercial aftermath, the inescapable Negro presences,
the rebellious sexuality of adolescent girls, the inbred anger of their brothers.

In his best books Faulkner opposes to the idea of doom that of endurance: the
latter with the double connotation of suffering and survival. It is the proud who
are doomed - the Sartorises, Sutpens, and Compsons - and the humble Negro or
poor white who endure.

Absalom, Absalom! also contains the most mature and profound examination of
Faulkner's greatest themes: the South's mixture of horror and pride in its own
history, the interrelationship of incest and miscegenation, the tragic legacy of
slavery, and, as always at the heart of it all, the family drama.

Themes
Race: This comes to be the arch-theme of the "house" of Sutpen and the
"house" of the South. Faulkner makes it clear that race is the central problem for
AmLit- lecture notes
the South in the post-Civil War period, and that without a thorough discussion
of this topic, the South will never move forward.

Memory: Each character tells the Sutpen legend from his or her own memory,
each exercises selective memory. Both Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson omit
important details from their stories, and Quentin is attempting to escape his own
memories by fleeing to the North, and Harvard.

History: The history of the South, and especially of the Civil War, forms a
compelling backdrop to the book. Faulkner's goal however is to present an
emotional history of the South that matches the strength and power of the
factual history.

The South: Quentin is asked over and over again by Northerners at Harvard,
about the South: "What's it like there?" Telling this story, Quentin exhibits all
the ambivalence, love, and hatred towards the region that most Southerners
have.

Narration: Each narrator brings his or her own set of preoccupations,

misinformed knowledge, and interests to the narrative. Faulkner expects the
reader, too, to participate in restructuring the Sutpen legend and, through this
action, understand how biased each narrative, each memory, each history is.

Design: The futility of directing Sutpen's life towards an idea or a "design"

without emotional concern for other human beings is proof that the only designs
that succeed are those that account for people as humans rather than as objects.

Haunted House: Sutpen's haunted house on Sutpen's Hundred, his fanatical

determination to build a mansion in the wilderness, is a metaphor for the South
and all of the sins that it is responsible for, including slavery and the repudiation
of the black "sons". Just as Sutpen's house fell because it failed to reconcile the
black sons with the white, the South, too, fell for the same reason.
AmLit- lecture notes

Faulkner's novels and stories show the destructive power of clinging to a terrible
past and how any history can be radically different depending on who is telling
the story. Faulkner typically tries to make himself disappear in these works and
instead of using the traditional third-person narrator commonly associated with
the author, he directs a chorus of voices that intertwine, complement, and
contradict one another.

Narrative technique
Faulkner’s maximalist style is like a net cast over a reality which is too rich.
e.g., Go Down, Moses, part 4, includes a six-page sentence illustrative of his
implicatory (not discursive) and enveloping (not developing) style.
Benjy’s monologues (The Sound and the Fury) partake of a syncretic universe
in which reality is not refracted yet through the intervention of consciousness
into a multiplicity of appearances.

Time
Faulkner's novels question our assumptions about time as regular, linear,
sequential, predictable. There are multiple layers, multiple simultaneous
histories, and the reader’s work is similar to peeling an onion, layer after layer.
More often than not, the story is told backwards, starting from the end.
An overwhelming, all-pervasive sense of doom, it is always too late when the
story starts. All characters have their face turned backwards (= loss of hope),
seemingly mesmerized by this unspoken frozen Event which broke once and for
all the monotonous succession of time (Sartre).
Symbolic gestures: Quentin breaking his watch, Bennjy not being able to read
the time = systematic rejection of official chronology.
 FAULKNER’S LITERARY HERITAGE

Flannery O‘CONNOR

Grotesquerie (> expressionism) at the heart of things:

“My work is literal in the sense that a child’s drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn’t try to
be grotesque, but to set down exactly what he sees – the lines that create motion. I am interested in
the lines that create spiritual motion.”

“To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large startling figures. I make my
vision apparent by shock.”

“man’s fall and his dishonour” - a mixture of love/cruelty, comic/serious/tragic.

A moralist with her eye upon both this world and the next.

Roman Catholic woman writer – violence and abnormality

Jolting civilization out of its cynicism and complacency

Violence
- a way of returning characters to reality and prepare them to accept their moment of grace (in touch
with itself, the self is most ready for eternity)
- an essential device to move the reader towards the story’s mystery

Characters’ fault is in themselves – arrogance, pride  reject the redemptive power of Christianity

Paradox re sin: her madmen, misfits, rapists, thieves commit crimes of a secular nature, against other
men; they are not as sinful as those who usurp the role of the divine, who disguise their emptiness
in ’good works’ = the ’respectuous and the unctuous’.

Good Country People (1955)

Leitmotif – matching physical deformity to spiritual affliction

wooden leg = maimed soul; names, titles

Eudora WELTY

Petrified Man (1941) A Worn Path, Why I Live at the P.O.

Paradigm of sexual difference  acts of violence bridge the gap betwen men and women

Discourse of mastery – male dominant culture/ideology

 ETHNIC VOICES
Richard WRIGHT

The Man Who Was Almost a Man (1961)

Demythologize the archetype of the young hero who achieves manhood by hunting.

The heroic and mythic dimensions of the hunt are not available to the Black American hero - parody

chivalrous white hero vs black hand field / urban outcast

Faulkner’s The Bear

mainstream pattern of the hunt, initiation within a tradition, everything is given  pride

Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man

abortive initiation takes place outside any tradition, everything must be earned  humiliation

Names (Ike vs Dave), ancillaries (gun, Old Ben vs mule), guidance (Sam Fathers vs ’invisible’)

Alice WALKER

Everyday Use (1973)

Heritage: ideology vs endurance

Heritage as tapestry/quilt

Dee a.k.a Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo vs

Maggie
AmLit – lecture notes

The Minimalist Blueprint

"less is more."
Carver is "the quintessential minimalist, seemingly reducing to an absolute spareness both his
subject-matter and his treatment of it".
Carver's fiction "deconstructs the codifying myths even as it re-inscribes them into a context
which exposes their pretensions to significance."

"silence" - the syntax is as much concerned with the silent as with the spoken, reciprocity
between the silent and the spoken. His work clarifies how short fiction interrogates the
hermeneutic significance of viewing events in a series.

If we look at minimalism as a mode of inquiry instead of a stylistic program - the emphasis

lies on concentration rather than attenuation. Carver's (1989) minimalist creed: "It's possible,
in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace
but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a
woman's earring - with immense, even startling power."

Critics1 - minimalist fiction defines an excessively small literary world, one in which
everyone tends to resemble everyone else, cultivating an obsessive concern for surface detail,
a tendency to ignore or eliminate distinctions among people it renders, and a studiedly
deterministic, at times nihilistic vision of the world.

Critics2 -Carver's stories in "Hopelessville, USA, the contemporary counterpart of Anderson's

Winesburg, Ohio", admit that below the surface "lies a morass of inarticulated yearnings and
unexamined horrors, repressed violence, the creeping certainty that nothing matters."

Critics3 - highlight the heartfelt pessimism of minimalist characters, their conviction that
things never are and never can be what they should be and also the "unsettling immediacy"
and "haunting verisimilitude" of stories in which the spoken word is endowed with
"subsurface values." Accordingly, minimalist fiction is no longer seen as a fiction of mere
surface and silliness, but instead becomes the literature of multiple levels, multiple meanings.
In these stories minimality is teleological, not technical, and its threat is a general feature of
the age. So, the menace migrates from worldview to the world itself.

Carver never thinks about "plumbing the depths". He writes: "What creates tension in a piece
of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible
AmLit – lecture notes

action of the story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just
under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things."

But where Hemingway's purified style was meant to imply volumes of unspoken knowledge,
like the seven-eighths of an iceberg underwater, Carver's method suggests that the other
seven-eighths either are not there or are not knowable. Hemingway never loses sight of his
frame of reference, his values. If he leaves something out, it is only because he is so sure of
what it is and he believes that, by leaving it out, he can make it felt more strongly. Carver has
less choice about what he leaves out. There is no universal referent, no code of ethics or
uncontestable values, no resource of significant events to draw from.

The chief threat is no longer minimalism as literary manner, but minimalism as narrowness or
poverty of spirit. It now represents the ultimate antagonist, the nihilistic monster that can
overwhelm the protagonist with silence, stillness, and senselessness. Minimalism is no longer
Hemingway's manner of suggesting the world's mysterious extensity by what is left out, but
rather the fear of discovering that there is no mystery and that minimalist technique may be
wholly sufficient to describe the "truth of the human heart."

Carver's writing owes much to Hemingway's "iceberg" aesthetic and his "theory of omission":
"you could omit anything if you knew that if you omitted and the omitted part would
strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."

Ihab Hassan (1971) - Anti-style is one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, is a recognition of

literature's limitations; anti-style fractures textual unity and, demonstrating the power of
"silence," it is "an intuition of the great emptiness behind the meticulous shape of things”.
Anti-style entails an interrogation of the boundaries of literature, of knowledge. Anti-styles
destabilise discourse, challenge literature's ability to denote precisely the referent.

Hassan - the "anti-languages" silence creates: “Some are utterly opaque, others completely
transparent. These languages transform the presence of words into semantic absence and
unloosen the grammar of consciousness. They accuse common speech”.

The narrative strategy of omission results in what Carver describes as "tension": "It's the
things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes
broken and unsettled) surface of things". Carver's ellipsis undermines the reader's ability to
concretise adequately owing to his emphasis on "surface". The reader perceives the surface
(event, description), but is incapable of penetrating the surface to discover the occluded
meaning or structure that grants the surface its texture, its shape.
AmLit – lecture notes

"Surface may generate a particular, complex dimensionality of its own". This is not to say that
Carver stories are hermetically sealed to the reader, but that their particular "dimensionality"
engages indeterminacy. The absence of depth implies the lack not of meaning but of
certainties, a condition that, destabilising the reader's ability to interpret, suggests
epistemological uncertainty as well. The landscape beneath the surface of things may perhaps
be present, but it is invisible.

It is precisely this invisibility, this concentration on omission, this narrative strategy of

implying rather than stating or explaining, that engenders the paradox of Carver's writing. Iser
(1978) refers to this process of employing gaps (which he associates with modern literature)
as “negativity”: “Blanks and negations increase the density of fictional texts, for the
omissions and cancellations indicate that practically all the formulations of the text refer to
an unformulated background, and so the formulated text has a kind of unformulated double.
This "double" we shall call negativity”.

Hermeneutic difficulty arises from the reader's inability to ascertain the identity of this
doubled text, this "negativity," a situation that results in considerable uncertainty. Indeed,
Carver's technique is to employ seemingly "realistic" narrative precisely for the purpose of
undermining an epistemology that would maintain that the external world can be readily
comprehended.

Edward Said's (1983) observations on narration elucidate the rift between narrative levels:
“wanting-to-speak, a specifically verbal intention, is forced to confront the insufficiency, and
indeed the absence, of words for that intention”.

Carver’s stories are often "a border between two nothings," in which previous events, if they
are included at all, offer little or no aid in interpreting the present. Narrative discourse is a
discourse of exclusion which involves separation rather than recovery. However, occluded
narratives depend upon those that are given shape through their articulation in writing.
Carver's texts manifest a dialectical relationship between the unsaid and the spoken.

“Minimalist” label: suggests a density that encompasses more than is obvious, the evidence of
things present but unseen or things seen but not there, the universe in a grain of sand. One of
the features is the "truncated plot" consisting of events and empty spaces that require
completion for readers who prefer solidity to voids. In this process, images arranged in certain
patterns transform the elliptical shape of the fiction into a more stable form that is the
narrative equivalent of what perceptual psychologists call subjective contours.
AmLit – lecture notes

There is a subliminal match between the structure consisting of missing, but perceived, events
and the geometrical figure formed by three pie charts arranged with one centred above a base
made of the other two, a wedge removed from each, the empty slots turned toward the centre.

In such a configuration illusory contours are involuntarily extended by the brain and eye, and
a stylised triangle comes into view, even though there are no lines, no triangle. The
phenomenology of visual perception and thought processes find a counterpart in readers'
responses to certain literary structures. The imaginary triangle contains the conditions of
simulation for the minimalist story. These artfully fashioned narratives present significant
details arranged in a way that causes the brain to supply missing information -- to extend the
lines. As a result, we perceive information that makes the point, develops character, reveals
the theme, justifies the voice. Just as the visual system mentioned above requires an internal
process between brain and eye to fashion the contours of a triangle that is not in the disks or in
the paper, but inside the viewer, so too does the reader's interpretation need an act of
unification; this unifying impulse may well be the goal of the minimalists' narrative tactics.

Carver’s stories are not, like the novelistic discourse Bakhtin describes, many-voiced or
multi-languaged. Carver reduces polyphony, backgrounds the many voices and the “carnival
spirit”, which are the essence of modern literature and novelistic discourse as Bakhtin
understands it. He suppresses the folk energies that are the founding forces of heteroglossia.

The authorial suppression of polyphony has important manifestations. One is the almost-total
absence in the stories of irony, parody, word play, and other ludic elements which are
expressions of heteroglossia. Carver’s fiction is rarely playful or marked by allusions, double
meanings, reflexive or metafictional gambits.

Carver reduces the varieties of discourse within the stories. There is no difference between
men’s speech and women’s in most stories; his interest in class and type – inarticulate people
– overrides concern with gender.
AmLit – lecture notes

One of the most surprising exclusions or suppressions is that of popular culture. Carver's
characters find forms of psychic and physical isolation; they hang up the phone, turn the TV
down or off, throw letters away, leave no forwarding addresses. In conversation they repeat
each other, become uncomprehending or self-absorbed or numbed by alcohol and marijuana.
Such acts of resistance to heteroglossia are almost always associated with loss of identity, a
malady of single voices in single rooms.

Carver's characters display obsessive behavior, desperate and abusive patterns, drinking,
smoking, and eating, adultery, voyeurism and violence – behavior linked "to a sense of failure
and recognition of the gap between American possibilities and their own hard lot".

Moving radically away from the obsessive self-reflexive, highly ironic, fabulistic, narrative-
subverting tendency. Still, appropriating them in some way even as they modify them, or
correcting an aesthetic vision.

F.Barthelme (1988) summarises the charges against minimalism:

• omission of 'big philosophical' ideas;
• not enough history or historical sense;
• lack of (or wrong) political posture;
• insufficient 'depth' of character;
• commonplace description too reliant on brand names;
• drabness of 'style'; moral poverty.

As a response to the perceived elitism of high postmodernist language and self-reflexivity,

minimalists see themselves as seeking a more direct and honest apprehension of life through a
self-imposed poverty of means. Minimalism abandons the experimentalist ethic of the high
postmodernist writers, rejecting linguistic flight and ontological self-questioning in favor of a
willed simplicity which honors the ordinary.

Minimalism: preference for parataxis over subordination that establishes the primacy of
sequence over consequence. The refusal to subordinate creates the impression of following
the train of associations of the characters' minds without submitting it to any unifying
discursive order. Whatever tension, it depends on the disparity between the blandness of the
prose and the seriousness of the conflict whose emotional stress it fails to register.

Highly self-conscious response to the postmodern critique of representation, which knowingly

simulates a "return" to plain style while remaining properly ironic about the discredited
representational conventions on which plain style rests. Minimalism makes the typically
AmLit – lecture notes

contradictory gesture of postmodernism, which "uses and abuses, installs and then subverts,
the very concepts it challenges". The minimalist project, then, wants to have it both ways,
trying to rescue representation from the stifling conventions of an essentially 19th century
realism, while avoiding the perceived solipsism and irony of the high postmoderns.

Refusing to establish a hierarchical order among sources of historical understanding, the

historical imagination of the surface places the various historical discourses available to it on
the same intertextual plane. This refusal makes minimalism a postmodern genre, scepticism
about the ability of historical narrative to comprehend and organise the data of contemporary
experience.