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 1
The best American writing negotiates a space between accessibility and brilliance: the former quality allowing access, at a certain level, by a wider variety of readers than might be possible for European Modernism, or certainly for the master of Modernism himself, James Joyce. In fact, the American reader has had access to some of the best writing available in the twentieth century without the necessity, for the most part, of the difficulty, effort, and potential confusion caused by the more complicated forms of Modernism. This quality of accessibility, however, has softened American readers, has disallowed them from critical judgement against writers who started in strength and ended in softness, who started in innovation, and ended in self-mimicry. American writing, curiously, both fosters a wider possible audience, in many cases, and has the tendency to trick that audience into accepting the weaker limits of its range. American literature of the twentieth century is a literature of tremendous complexity, tone, and variation, without, in many instances, the transformative qualities made possible by Modernists unburdened by our unique cultural stubbornness, our unique cultural individuality: cultural distinctions that both strengthen the possibilities of American writing, and limit them.
35
The expatriation of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, as well as, to a lesser extent, Ernest Hemingway, prepares the way for the infusion of Modernism into American writing. In fact, Stein and Pound, in their expatriation, transcend their Americanness and produce work that elevates them beyond the possibilities of their contemporary literary counterparts. Ernest Hemingway, however, borrows from Stein, and produces documents uniquely American in their tone while incorporating the rich possibilities the primary American expatriates had participated in while abroad. To a lesser extent, Faulkner followed this path by borrowing contextually from James Joyce's stream of consciousness and transplanting it, more accessibly, into his literature of the American South. In both cases, Faulkner and Hemingway adapted the intellectual complexities of modernism and produced literature that was both more accessible than its influence and less accomplished, although the relative harshness of this last bit is not intended to discount the considerable impact and skill of their work, but rather to show perhaps a softness in translation, or a second-handness in their approach that will be reminiscent in the incorporation of European Modernism by American Post Modernists at the end of the century.
2
The story of American literature in the twentieth century, however, would not be complete without a portion of the story of American literature from the century before it, for the idea of Americans transcending their contemporary literary expectations in order to create the essential American literature is not a new one. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, as well as, in different senses Poe and Hawthorne, transcend the literary expectations of their culture in order to produce the literature that most certainly is the literature of their culture. The necessity to overcome the limitations of the expectations of contemporary American literature is the continual necessity of American literature, and a discussion of American Modernism, and the necessity of its expatriation, would not be complete without a recognition of the metaphoric transcendence of the literature before it. In their internal expatriation, Melville and Whitman, Dickinson and Thoreau create a literature of a magnitude of the literature of Stein and Pound, who, in order to create theirs, needed physically to leave America to do so: the essential literature of the United States, then, has required, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, remarkably opposed approaches to achieve similar goals; the literature of the nineteenth century requiring rootedness in individuality, an internal depth that sublimates the expectations of the American landscape, and the literature of the twentieth century requiring escape from the nation and the culture that should most benefit from it.
3
If one were to list the accepted figures, schools and movements in American writing in the twentieth century it would look something like this: transitional writers (between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), such as Sherwood Anderson, influence a younger generation of writers, Hemingway and Faulkner, who, along with Pound and Stein, spend various portions of their time abroad, then, like Faulkner, and after a time, Hemingway, return to the United States, reaffirming their roots, and, in Faulkner's case, developing or participating in the development of the literature of the American South, in the company of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, while Hemingway returns to various portions of the United States, Africa, and Cuba and lays the groundwork for the most dominant form of American short story writing in the second half of the American century. After the influences of Pound and Stein begin to decline to the general American writer, more traditional, and stylistically expansive writers - Salinger, Bellow, Pynchon, Barth - begin to take the stage, alongside, or parallel to the development of the most romantically recognized movement in American writing of the twentieth century, the beat writers, with Pynchon and Barth signaling a transition from Modernism to Post Modernism: (the bulk of their writing, in both senses, signifying the importance and gravity of Modernism as it would be interpreted by a certain generation of writers who followed them, David Foster Wallace and William Vollmann among them). While these maximalists ply their trade, a concurrent group of writers - Barthelme, Carver, Lish - lobby for and produce a style of writing more in keeping with the pared down style of Hemingway in the beginning of the century, but inflected with a more colloquial tone. Don Delillo, Harold Brodkey, and Cormac McCarthy continue in the tradition of American traditionalism with remarkably different tones, styles, and approaches: DeLillo's hyper-contemporanity, Brodkey's intellectual emotionalism, and McCarthy's Faulknerian transformation. A younger generation, schooled in the school of Lish continues the Minimalism of the 70s, while a handful of poets and memoirists adapt the colloquialism of the seventies school of minimalism to their particular use in the form of confessionalism. Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, John Updike and Saul Bellow continue the American tradition of quality twinned with accessibility. All of these movements and groups and styles, all of these outcomes and variations and mimicries, all of the mish and mash of American writing of the twentieth century are equally valid, carry the same enduring weight, hold relatively similar positions in
the eyes of literary history...or so we have been told.
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The democratization inherent in American culture demonstrates the literary expectations an American writer must transcend in order to create writing commensurate with the essential American literature. The irony of American literature, or the effort to participate in the creation of an American literature, then being that the creation of writing of enduring quality, as an American, requires escaping from America and its literary expectations, either, as the writers of the nineteenth century did, by escaping internally, or the writers of the early twentieth century did, by escaping physically, or how writers since and forward will and have: by separating emotionally from the cultural expectation of mediocrity, and attaching to the work of value our country in opposition to its culture has produced.
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Pound and Stein, parts of Hemingway and Faulkner, the craft of Salinger, possibly portions of the work of Pynchon, the stories and novels of Barthelme, the stories of Eudora Welty and the novels of Flannery O'Connor, the stories of Harold Brodkey, the stories and novels of Gordon Lish and James Purdy, the stories of Diane Williams, Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, Grace Paley, the stories and novels of Barry Hannah, a substantial portion of the novels of Cormac McCarthy and William Vollmann, all of the work of Guy Davenport, minus the poetry, a selection of the stories of Raymond Carver, a few of the novels and shorter pieces of Barry Gifford, a handful of the novels of Don DeLillo: The history of American writing in the twentieth century, the history of literature in America in the twentieth century, revolves around these figures, distanced by style, or school or taste. Distanced by reputation and readership and acceptance. Literary quality is not necessarily a continuous development. Pockets of quality present themselves, regardless of cultural acceptance. Portions of the literature of an age are valid and worthy beyond that age, portions of it are not. American readers are automatically at a disadvantage to the democracy of its culture, having to select from the mess of acclimation the few suitable items that remain. Not every school is of equal standing, not every writer is valuable for the story he or she has to tell. Writing is not social commentary or political discourse. Writing is not self-evaluation or public spectacle. We are not blessed at every moment with work of enduring quality and importance. The American twentieth century is more populated with false starts and misapplications than it is by value or endurance, however, when the refuse is swept aside, when the wheat is separated from the chaff, when the false assumption of qualitative continuity is disregarded, we are left with a century of work, a century of literature remarkable in its potential impact (for those who are willing to tell it apart).
29
The primary American novel, the novel from which other American novels descend, against which are measured, through which must be evaluated is Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and certainly William Vollmann's Ice-Shirt, if not others of his work, most closely, from the literature that has been made available through common channels, approximate the qualities that make Melville's work so purely American in the sense that is worth striving for. Key features of all of these works include narrative strength, engaging voice, attention to detail, virtuostic verbal execution, impeccable timing, a moderate dose of humor, specificity, calculation, execution, and an attachment to the grotesque and marvelous details of the physical world. We cannot imagine the world without the images conjured by these novels once we have envisioned them because they approximate spaces so ruthless in their realities as to strengthen our perception of the one we live in. While not abandoning attempts at innovation, they are not works purely intended as innovative. They connect us to a literary history we recognize and understand, without executing that process in a manner that might allow the reader to be lulled by its formulas and their expectations. Leveraging a recognizable literary history they render speechlessness in a reader metaphorically by the act of language, by the insistence of language, by the force of language represented on their pages: a reader can be knocked dumb by them, can be transformed by the snapping forces of their authority; we are not saved by their languages, but are transformed by them, made more aware of the possibilities of language by the inescapable realities they create, an expansion of the spaces we inhabit, places we can walk into and away from but not without effort or the inevitability of change.
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The democracy of American culture relies on a belief in cultural progress continually, the steady march from brilliance to brilliance, the pure, individual expression of inner light that represents tangibly the unique braveness of an individual's experience, the special savagery through which one has marched. At the very least, our criticism expects value in every pot hole, that every school or thought or voice is brilliant in its own way, and, since all experience is valuable, and equally so, then all efforts and attempts are noble and worthy equitably.
29.1
First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party and penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other. I say, I myself have known three instances similar to this; that is, in two of them I saw the whales struck, and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no good ground to impeach.
22
The poetry of the century follows a similar course, with a pocket of greatness followed by mediocrity supposed to be its continuation. The Black Mountain School, for instance, or persons in its number, were reportedly descendents of Pound, practitioners of his good word. Jack Gilbert, Louis Simpson, portions of Donald Hall and Donald Justice, Mike Sarki, Cooper Esteban. These are the poets who, at the end of the century, most closely resemble, not in their methods or styles or approaches, but in the strength of their notes, their insistence on the outcomes of their writing as primary as opposed to the message in the words of their modified prose, the brilliance that preceded them. Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Frost balanced by those at the end of the century who paid attention to and continued phases of quality through their own strength and endurance.
27
America is incapable of producing a writer of the magnitude of James Joyce probably for the simple reason that writers of that ability appear only once every few hundred years, but also for reasons that are subtler than that, reasons that supply our national literature with strength, and define its limitations and boundaries. To produce work that transcends American expectations requires leaving America by a path of ones choosing. America cannot support itself, but needs itself, needs the best of itself to continue, so that, in retrospect, we can be proud of ourselves and point out this and that, while around us, at any particular moment, the noticeable goes unnoticed. James Joyce, of course, had to leave Ireland - Dublin, specifically - to become, as the cliché would have it, a citizen of the world. But what does this mean, and what does the fact that he was able to achieve with his writing something unparalleled in human history mean: a larger America exists to be transcended, to truly create the literature of the world, one must come to transcend it as well. Americans, then, having two obstacles to overcome.
29.2
The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot...and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some
were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again.
24
American writing is the second tallest mountain, or, among the second tallest mountains. Europe has a mountain of similar size, the Spanish and French and German languages included, but another mountain exists and has been climbed but no one particularly notices, or, if they have, thinks of it as rumor, as speculation, even though the document exists that pertains to it.
29.3
Those who worship symbols will be titillated by the fact that Oxen Island appears at first to be E-shaped, E for Eirik, but it is not, and Oxen Island did not quite fit Eirik. -- Puffins bob in the inlets. The island is very green. It smells of sheep manure. A cormorant cries petulantly. All around, the sheep, who have inherited the island from the oxen, bleat, but their bleats are as faint and far away as the hummings of flies. The sea is so grey as almost to be white beneath the clouds. From a high rock can be seen a little white house, with a dilapidated shed beside it. The path goes past the kitchen window, in which stands a bottle of vodka, and then across a series of rotten foot-bridges over bogs and streams and pawed-up mud. Then one can leave the trail, and strike out across the hard grass-hummocks until, on a sloping field that ends in a low sea-cliff, one comes across the stone foundation of Eirik's sheep-pen (all grass grown now). The stone wall that Eirik built begins there, running down in the direction of the white house, and then left. It seems longer than it is, because Oxen Island's edge has become a spurious horizon for it to pretend to stretch to. Brown and black horses graze by this wall, and purple flowers grow on the stones of it. One horse mounts another, and then they both graze again. After awhile, the horse-herd raises its half-dozen heads and canters away, over Eirik's wall. A chilly breeze blows. Birds call faint and querulous against a cloud. A semicircle of pink moss campion smiles from a stone.
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