American Literature

a paper delivered in Damascus, Syria, October 2003

Jack Foley

         It’s no easy task to talk about American literature and American culture in a short space. There is much, I’m sure, which you already know--and perhaps much as well about which you may be mistaken, as Americans are often mistaken about Arab culture. More, not less, interchange between our countries is necessary: getting to know another person has many twists, turns, and surprises; getting to know another culture has even more.

         Should I talk about rock and roll, about rap, about American Classical music, about American literature (novels and poetry but also history books, self-help books, sociological books, cook books), about sports, about relationships between ethnic groups, about gender relationships, about American media (films, radio, television, newspapers, drama), about communications in America, about ways of travel, about the use of the Internet--about what someone called, many years ago, “the lonely crowd” or about the mass of happy consumers regularly postulated by television programs in their advertisements? Should I talk about the look of American cities and the shapes of their buildings? All these things are relevant but can hardly be covered in a short period. In addition, two people may be looking at the same thing but registering it in entirely different ways. A nineteenth-century British reviewer, faced for the first time with the astonishing verse of the American poet, Walt Whitman, remarked: “Mr. Whitman seems to believe that because the Mississippi River is long and the Missouri River is wide, every American is God.” That is of course not at all what Mr. Whitman believed, but one can understand how the reviewer arrived at his opinion.

         A friend told me that a literate, intelligent European--a friend of his--made an interesting remark about American literature. The European said that, while he enjoyed reading American novels and poetry, he felt that they were never about anything. They were enjoyable, even very enjoyable, but at some deep level they had absolutely no subject matter. It is interesting that--in a widely-quoted remark--the creators of a popular American television program, Seinfeld, made a similar observation: they announced that Seinfeld too was “about nothing.”

         Is it possible for anything to be about nothing? Shakespeare remarks in a resonant moment in King Lear, “Nothing will come of nothing.” Yet Western Culture insists that everything came from “nothing,” that the entire universe was created ex nihilo.

         I think what the European meant was that American literature had no easily defined, obvious subject matter: this poem, “The Vampire” by the British poet Rudyard Kipling, is about the bad end people come to if they fall in love with an adventurous female:

A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool he called her his lady fair--
(Even as you and I!)

         But what exactly is the subject matter of this untitled poem by the American Emily Dickinson?

Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile--the Winds--
To a Heart in port--
Done with the Compass--
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden--
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor--Tonight--
In thee.

         Is the “thee” of the poem God or a human lover? There is no easy way to tell. The poem seems to name some sort of longed-for ecstasy: “Ah, the Sea!” But it is not quite clear what sort it is. What exactly does the word “Wild” mean here? An abandonment to sexuality? What is this “luxury”? The poem’s true subject seems to be the fact that the poet has felt something. For Kipling, feeling something is merely the condition of the poem. Of course he feels something about the kind of woman he is naming, and this is what he has to say about it; Kipling insists upon asserting a social context in which such a woman can be described. Dickinson’s poem is a powerful assertion of feeling--but there is no definite social or even religious context in which the feeling takes place. The poem, like feeling itself, is mysterious, not quite to be pinned down. Feeling is like the ocean: “Ah, the Sea!” There is perhaps the suggestion as well that there is a force which ordinarily moves against feeling- “Futile--the Winds- / To a Heart in port”--and so it is exceptional for the poet to be doing this, to be feeling something so intensely. Feeling is not present at all times but is a thing to be longed-for, conjured up, an if only.

         Dickinson’s contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson goes even further in his essay on “Nature”:

Standing on the bare ground...all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.

         Like Emily Dickinson, Emerson describes a sudden dissolution of the ego, a state which is utterly different from the state in which he usually exists--and he announces that in the midst of that state he is, precisely, “nothing.” American literature at such moments is definitely “about nothing”--a “nothing” which deliberately removes itself from the web of social situations and interactions which exists all around any individual person or object; a “nothing” which achieves, precisely, the obliteration of “everything.” Emerson’s passage names a desire to exist out of the world, to be elsewhere--to be “nothing.” God’s creation--Nature itself--is necessarily something. To become “a transparent eyeball” is to achieve an ecstatic condition in which whatever is flows through you. At such moments you are not likely to be making judgments about one kind of woman rather than another--or about one kind of employment rather than another or about whether people doing a certain job are receiving fair wages or about whether one political system is better than another. “I am nothing,” writes Emerson, “I see all.” “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!” writes Emily Dickinson.

         Why should this be the case? Why should this longing for what Emerson called “the Transcendental” be so important in American literature and American culture? Why is American literature so deeply about escape--and, often, about the failure of escape? “Which of us,” asked the novelist Thomas Wolfe, “has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?”:

Remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

         You must understand that American culture is a relatively recent thing. America as a nation dates back only about two hundred and twenty-five years. The Englishmen who “settled” the country initially thought of themselves as Englishmen, not as “Americans.” And it was precisely as Englishmen that they undertook a rebellion against King George. The question of what constitutes an “American” haunts American culture. How can we have a culture if we don’t know who we are? Or is it perhaps the culture which determines who we are? What kind of identity do we have if we have done this, that, or the other thing? What do our actions say about us? And, even more pertinently, who exactly is “us”?

         The United States has a long, confusing tradition of utter diversity. What “constitutes” culture in this country is a crazy quilt of contributions from all sorts of specific cultures. Poet Ishmael Reed has coined a name for this situation: “MultiAmerica”--not a single, unified entity but a soup of various elements which are in a constant state of movement. In the anthology, Unsettling America, editors Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan take this sense of movement as the primary fact about America: “We chose poems,” Jennifer Gillan writes, “that directly address the instability of American identity and confront the prevalence of cultural conflict and exchange within the United States...we hope to highlight the constant erecting, blurring, breaking, clarifying, and crossing of boundaries that are a consequence of the complex intersections among peoples, cultures, and languages within national borders, which themselves are revised constantly.”

         Gillan’s eloquent words recall those of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America appeared in the original French and in an English translation between 1835 and 1840. In America, writes de Tocqueville, “continual changes are...every instant occurring under the observation of every man”; there is “universal tumult,” an “incessant conflict of jarring interests”; “everyone is in motion.” As these quotations suggest, “the instability of American identity”-its “unsettling”-is an old story, but it is one which is continually hidden under the rhetoric of stability and constancy, a rhetoric which has furnished many a politician with comforting platitudes about “family values” and “Americanism.” The tensions that arise out of genuine difference, out of what may be in fact utter incompatibility, are what Americans must simultaneously deny and deal with on an everyday basis. It is in fact precisely this perception of incompatibility--of diversity, history--that American writers are trying to escape. The thrust towards some kind of perceived “unity” is very strong in the American character-- “I am nothing; I see all”--but so is the thrust towards chaos. If Walt Whitman is writing a poetry which celebrates “the Union of these States,” he is also writing a poetry which is in many ways supremely chaotic. His “Song of Myself” is one of the great structureless poems in the English language.

         At a high point in his great novel, USA, John Dos Passos cries out, “all right we are two nations.” At this point, we are not two but hundreds of nations, each in a state of simultaneous alienation and connectedness. It was the great task of the now defunct twentieth century to make clear the fact that, however much we failed to acknowledge it, chaos--or “multiplicity”--was the actual condition of living in the United States, indeed in the entire world. Two American writers immediately come to mind: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound--both of whom in a sense sacrificed themselves to their burgeoning sense of diversity. This is the beginning of Eliot’s famous poem, The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

         Puritanism is one of the great traditions of the United States, and I believe that one of the defining characteristics of Puritanism is its insistence that we make choices. The great Puritan poem, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), is about a wrong choice. In this, as has often been observed, Puritanism goes very well with consumer Capitalism, which also insists that we make choices: this product rather than that one. The richness of the passage from The Waste Land does not lie in its insistence on an either/or mentality. It lies in allowing a number of isolated contexts to “speak” to one another, to touch, to “illuminate” one another. T.S. Eliot was a deeply divided man; The Waste Land was his attempt to find a “form” which would have room for all aspects of his complex personality. He himself doubted whether the poem succeeded. Ezra Pound edited The Waste Land--cut it somewhat severely--and received credit in the printed version as “il miglior fabbro,” the better craftsman. Asked by an interviewer whether Pound’s editing “changed the intellectual structure of the poem,” Eliot answered, “No. I think it was just as structureless, only in a more futile way, in the longer version.” Writing the poem, the poet remarked, “I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.”

         At the time Eliot wrote The Waste Land, both he and Ezra Pound had been studying the English poet Robert Browning, whose “dramatic monologues” are among the jewels of English literature. In a “dramatic monologue,” the poem is “spoken” by a single person--someone who is not the poet--and we deduce the speaker’s situation from what he says: the effect is as if someone took one of the soliloquies from a Shakespeare play and presented it, entirely apart from the play, as an individual poem. Both Pound and Eliot wrote “dramatic monologues”; the most famous of these is Eliot’s brilliant “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), but Pound wrote several as well. Browning’s dramatic monologues can be extraordinarily complex in their implications, but they always maintain themselves as the utterance of a single speaker. Both Eliot and Pound began to formulate the idea of an individual poem spoken by various speakers with little or no attempt to clarify the distinction of the speakers from one another: voices simply appear. One might call such poems dramatic multilogues or polylogues. Eliot is aware, however, that such a poem implies not only an esthetic method but a self which may be “structureless.” In what may have been a moment of panic, he added a footnote to The Waste Land in which he insisted that the poem--which utterly explodes the idea of a single speaker--was in fact a dramatic monologue, the utterance of the single speaker, Tiresias:

 Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.

         Tiresias is indeed understood in Classical mythology to be androgynous, an “old man with wrinkled dugs,” as Eliot puts it. But he is not understood to be simultaneously young and old--and there are young and old speakers in The Waste Land. It is difficult to see how this figure who is “not indeed a ‘character’” can be said to “unify” the poem--to “become” all the other characters. Rather, Tiresias appears merely as one more voice in a poem which is full of voices.

         Eliot remarked that in writing The Waste Land as a young poet he had “more to say than one knew how to say” and had “something one wanted to put into words and rhythm which one didn’t have the command of words and rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible.” What was not “immediately apprehensible” to Eliot was the depth of his own perception of multiplicity: The Waste Land is a poem which cannot be regarded as the utterance of a single individual, yet in a desperate attempt at “unifying” his “structureless” poem, Eliot asserts that it is--that this “dramatic multilogue” is in fact a dramatic monologue. Pound had similar problems in asserting the “coherence” of the Cantos, crying out at one point “I cannot make it cohere” and ending in an embrace of silence:

Do not move
            Let the wind speak
                        that is paradise

          The American industrialist Henry Ford remarked in 1916 that “history is more or less bunk.” Thinking of his own Cantos, Ezra Pound defined the “epic” as a poem “containing history.” American literature is in many ways an attempt both to contain and to evade history. In her brilliant, peculiar poetry, Emily Dickinson deliberately ignores (fails to notice) the immense fact of the Civil War, whereas Walt Whitman seeks to incorporate the War into his work as primary subject matter. The need to evade history may arise because what T.S. Eliot called “the historical sense” is both strong and threatening. In that ongoing crisis which constitutes American literature, the writer is necessarily thrown back not on the particular issues which create a subject matter--what that European would have called a book’s being “about something”--but on the very conditions of writing itself, conditions which American literature is constantly attempting to define and justify.

         Though 2003 is very far from 1776, the nameless country called The United States was born out of revolution and became the complex focal point of a number of utterly divergent traditions. The vitality of these traditions gives the lie to the idea of “the melting pot,” a concept formulated by Israel Zangwill in 1908: “America is God’s crucible, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming.” “MultiAmerica” is a conversation among people who both agree and disagree--and who live with one another in an extremely problematical way, a way which is constantly “unstable,” constantly attempting to define itself. That is the problem facing American literature as a whole. It draws upon so many traditions and even, as in Eliot’s and Pound’s work, on so many languages that the possibility of its utter lack of unity is very great. Perhaps it will be the burden of the twenty-first century not to despair at this fact but to recognize a new definition of “unity”: not something all-embracing, not something which insists on touching absolutely everything, but a looser coalition in which various patterns and peoples emerge. In a famous passage from his book, Philosophical Investigations, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attempts to find an “essence” for the subject of “games”--a single quality without which a game cannot be considered a game. Witttgenstein is unsuccessful in this attempt. What he finds instead of a single quality--an “essence”--is

a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
         I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.-And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family...And we extend our concept...as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

         Such a vision of “variations set free from a theme” does not insist on reducing everything to one--to an “essence”--but on remaining tentative, open to whatever may occur. It is this openness to history--“the overlapping of many fibres”--matched with the frequent attempt to avoid history altogether, that is one of the great “traditions” of American culture. Such a tradition is necessarily, in the paradoxical words of the American critic Harold Rosenberg, “a tradition of the new.” (The United States is often referred to as “The New World,” as opposed to Europe, which is “The Old World.” And one of the mottos of Ezra Pound’s Cantos is “Make It New.”) In its desire for inclusiveness this tradition is anti Puritan--even to the point of embracing the irrational. That deeply American invention, “free jazz”--in which each instrumentalist is free to choose whatever key signature he wishes--is one way in which the tradition of the new is currently manifesting itself. Some people hear this music as deeply liberating; others hear it as pure chaos. Yet Puritanism maintains a strong presence as well; along with the tradition of the new, there is an equally strong interest in the exclusive, the limited, the old--an interest in what Herman Melville memorably called “forms, measured forms.” From this point of view, history, the Old World, Europe all arrive with a vengeance. American literature thrives on such ambiguity, on the plunging into history as well as the attempt to transcend history entirely--to say nothing of the insistence on choosing which aspects of a complex history to believe. Gore Vidal has pointed out recently that the movies are frequently an entirely fictional assertion of a past which exists only in the imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters. “Do I contradict myself?” asked Walt Whitman in a famous passage from “Song of Myself,”

Very well I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Jack Foley