SEVEN QUESTIONS
47
Harold Rosenberg:
I.
What is a "usable past"? The phrase seems to me most intelligible if
it is taken to mean a literary tendency to which a writer deliberately
attaches his own work in order to modify it. Thus Thomas Mann con·
aciously
uses
the romantic movement of the 19th century, and Eliot French
symbolism and English metaphysical poetry.
For an original artist this is a very peculiar orientation, not far
removed from that of the academicians. The writer stands outside his work
and builds it up from carefully selected materials. His posture implies a
readiness to regard himself as a representative figure, a literary landmark.
It implies also that the professional literary practice has been raised to
the
level of a philosophy-a philosophy of the practical value of Art.
One sets out ·to use (and change) the past o-l!_iterature in the interests of
its
future; and through this one hopes to change the world.
Merely to imitate, even to imitate persistently certain selected models,
is
n·ot to "use" the past in this sense. Imitation is more naive than such
111ing, has a closer resemblance to life itself. Long before we have cul–
tural, or even conscious aims, we imitate. And the writer who does not
aeek
primarily to affect the history of literature tends to live in his work
rather than to use it. Baudelaire establishes himself inside of Poe as a
base
of operations; he apes him but does not use him. Through Poe he
achieves a heightened sense of himself, whereas the "users" are always
talking .of the "self-abnegation of the Artist." Despite his deep and lumi–
nous consciousness, Baudelaire is simple in his mimicry, which absorbs
Poe
into a present act of knowing. I still find much human appeal in the
writer who is conscious by means of the past though not of the- past as
a
means.
Another distinction is that imitation is always of individuals, while
to
elect a section of the past as usable indicates an intent to capture and
exploit, for the sake of special interests, a specific historical area. In short,
the
whole idea of "usable past" is shot through with the politics of art.
The American cultural past consists of the total results of a combined
o&icial using and inspired individual aping of the European past. Begin·
ling with Independence, American writers and artists have behaved in the
llltive tradition by exchanging in rotation the following masters: British
and
French classicism, Rhenish romanticism, the Great of All Ages
(Transcendentalism), Italian classicism {mainly in sculpture), French
realism (social and psychological), French symbolism, etcetera. In Amer·
ice,
though not in Europe, to
be
an American has always meant to be a
properly dated European. Today, for instance, some people believe it
Ileana to be a Russian or German patriot.
Outside this American culture-always under two or more flags-–
Uft
lived the millions of native and immigrant americans who missed
the
chance to study with Thorwaldsen or at the Ecole des Beaux Arts or
to
enjoy the regulation Wanderjahre at Gottingen and Montmartre. These
