THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE
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dolph Bourne remarked, easily turned into "caricatures of desire."
The novel, the poem, the play-all contributed to the development
of a complete symptomatology of sexual frustration and release.
In retrospect much of this literature seems but a naive inversion of
the dear old American innocence, a turning inside out of inbred
fear and reticence, but the qualities one likes about it are its posi–
tiveness of statement, its zeal, and its pathos of the limited view.
The concept of experience was then still an undifferentiated
whole. But as the desire for personal liberation, even if only from
the less compulsive social pressures, was partly gratified and the
tone of the literary revival changed from eagerness to disdain, the
sense of totality gradually wore itself" out. Since the 1920's a
process of atomization of experience has forced each of its spokes–
men into a separate groove from which he can step out only at the
risk of utterly disorienting himself. Thus, to cite some random
examples, poetic technique became the special experience of Ezra
Pound, language that of Gertrude Stein, the concrete object was
appropriated by W. C. Williams, super-American phenomena by
Sandburg and related nationalists, Kenneth Burke experienced
ideas (which is by no means the sa:me as thinking them), Archibald
MacLeish experienced public attitudes, F. Scott Fitzgerald the
glamor of the very rich, Hemingway death and virile sports, and
so on and so forth. Finally Thomas Wolfe plunged into a chaotic
recapitulation of the cult of experience as a whole, traversing it in
all directions and ending nowhere.
Though the crisis of the 1930's arrested somewhat the progress
of the experiential mode, it nevertheless managed to put its stamp
on the entire social-revolutionary literature of the decade. A com–
parison of European and American left-wing writing of the same
period will at once show that whereas Europeans like Malraux and
Silone enter deeply into the meaning of political ideas and beliefs,
Americans touch only superficially on such matters, as actually
their interest is fixed almost exclusively on the class war as an
experience which, to them at least, is new and exciting. They suc–
ceed in representing incidents of oppression and revolt, as well as
sentimental conversions, but conversions of the heart and mind
they merely sketch in on the surface or imply in a gratuitous
fashion. (What does a radical novel like
The Grapes of Wrath
contain, from an ideological point of view, that agitational jour-
