PARTISAN REVIEW
IIpar from which Billy Budd was suspended; "To them, a chip of
it was as a piece of the Cross."
This seems at first sight a rather haphazard selection of Ameri–
can novels, by six such different and apparently unconnected writers
as Faulkner, West, Ellison, Wolfe, Hemingway and Melville. Yet
their works are comparable. They have, for one thing, a common
denominator in their tragic quality, thus raising the question of the
tragic elements in American literature, or, for that matter, in any
democratic literature. This also brings us back to the question of
tradition, in which tragedy is surely a factor. And while the con–
troversy about tradition, or the lack of it, and about its advantages
or disadvantages, continues in American literary criticism, it is worth
pointing out that the determining forces of American literature differ
from those of Europe, and particularly from those at work in solidly
institutionalized England. In America these forces appear not so
much in the form of authoritatively preserved social laws and cus–
toms, made concrete and visible in decor and etiquette, as in the
form (or formlessness) of modes of thought and imagination that
occur and recur
in
American cultural history. The figure of Christ
is an element of this imaginative tradition, and we shall try to dis–
cover its function and meaning by tracing its role in American
cultural history.
II
The role of Christ
in
the American tradition has been
varied and dramatic; he has been by turns the suppressed savior,
a rebel, and a liberator. In the middle of the nineteenth century we
encounter him as the opponent of the Calvinist minister, God's rep–
resentative in New England. Among the Puritans Christ occupied a
humble position, strikingly different from his role among other Pro–
testants as well as among Catholics. Puritanism was primarily an Old
Testament creed, and its dominant doctrine of limited atonement
severely restricted the rank and efficacy of Christ. He was then the
prince in beggar's garb, but, like the hero of the legend, he finally
emerged from neglect and suppression to assume his rightful mission
of liberation and redemption. As strict Calvinism declined, Christ's
stature increased; and for those who quarrelled with Puritan doctrine
