Hans Meyerhoff
AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY *
I have been browsing, of late, through a number of critical
studies in American literature, and I have been thinking about the image
of America they convey. Instead of reviewing Mr. Chase's book, which
was the editorial assignment, I have indulged myself by pursuing some
general reflections suggested by these books. The views expressed are
not those of a professional in American literature, but of a layman
who came to this country at the threshold of his adult life.
To begin with, the literary critic seems to be looking for something
that isn't there. He is always trying to discover what is "essentially"
or "characteristically" American in the literature of the United States.
He is constantly reaching for something, say, a sense of cultural identity
or a grand synthesis of the cultural life, which was beyond the grasp
of the imaginative minds who created American literature. He acts,
in Mr. Kazin's words, as the great lay philosopher in America. Like
Mencken, the early Van Wyck Brooks or Edmund Wilson, he may
try
to reshape the cultural ideal by a radical critique of society; like T. S.
Eliot or some of the New Critics, he may cultivate a cultural heritage
which does not correspond to social reality.
In
either case, the critic
is engaged in an enterprise which vies with the making of literature
itself. His work is part of the making of an American culture. His aim
is to validate the myth of a national consciousness, which the great
*
Richard Chase,
The American Novel and Its Tradition,
Doubleday Anchor
Original, 1957, $.95; Harry Levin,
The Power of Blackness,
Knopf, 1958, $4.00;
and
Literature
in
America,
an anthology selected and introduced by Philip Rahv,
Meridian Books, 1957, $1.95. My comments are based primarily on material in
these three books, with an occasional assist from D. H. Lawrence's
Studies in
Classic American Literature,
Doubleday Anchor (reprint), 1951, $.75.
