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PARTISAN RElVIEW
writers in American literature never achieved.
1
For, as everybody knows, American literature is regional, not na–
tional; its characteristics and consciousness are regional-New England,
Southern, Mississippi river-not national or American. The same is true
for European literature as well. Europe does no't represent a unified
culture, at least not until our own times. It has been as loose and feder–
ated an assembly of cultural units as America. The literature and cul–
ture of Europe is regional: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Irish,
not European- the crucial difference being that these regional units
developed a cultural homogeneity and established a national identity
which served as common background for a national literature. Thus
national identity in the different "regions" of Europe coincided, roughly,
with cultural identity. This did not happen in the United States.
"The United States," as James Fenimore Cooper wrote in 1828-
Toqueville made the same observation-"is the first nation that
p0s–
sessed institutions and, of course, distinct opinions of its own, that was
ever dependent on a foreign people for its literature." The Declara–
tion of Independence was a political, not a cultural, document. The
Liberty Bell is a political, not a cultural, symbol. National identity in
the United States rests upon a political structure, an economic system,
a popular ideology and a common history; it does not include a dis–
tinct literary tradition. The culture of New England and the South,
the most significant centers of regional literature in America, was Euro–
pean. The dominant strains of guilt and sin running through this litera–
ture are a European heritage: the Puritans brought their Manichean
conscience with them across the sea; the exploitative, feudal society of
the South was a replica of Europe's. Moreover, neither Massachusetts
nor Mississippi-as radically different in their cultural background and
in their "American" way of life as Dublin and Budapest-became cen-
I The special function of the critic in American life puts a great burden
upon his work and perhaps helps to explain (i) why he commands a special
prestige, (ii) why the voices of criticism often threaten to drown out the voices
of creative imagination, and (iii) why the critic so often employs a magic vo–
cabulary. At the moment, the magic words are "myth" and "archetype." I share
Mr. Arvin's sentiments that "few words have been used more glibly," and there
is a good discussion on the excess of myth criticism in Mr. Chase's book. It would
make an interesting study, I think, to compare the role of the critic and the
historian. The function of the latter, similar to the critic's, seems to be not
only to write
about
the history of the United States, but at the same time to
create a sense of history and national consciousness. This would explain what
I have always found most puzzling: the enormous output of historical works
in a nation not yet two hundred years old and the ceaseless combing and
re–
writing of the same material, especially the lives of the great national heroes
and the great national sagas like the Civil War.
