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PARTISAN REVIEW
ancient curse, for whence did the pioneers bring the image of conquest,
exploitation, power, and millionaire mansions but from the rape of
Europa.
All the books I have read cite the closing paragraphs from
The
Great Gatsb
y
as a particularly moving testimony to the American dream:
"As the moon rose higher, I became aware of the old island that
flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new
world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's
house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all
dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his
breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the
last time in hisory with something commensurate to his capacity for
wonder." Compelled into an
aesthetic contemplation
he neither under–
stood nor desired- how could he, for he was a Dutch sailor, an English
divine, a German soldier, an Irish peasant, a Jewish tailor, a Mexican
grape-picker, or an African slave. He did not come here to contemplate;
he came to conquer, to work, and to serve, to take possession of, and
despoil, "the fresh, green breast of the new world." Like Gatsby, "he
didn't know that it (i.e., the dream) was already behind him," that
he could develop in America, on a larger and more ambitious scale,
only what would have happened-and what
has
happened-in Europe.
If
one were to play the game of mythic image,s, one might specu–
late (as none of the critics do, surprisingly), that Moby Dick, the
white whale, the great animal-God representing the unconquerable
forces of nature, the mammalian sea monster as a substitute for the
great earth-mother-that Moby Dick is a symbol of America and that
the evil King Ahab, and his self-destructive assault upon the white
whale with the obviously phallic symbols of barbed harpoons, is a noble
nineteenth-century predecessor of the ignoble and impotent Popeye in
our times. The whole idea of kingship in America, from George
III
to
the captains of industry and the kingfishes of politics, is mfected by
original sin. Fatherhood is not an apostolic succession, but a fatal flaw,
a source of overweening pride, excessive guilt, and hidden defeat. The
myth critics can take it from here; but it isn't far to another prominan't
theme in the American 'Odyssey, Telemachus in search of a father.
Initiation and exorcism, too, are ambivalent symbols. They are
funeral rites of the past in a twofold sense: to banish the ghosts of the
Old World and to bury the burden of guilt acquired in building a new
home. They are also rites of propitiation, of purging the powers of
blackness, of making peace with ancestral voices in the new world. Few
