AMERICAN ODYSSEY
451
documents in American literature are more poignant than those cele–
brating this act of propitiation,
e.g.,
the friendship of Huck and
Jim,
the marriage of Ishmael and Queequeg, the initiation of the young boy
in
The Bear,
by Sam Fathers! In works such as these,
ther~
is a brief
moment of
satori,
of insight and purgation, of reconciliation and peace.
There is a momentary fulfillment of the "dream of a new human rela–
tionship" on the banks of the Mississippi. But this moment of fulfill–
ment is as "romantic"-what is it but another version of the pastoral
myth?-as Poe's tales of blackness, despair, and terror. For Huck's suc–
cessors soon beat it to the banks of the Seine, Thames, and Tiber.
Fitzgerald was right: the past prevailed over the future. "So we
beat on," he concludes, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
into the past"-to wit, Chartres and St. Mont-Michel, the Sal:zjburg
seminar and the festival of "two worlds" in Spoleto, whose mayor, fit–
tingly, is a Communist, borne back into ancient myths and archetypes,
the art treasures of the Old World, the "cultural heritage'" of the great
books, the Greek drama, and the wisdom of Zen. The exodus did not
discover the promised land. The American Odyssey ends where it be–
gan-in Europe.
The Prodigal Son has come home ; and he has been welcomed back,
with mixed feelings, to be sure, but, ultimately, with a Stoic acceptance
that it could not be otherwise, not only because Europe has ceased to
function as an independent political entity, not only because it has
caught up with the American
Wirtschaftswunder,
not only because
America has picked up the check, but also because, like Eliot's Tiresias,
it has foreseen and fore-suffered it all. In this sense, the American ima–
gination was in advance of Europe: it reacted, with romantic despair,
against the coming of a "new world" in which private dreams would
tum into public nightmares. In this sense, the classic American writers
were wiser, older, and more "modern": they didn't find anything worth
identifying with in this new world which was the core of shared exper–
ience in the United States and which anticipated the fate of EurOpe.3
It was Baudelaire who discovered the universal vision of Poe long! be–
fore contemporary American writers gained fame and fortune in France.
4 The name Faulkner chose is, of course, a literal symbol, substituting the
idea of a great "black" father for the discredited, guilt-ridden tradition of the
great white father.
S The American experience, being post-industrial, was ahead of Europe's.
The Russian experience, being pre-industrial, was behind Europe's. This seems
to have been a particularly advantageous position for both American and
Russian writers to anticipate, and diagnose, the impending crisis of Western
culture.
"
