Vol. 25 No. 3 1958 - page 453

AMERICAN ODYSSEY
453
Pound, Thornton Wilder, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Sartre, Mari–
tain, or Sir Herbert Read.
In
fact, the division of modern literature
(or thought) into "American" and "European" is now as arbitrary
and meaningless as the distinction between American and English litera–
ture has always been. Dostoevsky and Gide, Proust and Joyce, Kafka
and Camus, the angry young men or the beat generation are all symbols
of a universal literature in the Western world. The novel being a uni–
versal commodity, the critic himself becomes the most internationally–
minded figure, a cultural bridge, as we say, a busy go-between in the
exchange and fusion of two worlds. Try as he may to discover what
is "essentially" or "characteristically" American, he always ends up,
sooner or later, by rediscovering "the great tradition," which is not
American.
Thus Ulysses has come home to preside over the Atlantic Com–
munity, an international culture in which the images of Europe and
America blend and blur. And the writer faces the same old task whether
he lives on this side of the Atlantic or on the other. 'He must begin all
over again-to find, identify, and preserve himself as an authentic voice
in the wilderness. Nothing has changed, after all, as if Columbus had
never sailed the ocean blue.
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