NOVEL AND AMERICA
47
mock themselves as they use such devices; no wonder Mistress
Hibbins in
The Scarlet Letter
and Fedallah in
Moby Dick
are
treated half jocularly, half melodramatically, though each repre–
sents in
his
book the Faustian pact, the bargain with the Devil,
which our authors have always felt as the essence of the Ameri–
can experience. However shoddily or ironically treated, horror
is
essential to our literature. It
is
not merely a matter of terror fill–
ing the vacuum left by the suppression of sex in our novels, of
Thanatos standing in for Eros. Through these gothic images are
projected certain obsessive concerns of our national life : the am–
biguity of our relationship with Indian and Negro, the ambiguity
of our encounter with nature, the guilt of the revolutionist who
feels himself a parricide-and, not least of
all,
the uneasiness of
the writer who cannot help believing that the very act of com–
posing a book is Satanic revolt. "Hell-fired," Hawthorne called
The Scarlet Letter,
and Melville thought
his
own
Moby Dick
a
"wicked book."
The American writer inhabits a country at once the dream
of Europe and a fact of history; he lives on the last horizon of
an endlessly retreating vision of innocence-on the "frontier,"
which is to say, the margin where the theory of original goodness
and the fact of original sin come face to face. To express this
"blackness ten times black" and to live by it in a society in which,
since the decline of orthodox Puritanism, optimism has become
the chief effective religion, is a complex and difficult task.
It was to the novel that the American writer turned most
naturally, as the only
popular
form of sufficient magnitude for
his
vision. He was, perhaps, not sufficiently sophisticated to real–
ize that such learned forms as epic and tragedy had already out–
lived their usefulness; but, working out of a cultural background
at best sketchy and unsure, he felt insecure before them. His ob–
ligations urged
him
in the direction of tragedy, but traditional
verse tragedy was forbidden him; indeed, a chief technical prob-
