tfOVEl AND AMERICA
'49
novelists to find a mode of projecting their conflicts which would
contain all the dusky horror of gothic romance and yet be palat–
able to discriminating readers, palatable first of
all
to themselves.
Such a mode can, of course, not be subsumed among any of
those called "realism," and one of the chief confusions in our
understanding of our own literature has arisen from our failure
to recognize this fact clearly enough. Our fiction
is
essentially
and at its best nonrealistic, even anti-realistic; long before
sym–
bolisme
had been invented in France and exported -
to
America,
there was a full-fledged native tradition of symbolism. That tra–
dition was born of the profound contradictions of our national
life and sustained by the inheritance from Puritanism of a "typi–
cal" (even allegorical) way of regarding the sensible world-not
as an ultimate reality but as a system of signs to be deciphered.
For too long, historians of American fiction have mistakenly
tried to impose on the course of a brief literary history a notion
of artistic "progress" imported from France or, more precisely
perhaps, from certain French literary critics. Such historians
have been pleased to speak of "The Rise of Realism" or "The
Triumph of Realism," as if the experiments of Hawthorne or
Poe or Melville were helf-misguided fumblings toward the final
excellence of William Dean Howells!
But the moment at which Flaubert was dreaming
Madame
BovaTY
was the moment when Melville was finding
Moby
Dick,
and considered as a "realistic" novel the latter is a scandalous
botch. To speak of a counter-tradition to the novel, of the tradi–
tion of "the romance" as a force in our literatute, is merely' to
repeat the rationalizations of our writers themselves; it is cer–
tainly to fail to be
specific
enough for real understanding. Our
fiction
is
not merely in flight from the physical data of the ac–
tual world, in search of a (sexless and dim) Ideal; from Charles
Brockden Brown to William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, Paul
Bowles or John Hawkes, it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly,
