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RICHARD POIRIER
within its covers a conflict too often discussed as
if
it merely split
American fiction, or the works of American writers, down the middle.
On the one side we have the "romantic," and on the other we have
the "realistic" or "naturalistic" schools. None of the interesting Amer–
ican novelists can be placed on either side of this dichotomy. Nearly
all of them are writing in protest against the environment of the "rest
of life" which contradicts the dreams of their heroes and heroines.
The distinction to be made is between those whose protests sometimes
take the form of creating in their works an alternative environment, as
J
ames and sometimes Faulkner have tried to do, as Mark Twain for
a while did do, and those for whom the environment of the real world
simply overpowers, as it does in
Huckleberry Finn,
any effort of the
imagination to transcend it. In this case the imagination, as in the
novels of Dreiser and Edith Wharton, can only reproduce the effect
of environment as force.
II
The idea that through language it is possible to create environ–
ments radically different from those supported by economic, political
and social systems is one of the sustaining myths of any literature. It
is a myth in one sense because
it
is historically invalid: the enormous
contrivances of style called forth by this effort are themselves an ad–
mission that the environment thus created has an existence only in
style. Not God, not religion, not reality, history or nature, but style
is its only authority. It is a myth in another sense because writers do
want to believe, repetitively, despite history and their own experience,
in the transcendent power of their own stylistic enterprise. The repeti–
tion and persistence of this myth has been especially evident in Amer–
ican literature for the obvious reason that for the only time in history
men could, with the prospects of a new continent, actually believe
in their power at last to create an environment congenial to an ideal
self. American literature is thus full of images equivalent to the
frontier; as Edwin Fussell shows, Walden is the West for Thoreau.
On the pond he can build an environment for himself in which not
only wilderness but also the civilizing technologies are made sub–
servient to him.
Walden
is only one of the examples of something like
an obsession in American literature with plans and efforts to build
houses, to appropriate space to one's desires, perhaps to inaugurate
therein a dynasty that shapes time to the dimensions of personal and
