WORLDS OF STYLE
519
familial history. Most of the houses
in
Cooper answer these ambi–
tions, as does the Grangerford house in
Huckleberry Finn,
the House
of the Seven Gables, Fawns in James's
Golden Bowl,
Sutpen's Hun–
dred in Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!,
Silas Lapham's house, Gats–
by's estate, and even the remade country house of Bellow's
Herzog.
Coincident with some of these are the American theorists of housing
and of space, Horatio Greenough, Louis Sullivan, Frank lloyd
Wright and that great historian of space, power and architecture
Henry Adams.
The building of a house
is
an extension and an expansion of the
self, an act by which the self possesses environment otherwise possessed
by nature. By an act of building, so the theorists I've mentioned would
have it, it is possible to join forces with the powers of nature itself,
to make its style your style. But this conjunction is possible only
if
the
imagination and space are freed from the possessive power of all that
is not nature: from systems of any kind that derive from society and
history, from, often as not, "Europe."
From the outset American writers (or architects) who wanted
in America to create environments in concert with the formative
powers of nature found that they had first to rid themselves and
America of styles imposed upon them by history. Even the men who
dispossessed the Indian could only possess, could only
see
America
through the styles and instrumentalities of the old world. According
to Faulkner's Isaac McCaslin, the land was
"already tainted even before any white man owned it by what
Grandfather and his kind, his fathers, had brought into the new
land which He had vouchsafed them out of pity and sufferance, on
condition of pity and humility and sufferance and endurance, from
that old world's corrupt and worthless twilight as though in the
sailfuls of the old world's tainted wind which drove the ships-..."
"Possession" and "dispossession" find their greatest contemporary ex–
pression in
The Bear,
where the hero rejects both his historical and his
economic inheritance so that he might live in an environment where
time (his relation to family and family past) and space (the wilder–
ness, and the plantation he is to inherit) are redeemed by his sacrifice
of profit from either, his relinquishment both of a sexual and of an
economic identity. In
all
respects he gives up the house of his an–
cestors.
