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STEPHEN SPENDER
In his book
The 20's,
Frederick J. Hoffman cites Gertrude Stein
who characterizes a "real American" as "one whose tradition it has
taken scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realise our grand–
parents, and know ourselves and our history is complete." She thinks
that "big" historic events, such as war, increase the sense of contem–
poraneity. Hoffman quotes from
The Making of Americans:
This then the contemporary recognition, because of the academic
thing known as war having been forced to become contemporary
made everyone not only contemporary
in
act not only contemporary
in thought but contemporary in self-consciousness made every one
contemporary with the modern composition.
The past, in such a view, is a parenthesis within contemporary
subjective consciousness.
Hoffman observes, "as for the American past, writers in the
1920's were concerned for the most part to make it serve their own
ends." Howard Mumford Jones, in the
Theory of American Litera–
ture
(1948), wrote that the aim of the new American writers was
to "rewrite the story of American letters in values known only to the
twentieth century."
Gertrude Stein need not have brought the war into her argu–
ment. At most times in American history, ever since the earliest
beginnings, the bigness of the American "now" has either obliterated
or absorbed into itself the past.
American Nowness exploits the truism that the past can only
attain consciousness through the minds of contemporaries; European
Pastness exploits the truism that the immensely greater part of human
consciousness is the works of the dead. To be conscious only of the
present - or of the past only insofar as it is useful to the present–
is to have consciousness confined within the collective subjectivity of
a particular generation which happens, by the accident of birth, to
be alive at a particular moment.
To have a consciousness which is a vehicle of the past is to get
outside the current subjective contemporaneity into the wider objec–
tivity of past consciousness. Of course the past does not survive ex–
cept
in
those fragments which are imaginative and intellectual
achievements contained in monuments, customs, books and works of
