Manfred Puetz
IMAGINATION AND SELF-DEFINITION
In
his address at the National Book Award ceremony in 1953
Ralph Ellison stated that it was a shortcoming of contemporary
American literature that it lacked "the passionate will
to
dominate
reality as well as the laws of art." All those, he continued, who
struggled with the shifting forms of the American experience should
remember advice once given to Menelaus when he was in pursuit of
Proteus:
to
grasp the eternal shapeshifter firmly and never let go of him
unless he turned into the one form that represented himself.
In
the years since Ellison's speech, American novelists have done
their best to make up for this shortcoming (though maybe not in the
way Ellison had in mind). Yet, at the same time they have rejected his
advice. Their fantasies have come to dominate reality, but in the
process of exchanging blows with it, they have merely accepted the
forms of Protean existence.
One question has always been of extreme concern in the American
novelist's struggle with reality. The question is, where does the
individual stand in the context of this world or, in terms of a more
personal perspective, what is the form of the hero's self as it is found
among the forms of the world? At the end of the eighteenth century
John de Crevecoeur asked in his
Letters From an American Farmer,
"What is an American?" Ever since, such questions have been echoing
and resounding through American literature, slowly changing their
LOne from the general
to
the specific, until they reflected the hero's
strictly personal worry, "Who am I, this particular American?" The
seemingly final stage of the quest towards self-definition was a stage
many characters of the modern American novel shared with what
rapidly became an assortment of international literary stock-figures.
The "absurd," the "existential" and the "alienated" heroes of postwar
fiction, on which we have heard such profuse comments, were all in the
same position of striving for a definite sense of the self but failing to
achieve it.
