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PARTISAN REVIEW
"ideas," and he esteems everything real according to " values." Alter
seems inescapably driven to find the "idea" of the novel and then to
weigh novels according to a "value." Hi book i so good , so rich .in
modest and lucid intell igence, that it compels me to wonder whether
we ever can escape a metaphysical and "humanist" way of thinking
about truth. Perhaps we can 't-or shou ldn 't.
It
may be, as Leavis
thinks, that the critic's ta k is to define and judge. But perhaps his rea l
task is to let the work live in and through an act of understanding. And
Alter's true and very considerable merit, I think, lies not in his "ideas,"
but in the fact that he so often and so fully accomplishes that task.
DONALD MARSHALL
THE WRITER AS AMERICA
THE PURITAN ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN
SELF. By Sacvan
Bercovitc h. Yale University Press. $15.00.
We may be nearing the end of something in the study of
American literature. The fifties and sixties gave rise to an astonishing
body of criticism concerned with what is distinctively American about
American writing. The question itself had interesting cu ltura l and
political origins in the postwar years, and was not the property of any
exclusive ideology. Underlying the work of figures as diverse in literary
and social outlook as Perry Mi ll er, Marius Bewley, Richard Chase,
Henry Nash Smith, R.W.B. Lewis, Roy Harvey Pearce; Leslie Fiedler,
Charles Feidelson, Leo Marx, and Richard Poirier ran a common
premise that the classic writers hared discoverable "American" charac–
teristics, and that, once discovered, these characteristics wou ld -reveal
the cu lture itself. The term "American" provided the major, if not
always acknowledged, problematic of the criticism. And the centrality
of the literature to the cu lture was taken for granted.
The roots of this critical outburst wou ld be rewarding to study in
their own right, and before long someone is likely to undertake that
