Marginality and After: The Making of Modern American Literature

Margip.ality andAfter: TheMakingof Modern American Literature Dorothy Seidman Bilik.Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust ConsciousnessinRecent Jewish American Fiction. Middletown,Conn.: Wesleyan UniversityPress, 1981.216pp. Marcus Klein.foreigners: TheMakingof American Literature, 1900-1940. Chicago: The Universityof Chicago Press, 1981. 332 +xxipp. Robert Adolph Marginality is the theme of both these books. "I have wanted to say that the American literature of this century has been created by people who have known themselves to be marginal Americans, sometimes by an act of imagination and sometimes by right of birth. The cultural fact of America has consequently been either rejected or, repeatedly, created-but never merelyaccepted because in an abruptly urbanized, industrialized, radicalized and ghettoized society, there has been no American culture available for mereacceptance." So Marcus Klein concludes on page 288 offoreigners (the initialletter curiously lower-case), his large-scale survey of American literature in the first four decades of this century. This is the epoch when Alienation became the normal stance of the American author, to be succeeded after WorldWar II by what Klein, inAfter Alienation (1964),has called Accommodation . By 1900,argues Klein inforeigners, the myths and values of rural and small-townAmerica were rapidly receding under the impact of industrialism, urbanization and the New (i.e., non-northern European) Immigration. The best-known rejecters of this new American culture by acts of imagination weremostly sensitive, well-educated, anti-Semitic, sexist, patrician and WASP: Henry Adams, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sooner or later they all identified themselves with High Arnoldian Culture, fleeing the Great American Booboisie and the roaring vulgarity of the Lower East Side in order to drink at the fountainhead Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14,Number 4, Winter 1983,481-87 482 Robert Adolph of the eternal truths of mainstream Western tradition in the capitals of Western Europe. By so doing they sought to remove themselves from time and space, that is, from History, or at least its American variety. Adams retreats to Mont St. Michel and Chartres, Eliot to Canterbury, Pound to another version ofthe Middle Ages, Hemingway to his Great Good Place in the mountains of Spain, and so on. These writers represent for Klein the reactionary or right wing of the modernist movement that has shaped modem American literature. They are the Highbrows, inVan Wyck Brooks's sense. Their situation is paradoxical. They see themselves as marginal Americans despite-or perhaps, in lightof new conditions because of-their aristocratic credentials and instinctive understanding of themselves as keepers of the flame of original American traditions. Rejecters of modernism, these exiles nevertheless in their disillusionment with the modem world create (liketheir contemporaries the Dadaists and Surrealists) the artistic devices which define it. Finally, and perhaps most paradoxically of all, in their flight from American time and space they are performing that most American of all actions, lighting out for the territories. Except that now the territories are the Left Bank and Pamplona. Klein is much more interested, however, in the literature and culture of the non-elite back home struggling to define themselves as American rather than as Western European. They too see themselves as marginal, though in a very different way from the Adamses, Jameses and Eliots. Immigrants, ghetto-dwellers, ethnics, blacks, dispossessed Southern farmers, working stiffs and assorted urban lumpenproletarians: these are the principal lowercase "foreigners" of Klein's title. All see themselves as outsiders, yet each of these groups produces authorial representatives who discover in their very marginality a distinctively American essence. Much the same can be saidof the elitist exiles, especially when they must return. But where these reactionaries seek a way out of history in contemplation of eternal Forms, Klein's radicals attempt to enter history. For them words are weapons in historical time- and space-bound struggles. Especially in the Depression, these struggles normally involved at least a temporary alliance with some kind of Marxist grouping. To put the matter another way: where the reactionaries go to Europe to re-discover the Tradition, the radical kind of "foreigners" attempt to create a new tradition out of their own experiences at home, even if this means domesticating the European ideology of...