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PART I James's Hawthorne and the American Anxiety of Influence "And, Reuben," he added, as the weakness of mortality made its way at last, "return, when your wounds are healed and your weariness refreshed,- return to this wild rock, and lay my bones in the grave, and say a prayer over them." - Hawthorne, "Roger Malvin's Burial" I have sent you a little biography of Hawthorne which I wrote, lately, sadly against my will. I wanted to let him alone. -Henry James to Grace Norton, December 21, 1879 In the history of American literature, there have been two sorts of thunder, two very different prophecies, each of which may be considered a metaphor for a powerful and complicated conception of American literary nationality. Melville's Hawthorne says, "No! in thunder," thereby figuring the strong poet's denial of his tradition.! This "No!" may serve for the powerful commitment to a native American literature that would depend upon the repression of the past- of Europe, its history, and the "foreign"- by critic and artist alike. What the thunder also says is: "Give, Sympathize, Control," in T. S. Eliot's poetic translation of the fifth Adhyaya of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in his own fifth and final part to The Waste Land. 2 Eliot's thunder recalls us to the larger tradition of Western literature, and does so by suggesting that our very denial is part of the process by which we shall return to such tradition. Eliot's idea of tradition reveals the essential contradictoriness of literary nationality, and it is just this contradiction that I would figure from the beginning in the thunder's divided speech. For Eliot, a national literature comes to consciousness at the stage at which any young writer must be aware of several generations of writers behind him in his own country and language, and amongst these generations several writers generally acknowledged to be of the great.... It is not necessary that this background should provide him with models for imitation. The The American Anxiety of Influence 3I young writer, certainly, should not be consciously bending his talent to conform to any supposed American or other tradition . The writers of the past, especially of the immediate past, in one's own place and language may be valuable to the young writer simply as something definite to rebel against. He will recognize the common ancestry, but he needn't necessarily like his relatives. For models to imitate, or for styles from which to learn, he may often more profitably go to writers of another country and another language, or of a remoter age. 3 Eliot's defensiveness about his own cultural identity is especially marked in this passage, which is taken from his address at Washington University in St. Louis in 1953. The writer aspiring to a national identity needs a native tradition if only to justify his departures, repressions , and divergences. And yet, earlier in this address, Eliot had noted that the "two characteristics which I think must be found together , in any author whom I should single out as one of the landmarks of national literature," must be "the strong local flavor combined with unconscious universality."4 Eliot finds this combination in Poe, Whitman, and Twain, "three authors ... who have enjoyed the greatest reputation abroad."5 The landmarks, then, of nationality are themselves characterized in part by their international reputations and universal characteristics. Thus, despite his rebellion, the young writer is already involved in the fate of this tradition as part of his ultimate rediscovery of the unconscious universality of his own local sources and influences. "No! in thunder" is thus not the antipode of the thunder's other message. The artist's "control" of his materialhis apparent autonomy or "genius"- merely disguises the necessary surrender of the artist's ego before his strong predecessors ("Give") and the acts of interpreting and understanding that past effected by such surrender ("Sympathize"). In this sense, Melville's "No!" asserts the freedom of the artist only by repressing and then sublimating this act of surrender: the artist's discovery of tradition, history, and his own belatedness as essential to his national character. This prelude is admittedly a strange opening for a reconsideration ofJames's Hawthorne~ that slim contribution to Morley's English Men of Letters series that appeared in 1879. James's Hawthorne~ however, is an imposing and influential work, even in the considerable James canon, when we consider its significance in the development of ''Ameri- [18.116...

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