The Form of American Romance by Edgar A. Dryden (review)

Studies in American Fiction251 Dryden, Edgar A. The Form of American Romance. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988. 269 pp. Cloth: $27.00. Ever since Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition appeared in 1957, the literary term "romance" has provided a defining vocabulary for the critics of American literature. Edgar A. Dryden is no exception. By returning to the works of Sir Walter Scott, he develops in The Form of American Romance an approach to "romance" that brings to the foreground the acts of writing and reading and the problematic presence of the reader in the text who avidly pursues, often to the dismay of the author, the "charm of story" (p. 18). Persuaded by A. C. Hamilton's work on Elizabethan romance, Dryden concludes that "the experience of reading becomes the essential theme of romance" (p. xi) because in romance alone the reader is purposefully seduced into the magic of the tale. Dryden selects five American novels to explore this "curious and troubling moment where the act of reading appears to mark and disturb the American novelist's passage from life to writing and to entangle experience with an intertextual system of relationships" (p. xi). Not surprisingly, the novels included are by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, William Faulkner, and John Barth, but some of the individual texts interpreted, such as The Marble Faun and Pierre, generate a tension with conventional readings of these canonical writers. In a mildly Derridean fashion, Dryden finds in all the texts a conflict between genre and generation. In American romance, the "ghostly figure of a reader" instigates a "genealogical crisis" in the text so that the author is left with searching for "authority" rather than assuming its legitimacy (pp. 213—14). Hawthorne's The Marble Faun is "dominated by the difficulties of representing and interpreting the problems of writing and reading" (p. 34). Melville's Pierre is marked by disenchantment and "written against the 'countless tribes of common novels and countless tribes of common dramas' as well as against those 'profounder emanations of the human mind' . . .; yet it is doomed to absorb and repeat them" (p. 106). James' The Portrait ofa Lady is contaminated by the crass demands of a vulgar reader: "The principle of composition is always dislocated by the principle of consumption, the act of reading in perpetual conflict with the act of writing" (p. 136). Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! searches for the "mystery of relatedness" (p. 141) but is constantly reminded of "radical absence" (p. 167) and is infused by the sense that "one's own design is subject to the desires and expectations of others, desires that complicate and tangle ordinary lines of relations" (p. 143). Finally, in Barth's Letters, "claims of authorial distance, detachment, and omniscience are put into question by other letters that serve to question stable family structures, clear, unambiguous meanings, and a predictable future" (p. 202). Taking to task Nina Baym's and, to some extent, Evan Carton's skepticism about "romance" as a category convenient to critics but not authors, and one that serves the interests of defining a national literature, Dryden argues that the term is exclusive (by this he implies the current critical debate that privileges "romance" as the literary form and hence prevents discussions of novels by women and minorities) not because of "particular critical theories" but because of "a set of problems inherent in the relation between genealogy and genericity" (p. 223). But in the end, genre becomes for Dryden, like other critics, merely another anxiety-ridden act of "fathering." Interestingly enough, Nina Baym in her article "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors" (AQ, 33 [1981], 123—39) critiques exactly that tendency in many contemporary theories of narrative. Starting from the criticism of Harold Bloom, Baym finds a curious slippage between the phrases "to author" and "to father" (p. 138). The "genealogical crisis" that the author confronts when the reader reminds "him" of his fragile "authority" is precisely the displacement of the legitimating author within the narrative as patriarchal event. 252Reviews For instance, in Dryden's interpretation of Faulkner, the "ghostly presence" of echoing voices in the text...