The Uses of American Fiction

TheUses of Americanfiction ROBERT ADOLPH Kenneth S. Lynn. Visions of America: Eleven Literary HistoricalEssays. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, 1973. $9.50. 205 pp. Although the classic American novelists have usually been sharp critics of their society, the criticism has seldom been overtly political. Melville protested injustices in the navy, Mark Twain supported labour unions and expressed a bitter anti-imperialist feeling, but the best of these authors - Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Faulkner - were for the most part aloof, disdainful conservatives, antinomians, or simply unpolitischerMenschen . The Dickenses, Tolstoys, Malraux, Manns, Silones, and Grasses - novelists of the very first order with passionate political concerns and activities - have not appeared in North America. Some critics, however, are anxious to create such a canon of politicized artists. Kenneth Lynn does not attempt to summarize whatever overall purpose he might have had in mind, but there is a remarkable unity of method and theme in these eleven essays published from 1957 to 1971 and now gathered under the rather flat-footed title Visions of America. The book appears to be an effort to discover such a tradition of engage literature on this side of the Atlantic. Aware of their apolitical character, Professor Lynn wisely steers clear of the greatest American fictional classics (there is an essay on Huckleberry Finn, but unlike the others it is psychological more than political analysis). Instead he spends most of his time on novelists of the second rank, such as Howells, Stowe, Norris, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, chiefly to upgrade or rehabilitate their reputations on the ground that each of them penetrated the mask of genteel literary traditions to portray American social reality. For Professor Lynn this reality, the America worth writing about, was poverty, injustice, and violence. The final essay is a survey of writers who recognized the violence under the placid surface of American life, while in other pieces Professor Lynn sees Thoreau, Emma Goldman, Constance Rourke, and Edmund Wilson struggling like the novelists to come to grips with the dismal social truths beneath Whiggish and bourgeois gentility. For Professor Lynn the sociology of literary creation is crucial; all that men do is determined by their childhood upbringing and the economic THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. V, NO, :I.,SPRING :1.974 struggle.Every article therefore has a section on each author's perception of how the dream of success shaped American life as well as Professor Lynn'sperception of how it affected the author himself. There is a good dealof psychologizing about the authors' temperaments and childhoods, especiallytheir relations to their fathers, while the discussions of the authors' own quest for success descends at times to Franklinesque reckoningsof royalties and the like. The author of The Dream of Success is in other words a tough-minded psychological and economic determinist, whichplaces him close to the tradition of naturalism. And in fact he has much sympathy for the naturalistic writers; the chapters on Norris and Dreiserare to my mind the best in the book. Professor Lynn's sour vision of America leads him to some fresh perspectives. There are rich veins in these essays, some of which have becomewidely known and reprinted. I have in mind the fine sections on lonelinessin American writing, revealing itself before the Civil War as AhabianWille zur Macht and afterwards in works as diverse as HuckleberryFinnand The Ambassadors as wistfulness, a sense of missed opportunities and of life's having passed by., followed by a return to Nietzscheanquesting in Norris and Dreiser. With his interest in success, ProfessorLynn has special awareness of money in literature, especially for its stifling effect on Howells, its virtually sensuous appeal for Dreiser and Fitzgerald, and its ironic use by Thoreau. Then there are excellent summaries, especially in the essay on violence, of another specialty of Professor Lynn's, the tradition of southwestern humour, with its Whiggish ,anti-Jacksonian, anti-democratic bias. Constance Rourke and Emma Goldman richly deserve their eulogies. Finally, I do not think it amiss to notethat Professor Lynn, like the authors he most admires, has had the courageand integrity to translate his theoretical social concerns into practicalefforts by leaving the security of the Harvard English department for the Federal University in Washington...