Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002
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Reviewed by
The American Mystery consists of essays by Tony Tanner published between 1988 and 1998, except the last one on Thomas Pynchon that appears for the first time in this collection. Although he had planned this book, Tanner passed away before it was published. It begins with a Foreword by Edward Said, who Tanner had known since the beginning of their careers in the 1960s, and an Introduction by Ian F. A. Bell entitled, “Tony Tanner on American means of writing and means of writing America.” Describing Tanner’s appreciation of America’s literary language, Bell says that “Tanner notices a prevailing tendency to fade, [as in] the frequency of words like ‘melt’ in The Blithedale Romance, and asks us to see how ‘dematerialization, attenuation, liquidation, vaporization and other words of desubstantiation seem variously to dominate the changing atmosphere’” of American literature and culture. As Bell puts it, “[w]ords fail here, do not build; deliberately, they create no picture” in the struggle to deal with the contradictions of American history. These contradictions stem from what Tanner describes as the basic idea of America’s self-conception: “The new country, the United States of America, depended for its existence both as entity and concept on two things—appropriated, surveyed, legally apportioned land; and a sense of an uncharted, inexhaustibly bounteous west, a plenitude of possibilities: measurement and dream.” Critics may see in Tanner’s handling of this binary opposition a deconstructive tendency; however, one can also see here Tanner’s appreciation of the American sense of a transcendental dimension hovering on the margins of daily life.
Tanner conceives of the dematerialization of language in American literature, the move beyond the structure of binary opposites, as a continuous process of self-invention. This move involves literary strategies of transformation: the construction of ontological identity, character, and modes of representation. As Tanner observers in chapter one on Emerson, if life was in “flux” or constant “metamorphosis,” then writing should be the same. As Emerson says, “In the beginning of America, was not only the word but the contradiction of the word.” Emerson asserts that “Nature hates calculators; her methods are salutatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; . . . and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive on casualties . . . The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely” (“Experience”; Tanner’s italics). Tanner applies these qualities to Emerson’s own writing. Emerson believed that the “vast talent and power” of Napoleon’s activity comes to no result, while the “vast talent and power” of writers leave definite traces. Power is inseparable from change: “Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit (“Circles”). Emerson’s style of speech and writing, which seemed to be in permanent transition, oscillated between dissolving and congealing.
Similarly, in The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s language seems constantly to vaporize or dissolve together with the world being described. In this Romance Miles Coverdale, the narrator, is a writer like Hawthorne and sees his world at Brook Farm dissolve away, as if being inscribed and erased for the reader simultaneously. As Tanner says in chapter two, Coverdale undergoes a dissolution of self as he finds his environment becoming completely defamiliarized. Tanner notes that The Blithedale Romance does not ask what constitutes the real, much less the Real, as reality is only “known by the conviction that you have not got it.” As an American Romantic, however, Hawthorne may be suggesting that to know that reality is not real could be the beginning of a Real experience. Tanner tracks the binaries between fact and fiction, forgery and real money as a means of determining the “true” copy; whether “forging” the uncreated conscience of one’s race or forging money, “both ‘forgers’ work by putting falsities/fictions into circulation.” Ultimately, for Coverdale, America becomes “another spot, and an utter strangeness,” as apparently it does for Hawthorne, of whom Henry James said, “He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere.”
In chapters three, four, and five Tanner analyzes Herman Melville’s sea-faring tales, White-Jacket and Moby-Dick, as well as The Confidence-Man, expanding on the theme of “reversibility” he finds in Hawthorne. He defines “reversibility” in terms of doubleness: “All things are potentially double, paradoxically mixed, oddly reversible. Opposites may turn out to be more like identities.” Set against Manichean dualism, the reversibility in Melville’s Ishmael, for instance, reveals a “tolerant inclusiveness.” Melville’s style evinces a similar quality, an openness and “careful disorderliness.” Tanner finds this quality in America itself as it undergoes an endless metamorphosis in the ongoing process of self-invention. White-Jacket, as Tanner puts it, “tears itself free from any hampering orthodoxy and achieves a true Melvillian unsettling power,” thus surmounting the problems facing America and finding its unity and stability. Moby-Dick for Tanner diagnoses what Nietzsche calls “the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb.” Melville anticipates Nietzsche’s insights regarding “perspectivism,” which allows for contesting systems of value and different interpretations of the same text. Through Ishmael, who interprets the world with a tolerant inclusiveness, Melville shows how humanity is bonded into communities by reciprocal dependence. The Confidence-Man, Melville’s novel about trust and confidence in the new world of America, shows how “reversibility” can be re-cast as “interchangeability.” This term, which Tanner borrows from Thomas Mann, registers “the multiplicity and sheer ontological dubiety of the self” in a world where identity, as determined by the constructivist nature of language, is constantly being reinterpreted.
In the next three chapters Tanner discusses the work of Henry James and his relationship to Shakespeare. In “The Story In It,” James treats the Victorian version of passional relations, in this case between two women and a man. Tanner, in discussing the relation between romance and narrative, reveals how in James’ narratives passion always goes together with invisible inner “flounderings”: “James uses sea imagery and water metaphors perhaps more than any other major novelist—swimming, floating, sinking, drowning, floundering/foundering, lost moorings, faulty navigation, insecure anchorage, failed ports—and so on.” The metaphorical sea, for Conrad a “destructive element,” is for James “a sea of sex, or a sea of more generally diffused desire.” To launch on this sea means to embark on a story, however “un-English” or “ugly in all its hiding and lying,” as Tanner reveals in an astute analysis of the French influence on James and the romantic omissions in Anglo-Saxon literature. He also discusses James’ The Other House, an unjustly neglected novel that Ford Madox Ford highly praised, giving it a nod of acknowledgement in The Good Soldier which he originally entitled The Saddest Story, from the line in James’ novel: “Tony looked as if he were retracing the saddest story on earth.” An early reviewer praised the power The Other House. It is James’ one and only murder novel and was originally conceived as a play. Although James never succeeded in writing for theater he gained from his theatrical experience, especially in this novel from his exposure to Ibsen.
Turning to William Dean Howells in chapter nine, Tanner praises his novel Indian Summer for the wit, wisdom, and sophistication it applies in dismantling the American habit of idealizing and fetishising youth. Howells’s novel deals with the “feelings of middle-life in contrast to those of earlier years.” As Tanner notes, Howells develops a new style in American writing by keeping the tone and timbre realistic and low instead of using the high tone more usual of American expression. He lauds the elegiac, comic, and ironic tone with which the novel, addressing “corrigible folly rather than irremediable evil,” critiques the American myth of Adamic innocence. Tanner goes on in chapter ten to explicate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Approaching the novel from the perspective of Nick Carraway, who as Gatsby next-door neighbor lives on West Egg across the Bay from Daisy Buchanan on the more established East Egg, Tanner speculates about what will hatch from the Eggs of the wild continent discovered by Columbus. He sees Fitzgerald not only showing the story of Nick and Gatsby but also showing how Nick as narrator works out the problem of seeing his subject, Gatsby--the “story of Nick trying to write that story.” Or as Henry James puts it, “There is the story of one’s hero, and then, thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one’s story itself.” Fitzgerald, Tanner believes, is trying to see and write America itself, and the result is “the most perfectly crafted work of fiction to have come out of America.”
In the final two chapters, Tanner turns to the American postmodernists Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Although he considers Libra a “triumph” and praises much of DeLillo’s other work, Tanner has reservations about Underworld. One of DeLillo’s abiding concerns centers on the kind of life Americans can shape for themselves in a mediated, consumer culture drowning in a sea of information and news, which is often bad. The narrator of DeLillo’s Mao II, Bill Gray, comments that the novel, in its search for meaning, “was a great secular transcendence.” Today, however, things have changed. As Bill Gray puts it and as DeLillo’s fiction repeatedly shows, “There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or film.” Discourse between people in American has declined radically, having been replaced by the visual image; “So,” as DeLillo says, “people turn to the news.” This, Tanner laments, is exactly what DeLillo does in Underworld, which by focusing on every kind of bad news “begins to read like a form of atrocity tourism.” People may no longer need novels like they need bad news, but to fictionalize lists of horror, Tanner argues, has far less impact than the “news” itself. Nevertheless, “news” as a second order copy of the real thing is what Underworld provides. Tanner questions the concept of bad news as a means of approaching God’s “unmadeness” or cherishing His negation. Frank Lentricchia, unlike Tanner, sees the quasi epiphanies in DeLillo’s work as a form of postmodern transcendence. At the end of Underworld we read: “Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?”
For Tanner, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon is a more satisfying work. He appreciates Pynchon’s novel for its celebration of the times and places in which things still haven’t been reduced to certainty: “America in the 1760s [when the novel is set] was very exactly the place where all the old certainties—religious, political, territorial—were breaking up, and anything began to seem possible as the country was preparing to shake itself free of England, and to expand into the then seemingly infinite and boundless west.” Tanner sees in Pynchon the subjunctive premiss that opens the future of America to the possibility of a different path. Mason & Dixon celebrates America as the last frontier of subjunctivity. But the Mason and Dixon line becomes a wall, a line of difference that leads to an opposition, like the opposition between revelation or nihilism so common in Pynchon’s work. The west for Mason and Dixon represents a place where you could live without a line, unseparated, but the west has disappeared and the lines are now everywhere. These characters lived “in the moment of transition from a past to a new state”; they lived “ever in the Ubibquity of Flow, before a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition.” Tanner credits the success of Mason and Dixon as an immensely good-natured book to Pynchon’s “weirdly funny imagination,” his “whimsically unserious” writing which in the end is deadly serious. For his part, Tanner skillfully avoids lines of theoretical opposition in his lucid reading of the vastness of American literature, which as Pynchon shows continues to manifest unresolved contradictions—like that between revelation and nihilism. For anyone interested in the American Mystery that still persists in the 21st century, but especially for students and scholars in the humanities, Tanner’s book is a must read.