I’ve been thinking about how the history of American literature can help us understand our current xenophobic sociopolitical climate. It has long been the role of the author to articulate national identity, which locates writers in a mediate position because they may write the story of individuals, but their tales also carry a communal weight. This is especially true in the case of early American authors, as their homeland was a relatively younger one whose history was still in its early stages. As Nathaniel Hawthorne writes in his preface to The Blithedale Romance, as an author he seeks, “an available foothold between fiction and reality.”
The element that links early American works such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), modernist works such as Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930), and postmodern works such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), is their exploration of individual and communal written history, especially as it relates to the articulation of the division in American identity.
This divide can be attributed to what Marius Bewley terms the “Split in American experience,” by which he means the peculiar position between an older, more traditional Europe and a younger, more progressive America. This paradigm is not limited to early American literature, but continues to reach its ambivalent roots into the present.
According to Leslie Fiedler, this rift in America’s understanding of itself also derives from the haunting guilt concerning the marginalization and massacre of its native people, as well as the conflict between the individualistic urge to write literature and the communal urge to write the history of a relatively new nation. Add to this the appalling history of slavery and we have quite an American narrative to confront.
To this day, the nation’s relative youth, peculiar sociopolitical positioning, and indebtedness to written documents for its existence gives the American writer an inordinate amount of power to shape the ideology upon which the nation is built. In the most extreme cases, this renders the American novel a document that arbitrates between the American dream and the nightmare upon which the nation was founded–the erection of a people through the annihilation of others.