USA Literature in Brief by Kathryn Vanspanckeren - HTML preview

CHAPTER 7

THE FLOWERING OF THE INDIVIDUAL

The Great Depression of the 1930s had virtually destroyed the American economy. World War II revived it. The United States became a major force on the world stage, and post-World-War-II Americans enjoyed unprecedented personal

prosperity and individual freedom.

Expanded higher education and the spread of television

throughout America after World War II made it possible

for ordinary people to obtain information on their own

and to become more sophisticated. A glut of consumer

conveniences and access to large, attractive suburban houses made middle-class families more autonomous. Widespread

theories of Freudian psychology emphasized the origins and the importance of the individual mind. The birth control “pill”

liberated women from rigid subservience to biological norms.

For the first time in human history, many ordinary people could lead vastly satisfying lives and assert their personal worth.

The rise of mass individualism—as well as the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s—empowered previously

muted voices. Writers asserted their deepest inner nature, as well 36

37

as personal experience, and the importance of the individual experience implied the importance of the group to which it was linked. Homosexuals, feminists, and other marginalized voices proclaimed their stories. Jewish American and black American writers found wide audiences for their variations of the American dream, or nightmare. Writers of Protestant background, such as John Cheever and John Updike, discussed the impact of postwar culture on lives like theirs. Some modern and contemporary writers are still placed within older traditions, such as realism.

Some may be described as classicists, others as experimental, stylistically influenced by the ephemera of mass culture, or by philosophies such as existentialism, or socialism. Many are more easily grouped according to ethnic background or region.

However, on the whole, modern writers always lay claim to the worth of the individual identity.

SYLVIA PLATH lived an outwardly

exemplary life, attending Smith College on

scholarship, graduating first in her class,

and winning a Fulbright grant to Cambridge

University in England. There she met her

charismatic husband-to-be, poet Ted

Hughes, with whom she had two children,

Sylvia Plath

and settled in a country house in England.

1932-1963

36

37

Beneath the fairy-tale success festered unresolved

psychological problems evoked in her highly readable novel The Bell Jar (1963). Some of these problems were personal, while others arose from her sense of repressive attitudes toward women in the 1950s. Among these were the beliefs—shared by many women themselves—that women should not show anger

or ambitiously pursue a career, and instead find fulfillment in tending their husbands and children. Professionally successful women like Plath felt that they lived a contradiction.

Plath’s storybook life crumbled when she and Hughes

separated and she cared for the young children in a London apartment during a winter of extreme cold. Ill, isolated, and in despair, Plath worked against the clock to produce a series of stunning poems before she committed suicide by gassing herself in her kitchen. These poems were collected in the volume Ariel (1965), two years after her death. The poet Robert Lowell, who wrote the introduction, noted her poetry’s rapid development from the time she had attended his poetry classes in 1958.

Plath’s early poetry is well crafted and traditional, but her late poems exhibit a desperate bravura and proto-feminist cry of anguish. In “The Applicant” (1966), Plath exposes the emptiness in the current role of wife (who is reduced to an inanimate “it”):

38

39

A living doll, everywhere you look.

It can sew, it can cook.

It can talk, talk, talk.

The “Beat poets” emerged in the 1950s. The term “beat”

variously suggests musical downbeats, as in jazz; angelical beatitude or blessedness; and “beat up” —tired or hurt. The Beats (beatniks) were inspired by jazz, Eastern religion, and the wandering life. These were all depicted in the famous novel by Jack Kerouac On the Road, a sensation when it was published in l957. An account of a 1947 cross-country car trip, the novel was written in three hectic weeks on a single roll of paper in what Kerouac called “spontaneous bop prose.” The wild, improvisational style, hipster-mystic characters, and rejection of authority and convention fired the

imaginations of young readers and helped

usher in the freewheeling counterculture of

the 1960s.

Most of the important Beats migrated

to San Francisco from America’s East Coast,

gaining their initial national recognition in

California. The charismatic ALLEN GINSBERG

became the group’s chief spokesman.

The son of a poet father and an eccentric

Allen Ginsberg

mother committed to Communism,

1926-1997

38

39

Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he became fast friends with fellow students Kerouac (1922-1969) and William Burroughs (1914-1997), whose violent, nightmarish novels about the underworld of heroin addiction include The Naked Lunch (1959). These three were the nucleus of the Beat movement.

Beat poetry is oral, repetitive, and immensely effective in readings, largely because it developed out of poetry readings in “underground” clubs. Some might correctly see it as a great-grandparent of the rap music that became prevalent in the 1990s. Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in the United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what the poets see as the loss of America’s innocence and the tragic waste of its human and material resources.

Poems like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) revolutionized traditional poetry.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. .

40

41

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, a native of Mississippi,

was one of the more complex individuals

on the American literary scene of the mid-

20th century. His work focused on disturbed

emotions within families—most of them

southern. He was known for incantatory

Tennessee Williams

repetitions, a poetic southern diction, weird

1911-1983

gothic settings, and Freudian exploration of

human emotion. One of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual, Williams explained that the longings of his tormented characters expressed their loneliness. His characters live and suffer intensely.

Williams wrote more than 20 full-length dramas, many of

them autobiographical. He reached his peak relatively early in his career—in the 1940s—with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1949). None of the works that followed over the next two decades and more reached the level of

success and richness of those two pieces.

Born in Mississippi to a well-to-do family

of transplanted northerners, EUDORA WELTY was

guided by novelists Robert Penn Warren and

Katherine Anne Porter. Porter, in fact, wrote

an introduction to Welty’s first collection of

short stories, A Curtain of Green (1941). Welty

modeled her nuanced work on Porter, but

Eudora Welty

1909-2001

40

41

the younger woman was more interested in the comic and

grotesque. Like fellow southern writer Flannery O’Connor, Welty often took subnormal, eccentric, or exceptional characters for subjects.

Despite violence in her work, Welty’s wit was essential y humane and affirmative. Her col ections of stories include The Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), The Bride of the Innisfal en (1955), and Moon Lake (1980). Welty also wrote novels such as Delta Wedding (1946), which is focused on a plantation family in modern times, and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972).

RALPH ELLISON was a midwesterner,

born in Oklahoma, who studied at

Tuskegee Institute in the southern United

States. He had one of the strangest

careers in American letters—consisting

Ralph Ellison

of one highly acclaimed book and little

1914-1994

more.

The novel is Invisible Man (1952), the story of a black man who lives a subterranean existence in a cellar brightly illuminated by electricity stolen from a utility company. The book recounts his grotesque, disenchanting experiences. When he wins a scholarship to an all-black college, he is humiliated by whites; when he gets to the college, he witnesses the school’s president spurning black American concerns. Life is corrupt outside college, too. For example, even religion is no 42

43

consolation: A preacher turns out to be a criminal. The novel indicts society for failing to provide its citizens—black and white—with viable ideals and institutions for realizing them.

It embodies a powerful racial theme because the “invisible man” is invisible not in himself but because others, blinded by prejudice, cannot see him for who he is.

Born in Canada and raised in Chicago,

SAUL BELLOW was of Russian-Jewish

background. In college, he studied

anthropology and sociology, which greatly

influenced his writing. He once expressed

a profound debt to the American realist

novelist Theodore Dreiser for his openness

Saul Bellow

to a wide range of experience and his

1915-2005

emotional engagement with it. Highly

respected, Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

Bellow’s early, somewhat grim existentialist novels include Dangling Man (1944), a Kafkaesque study of a man waiting to be drafted into the army, and The Victim (1947), about relations between Jews and Gentiles. In the 1950s, his vision became more comic: He used a series of energetic and adventurous first-person narrators in The Adventures of Augie March (1953)—the study of a Huck Finn-like urban entrepreneur who becomes a black marketeer in Europe—and in Henderson the Rain King 42

43

(1959), a brilliant and exuberant serio-comic novel about a middle-aged millionaire whose unsatisfied ambitions drive him to Africa.

Bellow’s later works include Herzog (1964), about the troubled life of a neurotic English professor who specializes in the idea of the romantic self; Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970); Humboldt’s Gift (1975); and the autobiographical The Dean’s December (1982). Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) is a brilliant novella centered on a failed businessman, Tommy Wilhelm, who is so consumed by feelings of inadequacy that he becomes totally inadequate—a failure with women, jobs, machines, and the commodities market, where he loses all his money. Wilhelm is an example of the schlemiel of Jewish folklore—one to whom unlucky things inevitably happen.

JOHN CHEEVER often has been called

a “novelist of manners.” He is also

known for his elegant, suggestive short

stories, which scrutinize the New York

business world through its effects on the

businessmen, their wives, children, and

John Cheever

friends.

1912-1982

A wry melancholy and never

quite quenched but seemingly hopeless desire for passion or metaphysical certainty lurks in the shadows of Cheever’s finely drawn, Chekhovian tales, collected in The Way Some 44

45

People Live (1943), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). His titles reveal his characteristic nonchalance, playfulness, and irreverence, and hint at his subject matter.

Cheever also published several novels— The Wapshot Scandal (1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977)—the last of which was largely autobiographical.

JOHN UPDIKE, like Cheever, is also

regarded as a writer of manners with

his suburban settings, domestic

themes, reflections of ennui and

wistfulness, and, particularly, his

fictional locales on the eastern

seaboard of the United States, in

Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

John Updike

Updike is best known for his five

1932-

Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man—Harry “Rabbit”

Angstrom—through the ebbs and flows of his existence across four decades of American social and political history. Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux (1971)—spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s—finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from the

banal. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become a prosperous 44

45

businessman during the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes.

The final novel, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom’s reconciliation with life, before his death from a heart attack, against the backdrop of the 1980s.

Updike possesses the most brilliant style of any writer

today, and his short stories offer scintillating examples of its range and inventiveness.

NORMAN MAILER made himself the most

visible novelist of the l960s and l970s.

Co-founder of the anti-establishment

New York City weekly The Village

Voice, Mailer publicized himself along

with his political views. In his appetite

for experience, vigorous style, and a

Norman Mailer

dramatic public persona, Mailer follows

1923-

in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway. To

gain a vantage point on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Vietnam War protests, black liberation, and the women’s movement, he constructed hip, existentialist, macho male personae (in her book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett identified Mailer as an archetypal male chauvinist). The irrepressible Mailer went on to marry six times and run for mayor of New York.

From such New Journalism exercises as Miami and the

Siege of Chicago (1968), an analysis of the 1968 U.S. presidential 46

47

conventions, and his compelling study about the execution of a condemned murderer, The Executioner’s Song (1979), Mailer turned to writing such ambitious, if flawed, novels as Ancient Evenings (1983), set in the Egypt of antiquity, and Harlot’s Ghost (1991), revolving around the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

African-American novelist TONI

MORRISON was born in Ohio to a spiritually

oriented family. She attended Howard

University in Washington, D.C., and has

worked as a senior editor in a major

Washington publishing house and as

a distinguished professor at various

Toni Morrison

universities.

1931-

Morrison’s richly woven fiction has

gained her international acclaim. In compelling, large-spirited novels, she treats the complex identities of black people in a universal manner. In her early work The Bluest Eye (1970), a strong-willed young black girl tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, who is driven mad by an abusive father. Pecola believes that her dark eyes have magically become blue and that they will make her lovable. Morrison has said that she was creating her own sense of identity as a writer through this novel:

“I was Pecola, Claudia, everybody.”

Sula (1973) describes the strong friendship of two women.

Morrison paints African-American women as unique, fully

46

47

individual characters rather than as stereotypes. Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) has won several awards. It follows a black man, Milkman Dead, and his complex relations with his family and community. Beloved (1987) is the wrenching story of a woman who murders her children rather than allow them to live as slaves. It employs the dreamlike techniques of magical realism in depicting a mysterious figure, Beloved, who returns to live with the mother who has slit her throat. Jazz (1992), set in 1920s Harlem, is a story of love and murder. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Contemporary Literature

As the 20th century ended and the 21st century began,

mass social and geographic mobility, the Internet, immigration, and globalization only emphasized the subjective voice in a context of cultural fragmentation. Some

contemporary writers reflect a drift

towards quieter, more accessible voices.

For many prose writers, the region, rather

than the nation, provides the defining

geography.

One of the most impressive

contemporary poets is LOUISE GLÜCK. Born

in New York City, Glück, the U.S. poet

Louise Glück

1943-

48

49

laureate for 2003-2004, grew up with an abiding sense of guilt due to the death of a sister born before her. At Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, she studied with poets Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. Much of her poetry deals with tragic loss. Each of Glück’s books attempts new techniques, making it difficult to summarize her work.

In Glück’s memorable The Wild Iris (1992), different kinds of flowers utter short metaphysical monologues. The book’s title poem, an exploration of resurrection, could be an epigraph for Glück’s work as a whole. The wild iris, a gorgeous deep blue flower growing from a bulb that lies dormant all winter, says:

“It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth.”

From the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure seawater.

The poetry of BILLY COLLINS is

refreshing and exhilarating. Collins uses

everyday language to record the myriad

details of everyday life, freely mixing

quotidian events (eating, doing chores,

writing) with cultural references. His

humor and originality have brought him

Billy Collins

a wide audience. Though some have

1941-

48

49

faulted Collins for being too accessible, his unpredictable flights of fancy open out into mystery.

Collins’s is a domesticated form of surrealism. His best poems quickly propel the imagination up a stairway of

increasingly surrealistic situations, at the end offering an emotional landing, a mood one can rest on. The short poem

“The Dead,” from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), gives some sense of Collins’s fanciful flight and gentle settling down, as if a bird had come to rest.

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of

heaven

as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

The striking stylist ANNIE PROULX

crafts stories of struggling northern New

Englanders in Heart Songs (1988). Her best

novel, The Shipping News (1993), is set even

further north, in Newfoundland, Canada.

Proulx has also spent years in the West, and

one of her short stories inspired the 2006

movie “Brokeback Mountain.”

Annie Proulx

1935-

50

51

Mississippi-born RICHARD FORD began

writing in a Faulknerian vein, but is best

known for his subtle novel set in New Jersey,

The Sportswriter (1986), and its sequel,

Independence Day (l995). The latter is about

Frank Bascombe, a dreamy, evasive drifter

who loses all the things that give his life

meaning—a son, his dream of writing

Richard Ford

1944-

fiction, his marriage, lovers and friends, and

his job. Bascombe is sensitive and intelligent—his choices, he says, are made “to deflect the pain of terrible regret”—and his emptiness, along with the anonymous malls and bald new housing developments that he endlessly cruises through,

mutely testify to Ford’s vision of a national malaise.

Northern California houses a rich tradition of Asian-

American writing, whose characteristic themes include family and gender roles, the conflict between generations, and the search for identity. One Asian-American

writer from California is novelist AMY TAN,

whose best-selling The Joy Luck Club became

a hit film in 1993. Its interlinked story-like

chapters delineate the different fates of four

mother-and-daughter pairs. Tan’s novels

spanning historical China and today’s United

Amy Tan

1952-

States include The Hundred Secret Senses

50

51

(1995), about half-sisters, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), about a daughter’s care for her mother.

A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian,

SHERMAN ALEXIE is the youngest Native-

American novelist to achieve national

fame. Alexie gives unsentimental and

humorous accounts of Indian life with an

eye for incongruous mixtures of tradition

and pop culture. His story cycles include

Reservation Blues (1995) and The Lone

Sherman Alexie

1966-

Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

(1993), which inspired the effective film of

reservation life Smoke Signals (1998), for which Alexie wrote the screenplay. Alex