The American Romance
UNTERECKER, JOHN
The American Romance The American Novel and Its Tradition. By Richard Chase. Anchor. 266 pp. $0.95. Reviewed by John Unterecker Richard Chase, who is best known for his perceptive studies of...
...Chase feels, have not worked in the neat forms of that English tradition defined by F. R. Leavis...
...Chase's incidental judgments ("you may be the perfect master of your language without being a great master of the art of the novel...
...Reviewed by John Unterecker Richard Chase, who is best known for his perceptive studies of Melville, Emily Dickinson and Whitman, sets himself in his latest book the immensely difficult task of defining both the form and the essential vision of the American novel...
...Chase's keen interpretation of the history of our literature with the sort of detail which helps us understand not only the tradition of the American novel but the works on which that tradition is founded, works which superimpose on the bright surface of realism the dark and fatal patterns of romance...
...The essential vision, he concludes, is an insight into a chaos that is at the heart of things: "Judging by our greatest novels, the American imagination, even when it wishes to assuage and reconcile the contradictions of life, has not been stirred by the possibility of catharsis or incarnation, by the tragic or Christian possibility...
...It is even, Mr...
...The imagination that created Moby Dick, and other great American works from The Scarlet Letter to Light in August, is, then, not specifically tragic and Christian, but melodramatic and Manichaean...
...He succeeds brilliantly...
...Chase points out, to be found lurking in the imaginative metaphors of Henry James and the melodramatic naturalism of Frank Norris...
...Though not every reader will agree with all of Mr...
...Because their vision has been one of almost overwhelming chaos, our great novelists, Mr...
...The key figures in this American tradition, Mr...
...American novelists, on the other hand, find reality in the murk, and the novels they write are heavily laced with elements more closely associated with the "romance" than with the "novel...
...Chase argues, are Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Faulkner...
...Hemingway is an example"), most of them will, I think, find illuminating the penetrating short studies of individual works...
...it leaves them open...
...I do not mean to suggest that these studies are in any way more valuable than the book itself...
...They back up Mr...
...But the comments on such works as Moby Dick and The Portrait of a Lady and the brilliant analysis of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (the best short study I have yet come across of that complex and difficult book) are particularly rich in insight...
...It has been stirred, rather, by the esthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and disorder...
...Their form, as a matter of fact, becomes the "romance-novel," an imaginative, melodramatic, frequently comic work, loosely organized and sometimes splendid...
...its importance as a critical work, as a matter of fact, is precisely in its lucid and carefully organized presentation of a significant pattern in American literature...
...That tradition sees life in moral terms and leads its authors to construct novels which reflect the surface of life in patterns which may be clearer than the murky forces themselves that determine men's actions...
...It does not settle ultimate questions...
...But its theme and techniques are also to be found reflected in the strange melodramatic work of Brockden Brown and in such "novels of manners" as George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes, Howells's genial The Vacation of the Kelwyns, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 18
