"Hawthorne, Poe and Melville"
CHASE, RICHARD
Hawthorne, Poe and Melville Reviewed by Richard Chase Author, "The American Novel and Its Tradition'; professor of criticism, Indiana University The Power of Blackness. By Harry Levin. Knopf. 274...
...274 pp...
...The book accentuates the positive...
...Yet the inscrutable horror of Mont Blanc, as it appeared to Henry Adams after the agonized death of his sister, might have been added to the list...
...On ground as solid, that is, as one can be on when discussing this mad, disorganized and fascinating story...
...4.00...
...A recent book on Poe, for example, tells us that "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" is "a study of emerging consciousness," in which we see the "death" of a lower consciousness and the "birth" of a higher consciousness—an illustration, in other words, of the process of symbolism itself...
...W. H. Hudson would explain it as animism, 'the mind's projection of itself into nature,' our predisposition to be terrified by the exceptional...
...Levin feels no temptation to get into this squirrel cage, where the only possible subject of art is art...
...This may account for the stimulus it lends to visions and hallucinations like that of Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain...
...Levin accepts the fact that "the traditional medium of American fiction" is "romance...
...A characteristic passage is one on the "whiteness of the whale": "The symbolism of terror is universal...
...But he makes up for this by trimming the too much revered Billy Budd down to size, and by saying in contradiction to many contemporary critics that the "retroactive efforts to make a theologian out of Hawthorne are doomed to failure...
...Levin makes some acute observations about the effect on "A...
...This scheme, Levin admits, is somewhat arbitrary, but it is an inevitable approach to the subject...
...He is therefore disposed to take the fiction of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville on its own ground...
...the old and new worlds, the past and present, the self and society, the supernatural and nature...
...The works of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, which are the subject matter of Harry Levin's book, were regarded as social or intellectual documents but judged to be very disappointing as such, because there was so much "unreal" romance and symbolism in them...
...One effect of taking mescaline, Henri Michaux has recently testified, is an impression of "absolute white . .'" Enough allusions, surely...
...He tells us correctly that even Poe's weird and obsessive symbols lead to perceptions about life, that "they are charged with basic associations which are psychological and social...
...He correctly sees that "the union of opposites is the very basis of the American outlook...
...As Levin says in his preface, this outmoded interpretation was accustomed to "stress the American scene for its own sake, discuss our literature in the framework of ideology more often than art, and treat the romance as an anachronism retarding the development of Critical Realism...
...Gordon Pym" of Poe's ideas on slavery and the South...
...Levin's book helps to correct the older view that the American writings are dim and faulty social documents, but in doing so it does not lose the sense of the social connections of literature...
...It is notably allusive, appreciative, synoptic and discriminating...
...Besides all its illuminating particulars, what I like about Levin's book is its general tendency to conceive of our literature in its cultural and historical relationships...
...And he is thus on solid ground in proceeding to describe Poe's tale as one of the many American stories about "an adolescent initiated to manhood by the impact of his adventures...
...Many of the younger and young-middle-aged scholar-critics now write about American literature as if it had no connection with history or social reality at all...
...They conceive it to be purely epistemological, an "inner drama" of the mind that seeks to discover symbolic knowledge and meaning...
...In his attempt to sketch a "literary iconol-ogy," Levin's leading idea is that form in the works of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville consists in a dialectic of symbols of light and dark...
...Except in his preface, Levin is not insistent about critical principles, and only sporadically does he offer judgments of particular works, being interested in what his authors wrote simply because they Wrote them...
...In this, as in other ways, the book is a valuable contribution to American studies...
...Until recently the accepted approach to the older American literature was that of "the liberal imagination," as seen, for example, in Vernon Parrington's Main Currents of American...
...Thought...
...It has enough ideological backbone to give significance to the large number of comparisons and analogies it occurs to the learned author to make...
...for his profound belief in original sin is scarcely alleviated by any conviction of supernal grace...
...Like anyone else, Levin misses the boat once in a while—as for instance, in his passage on The Blithedale Romance...
...Otherwise Death would not ride a pale horse in Scripture, and the Ancient Mariner would never have been bedeviled by an albatross...
...The glitter of Antarctic snow and ice was the single mystery that Poe had left unresolved...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 20
