Intimations of the American Character: Five American Writers

the Statess only 230 long time aged(prenominal), give or carry on, thitherfore to ask after the Ameri bottom font is untold the same as asking after the guinea pig of a two-year anile non impossible, save hardly definitive. T heres a an anecdote of general reportage that on Nixons firstly trip to China Kissinger asked monoamine oxidase what he thought of the French Revolution. Mao answered that it was excessively soon to tell.Perhaps it is similarly soon to tell what the Ameri stinker character is as can be determined in the literature of the seventeenth 19th Centuries, but unmatched cannot mistake that in the various formulateing of its first significant authors (writers who felt themselves sufficiently invested in this democratic examine spread over some six million squ ar miles of fine- attend toing and infinitely re character referenceful land) the first intimations if not indications of who and what we argon (as opposed to where we came from the old countries) light up themselves known.Harold Bloom, Professor, author, reader, man of extraordinary powers of memorization, idiosyncratic, self-proclaimed Falstaffian, wrote, ironic altogethery decent, a practice authorize The Anxiety of Influence. With reference only to the title, which implies so much, especi eachy for any wouldbe artist who seeks place his/her own unique stamp on his/her cipher, atomic number 53 encounters the first problem for the truly creative We are not innate(p) with forbidden context. Mozarts aside, we mustiness school ourselves, absorb, learn, model, mimic and copy before we write, paint, sing, play music, dance, in a wholly new and pilot film air.The struggle to achieve what is original implies its own anxiety. Like Michelangelos slaves f marble, will we ever intercept free? Has American broken free of its overwhelming British influences? And if we fill broken free, if we stir achieved a unique and American voice, to whom do we owe the credit for the vast break with our bi-continental past? The important word here is context. No source is tapped in a vacuum. We are the progeny of forebears we are the ancestors of those to come.Time being what it is we can only look back. First, review the grim declamations of Jonathan Edwards and retrieve the anxiety of that faith which rested in an angry God, full of spit, dissolve and fury, an unhappy parent disappointed in his children, a God in a nominally Christian human, whos narrowed the avenue of repurchase to inches of rock-ledge that can be traversed by so few that a looks left with little to do but warn his assemblage about how bad its going to be when theyre dropped like spiders into the eternal flame.Of course, no God is ever as awful as his companyers and Edwards admonitions are the high point of that drive towards purity which pack the puritans from the corrupt Anglicanism of Elizabeth and James (not to mention Henry VIII who had his own take mercy and forgiveness). If a ngiotensin-converting enzyme were to read too much of Jonathan Edwards, one big businessman conclude that the American character is a dour, determined and fatalistic, the unfortunate dissolver of Augustines fear dripped through Calvins Swiss rectitude by way of Anglo-Saxon provincialism played out in the work force and minds of truly brave pilgrims determined to reform themselves al most(prenominal) out of existence.In terse the first structure of Americas self, its character, was a reaction to the wavering, the wiggle-room, and the corruptness in late Elizabethan, Jamesian-Protestantism. It is the expression of what one stack capacity holding to a god whos angry with the failure of his children. But Edwardss declamations are not the word of god so much as their expression of man angry with man.Ironically, the supposed anger of this god, by way of Edwards, will move Puritan congregation to embrace a work value orientation (Protestant, New England, rural, elemental, purifyi ng) which will stand in ambition to the source of the Reformation, itself Luthers reading of Romans which asserts salvation by grace and not by good works. But time passed and America, with its depth and breadth of resourcefulness, its brave and entrepreneurial people who made the move, took the chance, crossed the ocean in search of a better life, and would not be held captive in the ornate arrange of those ministers well-schooled in the endless dark night of the soul.Brave people, entrepreneurs, the can-do sort of people who cross oceans are not the type of people to succumb to anxieties. And they are not without humor. Indeed they require humor, because humor is the step-sister of practicality. The ironic point of view, the wit, the knavish turn of phrase, the creativity and intelligence of the comedic mode, are often the best delegacy to drive home points and conclusions and directives that might other perspicacious be lost in the didactic drone of dogma.Ben Franklin gave v oice to humor and common sense and practicality in his writings. We look upon him now, perhaps unfortunately, as a cartoon figure of Disneys imagination, or that precious gent employed each proterozoic pass to dress up in velvet, lace and granny glasses, to walk the streets of Philadelphia and flash children with the stilted language of the poor mimic. But to do so would be our loss. Franklin was a genius.He was a polymath, self educated and like most early Americans, born (as if dropped whole) into a new land affording infinite potential without the floors or ceilings of given classes, gifted with the curiosity and intelligence to make sense out of the new, original American experience, and to express the process for others. He was an inventor, a theme man, a man of letters, a political in-fighter, a political theoriser schooled in the writings of the Enlightenment.He was a humanist who, unlike his ascetic Puritans ancestors of capital of Massachusetts and environs, believed t hat humans were of value, body, mind and spirit. Franklin dared to believe, in the most general sense of the lesser-dogmatic theists that man was deserving of something better than Edwardss angry white bearded, sententious, demanding, unpredictable, inconsistent and different God.Through Franklin the American character first developed the genius of common sense, bring up with humor. In the settlement of New York by the inveterate, humanistic Dutch and Philadelphia by the easy, peaceful, sometimes silent Quakers, Franklin, the man who traveled south, denied the anxiety driven, forbidding orb view (so often fostered in too-cold climates) that sought to prepare man for eternity while denying the value of the here and now.Through Franklin we learn that man is capable of creativity, here and now, that man can better his station in life, that life is cost living and that process, ritual, form and style (Franklins writing can not but reflect some of the 18th Century politesse) are mea nt to follow function and that substance, rather than appearance, is the determinative value.Throughout a review of Franklins writings, one is struck by that wave of humanism and democratic values that asseverate themselves in the wake of effete royalties and courts and found their most eloquent expression in the preamble to Americas Declaration of Independence, penned by Jefferson (edited, polished, affirmed, if not ghost written by Franklin. ) Emerson, the sage of Concord, virtually unknown in cocktail conversation today, but for the notion of some salty rigid watchful New England self reliance, is the American writer with whom all American writers must contend.Like America, itself, full of contradiction in termss and principles that outran its real self, Emerson was an iconoclast, who looked about the beauty of Concord and saw that although the world was good, man made institutions, were, over time, necessarily corruptible and, instead of assisting the single(a) in his walk through life, last hindered the individual from clear sight, a post-Christian pantheism, a transcendent vision of Gods shockingeur and all that can be deduced, derived from that.In a way analogous to the solitary desolation of the dark night of the soul, Emerson encouraged the brave entrepreneurial American, optimistic, human, and sufficiently wise not only to appreciate the comedic mode of life (i. e. , life is ultimately and always salvageable), but to travel past the thickets of dogma, to apply his gifted and most importantly his co-creative mind to an understanding of the world about him. Yes, the America might be the New Jerusalem, a new place of unbounded somatic grace, but the kingdom must be experienced within as well.Emersons transcendent view is best appreciated when one posits the double-dyed(a) permeability of the divine through nature and then through the very self. Humanism need not stand in opponent to Edwardss angry god, but need only accommodate God, affording Him the place hes had forever, within and without ourselves. Thoreau lived a mile from Emerson. They were friends to the degree that that they could offer and get down friendship.Both were complex, but Thoreau gave voice and body to complexities, contradictions that flowed from Emersons first indications of a unambiguously American voice. (All men are created equal, and yet Americans buy and sell slaves. ) Thoreau is a photographic negative to much of what Emerson implies. Tough they both lived in this gee new country, Thoreau, the prophet, in like manner recognized problems which would and still occur to this day in a country so bountiful it invited a work ethic as boundless as its resources, size and frontiers.Work is a balm to the impatient and energetic soul. Perhaps its too much to say that all work is busy work (though a walk down common Avenue on a Monday in September might make one wonder), but work and the Americans over-praise of the over-valued activity is a defen se to works essential nature a perplexity from the anxiety of being. Americans praise those Americans who work hard, keep their heads down, work hard, never look up, never question, and might ask after function but never resolve.And these are the workers, the people, the men and women, who live the lives of quiet desperation. Thoreau is a radical in that he goes to the very source of an idea cloaked in so many assumptions and givens that the questioning itself renders him an iconoclast, an eccentric of the first order. Living alone by a pond is nothing compared to asking those questions which might upset the underpinnings of a society too busy to ask anything. Thoreau loafs with the intensity of a Kant.He questions not only the American way of life with its work ethic, but also the proposition that lifes primary value lies in work and that through work (only work) man will find his identity, ultimately his purpose and after this life perhaps his salvation. Thoreau is a loafer lik e Whitman, but Thoreau does not loaf to escape work, he loafs to escape meaningless work and to question the assumptions of New England in the early 19th centuryTheres a cliche in the work-a-day world, devoted to the corporate mind and group opine that sublimates the individual to the will and survival and perhaps betterment of the group. It is this Nobodys indispensable. Thoreau either heard or intuited this dismissal of the human and his efforts (Willy Loman 100 old age on), and said Why do we engage in a administration which demands our lives, makes false promises and considers us utterly dispensable? The American work ethic makes promises and offers the appearance of payback to justify itself. Indeed, such a charade is one under-pinning of the capitalist system.Were promised ticky-tacky houses, country clubs, swimming pools, unlimited credit at usurious rates, nice clothes, the right schools for above-average kids, and of course the magical totem , the icon, the car, the uber -van, the humvee, the mode of merchant vessels that will tell them who we are. Thoreau anticipated all of this the uneasy contract by which Americans remain trapped in the first and second levels of the hierarchy of postulate while our demi-gods of celebrity and power achieve a self-actualization denied everybody else. Not amazingly we are then bought off with television, sports, bread and circuses.One of the contradictions in Thoreau is that the assertion of the individual is Romantic, but the means employed is ascetic and classical. To live deliberately is not to live with frippery or Bouchers swings or the ease of decadent courts. To live deliberately is a radical undertaking, directing the speedy to slow up down to take time to loaf and view the smallest, finest things, those effects of founding which in their brief majesty put to shame all the unsatisfying memos, briefs, papers, efforts and transactions set down in the 19th Centurys ethos of success and wealth as the out ward sign of grace.Thoreau stands in opposition to the Americas madness for work. Walden has changed lives. People have been seen reading it during their speed commutes. Whitman turns within and explodes without. He does not so much challenge the sting and bustle of the great democratic experiment as he seeks to continue it, to swallow it, to take it in, because the genius of the poet this new American poet is begin enough, grand enough, to express the vastness of it all. Indeed every helping of every part is a part of every part.To turn within is to look without, to tie in the All. Whitman breaks the line open. Even a grade student looking at a poem by Whitman and a poem by Philip Freneau cant help but see the difference in form. The old and tired expresses itself in neat stanzas, century old rules. But Whitmans lines span the page. They scan and pose propositions only to complete the circle with their opposition stated like closing a door on a completed whole. The complimen t forms the greater proposition.This is a poet not so much of contradictions (though he admits as much), but a poet, like a demi-god, who can reconcile the apparent and real contradictions of life. Does America contradict itself (Slavery All men are created equal)? Yes. Can America reconcile its contradictions? Perhaps. One war says we have other wars say we have not. Perhaps its too smooth to remark that whereas the country was split north and south, Samuel Clemens, born in Missouri, a border state, obtained his unique voice traveling north and south along a river which in its own way sought to hold the war-ridden halves together.In Huckleberry Finn Twain reconciles the optimism and humor of Franklin, the adventuresome self-reliance of Emerson, Thoreaus marginal iconoclast and Whitmans reconciled over-soul. And yet, Mark Twain, the humorist, the colloquial voice of wisdom, the wooly relative we place at the head of the table, soon encountered, as America encountered the cracks and flaws of life, its stochastic terribleness, its self-inflicted wounds.At the very heart of the American character is the mater of slavery, the ludicrous contradiction of eloquence scripted to blow trumpets of gold and light bonfires of liberty that would out-enlighten the enlightenment. And still the ships came from the west coast of Africa. Slaves bought and sold. These contradictions are essential. They are indicators of life itself and incomplete America, its character nor its poets and writers are immune.Though we can look fondly on Americas optimism, humor, practicality, favor of substance over form, the acknowledgment that form follows substance, that in America merit counts we must also look upon the all too common type, born of the all too common fatigue unmingled in a country that offers just enough in a zero-sum game to keep the citizen alive one more day, for one more effort, for one more expenditure We know the desperate worker, who expends enormous amounts of energy, win over himself, fooling himself that what he does has meaning and purpose, that hes paid enough (as all those bleeding-heart liberal programs for all those minorities dont get in the way) and that someday, maybe when he retires with a weak heart and a fatigued spirit, he and his wife will travel the length and breadth of this great country and call to mind something of what that old gay poet wrote something about atoms and bed-fellows and lilacs This too is the American character desperate, tired, vain, prejudiced, spent, rigid, utterly human and, for all of it, ultimately forgivable.