The Reality of Appearances [antikvár]

PREFACE This book is the record of a journey of discovery made over some twelve years. That journey, with the work of Henry James and its British modernist context as point of departure, took me into a fascinating phase of American literary history. To continue the metaphor, although what the reader finds here is not the full trip, but only the retum half of it, I have tried to present the stations of this retum in such a way that something of the original thrill of exploration should still be there. What awakened my interest in the literature of what since Matthiessen has been called the American Renaissance was its persistent epistemological and in some cases ontological questioning of reality and the deeply sceptical answers it elicited from that reality. To put it another way, the more I studied the work of Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and some of the lesser stars in that constellation, the more obvious it became to me that qualities of sensibility, thought, and literary representation traditionally associated with modernism, occasionally with postmodernism, are present, sometimes in pristine purity, in the work of the authors named above. Emerson's fascination with the idea that perhaps "[t]he universe is like an infinite series of planes, each of which is a false bottom," Melville's cry that "appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man," Whitman's "terrible doubt of appearances" anticipate both the modernist vision and the anxieties attendant upon that vision. With a little stretch of the imagination one can even see early forms of Derridean decentring in such utterances. Likewise, the panicky backing away from the abyss thus opening up and the subsequent withdrawal into the world of illusions, or the creation of more tenable illusions, carmot but bring to mind the "world-versions," with no hierarchy obtaining between them, of Nelson Goodman and Paul Ricoeur. But this only demonstrates that there is nothing really new under the sun; the language and the manner of presentation may change while the underlying idea remains the same. There is a whole world here which invites theoretical study; I have no doubt that this, in the intellectual climate of our day, would be highly rewarding. Yet, prompted by the conviction that the study of literature has been driven into a dead end by excessive theorizing, I have kept theory to the minimum in the ensuing analyses. The meticulous attention to the text, so central to the New Criticism of the thirties and forties, should not be dismissed as the fad of an age less enlightened than ours. Observations, not to say truths, arrived at after proper engagement with the text, rest on much firmer founda- IX