Puritan New England

 From American Literature: A History. By Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen. (1. Beginnings to 1810).

Whatever the attitude of Native American peoples towards their Creation stories, the English Calvinists who landed in New England in 1620 as the vanguard of a mass migration of Calvinists to North America took their story very seriously indeed. For these fundamentalist Chistians, followers of the French reformer Jehan Calvin (1509-64, anclicized as John Calvin), every word of the Protestant Bible — swhich does not include the so-called deuterocanonical books of the Catholic Bible — was literally true. The Bible, the word of God, had absolute authority. These Puritans, as they were derogatorily called in England, were deeply unhappy with the Anglican Church, which admittedly had broken with Rome, but had retained the Catholic Church's hierarchical structure and mucho of its ceremonial trappings. It was, moreover, corrupt and theologically unsound. However, the Anglican Church was the national state church and the lives of so-called Dissenters were at the very least made uncomfortable. When in 1603 Queen Elisabeth I died and was succeeded by James I who started out by taking repressive measures against Dissenters, both Catholic and Protestant, many Puritans began to feel actively persecuted and those who had set up their own secret congregations outside the Anglican Church, which was of course against the law, had good reson to fear the authorities. And so, in 1608, a small group of threse so-called Separatists from Scrooby, a village in Northern England, decided to leave the Anglican Church and England altogether and to settle in the Dutch Republic, where they hoped to find religious freedom. They did, but found that the Republic's tolerance not only extended to other religions than Calvinism, but also to ways of life that they considered sinful and a serious threat to their children's salvation. This, coupled with difficult economic circumstances and a sense that they woul never really feel at home in the Netherlands, persuaded them to take the very drastic step of moving to North America. In 1620, having obtaind a charter under the tigle of the Plymouth Company and after various setbacks they set sail for Virginia in the Mayflower. Although the Separatists constituted a minority on board — this was, after all, a commercial venture backed by investors who weren't much interested in the motives of the emigrants whose enterprise they were funding — the Mayflower and the so-called Pilgrim fathers, a term used to describe the (male) Calvinists that it carried to America, would helped by the fact that the Mayflower was blown off course and was by adverse circumstances more or less forced to land in what is now Massachusetts, west of Cape Cod. Naming the place where they had landed Plymouth, they decided to stay even though their charter was for Virginia, much to the south. Realizing that they had settled without a proper legal basis, they drew up their own charter, the famous Mayflower Compact, which on the one hand took care to recognize the English king as their sovereign, but on the other hand established a Calvinist communitythat, exceptionally in those times, was governed by (male) majority rule and because of that came later to be seen as exhibiting a proto-democratic American spirit. 

Plymouth Plantation with its not exactly affluent settlers, never became a booking colony. But its existence on the Massachusetts coast became important when other, middle class and even upper middle class English Calvinists began to think about emigration. The large majority of those Calvinists had no desire to leave the Anglican Church, even if they rejected both the Anglican hierarchy and its teachings. But when after the death of James I in 1625 his son Charles I began to seek what seemed a rapprochement between the Anglican adn Roman Catholic churches, they, too, felt that Anglicanism and Cavinism were irreconcilable. Settling in North America offered a solution to their dilemma, since it allowed them to stay nominally with the Anglican Church, and thus within the law — important for people with property and other monetary interests — while de facto they were free to organize their own Calvinist congregations, a loose network of religious communities (local churches) that guarantees each congregation its indepeendence since there is no overarching and hierarchical organization. Whereas the Roman Catholic Church is centrally organized and its dignitaries are appointed by a hierarchical organization, with the Pope at its very summit, Calvinist congregations elect and appoint their own ministers and church functionaries (and occasionally send them packing, in cases of serious miscondunct or fundamental theological differences). And so non-Separatist Calvinists began to think of leaving England for the New World. The arrival in 1630 of a fleet of eleven ships, with over 700 emigrants, under the leadership of John Winthrop, established a bridgehead at Boston and in the next ten years more than 20,000 English Calvinists crossed the Atlantic to find religious freedom in the properly chartered Massachusetts Bay Colony. And so, with immigration continuing at a seady pace, in the late seventeenth century New England had a fairly homogeneous population, united by a vision of individual, congregational, responsibility and religious freedom — freedom for themselves, that is. As we will see, the Massachusetts Bay colonists had little patience with what from their point of view were dissenting views.

They did of course have virtually everything in common with their Separatist co-religionists at not too far-off Plymouth Plantation, with whom they almost immediately established friendly relations. The Puritan minister and historian Cotton Mather gives us in his Magnalia Christi Americana of 1702 a fascinating glimpse of that earliest period:

In the year 1632, the governor [Winthrop], with his pastor, Mr. Wilson, and some other gentlemen, to settle a good understanding between the two colonies, traveled as far as Plymouth, more than forty miles, through an howling wilderness [...]. The difficulty of the walk was abundantly compensated by the honorable, first reception, and then dismission, which they found from the rulers of Plymouth, and by the good correspondence thus established between the colonies.

Eventually, in 1691,  Plymouth Plantation and the Massachusetts Bay Colony would merge. 

By then

Philip Roth (1933-2018)

from American Literature: A History, by Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen

(from "After the war: 1945-80 - Jewish American novelists") (...)


Still, although Malamud's characters are not invariably Jewish, in his presentation of Jewish milieus in The Assistant and in his early stories he is the most Jewish of all Jewish American writers of the fifties and sixties. Here, mainstream America is a vague presence in the background, just like Poland and its inhabitants only feature in the distance in the ghettos and streets of I.B. Singer's stories (Gimpel  the Fool, 1957; The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961) or novels (The Family Moskat, 1950; The Magician of Lublin, 1960). Far more usual in Jewish American fiction is a continuous interaction with mainstream American culture and an unending negotiation of territorial boundaries. Such interaction even takes place when mainstream America is nowhere in sight, as in the title story of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a wistful story about class differences within Newark's Jewish community, in which the narrator's lover-for-a-summer has had her nose 'fixed'—'I was pretty. Now I'm prettier"–to conform to mainstream standards of beauty. With this collection of stories, Roth (1933-[2018]) found himself at the center of controversy, especially because of the stories 'Defender of the Faith', in which a calculating Jeish soldier tries to exploit the loyalty he expects from a Jewish superior, and 'Eli, the Fanatic', in which suburban, assimilated Jews try to prevent orthodox co-religionists from establishin a yeshiva in their mostly gentile neighborhood. Roth's fiercest critics, supset by what seemed a cynical view of middle-class American Jewry, accused him of self-hatred, even of anti-Semitism. What Roth captures in 'Eli' is the self-censorship and the dissembling that in the 1950s were part and parcel of assimilation and the deep sense of alienation—experienced here by the lawyer hired by his fellow Jews—that such a forced way of living may bring with it. This is in fact one of the overriding themes in Jewish-American writing of the first decades after the war. In order to be accepted by mainstream America, Jewish Americans abandon much of what may characterize them as Jews—sometimes, as in 'Goodbye, Columbus', even the shape of their nose—and move out of typically Jewish neighborhoods. But that estranges them from their background while their new environment never fully accepts them, leading to a sort of alienation that differs from that felt by young mainstream Americans but is felt even more profoundly.

After two rather traditional novels featuring a more mainstream cast and dealing with the familiar themes of relationships and personal problems and ambitions (Letting Go, 1962, and When She Was Good, 1967), Roth returned to more specifically Jewish themes with Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a virtuoso rant on a psychiatrist's couch in which the novel's protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, exhaustively lists all his frustrations at having been brought up Jewish, and in between details his insatiable lusting after blonde, all-American girls. Lust would from then on return regularly in Roth's novels, as in The Professor of Desire (1977) or the fairly recent Sabbath's Theater (1995), and has contributed disproportionally to his public image, but in those novels, too, Roth is concerned with Jewishness, even if he sees himself first of all as an American writer. In the last four decades, Roth has brilliantly chronicled Jewish life in the Newark of his younger years and has through an alter ego, the Roth-like writer Nathan Zuckerman who features in for instance Zuckerman Bound (1985) and The Counterlife (1987), offered incisive meditations on what it means to be a Jewish American writer. Early in his career Roth worried that 'the actuality is continually outdoing our talents', that the technical skills of American writers were no longer a match for the outrageous images and events that the culture casually produced. Fortunately, those fears were unfounded.


(From "The End and Return of History: 1980-2010 - Philip Roth")

Philip Roth has remained extremely prolific also after 1980, even to the point of becoming perhaps the iconic American author of the entire period. To begin with, Roth wrote a third novel in the David Kepesh series with The Dying Animal. Then, he has continued the series of novels featuring Nathan Zuckerman, the first instalment of which, The Ghost Writer, appeared in 1979, and the seventh, presumably also the last given its title of Exit Ghost, in 2007, with as other titles Zukerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). Zuckerman has often been interrpeted as an alter ego for Roth himself, but as of 1990 there also started appearing a new series featuring a protagonist called 'Roth', comprising Deception: A Novel (1990), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004). There is also a free-standing novel, Sabbath's Theatre (1995), and finally a series of short novels, Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (2010). We will here briefly treat three exemplary instances from this overwhelming oeuvre.

American Pastoral, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, starts from the premise of the good life in the country as the culmination of the American Dream and a counterweight to the chaos, oppression and misery of the Old World. This is also what the protagonist of the story, whose life Zuckerman records, seems to have been bound for all his life, until everything fell apart. The novel is set in Newark, and the turning point is the 1960s, when Newark's earlier prosperity has melted away under the onslaught of beginning globalization, the city's older population of first and second generation immigrants, many of them Jewish, like the protagonist, have moved away or been minoritized by the large numbers of African Americans that have moved in. Instead of a harmonious community Newark now is the scene of race riots and labor conflicts. On the level of the U.S. as a whole the havoc wrought in Newark repeats itself in the radical youth and political movements rocking the country. Roth returns a hard verdict on what has gone wrong with America during his own lifetime.

A similar feeling speaks from The Plot Against America, winnner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005. Roth finds his initial inspiration in a plea Charles Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic by airplane in 1927 and a national hero, made in 1941 to prevent the U.S. from entering World War II, for which he blamed the Jews, the British, and President Roosevelt. Lindbergh was in good standing with the Nazi regime and especially with Goering, the commander of the German air force. Roth takes the poetic liberty of situating Lindbergh's speech not in 1941 but in 1940, in the run-up to that year's Presidential elections, and casting Lindbergh as the Republican challenger of Roosevelt. When Lindbergh wins the election, life in the U.S. turns bitter for American Jews, and hence also for little Philip Roth. Things look even more somber when Lindbergh disappears on a solo flight with his famous Spirit of St. Louis airplane and Vice-President Wheeler, an extreme rightwing politician, assumes office. In the end, everything returns to normal, Rososevelt triumphs in a special election, Pearl Harbor signals the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and history resumes its familiar course. The Plot Against America asks some hard questions about the nature of American democracy and American politics more generally. For most commentators it was hardly a coincidence that Roth published a novel focusing on these questions, and with such characters, in the run-up to the 2004 elections, with an incumbent who in the wake of 9/11 had institued an authoritarian regime such as the U.S. had hardly ever seen before, and with a Vice-President of known conservative sympathies.

If American Pastoral and The Plot Against America address wider social and political issues, Everyman sticks to the personal level. In all of Roth's later work the consciousness of approaching death is overwhelmingly present, and particularly so in the foru short novels he published towards the end of his career (Roth in 2013 announced that he thought he had written enough and would write no more). In the futher unspecified 'he' protagonist Roth gives us a reincarnation of the medieval 'everyman' from the eponymous morality play. but whereas the medieval Everyman finds that with death all material worries and constraints dissolve and only spiritual virtues remain, because after death comes resurrection, noting of the sort happens in Roth's version. Everyman as the chronicle of a death announced, a merciless march from the cradle to the grave marked by disease, illness, the relentless deterioration of the body, deaths and funerals. Like the medieval play it holds up the mirror of our own fallibility and ephemerality, but without the consolation of faith.

Ray Bradbury y Philip Roth

—oOo—

Ezra Pound

(from American Literature: A History—by Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen; Routledge, 2014)

The driving force behind the renewal of English-language poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century was Ezra Pound (1885-1972). As of 1908 Pound spent most of his life in Europe, first in London (until 1920), then in Paris (until 1925) and finally in Italy.

For Pound the writer was the guardian of language: his task was to keep it sharply honed. Great liteature to Pound was 'simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.' Pound was resolutely international in orientation, and for him all of the world's literature(s) formed one organic body. What was important to him, then, was to distinguish between what from this enormous mass was worth preserving, studying and teaching, especially to other, younger writers, and what was not. This explains why Pound spent so much of his time and energy on didactical and theoretical essays, as well as on composing anthologies. It also explains why his entire life he continued to be an avid and prodigious translator—or 're-creator', as some of his critics prefer to call him because of his very idiosyncratic views on translation—from Italian, French, Greek and Chinese. In the end, these very same principles also underpin Pound's magnum opus The Cantos.

 Pound started his poetic career around 1905 as a rather traditionalist epigone of the English decadent poets and the earlier Pre-Raphaelites, Robert Browning and the medieval troubdours. In a dramatic monologue, Pound has an Italian or Provençal troubadour open a window upon his era. However, via these 'personae' he also voices his own opinions. A brilliant example of this technique, as well as of Pound's translation and re-creation methods, is the long multi-part 'Hommage to Sextus Propertius' (1917), in which he uses the Roman poet to lambast the England of World War I.

In London Pound got to know the English writers Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme. From them he borrowed the idea that a poem should be a dry, hard language object, and that the language of poetry should depart 'in no way from speech, save by a heightened intensity'. For Pound this meant that a poem should dispense with all unnecessary elements. The result was a movement that Pound himself in 1912 baptized 'Imagism', and which saw a poem as 'planes in relation', as the juxtaposition of images. The meaning of an Imagist poem results from the relationship that the reader discerns as obtaining between these images. The classical illustration of this theory is Pound's own 'In a Station of the Metro':

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

(1913, 1916)

Pound uses a semicolon at the end of the first line, thus leaving the two images unrelated in the work itself. It is left to the reader to discover, or to posit himself, a relation between the two, or not. With a colon the poem would have amounted to a simple affirmation: these faces are like petals, etc. With a full stop, the images would necessarily have remained separate. A simple comma would have made the second line a non-restrictive appositive to the faces in the first line, and would thus again have enforced a specific relationship betwen the two lines. Early in his carreer Pound became acquainted with the theories of the American orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), positing that Chinese characters were ideograms, stylized reproductions of the objects they represented. For Pound this meant that in Chinese writing characters were linked to one another through association and not, as in Western languages, through grammatical constructions indicating the precise relationships obtaining. Most of these ideas have since been discredited by scholars of Chinese, but for Pound they furnished the basis for his own associative poetic technique of juxtaposition and of planes in relation. For instance, the two lines that make up 'In a Station of the Metro' contain no verb, which reinforces the effect also invited by the use of the semicolon we pointed out before: because there is no clear grammatical relation between the two lines it is left to the reader to forge his own interpretation.

Pound's investment in Imagism as a movement was short-lived, as he quickly moved on to what he called 'Vorticism', a loose avant-garde circle around the Magazine Blast (1914-15). In many ways, though, Pound's idea of Vorticism simply entailed a further development of Imagism, as we can gather from his own definition that the image is 'a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can and must perforce, call a VORTEX, form which, and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing'.

As of 1915 Pound started looking for ways to apply his Imagist principles to the writing of longer poems. In techniques that were also becoming very popular in other arts—collage and montage, the juxtaposition of fragments, often consisting of truncated quotations from other earlier works, sudden temporal and perspectival shifts—Pound saw possibilities to extend his principle of 'planes in relation' to larger units. The first work in which he successfully applied a number of these techniques was 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' (1920). At the same time he also again made use of a persona. The result was an ironic and bitter reflection on Pound's own literary career until then, and on the London literary scene upon which he was at the verge of turning his back at that very moment. Pound's most ambitious, and most voluminous work is The Cantos, an epic of 116 cantos, upon which he started work on 1915, and which remained unfinished at his death in 1972. In his ambition to encompass all of human history, culture, and literature he roamed across languages, literatures, continents and ages. Mixing original lines with quotations and translations from the most diverse sources, The Cantos creatively practiced what Pound also advocated in his didactic and theoretical writings, and his anthologies. Although clearly meant as an epic in the line of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the Divine Comedy, and frequently directly quoting or alluding to these predecessors, Pound's Cantos lack the overall consistency and unity of plot of Homer's and Dante's works. Needless to say, this is deliberate on Pound's part. Just as Eliot would do in The Waste Land, so Pound too in his Cantos wants to stress the fragmentation, the brokenness of his contemporary world, the ruin of a civilization instead of, as he and Eliot saw it, the unity and triumph embodied in these earlier epics. 

In The Cantos, as in all of his poetry, Pound aimed at the simultaneity of all passages, all quotations, rather than the linearity of the classical narrative poem. By thus giving his epic a 'spatial form' Pound shows himself an exemplary modernist. Another modernist organizational principle Pound consistently adhered to is the recurring use of terms, characters and settings as 'leitmotifs', the associative resonance of words and contexts via what Pound himself called 'logopeia'. Notwithstanding his exemplary application of what have come to be considered as mainstays of modernist technique, or perhaps because of the extremes to which he pushed them, critical opinion as to the final success of The Cantos varies widely. Whichever position one assumes, the fact remains that with The Cantos, as with his other, earlier work, Pound contributed significantly to the liberation of English—and especially American—poetry from the formalist straitjacket it largely found itself in at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. He also did so by serving as mentor to younger poets, as indefatigable editor of (little) magazines, as coiner of avant-garde theories such as Imagism and Vorticism, and in the case of the older Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) as his part-time secretary while at the same time bringing him into contact with for instance Japanese poetry and theater, thus aiding him to change from the poet of the Celtic Twilight and the Irish Renaissance into the High Modernist poet we now know Yeats as.

One particularly famous part of The Cantos consists of The Pisan Cantos (1948). These cantos refer to the period when Pound, whose ideas on economics and politics were as idiosyncratic as they were in literature, and who was a staunch supporter of the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini, at the end of the war was imprisoned for treason. These cantos strike a strongly personal and even confessional note, signaling a break with the Eliotian doctrine of 'impersonalism' in which the poet hid behind a persona or a mask, and as such are often considered as a prelude to the Confessional poetry that in the 1950s and 1960s, with the poetry of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, would become the dominant mode of American poetry along with Beat poetry.

Semblanza de T. S. Eliot

—oOo—