Books

THE AMERICAN NOVEL AND ITS TRADITION.

December 1957 STEARNS MORSE
Books
THE AMERICAN NOVEL AND ITS TRADITION.
December 1957 STEARNS MORSE

By Richard Chase '37. New York:Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957- 266 pp.95¢.

In his. introduction Richard Chase contrasts the "solid moral inclusiveness and massive equability" of the English novel (such as Middlemarch, for example) to be "freer, more daring, more brilliant fiction" of the American romance-novel: The Scarlet Letter,Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn. Drawing upon the comments of Hawthorne and James on the art of fiction, he defines and describes the romance-novel as containing elements of adventure, melodrama, myth, allegory, symbolism, poetry — in short, of "wildness" - which one does not ordinarily associate with the characteristically realistic novel of the English tradition.

He characterizes the romance-novel as shaped by the contradictions peculiar to our culture - the disparity between ideals and practice, for example, noted by Tocqueville, and the division of our culture into "highbrow" and "lowbrow," made by Van high-Brooks; and points out that the American imagination has been preoccupied with "the melodrama of the eternal struggle of good and evil," less interested in "reconciliation than in alienation and disorder."

In illustration of his thesis he examines the melodramas of Brockden Brown; Cooper and the Leatherstocking; the limitations of romance in Hawthorne; Melville and MobyDick; the romantic elements in James; the vision of truth, the folk origins, and the mythic significance of Huckleberry Finn; and the naturalism of Norris - more "romantic" than "scientific." He concludes with an analysis of The Sound and the Fury, the most "novelistic" of Faulkner's novels, yet one in which "the element of romance is complexly assimilated and sublimated, so that it becomes a suffused poetry of language, metaphor, and event."

This summary scarcely does justice to Mr. Chase's book, which sets American fiction and the American tradition, with its origins in Puritanism and the frontier, in a fresh perspective. Both the central thesis and Mr. Chases's incidental comments and insights are stimulating.