Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s by George Hutchinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s by George Hutchinson Amy Fehr George Hutchinson. Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s. Columbia UP, 2018. xvii + 439 pp. George Hutchinson focuses his wide-ranging survey of American literature and culture on the decade of the 1940s. Hutchinson concedes that the decade is an arbitrary temporal designation, but he nonetheless makes a compelling case for this periodization. Most contemporary scholarship devoted to the 1940s marks the war as a point of rupture, and Hutchinson's focus on the entirety of the 1940s—not only the post-1945 era—allows for new perspectives on how periodization affects our understanding of literature and culture. "We need new ways of thinking about cultural transformation" (12), Hutchinson argues, and his work to establish lines of continuity between the years of WWII and the post-war years allows for an understanding of "the role of habit, processes of incremental cultural change, and the recursive nature of experience and expression." Indeed, Hutchinson goes so far as to write that the decade has been "the black hole of American literary history" (2), and his work—Facing the Abyss—promises to redress this issue. In reframing the period of the 1940s, Hutchinson provides an expansive and impressive bibliography that features both canonical texts and works the author explicitly reclaims from the "black hole" of literary and historical criticism. Examining what he calls a "literary ecology" (12), Facing the Abyss reads literary texts alongside visual and cultural artifacts such as paintings, dustjackets, publishing histories, reviews, and letters. In focusing on the literary, Hutchinson claims, "the 1940s was the most intensely literary decade in American history, perhaps in war history" (16). His work on the publishing industry perhaps best supports this claim, as does his related research on the Armed Services Editions of contemporary novels in chapter 1. Chapter 4 is also notable for revitalizing wartime texts that have been ignored in previous scholarship, constituting one of the books most important contributions. It is a difficult task to provide a clear outline of the nine chapters in Facing the Abyss, which also features an introduction and an epilogue. This difficulty stems in part from the nature of Hutchinson's "literary ecology," as each chapter explores the intersection of "various themes and motifs" (12). Moreover, Hutchinson's organizational structure signals another of the author's more interesting interventions. The book's chapters are organized thematically, loosely structured around intersections between various texts. The result is a work that rejects any monolithic understandings of the period but [End Page 548] instead offers a portrait of an era that highlights representative lines of ideology and inquiry. As a result, each chapter offers a distinct thematic perspective without isolating its content from the rest of the project. Chapters include topics ranging from "Popular Culture and the Avant-Garde" to "Ecology and Culture," as indicated by their titles. Moreover, the resurgence of a text such as Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go throughout the work exemplifies Hutchinson's interest in recurrence, while also underscoring the intersectional nature of the various themes housed in each chapter. The organization of the project is admirable, especially given Hutchinson's interest in periodization and categorization, but it is not without its flaws. What is gained in flexibility and breadth is sometimes lost in clarity, especially given the decision to exclude subsections or breaks to organize the text. Among the numerous motifs uncovered in Facing the Abyss, perhaps the most fascinating is Hutchinson's study of the ideal of universality or "planetary humanism" (4), which was popular during a decade when the United States reckoned with the politics of a World War. Hutchinson defines the ideal of universal humanity against problematic Enlightenment concepts of man, explaining that "it is rather focused, in a more limited sense, on asserting a universal humanity, a potential for mutual understanding, and the ethical responsibility that persons have toward one another, regardless of race and nation" (214). Hutchinson recognizes that contemporary critics (including this reader) might be skeptical of such an ideal, given the common and problematic liberal usages of the term. As such, Hutchinson works...