'Moby-Dick' and the Problem of a Democratic Literature

Abstract

It is no less true for being a commonplace that the American literary artist of the first half of the nineteenth-century suffered from the cultural sterility of his surroundings. Washington Irving achieved the status of America's first internationally recognized man of letters by fastening upon a time and place, seventeenth-century Dutch New York, in which the Americans were but transplanted Europeans with a lore and ways rooted in the misty regions of the folk history of the old continent. His initial task, executed very well indeed, was, as he saw it, to bring a sense of the legendary to the American landscape. Our observation that his Rip Van Winkle or Ichabod Crane descend from German folk tales is slight in the face of his extraordinary success in giving them a complete home in the lower reaches of the Hudson River Valley, and fixing them irrevocably in the imagination as the presiding spirits of their American locales. Fenimore Cooper, who sought to mythologize native materials, was also acutely conscious of the want of conventional fictional paraphernalia in his native land. His lament is a famous document of American literary history: There is scarcely an ore which contributes to the wealth of the author, that is found, here, in veins as rich as in Europe. There are no annals for the historian; no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist; no manners for the dramatist; no obscure fictions for the writer of romance; no gross and hardy offences against decorum for the moralist; nor any of the rich artificial auxiliaries of poetry.... The effect of a promiscuous assemblage anywhere is to create a standard of deportment; and great liberty permits every one to aim at its attainment. I have never seen a nation so much alike in my life, as the people of the United States, and what is more, they are not only like each other, but they are remarkably like that which common sense tells them they ought to resemble .... There is no costume for the peasant (there is scarcely a peasant at all), no wig for the judge, no baton for the general, no diadem for the chief magistrate. The darkest ages of their history are illuminated by the light of truth; the utmost efforts of their chivalry are limited by the laws of God; and even the deeds of their sages and heroes are to be sung in a language that would differ but little from a version of the ten commandments. However useful and respectable all this may be in actual life, it indicates but one direction to the man of genius.'