THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST: American stories, isolation, God, and violence. So everyone has a pet lineage of American literature. As far as I can tell, the line I find illuminating and compelling is sharply different from the one traced by Motime Like the Present, for example. (I mean, c’mon–Emerson? Why drink Diet Caffeine-Free Nietzsche?) Most cultures are characterized by particular tensions and conflicts–cultures aren’t univocal, but they emphasize some of the eternal conflicts over others. There’s a dark red streak in the American storytelling arts (lit and movies), an old and lurid line, violent and strikingly concerned–as some critic or other put it–with “ultimates.” Grand-scale questions. Here are some very scattered thoughts on that lineage. Impressionistic, not dispositive. Apologies in advance for scatteredness and high reliance on assertion rather than proof.

Blood at the Root. Despite–or, more likely, in reaction against–the American belief in second chances, the immigrant nation’s belief in starting over, American literature returns again and again to the idea that, in Faulkner’s words, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” The attitude toward the past isn’t nostalgic or accepting. It’s often an attitude of violent rejection–forget your old name, tear down the old buildings, leave home and start again as someone new, and hope nothing ever comes “Out of the Past” to find you. The edges never get dull. (Gee, I wonder if this could possibly have anything to do with the conflict between the Declaration of Independence and the slave economy?)

And They Were All Alone! In American cities and suburbs as much as in the romanticized West, there are all these humans who have either sought or been thrust into a rootless, anchorless, anti-traditional world, with little of the small-town sense that someone is always watching you (and therefore watching out for you). Americans are “The Searchers,” Lost in the Cosmos, without the familiar answers and moral habits supplied by a traditional life. (Agatha Christie writes a great deal about the breakup of the English social consensus after World War II; but that sense that suddenly you didn’t know who was in the next house, that the world had become strange and alien to you, comes naturally in American literature well before the twentieth century.)

A Protestant of my acquaintance once joked, about his approach to theology, “Well, so there we were, just me and Jesus….” So many American stories have this sense of radical aloneness, the ferocious quest to find out whether there’s anyone else out there. Think of Addie Bundren bringing the switch down on her children: “When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.”

When no one is watching, it’s possible to feel like you control the truth itself. You’re what the linguistic philosophers call “Super-Crusoe,” the man alone–there’s this whole controversy about whether Super-Crusoe could even develop language, since language requires regularity, verifiability. Both “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “Memento” get at this question–what is the point of the truth? Can the truth be made up if you know how? These questions haunt a society that is deracinated, fragmented, where the social consensus is constantly unsettled–where you escape the security of the beliefs you were raised in before you even have time to fully assimilate them.

This emphasis on the radically alone individual is, of course, the dark half of the American belief in the primacy of the individual conscience. Most cultures’ best tendencies are also the source of their worst failings, and so too ours. The culture that honors hope and second chances is also a culture that has to come to terms with the darkness we drag around behind us: Wherever you go, there you are. Or as Eric Sevareid put it in his eulogy for Werner von Braun, “Everything in space, von Braun said, obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws and obey them, space will treat you kindly. The difficulty is that man brings the laws of his own nature into space. The issue is how man treats man. The problem does not lie in outer space, but where it’s always been: on terra firma in inner man.”

Final thought: The national literature that most resembles American lit is not British but Russian. Violent, high-lonesome, and fiercely either for or against God (but not indifferent).

Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.

Sources (besides those already named above): Every Western I’ve ever seen, every (American) noir I’ve ever seen, Invisible Man, Blood Meridian, quite a lot of Emily Dickinson’s more ferocious work, Miss Lonelyhearts, Lancelot, Sabbath’s Theater, possibly Lolita (I need to reread it), and–let’s get some real pulp on here–The Secret History.