Pigment and Ether: A Comment on the American Mind

Abstract

ions and generalisations only had 'barren insulated facts' to work from. When young Hemingway watched the modern world at war he 'saw nothing sacred': 'Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages... the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.' Such 'barren insulated facts1 are like Hugh McVey's pebbles, not like Margaret Fuller's. Behind the material world tnere is no God, no Over-Soul: only a horrible nothingness nada for Hemingway, 'a vastness and emptiness1 for Anderson. The Hemingway hero has to orient him self as best he can by limiting himself to what the eye can witness, what the hand can verify. Which is why Hemingway devised the style he did: it is a Style which believes only in the authenticity of concrete particulars and works hard to separate out individual sense impressions and exclude all vague generalisations. Hemingway is a man trying to estab!"-h some personal moment by-moment; order and significance by carefully picking over the fragments of a world no longer held together by the large affirmations of the transcendental ists. Where Emerson saw all fragments of concrete reality as being hinged to some superior Reality on which they readily opened, Hemingway saw only detached details of matter, marooned in a meaningless void. Emerson's wondering is a constant act of worship: Hemingway's lucid scrutiny betokens a continuing effort of orientation. Emerson praised God by looking through matter; Hemingway saved himself by holding onto it. Emerson believed what he could infer; Hemingway relied only on what he could see and touch. Instead of the consolations of religion we have the consolations of sensation. Vague general isations have been abandoned in favour of increasingly accurate perceptions. The transcendental ists asserted that a man who could not see God everywhere was blind. The blind men of a later age had to return to a brail Ie-l ike reading of the world. Let us return to Tocqueville's point by quoting a worried entry from Thoreau's Journals which nicely bears out its validity. 'Let me not be in haste to detect the universal law; let me see more clearly a particular instance of it.' This hastejtowards universal generalisations seems to have had a peculiar magnetism for American writers at the same time as they have shown a real genius for the unbiased notation of concrete particulars. Certainly, much of what I have said attempts to suggest that American writers have shown an increasing suspicion of vague generalisations, and from Mark Twain onwards we have a series of writers who work increasingly hard to keep their gaze on the veridical details of the phenomenal world. And yet their emancipation from This content downloaded from 207.46.13.12 on Thu, 12 May 2016 05:56:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms