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The Past as Prologue
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10837 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1986 |
3,170 Words |
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Gregory Wolfe
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GENTLEMEN IN ENGLAND
A. N. Wilson
New York: Viking, 1986
311 pp., $17.95
HAWKSMOOR
Peter Ackroyd
New York: Harper & Row, 1985
217 pp., $16.95
Peter Ackroyd and A. N. Wilson, both young British novelists, have recently published works of historical fiction that vividly recreate past times and evoke such timeless themes as the nature of faith and the way we cope with a world mired in sin and injustice. Ironically, these novels have arrived on the American scene at a time when fiction of a historical cast has all but disappeared and the current fashion is for a brand of literary minimalism that revels in provincialism. It is unlikely that the American literary establishment will perceive Hawksmoor and Gentlemen in England as important attempts to break out of a facile presentism. That would be a shame, a blindness caused by some of our own worst national habits of mind.
Americans like to think of themselves as innovators in all walks of life, from automobile manufacturing to the making of poems. It is part of our national myth to see ourselves as perpetually redeeming a world about to fall into decay and barbarism. Much of the emotional force during the War of Independence and the Founding era derived from the conviction that America was a republican phoenix rising gloriously from the ashes of decadent, monarchical Europe.
The myth has even filtered into our sense of literary identity: Walt Whitman, the granddaddy of American modernism, threw off rhyme and meter to sing out the glorious freedom of New World democracy. The great modernists, Eliot and Pound, were American, after all. And though Hemingway and Fitzgerald lived the bohemian life at Left Bank coffee shops in Paris, they never gave up their Americanness: if anything, they went abroad to colonize Europe!
It is an exhilarating myth, and it strikes sympathetic chords inside most of us. But like many myths, it serves to comfort us and block out certain disquieting truths. The myth of American innovation, in its literary form, has led us to live in a present tense where creativity springs not from a dialogue between our tradition and current social and psychic pressures, but wholly out of the self--something full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus. The ironic flip side of our confident ability to remake the world is this: we tend to be provincial--provincial in time as well as space. Of course, this is not the whole story: our early New England and modern Southern writers have been steeped both in their sense of place and their vivid awareness of the past in the present.
Diminishing fictions
Nonetheless, the contemporary American literary scene is increasingly perceived as a self-enclosed, claustrophobic environment. Judging by the titles of some recent essays on the state of contemporary American fiction, it is clear that there is growing dissatisfaction with the lack of imaginative energy among the writers touted most vociferously by the literary establishment. One
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