American Tantalus

Horizons, Happiness, and the Impossible Pursuits of US Literature and Culture

Andrew Warnes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628920017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

American Tantalus argues that modern US fictions often grow preoccupied by tantalisation. This keyword might seem commonplace; thesauruses, certainly, often lump it in with tease and torment in their general inventories of desire. Such lists, however, mislead. Just as most US dictionaries have in fact long recognised tantalise's origins in The Odyssey, so they have defined it as the unique desire we feel for objects that (like the fruit and water once cruelly placed before Tantalus) lie within our reach yet withdraw from our attempts to touch them. On these terms, American Tantalus shows, tantalise not only describes a particular kind of thwarted desire, but also one that dominates modern US fiction to a remarkable extent. For this term specifically evokes the yearning to touch alienated or virginal objects that we find examined by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Cade Bambara, Richard Wright and Toni Morrison; and it also indicates the insatiable pursuit of the horizon so important to Willa Cather and Edith Wharton among others. This eclectic canon indeed "prefers" the dictionary to the thesaurus: unreachable destinations and untouched commodities here indeed tantalise, inviting gestures of inquiry from which they then recoil. This focus, while lodging cycles of tantalisation at the very heart of American myth, holds profound implications for our understanding of modernity, and, in particular, of the cultural genesis of the commodity as a form.

1

Perpetual Pursuits

Happiness, Horizons, and Other Elusive Objects in Modern US Culture

Even at this early stage, then, I hope I have begun to justify American Tantalus’s focus on US literature and culture, and to have shown that the attentions of this cultural field often fall on tantalizing objects of many kinds. In this opening chapter I plan to continue this work, and to do so by considering some significant US artists and writers whose different creations, I aim to show, also turn on the question or image of desire’s perpetual evasion. As important to this chapter, however, is its defence of the literary focus that American Tantalus will soon adopt.

The imperial pursuit of a tantalizing horizon looms so large in US cultural history that it might seem that American Tantalus should concentrate in the main on visual art. The foray into the Hudson River Valley School that follows these remarks, one might think, should herald not a literary discussion but an extended visual history that could then trace the influences of this landscape tradition to be found in post-1900 US artworks. Now it so happens that the analysis of Sanford Robinson Gifford’s A Home in the Wilderness (1866) which will presently launch this chapter does continue in some ways to reverberate throughout much of American Tantalus. Nonetheless, during its later passages, I also focus a lot less on visual text and a lot more on writing of different kinds. Narratives often eclipse our view of other artworks.

This is no accident. The defence of American Tantalus’s literary focus that I offer later in this chapter is at once theoretical and obvious. I draw on Roland Barthes’s Image-Music-Text (1977), but I do so to get at the simple observation that, if the US art tradition seems every bit as fascinated by tantalizing objects as US literature, then its relationship to these objects is fundamentally different. Leading Hudson River landscapes as well as the most radical works of pop art and abstract expression all simulate tantalization in the sense that they lure gallery visitors toward their priceless surfaces even as they prevent and all but criminalize actual contact. On the other hand, the codification of writing, the abstraction written into literature’s DNA, debars novelists from such mimetic practices. Nowhere can they traffic in simulation. Just as words are arbitrary, and just as reproducibility has purged the aura from the book, so the blank page now looms before writers as a realm of detachment in which they can only encode even as they represent the effects of tantalization. Literary form itself keeps them at a distance from this phenomenon in which they so often grow so interested. The abstract and arbitrary nature of words means that they cannot harness, and can only reflect, the kinds of experiences on which Moby-Dick dwells.

This is why, after my opening discussion of A Home in the Wilderness, I return to focus on the not unfamiliar subset of postwar US writing that dwells on what James Wolcott has called “the secret vices of suburbanites.”¹ Here I explore some of Richard Ford’s writing and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” (1964) among other examinations of what Wolcott also calls “the hidden tooth decay of the American Dream.”² Before I turn to consider these fictions of privilege, however, I want first to consider for a while longer the visual replication of the tantalizing effect. I want to turn to a point of focus not unlike American Tantalus’s point of departure: another sheet of smooth water, another shimmering surface, which entices and invites yet which would disintegrate, unavoidably, on touch.

The land outside

Before us spread the virgin waters which the prow of the sketcher had never curl’d, green woods enfolding them whose venerable masses had never figured in trans-atlantic annuals, and far away the stern blue mountains whose forms were ne’er beheld . . . or been subjected to the canvass by the innumerable dabblers in paint for all time past. The painter of American scenery has indeed privileges superior to any other; all nature here is new to Art.

Thomas Cole, Journal Entry (July 6, 1835)

Pueblo potters, creators of petroglyphs and oral narratives, never conceived of removing themselves from the earth and sky. So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. “A portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view” does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and his or her surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory she or he surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1997)

In the summer of 1865, as the weary peace held, Americans responded to the end of the Civil War in many different ways. National reconciliation was no easy prospect, and not least insofar as the victorious North felt obliged to respect what Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary has called the “idealistic expectation . . . that a nation is a voluntary association of free citizens,” and to refrain from contorting the defeated confederacy into positions of humiliating “forced loyalty.”³ Some, faced with this complex and contradictory situation, sought reconciliation on the grounds of a shared democratic tradition; other Americans reasserted white supremacy; and others still simply translated old military into new political grievances, resisting the consequences of peace as if defeat itself had affronted history. Emancipation in the meantime “continued to be celebrated by black Americans but failed to be included among the nation’s great traditions.”⁴ Ordinary black and white Americans did what they could to recover from the terrible onslaught and consequence of the war; only some were successful.

Sanford Robinson Gifford’s response to the ceasefire befitted his rising status as a landscapist of note. Having lost two brothers in the conflict, he elected to leave his home in Hudson, New York, and to head North in search of new subjects to paint. Ambition, perhaps, helped shape the plan. Many of the works for which Gifford was already known, from Scene in the Catskills (1850) to Mansfield Mountain (1859), were of scenes that not only lay within easy reach of his childhood home but which had also been subjects of the pioneering work of Thomas Cole. Now 42, and still seeming to some a minor figure, a mere student rather than leader of the Hudson River Valley School, Gifford seemed keen to distinguish himself, to identify new subjects, hone his approach, and generally do all he could to establish himself as an important artist in his own right.⁵ As he left his old childhood haunts behind, Gifford traveled further into New Hampshire, eventually nearing the northern edge of the White Mountains. Only a few days later, in paintings he would base on sketches he made of this rugged terrain, he would distil still further the play of shadow and haze, the overt manipulation of natural light, for which he was fast becoming best known.

This overt manipulation of natural light troubled some contemporary critics. Attacks on his work, while rare, took similar form, and tended to fault Gifford for failing to observe the “truth to nature” that the North American Review, for one, called an “immutable law.”⁶ His mannerisms, his mistiness, his lack of objectivity, could look artificial, falling short of the total Romantic surrender to and faithful reproduction of nature that many felt Cole’s earliest landscapes incarnated. Gifford’s error, as a New York Daily Tribune contributor complained in 1864, was to “show us Nature” under an aspect of “vaporous obscurity,” while George William Curtis fretted that Gifford’s “dream haze . . . may seduce the artist from a healthy sincerity.”⁷ Important critical arbiters of the modern era have sometimes enlarged upon these rare but nagging doubts. One such authority, Barbara Novak’s American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (1969), set Gifford apart from the “Hudson River men,” adjudging him instead a painter of “luminist landscape.”⁸ Another, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, as late as 1999 omitted Gifford from a Hudson River collection long composed of Cole’s Sunrise among the Catskills (1826) among other masterworks.⁹ As such, while a 2004 retrospective would correct this omission in some style, curatorial policy prior to that date chimed with Novak’s work, the gallery and the classic study agreeing, in effect, that Gifford did establish himself as an artist in his own right—but did so by pursuing new techniques, and a new approach to light in particular, that placed him at a remove from the Hudson River tradition.

Gifford himself, it is clear, felt differently. His public activities as well as his admiring references to Cole indicate that he did not feel his new painterly techniques distanced him from the Englishman’s legacy and that they would in fact improve, and perhaps even perfect, his capacity to honour it. Cole, we should recall, was a pioneer. At minimum, he was the first US landscapist alert to the power and logic of frontier mythology. As a pathfinder, however, his paintings sometimes fell short of their aspirations to complete aesthetic independence, and still brought European mores to bear on new American vistas. Regarding Cole’s work overall, something of a mismatch in fact grows apparent: his wilderness landscapes, sublime and picturesque, sometimes struggle to make the encounter with the new—the touching of the virginal—quite as central as his journals suggest it should seem. And all the while, even as some critics suspected Gifford of lacking Cole’s “truth to nature,” the latter’s pictures tell a different story. Their epic and rather posed appearance, not to mention their attempts to capture what Novak calls the “essential truth hidden behind the . . . vagaries of external nature,” reveal that Cole, too, was no neutral, straight observer.¹⁰ Less separated the men than some said. Both landscapists arranged, choreographed, the visions they brought to public view. The real difference was that, whereas Cole reshaped nature according to the mores of the picturesque, creating canvasses in which an alluring American newness appeared alongside more established and European elements, Gifford organized his pictures wholly around such allure, his sunsets, his haziness, and his reflecting pools together turning the horizon into a pivot: a magnet able to draw the eye toward it. Cole’s more excitable journal entries, on falling into Gifford’s hands, thus took on the status of a de facto aesthetic theory. America’s “freshness from the creation,” like Cole’s other outbursts about the New World, became the object, even the raison d’etre, of Gifford’s mature work.¹¹

Directly upon reaching the New Hampshire settlement of Gorham, Gifford left it. Gorham was a small and struggling community, a piddling “township” that The New England Gazetteer (1839) had once called “rough and unproductive.”¹² Even if he had he found it flourishing, though, Gifford was never going to linger there long. He had not undertaken his White Mountains tour to visit such fledgling settlements. He was there to capture, or at least rekindle, the formative encounter with the New England wilderness that Frederick Jackson Turner would later call the Old West.¹³ Three or four miles eastward he followed the Androscoggin, its tumbling course in time leading him to a small lake and a stunningly clear view of Mount Hayes. The location captivated him. Gifford devoted an entire day to it, studying the changing light from morning to sunset, and completing two sketches of Mount Hayes with the lake in the foreground and Cascade and Sugar mountains in the back. But this was just the opening stage in a pursuit of American nature that Gifford would resume back in his Manhattan studio. For the paintings he would go on to produce indoors did not duplicate or retrace these sketches. They would use them, instead, as prompts—as evocations by which he divined still more vividly his underlying idea of American wilderness. The ways in which Gifford’s untitled painting of the scene differs from his sketches, as detailed by Ila Weiss, certainly seem worth pondering:

[This first landscape] eliminates the foreground, so that the wood floats among the water lilies, opening the nearer space; and the aerial mountain beyond Hayes is moved and magnified to lure the eye into the deeper space occupied by a third peak, almost lost in the luminous air. An arc of salmon cloud puffs further dramatizes the recession. Far right, a single tree has been replaced by a wooded island in the right middle distance. The genre motif of a man by a boat is added on a beach connected to the cabin by a path. The entire image is cast in the ruddy glow of sunset.

Back in the studio, inspired by his sketches, Gifford thus renovated American nature. As he did so, the pond along the Androscoggin that had impressed him enough to warrant an entire day of observation underwent particular improvement. He cleared it of clutter, enhancing nature by removing nature; and, having “eliminated . . . foreground” from the landscape, he set about refilling it, the bare and undisturbed canvas now receiving a “measured” and sustained “application of short strokes of the half-dry brush” by which he built up his trademark haziness.¹⁴ Even after these alterations, though, Gifford’s pursuit of essential nature remained unfinished. His improvements led, in a second painting, to others—and to a title, A Home in the Wilderness, whereby he forswore proper nouns altogether to announce his mythic, patriotic intentions (see Figure 1.1). On this second canvas, as Weiss continues:

The silhouette of Mount Hayes is streamlined and darkened, along with that of a low hill to the right, in contrast to the lightened, more distant peaks, to form an elegantly undulate, wide shape. . . . The horizontally extended clearing is artificially split, elongated, and doubled in reflection again the darker silhouette. To reinforce this design, the forest border is lengthened . . . and darkened. . . . The pioneer idea is by this device thrice framed and underlined. . . . Nature has been intentionally manipulated to provoke a contemplative mood and heighten emotion.¹⁵

Figure 1.1 Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Home in the Wilderness (1867). Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Museum purchase, 1997.

Gifford, in this second set of modifications, thus continued in the spirit of the first. The decluttering of the lake by which he began now led him, on this second canvas, to streamline the land in similar style. The scene duly grows a little less geographical and a little more geological. As water, land, and sky reassert their elemental character over the scene, wiping away the mess of nature and society alike, so a terrain that Gifford had first encountered as being charted and familiar, littered with Indian as well as English names, and within sight of the town returns to its mythic roots, appearing once more prehuman. Signs of life that Gifford then allows back into the landscape duly come to seem more like exercises in mythmaking than they do concessions to reality. A cabin Gifford first saw on the banks of the Androscoggin now becomes a “genre motif,” even a dabbling in cliché; the hard realities of rural life dissolve into legend; and the struggling woodsman becomes a pioneer pitted against a land again untouched.

These, then, are the means by which Gifford practiced what Cole preached. Cole’s journal ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Introduction: Do Not Touch
• 1 Perpetual Pursuits: Happiness, Horizons, and Other Elusive Objects in Modern US Culture
• 2 The Becoming Blank: Fantasies of Invisibility after the Frontier
• 3 Play Things: Toys at the Edge of Whiteness
• 4 Necessary Torments: Temptations, Falls, and Bodily Compensations in Modern US Culture
• Conclusion: Beyond Fetishism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index