AmLit – lecture notes

THE AMERICAN HERO: INVOLVED vs DROPOUT

We have looked at various American literature configurations which present

patterns of similarity and contrast. The terms that would usefully characterize
such configurations are involved and dropout. To be involved is to be
committed to the society, to the establishment - conforming to it or seeking to
exist within it or to reform it. To drop out is not only to question the relevance
of the answers of society, but to question the questions too, to make a radical
and total break. The antithesis is not new: we may in fact argue that a
characteristically American experience, as reflected in literature, consists of an
original condition of involvement, a radical dropping out, and a return, sadder
and wiser, to involvement in society. And it is equally characteristic of
Americans, whether they have stayed within the establishment, whether they
have dropped out, or whether they have dropped out and returned, at once to
idealize and to be wary of the dropout and his way of life.

In American literature the dropout is usually portrayed as youthful and his

sanctuary is often pastoral (Rip, Sylvia), sometimes even primeval, and
invariably remote, distant in time or space. The protagonist who accepts
involvement is generally more mature and his habitat usually urban (with the
notable exception of Bartleby).
The important thing, however, is not the setting or the age of the protagonist. It
is the process of rejecting the original situation for an alternative, then
reconsidering the decision of rejection in the light of the experience provided by
the alternative, and then deciding whether to adhere to the alternative or to
return. The third phase with its elements of choice is what differentiates the
American pattern from archetypal journeys such as Dante's descent into the
Inferno. Traditionally, the hero's descent into Hell results in his return to the
world matured and enlightened. In the American version the choice is not
always so clear-cut. Sometimes the world has become so corrupt and disordered
AmLit – lecture notes

that the protagonist rejects it categorically. Sometimes Hell is so soft and

enticing that he chooses to remain. Sometimes he is himself inadequate, though
not necessarily as a result of some fault of his own. The price he pays, the
punishment for dropping out, is immaturity or death.

As Pilgrim Fathers and Founding Fathers, William Bradford and Benjamin

Franklin respectively, were establishment figures and involved. Bradford in Of
Plymouth Plantation assumed that his history of the founding of the Plymouth
colony was fundamentally an account of man's progress, through heavenly
grace but with occasional errors, toward the predestined achievement of
spiritual salvation. Franklin’s Autobiography is exemplary of the committed
life.

Soon, however, time and space brought an end to the vision of innocence and
newness. America was moving west, and conflict inevitably arose at the point
where the advancing frontier and the wilderness collided. It is from the
opposition of city and country, of civilization and the wilderness, of the restraint
of custom and the freedom of the Western expanses that the American hero-
quester emerges. What the hero did when he could no longer retreat into the
womb-like world of Thoreau’s Pond, but had to step into the breach between the
new and the old set the pattern for the American literary experience to the
present day.

Rip Van Winkle and Leatherstocking Tales, the literary creations of America's
first major men of letters, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, are
more subtle, more richly complex. In Irving's tale, Rip runs away to the Catskill
Mountains to escape his familial responsibilities. He meets a stranger, drinks a
potion and sleeps for twenty years. When he awakens and returns, in keeping
with the third phase of the pattern, he is a childish old man, unsure of his
identity. He lingers on, living on the fringes of a society that has passed him by.
In the Leatherstocking saga we follow the career of a partially Indianized white
man, constricted by the laws of society and requiring the spiritual sustenance of
AmLit – lecture notes

nature, and who moves ever westward ahead of the line of settlements. We see
him finally in The Prairie, an old man silhouetted against the western sunset. In
the weakness of his declining years, a context which is significant, he professes
a need for the social laws he has spent a lifetime trying to evade, a late gesture
of commitment. How curious that the two most notable characters of the first
cycle of American literature should respond so ambiguously to American
civilization, should drop out, and should return in so reserved a fashion.

So, William Bradford and Benjamin Franklin were by definition involved, but
still they all broke with the British establishment. Irving's Rip Van Winkle runs
away from the obligations of society and eventually returns, but his return is
qualified by the fact that while he was away a revolution had taken place and
the country had changed. Leatherstocking is another dropout who eventually
makes a return of sorts. He lives out his last years in a wilderness setting, finally
admitting to the need for civil laws, maintaining his racial integrity, and
adhering to his natural Christianity.

To indulge his excessive artistic sensibility, Roderick Usher of Poe's The Fall of
the House of Usher withdraws from the world into his stone-walled mansion.
The setting, in a phrase Poe uses elsewhere, is "Out of Space-Out of Time." We
recognize it as appropriate to Roderick who is a dropout, too. Here he remains
until his fantasies and projections grow to such proportions that he is
overwhelmed by them and ends in madness and death.

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises concerns American expatriates and uprooted
Europeans in France and Spain, yet the setting is much more immediate than the
symbolic landscape of the House of Usher. Badly hurt by a "dirty war," they
behave with a mixture of irresponsibility, self-pity, wit, and style. All these
characters are unable to learn how to function within the limitations of the
human condition, they are "cases of arrested development." Hemingway called
the type the "American boy-men."
AmLit – lecture notes

In Faulkner's The Bear, the boy Ike McCaslin undergoes at 16 an initiation into
the social order of "men, hunters, with the will and the hardihood to endure and
the humility and skill to survive." He learns at the same time that his personal
inheritance and, by extension, his society, is tainted. When he legally comes of
age, he renounces it. He earns his livelihood as a carpenter and the respect of
the community for his skill as a hunter. But the woman he wanted to marry
refuses him because he will not accept his legacy. We see him, finally, an old
man of almost 80, childless but known as "Uncle Ike" to the sons and grandsons
of the men who taught him to hunt. In renouncing his legacy, Ike shows a sense
of moral responsibility but he is also renouncing his society and stepping aside
from it. He is dropping out, and he fails to return. His is a private act, somewhat
selfish and evasive.

A vein of selfishness and evasion, in fact, characterizes these dropouts. They

focus inward upon themselves rather than outward toward the community and
the future. Roderick Usher, the introverted artist, destroys himself, he is in
effect a suicide. Ike McCaslin, who understands what he must do to cleanse
himself (and his society) as instinctively as he understood what he had to do in
order to see Old Ben, the bear, cannot bring himself to do it and thus cannot
completely return, and spends his life in an agony of frustration.

In contrast are the affirmations of those who dropped out and returned, returned
without reservation or qualification. Two examples: the personae of Thoreau's
Walden and Whitman's Song of Myself. Both are autobiographical accounts of
men who deliberately turned inward, separating themselves from society, in
order to learn how to live more completely within society. Both center upon the
self, but in a way that ultimately extends outward toward the universal.
Though fundamentally alike, they still differ in important respects. The main
difference is that Walden is factual and down to earth, while Song of Myself is
mystical, an observation which is not intended to diminish the symbolic import
of the facts of life in the woods or the firm validity of the rhapsodic insights of
Song of Myself. The difference is more one of tone, of approach.
AmLit – lecture notes

"When I wrote the following pages," Thoreau begins, "I lived alone, in the
woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house I built myself . . . At present I am
a sojourner in civilized life again." The emphasis is on regeneration and return.
Thoreau was a sojourner at Walden Pond in order that he might become "a
sojourner in civilized life again." In his solitude he came to realize his
commitment to society.

Whitman was a visionary who could write a mystical poem with the exalted
title, "Song of Myself." I celebrate myself, and sing myself," his Dionysian
incantation begins. An ecstatic flight takes him first inward into the solitude of
self, but ultimately the movement is "Outward and outward and forever
outward." From the self he reaches out to touch, to embrace, and then to
embody and fuse. The climactic vision is one of "form, union, plan." This
mystical union is presented as sexual union, for Whitman saw in the sexual act
the essence of both selfishness and mutuality. The mystical element is rendered
substantial by embodiment in flesh; the flesh can be spiritualized because,
rendered guiltless, it has returned to a state of original innocence. Whitman's
journey begins in withdrawal and ends in return, in an affirmation both of the
individual identity and identity with all other selves, and in a mystical union of
the body and soul that permits the retention of the integrity of each.

The quest of the hero is a search for something that has been lost or taken away
from him, something that ought to have been his birthright. He encounters
fabulous forces and wins a decisive victory. The successful completion of this
search reveals to the hero the secret of his true identity and enables him to
return from his mysterious adventure and take his rightful position in society.

As the picture of the American hero changes so does the imagery associated
with the forest. No longer a place of communion, the forest becomes a place
where things are tested out, a place of exile where initiation is undergone and
from which return must be made. Located firmly in a world burdened by time
and experience, the ambiguous setting of the forest becomes a place of moral
AmLit – lecture notes

choice. In the shaping of the American character the forest is the central image
of the American Dream. The image is of the endless expanse of western
wilderness where one could always dream of starting over. America’s mythic
destiny — a place of second chances — is confirmed in the dream. As a literary
symbol, the forest became the metaphoric space where the American hero-
quester undergoes his initiation. For the American hero the choice of whether
to enter the wilderness or not becomes a decision of whether to confront reality.

What generalization can be derived from this? What does this tell us about the
American national experience and the national character?
Americans are committed to freedom not only as an end, but as a means of
achieving social responsibility. They recognize rejection of the establishment as
a normal phase of growth, of the educative process. In literature this phase is
associated with a movement backward into childhood, inward into the self,
faraway into the physical spaciousness of the western frontier or the psychic
spaciousness of the Old World. At the same time, Americans are fearful that the
dropout may not choose to return, to accept the responsibilities and demands
and uncertainties of society. So, the response to the dropout is ambivalent.
Americans revere the Founding Fathers and find inspiration in Thoreau and
Whitman because, in their fashion, they dropped out and returned. The
adventures of Leatherstocking and Rip Van Winkle they remember with
affection and nostalgia, but do not take seriously because their return was only
partial. Poe somehow frightens them with the dark implications of his tales of
those who did not return. In conclusion, they have all chosen the risk of freedom
in order to attain maturity and responsibility, but it hasn't been an easy choice
and sometimes their uneasiness shows.