American Studies

American Studies
by Louis Menand.
review by E.A. Lombardi

Guide Rating -

In this collection, Louis Menand combines nervous breakdown, racism, and anti-Semitism. He brings together these seemingly opposing forces to explore the importance of time, morality, and that little thing called writing. "We look backward for clues," and he says it's because "we have no place left to look." Are we disillusioned or just lost in the maze of literary history and culture?

A Case of Breakdown?

The themes of madness and breakdown are consistent threads in literature. Perhaps it's because some writers are on the fringes of society; or maybe it has something to do with the artistic temperament. Goethe writes, "We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."

Of course, whenever we discuss breakdown and literature, it's usually easy to pick out a few examples that illustrate the point. There's Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Maupassant to name just a few. But, for these cases, we have evidence, both from their works and from the stories of their lives (Maupassant and Woolf killed themselves).

So, if William James really did have a breakdown, it would be rich fodder for essays, books, and discussions. We could discuss how that breakdown affected James's writings. As Menand says, "there was a side of James that is not captured in his writing, as colloquial and high inflected with personality as it is." Perhaps a nervous disorder or breakdown would offer new insights into his life and works.

In any case, Menand traces the threads of depressive incidents. "If you knew my life," James wrote in 1882, "you would confess that my little stream of work runs on under great disadvantages."

Of Race, Murder & More

Of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Menand writes that "he did not think that the coarse of human events was fixed..." Or, "if it was fixed," Holmes didn't believe that we could "reliably know anything about it."

To elaborate upon this point, Menand draws from the rich diversity of America, with some of the most out-of-the-ordinary pieces of culture and literary study. "Appearance, mystique, aura, reputation: these are the things that interest us, and they are real as anything else." We can't always detect it while it's happening, as Menand reminds us; but it's there nonetheless.

Then we read about the stories of the dark side of writing: the racism, murder, and other brutal realities. Where does it come from? And, what are the intents of the writers? Menand's next topic of study is related to the anti-semitism of T.S. Eliot. The discussion isn't about whether or not there was evidence of Eliot's attitude toward the Jews. Instead, he looks at where these feelings come from, how they are represented in his works and the real force behind the words.

In "T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form," Anthony Julius wrote that anti-Semitism "does not disfigure Eliot's work; it animates it. It was, on occasion, both his refuge and his inspiration, and his exploitation of its literary potential was virtuoso."

Ultimately, Menand reiterates the dual nature of anti-Semitism in Eliot's writing, drawing this discussion with him into the next essay:"Richard Wright: The Hammer and the Nail." Here again, we discover a revolutionary writer, but the racism is felt from a very different angle here.

As Menand says, "Wright was a writer of warring impulses. His rage at injustices of the world he knew made him impatient with the usual logic of literary expression. He was a gifted inventor of morally explosive situations, but once the situations in his stories actually explode he can never seem to let the pieces fall where they will."

The Pieces Fall Together

Menand starts off his collection of essays by saying, "The only reliable lesson the past teaches us is how locked we are in the present." The past in literary history reminds us of the many threads in the stories we tell, probably because we tell the stories of our lives. Our experiences interweave through our fictional offering, and even our non-fiction ones, until it's hard to say what's "real" and what's not.

Menand writes, "We want to play with yesterday's cards, but yesterday has already unraveled past reconstructing. Today is the only day we have." So, I'll end with that.