compiling quotes from this wonderful book. they certainly don’t make cultural study like this any more, folx
- Listless and simple, [the Yankee] might be drawn into a conversation with a stranger, and would tell a ridiculous story without apparent knowledge of its point.
- [The Yankee] seemed cautious and solitary. Asked a question, he was likely to counter with another….But this reluctance was only another form of masquerade. These bits of indirection were social; direct replies would end many a colloquy: questions or evasions prolonged the talk and might open the way for more.
- [Humor] bears the closest relation to emotion, either bubbling up as from a deep and happy wellspring, or in an opposite fashion rising like a re-birth from dead levels after turmoil. An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.
- Yankee speech with its slow-running rhythms and high pitch—as if an inner voice were speaking below the audible one—was well adapted to the monologue. Its sound was subtly varied; the cautious drawl served to feel a way among listeners. As Lowell pointed out some years later, Yankee speech was not so much a dialect as a lingo: that is, its oddities were consciously assumed. It was another form of masquerade.
- This lawless satire was engaged in a pursuit which had occupied comedy in the native vein elsewhere. As if it were willful and human, the comic spirit in America had maintained the purpose—or so it seemed—to fulfill the biblical cry running through much of the revivalism of the time: to “make all things new.” It was a leveling agent. The distant must go, the past must be forgotten, lofty notions deflated. Comedy was conspiring toward the removal of all alien traditions, out of delight in pure destruction or as preparation for new growth.
- The orgiastic forest revivals with their pagan spirit and savage manifestations bore a not altogether distant resemblance to the Eleusinian mysteries out of which the Greek drama had developed.
- Far from having no childhood, the American nation was having a prolonged childhood, extended as the conditions for young and uncertain development were extended and spatially widened by the opening of wilderness after wilderness, the breaking down of frontier after frontier. The whole movement westward had a youthful illusory character, like one of those blind migrations of other people over the older continents.
- To look upon the comedy of this time was to conclude that the Americans were a nation of wild and careless myth-makers, aloof from the burdens of pioneer life, bent upon proving a triumphant spirit.
- [Inevitably] genius embraces popular moods and formulations even when it seems to range furthest afield. From them literature gains immensely; without them it can hardly be said to exist at all. The primitive base may be full of coarse and fragmentary elements, full of grotesquerie or brutality; it may seem remote from the wide and tranquil concepts of a great art: but it proved materials and even the impulse for fresh life and continuance.
- Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. Its objective–the unconscious objective of a disunited people—has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of society and the rounded completion of an American type. But a society has not been palpably defined either in life or in literature.
- For the creative writer the major problem seems to be to know the patternings of the grain; and these can hardly be discovered in rich color without understanding the many sequences of the American tradition on the popular side as well as on purely literary levels. The writer must know, as Eliot has said, “the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind.”
there were others that I didn’t mark down but as I get farther away from this the less inclined I am to find them
Leave a Reply