American Studies ETDs

Publication Date

5-2-1973

Abstract

The present basis of our society implies the inevitable destruction of the environment. The considerations which make this evident also make nonsense of the distinction between capitalism and socialism. Further, if we wish to save the environment we must abandon the scientific world view. The crucial question is a question of values, and values have an aesthetic basis. That is, values have a mystical basis. Though my approach to it is more or less anthropological when I begin, American literature provides the indispensable basis for my examination of the shape and quality of actual American life, seen in ecological totality as a dynamic functional interrelationship with the "environment." Of course, the point is that "culture" and "environment" are not finally distinguishable, nor are the "individual" and the "environment." The biota is a larger aliveness, not ultimately definable, which comprehends all aspects of human life as well as the life of what we call the "environment." The life of the biota includes not only the aspects of human life that biology can describe, but all human culture and the emotional life that culture organizes and displays. I develop the ecological meaning of the value system that I find dramatized in The Great Gatsby, Babbitt, and the Charley Anderson portion of The Big Money. I take that value system as representing the real values expressed in the choices and activities now destroying the ecosystem, which includes as a living and organic process those choices and that value system, pathological as it is. I select those works as being psychologically true to ordinary American life, frankly basing my judgment on the sense of that life that I have acquired by living it. Thus I present culture as an aesthetic construct, and through American literature I reveal and criticize the operative aesthetic of American culture. I maintain that our biotic crisis is an inevitable function of our dominant cultural aesthetic, as that aesthetic stands revealed in literature and as it informs ordinary daily life. I thereby define the biotic crisis as an aesthetic crisis--a "subjective" crisis that the naive "objective" stance of positivist rationality cannot meet. In addition to dramatizing the dominant value system which operates to degrade the biota, American literature develops an alternative value system based on an alternative aesthetic which we can find set forth, often despairingly, in certain works, and which all our most characteristic and essential literature tends to imply. The core of my dissertation is my presentation of that alternate aesthetic as I see it in the works of Henry Thoreau, Robinson Jeffers, and Wallace Stevens. I emphasize its overwhelming ecological significance. Crucial to my presentation are various suggestions regarding Thoreau in Sherman Paul's The Shores of America, and the entire line of argument regarding Jeffers and Stevens which forms the climax of Wilson O. Clough's The Necessary Earth. We can easily see the contrast between the tawdry aesthetic which informs the America of Gatsby, Babbitt, and The Big Money, and the aesthetic that I find in Thoreau, Jeffers, and especially Stevens. It is much harder to see the strange inner connection between those two aesthetics, and between the two seemingly disparate axiological worlds that follow upon them. I view the operative aesthetic of Babbitt America as a perversion of the more essential American aesthetic of which our popular culture is at once a distorted reflection and a terrified though fascinated denial. The false America and the true--yet tragically the same. I connect them by showing that they both rest on John Locke, whom I call the author of America. The dominant American value system affects the rest of the biota through the economic system, which not only implements the value system but serves as its primary manifestation--that is, as its expression, as a vehicle to convey its meaning, its amour-propre. And as a way to establish it beyond question since the mode whereby people organize their lives is also the mode whereby they judge life. The ultimate purpose of any cultural activity is to communicate value. The ecological meaning of the dominant value system which American literature portrays is a function of the view that one takes of the economic system. I set forth my view of the economic system in considerable depth, presenting its basic assumptions in terms which largely accord with Thorstein Veblen's Theory of Business Enterprise. I demonstrate that economic assumptions are first of all aesthetic assumptions aimed at the realization of certain values, and I present the relationship between American economic assumptions and biotic degradation. I stress the point that our supposedly free economic system is absolutely intolerant of other economic systems, being structured to make their existence impossible. And I attack our received economic assumptions, basing my attack on considerations derived from Lewis Mumford's "The City and the Machine," augmented by Claude Levi­Strauss's conclusion to Tristes Tropiques, and Norman O. Brown's Love's Body. I make no pretense of remaining neutral or detached. I accept those values that seem to enhance our biota, and use them to undercut those values that seem to diminish it. For the biota is whatever life we have. Accordingly we must comprehend "biota" in its largest possible sense, including and included by our subjectivity. The existential absurdity of my "subjective" choice of values is in the world of "objective" reality--and vice versa. Scholarly judgment, like a poem, must be "the cry of its occasion,/Part of the res itself and not about it." To think ecologically is to embrace the absurd suchness of empirical reality. Absurdity--or mystery. To deal with mystery is to admit nonsense, which in a dissertation means to violate the forms of discursive logic. The requirements of discursive propositional thought enforce assimilation to the positivist tendency that has been humanism's impotence and distraction. The prologue to my dissertation explains all this in relation to a theory of American Studies and a view of scholarship that lives up to Emerson's challenge, and Thoreau's. My aim is comprehensive vision, not orthodox adherence to the stunted modes of linear expression. I use photographs. I use artwork which my wife Sharon contributed. I use red blue and green type. I use various formal and syntactic devices to disrupt the false continuity that my academic training relentlessly traps me into following. I use extra-wide spaces between paragraphs. I use occasional arbitrary patterning of words on the page. I use a great many intrusions of stray quotations breaking into the midst of my own words. And I have an entire section consisting of nothing but ecological revelatory passages that I selected from various American authors. The body of my dissertation is in three sections, then. "ASSUMPTIONS": my economic analysis, axiological assertions, and ecological theory. "DREAMS": my literary analysis and discussion of Locke. ''REVELATIONS": my attempt to apply Norman O. Brown. To read as if I were alive. As Emerson required. And Thoreau. And Walt Whitman: "You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,/You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,/You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."

Project Sponsors

The Student Research Allocations Committee of the University of New Mexico

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

American Studies

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

American Studies

First Committee Member (Chair)

Joel M. Jones

Second Committee Member

Illegible

Third Committee Member

Joseph J. Fashing

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