A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 599

idealize the family, it does suggest that coming to know one’s family, even distant

family, is a way to know oneself. The verdict on the family in Close Range (1999),

a series of stories set in the West, is more corrosive. And equally corrosive is the

verdict on the West. Here, families disintegrate, relationships rarely last for more

than “two hours,” and the culture itself seems to be given over to the abstractions of

money and image. In one story, “The Mud Below,” a character called Diamond Felts

tries to pursue a model of cowboy masculinity and courage that he finds seductive

by joining a rodeo. He is motivated, it turns out, by the refusal of his father to accept

him: “Not your father,” his father tells Diamond, “and never was.” But his adventure

ends in a disastrous accident. Even before that, the brutal reply of his mother when

Diamond asks her who his father was, “Nobody,” lets us know how much this is a tale

about two kinds of failed paternity. There is the failure of the literal father, of course,

but there is also the failure of the founding fathers of Western myth. Casting a cold

eye on that myth, Proulx sees it as a mask and a masquerade: a concealment of the

real, historically, that has been converted into a commodity. Proulx is, of course, not

alone in this, nor is she in the conviction that the two rivers of American history

have become fatally mixed and muddied. Or, as the caustic epigraph to Close Range

has it: “Reality never been of much use out here.”

Beats, Prophets, Aesthetes, and New Formalists

Rediscovering the American voice: The Black Mountain writers

In 1950, Charles Olson (1910–1970) began his essay on “Projective Verse” in this way:

(projectile (percussive (prospective

vs.

The NON-Projective

With these words, he declared war on both the formalists and the confessionals; and

he announced the emergence of new and powerful forces in postwar American poetry.

“Closed” verse, the structures and metered writing “which print bred,” was to be

jettisoned, Olson declared; so too was “the private-soul-at-any-public-wall,”

the lyricism and introspection of the strictly personal approach. What was required

was an “open” poetry. A poem, he announced, was “a high-energy construct,”

the function of which was to transfer energy “from where the poet got it” in experience

“to the reader.” This transfer could be achieved by means of “FIELD COMPOSITION:”

“FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” Olson insisted,

writing the words large (as he often did) to register the importance of what he was

saying. And in his view the ideal form would consist of a steady, dense stream of

perceptions: “ONE PERCEPTION,” as he put it, “MUST IMMEDIATELY AND

DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCETION,” so the poem could become more

“the act of the instant” than “the act of thought about the instant.” The “smallest

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