Novels Restless Search for Tradition

So writes John Milton, in an article called The American Novel: The Search for Home, Tradition, and Identity, published in the Western Humanities Review of spring, 1962. Divorced from his European traditions, Milton says, the American has not yet found a new, American tradition.

This search was a curious mixture of physical and spiritual emphasized by the American achievement of "physical houseness," where any American with a job can own a house even if it is poorly built and subject to early decay. On the east coast, the house in the suburbs has become a status symbol.

But unlike the European the American does not regard staying in one place as a symbol of status, and his dwelling place will vary with the fluctuation in his status. Milton says. The house does not represent family traditions.

The reason for this. Milton claims, is bound up in the literature of the American west.

"Just as the American in many respects escaped from Europe" he explains "so has the Western American escaped from the East in his own country" . . . "Americans believe in the fresh start." Thus, as Alexis de Tocqueville says in Democracy in America, "the track of generations is effaced."

Making a fresh start, claims Milton, means that, like Adam, the American loses his tradition and home and must search for them, whether it be in the mountains of West Virginia, or the Great Plains, or the West Coast.

Sometimes, as in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the migrations westward are through sheer economic compulsion, but more often, as Mark Twain showed in Huckleberry Finn, they are the escape from an unsatisfactory or bad environment.

The railroad is a common symbol of this escape, but Milton points out that as it brought civilization further West, it was also a symbol of recapture.

Hence, says Milton, the importance in American literature of an objective understanding of the entire past, so that the perennial question "Who are we?" has been replaced in America by "Where did we come from?" Man's need, as Steinbeck so often emphasized, is to identify himself with a particular place to find his traditions, and to establish a sense of "rootedness."

This theme has come to fruition in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, and Melville's search in Moby Dick, and more recently in the rootlessness of Salinger's Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and the Okies in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

What the American must discover says Frederick Manfred in his long semi-autobiography World's Wanderer, is that each succeeding generation is not left on its own but "is one part of a long chain of generations," a concept which de Tocqueville emphasizes is characters tic of the establishment of an aristocratic society.