There is a common tacit agreement about America as a nation of hard-headed practicalists devoted to `bitch-goddess success'. The excessive obsession of the typical American adult with material success turned him into a worshipper of the dollar. But the sensitive writer has run counter to such obsession and argues for ethical values. John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning American novelist, aligns himself with the idealist tradition in American imagination. In this idealist engagement, Steinbeck has drawn on the Indian metaphysical explorations in the Vedas and there are remarkable "cultural universals" analogous with the thoughts of Adi Sankara, and even, the advice of Vidura in the Mahabharata. It is this concern of Steinbeck for the higher values in human endeavor that endears him to the Indian readers and ensures a durable niche for him.
Through
a common tacit agreement, as it were, America is considered
a land of hard-headed practicalists, entirely devoted
to the pursuit of what William James once called "bitch-goddess
success." The vulgar, meretricious image of the
American, symbolized for the layman and the initiated
as well by the Hollywood flicks, is that of the worshipper
of the dollar. In America, as Max Lerner put it, "the
indices of belonging are belongings." It is generally
agreed, in the words of Winifred L Dusenbury, that "personal
success is the universally recognized goal of its (America's)
people." The archetypal American hero, one meets
in the pages of the novels of Horatio Alger Jr, plunges
into the maelstrom of city life, capitalizes on one
of the myriad opportunities and by his own pluck and
luck reaches the top of the economic heap.
Even
Theodore Dreiser declared that pecuniary and sexual
success were the values of the American society and
that those were his values too. Like his 19th century counterparts, Dreiser also committed the blunder
of confusing pursuit of success with pursuit of happiness.
He was almost obsessed with the desire for material
and social supremacy. |
