American History in Drama: The Commemorative Tradition and Some Recent Revisions

Abstract

AMERICANS HAVE always thought of history as something to make rather than recall, and therefore have been extraordinarily busy doing the first often at the expense of the second. However one defines the past, Americans are sure to have fled from it, in pursuit of dreams of otherworldly fulfilment or worldly success, or just out of some need to get on, feeling perhaps pushed like Huck Finn, or maybe for no reason at all, just an itch to light out for the territory ahead. When the past is recalled, rosy recollections of earlier glories usually spring into view as we collectively speed toward the future through the present — traces of a heritage seen like the old trees uprooted to make way for a gas station in Kunitz's "The War Against the Trees," "caught/In the rearview mirrors of the passing cars." "History was lived," says the politically astute Envoy in Genet's The Balcony, "so that a glorious page might be written and then read. It's reading that counts." Nowadays, though, it's viewing that counts.