As Abish attests, all American art is alliterative.

(x-posted.)

Not really, of course.  Only if it’s postmodern or romantic, and today it’s romantic.  Edwin Markham’s The Real America in Romance (1909) sought to blend “authentic history and romance … to their mutual advantage.”  His rationale:

Here are set before us the examples of great men of earth, men great in their patriotism and self-sacrifice; and side by side with them are romantic characters typical of the times, men and women only less great in their kindliness and unselfishness, all affording a high expression of the art of Anglo-Saxon romance. Instead of reading about historical characters and events, we see the persons themselves in action, and live with them through the events of their day and generation. The reader loses himself in the irresistible fascination of the story, and the impressions resulting are made on the heart as well as on the intellect.

You do not merely read about Columbus: you endure with him his hardships, share with him his disappointments, rejoice with him in his achievements. You actually feel the thrill of discovery when the New World swims into his vision. Not content with telling you merely that Washington wintered and suffered at Valley Forge with his army, the author takes you straightway into the camp, shows you the torn and bleeding feet of the soldiers, and makes you stand watch with the half-fed sentries, with little to warm your blood except a fiery determination to die of cold, hunger, or British bullets, rather than give up the fight for your country.

That’s a single paragraph in the original, but I’ve sliced it up 1) because it’s overlong, and 2) to emphasize a rhetorical shift from “the reader” to “you.” What opens as a theory of literary affect quickly pivots into admonishment — the reader who doesn’t endure, share, rejoice, winter, suffer or stand watch isn’t merely a bad reader but unpatriotic.  “If you have fail to empathize with those who fought ‘for your country,’” Markham as much as says, “you’re a terrible American.”  He never considers a reader might withhold sympathy not because he or she possesses a paucity of patriotism, but because his bathetic prose betrays an ear unworthy of enthused encomium.  Consider the first sentence of Volume IX, The Stars & Stripes:

A band of boys was abroad in the streets of Boston.

But Scott, you say, happy accidents have happened heretofore! Granted.  Now consider the first two sentences of the second paragraph:

But it was not mirth nor mischief that brought them forth to throng the streets.  So much might have been inferred from their eager and excited talk as they hurried over the flagging, covered thinly with snow.

Those alliterative pairs — “mirth nor mischief” and “eager and excited” — bespeak a deliberately alliterative aesthetic agenda.  Still don’t believe me?  Turn to the twenty-first page and proceed to ponder this passage:

Then the people, or such of them as did not feel the restraint of the more orderly element, rose in riot.  The answer to the riot came in the shape of red-coated soldiers, two regiments of them, under Colonel Dalrymple; and the appointment of hated Hutchinson, Tory townsman, as lieutenant-governor.  [...]  Now the tension of nearly two years had been drawn taut within three days, and peace thus strained had snapped.

The last phrase — “peace thus strained had snapped” — demonstrates why authors aim alliterative for effect.  (My last sentence, not so much.)  It is, in fact, a rather awesome example of alliterative effect: the initial “s” links both words, but the long diphthong of “strain” enacts a straining snapped by the short monothong of “snapped.”  However, since Markham’s every sentence subsists on said diet, this felicitous phrase fails to find favor.

The reader turned off by Markham’s abusive alliteration isn’t unpatriotic per se, merely in possession of refinement and taste.  But if the above hasn’t convinced you of Markham’s “talent,” try this:

With a whoop, the band broke toward the sentinel.

“Kill him!” they cried.  “Kill the bloody-backed scoundrel!”

They fell to pelting him with snowballs.

“The lobster is going to fire!” cried the lads, pressing closer.

What happens when you pelt lobsters with snowballs?  Death or Fafblog.

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

Reading you and the Little Professor, I sometimes think Real Literary Scholarship entails bringing the acutest, best-informed attention to bear on crap.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I think the problem is that if you're studying anything more than a half-century old, Vance, all the best stuff has been taken, in that whenever you think that you're saying something new about it, all that you're really doing is accidentally repeating what some prior critic has written.

That's the attraction of brand-new theoretical approaches, of course. All of a sudden you can re-visit the old standards. But soon enough they've all been re-done.

As you may have read on Acephalous sometime back, I'm awaiting the natural extension of this phenomenon, Jo. Jo is a grad student (or whatever their equivalent is) a few centuries from now, or whenever, when increasing population and education and who-knows-what expansion of mental capacity have led to not only the exhaustion of the good works of the past, but even of the crappier ones. And of course, our era is one of the first really pickily archived ones. At that point, Jo will be doing some sort of thesis on literary conversations at the turn of the 20th century, and will be picking over these comments: "So who is Vance Maverick? Can I identify this source?" Perhaps your comment above will head up one of Jo's chapters, or something.

[Vance Maverick]

I shall strive to compose my incoherent feces-flinging and self-contradiction in a form worthy of Jo's scrutiny.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I think that to a mentality that can find interest in centuries-old blog comment threads, being "worthy of scrutiny" is rather beside the point. But this mentality must eventually exist, given enough time and variation and assuming no catastrophic breakdown in civilization. After all, Scott is already reading Jack London's letters and whatnot.

Actually, I'll go out on a further predictive limb. Assuming that someone archives these blog comments somehow, the first grad student to express interest in them will appear not centuries from now, but 30 years from now.

[Ray Davis]

Prosodic note: Initial vowels don't produce an alliterative effect, and "eager and excited" doesn't even work as assonance. Not that I have anything against annoying affectations, but Markham's affectations are inept as well as annoying.