Genealogie della disperazione: falliti, velleitari e fuorilegge in In the American Grain di William Carlos Williams

This essay focuses on William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, a fascinating book that presents the history of the United States as a succession of failures, illusions, and misguided aspirations. Written during a decade when many American writers and intellectuals were preoccupied with the search for a “usable past,” usually grounded in a rejection of the Puritan legacy in American culture, Williams’s text offers a radical alternative. He proposes a multilingual and multicultural genealogy of the United States, in which the travelers, explorers, statesmen, and artists who shaped the nation are reimagined not as heroic founders, but as fragile, tormented figures. These individuals are portrayed as struggling less against the physical hardships of the New World than against their own anxieties, their inner demons and psychological torments. The last part of the essay, in particular, focuses on the figure of Red Eric, through whom Williams suggests an unconventional form of American exceptionalism, rooted not in the embrace of democracy but in its rejection.