Confronted again with the world he had left, Dreiser endowed it with the dreamlike quality of suspended animation, notwithstanding his awareness that the impression of immobility may have derived not from actual events but from the "fixedness" of a "purely imaginative" tradition. In the American imagination, the small town never changes: it dreams on, in a world where everything else has changed, and for that reason an observer uprooted from those scenes, himself completely and irrevocably changed by acquaintance with the larger world, can no longer take part in its life or share its ideals. Note the crucial assumption that "idealism and faith" flourish only in a state of innocence. It is this assumption, so radically at odds with the view that childhood experience is the basis of mature conviction, that unavoidably gives rise to the nostalgic attitude in the first place. If a belief "in goodness, in virtue and duty" cannot survive exposure to experience, the past can be seen only as a lost Eden, where illusions alone sustain the capacity for belief—a lovely dream that had to die. In the words of Thomas Wolfe, another novelist torn between elegy and satire, equally unable to imagine any escape from this choice, you can't go home again.

The view from "Pittsburgh" precludes an imaginative reconstruction of the spiritual journey that began in Hannibal, Terre Haute, or Clyde, Ohio. The self-exiled son of the Middle Border can no longer recognize himself in memories of boyhood; he revisits them as a total stranger; and the literary convention that requires an outside observer of the village, at once protagonist and interpreter, as the central point of reference in its story, emphasizes the discontinuity between village and city, childhood and maturity. As Anthony Channell Hilfer notes in his study of the village theme, "The village, in order to be appreciated, had to be seen from the outside. After all, one of its virtues was its supposed lack of self‐ consciousness." Hence the need for a "narrator or spokesman who speaks from outside the village perspective." An apparent exception, the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, proves the rule, according to Hilfer. For all his rustic pose and speech, the Stage Manager is one of us, the knowing urban audience; and his title, indeed, reminds us even more effectively than the device of the outside observer that the American village is an illusion stage-managed for the entertainment of sophisticated city slickers, object of a wistful yearning that can easily edge over into mockery but has little in common with the imaginative reinterpretation of past events.

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