THE LILAC THAT RIP NEVER PLANTED
THE LILAC THAT RIP NEVER PLANTED

Summary/Abstract: Irving’s hero Rip Van Winkle “presides over the birth of the American imagination” (Leslie Fiedler) in terms of providing a prototypical character that was to be revamped over and over again in such later fictional embodiments as those created by Cooper or Vonnegut, Twain or Salinger, Melville or Hemingway. The author of Moby Dick, in the year of his death, also proposes a poetic projection of Rip as the American artist in his “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac,” where the lilac itself (never mentioned in Irving’s tale) plays an essential role (unexplored by the first author) in reinventing and building a tradition out of nothing. The paper follows the title concepts (“lilac,” “Rip,” “plant”) in their migration and evolution from the Old World to America and its (literary) culture, i.e. from Persia, Turkey, and the Balkans to Virginia and upstate New York, from Great Britain to New England, from Germany to Pennsylvania.

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