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Literature and History: Neat Fits

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.1996.0055

1080-6601

Robert von Hallberg,

American and British Literature Analysis

Literature and History: Neat Fits Robert von Hallberg (bio) I want to return to Marjorie Perloff’s point about Michaels’s terminology and periodization, in order to confirm her claim that the scope of Our Americais less comprehensive than its subtitle suggests. The term in dispute is of course modernism, which is conventionally distinguished from a good deal of writing, painting, and music produced by twentieth-century artists. Modernism indicates some affiliation by resemblance or avowal across the generic boundaries of music, painting, and literature, or even intellectual disciplines like physics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology between the years—in Anglo-American academic literary history—1909, taking the first Futurist manifesto as the starting point, and maybe 1930 or a little later. Michaels’s nativist modernism is much more nativist than modernist: the connections of his authors to international trends in other arts or areas of expression are faint (William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes are the exceptions). One reason this matters is that terms like modernism and romanticism are reserved for especially comprehensive historical trends, such as seem in motion when artists or thinkers in diverse media begin to collaborate. Michaels’s subject is a distinct range of modern writing more than modernism. His period begins with the end of World War I and runs through the 1920s, which in literary-historical terms was a time of fruition more than inception. Modernism in the English language peaked in 1922, when The Waste Landand Ulyssesappeared, and 1923, when William Carlos Williams’s Spring and Allwas brought out at his own expense, and Ezra Pound wrote the [End Page 115] Malatesta Cantos. A good fourteen years of intellectual and especially artistic agitation and a world war led to the peak of those years. Michaels’s nativist modernism is fearful of contact with the new immigrants and even more of African Americans. The attraction to incest in William Faulkner, and other authors, as Michaels shows, expresses just this phobia. Michaels presents a strong case for a close fit between literary and political history—Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House,for instance, and the Immigration Act and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (OA,30)—that serves our short-term professional interests well. Do literary historians engage the issues that determine the future of our America? Yes, certainly: the texts we teach address just the issues that govern debate about political and social policy. The long-term problem is exactly this reassuring fit. If literary history fits social and political history too snugly, it becomes redundant, after one has examined the history of legislation, say. Fear of immigrants in Congress, the courts, and then—small surprise—in novels and poems too. Literary history is better justified just where it records some deviance from social, political, and institutional history. The deviance I have in mind is visible when writers dream of a different country than the one to which they are born. Michaels loves to expose the nativist-modernist folly—articulated by Calvin Coolidge—of becoming what you already are. But I think of Ernst Bloch’s courageous advocacy of French surrealism in Heritage of Our Times(1935) just when Germany was enforcing Nazi conformity; 1his claim, taken up by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious,is that literary texts rightly desire a different world. Bloch wrote in 1918 that the “spirit of utopia exists in the ultimate predicate of all great expressions.” 2That is the revolutionary dimension of artistic expression. Michaels excavates a spirit of realism and conformity instead, or a neat fit between political history and artistic expression. My point can be felt more concretely in the case of William Carlos Williams. Michaels rightly shows how Williams enthusiastically expresses Coolidge’s impulse to become more American, but Williams’s deviant imagination of rape and miscegenation complicates this picture. Spring and All(1923) is about violation, though significantly not incestuous violation. The core myth there is that of the abduction of Persephone, the crossing of virginal purity with hellish alterity. Remember too that Père Rasles, the male hero of In the American Grain(1925), is distinguished by his will “TO MARRY . . . to hybridize, to crosspollenize” with...