New England beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First LiteratureThe Dream of the Great American Novel
2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00029831-4257916
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
Resumo“So many Harvard interiors breathed the New England past—so many Harvard generations!” (284). This is what Elisa New, at one time fully an outsider, found upon immersion in the halls, archives, and classrooms—the intellectual relay stations—of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now she and her distinguished emeritus colleague, Lawrence Buell, have written complementary works of literary-historical reclamation in which New England calls to us still: New’s is taut, contemplative, and ravishingly proselytizing; Buell’s broadly synthesizing, thought filled, and judicious. With New England beyond Criticism, New turns us inward to an Emersonian expanse of consciousness commanded by “America’s First Literature,” in which interiority is made possible and individuals brought into congregation by contemplation of the Word alone; in prodigiously amplifying close readings, New puts to rout the high-end profession’s longtime refusal to wax enthusiastic about, confess possession by, and realize instruction from the canon. With The Dream of the Great American Novel, Buell dilates memory not only backward but outward, inviting us aboard the big ships of the imagined democratic pluralist state. By exploring a century and a half of the idea among all such ideas of a literature about and for the United States, “nationness” (13), Buell uncovers the always already polyglot constitution and transnational circulation of our “Great American Novels” (18), the critiques therein of nationalist ideology, and the parodies of “GAN”-ification (1). Together, New and Buell reanimate and recirculate the Puritan origins and romantic trajectories of the US literary imagination: the uncanny sophistication of its self-reflection and the grandness of its nation-making, nation-contesting novels. To dig into these monographs is to be struck, time and again, at how wondrous canonical formations and their religio-aesthetic convictions are, especially those of New England. And it is to be struck, time and again, by the degree to which each of these scholar-enthusiasts—New explicitly, Buell implicitly—convey the ever-self-renewing, ever-self-deconstructing dialectic that is the Protestant pedagogy of American literature.My first “amen!” is to the commitments of New and Buell to the texts and legacies at hand. New inveighs against “the bias toward literary advance” and the “corrective” mandate that has characterized prestige criticism for at least a generation, calling instead for a return to the “breadth and brio, conviction and accessibility, lyricism and vision, and a readiness to meet readers beyond disciplinary boundaries” of our better forbears (8). New’s investigative procedures deliberately reenact “the Calvinist-Cartesian regime” (250) of her adopted materials, with a theological underpinning dating to Cotton Mather and an apocalyptic appetite dating to Michael Wigglesworth, and with Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Robert Frost relaying us from the Puritans to William and Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Lowell, and the latter-day Susan Howe and Marilynne Robinson. The thrill for New is to engage us in the meditative intensity of Puritan-descended, Puritanism-affirming textuality, discounting mediation at every turn except that of language. The thrill for most of her readers is to become a New Englander (again), if only for a winter’s eve, or as Marc Cohn once put it: “‘Tell me, are you a Christian, child?’ / . . . ‘Ma’am, I am tonight’” (“Walking in Memphis,” Atlantic, 1991).Professor Buell, by means of a plain style at once typologically Protestant and reemergently humanist, with a burning concern for the literary history of exceptionalist thought and a long-term involvement with many of its major artifacts, takes us through four GAN scenarios: (1) the conception of the idea by novelist John W. De Forest and its first realization in The Scarlet Letter (1850), the “reluctant master text” (71); (2) the salience, indeed, providence, of the obscurity-to-prominence plot, beginning with Benjamin Franklin and culminating in Philip Roth; (3) “the romance of the divide,” where “plots turn on issues of sectional and/or ethnoracial division” (7), from Mark Twain and Stowe to William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, and Ralph Ellison; and (4) the compendious master novels, from Moby-Dick (1851) to John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1938) to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), lighting upon most of the maximalist novels between (Gertrude Stein, Theodore Dreiser) and beyond (David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann). Like New, Buell works not to deflate his materials but to give them their due: layered, overflowing, and compulsively intertextual, as formidable as the whale itself. F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) redux, anyone?My second “amen!” is to their commitment to the histories of intellectual and writerly engagement that culminate in their own work, though this is a more vexed and dialectical matter. New leverages, intensely and luminously, a New England legacy of reading New England, particularly Harvard-affiliated writers: indeed, she concretizes her descent line with an epilogue shout-out to Richard Poirier and a whole host of New England critics (thirty-nine of them, absenting the great O. W. Firkins). Buell leverages, capaciously and often counteractively, the compensatory US-based conversation about the great American novel, which he has discovered is “a complex, messy interaction” (9) between credentialed scholars and what is, in effect, the GAN industry: on-the-make writers, vested publishers, equally vested educators, readers at large, and journalist-bloggers. Inhabiting the interpretive branches of the literary movements they examine, both New and Buell generate an attractive and powerful, because overdetermined, form of aesthetic knowing, with its attendant advantages and risks.Here, then, I am tasked to ask: After self-commentary, then what? What might alternative traditions of accounting for the same canons (essential New England–ness, programmatic Americanness) tell us?In the endnotes to a single chapter, New nods to Leslie Fiedler, Ann Kibbey, Jenny Franchot, and a brilliant then-Jesuit maverick, Edward J. Ingebretsen—but these four pave Catholically informed roads not much taken. New catches the sexuality for Hawthorne at Blithedale in his Romance (1852), but her version of The Scarlet Letter skips by the felt sexual consecrations and injurious eros, choosing to underscore instead Dimmesdale’s Calvinist embrace of secret sin and public redress (no confessional), soft-pedaling Hester’s service ethos–cum–internal rebellion as a Pollyannaish high-school mentality and taking Chillingworth’s stalker vendetta out of the picture. What would others say? D. H. Lawrence, that bad-boy miner’s son and porno-modernist interloper, argues for the devil in blue-eyed Hawthorne’s gothic irony and knows it is a matter of race, too. William Carlos Williams, that Jersey doctor-poet-essayist and half Puerto Rican, was taken enough by Mather to quote passages verbatim yet never forgets the impress of either the Spanish conquistadors or the French Jesuits. And Fiedler himself, that trained medievalist and accomplished Dante scholar, not to mention a Jewish boy from Newark in Montana—who regarded Joseph of Nazareth as Christendom’s most innocuous cuckold and Chillingworth as America’s nastiest—would be flabbergasted: another dangerous American book made safe for Protestant sentiment, again.Intriguingly, Buell cites Fiedler’s insistence on the love plot (“a transmogrified” ménage à trois [82]), but he does so only to demonstrate, in turn, why The Scarlet Letter has proven to be the exception that proves the exceptionalist rule. Registering the near-forgotten influence of Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Héloise (1761), Buell decouples The Scarlet Letter from the New England discourse of national identity and conjoins it instead to a continental exposé of social repression: the nationalist promise fades away in the novel and with it the novel’s claim to original GAN-ishness. It’s a clever argument, since it allows him to acknowledge Hawthorne’s principal concerns with interdicted sex, vengeful intimacy, and violated sanctity—which are, of course, Fiedler’s as well—as the very things that disqualify the novel from actually founding GAN discourse. For what Buell recognizes is that the defining institutions that count in the attribution and making of a GAN—“democracy, individualism, capitalism, sectionalism, immigration, expansionism, signature landscapes, demographic mix”—have been, in the discourse’s self-accounting, scrubbed of church, and this despite the fact that religion is implicated at every institutional site so enumerated, as are sex and marriage (29). That the interplay of sex, violence, and sanctity is eliminated from the longtime and still-reigning formulation of GAN is of course strangely indicative not of the novels themselves (consider An American Tragedy [1925], The Great Gatsby [1926], and Absalom, Absalom! [1936]) but only, and pointedly, of the pronounced GAN-ian desire for a pure—Euro-free! Papist-resistant!—distinctiveness.Great literature invariably bursts its boundaries, and so do its best devotions. That’s the dialectic. If it once made sense to observe that the more we work to demystify the dominant form (New England Protestantism, GAN-ness), the less we know of the alternatives and the more hegemonic formulations limit our imagination, then these texts reverse the paradox. The more immersed the scholars are in the texts under their charge, including the canon (indeed, especially the canon), the more they reveal where the fractures, the edges, and the antitheses exactly lie: to the benefit of not only what they see but also what they don’t. As these marvelous studies demonstrate, what makes all of American literature most available to us is a recognition of its founding forms—for every work of American literature is at least half Protestant, bar none, at once a vessel for inspiration and a provocation to dissent—what we might call, after Van Wyck Brooks, that ol’ New England Don, our really usable past!
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