Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
on arguments made first in literary form.
While the logic of literary debt is central to the premise of this book, I do not pursue it by means of a comparative literary inquiry in the standard sense. While I make frequent and substantial reference to British literary culture in the period, and while I will continue to refer back on occasion to the European sources of American claims to national originality, I do not proceed by holding transatlantic literary works side by side in order to gauge their similarities and differences. For I am less interested in evaluating American assertions of literary distinction (say, by subjecting it to comparative readings that would give the lie to them by exposing what was imitated) than in anatomizing the fantasy of national originality and analyzing the cultural materials out of which it was built. In order to do that properly, of course, one cannot only tease out novelty claims immanent in literary works; one needs also to reconstruct and understand the broader critical and aesthetic milieu that animated the self-theorizing and metaliterary gestures of the period’s imaginative literature.
It is an interesting feature of this first wave of literary nationalism that there appears at first to be no robust archive of extraliterary source material alongside the literary work to which we can turn for such context. This seems to set it apart from the later waves of literary nationalism, which produced a discrete and still familiar body of such material. So, for example, we feel we can learn at least as much about the nationalist aims of Cooper’s fiction from the periodical literature of the decade that preceded it—such classic pieces as Walter Channing’s “Essay on American Language and Literature” (1815) and Edward Tyrell Channing’s “On Models in Literature” (1816), along with other American entries in the transatlantic “Paper Wars,” that exchange of cultural salvos fired in the pages of periodicals like the North American Review and the Edinburgh Review. Similarly, as much as we ask the literary works of the American Renaissance to stand on their own as our version of a “great tradition,” any investigation of their cultural-nationalist underpinnings would likely begin with Emerson’s “The American Scholar” address, the critical writings of the mid-nineteenth-century “Young America” movement, or Melville’s satirical treatment of it in “Young America in Literature.” By contrast, the apparent lack of a similar critical archive parallel to the literary works of the post-Revolutionary period—or, rather, preceding the literary production and feeding into it, as in the above examples—may be partly what entices us to read forward in time, hastily assimilating them to the literary production of later periods and finding the earlier works wanting in comparison.
Yet there was in fact a critical context proper to this earlier literary tradition, though it was not the exclusively “American” one we expect it to be by analogy with later waves of literary nationalism. That context is the transatlantic, but chiefly British, writing on “taste” during the eighteenth century. By replacing early U.S. literature in that critical environment, it becomes possible to recover the cultural conversation that finds early American writers implicitly responding to earlier British critics and theorists like Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, and Hugh Blair, and rather selfconsciously locating themselves in relation to eighteenth-century, and largely pre-Kantian, theories of what would later be termed “the aesthetic.” We stand to learn much more from these more contemporaneous transatlantic exchanges than from imagining a transhistorical communion that finds Charles Brockden Brown and Joel Barlow calling prophetically ahead to their future countrymen Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.
Specific aesthetic concepts will receive focused discussions in the individual chapters below, but the general claim that is fairly consistent across the range of the literary examples I consider is the fantasy that a cisatlantic literature would finally instantiate and fully actualize an aesthetic that British criticism had already been able to describe on the far side of the Atlantic, but that Britain’s literature had never itself been able to incarnate. That fully realized “American aesthetic” is most familiarly described in terms of characteristics like “authenticity” or “sincerity” (the pair of concepts Lionel Trilling explored in a 1972 book), vernacularity (a feature of the “best” American prose that is generally thought to have reached it apotheosis in Twain), the triumph of the “plain” style (“the presiding rule of American prose,” according to Perry Miller), and so on.123 But what I will frequently emphasize in the earliest articulations of these and other literary characteristics is the crucial fact that they were always defined privatively rather than positively, for they aimed above all to claim for themselves a world apart from the polish and disguise of European traditions of letters. Thus, what we call Crèvecoeur’s rustic style was self-described as “incorrect” and “inelegant”; Brown’s tortuous style was sublimely “irregular”; and the plain style valued by the seduction plot really could ever only identify itself as “artless,” that is, as the salutary absence of ornament and artifice. The utter consistency of all of this subtractive definition ought to make us reconsider the old saws about the American “voice” and to recognize the idea not as some organic expression of a national character but as the mythic end result of a self-conscious cultural exertion. Whatever an “American voice” in literature is or has become, it does not have its source in some originary set of national characteristics; rather, it was derived, I am convinced, out of a deliberate operation of cultural negation or subtraction—rather like an algebraic solution to a cultural equation.
The chapters that follow trace several versions of this process as it unfolded in relation to specific genres and literary figures. These were “literary arguments” in a dual sense: arguments about literary form conducted largely through literary form. To lay the groundwork for the literary-historical sequence that follows it, Chapter 2 begins with the purely linguistic side of the story: Noah Webster’s plan to “introduce order and regularity into the orthography of the AMERICAN TONGUE” as the cultural location where the logic of difference-in-repetition was being worked out most clearly in the late eighteenth century. Webster’s solution to the problem of a national language was not to invent a new vernacular but rather to “reform the mode of spelling.”124 Orthographic reform went to work at a very particular level of linguistic practice, between surface and substance. For once Webster committed to modifying an existing language rather than building a new one from scratch, he had to think up a way to alter the manner in which the language was used without discarding the basic materials of that language. Put simply, he needed to propose a modal change. What Webster thus devises is less an “American language” than “American-style English.” This linguistic solution was thus the perfect analogy for a literary solution, which would use a similarly modal logic to describe the distinction between English literary culture and its Anglo-American rearticulation as a change in style.
Chapter 2 turns to Crèvecoeur’s epistolary narrative Letters from an American Farmer (1782) as one of the most successful attempts to define literary Americanness in stylistic terms. The linchpin of Crèvecoeur’s prose style is the self-deprecating gesture of contrast between the American’s awkward language and the elegance and polish of polite English letters. Thus, while most critics focus on the work’s naïve narrator, Farmer James, I focus on the ontologically prior imaginative act that enables James to show himself: the invention of the farmer’s urbane British correspondent. This correspondent is everywhere and nowhere; we never read his letters, but James everywhere defines his own epistolary voice by contrast with them. Moreover, despite the farmer’s extravagant posture of “American” naïveté, Crèvecoeur cannily fashions this version of an American style out of traditional European literary topoi and theories of the aesthetic. The farmer’s letters recombine these literary materials and then recirculate them for a transatlantic audience fascinated by literary Americanness as an exotic new cultural substance. Ever since, American literary history has had to grapple with the awkward possibility that an Anglophilic French gentleman may have pioneered “our” literary style.
Charles Brockden Brown, the subject of Chapter 3, worked within the gothic novel form to make a different kind of “Americanness” claim supposed to be linked to the unique topographical features of the American landscape. This, too, was a skillful modal revision