Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
a different kind of epistemological responsibility to the referent and to the world of objects.
Perhaps no nineteenth-century author voiced the proposition more boldly than Walt Whitman in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature…. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir.”15 These more jingoistic expressions of American literary nationalism have received a great deal of scholarly attention, whether in the spirit of celebration or rebuke, in part because they invite associations with American exceptionalism in its explicitly political forms—that fateful fantasy of a uniquely structured society, endowed with peculiar rights and responsibilities on the international world stage, while also being exempt from rules held to be universally binding for all other nations.16 Even Hawthorne’s relatively modest invocations of romantic literary license could be recruited on behalf of literary exceptionalism. From his experiments in fictional form, the story goes, arose a prose tradition that possessed a unique power to conjure what Richard Poirier called a “world elsewhere”—a kind of heterotopia called forth by, and dwelling in, literary language itself.17
My purpose in taking this brief forward peek is simply to point out that, to readers familiar with later, more extravagant expressions of literary uniqueness, the scene of a nascent U.S. literary culture actually boasting of local versions of British types tends to seem rather quaint by contrast. Where is the declaration of radical alterity? Where is D. H. Lawrence’s heterotopic version of American literature, peopled by what he called “strangers, incomprehensible beings … creatures of an other-world”?18 In fact, the late eighteenth-century works under consideration here made a different kind of claim. This earlier generation of Anglo-American writers sought not to produce new literary forms but to put a local stamp on borrowed ones.19 The later attack on their imitativeness (Melville’s “better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation”) is evidence, not that it took until the generation of Hawthorne and Whitman for American writers finally to succeed in being original where their predecessors had failed, but rather a sign that a new notion of “originality” came to wage war on an older one, redefining the concept of “imitation” in the process. The literary historian’s challenge, then, is to apprehend the earlier formation in its own terms, rather than understanding it merely as an uncompleted cultural gesture—that is, without orienting it at the outset toward its more famous teloi. The first order of business is to recover that older sense of literary originality, according to which one could, without derision or triviality, without inconsistency or absurdity, actually celebrate an American Milton or an American Goldsmith. To do analytical justice to that literary logic of adoption and adaptation—to see it as anything other than a failure to become a later idea of literary art—will require us, first of all, to shift our frame of reference to pre-Romantic notions of artistic originality, where literary genius could consist in the exemplary performance of an existing form.20
Transplantation, translation, transfer, conversation, correspondence, commerce—these are the terms in which early U.S. authors conceived of transatlantic literary relations. The concept anchoring their literary nationalism was not absolute alterity but rather, as Leonard Tennenhouse has put it, “repetition, with a difference.”21 Yet they still boasted not just of radical novelty, but of national originality by virtue of what Charles Brockden Brown called their “unexampled” quality. What, then, might these writers have to teach us by violating the Emersonian dictum, “Insist on yourself; never imitate”?22 To begin to answer this question, we must become far more interested in the eighteenth-century origins of a notional “American literature” than in its nineteenth-century destinations.
Inventing the Cisatlantic
I have called the idea of literary Americanness a late eighteenth-century marketing scheme, but it was also a recognizable cultural project very much of its historical moment—one particular expression of a post-Revolutionary imperative, after having established a new sovereign body politic, to define the “American” as a new figure and endow it with a distinct, even unique national character. One of the most revealing aspects of this project was its unabashed, undisguised arbitrariness; rather than some organic substance, “American character” clearly named a lack or absence that would have to be remedied by a deliberate cultural exertion. This is not merely some retrospective poststructuralist conceit. As Anglo-American statesmen began to insist at the time, and social and cultural historians closer to our own time have emphasized in turn, the Revolution was not the end of a process of national self-definition but its merest beginning. To put it in the simplest terms, the problem was this: “Americanness” did not yet exist as a positive entity with concrete attributes, but for a host of political, social, cultural, and economic reasons, Anglo-Americans suddenly found it increasingly necessary to speak as if it did. Yet unless they were willing to embrace an indigenous definition modeled on the continent’s native inhabitants—a cultural road generally not taken during this period, despite certain symbolic gestures in that direction—they had but one alternative. To produce the American as a category in its own right, they would have to begin by defining it in opposition to the Briton. That simple logic of negation cut a path through a thicket of cultural self-definition. Through it, the cultural space of the “cisatlantic” would henceforth be constituted in a complex differential relation to the transatlantic cultural spaces against which it seemed to distinguish itself.
“People in America have always been shouting about the things they are not,” D. H. Lawrence long ago observed in Studies in Classic American Literature.23 Terence Martin, lending some rigor and specificity to this formulation, has investigated the “rhetoric of negation” that served for a long time as the predominant mode for American acts of self-definition.24 Late eighteenth-century Americans, Martin observes, display a particular “tendency (perhaps a need) to negate Europe in order to identify and possess America,” thus producing a vast canon of “negative catalogues” and “statements mark[ing] the difference between an old world and a new by enumerating what is missing in the new.”25 Paradoxically, the “form and impulse” of this kind of negative cultural definition itself had roots in the European cultures that were being negated; moreover, as I will indicate in the pages that follow, some of the actual content of these privative definitions of Americanness had observable European counterparts and equivalences. Yet in this kind of cultural myth making, even borrowed gestures could be turned back against the lender in an insistent act of disidentification. Out of this cultural dynamic was born what Martin calls “the powerful dialectic that fostered a sense of American identity” during the Early Republic: “From the Old World came a conception of the New, from the New a conception of the Old by means of which Americans could announce what they were not … and thereby proclaim their superiority.”26 My subject here is not this larger cultural process as such, but the literary problem that was its particularly concrete homologue.
According to some Anglo-American thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century, the solution to the vast and abstract problem of cultivating a new national identity might begin with language itself. “Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national,” Noah Webster insisted in Dissertations on the English Language (1789). “However they may boast of Independence, and the freedom of their government, yet their opinions are not sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners, are still prevalent among the Americans.”27 As we can immediately infer from this oft-quoted description, Webster did not believe that the solution could be a political one; after all, the problem had not yet taken care of itself in the course of achieving political independence, nor even a bold act of federal reconstitution. There was now a new national “government,” to be sure, but not yet a national culture; there was a new “country,” but not yet a nation; this country had “people” in it whom he can call “the Americans,” but Americans were not yet a people. This peculiar deficiency could only be remedied, Webster was convinced, in the realm of language. “A national language is a band of national union.”28 U.S. national character would eventually arise from the invention of a language which was English,