Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
1, Webster went to work on a technical level to purge American spellings of the inconsistencies and polyglossic baggage British English had acquired from long proximity to other European tongues. A completely rationalized and simplified mode of spelling, he wagered, would immediately pay off at the level of cultural reproduction; children of all ranks would learn the language faster and more expertly, as would immigrants with different mother tongues. In this way, a purified English language would bring a principle of uniformity to bear on the diverse contact zone that was the social reality of eighteenth-century North America, binding together a host of languages and regional and class dialects into a single new linguistic community. This would make it difficult for another European language to compete with English as the language of America. It would also keep African Americans and Native Americans at the cultural margins by defining America as English in an ethnolinguistic sense. The “American tongue,” Webster asserted, would have to be based on English, for that language is “the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents”; yet the language would define itself as American by virtue of its departures from British English. In order to perfect the language while making it distinctly “ours,” then, Webster set out—as he put it rather strikingly—to “make a difference”29 between British and American English. Certainly, we should understand this phrase quite literally: the desired national distinction would have to be made, that is, manufactured through the technical means of orthographic reform. But we would also do well to hear in Webster’s word “difference” the mathematical denotation of that term, namely, the result of a subtraction. For this was a bid for linguistic novelty that proceeded, in effect, by taking something away. Webster would define American English precisely by negating or abjecting those aspects of British English which he regarded as corrupt or irrational. What was left over after this deductive operation would constitute a “new” language practice.
Meanwhile, as linguists and lexicographers were trying to puzzle out what it was going to mean to speak English on this side of the Atlantic, authors of imaginative literature were busy working out the analogous literary problem that centrally concerns me here: how their works could exist within the larger body of anglophone writing and yet still claim to lie apart from it as a distinct national tradition. The linguistic solution I have just summarized in fact pre-traced the exact path the literary solution would take, while also suggesting why literature could be a productive medium for working out fundamental problems of cultural identity. Anglo-American literature, like its language, was essentially and inescapably derivative. Yet it too would insist on defining itself not as a repetition of past practices, but by virtue of what it is not: not aboriginally American because it is English in origin, but at the same time not British because it is American in practice. After all, Noah Webster did not propose, as some of his contemporaries are said to have done, that the North American republic adopt a truly American language such as Iroquois or Algonquian in order to provide itself with the necessary “national band”; rather, he began with Johnson’s English and then made certain local modifications to it in order to recast the language in a putatively American form. Just so, Anglo-American literary artists did not, say, begin to write trickster tales as a way of asserting the indigeneity of their tradition; nor did they embrace African American literary forms like the slave narrative as the (arguably far stronger) basis of a culturally distinct tradition. Instead, these authors began with the established forms of English letters and then set out to alter those forms in ways that would render them uniquely “American.”30 By analogy to the Judeo-Christian creation myth, we might say that the creation of U.S. culture was less like that of the first man and more like that of the first woman; “Americanness,” that is, was less a miraculous ex nihilo creation than a generation of radical difference through an act of subdivision and derivation.
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The exception, as the saying goes, is constituted by the rule; just so, “American literature” began to self-generate by first defining a British literary norm from which it might then “except” itself. We can call it a literary version of what Amanda Emerson, drawing on the social theory of Georg Simmel, has termed “negative affiliation.”31 That is, the very idea of the unique singularity of our literature, or of its distinct national character, first originated with the authors’ self-conscious negation of certain characteristics of British literary culture rather than having grown organically from any distinctive features of the American scene. Thus, for example, if British letters were supposed to be hypercultivated and artificial, Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer refashioned their American counterpart as blessedly rude and therefore as manifestly authentic (Chapter 2). If the British culture of the aesthetic was an art of the polished and the beautiful, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly rewrote the gothic romance as an aesthetic of the difficult that mirrored the rough sublimity of America’s geography (Chapter 3). And if British courtship practices and their fictional expressions relied on artifice, disguise, and hypocrisy, seduction novels like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette argued, American expression was artless, sincere, and plainspoken (Chapter 4). In many if not all instances of this kind of national self-definition, the so-called British norm is little more than a stereotype serving the obvious function of enabling Anglo-American differentiation by contrast. More than that, as I have already noted above, this whole logic of negative or subtractive originality, along with some of its characteristic cultural contents, were often themselves direct borrowings from specifically British rhetorics of negation. Even as U.S. writers asserted their distance from British literary culture, they repeated structurally identical gestures of differentiation with which that British culture had set itself against (for example) a French literary culture that it had cast in comparable terms as extravagant and hypercultivated, over-polished and insincere. For all of its claims to novelty, then, this kind of national differentiation did not invent any “new” cultural values. Far from it. In fact, it usually proceeded by grasping onto a cultural opposition already active in British culture, adopting one of its poles as the axis of a supposedly American characteristic, and consigning the other side of the binary to a residual British cultural stance. This was precisely what Noah Webster did, for example, when he embraced certain phonetic spellings that had already been put forward by certain British lexicographers (including color for “colour” or public for “publick”), and then extrapolated from them an “American” mode of spelling.
In spite of its rhetorical tenor, then, the American negation of British literary culture was not really a cultural “disaffiliation”; it would be more accurate to theorize it as an inverted form of affiliation.32 My belief is that this basic reorientation immediately reframes the old question of what makes American literature American. If the set of positive literary features we later came to associate with an American aesthetic (characteristics like naïveté, vernacularity, a demotic style, and so on) were not the origin, but the product, of a process of negative definition, then our literary-historical objective must shift accordingly: instead of setting out to discover the “American” characteristics that generated a literature, we would look for the moment when a U.S. nationalist cultural attitude first defined an abjected norm, and, in that very same process, defined itself as the exception. What we thus discover is that the claim of cisatlantic literary originality itself has an irreducibly transatlantic source. “To be sure of what they were,” as Terence Martin puts it, Americans “converted a European tradition to their own use and proclaimed (with developing conviction) what they were not.”33 The case I consider in Chapter 2 furnishes a particularly concrete example, for this was precisely what Crèvecoeur did when he used a (fictional) learned British correspondent as a transatlantic foil for that of his “simple [American] farmer” (Letters, 49). So, too, by having Farmer James describe his own writing almost exclusively through grammatical privatives (“However incorrect my style, however inexpert my methods” [49]), Crèvecoeur signaled that the style of his “simple farmer” had to be negatively derived, as it were, from a putatively British norm. New stereotypes of “American” identity, language, and literature began to emerge at this