Reading Janice Fiamengo's "The Bad Faith of Andrew Delbanco" prompts me to re-post this still relevant 1990 talk.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-bad-faith-of-leftist-intellectuals-today/
The Price of
Diversity: A Minority Report on the American Classics as National Scriptures
HERSHEL
PARKER
This is a version of the talk I gave at the 1990 Chicago
MLA organized by Professor James Justus for the American Literature Section
session on anthologizing American Literature.
I spoke as one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of American
Literature; the other two speakers were Martha Banta, an editor of the Harper
Anthology of American Literature, and Paul Lauter, general editor of the Heath
Anthology of American Literature.1 In adapting what I said in Chicago for an
issue of College Literature on teaching minority literature I
acknowledge my vested interests (aesthetic, scholarly, and economic) in the NAAL,
but here I write more personally as an American with close ancestors of two
races who had cherished some works of American literature as private scriptures
for more than a quarter of a century before becoming an editor of an anthology
and who has taught the great works of mid-nineteenth century American
Literature year by year for almost three decades. I write in some discomfiture, for after
seeing myself as an outsider all my life, a Depression Okie, a dropout from high
school who worked his way through college (and sacrificed seven years'
seniority as a railroad telegrapher to go to graduate school), and a man whose
academic career has been devoted to showing that much of what passes for
criticism and scholarship has been a waste of everyone's time, I now find
myself sounding like the most reactionary of all living old fogies.
Sobered by this new perspective, I nevertheless begin
with some propositions about residual effects of the New Criticism on the way
some professors, some contributors to the Heath anthology in particular, have
set about expanding the canon of American literature. During and after the 1950's many graduate
students earned PhDs without having been trained in historical research, in
research into literary history, in biographical, textual, and bibliographical
research; and of course they were not trained to be cautious in the handling of
evidence pertaining to such research. So
fast is the generational turnover in American colleges and universities that
the students of the New Critics in the 1940's and 1950's (and their own
students and those students' students) became the teachers and practitioners of
a series of later approaches derived from or deeply indebted to the New
Criticism--among which were phenomenology in the 1960's; reader-response,
structuralism, and deconstruction in the accelerated 1970's; then the New
Historicism in the 1980's and early 1990's.
All these literary approaches regarded the literary text as a New
Critical verbal icon, even the deconstructionists, who could not initiate the
dismantlement of anything less than a perfect literary artifact. Every successive dominant literary approach
since the 1950's has followed the New Criticism in repudiating historical and
biographical research as that was understood in the 1940's and 1950's.
By the end of the 1960's many young critics, politicized
by the Viet Nam War, felt alienated from an MLA which they saw as pursuing its
scholarly or critical course oblivious to the fact that the nation was
prosecuting an unjust war, and in quintessentially American fashion the young
activists seized control of the MLA, and as members of the establishment have
retained and consolidated their control of it for more than two decades. By and large, these young radicals were
products of their time. That is to say,
they were New Critics, untrained in the handling of scholarly evidence. In one of our cozy confabs in the mid-1980's
(later I explain how we became friends) I challenged Paul Lauter with the
accusation that his collaborators were from the generation least trained in
literary history, least able to revise the canon responsibly. He confessed it at once, and confirmed it
with a story from his own graduate career at Yale. In the mid-1950's he arrived in an American
Literature class armed with older students' notes taken in previous courses
given by Stanley T. Williams (the Irving scholar now revered by some as the
teacher of great Melvilleans), notes devoted to information about literary
history, biography, and bibliography, as well as literary evaluation. Lauter found at the podium not Williams but
Charles Feidelson--the man who had savaged The Melville Log in American
Literature as a mass of documents irrelevant to literary criticism. The moral of the story was that the classnotes
from Williams were useless in the new order at Yale. This was a devastating disruption of
continuity in the study of American history and American literary history, and
most later specialists in American literature made no effort to retrieve for
themselves what their generation had been denied. The loss of connections to earlier history is
plain in Annette Kolodny's list of "moments that generated all the new
scholarship" of the New Historicists or New Americanists, from "that
moment in 1962 when Students for a Democratic Society published the 'Port Huron
Statement'" to "the 1973 seizure of the church and trading post at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by members of the American Indian Movement
publicizing a century of betrayals."2
In the late 1970's and early 1900's many young
professors, untrained in research into history and literary history (and
biography), decided that they wanted to write some literary history while there
was still time, before they turned forty-five or fifty. Rather than educating themselves in such
disciplines, they proceeded to write history and literary history as if
research had all been done long before, once for all. The general editor of the Columbia
Literary History of the United States, Emory Elliott, cheerfully rationalized
his contributors' failure to do research by announcing that they were doing
something better than poring over musty old documents in pursuit of an
impossible goal, that of telling the truth about literary history. They were not such fools as to hope to tell
the truth: they were storytellers, and were to be judged on their narrative
verve, not on anything like discovery of and adherence to facts.3 In the spirit of the Columbia volume, the
author of the Melville chapter does not even refer to the great trove of new
biographical material available at the New York Public Library since 1983. Sacvan Bercovitch, the general editor of the
forthcoming Cambridge literary history, has been extolling a book by one of his
contributors, a study of the literary marketplace in the American Renaissance
for which the author did absolutely no archival research into contracts and
promotion tactics and distribution systems and sales figures but instead
proceeded as if William Charvat had long ago done all the research that ever
needed to be done.4 On the
rare occasions when the New Americanists actually perform archival research,
they may reveal their ineptitude in embarrassing ways, as when Neal L. Tolchin
builds an entire chapter on his mistranscription and misinterpretation of a
letter written by Melville's mother.5 We may never make up for what we lost when
Feidelson replaced Williams at Yale.
We lost something even more devastating than continuity
in the aims and methods of scholarly research.
Since this paragraph will distress Cleanth Brooks if he sees it, I
remind you that he denies ever having been a New Critic: what I allege was the
last thing on his mind. One of the
lingering consequences the New Criticism has been the removal of one of the
crucial checkpoints through which candidates for canonicity had always been
required to pass--the test of literary value.
By banning the study of the creative process the New Criticism had set
up a situation in which critics (unable to stop talking in biographical terms)
routinely managed to convert even such an essentially biographical subject as
Henry James's revisions into a New Critical enterprise, abstracting revision
from the revising author (and doing so on the basic of perfunctory comparisons
of texts). Literary criticism through
the 1960's and 1980's still contained biographical and historical assumptions,
but divorced from biographical and historical evidence; at times the critic
reading a flawed text would condemn the poor author for not being able to to
what he had in fact done, before being forced to expurgate his text.6 The habit of bashing an author unjustly, on
the basis of a text flawed through no fault of his or her own, is unpleasant to
witness, but not of enormous importance.
However, this dissociation of the work of art from knowledge of the
creative process has recently had a momentous consequence. Literature professors have all but stopped
talking about the creative process (the only place you see it in MLA programs
is in relation to freshman writing courses) and have lost the knowledge that
aesthetic value might have some connection to the creative process. Clinical psychiatrists studying the creative
process are concluding that the test of an artist's achievement is both its
originality and its aesthetic value,7 but having long divorced value
from the creator and placed it elsewhere (as inherent in the text, or in the
reader) some young professors have felt free to go further and abandon the
criterion of aesthetic value in what they teach in American Literature courses.
Although I am an editor of an anthology which without
apology presents classic texts of American literature, I see myself as having
devoted much time to scrutinizing the body of American Literature with the
intention of expanding its canon. I have
done so unconventionally, to be sure--by retracing the processes of
composition, revision, and publication in ways that cast doubt on what we teach
when we teach a work called Pudd'nhead Wilson or The Red Badge of
Courage or Sanctuary or An American Dream. When I guided a student into reconstructing
the text of Red Badge to a form very near what Crane wrote, before it
was brutally truncated, I was expanding the canon by creating a text unread
since early 1895.8 But I have
also been concerned with expanding the canon in more conventional ways. As a graduate student in 1961 I combed The
Literary History of the United States and The Literature of the American
People9 and scanned older literary histories to compile a list
of works that literary historians thought were wrongly neglected. The library at Northwestern didn't have
Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862) and a few others on my hunting
list, and I didn't realize that I could have found Rebecca Harding's "Life
in the Iron Mills" in the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly, but I read
two hundred or so of these neglected but admired works and was drawn into
reading many not on my list. (Stowe as a
New England realist, the historian of the psychological effects of
Edwardsianism, was a revelation, so I read almost everything except the Sam
Lawson stories, which defeated me.) This
reading of neglected literature profoundly affected the way I later taught
American Literature, for from the time I began teaching I found I had to carry
into class out-of-print books and read from them or else type out or (after the
mid-1960's) photocopy passages from minor works in order to demonstrate
literary influences and cultural continuities and discontinuities. At the University of Illinois the library was
so splendid that in 1964 I could set undergraduates to explore minor literature
and get a fine paper on a topic such as "New York through Women's Eyes in
the 1840's" (that is, New York as reflected in fiction by women published
in that decade). (Very few teachers in
the country could assign a large class such topics even today.) Thereafter I taught a major works survey that
varied year to year, but I always held up and talked about or read from many
minor works.
With this interest in expanding the canon I was excited
when in early December 1983 I received the flyer for Reconstructing American
Literature, Paul Lauter's forthcoming Feminist Press collection of
revisionist syllabi from American literature courses.10 At MLA I carried the flyer around the hallways
of the Hilton until I found a man passing out copies of it. I don't hang out with strangers at MLA very
much, but I wanted to know the writer of that flyer, so I hung out with Lauter. One day we burrowed far beneath the Sheraton,
down where the signs still said Americana.
At the end of the tunnel were bound copies of Reconstructing American
Literature, and he gave me the first signed copy, "to continue &
develop the debate." I promptly
required it in an undergraduage class and in two graduate classes, and for
later courses I talked about it and put it on reserve. I was painfully ambivalent about it, cheered
by the fact that many young people were now reading and teaching neglected
works but disturbed at some of the attitudes I found in the syllabi and the
headnotes. I thought some of the syllabi
were sexist--biassed against men (the delightful Caroline Kirkland could be
rediscovered but not the marvelous Joseph Kirkland). I thought the syllabi were biassed against
regions of the country, particularly the South, but also the West and the
Midwest, including Chicago (Joseph Kirkland had two strikes against him). I thought they were biassed against even
women regional writers unless they happened to be from New England, biassed
against stories about fundamental Protestantism, biassed against any writer who
did not have leftist leanings, or leanings that could be construed as
leftist. I felt condescended to by some
of the contributors who, I thought, were assuaging their cultural guilt by
teaching what purported to be American Indian literature but was textually
suspect and anyhow was anomalous, since it was in translation. I made these points at the 1984 MLA on a
panel Lauter and I organized with Coral Lansbury, part of our ongoing efforts
at continuing and developing the debate,
What I learned from Lauter and his crew and their
associates was directly reflected in the authors I began adding to my section
of the second edition of NAAL and the changes I made in the selections
for writers already included. At the
March 1984 NEMLA meeting in Philadelphia I went to a meeting of Lauter's group
to ask them (among other things) to level with me: were they teaching Margaret
Fuller's The Great Lawsuit, the whole of which I had laborously
annotated for the first edition of NAAL and about which users of the
anthology were less than enthusiastic.
(The Lauter collaborators confessed that they weren't really teaching
the Fuller, but they were happy to have it in the anthology.) At dinner with some of the Lauter group
Lawrence Buell wrote "Eliz. Stoddard / 'Lemorne vs. Huell' / (1862) / Harper's"
in the back flyleaf of my copy of Reconstructing American Literature. I found the story as worthy as Buell did,
especially since there was nothing in NAAL to suggest the influence of
the Brontes in the United States aside from the major example of
Dickinson. Within days I was giving the
Stoddard story a long-delayed chance to achieve canonicity. Some literary works never get a chance;
sometimes one chance is all a work needs.
The verdict is not in, but here is a "contingency of value"
for Barbara Herrnstein Smith's file:11 a story given a chance in my
section of NAAL--and subsequently in the 1985 Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Gubar The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women--because I sat
between Rita Gollin and Larry Buell at the non-smoking end of a long
table. (Nothing is quite that simple, of
course: I was predisposed to learn more about Stoddard because of what scholars
had said in the 1940's and early 1950's.)
My fascination with the aims of Lauter and his crew and with their Reconstructing
American Literature may not have been widely shared (I wonder who else
required students to buy it as often as I did), but I think everyone who even
thumbed through Reconstructing must have profited from it, and long
before the Heath anthology was published Lauter and his contributors (and their
friends and associates) had achieved some of their goals indirectly, through
their influence on NAAL and other anthologies.
But now I would say that the weaknesses I pointed to in Reconstructing
American Literature recur in the Heath Anthology of American Literature
(1989). I had missed in the syllabi in Reconstructing
any evidence that the contributors had embarked on a grand promiscuous reading
of all the American literature the contributors could lay hands on, open to
finding merit anywhere, the way David S. Shields in the early 1980's was
reading every Colonial poem he could find (without first subjecting it to tests
for political correctness).12
Many of the contributors to the Heath anthology seem to have gone
hunting not see what wildlife (some of it once domesticated) was in the
underbrush but with the specific intention of spotting only minority writers
who had not been in previous anthologies.
But one should not confuse the recovery of many minority writers with a
true reassessment of the canon of American Literature. The Heath advertising makes its highest
claims for the diversity of the anthology, but diversity is just what I miss
in it--a wide representation of American humorous literature; of sporting
literature; of literature dealing with religious customs, including Midwestern
and Southern Protestantism; of early international novels; of the writings of
historians (after the colonial period, where they are well enough represented);
of the literature of local color and regionalism, with due representation of
the literature of the South, West, Midwest; of literature which depicts
American customs and mores (including sexual mores of the middle classes); and
any attempt to demonstrate the literary traditions out of which American
literature developed, especially its debts to British literature. Caught in the crunch between the economic necessity
of including the "classic" American writers (however squeezed, as
poor Henry James is) and the desire to represent a wide range of minority
voices, in particular voices of women, blacks, and American Indians, the Heath
editors wrote off generations of American writers who in their own times had
been the most popular or the most respected American voices.
When I wished the Reconstructing syllabi had
included more establishment authors I wasn't asking for equal time for
political bigots or early imitators of Hawthorne. Then, in the depths of the first Reagan
administration, I thought we might as well know how some of the kindly people
who had voted for Reagan had learned to fear and hate some people less
fortunate than themselves. Now, in the
1990's, when many teachers will want to say, and perhaps even do, something
about homelessness in America, it might be good to teach Stephen Crane's
"Experiment in Misery" and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie,
but it might be still better to teach some of the conservative voices of the
1870's and 1880's when unemployed people (many of them not native born) began
wandering out of cities into small towns and rural areas looking for work and
food, and creating what became known as the Tramp Menace. In December 1990 the news magazines said
there was a shift in public opinion, a hardening of sensibility about the
unemployed and the homeless. If we want
to put into historical perspective questions of practical compassion as well as
idealism, we could do worse than to listen to some frightened and angry conservative
voices that helped mold American public opinion--the voice of Thomas Bailey
Aldrich in The Stillwater Tragedy (1880) or John Hay in The
Bread-Winners (1884) or the xenophobic Stowe in Poganuc People
(1878) or the ambivalent voice of Mary Wilkins in The Portion of Labor
(1901). That sort of writing by men and
women who were part of the literary establishment but who have lost some or all
of their prestige is not represented in the Heath anthology: the men are
dropped altogether and politically suspect or incorrect writings by the women
are not selected.
The most visible innovations in the Heath anthology are
the new selections by racial minorities, especially blacks and Indians. Last September I flew Oklahoma to see a
quarter Choctaw and quarter Cherokee aunt on her ninetieth birthday; it turned
out that others had had the same idea, dozens of them, half-Indians and
quarter-Indians among some of the more elderly.
Most of us were strangers to each other and all of us peered at the
unfamiliar, but undeniably familial and undeniably Indian faces, and tracing
our relationships required us to recall tribal identity. This is prefatory to saying that I react
viscerally to the practice of anthologizing as "American Literature"
Indian "writing" recorded by whites or translated by whites--or
reconstructed and substantially or wholly written or rewritten by whites. Can a story be Indian when a white man took
U. S. copyright to it? Anthology editors
are assuaging their consciences cheaply when they print a speech a white
newspaper editor fraudulently put in the mouth of an Indian chief. Even when the documents are genuine, the
anthologists are inconsistent in printing translations of them. We don't include in American Literature
anthologies a section of creation myths of the ancestors of all people now
living in the United States (such as chapter one Genesis), so why include
Indian creation myths? (I leave aside
the question of what criteria of political correctness govern the choice of
creation myths and which tribes are privileged over others.) My experience is skewed by the fact that my
Indian ancestors (being from the Five Civilized Tribes) became assimilated a
long time ago (although I have a 1906--pre-statehood--family photograph which
includes a Choctaw ancestress who at that late year, my aunt says, spoke only
Choctaw). Members of tribes that kept
their identities might feel differently--but then they can keep their
literature alive in Navaho or Hopi dialects, not English. I feel like saying to white anthology makers,
"You won, we lost, let it go."
Give my surviving aunts the tribal rights they were cheated out of
through being required to register far away from where they lived, clean up
some of the horrors in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, do something (fast) about
fetal-alcoholism syndrome on the reservations (a daily tragedy in 1991 with
bitter consequences stretching far into the twenty-first century), but don't
try to make up for genocide with a few dubious translation of dubious texts. (After I said this in Chicago, several people
with Indian blood told me they felt just the way I do, and some white people
said they had never known what to do with those translations of Indian songs or
speeches.)
That's personal, maybe more personal than scholarly, but
I am on more solidly objective ground in suggesting that in their eagerness to
represent minority writers who actually wrote in English some of the Heath
editors lose sight both of aesthetic value and historical significance. The result is a pervasive leveling in the
Heath anthology, to the point that Frederick Douglass hardly seems to be a more
important writer than, say, Harriet Jacobs.
Any time a victim of memorable suffering looks in his or her heart and
writes, the result is apt to be a moving human document--but not necessarily a
literary document. Jacobs's Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is such a moving human document, but it
was published too late to have any historical impact, and strikes me as having
little literary merit. Douglass's terse
1845 Narrative is one of the greatest human documents in all of American
literature, but it is also a literary document, and very much an American story
in the Franklin tradition of self-education and self-propelled ascent from
humble beginnings to national prestige.
Douglass did not simply look in his heart and write. As a slave boy in Baltimore he learned to
comprehend the dialogues and forensic disputes in his copy of The Columbian
Orator. I hadn't realized until I
read the copy in the Special Collections at the University of Delaware, but of
course "Columbian" meant "American"; even in slavery
Douglass was training himself with a textbook for would-be national
orators. With greater advantages
Melville's brother Gansevoort was doing exactly the same thing at the same
time. And before he wrote down his Narrative
Douglass tried parts of it out, night after night, before live audiences,
getting the story right before putting it into print--just as, at the same
time, Herman Melville was trying out the spicier episodes of Typee on
his fellow sailors. Taste has changed,
and we have to remind ourselves that Douglass's purple passages, such as the
set piece on the sails on the Chesapeake Bay which William Lloyd Garrison
praises in the preface, were not only proof that Douglass could write the sort
of bravura display which the times admired: such passages were profoundly
functional, because "fine writing" in prose is like poetry--quotable,
memorable, and even memorizable, and therefore powerful in the crusade to
awaken the consciences of the North.
Even in slavery Douglass was struggling with something very few freeborn
people ever conquer--style, and by the time he wrote the Narrative
(although a white man in Maryland held title to him) he was his own literary
master. To lump Douglass with Jacobs is
to ignore his triumphant struggle to become not just the author of a book but
an American orator--when oratory was an art, samples of which were presented in
schoolbooks (all through the century) along with samples of biography and
history as well as essays, fiction, and poetry.
The Heath anthology not only represents minority figures
with selections of dubious authenticity and other selections of dubious
historical or aesthetic value, it also distorts even "standard"
writers, at times (not always), by presenting them not in a historical context
(history being deemed irrecoverable) but in terms of late twentieth century
political correctness. In the Heath
anthology Melville is presented as a proletarian, an enemy of "capitalism
and slavery," who wrote his books out of a bleeding social conscience.13 I don't recognize this Melville, despite some
zealous political passages in his early writings. Melville's considered judgment was that
bringing contemporary issues into a literary work was always a mistake, as when
he criticized the section of "Lycidas" on the corruption of the
English church: "Mark the deforming effect of the intrusion of partizan
topics & feelings of the day, however serious in import, into a poem
otherwise of the first order of merit."14 In the Heath anthology "Melville"
is what Barbara Herrnstein Smith might call an example of adaptive
misuse--misuse of a nineteenth-century writer to fit a late twentieth
pseudo-Marxist agenda.14 (I
find it very hard to take academic radicalism seriously when it shelters itself
under tenure and the capitalistic TIAA-CREF just the way the rest of us do.)16 We know that Thoreau lost sleep--literally
lost sleep--over the remanding of fugitive slaves to the South. As far as we know Melville never did. As he wrote in "Loomings,"
"Who aint a slave? Tell me
that." He had other agenda. Great writers do not always respond in the
same ways to the same momentous political issues of their times, and I feel no
compulsion to grade Melville or anyone else on a chart of political
correctness--not Hawthorne the Southern sympathizer, or Emerson the advocate of
resettling freed slaves in Africa, or George Washington Harris the all-round
sexist and racist who helped drive some of my ancestors out of their homes and
helped start them on the genocidal march to Indian territory, or Stowe the
bigot who rued the influx of the pauper poor from southern Europe. By the current criteria of political
correctness no one in the nineteenth-century can 'scape whipping, and the New
Americanist may have to decide whether to cut off all acquaintance with past
writers just the way he or she has to decide whether or not to stop seeing
relatives who keep framed signed photographs of Vice President Quayle on their
television sets. Frederick Crews, who
has become the most eloquent and comprehensive reviewer of academic books on
American literature for the benefit of the general reading public, poses the
problem that confronts people like some of the Heath editors: "will they
be able to acknowledge a possible divergence between political correctness and
literary power?"17
Political correctness clashes with historical truth in
the Melville headnote where the editor says that Melville's father-in-law
Lemuel Shaw was "a staunch defender of racial segregation and of the
infamous Fugitive Slave Law."18
Is the student who thinks slavery is morally wrong supposed to feel
self-righteous when he or she encounters this reference to the "infamous
Fugitive Slave Law"? Is a black
student supposed to have his or her sense of victimization enforced? Still believing that one can recapture much
of the truth about many episodes of the past, I declare that in 1850 the
Fugitive Slave Bill was not infamous.
It could not have been adopted as part of the Compromise of 1850 if it
had been infamous. Most Americans, even
most of those who opposed slavery, accepted the bill as a necessity because
their strongest commitment was to preserve the Union, not to redress a wrong
built into the Constitution and plaguing every subsequent generation. The historical truth is that a decade before
the Civil War began devotion to the union overwhelmed scruples about slavery
throughout the North. In 1962 at the
Boston Public Library I spent days reading through the newspaper coverage of
fugitive slave cases. During the Sims
case, in the spring of 1851, all the newspapers of both parties, Democratic and
Whig, were united in wanting Sims to be promptly and peacefully remanded. All respectable citizens thought the Law
should be enforced in order to preserve the union. Only a couple of newspapers, the Liberator
and the Commonwealth, advocated rescuing a fugitive slave or otherwise
actively resisting the law. The phrase
"lunatic fringe" had not been coined, but those papers were regarded
by all decent people, Whig or Democratic, in that light, or worse: not only
lunatic, but incendiary. Yet only four
years after the Sims case the Massachusetts legislature passed, over the veto
of the governor, the Personal Liberty Act--the purpose of which was to nullify
the Fugitive Slave Law. In those few
years public opinion in Massachusetts had been reversed--by activists like
Garrison and Parker and Whittier and Douglass.
Thoreau helped. Such idealists
achieved one of the most dramatic reversals of public opinion in American
history.
In the late 1960's, fresh from reading the thunderous
denunciations of the "higher law" advocates in the Boston newspapers,
I was able, in class after class, to put into historical perspective the
changes in public attitudes toward the war in Viet Nam. Rather than politicizing the classroom in the
sense of directing students to judge the war in a particular way, I was
actively encouraging students to understand present history in the light of
past American experience. Here, in
American mid-nineteenth century history, and literary history, was proof that a
handful of people following their consciences could sway a majority to their
side--an almost exact parallel to our contemporary experience. When you tell a student only that the
Fugitive Slave Law was "infamous" you may instill a cheap dose of
self-righteousness, but you distort history, you obscure our sense of the lives
of authors like Thoreau, and you close off any chance of using the past in
order to understand, and perhaps to effect changes in, the present. As strongly as I object to those Heath
editors who see an anthology as a means for politicizing students, I don't see
how anyone can avoid calling attention to political implications in classic
American Literature and relating the classics to present political
conditions. During the Viet Nam war
journalists and politicians beat their breasts lamenting that America had lost
its national innocence, that for the first time in our history we were fighting
an unjust war. They were wrong, but I
don't remember in the 1960's seeing historians point to the Whig outcries over
Polk's invasion of Mexico (Executive War!) and McKinley's invasion of the Philippines. The historical truth is that every two
generations or so America (according to some idealists) had lost her
innocence. (Then, once the memory had
faded, she had magically had regained her innocence.) As he declares in one of the most poignant
passages in "Slavery in Massachusetts," Thoreau during the remanding
of slaves had cast about to define his vague sense of loss and had realized
that what he had lost was a country.
Through the 1960's and early 1970's I carried to class a fading thermofax
of William M. Gibson's 1947 article on Howells' and Mark Twain's opposition to
the Spanish-American war, where he quoted Howells's lament at the loss of a
national idealism and innocence; in the 1980's I replaced that worn out
teaching aid with a crisp Xerox of the article.19 During the Viet Nam years Robert Lowell and
Norman Mailer were making old discoveries while thinking they were making them
for the first time. In the late 1960's
students did not always like hearing that they were less than unique, and in
the 1970's they did not always like hearing that the old pattern had been
reenacted in the September after Kent State, when in colleges all over the
country the Me Generation emerged cloaked in a fog of apathy and amnesia. By showing the recurrent pattern I was using
writings by classic American authors to teach something I considered
immeasurably significant about the American national character--a pattern of
slow arousal of conscience, of action on the basis of that conscience, and
afterwards the pall of a collective amnesia.
Anyone reading this in the first administration of the Environmental
President / Education President can draw his or her own more recent
applications to American life, and assemble a range of classic texts on the
subject of one aspect of the American national character, the capacity to
suppress a profound perception by quick forgetting--"Rip Van Winkle,"
"My Kinsman Major Molineux," "Benito Cereno."
Underlying the last paragraphs is my conviction that the
aesthetic value of the American classics is not separable from cultural and
political value; now I need to confront a new threat, the diminishing store of
knowledge of history, including literary history, which students now bring with
them to college. To understand--and make
full cultural use of--Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" we
need to know the circumstances under which it was recognized (under the
apparently unauthorial title "Civil Disobedience") as a major
political weapon. To teach "Benito
Cereno" in a way faithful to Melville we need to have a sense of the
complex racial attitudes possible for a northern white to feel in the middle of
the decade before the Civil War. Yet
students come to college knowing less about American history and American
literature year by year (the eleventh grade American Literature course has been
discarded by many Delaware schools in the last several years), and in many
colleges undergraduates have few chances to make up the loss by reading classic
nineteenth-century American texts.
The breaking of the tradition of teaching American
Literature in high school justifies a look back at the start of that
tradition. The makers of my little
collection of textbooks of American Literature (for high schools, not college)
published between 1890 and World War I probably did occupy positions of
"cultural power," as Barbara Herrnstein Smith says all anthology
makers do.20 Many of them
were diffident about the aesthetic value of the literature yet producted, yet
willing to propose that the study of the best writing we had produced would
"enlarge the views, improve the taste, intensify the patriotism, and
elevate the aims of teachers and pupils."21 In an 1898 textbook the editor placed
patriotic concerns far above aesthetic concerns:22
There are many works which should be studied by every
American, if for nothing else, because of their relation to our national
history and ideals. The Biglow Papers,
the Harvard Commemoration Ode, Whittier's tribute to Lincoln,--all
these, and others like them, have their place in the education of American
youth. They should be given the fullest
chance to do their work of quickening our national conscience and lifting us to
nobler life. And it is not books only
that help to elevate. The personal
example of such author-patriots as Lowell, Whittier, and Curtis, of such
stainless scholars as Longfellow, should be a most widespread and potent
influence for good. In a great
commercial nation such as ours, the inspiration from the life and aims of the
scholar and the poet is especially needed to correct the tendency to strive
only for the commonplace and the practical.
A 1911 editor was still more aggressive:
Any one who
makes an original study of American literature will not be a mere apologist for
it. He will marvel at the greatness of
the moral lesson, at the fidelity of the presentation of the thought which has
molded this nation, and at the peculiar aptness which its great authors have
displayed in ministering to the special needs and aspirations of Americans. He will realize that the youth who stops with
the indispensable study of English literature is not prepared for American
citizenship, because our literature is needed to present the ideals of American
life. There may be greater literatures,
but none of them can possibly take the place of ours for citizens of this
democracy.
For all the aesthetic and political naiveté (not to
mention tacit sexism) of such pronouncements, I think these textbooks did great
cultural and political good.
Rather than lamenting the threat to their cultural
identity, millions of immigrants between 1890 and 1910 deliberately sacrificed
their European languages and literatures so their children like other Americans
would know only English, which luckily is the language of Shakespeare. Learning
English and American literature in school was a means of transcending social
and economic barriers. Yes, as a nation
we lost the chance for multi-cultural enrichment during that period of
intensive Americanization but as far as the immigrants were concerned, that
loss was compensated for by economic and political opportunities here: being
American was a privilege. We all know of
exceptions such as Jews who could not bear the barbarism of Brooklyn and went
home to Germany in the mid-1930's in order to live a richer cultural life. But for most immigrants, all along, America
was not just a nicer place to live but a place they chose when the options were
death or life; ask ask septuagenarian Jews, who got out of Europe in the late
1930's, or ask "boat people" of the 1970's and 1980's. No wonder immigrants who married here and had
American children or who came here married and brought their children or sent
for them later--no wonder these parents were determined that their children, in
order to be securely, irrefutably Americans, would speak only English and read
in school what the native children were reading. Textbook editors and immigrant families were
in at least tacit collusion, for the editors helped see to it that immigrants
and native-born Americans alike were instilled with an awareness of a common
body of classic American literature (however distorted it would look to our
eyes, with its heavy tilt toward poets such as Longfellow and Whittier). Youngsters of whatever ancestry were exposed
to "Rip Van Winkle" and "Self-Reliance" and
"Evangeline" and "The Barefoot Boy." No matter that removed such literature was
far removed from urban life or even rural life as it had become, it did its
work in familiarizing children with the same literary texts and predisposing
them to enjoy American poetry and other poetry in the English language all
their lives. Such functions of
literature seem to have been abandoned in the public schools without anything
of value being substituted, and advocates of bi-lingual teaching are now
overwhelmed by the reality of the new immigration. As I write this paragraph the NEWSWEEK for 11
February 1991 arrives with an article on "Classrooms of Babel," where
the writer concludes: "Bilingual classes aren't an option in a classroom
where a dozen languages are spoken."
Any attempt to apportion equal time for literature written by Americans
of various linguistic ancestries is going to founder. We have to choose whether to follow the
textbook makers of a century ago in trying to instill in students some
knowledge of an (ever-varying) core of American classics or else we have to
give up the idea of having any communal knowledge of any American Literature.
In the last sentence of the Preface to Leaves of
Grass Whitman said: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs
him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." In the turn of the century textbooks I just
cited, he was still a marginal figure (although far better known than
Melville), but the country had affectionately "absorbed" some other
"major" writers and some of its lesser writers, and was the more
humane and united for it. It is easy to
make fun of this position. Kolodny mocks
Harry Levin for his naive belief that we once had been nourished by a
collective knowledge and collective memory of American literature. I think we did have such knowledge and
memory, and that we are far along in the process of trashing it as effectively
as we have trashed the environment.
Nothing good has replaced it. Now
are the words and images that unify the country derived from television
commercials, MTV, or movies rather than literature?
I confess to some wishful thinking of my own, a
lingering hope that there can be at least an eleventh-grade high school class
and a sophomore or junior college class in which all students will have a
chance to read works of American literature which have entered most deeply into
the collective American consciousness--the American scriptures. This is problematical. Aesthetic evaluation really is, as Barbara
Herrnstein Smith says, contingent on many factors; but some literary works
really are better than other literary works, and anyone imbued both with a
sense of the preciousness of time and a love of literature will feel that he or
she is better occupied teaching the best literature most of the time. In chapter three of Walden Thoreau
described popular literature of his time as "Little Reading" which
could be consumed without strain by the barely literate, in pathetic contrast
to the classics, which students always have to stand "on tiptoe" to
read, which can be truly read only by those whose lives are changed by the
experience of reading. In teaching (and
anthologizing) I act on Thoreau's assumption--that documents which afford the
most rich, complex aesthetic experiences might also be the very documents most
likely to work transforming enlightenment--social, cultural, political
enlightenment--in all earnest young students.
We may survive as a people without knowledge of a common body of literature,
but if we read the casual writings of the day, the Times, as Thoreau says,
rather than reading literature meant for Eternity (or if we forsake the
pleasures of reading altogether, even Little Reading, for the pleasures of the
other media) we lose something that all civilized societies have held sacred,
the aesthetic and richly socializing experience of absorbing a set of national
classics, an experience that just might be worth passing on to the next
generation.
1. Ronald
Gottesman et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of American Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). The second edition (1985) and the third
edition (1989) are edited by Nina Baym, et al. See also Donald McQuade, general ed., The
Harper Anthology of American Literature (New York: Harper & Row, 1987)
and Paul Lauter, general editor, The Heath Anthology of American Literature
(Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1990).
2. Annette
Kolodny, "The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the
United States," American Literature (1985) 57:291-307; the
quotations are from pp. 306 and 307. I
have picked up the apt term "New Americanists" from Frederick Crews,
"Whose American Renaissance?" New York Review of Books (27
October 1988) 35:68, 70, 72, 74-81.
3. Emory Elliott,
ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1988), p. xvii. The New
Americanists-New Historicists seem to think that they have done all the
research there is to do if they go to the library and find a 1930's or 1940's
book on the topic they are interested in.
4. See Bercovitch's review of Michael T. Gilmore's American
Romanticism and the Marketplace in TLS (9 January 1987) 4371:40.
5. Tolchin, Mourning,
Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988). Chapter 2 (pp.
36-58) is built on the claim that Melville's mother was baffled by Typee
("which none of us understand") when in fact what confused her was
her son Allan's letter about it.
6. Flawed
Texts and Verbal Icons (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984),
Chapter 4, "The Authority of the Revised Text and the Disappearance of the
Author: What Critics of Henry James Did with Textual Evidence in the Heyday of
the New Criticism." For James C.
Calvert's author-bashing, see pp. 166-168.
7. A magnificent
book, almost wholly ignored by literary critics, is Albert Rothenberg's The
Emerging Goddess (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979); Chapter 13 should
be read by every graduate student and English professor. A simplified discussion of value is on p. 9
in Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1990).
8. Stephen Crane,
The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Henry Binder (New York: W. W. Norton,
1982). See also in my Flawed Texts
and Verbal Icons Chapter 6, "The Red Badge of Courage: The
Private History of a Campaign that--Succeeded?"
9. Robert E.
Spiller, et al., Literary History of the United States (New York:
Macmillan, 1948) and Arthur Hobson Quinn, et al., The Literature of
the American People (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951.)
10. Paul Lauter,
ed., Reconstructing American Literature (Old Westbury, N. Y.: Feminist
Press, 1983).
11. Barbara
Herrnstein Smith, "Contingencies of Value," Critical Inquiry (1983) 10:1-35. Reprinted in Contingencies of Value
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988).
12. This massive
research culminated in Shields's Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and
Commerce in British America, 1690-1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990).
13. Carolyn R.
Karcher, "Herman Melville, 1819-1891," in The Heath Anthology of
American Literature, I:2402.
14. Herman
Melville's annotation in his copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton,
(Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1836) p. 277.
15. Barbara
Herrnstein Smith, "Contingencies of Value," p. 13.
16. Kolodny, p.
107, celebrates the bravery of "feminists, Blacks, gays and lesbians in
the academy" who "risked their careers to pursue" their new
awareness of "diversity, division, and discord" in the United States
and its literature; the statement might be nearer the truth of what happened if
"risked their careers to pursue" were emended to "built their
careers on pursuing."
17. Frederick
Crews, "The Strange Fate of William Faulkner," New York Review of
Books (7 March 1991), 38:47-52; the quotation is from page 51.
18. In the Heath
anthology, Karcher, I:2402.
19. William M.
Gibson. "Mark Twain and
Howells: Anti-Imperialists," New
England Quarterly (1947) 20:465-466.
20. Barbara
Herrnstein Smith, pp. 25-26.
21. Selections
from Hawthorne and his Friends, preface by Dr. Richard Edwards (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), p. viii.
22. Henry S.
Pancoast, An Introduction to American Literature (New York: Henry Holt,
1898), p. vi.
23. Reuben Post Halleck, History of American
Literature (New York: American Book Company, 1911), p. 6.
