A Little Learning about Manuscript Transition
By the late 1980s a few up and coming young academics saw that, after all, there was some strategic self-promotional value in acknowledging things historical and even things biographical. A very few of these younger academics began going to the archives, the most persistent of whom was Neal L. Tolchin, who worked his findings into his 1988 Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville. Tolchin was a rarity, a New Historicist who had actually set out to perform archival research. In 1992 Andrew Delbanco offered this praise of Tolchin’s arguments and conclusions without mentioning Tolchin’s use of manuscript material:
Another substantial book, Neal L. Tolchin's Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville, uses psychoanalytic categories to propose a different way in which antebellum American culture was constricting and oppressive. Here we learn that Americans, especially women, were subject to a pathology of chronic grieving that placed them in 'a double bind . . . which at once prolonged the process of mourning and blocked the expression of feeling in bereavement."
While employing his "psychoanalytic categories," Tolchin [xv] had essayed "a radical revision of the biographical text" which located "Maria Melville's hitherto marginalized influence at the center of the tensions in Melville's art."
In achieving this revolutionary view, Tolchin had ventured into the New York Public Library to look at some of the letters in the Augusta Papers and had traveled to Pittsfield to look at family letters in the Berkshire Athenaeum. Tolchin did not recognize that he was having trouble, particularly with Melville's mother's letters. Maria Gansevoort Melville's handwriting is perfectly clear, after you transcribe several dozen of her letters (a comment that almost guarantees that I will blunder the next time I quote her). Tolchin printed some very strange transcriptions, and some of his biographical conclusions on the basis of mistaken transcriptions are breathtaking.
Tolchin's difficulties with transcribing and understanding are most prominently displayed in the first paragraph of his second chapter, "The Liminality of Grief: Mourning Ritual in Typee." Here Tolchin's misreadings are so serious as to undermine not just a single chapter (built upon misreadings) but his entire book:
In a letter of February 7, 1846, a puzzled Maria Melville comments on her son's recently published first novel, Typee, "his book which none of us understand, so contradictory in its information." One wonders if Mrs. Melville associated her son Gansevoort's leg ailment with the mysterious leg injury that the narrative persona, Tommo, suffers and which causes him to be carried about on a native's back. Writing on March 5, 1839, Melville's mother describes how "Gansevoort has still to be carried to the fire and is unable to bear his weight." One further wonders whether the cause of Tommo's disability, his exposure to "death-like coldness" during a rainy night spent in a ravine, triggered for Mrs. Melville a memory of her husband's fatal exposure. To explore the social text of Tommo's leg wound and how it relates to Maria Melville's sense of Typee's contradictions, I examine the novel's conflicting types and peeps, as it links the pain inscribed in Tommo's body to Melville's frozen grief for his father.
This is remarkable as "a radical revision of the biographical text," but it rests upon a transcription of a document in the Augusta Papers by a New Historicist not trained in working with manuscripts.
To begin with, the letter Tolchin purports to quote is not dated 7 February 1846 but 28 February 1846. In it Maria explains a complex situation to her daughter Augusta, then visiting the Van Rensselaers in Albany:
Herman left us last monday Eveg for Troy on his way to New York by the early Cars--he receiv'd a letter from Allan in the morning regarding his book which none of us understood, so contradictory in its information. Herman was very desirous of having it come out in Wiley & Putnams "Library of Choice Reading," and from Allans letter, the thing was not determined, and indeed the arrival of the Book itself by the Cambria by the reading of Allans letter was more than uncertain. If the book was not got out by the first of March he would lose the Copy right in America, so Gansevoort wrote. Herman had no Idea of that you may suppose, to have the copy right was all to Herman--so he concluded to go to New York, altho Gansevoort particularly requested him to remain here--but too much was at stake and he went down--to assure himself that all was safe.
Maria, of course, does not say that the whole family was puzzled by Typee. They were puzzled not by Typee but by Allan's letter about it. In actual biographical fact Maria Melville nowhere manifested any "sense of Typee's contradictions," if such contradictions existed. On the contrary, good mother that she was, she perfectly understood how important preserving the American copyright for his book was to Herman. Tolchin had constructed his chapter on an absolutely false basis.
Punning on the subtitle of Typee ("A Peep at Polynesian Life"), Tolchin declared he would explore "the novel's conflicting types and peeps, as it links the pain inscribed in Tommo's body to Melville's frozen grief for his father." After misquoting the letter, Tolchin explained that he would build an elaborate theory on the basis of "the social text of Tommo's leg wound and how it relates to Maria Melville's sense of Typee's contradictions"--how the social text relates to a sense of contradictions that Maria Melville never experienced. For any New Critic, of course, the opening of a chapter or a larger work carries in it the plan of the whole. Well-trained critic that he is, Tolchin recurred to his powerful opening as he constructed the rest of the chapter. He began a new section of the chapter with a reminder that some of Tommo's actions and "the contradictory peeps at Marquesan life" must "have been in large part responsible for the bafflement with which Melville's family read Typee." No, Herman and Maria, at least, were puzzled by Allan's muddy letter, but not about the meaning of Typee. And of course, good critic that he is, Tolchin in the last sentence of the chapter tied the whole back to the first paragraph: "Tommo mirrors back to Maria Melville the 'contradictory . . . information' of her own unresolved grief as it has been transmuted into and energized her son's fictive mourning rite."
The first readers, you think, would have done a little spot verifying of Tolchin's transcriptions and then would have hooted the book out of libraries? That did not happen. No one at Yale University Press, no reader for the press, no reviewer or critic checked any of Tolchin's transcriptions from manuscripts. It did not matter at all that Tolchin had built a whole chapter on a fantastic misreading of Maria Melville's handwriting, and that, of course, according to the theory of organic unity the falsely-conceived chapter is built into and effects the entire book.
I called the mis-transcription in Maria’s 28 February 1846 letter to the attention of Brian Higgins so he could mention it in the annual American Literary Scholarship, but apparently no one has referred to that warning in print. Tolchin's book has been cited favorably dozens of times. In the American Historical Review (April 1990) Karen Halttunen declared that "Tolchin convincingly demonstrates that Melville's work abounds with images of blocked bereavement and with thinly veiled references to the death of his father." Tolchin "offers a compelling synthesis of the body of Melville's work." Bryan Collier Short in Cast By Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development (1992) lists it among "biographically oriented studies" and Karen Elizabeth Smythe in Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (1992) cites it as "a biographical study." Julia A. Stern, in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997), offers this praise:
Much of my thinking about the relationship between the feeling that characterizes sentimentality and the pathological disturbance of mourning that takes shape in melancholia is inspired by Mitchell R. Breitwieser's remark that, in a recent work on Melville and mourning in antebellum America, Neal L. Tolchin has identified the centrality of a blocking and channeling of mourning in genteel culture, and the consequent production of an underground melancholia. Tolchin's extensive and perspicacious investigation of Melville's America suggests to me that sentimentalism is a reappearance of the Puritan sublimation of mourning . . . ." 241
It is "an important study," says Peter Balaam in Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Composition, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature (2009). As dozens of favorable citations show, Tolchin's book has entered into common knowledge among writers interested in histories of emotion, in grief, misery, gender, death, and even the making of the middle-class family. Not one of the critics who have praised its insights and have incorporated its findings has seen that the second chapter is built upon a grotesque error which taints many other passages in the book. A critic who takes this flawed book as "a compelling synthesis of the body of Melville's work" is deluded, and insofar as the critic incorporates Tolchin's findings into his or her own work, that work is tainted.
Showing posts with label the New Historicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the New Historicism. Show all posts
Monday, March 28, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
A Short Comment on Unqualified Reviewers and the Dearth of Researchers
Any good biographer would prefer to be reviewed by other biographers who have worked through the known archives and have discovered at least a few unknown caches of material. Few reviewers, as Carl Rollyson testifies in Biography: A User's Guide (275), have such qualifications. Why should we expect them to have? Older reviewers now writing were almost all trained as New Critics to ignore biographical evidence, and very few of them learned along the way how to take account of long-known documentary evidence, let alone how to weigh new evidence. Most younger reviewers have studied under third generation New Critics or else under first or second generation New Historicists who studied under New Critics, and many of the young have been trained mainly in Deconstructionism and its successive -isms by teachers who know nothing of historical and biographical research and carry New Critical tenets into trendier approaches. In the 1960s and early 1970s it became clear that critics could not write a minimally acceptable "Historical Note" for the Northwestern-Newberry Edition (one surveying the composition, publication, reception, and later critical history), and became clear, even, that all of us needed refresher courses in biographical investigating.
When academics in their forties or fifties or even sixties now attempt to do serious research they are handicapped by lack of training, and their writings almost never meets even minimal standards--such as being able to date documents accurately, to transcribe them accurately, and to demonstrate some comprehension of their significances. Ever since the mid-1980s, when I began helping Jay Leyda expand The Melville Log I have been looking for companions in biographical research on Melville and not finding many. Among the hunters are the chairman of the history department at UCSB, a librarian at Harvard, a librarian in Albany,a librarian in Portsmouth, an ice cream man in Cleveland, a nursing home man in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and a former student of mine in Idaho. A few great researchers, notably the Kennedys, have been silent for several years.
The dismal level of the academy is epitomized for me by Cathy Davidson's perversion of the scholarly AMERICAN LITERATURE in a special issue (March 1994) in which she allowed a hand-selected contributor to proclaim: "WE ALREADY HAVE FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHIES OF MELVILLE."
Could there be a clearer attack on biographical research?
When academics in their forties or fifties or even sixties now attempt to do serious research they are handicapped by lack of training, and their writings almost never meets even minimal standards--such as being able to date documents accurately, to transcribe them accurately, and to demonstrate some comprehension of their significances. Ever since the mid-1980s, when I began helping Jay Leyda expand The Melville Log I have been looking for companions in biographical research on Melville and not finding many. Among the hunters are the chairman of the history department at UCSB, a librarian at Harvard, a librarian in Albany,a librarian in Portsmouth, an ice cream man in Cleveland, a nursing home man in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and a former student of mine in Idaho. A few great researchers, notably the Kennedys, have been silent for several years.
The dismal level of the academy is epitomized for me by Cathy Davidson's perversion of the scholarly AMERICAN LITERATURE in a special issue (March 1994) in which she allowed a hand-selected contributor to proclaim: "WE ALREADY HAVE FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHIES OF MELVILLE."
Could there be a clearer attack on biographical research?
Friday, March 25, 2011
Series on Critics doing Historicism without doing the work of Historians, No. 2, Wai-chee Dimock
You can see the Little Jack Horner syndrome in action when an academic critic sticks a thumb into published books rather than actual archives. Wai-chee Dimock's Empire for Liberty (1989), an early contribution to the New Historicism, was praised by Sacvan Bercovitch for giving "a model of a new kind of historical scholarship that has absorbed (as distinct from imitated) 'European theory' and whose historicism is a form of sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis." This is from her second paragraph:
Far from being a liability, territorial expansion had come to be seen, by the 1830s, as a basic requirement for the nation's well-being, so basic that it became practically an alimentary need. Major Davezac, a speaker at the 1844 New Jersey Democratic State Convention, proceeded from just that premise when he alluded to America's "pasture grounds"--invoking, in his zeal, if not the "mighty bulk" of the whale, then something almost as bulky: "Make way, I say, for the young American Buffalo--he has not yet got land enough; he wants more land as his cool shelter in summer--he wants more land for his beautiful pasture grounds. I tell you, we will give him Oregon for his summer shade, and the region of Texas as his winter pasture. (Applause.) Like all of his race, he wants salt, too. Well, he shall have the use of two oceans--the mighty Pacific and the turbulent Atlantic shall be his.
Melville, Dimock declared, "could not have known about a speech at the New Jersey convention," but he and Davezac, "the enshrined writer and the forgotten speaker," together "inhabited a historical moment." Davezac was worth recalling, "obscure as he once was and discredited as he has since become."
Dimock gave no evidence that Davezac had become discredited except by her high standards of Political Correctness in which anyone is evil who advocated expansion. Her "historicism" had not driven her to find even the first name of this man who was anything but obscure. Auguste Davezac had had a remarkable life. Born in Santo Domingo in 1780, he was studying in France during the great uprising of 1791 in which two of his brothers were killed. The surviving members of the family fled to the new United States, settling in Louisiana, where Davezac rejoined them and studied law with Edward Livingston, of the prominent New York family, who became his brother-in-law. The great adventure of his life was being aide-de-camp to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and every American in the 1840s knew that whatever credit some precisionists gave to the Treaty of Ghent the war was really won at New Orleans on 8 January 1815. Jackson had sent Davezac to the Hague for much of the 30s as chargé d'affairs. As Jackson became more feeble and made fewer appearances even in Tennessee, Davezac was, by the 1840s, after his removal to New York, the cherished living Manhattan connection to that still-recent battle which Americans thought had ended the Second War for American Independence. At the dinner table in the Manhattan of the 1840s, with yet another war with England seeming imminent, over Oregon, that pasture ground for the bipedal American Buffalo, Davezac could tell intimate tales of Jackson and even tell about the legendary Jean Lafite.
Davezac was also a prominent literary man, capable of writing learnedly on Froissart's Chronicles in the November 1843 United States Magazine and Democratic Review, one of his favorite places to publish. His contemporaries would have hooted at the idea that he was obscure. To be sure, Whigs could attribute his fame to his publicizing himself, as when Thurlow Weed in his Albany Evening Journal on 12 November 1844 referred to him as "glorification DAVEZAC, who by his endless parrot songs of Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans" had "sickened and disgusted both friends and foes." (Everybody knew everybody: Melville gave Weed a copy of the Revised Typee in August 1846.)
Melville, Dimock was sure, "could not have known" about a particular 1844 speech of Davezac's. But how farfetched is it to think that Melville may have known a good deal about Major Davezac, and perhaps might even have read some of his speeches, perhaps even that particular one? Melville's older brother Gansevoort Melville in his instant-retrieval Index Rerum which he used in 1840 and 1842 noted a speech by Major Davezac "of New Orleans" and just where to find it ("the whole speech is contained in Bell's New Era for February 29, 1840"). In the 1840 campaign Gansevoort campaigned with Davezac, as Davazec wrote to Robert J. Walker, the Secretary of the Treasury, on 11 April 1845: “Soon after my arrival in the State of New-York, I became acquainted with Mr. G. Melville, by being fellow labourers in the cause of Democracy, in the canvass of 1840. Young as he then was, he gave indications of talents, as a popular orator, which his mature exertions, in the last memorable contest, have proved not to have been fallacious.”
During the final weeks of the campaign Herman was in New York with Gansevoort and Allan and would have been aware of his older brother’s association with a hero of the Battle of New Orleans. On 14 June 1843 Davazec and Gansevoort both championed the dissolution of the Union between Ireland and Great Britain at a great Repeal meeting, Davezac speaking at length as one of the stars and young Gansevoort speaking more briefly. In 1844 the next younger Melville brother Allan was saving in a "bushell" basket dozens of newspapers containing Gansevoort's speeches, and might well have saved some of Davezac's along with his brother's, since the two had been political allies. When Davezac rode in the great Democratic torchlight procession in Manhattan on 1 November 1844, in which Gansevoort and Allan Melville also took part, and which Herman almost surely witnessed, he carried a banner and a flag, the banner proclaiming "THIS FLAG WAS AT THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS 8TH JANUARY, 1815: MAJOR A. DAVEZAC." For all Democrats he was a national hero. Early in 1845, while Melville was writing Typee in Manhattan, Davezac was everywhere in the press. The Democratic Review in February, out in late January, carried an article on him accompanied by "a Portrait on Steel," and the article was reprinted in the Broadway Journal and the New World and perhaps elsewhere. Davezac in the 11 April 1845 letter to Walker was championing Gansevoort Melville for an appointment from President Polk on the basis of his great services in 1844. For a time Gansevoort had possession of the strong letter of support which Davezac wrote for him, and typically would have shown it to Allan. Herman might have been in Lansingburgh by then, but he might have heard of the letter from Gansevoort or Allan. Certainly to Melville there was nothing obscure and nothing discredited about Auguste Davezac. A historian judging by modern standards of Political Correctness might well find grounds on which to disapprove of Davezac, as when he worried, after Mexico decided that blacks could not be enslaved, that New Orleans slaves would run off along the coast of Texas and take refuge in the newly independent country. Dimock, however, seems arbitrarily to have declared Davezac discredited because he believed, half a decade before the admission of California to the Union, that the United States should expand to the Pacific.
What Dimock practiced in Empire for Liberty, and what many of her New Critical and New Historicist peers practiced, was historicism without historical research. Names of historical figures? pieces to be used as decorations. Yet she traveled to libraries: "I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Melville Collection at the Newberry Library, which has compiled the nineteenth-century reviews." "Which" is revealing: the impersonal "Collection" had compiled "the" reviews. She had the thrill of discovery by opening a drawer and finding reviews compiled by the "Collection"! She could not visualize my compiling the files during repeated trips to the New York Public Library Annex, the New-York Historical Society, and many other repositories. The "Collection" had compiled "the" reviews--meaning all the reviews that existed? I was engaged in an ongoing compilation of reviews but it plainly never occurred to her that she could have joined in the hunt, perhaps in papers especially apt to take a political slant congenial to her. "Which has compiled" reveals her failure to visualize real people doing productive work in her own time. Similarly, she is thrilled by dipping into books written by people who have gone to libraries more remote even than faraway Chicago and have handled special books with their own hands. She cites a book by R. W. Van Alstyne for the source of her quotation from a 1776 book, not just any old book but "a rare book in the Huntington Library"--way out in California! This is breathless flirtation with the trappings of scholarship.
Dimock had absorbed without question her New Critical and New Historicist training. For her there were no living researchers engaged in ongoing archival scholarship, and there never had been living writers engaged in ongoing creative projects. For her, the "standard critique of the notion of 'creativity' is Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production" (which she cites in a late translation). She cites approvingly Jerome McGann, a follower of James Thorpe's theory of the socialized text, and cites Paul Feyerabend's "Creativity--A Dangerous Myth." The creative author is a myth (the reader, academics had known since the 1970s, creates meaning) and the idea of individual creativity is dangerous to critical theory. As Joel Myerson said in Text (1994), McGann suggested "an almost Marxist, collective ownership of the text among the authors and other participants in its creation: the 'workers' of the text have indeed united." Dimock does not cite the great 1979 book by Albert Rothenberg, The Emerging Goddess, which she ought to have known as the "standard" book on creativity, and does not cite exciting new work done on creativity and in the cognitive sciences in the 1980s. She turns her back on real creative writers, showing no understanding of creative writers as real people. She turns her back on real scholars who compile evidence exhaustively before daring to try to interpret it wisely. No wonder she typically takes her quotations at second hand, from people who have quoted passages from other books: picking her quotations from other books distances her from real scholars working with real documents.
It is typical that Dimock takes the item about Davezac "as quoted in" Albert Weinberg's Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalistic Expansion in American History (1935), the way, as I show elsewhere, that Andrew Delbanco picks up phrases "as quoted in" my biography of Melville. Dimock's New Critical teachers apparently did not tell her that it is disreputable to take a quotation from another book or article rather than going to the original, to be sure what it really says. Even if the words are quoted accurately, one cannot know the contexts from which they were quoted. Also, it is curious that so much of the scholarship she relies on was published before the New Criticism. It seems as if the decade of the rise of that long-dominant approach to literature somehow gives the American New Historicists a cut-off decade, the early 1940s, beyond which histories such as Weinberg's can be taken as sacred texts. Critics such as Dimock, however much they are praised as models "of a new kind of historical scholarship," are not in fact not doing historical research, and they learn nothing from the archives about Melville any more than about Major Auguste Davezac. You stick a thumb in a 1930s history and pull out what may be a veritable truth and may be an earnest attempt at truth which has been supplemented over the decades and perhaps even superseded.
Far from being a liability, territorial expansion had come to be seen, by the 1830s, as a basic requirement for the nation's well-being, so basic that it became practically an alimentary need. Major Davezac, a speaker at the 1844 New Jersey Democratic State Convention, proceeded from just that premise when he alluded to America's "pasture grounds"--invoking, in his zeal, if not the "mighty bulk" of the whale, then something almost as bulky: "Make way, I say, for the young American Buffalo--he has not yet got land enough; he wants more land as his cool shelter in summer--he wants more land for his beautiful pasture grounds. I tell you, we will give him Oregon for his summer shade, and the region of Texas as his winter pasture. (Applause.) Like all of his race, he wants salt, too. Well, he shall have the use of two oceans--the mighty Pacific and the turbulent Atlantic shall be his.
Melville, Dimock declared, "could not have known about a speech at the New Jersey convention," but he and Davezac, "the enshrined writer and the forgotten speaker," together "inhabited a historical moment." Davezac was worth recalling, "obscure as he once was and discredited as he has since become."
Dimock gave no evidence that Davezac had become discredited except by her high standards of Political Correctness in which anyone is evil who advocated expansion. Her "historicism" had not driven her to find even the first name of this man who was anything but obscure. Auguste Davezac had had a remarkable life. Born in Santo Domingo in 1780, he was studying in France during the great uprising of 1791 in which two of his brothers were killed. The surviving members of the family fled to the new United States, settling in Louisiana, where Davezac rejoined them and studied law with Edward Livingston, of the prominent New York family, who became his brother-in-law. The great adventure of his life was being aide-de-camp to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and every American in the 1840s knew that whatever credit some precisionists gave to the Treaty of Ghent the war was really won at New Orleans on 8 January 1815. Jackson had sent Davezac to the Hague for much of the 30s as chargé d'affairs. As Jackson became more feeble and made fewer appearances even in Tennessee, Davezac was, by the 1840s, after his removal to New York, the cherished living Manhattan connection to that still-recent battle which Americans thought had ended the Second War for American Independence. At the dinner table in the Manhattan of the 1840s, with yet another war with England seeming imminent, over Oregon, that pasture ground for the bipedal American Buffalo, Davezac could tell intimate tales of Jackson and even tell about the legendary Jean Lafite.
Davezac was also a prominent literary man, capable of writing learnedly on Froissart's Chronicles in the November 1843 United States Magazine and Democratic Review, one of his favorite places to publish. His contemporaries would have hooted at the idea that he was obscure. To be sure, Whigs could attribute his fame to his publicizing himself, as when Thurlow Weed in his Albany Evening Journal on 12 November 1844 referred to him as "glorification DAVEZAC, who by his endless parrot songs of Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans" had "sickened and disgusted both friends and foes." (Everybody knew everybody: Melville gave Weed a copy of the Revised Typee in August 1846.)
Melville, Dimock was sure, "could not have known" about a particular 1844 speech of Davezac's. But how farfetched is it to think that Melville may have known a good deal about Major Davezac, and perhaps might even have read some of his speeches, perhaps even that particular one? Melville's older brother Gansevoort Melville in his instant-retrieval Index Rerum which he used in 1840 and 1842 noted a speech by Major Davezac "of New Orleans" and just where to find it ("the whole speech is contained in Bell's New Era for February 29, 1840"). In the 1840 campaign Gansevoort campaigned with Davezac, as Davazec wrote to Robert J. Walker, the Secretary of the Treasury, on 11 April 1845: “Soon after my arrival in the State of New-York, I became acquainted with Mr. G. Melville, by being fellow labourers in the cause of Democracy, in the canvass of 1840. Young as he then was, he gave indications of talents, as a popular orator, which his mature exertions, in the last memorable contest, have proved not to have been fallacious.”
During the final weeks of the campaign Herman was in New York with Gansevoort and Allan and would have been aware of his older brother’s association with a hero of the Battle of New Orleans. On 14 June 1843 Davazec and Gansevoort both championed the dissolution of the Union between Ireland and Great Britain at a great Repeal meeting, Davezac speaking at length as one of the stars and young Gansevoort speaking more briefly. In 1844 the next younger Melville brother Allan was saving in a "bushell" basket dozens of newspapers containing Gansevoort's speeches, and might well have saved some of Davezac's along with his brother's, since the two had been political allies. When Davezac rode in the great Democratic torchlight procession in Manhattan on 1 November 1844, in which Gansevoort and Allan Melville also took part, and which Herman almost surely witnessed, he carried a banner and a flag, the banner proclaiming "THIS FLAG WAS AT THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS 8TH JANUARY, 1815: MAJOR A. DAVEZAC." For all Democrats he was a national hero. Early in 1845, while Melville was writing Typee in Manhattan, Davezac was everywhere in the press. The Democratic Review in February, out in late January, carried an article on him accompanied by "a Portrait on Steel," and the article was reprinted in the Broadway Journal and the New World and perhaps elsewhere. Davezac in the 11 April 1845 letter to Walker was championing Gansevoort Melville for an appointment from President Polk on the basis of his great services in 1844. For a time Gansevoort had possession of the strong letter of support which Davezac wrote for him, and typically would have shown it to Allan. Herman might have been in Lansingburgh by then, but he might have heard of the letter from Gansevoort or Allan. Certainly to Melville there was nothing obscure and nothing discredited about Auguste Davezac. A historian judging by modern standards of Political Correctness might well find grounds on which to disapprove of Davezac, as when he worried, after Mexico decided that blacks could not be enslaved, that New Orleans slaves would run off along the coast of Texas and take refuge in the newly independent country. Dimock, however, seems arbitrarily to have declared Davezac discredited because he believed, half a decade before the admission of California to the Union, that the United States should expand to the Pacific.
What Dimock practiced in Empire for Liberty, and what many of her New Critical and New Historicist peers practiced, was historicism without historical research. Names of historical figures? pieces to be used as decorations. Yet she traveled to libraries: "I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Melville Collection at the Newberry Library, which has compiled the nineteenth-century reviews." "Which" is revealing: the impersonal "Collection" had compiled "the" reviews. She had the thrill of discovery by opening a drawer and finding reviews compiled by the "Collection"! She could not visualize my compiling the files during repeated trips to the New York Public Library Annex, the New-York Historical Society, and many other repositories. The "Collection" had compiled "the" reviews--meaning all the reviews that existed? I was engaged in an ongoing compilation of reviews but it plainly never occurred to her that she could have joined in the hunt, perhaps in papers especially apt to take a political slant congenial to her. "Which has compiled" reveals her failure to visualize real people doing productive work in her own time. Similarly, she is thrilled by dipping into books written by people who have gone to libraries more remote even than faraway Chicago and have handled special books with their own hands. She cites a book by R. W. Van Alstyne for the source of her quotation from a 1776 book, not just any old book but "a rare book in the Huntington Library"--way out in California! This is breathless flirtation with the trappings of scholarship.
Dimock had absorbed without question her New Critical and New Historicist training. For her there were no living researchers engaged in ongoing archival scholarship, and there never had been living writers engaged in ongoing creative projects. For her, the "standard critique of the notion of 'creativity' is Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production" (which she cites in a late translation). She cites approvingly Jerome McGann, a follower of James Thorpe's theory of the socialized text, and cites Paul Feyerabend's "Creativity--A Dangerous Myth." The creative author is a myth (the reader, academics had known since the 1970s, creates meaning) and the idea of individual creativity is dangerous to critical theory. As Joel Myerson said in Text (1994), McGann suggested "an almost Marxist, collective ownership of the text among the authors and other participants in its creation: the 'workers' of the text have indeed united." Dimock does not cite the great 1979 book by Albert Rothenberg, The Emerging Goddess, which she ought to have known as the "standard" book on creativity, and does not cite exciting new work done on creativity and in the cognitive sciences in the 1980s. She turns her back on real creative writers, showing no understanding of creative writers as real people. She turns her back on real scholars who compile evidence exhaustively before daring to try to interpret it wisely. No wonder she typically takes her quotations at second hand, from people who have quoted passages from other books: picking her quotations from other books distances her from real scholars working with real documents.
It is typical that Dimock takes the item about Davezac "as quoted in" Albert Weinberg's Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalistic Expansion in American History (1935), the way, as I show elsewhere, that Andrew Delbanco picks up phrases "as quoted in" my biography of Melville. Dimock's New Critical teachers apparently did not tell her that it is disreputable to take a quotation from another book or article rather than going to the original, to be sure what it really says. Even if the words are quoted accurately, one cannot know the contexts from which they were quoted. Also, it is curious that so much of the scholarship she relies on was published before the New Criticism. It seems as if the decade of the rise of that long-dominant approach to literature somehow gives the American New Historicists a cut-off decade, the early 1940s, beyond which histories such as Weinberg's can be taken as sacred texts. Critics such as Dimock, however much they are praised as models "of a new kind of historical scholarship," are not in fact not doing historical research, and they learn nothing from the archives about Melville any more than about Major Auguste Davezac. You stick a thumb in a 1930s history and pull out what may be a veritable truth and may be an earnest attempt at truth which has been supplemented over the decades and perhaps even superseded.
Series on Critics doing Historicism without doing the work of Historians, No. 1, Richard H. Brodhead
FAVORITISM IN THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE
When I saw the title of Richard Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne in 1986 I was feeding Melville documents to Jay Leyda for an enlargement of THE MELVILLE LOG and decided I did not need to look up the book, since I had a good idea of just how pervasive Hawthorne's influence was among American novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century. When I bought a copy in July 2007 (a presentation copy signed by the author “with great fondness” to “a friend indeed”), I found that Brodhead had set out to show just "how pervasive Hawthorne's influence was among American novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century"—without having any idea how pervasive that influence was!
Writing soon after Paul Lauter’s RECONSTRUCTING AMERICAN LITERATURE (1983—really, 1984), that nationwide attempt to open the canon to specific groups previously neglected in survey courses, Brodhead knew he was on politically dangerous ground, or, more likely, to judge from the Preface, learned AFTER he had finished his book that he was apt to be attacked for ignoring women, to begin with, and others being championed by Lauter’s group. This is my guess, based on a close reading of the Preface. I think that rather than reconceiving the book after receiving criticism for dealing only with dead white males, Brodhead decided to finesse the problem by justifying himself in the Preface. Otherwise the Preface is hard to account for.
The School of Hawthorne begins with Brodhead bobbing and weaving over the obvious Political Incorrectness of his book, justifying his limiting the principal students to famous male writers (one of whom, Melville, scarcely belongs in the book). This is Brodhead:
“The particular tradition I have chosen to study is, I know, a highly canonical one. Not only does it include the authors ranked greatest in modern estimates of American fiction: the relation of such writers to Hawthorne has itself become a virtually canonical topic, a constant subject of official study. In view of the weight that has been attached to it I hasten to add that my intention in returning to this group is not to try to reinstate the Hawthorne-Melville-James-Faulkner line as the Great Tradition in an exclusionary way. I do not believe that the American novel has (in Richard Chase's words) ‘its tradition.’ It has a wealth of competing and interpenetrating traditions; no one of these is more American than the others; and no author draws strength from one American vein alone.”
In the next paragraph, beginning with a wordy, weaving construction ("if I return to . . . it is out of") Brodhead tries hard to show that he is open to enlargements of the canon, even though he is excluding anyone but his great male writers:
“Nevertheless, if I return to the high canonical American novelists it is out of the conviction that they exhibit forms of literary engagement whose possibilities we would not know of from the work of other writers, so that we can only forget them (as we once forgot their fellows) at the cost of loss of knowledge. If I return to them, it is also in the belief that we are now in a position to see these familiar authors under new lights. Renewed interest in writers formerly marked fit for forgetting has helped remind us that canons are selective and changing cultural constructions, not neutral registers of literary worth. This insight should lead us to extend the range of our literary attentions out beyond canonical boundaries. But it can also enable us to put a new question to canonical literature itself: to ask how its cultural status has been created and maintained, and with what consequences (canonicity as a historical fact inevitably has consequences) it has enjoyed the status it has. Similarly, non-canonical writing has brought back with it a new knowledge of the social history of American authorship, an enriched sense of the social conditions that have both enabled and contained writers' assertions of themselves as writers.”
There many problems with Brodhead's tergiversative twisting and turning. First is his obvious intention to disarm critics who object to his focusing on "well-known authors" who happen to be (he does not dare say) all male. Second is his evading the basic question he ought to have been asking: "Who attended the School of Hawthorne?"
Brodhead wrote the book without asking that basic question, and the consequence is that his book is rather less than a halfway decent job that nevertheless will prevent anyone else's doing the job better. "Sorry," any press will say, "there's a book by Richard H. Brodhead on that very subject and it is published by Oxford University Press. The job has been done!"
The job has NOT been done. Whenever others had published articles on novelists influenced by Hawthorne, Brodhead paid some attention, but otherwise he was bumfuzzled, wanting to acknowledge highly admirable forces arguing for opening the canon but unable to see beyond the major figures who had been taught in his classes at Andover and Yale. Brodhead was unable to detach himself from the male elite even while trying to appease the lesser hoards by overlapping equivocation, and finally rushed to judgment on the basis of a limited knowledge of American literature.
To put it bluntly, Brodhead had elected to write a contribution to the history of the novel in the United States without reading very widely in the novels written in the United States. Seeing that Brodhead's book focused on "major authors," I looked for "lesser" ones, such as Harold Frederic, an obvious student of Hawthorne's, whose debt several critics had pointed out, and was pleased to see that Brodhead mentioned The Damnation of Theron Ware. But when I began looking for other novelists who followed Hawthorne I did not find them. The index cited a mention of Thomas Bailey Aldrich on p. 8. There I found this remarkably invidious comment: "Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a once-admired poet more forgotten now than even the word 'limbo' can suggest, found his poetical vocation while reading Longfellow." As someone who knows first hand just how much pain Brodhead's snide innuendo can inflict (for I remember my baffled agony at his declaring in the New York TIMES that I had made up Melville’s POEMS and probably had made up THE ISLE OF THE CROSS too), I wince at the contempt in this sentence as I retype it. Here elitist contempt masks Brodhead's own ignorance.
So Aldrich is farther out of reach even than "Limbo"? What about the nearby shelves of the Sterling Library? Brodhead should have harrowed Hell itself if necessary in reading through novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century looking for followers of Hawthorne. How, I ask, how can you write a book about The School of Hawthorne and mention Thomas Bailey Aldrich with such disdain and not discuss, not mention at all, his The Stillwater Tragedy, which opens with a passage written in loving homage to Hawthorne's set piece in The House of the Seven Gables on the passage of the night and the morning while a corpse awaits discovery?
How, I ask, backing away to an earlier decade, can Brodhead have mentioned Harriet Beecher Stowe several times in the notes without knowing that Hawthorne's influence can be traced in her New England novels, very obviously, the title should tell you, in The Pearl of Orr's Island?
Brodhead wrote The School of Hawthorne without doing the basic research--without reading widely in American fiction of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. This is not a case where you need to start with working through boxes of holograph letters in archives: first you just need to read a lot of novels by a lot of people, not just writers designated now as the greatest.
I have a good idea of what the research should have involved. In 1961, after I had decided to work on Melville with Harrison Hayford at Northwestern, I arranged to take my only graduate independent reading course. I went through all the literary histories of American literature making lists of nineteenth-century American novels pointed out by one critic or another as interesting although neglected. I read as many on the list as I could find. I missed some, notably Rebecca Harding's story "Life in the Iron Mills," which, as I saw later, I could have read in the Atlantic Monthly. But I read or skimmed thoughtfully 200 or so other books and made little two or three page reports on them. Among the best surprises for me were Caroline Kirkland's Michigan books and Harriet Beecher Stowe's New England novels. Nobody did New England theology of the Young Republic more authoritatively than Stowe. I never got to teach the powerful Oldtown Folks, but as paperbacks became available I did get to teach a couple of her other extraordinary New England books. What I learned served me extremely well in classes later on, and came into play when as I looked at The School of Hawthorne.
I have made color Xeroxes of the flyleaves of LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE where I jotted down titles from different literary histories or other sources in 1961. I will post them in this blog as part of this series on Brodhead’s attempt to make a specific contribution to American literary history without doing basic historical and biographical research in the 19th and 20th century American novel (and story). These titles are not meant to be anything like complete; they are titles cited in major American literary histories which predate (twice which immediately predate) the ascendancy of the New Criticism.
Brodhead was a graceful enough critic when he decided to branch out into literary history but he had no training as a scholar. How could he? The New Criticism, embodied by Charles Feidelson of Yale, had scorned biographical-historical research for decades? A scholar would have worked his or her way through dozens of nineteenth-century American novels lying neglected in Sterling Memorial Library before thinking of writing a book called The School of Hawthorne, and then the scholar would not have needed to make repeated excuses for not opening the canon. And no scholar would not have displayed such cruel disdain for Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The point, of course, is that Brodhead singled out Aldrich because he had heard of Aldrich somehow. What of all the others he had not heard anything of? What about Harriet Beecher Stowe? Someone had told him about some stories of hers that were influenced by Hawthorne, so he got her in the notes. But no one had pointed him to her novels written in the classroom of Hawthorne. Well, as I indicated, I have a special admiration for Stowe’s New England novels, but they are only representative of the works of American writers who really were enrolled in the schoolroom of Hawthorne, paid their fees and attended regularly.
I will post other items in this blog about literary critics who set out to do the New Historicism without becoming competent as historical researchers—doing historicism without the muss and fuss of becoming historians, as Brodhead did in THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE.
When I saw the title of Richard Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne in 1986 I was feeding Melville documents to Jay Leyda for an enlargement of THE MELVILLE LOG and decided I did not need to look up the book, since I had a good idea of just how pervasive Hawthorne's influence was among American novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century. When I bought a copy in July 2007 (a presentation copy signed by the author “with great fondness” to “a friend indeed”), I found that Brodhead had set out to show just "how pervasive Hawthorne's influence was among American novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century"—without having any idea how pervasive that influence was!
Writing soon after Paul Lauter’s RECONSTRUCTING AMERICAN LITERATURE (1983—really, 1984), that nationwide attempt to open the canon to specific groups previously neglected in survey courses, Brodhead knew he was on politically dangerous ground, or, more likely, to judge from the Preface, learned AFTER he had finished his book that he was apt to be attacked for ignoring women, to begin with, and others being championed by Lauter’s group. This is my guess, based on a close reading of the Preface. I think that rather than reconceiving the book after receiving criticism for dealing only with dead white males, Brodhead decided to finesse the problem by justifying himself in the Preface. Otherwise the Preface is hard to account for.
The School of Hawthorne begins with Brodhead bobbing and weaving over the obvious Political Incorrectness of his book, justifying his limiting the principal students to famous male writers (one of whom, Melville, scarcely belongs in the book). This is Brodhead:
“The particular tradition I have chosen to study is, I know, a highly canonical one. Not only does it include the authors ranked greatest in modern estimates of American fiction: the relation of such writers to Hawthorne has itself become a virtually canonical topic, a constant subject of official study. In view of the weight that has been attached to it I hasten to add that my intention in returning to this group is not to try to reinstate the Hawthorne-Melville-James-Faulkner line as the Great Tradition in an exclusionary way. I do not believe that the American novel has (in Richard Chase's words) ‘its tradition.’ It has a wealth of competing and interpenetrating traditions; no one of these is more American than the others; and no author draws strength from one American vein alone.”
In the next paragraph, beginning with a wordy, weaving construction ("if I return to . . . it is out of") Brodhead tries hard to show that he is open to enlargements of the canon, even though he is excluding anyone but his great male writers:
“Nevertheless, if I return to the high canonical American novelists it is out of the conviction that they exhibit forms of literary engagement whose possibilities we would not know of from the work of other writers, so that we can only forget them (as we once forgot their fellows) at the cost of loss of knowledge. If I return to them, it is also in the belief that we are now in a position to see these familiar authors under new lights. Renewed interest in writers formerly marked fit for forgetting has helped remind us that canons are selective and changing cultural constructions, not neutral registers of literary worth. This insight should lead us to extend the range of our literary attentions out beyond canonical boundaries. But it can also enable us to put a new question to canonical literature itself: to ask how its cultural status has been created and maintained, and with what consequences (canonicity as a historical fact inevitably has consequences) it has enjoyed the status it has. Similarly, non-canonical writing has brought back with it a new knowledge of the social history of American authorship, an enriched sense of the social conditions that have both enabled and contained writers' assertions of themselves as writers.”
There many problems with Brodhead's tergiversative twisting and turning. First is his obvious intention to disarm critics who object to his focusing on "well-known authors" who happen to be (he does not dare say) all male. Second is his evading the basic question he ought to have been asking: "Who attended the School of Hawthorne?"
Brodhead wrote the book without asking that basic question, and the consequence is that his book is rather less than a halfway decent job that nevertheless will prevent anyone else's doing the job better. "Sorry," any press will say, "there's a book by Richard H. Brodhead on that very subject and it is published by Oxford University Press. The job has been done!"
The job has NOT been done. Whenever others had published articles on novelists influenced by Hawthorne, Brodhead paid some attention, but otherwise he was bumfuzzled, wanting to acknowledge highly admirable forces arguing for opening the canon but unable to see beyond the major figures who had been taught in his classes at Andover and Yale. Brodhead was unable to detach himself from the male elite even while trying to appease the lesser hoards by overlapping equivocation, and finally rushed to judgment on the basis of a limited knowledge of American literature.
To put it bluntly, Brodhead had elected to write a contribution to the history of the novel in the United States without reading very widely in the novels written in the United States. Seeing that Brodhead's book focused on "major authors," I looked for "lesser" ones, such as Harold Frederic, an obvious student of Hawthorne's, whose debt several critics had pointed out, and was pleased to see that Brodhead mentioned The Damnation of Theron Ware. But when I began looking for other novelists who followed Hawthorne I did not find them. The index cited a mention of Thomas Bailey Aldrich on p. 8. There I found this remarkably invidious comment: "Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a once-admired poet more forgotten now than even the word 'limbo' can suggest, found his poetical vocation while reading Longfellow." As someone who knows first hand just how much pain Brodhead's snide innuendo can inflict (for I remember my baffled agony at his declaring in the New York TIMES that I had made up Melville’s POEMS and probably had made up THE ISLE OF THE CROSS too), I wince at the contempt in this sentence as I retype it. Here elitist contempt masks Brodhead's own ignorance.
So Aldrich is farther out of reach even than "Limbo"? What about the nearby shelves of the Sterling Library? Brodhead should have harrowed Hell itself if necessary in reading through novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century looking for followers of Hawthorne. How, I ask, how can you write a book about The School of Hawthorne and mention Thomas Bailey Aldrich with such disdain and not discuss, not mention at all, his The Stillwater Tragedy, which opens with a passage written in loving homage to Hawthorne's set piece in The House of the Seven Gables on the passage of the night and the morning while a corpse awaits discovery?
How, I ask, backing away to an earlier decade, can Brodhead have mentioned Harriet Beecher Stowe several times in the notes without knowing that Hawthorne's influence can be traced in her New England novels, very obviously, the title should tell you, in The Pearl of Orr's Island?
Brodhead wrote The School of Hawthorne without doing the basic research--without reading widely in American fiction of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. This is not a case where you need to start with working through boxes of holograph letters in archives: first you just need to read a lot of novels by a lot of people, not just writers designated now as the greatest.
I have a good idea of what the research should have involved. In 1961, after I had decided to work on Melville with Harrison Hayford at Northwestern, I arranged to take my only graduate independent reading course. I went through all the literary histories of American literature making lists of nineteenth-century American novels pointed out by one critic or another as interesting although neglected. I read as many on the list as I could find. I missed some, notably Rebecca Harding's story "Life in the Iron Mills," which, as I saw later, I could have read in the Atlantic Monthly. But I read or skimmed thoughtfully 200 or so other books and made little two or three page reports on them. Among the best surprises for me were Caroline Kirkland's Michigan books and Harriet Beecher Stowe's New England novels. Nobody did New England theology of the Young Republic more authoritatively than Stowe. I never got to teach the powerful Oldtown Folks, but as paperbacks became available I did get to teach a couple of her other extraordinary New England books. What I learned served me extremely well in classes later on, and came into play when as I looked at The School of Hawthorne.
I have made color Xeroxes of the flyleaves of LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE where I jotted down titles from different literary histories or other sources in 1961. I will post them in this blog as part of this series on Brodhead’s attempt to make a specific contribution to American literary history without doing basic historical and biographical research in the 19th and 20th century American novel (and story). These titles are not meant to be anything like complete; they are titles cited in major American literary histories which predate (twice which immediately predate) the ascendancy of the New Criticism.
Brodhead was a graceful enough critic when he decided to branch out into literary history but he had no training as a scholar. How could he? The New Criticism, embodied by Charles Feidelson of Yale, had scorned biographical-historical research for decades? A scholar would have worked his or her way through dozens of nineteenth-century American novels lying neglected in Sterling Memorial Library before thinking of writing a book called The School of Hawthorne, and then the scholar would not have needed to make repeated excuses for not opening the canon. And no scholar would not have displayed such cruel disdain for Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The point, of course, is that Brodhead singled out Aldrich because he had heard of Aldrich somehow. What of all the others he had not heard anything of? What about Harriet Beecher Stowe? Someone had told him about some stories of hers that were influenced by Hawthorne, so he got her in the notes. But no one had pointed him to her novels written in the classroom of Hawthorne. Well, as I indicated, I have a special admiration for Stowe’s New England novels, but they are only representative of the works of American writers who really were enrolled in the schoolroom of Hawthorne, paid their fees and attended regularly.
I will post other items in this blog about literary critics who set out to do the New Historicism without becoming competent as historical researchers—doing historicism without the muss and fuss of becoming historians, as Brodhead did in THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Defining Moment of my Academic Career
The Defining Moment of my Academic Career
In the early summer of 1962 I met two Columbia graduate students who were writing PhD dissertations on Melville under Richard Chase. They had heard vaguely of Northwestern University and were amused that it was offering doctorates, not realizing, I decided, how badly the Northwest Territory needed some sort of regional school. They were fascinated that I could be writing a dissertation that required going to New York City. They were dumbstruck when I told them I went to the New York Public Library or the New-York Historical Society every day to copy out nineteenth century letters and diary entries about Melville and politics, or else read nineteenth-century newspapers looking for Melville's brother Gansevoort's speeches and reviews of Melville's works and other articles about Melville and his family. They had a great story to regale their fellow students and Chase with at Columbia, this skinny guy from the Midwest in a gray glen plaid wash-and-wear Baskin suit and a subdued rep tie going to the libraries every day and looking at old newspapers and manuscripts! In 1962, a graduate student going to the archives as if the New Criticism had never triumphed! Coming all the way to New York to do it! They were too polite to laugh outright, but the way they kept looking at each other showed they thought this was the quaintest damned thing they had ever heard. It probably was. They made it plain enough that the research required by my dissertation topic had pushed me out of step with my sprightly contemporaries. I just didn't know how far out of step I was. I keep coming back to this story now because as the years passed I realized that it predicted the resistance to historical scholarship, textual scholarship, biographical scholarship which would manifest itself in each succeeding decade.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)