Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (original) (raw)
1987, American Literature
Like many others, this book began with an entirely different subject. When I first started work on this project over eight years ago I became interested in those moments within American Renaissance writings when characters' actions seemed out of keeping with their motives, when their cultural identity seemed opposed to their previous experiences and their utterances resistant to the thematic structures designed to organize them into coherence. Eight years ago I was convinced that the dominant paradigm explaining American Renaissance writing, proposed by Matthiessen and Chase and Bewley and refined on in different ways by Richard Poirier, Quentin Anderson, and, more recently, Joseph Riddel, John Carlos Rowe, and John Irwin, was an appropriate framework to explain American Renaissance writings. According to these critics, inconsistencies in character, theme, and cultural action participated in a much greater cultural contradiction, the permanent opposition between the culture's past and present demanded by the Revolutionary mythos, the dominant structuring principle for all American culture. Eight years ago I hoped to produce a work able to explain American Renaissance writings in terms of the crisis in self-legitimation the Revolutionary mythos produced. But now I think this crisis in legitimation more applicable to post-World War II American culture than to pre-Civil War America. Prior to the Civil War, Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, and in very different ways Melville and Poe searched for forms of cultural agreement more lasting than the mere opposition to a past sanctioned by the Revolutionary mythos. The Revolutionary mythos produced citizens who believed in nothing but opposition-to family, environment, cultural antecedents, and even their former selves. Their relationships with others were no more lasting than the time it took to prove superiority to another. Such associations may have been valuable as a way of weaning Americans from their roots in the East and turning them toward the western territories, since the western territories needed settlers who depended on their own wits more than the company of others. But in the troubled years preceding the Civil War, the issues of union, expansionism, and slavery turned the ix X Preface If the line of thought holding together the ideas in this book were traced, it would reach back into my lindergraduate years and would include in its lineage many teachers, students, and friends. Professor Warren G. French and Professor James E. Miller, Jr., started me on the way to this understanding of America. My first teaching experience at Dartmouth, in a class I taught with James M. Cox, led me to rethink many of the received ideas about American literature. And discussions with Cox, Lou Renza, Blanche Gelfant, Noel Perrin, Horace Porter, and Ivy Schweitzer, all colleagues in American Literature at Dartmouth, led me to refine my ideas. In postgraduate seminars with Paul de Man and with Edward W. Said I engaged some theoretical questions at work in my project. The critical community responsible for boundary 2, a group comprising William Spanos, Paul Bove, Daniel O'Hara, and Jonathan Arac, provided me with the best kind of intellectual environment. Individually and as a group, these critics challenged my ideas of visionary compact, tradition, and collective memory, giving me the resistance needed to refine and in many cases reevaluate my ideas. I found in Allen Grossman's notion of cultural personhood and in Frank Lentricchia's critique of modern social change discriminations essential to the completion of my project. Kate Nicholson forced me to think critically about the notion of transition. For much of my understanding of the binding work of mourning as a cultural process and the cultural value of associations I am indebted to Paco Garcia. I also owe thanks to David McLaughlin, President of Dartmouth, who challenged me to put some of these notions about community into practice when he appointed me Chairman of the Committee on Student Life at Dartmouth. Richard Poirier, James Cox, Lou Renza, and Jonathan Arac generously xiii xiv Acknowledgments gave sections of the manuscript readings critical enough to demand crucial revisions. Allen Fitchen and Frank Lentricchia believed in it from the first draft and were extremely helpful editors. And Susan Tarcov gave me a much-valued writing lesson in her copyediting of the manuscript. But this book would never have been completed had Patricia McKee not taught me the difference between visionary compacts and a genuine human bond. The entire book is an acknowledgment of that difference.