Sacvan Bercovitch,
Sacvan Bercovitch is Carswell Professor of English and American Literature at
Harvard University. He is the author of The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The
American Jeremiad, among other works. He has also edited several collections of essays,
most recently Reconstructing American Literary History (1986). This essay was delivered, in
substantially the same form, as a two-part talk at the Salzburg Seminar, session 242. 9-21
June 1985.
For my present purposes, and in terms of my immediate concerns, the problem of
ideology in American literary history has three different though closely related aspects: first,
the multi-volume American literary history I have begun to edit; then, the concept of ideology
as a constituent part of literary study; and, finally, the current revaluation of the American t
Renaissance. I select this period because it has been widely regarded as both the source and
the epitome of our literary tradition; because it has > become, accordingly, the focal point of
the critical revision now under way in American studies; and because, from either of these
perspectives literary or critical, it seems to me a particularly fitting subject for the occasion.
For one thing, we owe the idea of an American Renaissance at to F. O. Matthiessen, who was
a prime mover of the Salzburg Seminar, and a member of its first faculty in 1947. Moreover,
American Renaissance was a classic work of revisionist criticism. It reset the terms for the
study of American literary history; it gave us a new canon of classic texts; and i t inspired
the growth of American studies in the United States and abroad. It is not too much to say that
Matthiessen, American Renaissance, and the Salzburg Seminar brought American literature to
postwar Europe. What followed, from the late forties through the sixties, was the flowering of
a new academic field, complete with programs of study, periodicals, theses, conferences, and
a distinguished procession of scholarly authorities, including many graduates of the Salzburg
Seminar.
Matthiessen figures as a watershed in this development. For if American| Renaissance
marked the seeding-time of a new academic field, it was also the harvest of some three
decades of literary study. I refer, first of all, to the dual legacy that Matthiessen acknowledges
of T. S. Eliot and Vernon Parrington which is to say, the partnership in American
Renaissance between the terms "literary" and history"; or, in the words of Matthiessen's
subtitle, between Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman ~art," meaning a
small group of aesthetic masterpieces, and "expression," meaning representative works,
reflecting and illuminating the culture at large. It was the remarkable achievement of
Matthiessen that his book yokes these concepts gracefully together. Somehow, one concept
seems to support the other. The historical designation American seems richer for its
association with an aesthetic renaissance; Emerson's and Whitman's art gains substance by its
capacity to express the age. Matthiessen himself did not feel it necessary to explain the
connection. But we can see in retrospect that what made it work what made it, indeed,
unnecessary for Matthiessen to explain the connection was an established consensus, or
rather a consensus long in the making, which American Renaissance helped establish. I mean
a consensus about the term Literary" that involved the legitimation of a certain canon, and a
consensus about the term "history" that was legitimated by a certain concept of America.
That double process of legitimation may be traced in the emergence of the United
States, between World War I and World War II, as the major capitalist power or, in the Cold
War terms of the late forties, the leader of the Free World. Providentially, we have two sets
of literary landmarks, European and American, to commemorate the process. At one end, in
1917, D. H. Lawrence's germinal Studies in Classic American Literature and the The
Cambridge History of American Literature (hereafter, the first Cambridge History); at the
other end, framing the U.S. experience in World War II, American Renaissance (1941) and
The Literary History of the United States, by Robert Spiller et al. ( 1948), which proceeds
teleologically, from "The Colonies" through "Democracy" and "Expansion" to "A World
Literature." "Increasing power and vitality," according to Spiller's opening "Address to the
Reader," "are extraordinarily characteristic of [our nation].... Never has nature been so rapidly
and so extensively altered by the efforts of man in so brief a time. Never has conquest
resulted in a more vigorous development of initiative, individualism, self-reliance, and
demands for freedom." Hence the ®Americanness¯ of our major authors. Ours has been a
literature "profoundly influenced by ideals and by practices developed in democratic living. It
has been intensely conscious of the needs of the common man, and equally conscious of the
aspirations of the individual.... It has been humanitarian. It has been, on the whole an
optimistic literature, made virile by criticism of the actual in comparison with the ideal.
Significantly, Matthiessen's American Renaissance celebrates the same manly ideals. Even
while recognizing (as Spiller does) the tragic-ironic emphasis of Hawthorne and Melville,
Matthiessen tells us in his introductory chapter that "the one common denominator of my five
writers . . . was their devotion to the possibilities of democracy." And like Spiller, he locates
those possibilities in self-reliance, initiative, individualism, and (to recall Matthiessen's
original title) the freedom of "Man in the Open Air." Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne,
Thoreau, and Melville, he explains, all felt it was incumbent on their generation to give
fulfillment to the potentialities freed by the Revolution, to provide a culture commensurate
with America's political opportunity.
This is the background against which the new literary history will have to define itself.
During the past couple of decades consensus of all kinds has broken down left and right,
political and aesthetic broken down, worn out, or at best opened up. Conspicuous among
these is the dual tradition that Matthiessen inherited: on the one hand the literary consensus
authorized by Eliot, which announced itself as the New Criticism; and on the other hand, the
consensus history (as we have come to call it) through which Parrington defined the main
currents of American culture. Together, these traditions issued, in American Renaissance, as
the vision of five marginal men who represented not only their own age but the very meaning
of America. The reason for the current ferment in American studies is that the assumptions
behind that vision no longer seem to account for the evidence. We have come to feel that the
context they provide conceals as much as it reveals. To use a once-fashionable phrase, the
paradigm has become inoperative. What we have instead is a Babel of contending approaches,
argued with a ferocity reminiscent of the polemics that erupted in the last, great days of
Rome, and that Augustine lamented as the barbarism of the scholastics. I do not mean by this
to suggest some ominous political parallel. My point is simply that the risk we run in
undertaking an American literary history now is that it will be perceived, upon its devoutly
wished-for publication in 1989, as being neither history nor literary nor American.
Let me say at once that I don't see any solution to the problem. Or rather, the only
solution I see lies in making the problem itself the cornerstone of the project. It was the
achievement of Matthiessen and Spiller to consolidate a powerful literary-historical consensus.
It will be our task to make the best of what (for lack of a better term) may be called a period
of Dissensus." So I come to the first part of my subject, the new Cambridge History of
American Literature. My purpose here is purely descriptive. I would like to give some general
sense of how this work i being put together if nothing else, to outline the sorts of questions
that lie behind our pasteboard decisions.3
How, then, to make a virtue of dissensus? To start with, we decide to go with those
whose dissensus it is; that is, with Americanists trained in the sixties and early seventies. Our
contributors are generally between tenure and forty-five; they represent no special approach,
school, network or set of principles, except the principles of excellence and balance. They
were chosen for the quality of their work, for their diversity of views an interests, and for
their openness to other, conflicting views and interest None of this necessarily implies a rift
between generations. Some of the young scholars are confessed traditionalists; others are
openly build upon the work of their teachers; and all of them are committed to presenting not
just their own insights but those of peers and predecessors. Still, they will present these from
within a distinctive generational experience; ar that experience (of discontinuity, disruption,
dissensus) requires its difinititive form of expression. In considering a format for the History,
X obvious precedent came to mind. The "omnium-gatherum" seemed inappropriate for our
purposes as did the alternative model of the single author history, and for much the same
reasons. The eclectic mode the first Cambridge History assumes comprehensiveness and
objectivity The cyclical design of the Spiller History expresses a single-minded attempt at
synthesis.
Any contemporary effort will have to be flexible, open-ended, a] se f-reflexive. This
may help explain our decision to restrict the number: of contributors. Lacking the authority
for synthesis, we felt we should encourage personal voices. Lacking faith in sheer plenitude,
we felt it necessary to allow fuller scope for active collaboration, not only with each volume,
but across volumes. In short, we wanted neither a host piece-work specialists to fill out a
putative grand design, nor representative of a host of eclectic constituencies to satisfy some
putative statistical no (twelve pages for the Chicanos, fourteen for the Chinese, two for
Eskimo). Perhaps the right term for the approach we sought is integrated in the sense of
narrative integration, and with the qualifications I h just mentioned. Integrative, as distinct
from either eclectic or synthetic personal voices, responsive to different voices, but allowed
ample development in their own right; continuities and contrasts between e emerging neither
by chance nor by editorial fiat, but through substantial interchange between contributors.
Clearly, this precarious balance latitude and mutuality would require a group of manageable
size. need an Aristotelian mean between the hubris of Parrington's one the anonymity of
Spiller's fifty-five,et al." We settled on twenty contributors, for five volumes of about six
hundred pages each.
Twenty-one spokespersons for dissensus! I cannot say that the pros filled me with
confidence. The next step in our venture was to bring a group together and see what
assurances could be worked out. Partly the conference dealt with practical matters. But most
of it, and by all accounts the most reassuring part, was devoted to the moot points. Without
compromising on basic differences, the contributors found they could agree on what the
central questions were; on the need for a narrative form which, in texture and substance,
would embody the questions they shared; and on the central importance of history in dealing
with those questions not only because the contributors were already themselves committed to
writing a literary history, but because they were convinced that the tendency of literary
theory, in all its varieties, from deconstruction and feminism to ethnicity, semiotics, and
cultural archaeology, lay in that direction. That sense of common questions and directions was
enough to start with; but it did not resolve what I believe was implicitly the central issue of
the conference, the problem of ideology. Let me emphasize the personal note: ideology was
not on the agenda; it did not enter our discussions in any direct and substantive way; it does
not refer to any particular political stance; and it will not be the unifying theme of our
History. But as a problem, I think, ideology will become increasingly important to all the
contributors in the course of writing the History.
That implicit and insidious problem is the central concern of this paper, and it may be
well to begin with a general definition.4 I mean by ideology the ground and texture of
consensus. In its narrowest sense, this may be a consensus of a marginal or maverick group.
In the broad sense in which I use the term here (in conjunction with the term "American,")
ideology is the system of interlinked ideas, symbols, and beliefs by which a culture any
culture seeks to justify and perpetuate itself; the web of rhetoric, ritual, and assumption
through which society coerces, persuades, and coheres. So considered, ideology is basically
conservative but it is not therefore static or simply repressive. As Raymond Williams points
out, ideology evolves through conflict, and even when a certain ideology achieves dominance
it still finds itself contending to one degree r another with the ideologies of residual and
emergent cultures within he society contending, that is, with alternative and oppositional
forms hat reflect the course of historical development. In this process, ideology functions best
through voluntary acquiescence, when the network of ideas through which the culture justifies
itself is internalized rather than imposed, and embraced by society at large as a system of
belief. Under ese conditions, which Antonio Gramsci described as "hegemony," the terms of
cultural restriction become a source of creative release: they serve to incite the imagination, to
unleash the energies of reform, encourage diversity and accommodate change all this, while
directing e rights of diversity into a rite of cultural assent.
I would like to advance this model, hypothetically, as a description what we have
come to term the American ideology. And having done that, let me enter two caveats. The
first is that the term itself is somewhat misleading. The American ideology is often described
as some abstract corporate monolith whereas in fact the American ideology reflects a
particular set of interests, the power structures and conceptual forms of modern middle-class
society in the United States, as these evolved through three centuries of contradiction and
discontinuity. So "considered as America" is not an overarching synthesis, e pluribus unum,
but a rhetorical battleground, a symbol that has been made to stand for diverse and sometimes
mutually antagonistic outlooks. My second caveat tends in the opposite direction a
qualification of the qualification. I would urge that, in spite of all that diversity and conflict,
the American ideology has achieved a hegemony unequaled elsewhere in the modern world.
For all its manifold contradictions, it is an example par excellence of the successful
interaction between restriction and release, rhetoric and social action. An ideology, to repeat,
arises out of historical circumstances, and then re-presents these, symbolically and
conceptually, as though they were natural, universal, and right as though the ideals
promulgated by a certain group or class (in this case, individualism, mobility, self-reliance,
free enterprise) were not the product of history but the expression of self-evident truth. The
act of re-presentation thus serves to consecrate a set of cultural limitations, to recast a
particular society as Society, a particular way of life as the pursuit of happiness. Ideology
denies limitation, rhetorically, in order to facilitate the continuity of certain rhetorical forms.
But the forms themselves may be expansive, dynamic. Ideology transmutes history into myth
so as to enable people to act in history.
In this sense, ideology stands at the intersection between the terms a literary" and
"history," mediating between canon and context, expressive form and social structure. When
mediation succeeds, literary historians can proceed under the aspect of eternity, as though they
were free of ideology, unfettered by limits of time and place. It is the sort of freedom that
Augustine felt, in setting out the correct path for exegesis; or the Anglican Thomas Hooker,
explaining the "divine" right of kings; or Karl Marx, discovering the "scientific" laws of
history; or Emerson, announcing the transcendent" prospects of the American Scholar. In each
case, freedom is a function of consensus. And lest I seem to have exempted myself from that
process, I would like to declare the principles of my own ideological dependence. I hold these
truths to be self-evident: that there is no escape from ideology; that so long as human beings
remain political animals they will always be bounded in some degree by consensus; and that
so long as they are symbol-making animals they will always seek in some way to persuade
themselves (and others) that their symbology is the last, best hope of mankind.
I think it's safe to say that I share these principles with all or most of the contributors
to the new Cambridge History. It is a commitment to partiality that allows for only two
alternatives to the authority of consensus: either to subscribe to a different consensus
altogether, or else to confront the problem of ideology, in an attempt to understand its limits
and describe its methods of representation. The option, in short, is not time or eternity; it is
the nature and degree of one's involvement in consensus. And that option depends in turn not
just on qualities of mind and vision but on the historical moment. It seems to me largely a
matter of history that both Matthiessen and Spiller assumed that American literary history
transcended ideology: American because it stood for the universal possibilities of democracy,
history because it was an objective account of the facts, and literary because great art was to
be judged in its own timeless terms. It seems to me equally a matter of history, a measure of
the dissensus of our times, that all those concepts history, literary, American, and
transcendence are now subjects of ideological debate.
Let me briefly recall the sources of that quandary.5 One is the recognition that
questions of race and gender are integral to formalist analysis. Another is the recognition that
political norms are inscribed in aesthetic judgment and therefore inherent in the process of
interpretation. Still another is the recognition that aesthetic structures shape the way we
understand history, so that tropes and narrative devices may be said to use historians to
enforce certain views of the past. These perceptions stem from contending approaches in
contemporary critical discourse. Directly and indirectly, the controversies engendered by these
approaches, and by the differences between them, have undermined the old terms of
consensus and thereby heightened a broad ideological awareness among Americanists, while
at the same time providing them with new modes of analysis.
Still another source of this quandary, which might be termed the fall from
transcendence into history, is the widespread critique of the so-called myth and symbol school
of American studies, not only by a new generation of critics, but by the founders themselves.
Henry Nash Smith, for example, tells us in a recent essay that he failed in Virgin Land to
consider the tragic dimensions of the Westward Movement because they were cloaked in
ideas so familiar as to be "almost inaccessible to critical examination." Now, the same ideas
("civilization","free land","frontier initiative," "self-reliance") also obscured the views of the
writers he treats, as well as serving, historically, to inspire the energies and rationalize the
atrocities of the Westward movement.6 It amounts to a casebook example of ideology in
action, a model instance of the relation between interpretation, imaginative expression, and
social action that creates and sustains consensus.
The example here is mainly negative, a model of intellectual constriction. This, indeed,
is the model commonly associated with ideology, as we have inherited the concept from the
social sciences. According to this tradition, ideology is inherently suspect, and analysis
naturally seeks to expose its limitations through a process of debunking, unmasking,
demystifying. In this case the process deserves special emphasis for the contrast it suggests
between myth criticism and ideological analysis. Like ideology, myth is inherently suspect,
and for much the same reasons: is (among other things) a vehicle of culturally prescribed
directives for thought and behavior. Literary critics, however, have tended to avoid the
parallel by enforcing a sort of exegetical imperative of inversion. Since ideology pretends to
truth, the task of analysis is to uncover, rationally, the sinister effects of its fictions. Since
myths are fictions, the task is to display, empathetically, their ®deeper truths" the abiding
values embedded deep in simple plots, the range and richness of formulaic metaphors. The
double standard reflects the familiar Kantian distinction between the aesthetic and the
cognitive faculties. To criticize a myth is to appreciate it from within, to explicate it
intrinsically," in its own ®organic" term To criticize a piece of ideology is to ®see through" it,
to expose" its historical functions, necessarily from an ~extrinsic," and usually from hostile"
perspective.
Hence the corrective import of ®ideology" in recent American studies It is an attempt
by a new generation of scholars to distance themselves from cultural preconceptions, so as to
make the study of myth a mode of cognitive criticism. This approach constitutes a fresh
direction in the field and it has had salutary effects; but the approach itself remains
problematic for literary history. For one thing, the extrinsic method seized on negative aspects
of ideology; its diagnoses feed on social disease Significantly, the recent studies I mentioned
in American ideology exclusive consideration of the rhetoric of civil rights, the ideals of
conservationism the appeal to liberty, and for that matter the sheer vitality of the culture That
may be no more than a choice of focus, but effectually it misrepresent the very nature of
ideology, which (in the broad sense I intend here) to enact the purposes of a society in its
totality. We come to feel, reading these works, that the American ideology is a system of
ideas the service of evil rather than (like any ideology) a system of ideas wedded for good
and evil to a certain social order.
Another, more serious problem is that the extrinsic approach St the critic at odds with
the work of literature. I mean work in its functional sense, the constructing of an imaginary
world that invites a suspense of disbelief and requires an appreciation of the writer's power to
persuade the reader to that suspension. One familiar resolution of the problem reinforced in
different ways by Matthiessen and Spiller, is to separate high art from popular culture through
an almost dogmatic application of the distinction I made earlier between intrinsic and
extrinsic criticism Our classic writers are honored as keepers of the American myth; other
writers (especially the popular ones) are unmasked as representation of American ideology.
When Robert Rantoul invokes the tenets of laisse faire to attack the abuses of capitalism, we
claim that his views are contradictory or ambivalent. When John O'Sullivan advances the
principal of minimal government, self-reliance, and American progress, we accuse him of
using ideology to veil oppression. When Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman express that
ambivalence and advance those principles, we say they're creating ambiguities, criticizing the
actual under the aspect of the ideal, and enhancing the possibilities of democracy.
I am not forgetting the vast differences between these men in mind and imagination;
nor do I mean to deny important differences in their relation to the dominant culture. My
point is that the traditional dichotomy between art and ideology a pillar of the old
consensus is problematic and has increasingly become a subject of debate for this
generation. For though in some sense, certainly, a work of art transcends its time though it
may be trans-historical or transcultural or even trans-canonical it can no more transcend
ideology than an artist's mind can transcend psychology; and it may even be that writers who
translate political attitudes into universal ideals are just as implicated as the others in the
social order and, in the long run, are perhaps more useful in perpetuating it. This is not at all
to denigrate their achievement. Nor is it to deny that American writers have sometimes used
the symbol of America to expose ideological contradictions, and so on some level turned the
cultural symblogy against the dominant culture. Nor, finally, is it to forget the special
capacities of language to break free of social restrictions and through its own dynamics to
undermine the power structure it seems to reflect. It will continue to be a function of literary
history to define what is extraordinary, irreducible, and uncontained about our major texts.
But obviously any defense of literature (as art) which requires a pejorative view of popular
culture (as ideology) is itself ideological, part of a strategy designed to enforce the separation
of "spheres of influence": business from family, government from religion, politics from art.
Like other apologias for literature, as handmaid to theology or as servant of the state, this one
has its origins neither in the laws of nature nor in the will of God but in history and culture.
And I would suggest that a heightened ideological awareness may help us not only to
understand literary texts more fully in their own time but more precisely to define their
trans-historical import.
I have in mind a cultural dialectic, attuned to the power of language no less than the
language of power, sensitive to the emotional and imaginative appeal of myth while insisting
on the cognitive dimensions of art. And what makes this sort of model viable, or at least
approachable, is the emergence over the last two decades of a sophisticated concept of
ideology that is newly useful for the study of literature. I think above all of various forms of
Marxism, or neo-Marxism, that have broken from Marx's mechanistic view of
base/superstructure, much as recent forms of Freudianism have broken from Freud's simplistic
view of art as wish fulfillment and child's play not to deny the interactions between rhetoric
and social or biological reality, but to reinterpret these in ways that allow for the complexities
of consciousness and for the shaping influence of rhetoric on reality. Basically, Marx saw
ideology as false consciousness; he tended to define any ideology that differed from his own
as a form of subjectivity that obfuscated scientific analysis. Recent forms of Marxism
(influenced in part by a new, relativistic model of science) have abandoned that dream of
objective knowledge. Much as the unconscious has come to be seen as a crucial aspect of
consciousness, subjectivity for these neo-Marxists, from Frankfurt to Paris, Oxford, New
Haven, and Berkeley, has become a constituent of history.
This is not the place to detail the change.7 Let me simply list some of its major
aspects: the emphasis on language as an intrinsic part of the material of history, and hence
itself a central category of historical analysis; the sense of social reality as being at once
volatile and malleable, and thus susceptible to radical transformation through the agencies of
art; the redefinition of the work of imagination as the constant structure of social knowledge;
the concern with silences and ruptures in the text as constituting a vision of cultural
alternatives (a vision muted, repressed, but nonetheless formally manifest in the world of the
text); the development of a utopian hermeneutics which sees in the values, symbols, and ideas
of a given culture, as these are represented in art, the primary structures of human needs and
aspirations the first principles of a sort of noumenal ~collective logic" so that interpretation
becomes the bridge between ideology and the ideal. What is striking here for my purpose is
the intense concern with expressive form. If the old "vulgar Marxism" tended to flatten works
of art into political blueprints, this new Marxism, as though in overcompensation, compels an
even closer reading of the text a more rigorous attention to paradox, irony, and
ambiguity than that dreamed of by the New Critics. The text, it would seem, has been
invested with all the subtleties of historical process so that history may be understood through
the subtleties of literary criticism.
In some cases, this amounts to textuality raised to the status of biblical exegesis. I
believe that, here as elsewhere, Marxism betrays its roots in the Reformation, with its
obsessive apocalyptic correlations between scripture and current events. But my point is not to
make a brief for or against Marxism. It is to indicate the possibilities available to literary
historians beset by the problem of ideology. From this perspective, I should stress, first, that I
have given prominence to Marxist theorists because it happens that they have been the ones
most actively engaged with ideological analysis. Second, their engagement is of particular
interest because it insists simultaneously on the historicity of the text and the linguistic,
expressive dimensions of historical experience. Third, that insistence has tended toward the
development of an intrinsic mode of ideological criticism, a form of historical diagnosis
which requires an appreciation of ideology from within, in its full imaginative and emotional
appeal. Fourth, that development has remarkable and for the literary historian, richly
provocative affinities with non-Marxist approaches to ideology. I think, for example, of Max
Weber's concept of ideology as < positive, empowering force not so much the child of
history as a pervasive historical and cultural agent in its own right and of Karl Mannheim's
®sociology of knowledge,¯ where all knowledge is by definition ideological, so that (in his
words) reality is "the interplay between these distinctive attitudes in the total social process."
For both Weber and Mannheim (as also, implicitly, for Kenneth Burke), ideology provides a
focus for historical understanding that is grounded in the substantiality of expressive form.
And much the same may be said of Clifford Geertz. Although Geertz confines his analysis in
this respect to periods of cultural transition, still his analysis centers on the relation between
ideological "systems of meaning" and historical "modes of knowledge."8 In the wake of
consensus, he writes, ideology directs the search for a new coherence. And I would add that,
while waiting for the new coherence, dissensus direct us toward the problem of ideology.
This seems to me a particularly promising direction in the case of American literary
studies. I spoke earlier of the symbol of America as a rhetorical battleground, but of course it
could become so only because, from its origins, the symbol was so transparently ideological.
What could be a clearer demonstration of ideas in the service of power than the system of
beliefs which the early colonists imposed on the so-called New World? What clearer
demonstration of the shaping power of ideology than the procession of declarations through
which the republic was consecrated as New Israel, Nature's Nation in the Land of Futurity?
®America" is a laboratory for examining the shifting connections between politics (in the
broadest sense) and cultural expression, or, in Ceertz's terms, between historical knowledge
and aesthetic systems of meaning. This is nowhere more evident than in the mid-nineteenth
century, when the process of consecration was hardening into cultural consensus; when,
accordingly, the conflicts inherent in the symbol of America became most pronounced; and
when, under pressure of vast economic change and impending civil war, the culture found
expression, in all its contradictions and all its power of compelling allegiance, in a
self-consciously American literary renaissance. And the conditions for examining that
renaissance in its broadest meanings, literary and historical, were never more auspicious than
they are now, when the old ideological consensus has broken down.
So I come to my third and final subject, the problem of ideology in the current
revaluation of the American Renaissance. In the interests of brevity, I confine myself to one
aspect of the problem, the much-discussed radicalism of our classic writers. The issue has
special relevance here because it was central to the process of canon formation from
Lawrence through Matthiessen. The literary establishment that substituted Song of Myself for
The Song of Hiawatha also sanctified Whitman as outsider and rx nonconformist The scholars
and critics who raised Moby-Dick to sudden to epic prominence proceeded to acclaim
Melville for his No-in-thunder to a the powers of the earth. Directly and indirectly, the old
consensus tended to privilege the subversive: duplicity in Hawthorne, protest in Thoreau,
marginality in Poe, antinomianism in Emerson. All this, be it noted, the name of a distinctly
national tradition, a classic literature newly recover for its quintessential ®Americanness.¯
It will be a major problem of the new literary history to explain t paradox of an
antagonist literature that is somehow also culturally representative. That did not really trouble
an earlier generation of critics because they tended to separate the America of the myth,
represent, by our classic writers, from the real America, represented by ideology and their
victims. Literary history, I believe, requires us to integrate tho two kinds of representation.
What forms that integration will take in large measure determine the extent to which we will
achieve what is called an integrated narrative. Somehow, we will have to take the American
Renaissance out of the realm of cultural schizophrenia which is the legacy of the old
consensus and relocate it firmly in history, which is to say, the center of the antebellum
movement toward industrialization, incorporation, and civil war. On some basic level, we will
have to reconceive our so-called radical or subversive literary tradition as an insistent
engagement with society, rather than a recurrent flight from it. In other words, we will have
to re-historicize the ideal Americas projected in our major texts those fabled frontier
republics of the soul and worlds elsewhere of endless (because self-generating) ambiguity,
those roman, lands of moral antinomies (Old Serpent and New Adam, Innocence al
Experience) we will have to re-see these fictions historically, in dynamic relation to the
culture: neither as mirrors of their time, nor as lamps ®the creative imagination, but as works
of ideological mimesis, at on. implicated in the society they resist, capable of overcoming the
forces that compel their complicity, and nourished by the culture they often seem to subvert.
With this end in view, let me outline two current approaches to the problem. How can
an antagonist literature be said to be culturally representative? And specifically, in what sense
does this group of America classics, themselves so deeply concerned with the idea of
America, represent a radical literary tradition? One answer begins in the utopian hermeneutics
I noted earlier. In this perspective, all utopian visions, secular or religious express powerful
feelings of social discontent; many are adopted t repressed or ascendant groups to challenge
the status quo; and while some of them are thus incorporated into the ideology of a new
social order, nonetheless, as utopian visions, even these remain a potential source of social
unrest, a standing invitation to resistance and revolt. Every ideology, that is, breeds its own
opposition, every culture its ow counterculture. The same ideals that at one point nourish the
system may later become the basis of a new revolutionary consensus, one the. invokes those
ideals on behalf of an entirely different way of life, moral and material.
Now, in the mid-nineteenth century the source of dissent was a indigenous residual
culture, variously identified with agrarianism, libertarian thought, and the tradition of civic
humanism. By any name, it was the guiding ideology of the early republic. It had provided an
impetus to revolution, a series of rituals of cohesion, and a rationale for the political and
social structures of nationhood. As the economy expanded, those structures shifted to
accommodate new commercial interestes. The cultural continuities were too strong, too basic,
for the ideals themselves to be discarded. They were the self-evident truths, after all, of liberal
democracy. So the earlier rhetoric persisted, supported by preindustrial traditions and regional
agrarian communities that increasingly contrasted with the ways of the Jacksonian
marketplace. And on the ground of that opposition, our classic writers developed a sweeping
critique of the dominant culture. It was a diagnosis from within, based on the profound
engagement of these writers with a society in transition from agrarian to industrial capitalism,
and it issued in an imaginative rendering of that society which was at once radical and
representative, an expos‚ of inherent contradictions that re-created the culture in its full
complexity.
The result, of course, was far more than expos‚. It was (to repeat) a diagnosis from
within, rooted in the rhetoric of an earlier America, a rhetoric that had lost its direct social
function though it remained nonetheless a staple of national self-definition. And thus freed of
its practical tasks which included, let me recall, the preservation of slavery in the South, and
the exclusion of large parts of the population everywhere in the country from the privileges of
power divested of these and other ideological responsibilities to the social order, the rhetoric
could appeal now with the greater purity, as the vehicle of disinterested universal truth. If it
could no longer serve the culture,. it could serve the cause of culture at large, by conserving
the myths of a bygone age. Accordingly, it aligned itself, against the actual course of events,
with trans-historical dreams of human wholeness and social regeneration, and thereby invested
the notion of an ideal America with a politically transformative potential. In sum, the ideology
of the early republic became, in the utopian form of myth and promise, a fundamental
challenge to the national republic. And in the major works of the American Renaissance the
challenge found its classic literary expression. Both as cultural critique and as prophetic
summons, these classics turned the ideological norms they represented independence,
liberty, enterprise, opportunity, individualism, democracy, ®America" itself against the
American Way. This view of American literary radicalism promises a fuller account than we
have had of what Matthiessen (and many others after him including Spiller) termed the
conflict between the real and the ideal America.
The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History Critical Inquiry, Summer 1986, Volume 12, Number 4 |