Xref: murdoch uva.engl.amstdsma:103 Newsgroups: uva.engl.amstdsma Path: murdoch!darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU!abh9h From: abh9h@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (Alan B. Howard) Subject: D.PEASE Message-ID: Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: uva Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 21:56:23 GMT Visionary Compacts and the Cold War Consensus If interest relates men, it is never more than some few moments. It can create only an external link between them . . . where interest is the only ruling force each individual finds himself in a state of war with every other . . . nothing is less constant than interest . . . it can only give rise to transient relations and passing associations. --Emile Durkheim Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go West and shout of freedom . . . The shout is a rattling of chains, always was. --D. H. Lawrence In the aftermath of World War I, D. H. Lawrence traveled to America, whose "spirit of place" he hoped would revivify the root idea of the Western world. Lawrence turned to America because he believed that the great passional life of Europe, what he called its "spirit," had already migrated to America. While in Europe, this great westering spirit had resulted in great artistic and cultural achievements; but they belonged to Europe's past. To interpret the achievements of American culture as a branch or province of European culture Lawrence considered a betrayal of the living spirit of European culture. And to betray the spirit is to lose the opportunity to be remade in its image. So instead of experiencing American life as if it were an unsuccessful effort to remember Europe's past achievements, Lawrence described Europe as a dying civilization in need of America's spirit for cultural renewal. And it is this change in the way of experience, a change in being, which we should now study in American books. We have thought and spoken till now in terms of likeness and oneness. Now we must learn to think in terms of difference and otherness . . . The knowledge that we are no longer one, that there is this unconceivable difference in being between us, the difference of an epoch, is difficult and painful to acquiesce in. Yet our only hope of freedom lies in acquiescing. The change has taken place in reality. And unless it takes place also in our consciousness, we maintain ourselves all the time in a state of confusion. We must get clear of the old oneness that imprisons our real divergence.' Lawrence's words are inspiriting. He meant them as a mandate, a cultural imperative directed to all of his fellow Europeans, asking them to come to terms with the fundamental challenge of modern culture. It was in coming to terms with America, Lawrence believed, that Europeans first encountered the great challenge of modern existence. It was in America that the gulf between change and the unquestioned authority of Europe's past--what Lawrence elsewhere referred to as its tradition--first became visible. "There is an unthinkable gulf between us and America," Lawrence writes in "The Spirit of Place," and across this gulf "we see, not our own folk signalling to us, but strangers, incomprehensible beings, simulacra, perhaps of ourselves, but other, creatures from an other-world. The connection [between Europe and America] holds good historically for the past. In the pure present and in futurity it is not valid. The present reality is a reality of untranslatable otherness, parallel to that which lay between St. Augustine and an orthodox senator of the same day. The oneness is historic only."2 The historical association with which Lawrence closes this moving passage carries all the force of his vision. By drawing a parallel between Saint Augustine's relation to a Roman senator and an American's to a European Lawrence preserves an image of the progress of Western culture. The "idea" of Europe began, Lawrence believed, in the elaboration of differences between African saints like Augustine and the senators in Rome. These saints were not Romans, but "the prelude to a new era." In these saints Lawrence felt the same mystic passion, generative of a new life out of old decadence, that he finds in America. In its difference from Europe, America's spirit reminds Lawrence of the origins of Europe. By migrating to America Lawrence is only following in the steps of the great spirit of Western civilization itself, as it progressed from Rome to Europe then to America. By studying the classics in American literature, Lawrence aspired to embody the spirit of Europe's past in its living form. Lawrence did not separate himself from the great works achieved in Europe's past but renewed his relation with a living form of the same westering spirit that gave rise to them. His wish was not to recall what Europe had already achieved but to realize, for his age, what had been envisioned for it in the past but not yet fulfilled. So instead of emigrating to the Old World of Europe's past, as did his contemporaries Eliot and Pound, he migrated to a new world, the America that Europe had dreamed of in the past when her spirit needed revival but that had not yet been turned into a living reality. Lawrence turned his face away from the realm of memory, where everything endured the way statues do, and toward what remained to be made of the stuff of memory, a new life in the "pure present." This world in the pure present was not the America Pound and Eliot had left but the world Lawrence would envision by writing Studies in Classic American Literature. In writing that work, Lawrence came into consciousness of another enabling difference. Not this time the difference between African saints and Roman senators, but a related one: the difference between the world the founders of American culture envisioned and present-day America. By ex- periencing this difference between the original vision of America and its present reality, Lawrence entered into renewed relation with the unrealized purposes and ideals--what he calls the spirit--of American culture. He needed to tap the reservoir of this culture's living spirit from the past because he believed that America was the last resting place of the spirit of the Western tradition. And after the deadening effect of World War I, Europe needed a renewal of its spirit, or it, like Rome, would fall of its own weight. D. H. Lawrence's Visionary Compact In situating Lawrence's study of American literature in this context, I wish to draw attention to the cultural duties to which he assigned his Studies. As the essay introducing that work--"The Spirit of Place"--indicates, Lawrence needed to write this book. And his need was not merely a personal one but was related to the needs of his culture. Like Lawrence, Western culture needed to be replenished by vitalizing sources of life. To let the spirit of the culture's founders become active in him, Lawrence had to let their spirit replace the life that had become decadent in him--which meant that he had to address their classic visions in terms of modern Amer ica's loss of that vision. Only a writer who put himself in present relation with the living ideas of the true America from the past could make the present America vanish like a bad dream. In writing his book on America's classic writers Lawrence renewed their commitments and underwent their struggles. He forged a visionary compact with the continuing goals, purposes, and aspirations of these figures from America's past. I call the compact Lawrence established visionary for two reasons. The term "visionary" is consonant with Lawrence's key term "spirit" and emphasizes the demand implicit in both terms to make visible what has not yet been realized from a past. When joined with "compact," "visionary" calls attention to what is most vital about America's civic covenant, its basis in the spirit all of its members share. At the time Lawrence wrote, the notion of a civic covenant had suffered the same fate as his belief in a "spirit of place." Modern liberalism, the ruling ideology in Lawrence's culture and our own, emphasizes an individual's struggles against the conformity demanded by his fellows, thereby demoting civic covenants to the status of contracts and the "spirit of place" to a cultural superstition. But Lawrence believed modern liberalism to be a form of negative freedom, the desire merely to be free from a variety of constraints, whether of European tyrants, constrictive legislation, or, more pervasively, the past itself. In "The Spirit of Place" Lawrence carefully dis- tinguishes negative freedom from what freedom meant in America's classics. "It is never freedom," Lawrence writes, "till you find something you really want to be." "Men are free," he continues, when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep inward voice . . . Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go West and shout of freedom . . . The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.3 Lawrence's rationale for distinguishing the "classic" vision of American freedom from the merely negative freedom is related to his purpose in writing Studies in Classic American Literature. He turned to America as a cultural locus for a tradition of freedom compatible with the westering spirit that had given rise to the classic work in Europe's culture. He believed that in America the cultural contradiction of modern existence--the gulf between change and tradition--could be resolved as a transmission of freedom. In studying the classics of Amerlcan literature, Lawrence attempted to make a cultural reentry into the modern world. Whereas Eliot and Pound turned away from modern America for traditional, Old World values alienated from it, Lawrence returned to modern America with his vision of the living tradition from America's premodern past. The founders of America's tradition, Lawrence believed, had already found a way to transform the purely negative freedom at work in a modern existence into a more enduring form of liberty. In recalling what remains to be made of the vision of her classics, Lawrence felt himself called to an alternative experience of the modem world. Studies in Classic American Literature constituted La wrence's symbolic "naturalization" as a citizen of an American Republic of Letters. Only through this symbolic transfer of citizenship could Lawrence recover what he called "true liberty" as a culturally transmissible, collectively inherited commonwealth of freedom. Modernism, Crisis, and Negative Freedom Unlike Lawrence, who saw the American classics as an antidote to the negative freedom at work in modern existence, most modem interpreters of the American canon have transposed that canon itself into an example of negative freedom. Underlying most modem readings of the American canon is a common wish. These interpreters need to assign value to the independence of a present moment from past moments because they identify this independence with the cultural motion of modernity. Their commentaries assign value to the passing moment, the sheer appearance of the new, by associating it with the Revolutionary moment in America's past. In so doing they reinstate the authority of a negative freedom as well as the cultural contradictions it produces. The greatest difficulty confronting any advocate of negative freedom is cultural legitimation.4 Cultural legitimation becomes a problem when citizens base their personal identity as well as their nation's identity on a refusal to acknowledge the authority of institutions inherited from the nation's past. Without a past to inform their present lives, individuals have no basis for present identity. Many citizens in Revolutionary America experi enced this crisis in legitimation when they refused to acknowledge their pre-Revolutionary past. They based this refusal on the same grounds as do many modern commentators on the American Renaissance, that is, the Revolution: an event from the nation's past that has been subsequently elevated into a mythos, a political fiction capable of organizing the lives of many Americans. The Revolution had indeed secured the nation's freedom from an oppressive past. The mythic associations accruing to this historic event subsequently made freedom synonymous with liberation from an oppressor. And this negative freedom granted cultural authority to a variety of breaks from an equally variable series of oppressors.5 Now, as long as the British tradition along with all its coercive laws, customs, and regulations remained a presence in America, the authority invested in our liberation from its oppression remained unchallenged. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, when most of America's classics were written, the presence of an oppressive British past had all but disappeared, leaving Americans with a problem in self-legitimation. Without a British tyrant and his Old World customs to oppose, Americans had to discover a basis for the nation's identity in something other than a break from Britain's past. Trouble attended any new discovery because that definitive break had already turned into a dominant way of producing an American culture. The mythos of the Revolution, and the negative freedom supporting it, encouraged many Americans to turn liberation into a daily ritual. Long after the historical conditions supporting the Revolution had disappeared, revolution in the attenuated form of oppositions to received institutions remained the rule of the day. Opposition to the established, whether in the form of received ideas, practices, or institutions, based its authority on the patriot's break from an old world. But it also generalized that mythical event until it became a defining trait in the nation's character. American authors turned this oppositional model into an advantage, modern commentators have argued, by insisting on their difference from Europe's tradition. But this model also posed an obstacle to any effort to begin a vital tradition of American letters. At its most radical level (and the model supported radical interpretations of its implications) this model supported an intolerance of anything past, whether that past be measured in centuries, decades, or, in the case of newspaper dailies, days. Without any past to carry forward, the nation's authors found themselves without a cultural context, and without a context they could depend upon no consistent set of purposes and had no legitimate tradition to carry forward. Unlike Lawrence, the regnant tradition of American critics has argued that American writers turned even their cultural dislocation to an advantage. Their very separation from a tradition, according to these modern commentators, afforded these writers a unique relation to both literary forms and cultural institutions. Exempt from submission to these structures, American writers were free to take artistic possession of them, and, through an investment of inventive energies greatly exceeding the endurance of existing cultural structures, work themselves free of them. Such critics as Richard Chase, Richard Poirier, and Harold Bloom have claimed that America's classic authors turned the crisis in cultural authority into the defining principle of their art. They did not feel culturally deprived by the loss of context; rather, any context capable of assimilating their vision they wrote out of existence. Consequently when writers, like Melville in Moby-Dick, released into their narratives rhetorical energies, visionary perspectives, and multiply dimensioned characters vastly superior to the power of any organizing principle to control them, theme went the way of context--as did characters, plots, structure, anything able to claim control. What took the place of control, in the canonical modernist view, was the negation of any form capable of restraining visionary forces. And without the need for validation, these writers invested illegitimacy itself with great cultural value. But this argument, along with the tradition of criticism lt sustains, rationalizes an oppositional model more compatible with modern than premodern America. In the "Renaissance" moment in our literature, this oppositional model, as well as the Revolutionary mythos supporting it, did not sustain but threatened the nation's identity. And many Americans looked to the pre- Revolutionary past with the urgency Lawrence would display three generations later. They too needed a renewed sense of a living past to sustain their present lives. Many Americans put "Union" in the place of the oppressor, and their subsequent threat to secede turned negative freedom into a negation of the nation's identity. More than at any other time in the nation's history, Americans now looked for a non-Revolutionary context to define the nation's purposes. Instead of appearing as a definitive break from a past, the Revolutionary moment was redefined by such writers as Whitman and E merson in terms compatible with Lawrence's, as an unfulfilled promise for the future, an as yet unrealized vision, with principles awaiting answering deeds, motives in demand of present enactment. Instead of remaining an oppressive burden to be opposed by the present age, the nation's pre-Revolutionary past underwent a similar elevation in value. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans confronted in the issue of slavery unfinished cultural business from the Revolutionary past. And the ensuing debate over liberty led many Americans to challenge the value of negative freedom sanctioned by the Revolutionary mythos. For freedom negatively defined freed an individual not only from oppressive institutions but from his neighbors, his family, his past, and in many cases from his principles. In the arguments over the divisive issue of slavery, the nation's orators emphasized the positive value of liberty. There were other issues--expansionism, free trade, national conscription, to name the most divisive--demanding the attention of American citizens. There were also many unprincipled ways of addressing these issues, compromises arrived at by opportunistic legislators, and Supreme Court decisions protecting special interests. Melville carried his dispute with his father-in-law, Justice Lemuel Shaw, over the Fugitive Slave Law over into his narratives. Nathaniel Hawthorne preserved his disgust with the corruption of partisan politics in the preface to The Scarlet Letter. Throughout the antebellum period, not just Melville and Hawthorne but many American writers tried to recover a social context. They did not need to write themselves free of existing structures. The nation's divisiveness over its fundamental principles had already produced a surplus of negative freedom these writers found threatening rather than enabling.6 A Twentieth-Century Consensus But in the twentieth-century commentary on American Renaissance literature, these divisive political questions, as well as the pre-Civil War cultural context, tend to drop out of sight. They are supplanted by more rarefied struggles: what Richard Chase has designated the artist's quest for an open form in defiance of constricting structures, what R. W. B. Lewis has called the American's need to sustain radical Adamic innocence in the face of familial and social responsibilities, what Charles Feidelson has described as the American's effort to return all things--facts, characters, places--to unity in the organicist activity of language. Such characterizations, or variations of them, presently accompany the classics of the American Renaissance. Part of the reason for the elision of context is historical. Writers immediately after the Civil War, like Mark Twain and Henry James, also separated antebellum letters from an ideological context. The Civil War, in its bloody resolution of the nation's political issues, caused Twain to treat even the issue of slavery as a pretext for practical jokes and burlesque. After that war, Twain along with the rest of the nation needed to believe himself forever free from divisive contexts. Disagreement had, after all, led people to give up their lives for political principles. Following the war, Twain reduced political beliefs to the status of tall tales, occasions for pleasure in taking someone in rather than taking someone's life. Those who took lives rather than jokes, like the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords were what Twain's humor put behind us. Not just Twain but most Americans needed to believe that the Civil War had put an end to ideology, if only so that they never again would need to confront the troubling questions leading the nation to war. After the Civil War, the mythos of the Revolution returned: to claim the Civil War as its definitive reenactment. Critics whose politics were as different as F.O. Mathiessen's and Charles Feidelson's could not claim the Civil War as the basis for their elimination of the pre-Civil War context. But these critics did share a predisposition with Americans who wrote immediately after the Civil War. They too needed to believe in an end to ideology in America. Writing in the years immediately preceding World War II, Matthiessen needed to put aside internal disputes over ideology, the better to defeat the totalitarian powers Germany and Japan. And in the Cold War that followed World War II, Feidelson had reason to dissolve all signs of literary dissent into an organicist process. His book Symbolism and American Literature uses the literary term "symbolism" to separate America's literature from any merely local or national identity so that it can the better enter the modern world. Here "symbolism" becomes indistinguishable from the process of change and the activity of modernization. Like symbolism these two processes include every determinate form--whether it be a character, a theme, or their setting--in an open-ended process, capable of dissolving their objective structure into its movements. Feidelson sets up an opposition between this organicist, utterly free process and forms of closure intent on contain ing the freedom of this process within structures; the parallel with the Cold War is obvious. A Cold War consensus on the question of liberty opposes the freedom of an open-ended process to the totalitarianism of closed systems. In the final chapter of this book I will discuss the relationship between the Cold War and the American canon more fully. Now I would only point out that Feidelson's study uses symbolism and its organicist processes to draw together writers who lived at a time when the nation's symbolic apparatus was breaking apart. Feidelson's attention to symbolism elevated the value of studies in American literature, putting the classics in American literature on an equal footing with studies of more prestigious figures in the modern tradition. In doing so, however, Symbolism and American Literature also made visible a relationship modernism shared with a certain aspect of premodern American culture.7 To explain how, I need to return to the discussion of the mythos of the Revolution. Earlier I suggested that the Revolutionary mythos identified a break from an oppressive past with true freedom. So does modernism. Like the mythos of the Revolution, modernism is definable out of its denial of historical continuity. And critics who write from within a modernist moment often reclaim works from the past for a modern tradition by finding evidences of breaks and discontinuities in them. Later I will distinguish the cultural function of the Revolutionary mythos from the cultural work performed by modernism. Now I will only call attention to the work these two quite different cultural forms accomplish for each other. When put into service together, modernism and the Revolutionary mythos effectively dissever American literature from any historical context other than the one foreordained by the mythos of the Revolution. To return that literature to its context, we need to remind ourselves of the ways in which nineteenth-century writers found the mythos inapplicable to their situation. Since modern critics of American literature have made the mythos of the Revolution seemingly the only applicable context, I will return to a nineteenth-century context by way of a modern critic who has used the Revolutionary mythos to replace it. A Pre-Revolutionary America Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" is an ideal focus for any discussion of the relationship between different time periods. It was, after all, the anxiety-filled years of the Revolutionary War that Rip chose to sleep through. For many commentators on this fable, Rip's liberation from a difficult wife and troubling family responsibilities indicate a crucial effect of the Revolution--it freed American men from a past filled with responsibilities, anxiety, and in some cases domestic as well as political tyranny. In elaborating the implications of Rip's character for American culture, Leslie Fiedler writes that "the myth of Rip is much more than just another example among the jollier fables of masculine protest; it is the definition, made once and for all . . . of a fundamental American archetype. In some ways, it seems astonishingly prophetic: a forecast of today's fishing trip with the boys, tomorrow's escape to the ball park or the poker game. Henpecked and misunderstood at home, the natural man whistles for his dog, Wolf, picks up his gun and leaves the village for Nature--seeking in a day's outing what a long life at home has failed to provide him. It is hard to tell whether he is taking a vacation or making a revolution, whether his gesture is one of evasion or subversion." 8 Fiedler manages this set of assertions about Rip by first positing him as an American archetype rather than a character located in a specific locale and confronted with a peculiar historical- dilemma. Rip in Fiedler's version no longer shares the plight of the other Dutch settlers around Tarrytown. They were faced with a new leader (George Washington instead of George III) to honor, and a new form of government (democratic rule as opposed to a monarchy) to negotiate. They also had undergone a change in cultural and national identity. No longer Dutch settlers, they had to become citizens of the United States. Among them in the village were figures who had once identified with the Tories rather than the patriots, and many others who, although they had opposed British rule, still sympathized with older village ways, inevitably associated with British rule. Rip's village, in other words, was filled with many individuals who were as confused about the effects of transition from colonial to postcolonial America as was Rip. Fiedler's elevation of Rip into a universal American archetype exempts him from any complicating transactions with his native village as effectually as did Rip's twenty-year sleep. Indeed Fiedler might be considered a twentieth-century analogue of the Hendrick Hudson figure from the tale, for in elevating Rip into the lofty position of cultural archetype, Fiedler enables him to remain untouched by his village context, just as Hudson's flagon of spirits protected him from the effects of war. In a sense Hudson and Fiedler share a common rationale for their treatment of Rip. Hendrick Hudson as the presiding "spirit of place" needed Rip's mind free of the complications of the war in order to preserve the memory of Tarrytown's pre-Revolutionary past. Leslie Fiedler, as a Cold War American critic, needs Rip to domesticate revolutionary impulses. Turning these otherwise political energies homeward, Fiedler turns Revolutionary independence into freedom from a termagant wife, wearisome family responsibilities, and a settled past. In the cultural uses to which Fiedler puts Rip, it is no wonder he cannot distinguish Rip's revolution from an "evasion." It is an evasion. In fact Rip's sleep had nothing in common with a revolution, then or now. Fiedler silently equates revolution with Rip's freedom from a variety of confining contexts in order the better to associate freedom with a form of twentieth-century liberalism that Fiedler and many of his generation adopted after World War II. Liberals confine revolutionary freedom to quite a narrow context, defining it as a freedom from a variety of constraints. They also celebrate its consequences as if they could be described in terms of a continual furlough, with plenty of rest and recreation for soldiers who need not distinguish the war of freedom they waged against Nazi totalitarianism from the domestic struggle they will wage when they return home--against inevitably dominant wives and confining home lives. While the archetypal Rip may seem to fill in the details for the portrait of American life proposed by a liberal-minded post-World War II critic, he bears little resemblance to the character in Irving's tale. There, unlike the other villagers, Rip does indeed have a difficult domestic situation. Bu~ Irving attends to Rip's need for freedom from his wife only to reduce the implications of American liberty to a manageable domestic context. When Rip awoke, he found himself free from his wife, but he found himself free from every other defining context as well. And as a consequence of this freedom, he found it difficult to find himself at all. Without his dog, his family, his former village friends, and confronted with a set of faces, buildings, outfits, and village manners he had never before encountered, Rip experienced America's freedom as a loss of character. Upon awakening from a twenty-year sleep, Rip initially recognized no one, and no one recognized him. Without the possibility for mutual recognition he found himself unable to distinguish the negative freedom Fiedler celebrates so jovially from a terrifying sense of estrangement. As well he should; for he was from a pre-Revolutionary Tarrytown the Revolution had left behind. Or was supposed to have left behind. While apologists for the Revolution may have claimed that it liberated America from her past, that liberation was more easily managed in their abstractions than in the lives of many Americans. As a figure in transition from a town life before the war, Rip enabled the townspeople to elaborate upon the changes the war made in their lives. When he appeared from out of the "nowhere" that once was Tarrytown, he made it necessary for the rest of the townspeople to do what the Revolutionary pundits claimed they should never do: that is, remember the conditions, cultural attitudes, and characters in the village life before the war. To give Rip back his identity they had to identify themselves with what the Revolution had forcibly cut them off from. Coming to terms with Rip's lost identity made it necessary ~or them to explain their present village life to a figure from its past. In explaining their culture to Rip, they implicitly accommodated their present world to their broken past, thereby recovering connection with what the Revolution had disconnected them from. Their assimilation to the past also made it possible for them to assimilate formerly alienated characters from the Revolutionary past: loyalists to the British cause, Dutch settlers who still followed the "Old World" ways in Tarrytown, and even Rip's ne'er-do-well son, who found in his father a historical precedent and excuse for his laziness. Rip turned the pre-Revolutionary past into a presence in their village. Since he had slept through the Revolutionary War years, Rip, unlike other townspeople whose years bridged the gap between pre- and postRevolutionary America, did not feel compelled to change himself into a post- Revolutionary American. Because it took place while he slept and thus never happened as an event in his life, the Revolution made no drastic change in Rip's life. He enabled the rest of the village to drop it out of their lives as well, and recover relation to the town's past, their personal pasts, and the locale's history. Unlike Fiedler, Irving did not exploit Rip's revolutionary potential but used his status as a transitional figure to do the work a transitional object does for an infant. Rip enabled the villagers to give up their need for an exclusive attachment to one historical period and make it continuous with others. Irving did not write about Fiedler's modern culture. His America did not need to define freedom in terms of a set of cultural constraints it confirmed by opposing. But the villagers in the upper New York towns he traveled through were undergoing crises in their identities akin to Rip's. Like Rip they needed a way to make their present cultural lives continuous with rather than disconnected from their past. In the story's linking up the two separated America's, much more was at stake culturally than finding the lost identity of Rip Van Winkle. Without a firm belief in the purposes it carried forward from a past, a nineteenth century American village lacked any coherent sense of cultural purpose. Like Rip Van Winkle, its purposes were too quickly elevated into the realm of abstract and universal archetypes and too quickly separated from the daily lives, cultural situation, and local contexts of its citizens. In the nineteenth century the political myth of manifest destiny became, for those who found themselves uprooted by the turmoil following the Revolution and for the many others--recent immigrants, the poor, the homeless--who had no roots at all, an archetypal catchall term enabling them to interpret cultural alienation as part of the nation's polity. But while the already alienated may have had little difficulty in situating their placeless lives within a mythical archetype, many more Americans felt threatened rather than exhilarated by a politically brand-new world. In response to the threat of cultural anomie, many writers turned postRevolutionary America into a haunted landscape. Unlike the writers of Gothic romances which surged up in post- Revolutionary Europe, writers of the supernatural in America did not find in their country the ruins of lost traditions and devastated aristocratic lineages from Europe's past. If anything, post- Revolutionary America was insufficiently haunted. It lacked what a revolutionary culture needs in order to flourish--the remnants of an old tradition to continue to oppose. Without such ruins from an older world, Americans confronted difficulty in experiencing their historical situation at all. To restore time to America's places, writers looked for ways to haunt them with an archaic past, as Irving did in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In this tale, the tree from which Major Andre, an American traitor, was hanged and the horse a Hessian soldier rode figured prominently. The tree, having lived through the Revolution, shared a trait in common with Major Andre who was hanged from it: both were possessed of dual sympathies, with a British past and an American present. After the war Americans were asked to get rid of memories from their personal pasts because sympathetic memories of British rule may have been stored in the personal memory as well. But many Americans needed their memories as well as their past in order to lead significant cultural lives. And they were willing to tell ghost stories about such figures as Major Andre, who died because of his divided loyalties, to keep these memories vivid. The legend surrounding Major Andre's hanging tree enabled those who exchanged it to come to terms with the self-division in their own characters and translate their personal self- division into a way of characterizing their locale. By converting the need for a local past into a haunting ghost tale, these post-Revolutionary Americans could both satisfy their wish to recover a past and simultaneously deny that past--as the work of an ineradicable, alien, even un-American presence. Like Rip Van Winkle, the ghost of Major Andre was a transitional figure who enabled many Americans to affirm their past through the presence of his ghost yet deny it in their acknowledgment of his disloyalty. After the village locals produced their haunts, they could use them on figures like Ichabod Crane. An uprooted, upwardly mobile American from somewhere else, Ichabod Crane would have felt quite at home with the universal locale made available in Fiedler's archetypes and the politicians' myths. He would have been at home with them because he could call no place his home. Thus, unlike the village locals, Crane feared the spirits who insisted on "possessing" places, because they implicitly identified him as trespassing upon other people's worlds and thereby threatened him with retribution. There was another reason for haunting tales. Most tales not only inhabited American places with memories from the past but also heightened the sense of place. Without the headless horseman haunting the spots he rode through, these local places would not have demanded much more than merely passing acknowledgment. Haunting these local regions added those mysterious dimensions of time and space necessary for the development of a unique local identity. Crane's fear of the headless horseman enables him to recognize Tarrytown's peculiar character. Unlike other towns he might have passed through, Tarrytown was not a uniform, featureless terrain but a culture with customs, manners, and tacit rules of behavior. Ichabod Crane's faith in mobility, progress, and other generalized qualities resulting in a uniform American character made him a stranger in a world with specific, historically situated characteristics and clearly defined local types. By terrifying Crane with their legends, such inhabitants as Brom Bones were able to identify themselves with the spirit of this place rather than with Crane's progress through it. Conversion and Self-Division In calling attention to the hunger for continuity at work in nineteenth century Americans. I have indicated a need they shared with D. H. Lawrence, but I have considered only in passing the major cultural barrier to any belief in cultural continuity they shared with modernist commentators--that is, the change in identity the Revolution was believed to have made possible. The Revolutionary War did, of course, change the political and cultural identity of America, but many Americans had great difficulty in matching up the Revolutionary change in the nation's identity with changes in their own lives. Many Americans were unable to complete their conversion from one identity to another. Instead, many Americans experienced divisions within their identities, in which the British loyalist co- existed with the American patriot, the local inhabitant with the national citizen, the immigrant with the settler. Often these self-divisions required radical cultural strategies for accommodation. We have already considered how in "Rip Van Winkle" Washington Irving invented a transition figure able to heal the divisions at work in Tarrytown. In his Gothic romance Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown invented a set of characters who felt unable to meet the demands America made on their personal identities. Brown peoples this novel with the descendants of a German visionary who felt called to America but was unable to answer the call. Answering the call meant giving up his German identity and becoming someone remade in an image compatible with the call. The older Wieland's dilemma is one with which many European immigrants could identify. They found it necessary to change their manners, their past, their language, and sometimes their personal identities to answer this call to become citizens in a new culture. Most immigrants did not associate the call with a religious destiny. But Wieland did, and, when he could not live up to this high calling, his body, instead of undergoing a conversion experience, underwent spontaneous combustion. Wieland experienced the need to change his identity as an impossible demand. And he died instead of changing. But his descendants in America underwent an even more uncanny experience. They heard voices within themselves urging them to perform actions with which they could not identify. To understand this division between inner voice and identity, motive and deed, we must remember something else about nineteenth-century America. It was a culture of oratory. In the nation's past, great orators like Patrick Henry and Ethan Allen had matched Revolutionary deeds with inspiriting words. More contemporary orators like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay maintained Revolutionary passions in the pitch of their voices, creating a mode of speech invested with extraordinary cultural value. In listening to these orators, who claimed the right to speak for America's citizenry and to America's destiny, many Americans experienced a separation between the sheer motivating power in the orators' words and the actions urged by them. Whose deeds could match Webster's words, Emerson, for one, would wonder in his notebooks. Whose person could embody the orators motives, Charles Brockden Brown wondered through his characters. If they could change their persons into a form more compatible with the fiery quality of the orators' language, something like the spontaneous combustion of Grandfather Wieland might be the result. If they could not assimilate their characters to the conviction carried by these voices, they could become like Carwin, another character in Wieland. Unlike the elder Wieland, who tries to meet the demands of a voice, or the younger Wieland who believes he hears his grandfather's voice, Carwin simply impersonates other people's voices. Like an immigrant who would learn a new language but without bothering with the convictions and beliefs accompanying it, Carwin learns how Americans speak but he does not speak like them. He separates their passions from his voice, thereby increasing his mobility through regions with different dialects but decreasing the possibility of his ever identifying with the convictions the local inhabitants share. Carwin can change places because his pow~r w ~ r~ V(~ the place of a personal identity. He changes places but he never undergoes a change of identity. He does not have any identity to change. For the characters in Wieland, as well as many of its nineteenth-century readers, per- sonal identity was indistinguishable from a voice of conviction. These inner voices had undergone the change of identity called for by the Revolution. But although they were honored like the nation's orators who were also possessed of Revolutionary identities, these voices had no influence over the everyday lives of the persons in whom they spoke. Brown's characters experienced themselves as split apart, undone, victimized, or quite literally burned up. His characters could not turn these voices into motives for personal actions because the scene of the Revolution able to make them meaningful had disappeared. The dissociation of the voice of passionate conviction from the everyday actions of most Americans created a favorable context for the unprincipled compromises the nation's orators would bargain into existence. As we have seen, this dissociation of Revolutionary motives from local actions was of great sociological use. Elected representatives in Washington could exemplify a national identity, while in the towns and villages individuals could continue to construct their characters according to more local demands. The need for a national identity, in other words, led to the election of political representatives who could meet that demand, but at the expense of local identities, personal pasts, and vital group life. The Frontiersman and the Loss of a Past I have begun to point up the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans needed to recover a past. Now let me consider why they needed to abandon one. The move west made it necessary for many individuals to pull up their roots; it also made cultural anomie, or the inability to designate oneself as part of any vital community, a common form of social malaise. The doctrine of manifest destiny was, on one level, intended to convert this anxiety accompanying cultural displacement into a national mission. And the figure of the frontiersman was intended to give this experience of uprootedness a heroic appearance. Here indeed the Revolutionary mythos resurfaces, in characters resembling Fiedler's archetypal American hero. This descendant of the "natural man" always in a state of transition between nature and culture also appears within a particular historical and political context. The elevation of the homeless American into a national archetype enabled Americans who looked westward to separate themselves from their local communities with a sense of heroic mission. But when frontiersmen like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone were elected to national leadership, they brought the frontiersman's code to Washington, sanctioning policies that placed no limit to America's boundaries or the individual's drive to self-aggrandizement. Unlike many Americans who were compelled to move west for reasons of impoverishment, such frontier heroes as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Cooper's Hawkeye chose to move west. By representing their relationship with the West as a heroic confrontation with the elements, the writers who popularized these figures made a western identity available nationally. The cultural identity these figures like Hawkeye represented was based on an individual's power to affirm his separation from any roots, a power that was a necessity for survival. Unlike the Easterners whom he leads through the western territories, Hawkeye has no attachments to anyone except the adventuring spirit itself. To be in Hawkeye's company is to learn how to impersonate a variety o~~ forest characters but to identify with none. Through this character, Americans could learn how to experience disconnection from a past, their families, and even one another--as Hawkeye is ready to do as he chooses the last of a dying Indian tribe for his companion--as an affirmation of identity. Unlike Ichabod Crane, who experienced his difference from the others in Sleepy Hollow as a loss of a personal identity, so that he recognized himself in the headless horseman, Hawkeye celebrates his power to accommodate himself to different regions, languages, personalities, and even bodies (in his impersonations of Indians, soldiers, animals). Hawkeye asserts his freedom from a personal past or a local region in order to nationalize his identity. Cooper's insertion of the national character of Hawkeye within a frontier context permits him a certain necessary legal fiction. Hawkeye's relationship with the last of the Mohican tribe, who were, in Cooper's view of it, the last Indian nation truly worthy of the American landscape and whose purity of blood lineage established their clear entitlement to the land, put Hawkeye in line to receive America's frontier from them. In Hawkeye, in other words, Cooper invented a figure who was able to transform cultural dispossession--that of the Mohicans--into a form of self-possession. Cooper was also able to treat Hawkeye's act of taking possession of himself in the woods as a rationale for America's legal title to the frontier. And every time Hawkeye teaches one of the Yankee greenhorns the ways of the woods, he initiates them into the same cultural process. In Hawkeye the contradictory demands made on America's citizens on the one hand by the nation's manifest destiny and on the other by local regions were resolved. In Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales Americans could find a set of characters confronting a characteristic dilemma of the time--the need to give up a past world for a completely new life out west--and find in Hawkeye a means of working through the dilemma. They could discover how to experience their otherwise painful separation from local roots as an opportunity to participate in the expansion of the national character. The tales were set in the years of the French and Indian Wars to find in those pre-Revolutionary years a historic precedent for national as opposed to local self-definition. By converting those pre-Revolutionary years into a historical period in which Americans were affiliated with the last of a noble Indian line, Cooper enabled Americans to imagine the American nation as the beginning of a new cultural line which included all Americans as its heirs. Hawkeye and the General Will If Cooper's Hawkeye indulged in the Revolutionary fantasy, he did so only in his permanent conflicts with Indian tribes. He equated them with Old World rule; their noble bearing, stringent traditions, and often oppressive rulers clearly had European equivalents. Although Cooper also distinguished the Indians from their European counterparts, he did so to maintain a Revolutionary opposition more appropriate to historical conditions at the time he was writing. Without a European tradition to oppose, Americans traveling west could treat the Indians as an appropriate substitute. A difficulty arose, however, whenever the figures in Cooper's tales wished to settle down. In elevating Hawkeye's national identity above any local identity, Cooper made it difficult for any of his settlers to consider the life they shared within the settlement as something other than a loss of the frontiersman identity they shared with Hawkeye. Outside the Leatherstocking Tales, however, the nation had a place for its Hawkeyes, and for any other Americans who could prove their power to act upon a seemingly permanent supply of Revolutionary motives. Andrew Jackson, General Tyler, and Davy Crockett were some of the figures whom the nation sent to Washington, as the only locale appropriate for their identities. Here their sometimes frightening acts of taking possession of their own characters at the expense of others' would be taken not as self interest but as examples of heroic individualism. If we put Hawkeye into relation with the characters in Brown's Wieland we can begin to see another reason for Cooper's popularity. Hawkeye acted on those Revolutionary powers of voice Wieland found so terrifying. In Hawkeye we find a character who derives his power to lead a group not from his enactments of the group's mandates but rather from his separation from the general interest of the group. In finding a way to become like Hawkeye, the other Americans in Cooper's narratives find not only a way to separate themselves from their pasts but a way to separate themselves from each other--as, say, David Gamut and Major Heyward do in Last of the Mochicans. In Hawkeye, in other words--as well as In Jackson, Crockett, and Boone--Americans found a way to separate from their local identities and to identify with a national character whose self- interest became the defining feature of his ability to lead. Americans characteristically identified a leader's ability to lead with the power of his personality, and they defined that power as the ability to transcend the limitations of a local past. In the same characters through whom they nationalized their identities, Americans learned how to give up their pasts, their local roots, as well as any vital group life. While these various forms of disaffiliation gave Americans increased possibilities for social mobility, multiple associations, and personal aggrandizement, they nevertheless threatened the cultural and political life of the country as well. The pressure to develop a national as well as a local identity often lead to an opposition between the two, and the opposition was sometimes resolved through a move west, in which the past was dissolved, or, less frequently, through a move into politics, whereby the past could be tran- scended as a gain in one's national identity. One gained, however, by losing vital relations with others. And this loss threatened civic life altogether. In the nineteenth century, I am claiming, Americans underwent a crisis in their understanding of the duties owed the self and the group. The major cause for the crisis inhered in the notion of a national identity. During the Revolutionary War Americans did not need to confront a distinction between their persons and an interest greater than the personal. Everyone who fought in the war did so for the sake of national freedom. But after the war Americans had to invent an identity for the nation, and a national character to match it. When the mythos of the Revolution made it necessary for them to give up their personal pasts for the sake of the new nation, it left them with no sense of national interest other than this act of dispossession. Consequently, many Americans based their American identity on the inability to distinguish their personal identities from the national identity. The national policies of westward expansion and manifest destiny provided a national motive within which individuals could establish their national identity. At the same time, however, the question of local as opposed to national self-definition reappeared. In the mid-nineteenth century, many Southern and western Americans considered the national Union itself to be a constraint on personal freedom. These Americans insisted that the individual's responsibilities to local conditions and community concerns were definitive. Secession, particularly when entangled with the issue of liberty, struck many Americans as the only recourse in order to recover local rights. The secessionists, or at least their representatives in Washington, did not argue for local rights in terms of the allegiance they owed to local conditions. They borrowed terms from the Revolutionary mythos to argue for their freedom, as opposed to the tyranny of the Union. Clearly, something was missing from the terms of a debate on the relationship between the responsibility an individual owes on the one hand to local groups and on the other to national concerns, when both sides used the Revolutionary mythos as their means of pursuing that debate. Modern critics tend to leave this missing consideration out as well. There is a reason for this per- sistent omission. In the nineteenth century, local group interests had no way of articulating themselves in terms compatible with the national interests. The split between local interests and the national interests was mediated in Washington where politicians from different locales could be reborn as national characters who shared the common ability to rise above the shortcomings of a modest (often log-cabin) past and become national spokesmen. What was missing from both the politicians' considerations and the nation's politics was any belief in what Rousseau called a general will and what nineteenth-century Americans called a general interest or public will.9 But whereas in the nineteenth century not only Irving and Brown but in more complex ways Hawthorne and Melville were calling attention to the need for a recuperated public will, most twentieth-century commentators associate the general will with a form of despotic control. Fiedler, in the work I have cited, affiliated communal life in Rip's village with the domestic tyranny he suffered at home, claiming Rip rebelled against both when he went on his twenty-year jaunt with the boys. But Fiedler's version--and, I will soon argue, those of many post-World War II critics--equated any group interest with the demands of an oppressive power. Most of the critics who developed what I will call the Cold War consensus about American literature did so in the years following the formation of two mass movements: World War II and totalitarianism. Many of them served during World War II and compensated for their submission to the control of the military by redefining freedom solely in personal terms on return home. Not just Rip, but all of America and all of America's culture were defined as freedom from an oppressive structure--whether in the form of an Old World tradition, an individual's past, family responsibility, or a group's interest. This negative definition of freedom was sustained by the continued presence of a totalitarian power in Europe as well as the constant threat of mass destruction by nuclear weapons. The prospect of sharing a mass grave, as Allen Grossman has pointed out, drives people to overvalue their individuality.l While this purely negative definition of freedom does release a lively sense of personal autonomy, it does so at the expense of a vital public sphere. For individuals who conceive of the life they can share together as a threat to their personal freedom cannot organize any vital community at all. While the loss of group life was experienced by many post-World War II critics as a gain in personal freedom, it was experienced by many nineteenth-century Americans as a threat to personal freedom. One of the ways American writers expressed this threat was in the terms of what I earlier called the legitimation crisis, for without a community in which they could express their identities many Americans experienced their national identity as a form of personal illegitimacy. When we consider this experience, we tend to impose upon it twentieth-century notions of the elevation of personal over community freedom. Thus, in his sequel to Inventing America, a book that investigates the sources of political power in pre-Revolutionary America, a recent commentator, Garry Wills, has chosen the post-Revolutionary legend of George Washington as the locus for meditation.11 The subject of his meditations can be reduced to a single question: having been, in Wills's term, "invented" through the actions of the charismatic founding fathers, how could America develop an orderly line of succession? In formulating a response to this question, Wills finds in Washington the figure who, as the legendary father of our country, deliberately promoted the nation's sense of a genealogical line of succession. To add force to the issue of legitimate succession, Wills separates the legendary materials surrounding Washington's life from their usual historical locations--his decision to command the Revolutionary army and his election as the first president--and brings them into relation with those two extraordinary occasions when the question of national succession and the related issues of national security and historical continuity seemed most urgent: the historically distinct but psychologically inseparable decisions to resign from military duty and from the office of the presidency. Because they seemingly sec ular charisma guiding Wills's discussion, these resignations from office fascinate Wills much more than do Washington's acceptances of power. According to the most fundamental tenet of that theory, a charismatic leader's resignation from office should result in the disruption of the orderly procedures of succession he alone could legitimately authorize. Washington's resignations differ significantly, in Wills's versions, from those of other charismatic leaders because they signal his willingness to give up the power he has agreed to exercise with reluctance. After emphasizing the relation between the willingness to resign power and the reluctance to assume it, Wills equates public reluctance with political pretense. Washington carefully staged these resignations, Wills argues, because within the context of Revolutionary America those who appeared least eager for power, those resigned to accept rather than eager to attain it, would be those most read- ily invested with power. What Wills calls Washington's carefully staged "acts" of resignation thus legitimize the theory of secular charisma informing Wills's book. Wills gains historical legitimacy for this argument when he reminds us of the "historic" affiliation by artists, writers, and politicians of Washington with Cincinnatus, one of those legendary figures from world history our young nation used to come to terms with George Washington's unusual actions. The similarities make the comparison seem inevitable. Like Cincinnatus, Washington gave up the sword for the plow; like Cincinnatus Washington treated his military office not as a legitimate but as an "emergency power" granted by the nation's government at a time of national danger and to be handed back to that same government once the danger had passed. But the one crucial dissimilarity should lead us to a qualification of Wills's argument. Unlike Cincinnatus, Washington did not as yet have a duly constituted government capable of accepting his resignation from command of the army. The separation from England, achieved by his command, had not as yet resulted in the agreement among the colonies, the social contract, that would convert them into the United States of America. Without such a government, Washington, unlike Cincinnatus, would f nd no legitimate power capable of accepting his resignation. When reconsidered within this context, Washington's resignation has a different signifi- cance for American history. The unusual terms of resignation of military power were implicit in Washington's letter accepting it. In offering him the commission to serve, the New York legislature wrote: "America . . . may have sure pledges that he will faithfully perform the duties of his high office; and readily lay down his power when the general weal requires it." And Washington replied: "When we assumed the soldier we did not lay aside the citizen; and we shall most sincerely rejoice with you in that happy hour when the establishment of American liberty, upon the most firm and solid foundation, shall enable us to return to our Private Stations in the bosom of a free, peaceful, and Happy Country." 12 We can best ascertain the effect of Washington's decision to lay down arms when we consider the alternative. As commander-in-chief of a victorious army, he could have established, after the defeat of the British, a military government. Instead, Washington aligned himself with the foundations of what was to become the Constitution, and, as a representative of this as yet unwritten document, he actually persuaded General Gates and his party of militia away from the military takeover they thought the only valid form of government. He did not resign from his military duties, then, so much as he used his prior office as commander-in-chief of the armed forces to authorize the validity of a not as yet formulated contractual agreement that would lead to the formation of the United States. If we correlate this unwritten document with one of the terms used in the empowerment of Washington, i.e., the "general weal," we discover an unusual turn of affairs. Washington did not resign when, as the New York legislature put it, "the general weal required it." The general weal did not yet exist. But in resigning, Washington acknowledged or rather affirmed the existence of a general weal capable of accepting his resignation. In his prior office as the commanding general of an army, Washington converted what otherwise could have been interpreted as the rash and impulsive demands of upstart colonies into the decisive powers of a nation that was about to be. In his surrender of military duty Washington indicated his faith in a general weal or commonwealth whose demands were greater than any personal interest. His resignation, in other words, constituted the preformation, as a scene in the life of a private citizen, of a pro tem government. In surrendering to a general will not yet constituted, Washington performed what the Constitution would later turn into part of a national agreement: the orderly transfer of power, as ensured by the "separation of powers." What remains most uncanny about Washington's conversion of his personal action into the site of a transfer of national power, however, inheres not in the action itself but in its constitutive agencies. For Washington did not merely resign from his office of representative of a nation's military; he resigned to his office of representative of an as yet unwritten contract, the Constitution, which would resolve the conflicting interests of the colonies into the general weal of the United States of America. Washington, then, as a private person, never truly appeared at all. Or rather, the private person Washington appeared only long enough to preenact the acceptance of an as yet unwritten social compact which required the surrender of the selfinterest of each private citizen to the general weal. Put simply, Washington's resignation translated civic virtue, the sacrifice of self-interest for the general interest of the commonwealth, into an exemplary founding action. In his association of Washington with the mythic Cincinnatus, Wills effectually ignores what Washington was eager to emphasize: the implications of his actions for the commonwealth. As a postRevolutionary nation, America needed to convert the fundamental impulse of will certain to motor a revolution--the urge to rebel against an authority--into a past action. And one of the ways in which the rebellious impulse was made to seem past was through its redesignation as a lower, primitive, or unevolved form of a higher or civilized will. Not the impulsive will of a single man, but the commanding design of a higher; or, borrowing the terms of Enlightenment philosohies, a more mature will, resulting when individuals surrendered the conflicting interests and warring impulses keeping them separate for the agreements bringing them together. When considered in this context, the image of Cincinnatus accrued power for Washington not by underscoring his reluctance to exercise it, but by supervising its orderly transfer. As the figure who oversaw from the past the resignation of the representative of rebel forces to the representative of a polis of mature citizens, Cincinnatus implicitly corroborated that the first responsibility of the new government was the need to get the Revolution behind them. In designating his resignation from the Revolutionary army as a return to the liberty and peace of a private citizen, Washington, in his private person, established two claims prerequisite for a stable government--its ability to be permanent and to represent the will of the people. By resigning the rebel will to what would become the Constitution, Washington preconfirmed the government's power to represent the will of the people; by treating this governmental power as a form preexisting his entrance into the Revolutionary army, Washington gave that government a pre- Revolutionary form, or rather a historic form. In his resignation, then, Washington did not, as Wills claims, conceal his private need for continued "Revolutionary" power through the public charade of a reluctance to accept it. By representing himself as the citizen of a pre-Revolutionary nation to which he could return after performing the extraordinary and unusual duties of revolution, he turned the Revolution not into the nation's founding moment but into that extraordinary episode in the nation's history where it became necessary for the nation to recover and secure an already existing past. All of which is to say that Washington's public resignation turned out to be the occasion through which the nation could imagine a past for its social contract. And we can best ascertain the force of this transformation by resituating it within the authoritative political context of our own day. For in our day, the fiction of the social contract as the ongoing negotiation with the general will of the people has been replaced. No longer can the individual express freedom through a working relationship to a general will expressive, in turn, of varying agreements working through the continuing negotiations of the collective heterogeneity known as the people. Instead, the people have been turned into a collective homogeneity, the masses, and individuals more commonly express freedom as their separation from the masses than, as was the case in Washington's time, as their participation in the will of the people. An even more fundamental revisionary equation presently sustains this attitude. Consequent to the appearance of fascism and communism as political systems competitive with America's, the general will has been generalized into a totalitarian will to power, and this generalization has, in its turn, demanded a revision: of the formerly free will of the people into the tyranny of the masses. In his modern book on Washington, Gary Wills clarifies the difficulty of getting the Revolutionary moment behind us. According to the logic of Wills's oppositional frame, the individual can express freedom not through associations with but only through independence from the will of others. And this fundamental separation of the individual from any group necessarily leads to and validates the notion of secular charisma guiding Willis's discussion, for it implies the inability of the general weal ever to arrive at a decision that will do otherwise than bind the individual to the distractions of the moment: a bondage that, in its turn, can be answered only by a superior, because individually rather than group-formulated, mode of decision making: that of the charismatic individual. The individual chooses alienation, in the decision to be free from the group, as both the legitima tion of power and the best way to exercise power. Which is why he is reduced to one of two positions: either to that of a passive spectator of unfree because group-associated forms of power (which, Wills suggests, political life really is); or to that of a leader who accrues power by "stag- ing," as in Wills's analysis of Washington's scenario of resignation, his independence of the group. Will's analysis highlights the contradiction at work in this modern conception: the power of the charismatic political leader derives its only legitimacy in the eyes of the people from his independence from the group. But he is not independent: his leadership depends upon his power, again and again, to get the people to follow him. His assertions of independence are therefore unauthentic or theatrical, and his power illegitimate. Put into the simplest form, the will of the charismatic leader becomes indistinguishable from the tyrannical will of the people. Now I should like to reactivate our earlier qualification of Wills's theory by suggesting that Washington was exercising a political virtue utterly inimical to both the notion of charismatic power and the oppositional frame underlying it. For Washington, as we have seen, did not stage a resignation but resigned himself, not as either an individual or a mass man but as the mediation between them, to a general weal which his act of resignation lent palpable form. The reappearance of Washington's resignation in popular legend as well as the classics in American literature only underscores its most fundamental quality: in resigning, Washington was not staging but carrying out, as his newly won right, an action embodying all the terms of the civic covenant 13-- the surrender of self-interest for the interests of the commonwealth. We can say that Washington resigned from military duty in order to fulfill the obligation of a prior contract. But in order to ascertain the force of the obligations of this absolutely prior contract we might wonder what might have happened had Washington taken an alternative course of action: what would have happened if Washington's resignation had been demanded rather than freely offered. Would we have had a smooth transfer of power from military action to civil government, or would America have found herself in an endless vacillation between rebellion against authority and tyrannical assertion of authority, characteristic of, say, the aftermath of the French Revolution? Or characteristic of, on the other hand, Wills's description of the relations between Washington and the American people and Fiedler's description of Rip Van Winkle's relationship with his wife. These descriptions are of a piece: while Fiedler's Rip had to get free of his wife, Wills's Washington had to be free of the American people. But they coincide in modern rather than historical contexts. And their concept of freedom, as that which can belong only to an individual and be expressed only negatively, is modern too. In arguing for a different interpretation of Washington's resignation, I do not want to replace one idealization, that of the free individual, with another--of the American people. Instead, I want to call attention to an element missing from these modernist versions, but one very much present in the past. The best way to call attention to what was present then and missing now is to remember how the role George Washington plays in Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" differs from the part he plays in Garry Wills's Cincinnatus. The legend of the headless horseman involves the Major Andre incident, and that incident concerns Washington's power to execute a decision on his own authority and his need for consultation with the general will of the people. Many of the American people sympathized with the division in Major Andre's sympathies because they shared them. And in continuing to feel haunted by the injustice of Washington's decision, the Americans who kept the incident alive by trading on versions of the legend established a council of their own on the matter, quite different from Washington's. Part of the reason the citizens of Sleepy Hollow kept alive the legend of Major Andre was to differentiate their local judgment from Washington's decision. Through such legends as this one, and such related activities as rumor, gossip, and regional tales, Americans in the nineteenth century came into collective relation with issues of national importance. This communal and collective participation, with the particular, and now extraordinary, relations of individuals and groups it entailed, is difficult for us to identify, because for one thing, as I suggested earlier, local group interests tended not to be articulated in Washington by men interested in representing a national identity. Modern critics have had especial difficulty, given the modernist assumptions I have been considering here. Yet such collective participation is clearly active in the exchanges of rumor, gossip, and tales that function in Irving's Sketches, Brown's Gothic novels, and Hawthorne's historical romances. By exchanging these forms of group discourse, communities took col lective possession of historical facts and political persons. Legends, gossip, and local tales required interpretation, from within an otherwise un differentiated group. Each individual within the group worked out his own attitude to an issue only in relation to those of the other members of the community. And the decision-making process included tale telling as an essential aspect of communal deliberations. Tales, legends, and gossip brought otherwise impersonal, abstract questions within terms compatiblewith community organization. Different local regions developed different legends about Washington. The different legends allowed each region to identify Washington as a participant in its processes. These legendary associations enabled local communities to participate collectively in national decisions. Gossip is the more transitory of these communal forms. As an account of what a people would like to believe about a subject, it establishes a superficial relation between the subject and the community. The superficiality often proves to be the most beneficial trait. For instead of turning his subject into an object of contempt, gossip usually resulted in intimacy among those exchanging it. Through the exchange of gossip, a group experiences an intimacy more usually associated with individuals. Gossip offers a community the opportunity to form what we could call the private life of the people. In gossiping about someone whose personal affairs otherwise endanger a community's relations, the community finds a way to return that person to their terms. Legends, on the other hand, are cherished accounts of what a people cannot help believing. The people of a region gather these accounts and hold onto them precisely because they cannot or will not be verified by history. Unassimilable to history yet indicative of the ways in which com- munities organize their acknowledgment of what continues to draw them together, legends are what remains unspoken about a people. Yet legends bear repeating precisely because they constitute the preconditions for a people's history. Legends are what history cannot accommodate because they outline the shadowy border between the fictions history has produced as its facts and the facts history must pass over as mere fictions. Representations and Legends Wills assumes an attitude toward Washington's identity as a leader much different from that of the citizens of Sleepy Hollow. But Wills's attitude is not only a modern anachronism. Following the Revolution, many Americans tried to invest the Revolutionary heroes with a surplus of cultural authority. Again, for quite specific political reasons. In the political debate transacted in the Federalist Papers, American theorists with views as different as Jefferson's and Madison's tried to invent a governmental process able to balance out the very different political energies of economic interests released by the Revolution. The "balance of powers" theory of government resulting from these debates was designed to permit both newer and older versions of government to exist side by side. The relationship among the executive and legislative branches of government was founded in the hope of enabling a balanced exchange between national leadership and local interests, with the judiciary branch designated to sustain the balance. The major difficulty confronting the designers of this theory was the issue of political representation. More specifically, they wondered how to represent the will of the American people. For the Federalists among them, the American people were indistinguishable from mobs, susceptible to the rabble-rousing rhetoric of counter-revolutionaries. To prevent a reactivation of volatile Revolutionary energies, they represented the Revolution as a permanent feature of American government. When described as a balance of power, the relationship between the executive and the legislative branches of government designated the power of the people not merely to represent themselves to their leader but to direct his will, through their legislation. Should the president fail to act properly, the Revolutionary imperative of the people could result in impeachment proceedings. The Federalists wanted to contain the Revolutionary impulse within this representation of balanced powers. But they also wanted to assure that the people would have a represented, rather than a direct, relation to the federal government. In centralizing the quite diverse, multiply directed interests of the American people in their model government, the designers of the Constitution alienated the people's expression of their will from its representation. To sustain this alienation, they enhanced the value of the men chosen to represent the people's will, as well as their oratorical means of representing it. We can best ascertain the consequences of this overidealizing of the po litical function of representation by considering the social role played by "founding fathers." In designing the political organization of a nation described as democratic, and which should have been free to revise that organization, these men had to devise a way to maintain it. As democratic men they were no different from their equals; but as founding fathers they were not men among equals: they were progenitors, who produced the equality and liberty the rest of the American people represented. Designated founding fathers, they could claim to be the freedom and equality other Americans could honor and thereby learn how to represent. The idealization of the characters of the people's representatives, in other words, assumed the early form of a denial of their representative function and in effect reversed the relation between the leaders and the will they were to represent. They were what the American people should represent. With the people turned into representatives of the founding fathers, the founders could claim to be the most representative of the will of the people--by simply being themselves. The Adams family exploited the founders' monopoly over the representative function of government to establish a version of an American royal family each of whose members inherited the power to rule by being.'4 In redressing this imbalance in representation, local groups removed the founders from their positions within national office and turned them into characters within their tales. Popular legends and tales about these officials literally subjected them to the renegotiation of their characters among sometimes quite brutal townsfolk. When the overidealized founders passed through tales told and retold by townspeople and villagers, they lost their social distance as well as their national identities. The extraordinary little boy in Weems's biography, who chopped down a cherry tree but never told a lie, grew up to father children by his slaves in popular legends, brutalize his troops, and aspire to monarchic rule. Now, it could be argued that these local accounts only confirmed Washington's authority by "rounding out" the official biographies. Local accounts could be understood as ways of coming to terms with federal decisions by putting them into more local terms. They could be understood as such, that is, were they not associated by Thomas Jefferson during the decisive election of 1800 with the authority of the popular as opposed to the federal will. Jefferson encouraged the people to take possession of their representatives by subduing the representatives' self-interest to the public will. The people's tales compelled the nation's leaders to step down from the public stage that was more compatible with the self-representations of the Federalists. The fundamental debate between the Federalists and the Republicans during the election of 1800 concerned the role of the public. The Federalists dismissed the public's opinions as prejudice, unworthy of consideration when arriving at a political judgment, while Jefferson considered the public will the fundamental value of political life. Without a public will, there could be no civic virtue but only self-interest. The public will constituted the greater interest of a nation to which every citizen should become subservient. Jefferson of course recognized that the public will could dissolve into the undifferentiated reaction formations of unruly mobs. He turned to interest groups, vital regional communities, city clubs, and local guilds and associations of various kinds as examples of democratic organizations. He also recognized the value of tales in organizing these collectives into individuated groups and group-minded individuals. Through tales and romances, Jefferson wrote, "the field of imagination is thus laid open to our use and lessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home every point." Without these tales, the group's power to make up its own mind on matters of political importance would be countermanded by official accounts. The tales, instead of being subservient to national accounts, permitted local groups to accrue national value for their local associations. Tales put their tellers into vital relation with otherwise alien national powers, and the different versions, additions, elisions, and other "telling" procedures these groups engaged in when retelling an important political incident enabled them to make it an event for their collective experience. This activity was constitutive of a will of the American people suitable for representation in Washington. Unalienated Will National leaders claimed a center stage, set upon the scene of the nation's founding, with appropriate social actors (the founding fathers and their line of charismatic succession) and appropriate roles for them to play. But their claim to centrifugal political power was opposed by the competing centripetal claims of the heterogeneous interest groups through the states. Positioning, say, John Adams in a local tale rather than a White House meant disclaiming his powers over the self-determination of a local group. And these disclaimers, when coupled with the power to vote a politician in or out of office, developed validity for an American public sphere. What I cannot overemphasize is the role these protoliterary forms played in the formation of any American public sphere. Without legends, romances, and local gossip to countermand it, the Revolutionary mythos was possessed of extraordinary generalizing powers. We have already considered its power to abstract local places into its scene. It also provided a permanent backdrop for the national political stage, lending Revolutionary force to the actor's words. And as Sacvan Bercovitch has reminded us, this mythos lent typological force to the words and deeds even of conservative politicians. When invoked by an American politician, the rhetoric of Revolution could make the most conservative of political platforms sound prototypically American. Refusing to engage the politicians on the national scene, local groups developed other forms of self-representation invested with local associations rather than official memories. Thomas Campbell emphasized the political function of village legends when in 1816 he described them as a version of countermemory making up for an "almost total deficiency in those local associations produced by history and moral fictions." In reflecting on the cultural value of his "sketches," Washington Irving explained in 1848 that they provided "imaginative associations which live like spells and charms.'' And many American writers with aspirations for an American republic shared Longfellow's wish that all of its locale would "one day be rich in associations." 15 As all of these citations indicate, during the early nineteenth century writers needed to invest local regions with memories of their own, because the Revolutionary mythos threatened to translate all of American life into a compulsive reenactment of a single national event. As a reaction against the disconnective power of the nation's myths, these collective memories reestablished connections between local will and national events. They produced a form of political tranference, permitting the popular will to recover local relationship with the issues, purposes, and motives formerly reserved for national politicians, whose self-representations tended to become separated from the people's will. In these activities the people made the politicians servants of their will. Which is another way of saying that if the politicians would not serve the interests of the people, these forms of popular will made the politicians subservient. And in a way that would have been impossible in the official arena of discussion. As practical actors in the art of public persuasion, most politicians knew how to turn occasions for discussion into opportunities for dramatic display. As I make clear in the final chapter, politicians theatricalized the scene of public discussions, turning their speeches into spectacles to be witnessed rather than positions to be argued. To reclaim vitality for a public sphere, local groups did not engage politicians on their own terms but established a different culture. Understanding this culture requires an attitude toward protoliterary forms as well as the public through which they circulated different from the one Fiedler and Wills adopt. For both of them, the collective life of the American people is a homogeneous, generalized mass formation. As an undifferentiated collection of anonymous persons, the masses are susceptible to control, both Fiedler and Wills would have it, by cultural forms that satisfy their demand for pleasurable distraction. Since they would define the masses as that which defies differentiation, the ideal form of mass culture would confirm the masses' undifferentiated status. According to this definition, public spectacle, as that which enables a leader to separate himself from an undifferentiated mass of spectators, would be an ideal form of mass culture. In public spectacles, large groups discover the uniform response they share with a multitude of strangers. The separation between the spectators and the spectacle controlled by the leader is felt not as a loss but as the precondition for enjoyment. On the politician's stage they can watch as an actor who appears larger than life at once claims to represent them yet separates his action from those who can only witness it from within the crowd. In the nineteenth century the historic sites the American Revolution left behind provided the nation's politicians with appropriate scenes for mass spectacles. By speaking every ten years or so at the Bunker Hill Monument Daniel Webster would corroborate the powers of his person over any issue requiring national attention. And the gathered multitudes would surrender their need to participate any more deeply in the process than as spectators. When such a relation was given legendary form, however, both the personal appropriation of attention and the surrender of the public will were subject to revision. In order to dissociate the politician's position from his dramatic persona, such writers as Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter~ turned him into an allegorical presence. Allegory is a literary form with origins in a community rather than a private person. When claiming to represent an abstract principle like liberty, a dramatic speaker could make the representation appear adequate by investing it with the force of his presence. But in a community in which allegorical claims are made for the person, as in Puritan New Boston, every person is not only him- or herself but also whatever moral virtue he or she is trying to perfect. His or her confessional relation to the community turns the question of adequate representation from a pri vate matter into a subject of group deliberation. Whether or not Arthur Dimmesdale represents piety or passion, for example, does not remain an issue for him personally to decide. As soon as he makes public his struggle with these abstract moral qualities, in a community for whom the embodiment of any moral quality is always a matter of struggle, his personal struggle turns into an occasion for collective debate. All the protoliterary forms at work in the nineteenth-century public sphere had allegorical components. In working variations on the cherrytree legend of George Washington, for example, participants in the communal narrative were interested not so much in his personal character as in the trust that his character was supposed to command. In impersonating the headless horseman, Brom Bones worked through his own irresponsible, reckless relationship with the community by finding such behavior indistinguishable from a Hessian mercenary's. In permitting him to alienate his character from the qualities of irresponsibility and recklessness, the allegorical figure of the headless horseman helped Brom Bones to find an identity more appropriate to his standing in Sleepy Hollow and allowed the community to acknowledge the change in his identity. As these examples suggest, allegory played an important role in the formation of the collective life. Specifically, allegory denied the separation between the individual self-representation of universal principles and the community's power to make sense of those principles as well as of the individual. Since allegory turns principles represented in a person into subjects for communal consideration, it makes it impossible for an individual to claim merely personal relationship to them. The politicians claimed in the political arena a separate sphere for their representations of such national principles as liberty, equality, and justice. But allegory became a means of breaking down the distance between the political arena and the rest of the public sphere. Instead of sustaining a homogeneity within a group, allegory separates an individual's response to a question from already established group judgment, thereby making room t r further consideration. Allegory, like other vital forms in the public sphere, turns the group mind into an active participant in a deliberative process. An individual does not make up his own mind about the significance of a moral or political principle for his community, nor docs he let a group make up his mind for him. Instead, the single individual and all other participants in a decision over allegorical significance consider its meaning not only for themselves but for the group. The "good" of the group becomes a constitutive aspect of deliberation, as it mediates between individual discussants in their deliberations. The group life is not merely the outcome but an active participant. To call attention to the collective life forwarded by his allegories, Hawthorne often referred to them as twice-told tales. For to repeat a story is to deny sole responsibility for its authority and to reveal its socializing power. The twice-told tale exists as a relation, involving the tellers in an ongoing deliberation over something that takes place, in the telling. A twice-told tale, by demanding another telling, expands and intensifies the collective life. Such a tale can enter into relation to everyone precisely because it is authored by no one in particular but invites participation by everyone. By releasing the energies of deliberation within a group, allegory eliminates the distinction between those who participate in a decision and those who watch them. In the nineteenth century, the sense Americans made of the global allegory called the United States removed them from a spectatorial to a more involved relationship with political life. I have called specific attention to the value of allegory in the life of a collective in order to remove it from the dubious work it has been asked to perform in previous discussions of nineteenth-century American literature. In The American Novel and Its Tradition, for example, Richard Chase defines allegory as "a language of static signs and a set of truths to which they refer. In allegory the signs or symbols have little or no existence apart from their paraphrasable meaning. Allegory flourishes best, of course, when everyone agrees on what truth is, when literature is regarded as exposition, not as discovery."16 Chase proceeds to contrast allegory with symbolic literature, which "responds to disagreements about the truth." Throughout his discussion of The Scarlet Letter he finds value in it only when it approaches the "symbolistic." Chase's distinction between allegorical and the symbolic has political overtones. For him allegory has its origins in the group's opinion rather than in an individual's judgment. Consequently he can find value only in the multiple, often contradictory meanings a sign can command. In basing his distinction between allegory and symbol on the difference between a group's agreement and individual disagreements, Chase joins the modernist consensus we have found represented in Fiedler and Wills. He too believes freedom resides only in separation from a collective life, predefined as homogeneous, uniform, and unfree. But Chase is more valuable for our discussion in the implicit connections he draws between the tradition of the novel and American political life more generally. Like cultural life, "the American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of existence." Like a participant in American culture, a reader of an American novel "would have found that it lacked the sense of life as it is actually lived, that it did not establish the continuity between events and the characters' sense of events and that there was a general lack of that experience" which Chase defines as "our apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures."17 I find Chase's description of America's literary tradition valuable because it designates the conditions of cultural division at work in the nineteenth century. But what Chase doesn't acknowledge is their continued existence in the post-McCarthy years when he was writing his book. Like its nineteenthcentury counterpart, Cold War America is a culture organized around con- tradictions and division. One of the best ways to separate the public sphere from participation in the political life is and always has been through a predesignation of the polis as composed of a uniform mass. All of Chase's descriptions of America's traditions tacitly sanction a separation of cultural from political life. And he legitimizes this separation by defining political dissent in terms of an opposition to group will. In his reading, political freedom consists in the power to elaborate and deploy the contradictions of everyday life. According to Chase, American literature exists for the sake of refining one's alertness to contradiction. And the power to maintain multiple attitudes toward an issue, resulting from this exercise, enables Chase to "experience" the contradictions the characters cannot. In cultivating an experience of cultural contradiction, Chase only cultivates the separation of powers--the cultural from the political, the individual from the group, the person from his representations--at work in the greater culture. His interpretation invokes dissent or the power to disagree as its rationale but rarefies dissent into a form of ironic apprehension that only confirms his individual right to separate from any public sphere in which his attitude could make a difference. Chase's interpretive strategy works over the powers of dissent until dissent itself appears indistinguishable from the recognition of contradiction, disconnection, alienation organizing the culture. His interpretation justifies his disconnection of dissent from a public sphere and his identification of dissent with a private world. Which is another way of saying that interpretation becomes Chase's way of certifying a nonparticipative role in the life of the public sphere. The same habit of mind is at work here as was at work in the other modern readers of nineteenth- century America. They read that culture for signs of the separation between the individual and public life that confirms their own. But throughout this discussion I have tried to point out very specific countermovements at work. And oftentimes these countermovements worked through the same forms modern Americans use to confirm their cultural contradictions. Then, allegory was an instrument in the collective life; today allegory is seen as opposed to an individual's freedom. But it can remain opposed to an individual's freedom only if that freedom is defined in terms of an infinite interiority, forever different from everyone else's. That may be a way of understanding freedom now. But in the nineteenth century, the secession issue demanded that all Americans take account of the relationship between their individual lives and the national interest. And slavery, the issue that made secession a possibility, demanded of America's citizens a careful examination of their relation to rather than alienation from their actions. The slave made concrete the relation between what an individual wanted to do with his motives and what someone else, whether slaveowner or politician, wanted him to do. Today we can sustain the contradictions between our personal and public lives as signs of our individual freedom, but the issues leading up to the Civil War demanded that the nation come to a reckoning about the relationship between a nation's polity and its citizens' lives. And in this book I will show the part American literature played in arriving at this reckoning. Visionary Compacts This discussion of the modernist appropriation of nineteenth-century American literature returns us to the legitimation crisis, which was the original subject of this book. By reading nineteenth- century texts in terms of cultural separations--personal motives from political action, significance from world, the past from the present, the individual from the collective, and authority from identity--the tradition of critics of American literature rationalizes a crisis in legitimation. This crisis is not specific to American culture or to American literature but inheres in the core of mod- ernism itself. Modernism "both affirms its historic discontinuity from a past and needs to legitimize this discontinuity by locating ancestral origins for it. Modernism refers both to an act--without a past--and to a literature about that act. Because language is intrinsically mediational, modernist literature cannot truly be that act but can only be about that act. So modernism inevitably traces a frustrating double movement. It can never coincide with the present moment, which is its subject. The literary critic Paul de Man has described this situation with all the sympathy his irony will permit: The continuous goal of modernity, the desire to break out of literature toward the reality of the moment, prevails and in its turn, folding back upon itself, engenders the repetition and continuation of literature. Thus modernity, which is fundamentally a falling away t`rom literature and a repetition of history, also acts as the principle that gives literature duration and historical existence '8 In this reading of modernity, its behavior in relation to the past cannot be distinguished from a modern individual's in relation to a group. Both modernity and its individuals wish utterly to separate themselves from the past and the masses respectively. And both use the same terms to represent the opposition. The past against which modernity struggles turns out to be an oppressive logocentric tradition, become homogeneous out of a common predisposition: namely, to render each of its moments fully selfpresent. Like the tradition, the masses against which the individual must affirm his independence are rendered uniform by being reduced to a single demand: to make the individual subservient to their will. Modernism depends on both the present's opposition to the past and the individual's opposition to the mass in order to sustain its activity. For the "past" can be dissociated from the present only if it can be conceived of as undifferenti- ated, and the masses, in constituting the appropriate representation of the undifferentiated, permit a break from the past without regret. These two cRonceptions, then, are deeply interrelated. In designating the past as a logocentric tradition, the most recent ideology of modernity, French poststructuralism, borrows a term important for a shared communal life, i.e., "tradition," in order to confirm the accompanying defini- tion of the individual as a person inevitably cut off from a community. In defining the individual as inevitably separated from a past, modernism also disconnects the individual from any collective purposes or motives to be carried forward from a past. Commenting on this modern notion of a "present" simultaneously discontinuous from both past and future, Frank Lentricchia underscores its effect in the public sphere: The present properly conceived . . . is the time of praxis, but understood in its usual fashion, the "present" is inhospitable to action. Praxis taking place in a moment really segregated from past and future, a contemporaneity isolated unto itself~; wholly self-present, would in its ahistorical character possess no critical memory of our society's genealogy. It could not reach back--nor would it be able to bring to the moment, in its consciousness blanketed by a temporality utterly immediate, any sense of potentiality, of the possible, of change.'9 Lentricchia's description points to the crucial problem modernism poses for the public sphere. In separating the past off from the present, modernism makes cultural change impossible. In order for change to be meaningful there must be something to change. But modernism, in reducing each moment into an abstract discontinuity, reproduces endless novelty in place of change. Instead of being available for either change or continuity, the past is simply discounted as the outmoded. And this endless-obsolescence procedure produces an aesthetic consciousness grounded on the legitimation crisis. What this crisis finally legitimizes, however, is a cultural identity grounded on crisis itself. Criticism gives this culturally pervasive state of crisis density and critical mass by rationalizing it as the discovery of textual aporias. In the discovery of an aporia a critic can make the dissociation between what he knows and how he acts, the cognitive and performative dimensions of his speech and his life, seem the result of critical insight rather than cultural organization. A crisis mentality insists upon acknowledging disjunctions of all kinds. But the fundamental disjunction upon which all of this is grounded is that between mass culture and high culture. The literary critic, as a professional connoisseur of crisis, oversees the affiliation of political life with mass culture rather than with high culture. And the critic's activities are designed to perfect the separation between mass culture, where modern individuals perform the labors of their everyday lives, and high culture, where the individual experiences the separation from enabling cultural activity as the loss of a tradition. The critic simultaneously acknowledges political activity and justifies separation from it. As Terry Eagleton has recently reminded us, criticism derives its cultural authority through its historical affiliations with political and religious dissent.20 But recent criticism rarefies this freedom of speech into an opposition to determined significations. The verbal indeterminacy resulting from this activity declares itself as a freedom from explicit determinant political practices. Political dissent is also generalized into a pervasive adversarial or critical opposition. This generalized oppositional stance, often asserted in the name of cultural heterogeneity, is not usually associated with any spe cific cultural group. The term "heterogeneity" borrows its pathos from its relation to marginal cultural groups. But if these groups should express their needs in explicit terms, they would violate the critical principle of heterogeneity. In laying claim to fundamental political freedoms--of speech, press, self-representation--yet dissociating these freedoms from any explicit cultural groups, literary commentary disconnects criticism from any cultural purpose other than generalizing its crisis attitude. And this generalized crisis sanctions the disconnection between the cultural and political dimensions organizing the modern public sphere. A similar disconnection of the political arena from the public sphere was at work in nineteenth- century America. But instead of validating this division by turning the resultant crisis in cultural legitimation into a pervasive cultural attitude, the writers I will consider overcame the disconnection by radical renegotiations of the American social compact. As a cultural rationale for a crisis mentality, the legitimation crisis validates the division between political authority and the authentic experiences of modern life. When consigned to an activity in mass culture from which an individual must free himself, the political becomes an autonomous dimension of modern life. Its inclusion within the low aesthetics of mass culture ensures for politics the power to operate according to its own rules. The disconnection of politics from other aspects of everyday life gives politicians their own authority. And this same disconnection pro- duces a nonpolitical form of self-legitimation for individuals within nonpolitical dimensions of modern life. Unable to authorize their lives in terms of a political sphere they have discredited, modern individuals turn their opposition to political authority into a principle of cultural authority. Hence they can convert their "generalized opposition" to political authority into the "political authority" of everyday life in the modern world. I have tried to show how the Cold War sanctions this division of political issues from everyday life. Its clear opposition between "our" genuine freedom and "their" totalitarianism presumes at once to define the only true political question and to decide it--as an ideal opposition. In the nineteenth century, a similar ideal opposition was at work in the organization of American life: the Revolutionary mythos also turned a generalized cultural opposition to political authority into a way of making American politics a self-determining activity. But Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, and, in a different way, Poe, wrote in order to overcome this division. When we consider this period we usually presuppose in it the relationship of a mass (or an elite) audience and an inventive artist that is at work in our times. But when these writers wrote, the public could not agree to the division of their everyday lives and the nation's political identity. Many of them were preparing to go to war in order to express their political purposes. And, as I suggested earlier, the Civil War screens our modern considerations of the period. Having been fought because of disagreements over the fundamental issues of union, slavery, and expansionism, the Civil War, like its Cold War descendant, now makes these issues seem already definitively decided--even in the historical periods before the Civil War. I cannot do justice in this book to the many complex attitudes toward these issues that were at work in the period, but I can suggest the ways in which these issues demanded political action from all America's citizens, and the ways in which American Renaissance writers tried to overcome a division of cultural realms. For these writers, I would maintain, wrote not to impose their political decisions on others, but to establish an American public sphere in which all citizens could enter into the decision-making process. The public sphere in nineteenth-century America was as thoroughly aestheticized then as it is now. Then politicians routinely acknowledged the relation between political and artistic activities by appointing writers and artists to political posts. Hawthorne and Melville were Custom House officers, Whitman was an effective ward leader, Emerson often shared the lyceum circuit with politicians, and even Poe was considered (briefly) for a post in Washington. Artistic work was acknowledged as implicitly political because both artists and politicians shared a common task. In antebellum America they both tried to shape the public will. In antebellum America the masses were not homogeneous. It would take the Civil War to turn different interest groups into opposed mass movements. Prior to the Civil War many politicians invoked that previous mobilization of the masses, the Revolutionary War, to urge a mass consensus. But disagreements, often within the same person, broke most consensus formations into splinter groups. Confronted with this release of numerous, conflicting interest groups, politicians tried to consolidate them into voting blocs. They used all their oratorical power to reduce the masses into the position of spectators. But writers like Hawthorne and Melville believed in the value of shared demo cratic processes as opposed to spellbinding oratory. Instead of affirming the orator's power, which as we have seen was founded upon the scene of the Revolution, Hawthorne returned to the pre- Revolutionary origins of American culture. And he found there a vital reserve of unfinished cultural business. Then he devised an aesthetic strategy to make this collective life from the past the subject as well as the potential result of his tale. His friend Melville would in Moby-Dick simply expose the orator as a figure of self-aggrandizement. When he wrote, Melville imagined Hawthorne as an impersonation of a collective readership. Believing Hawthorne the one person in the American sphere able to recognize the falsity of political rhetoric, Melville addressed his novels to Hawthorne in order to write a more adequate public sphere into existence. Both of these writers refused to sanction any division in the cultural realm. Instead of identifying their works as original inventions of isolated artists, both Melville and Hawthorne identified their writing with collective projects. Melville's narratives depended on an American public to whose reaction against the orator's compulsive rhetoric he gave shape. Hawthorne's, on the other hand, aspired to a communal life that existed only in his writing. In drafting a new social compact for America, these writers wrote prefaces making explicit the relationship between their writing and that greater process of political deliberation called the public will. In the preface to The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne specifically situated himself in relation to an alienating public sphere. In the preface he experienced what was missing from his present political life as the return of a repressed memory. That repressed memory had to do not with an event in his personal life but with the vital collective life of the pre-Revolutionary past. In returning to the pre-Revolutionary past Hawthorne violated the terms of the Revolution- ary mythos that insisted on the separation of a community's will from a politician's representations. He returned from that past, moreover, with a different moral faculty for the American people to exercise: a collective memory capable of reestablishing their relation to purposes from the past in need of present enactment. I have called Hawthorne's renegotiation of the terms of American social life a visionary compact because in his writing he saw what was missing from his contemporary life. In Hawthorne's view only the acknowledgment of a collective will could make good on the principle of participatory democracy upon which the nation was founded. Hawthorne's visionary compact did not oppose any existing ideology. Such an opposition would have personalized his project by incorporating it within the scenario of an individual's rebellion against an oppressor. Hawthorne's tales derive all their force by drawing upon an unfulfilled promise in America's founding covenant. Hawthorne's America needed to be reminded of its ongoing power to renegotiate the terms of the covenant binding Americans to one another. He intended his tales to participate in democratic processes that could be activated by the telling and the reading. In their writing as well, such American transcendentalists as Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau established visionary compacts, but different from Hawthorne's. Unlike him, they did not return to a collective life from the nation's past. Instead they took advantage of political fictions capitalized on by the orators and situated themselves on the still-present founding scene. Unlike the orators, however, they did not claim sole power to act upon the principles found there. Instead they asked that these principles be available to all Americans and not just the orators. "Why cannot we also enjoy an original relation with the universe?" Emerson asked at the outset of Nature. At a time in which the politicians compromised on founding principles for the sake of expediency, Emerson and Whitman returned to the scene of the nation's founding to recover integrity for the principles of liberty and equality and make them available as motives for the actions of all Americans. In so doing, these so-called transcendentalists did not replace political realities with transcendental ideals. They returned to the political principles founding the nation and tried to forge ways to realize them. None of these writers disclaimed the founding principles as merely ideological. Each of them envisioned the founding principles as well as the covenant of relations as unfulfilled promises in need of the renewal that visionary compacts could effect. In fulfilling these promises, they developed new faculties, like self-reliance and the collective memory, capable of converting founding principles into motivating forces rather than past ideals. Instead of opposing the nation's principles, in an age of political compromise, these writers found those principles to be vital moral and political energies. All of these writers share a common cultural mission. In returning the nation to its principles they literally restored it to its soul. A nation can lose its soul the same way an individual can, by compromising on its principles. But the visionary compacts they devised were by no means homogeneous. They differed as completely as did the allegiances these different writers felt toward the individual and the community. To call attention to these differences, I have organized this book around the contrasts rather than the continuities. I emphasize the differences between Hawthorne's visionary compact and those of Whitman, Poe, Emerson, and Melville. To make their differences emphatic I treat the writers as if they were themselves involved in a common process of political and cultural deliberation. The chapters call attention to an urgent cultural task common to all of these writers by calling attention to what urged each writer differently. Throughout this book I relate nineteenth-century cultural situations to modern appropriations of them for the same reason I began this chapter with a distinction between Lawrence's study of the American tradition and those of modern commentators: to call attention to what is missing in modern commentary on the period. In so doing, however, I do not avoid commentary or literary interpretation. To do so would risk turning these works into illustrations of a historical problem. But when I do interpret I bring the interpretation into relation with a greater set of cultural forces than the interpreter's will. In returning to these visionary compacts from the past I do not wish to affirm the cultural value of these individual writers. Instead I wish to insist upon their value as a cultural reserve, a store of unrealized cultural motives, purposes, and political processes we honor but do not act upon. In a modern world, whose cultural contradictions are organized through a generalized crisis in legitimation, these visionary compacts continue to do cultural work. They can establish an enabling context for overcoming the divisions of cultural life at work in our own time.