Democracy, Memory, and Methodology

Democracy is a central term in the arguments advanced by both Paul Downes in Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature and Sarah J. Purcell in Sealed With Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America, yet the word means something quite different to each author. For Downes, democracy names a political structure in which the people simultaneously occupy the positions of law-giver and law-receiver—a fundamental dualism that splits the democratic subject and has profound implications for systems of representation, whether political or literary. In Purcell's hands, however, democracy is closely allied with pluralism: the "democratization of public memory" of the revolutionary war that is the focus of her work involves increased public participation in defining the meaning and history of the war across an array of class, race, and gender categories. In the context of these two books, democracy thus names something of a methodological divide or perhaps a missed encounter: juxtaposing these books highlights the divergent engagements of poststructuralist literary criticism and cultural history. Rather than seek to discern the failings of either methodological approach in this comparison, one might view the multiple paths of approach to the early national period demonstrated in these two works as salutary—demonstrative of vitality rather than deficiency. Individually, each of these books offers much in the way of insight concerning the workings of democracy in the early national period; collectively, they suggest less the limitations of either historical or literary methodologies than the capaciousness of the term democracy as a historical, literary, political, and theoretical site of inquiry.

In his avowed concern with deconstruction and literary theory, Downes embarks on a project that is less familiar within the field of early national studies than Purcell's cultural history. Indeed, given the historicism that informs even most literary studies in the field, Downes's work has a novel, and sometimes unsettling feel to it precisely because of its literary theoretical bent. In broad terms, Downes is concerned with meaning-making in and around the Revolution and particularly with the decisive opposition between monarchy and democracy that structured much political and literary discourse of the time. The central deconstructive insight of the project concerns the interdependence of democracy and monarchy: rather than marking a binary opposition, Downes argues, the two terms describe an inextricable connection. As such, one can trace within the representational practices of democracy both an explicit rejection of monarchy and an implicit dependence upon notions of sovereignty contained therein. Downes thus proposes that "monarchism and republicanism [should] not be seen as the poles of an opposition but as different but related attempts to manage the same political problems" (5).

What are these political problems—the "paradoxes, inconsistencies and aporias" at stake in both monarchical and democratic structures of authority? For Downes, these problems primarily concern the legitimation of political authority—a legitimation that itself lacks legitimacy. Monarchy, for instance, turns to the theory of divine right to guarantee political authority (an "extra-legal" and "blasphemous" appropriation of divine authority, according to Downes); in related terms, democracy seeks to find its grounding in a location beyond politics—in a truth that transcends the merely political. As Jacques Derrida has argued, the attempt to find an extrapolitical site of democratic truth and authority is in evidence in a linguistic sleight of hand in the Declaration of Independence: the Declaration pronounces the sovereign power of the "People" into existence in a performative speech act but cloaks this act in mimetic or constative language by invoking both "Nature" and "Nature's God" as sources of this legal authority. Citing Derrida's reading of the Declaration, Downes thus proposes that the "constitutive aporias of the political" consist in "everything that, under the name of politics, resists the passage between the constative theory of the state and its performative history"(7).

Because democracy shares problems of legitimation—and indeed...