A Usable American Literature

When I first read Terry Eagleton’s thundering assaults on Bush’s imperial America, not long after “Shock and Awe,” what struck me was how much parts of After Theory (2003) sounded like a literary “American studies” that flourished 150 years earlier. Is this Herman Melville diagnosing the cultural monomania that produced Ahab in Moby-Dick (1850): “What is immortal in the United States, what refuses to lie down and die, is precisely the will. . . It is a terribly uncompromising drive, one which knows no faltering or bridling, irony or self-doubt. It is so greedy for the world that it is at risk of pounding it to pieces in its sublime fury, cramming it into its insatiable maw” (187)? Is this Nathaniel Hawthorne explicating his critique of industrial obsession in “The Birth-mark” (1843): “It is its demented refusal to limit and finitude, its crazed, blasphemous belief that you can do anything if you put your mind to it, which lies at the source of its chronic weakness. Nations or individuals which cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the realities of frailty and failure—that this is what we all start from, and where we all return—are feeble indeed” (226)? To fast-forward, is this F. Scott Fitzgerald lecturing on The Great Gatsby (1925): “The USA is a nation which tends to find failure shameful, mortifying or even downright sinful.. . . No group of people uses the word ‘dream’ so often” (185)? The Eagleton who helped teach me to read American literature as an historical and ideological symptom—an indispensable approach—unwittingly demonstrated the power of American literature as a critical and theoretical resource.

This sent me back to the idea of a “usable past,” a term coined by Van Wyck Brooks in 1918, explored and expanded by Lewis Mumford in the 1920s and after, and implemented in the early development of American studies by the likes of F. O. Matthiessen. The “usable past” that such critics originally had in mind was revisionary literary history. They waged a pragmatic regeneration-through-literature campaign for numerous reasons: to give modern American artists and critical spirits a sense of solidarity with undervalued (or buried) creative and dissenting authors; to galvanize civic discussion of what America and its “cultural economy” (Brooks 168–69) was, is, and can be; to engage critic and reader in a self-critical self-historicizing. Put differently, the “usable past” critics assumed responsibility for showing how Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and others could be useful in re-creating American self-conception. These champions of the usable challenged utilitarian capitalist meanings of “useful.” If their social aesthetics concentrated on the arts, the significance of this was never purely aesthetic but fostered encompassing quality-of-life values. Usable historicizing potentially functioned as an organizing tool: to help re-organize ideas, feelings, commitments, values, and hope.¹

Although he does not cite them, the usable literature/usable past crew was probably on Kenneth Burke’s mind in 1941 when he reframed literature as a strategic “equipment for living” (304). On the eve of World War II, Burke was drawn to the Concise Oxford Dictionary’s definition of strategy when rethinking what literature does: “Movement of an army or armies in a campaign, art of so moving or disposing of troops or ships as to impose upon the enemy the place and time and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself” (297). Agit-prop troupes in the 1930s had staged the theoretical argument that “art is a weapon,” especially potent when presented simply as being about “life” rather than a particular political, class, racial, and national organization of life.² Burke, influenced by Marxism, may also have been pondering this kind of work. Like the “usable” critics and the agit-prop activist-artists, he understood literature as an organizing force: organizing incentive, self-definition, and agency. “Proverbs,” he wrote, “are strategies for dealing with situations” (296). He, too, thought of...