Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (review)

This book is timely in several respects. It engages with the post- and trans-national debates that have produced some of the most challenging work of the last decade in the field that used to be called American Studies. It explores new theoretical paradigms for such discussions and ventures into ambitious comparisons across centuries, continents, and genres. In a very specific sense, too, it is a book of and for the times. Dimock’s style is inviting and delightful. Her tone is mild and she never hectors, but this is unmistakably a dissenting report from a war zone. Through Other Continents is a strong voice from the academy, post-9/11, to urge that America’s engagement with world religions, histories, and cultures not only should be, but has always been “a complex tangle of relations” (3)—and that we have much to gain by exploring these. Metaphors of kinship—webs, coils, rhizomes, coils, loops, yokes—occur a lot in a densely textured argument that itself becomes metonymic of the connectedness it advocates. This is no small feat when her examples range from the Bhagavad Gita to Walden Pond, Egyptian funerary ritual to Italian revolutionaries, the conquests of Alexander to the golden bowls of Henry James, Native American coyotes to Chinese monkeys. All (and more) contribute to a thoroughgoing critique of the “scholarly unilateralism” (3) of nation-based literary studies, as notably practiced in the exceptionalisms of “American Lit.” It is a large admonishment: not only poor criticism, the author implies, but dangerously myopic—a purblind refusal of the inevitable, inexorable connectedness of the human species across time and space.

Through Other Continents’ impressive purpose is to reconnect close critical reading with the largest ethical issues that face western societies in a global context. The political engagements of the literary are everywhere apparent. Dimock offers “the playing field called ‘literary culture,’ brought into being by that most intimate of acts, the act of reading,” (8) as an example of an activity that questions national parameters at levels both below and above the jurisdictional frame of territorial or national power. It is, she argues, “an NGO of sorts . . . operating on a scale both too small and too large to be fully policed by the nation-state” (8). It is no surprise that nation-based literary studies are briskly dismissed: “What assumptions,” she inquires with a certain asperity, “enable us to take an adjective derived from a territorial jurisdiction and turn it into a mode of literary causality, making the latter reflexive of and indeed coincidental with the former?” (3). Both the provincialism and short-windedness of Benedict Anderson’s influential theory of nationalism and its dependence on the temporal standardization characteristic of post-Newtonian western culture stand exposed. These chapters argue forcefully against the “measuring tape” theory of time, “uniform and abstract, untouched by locality, and untouched by the differential weight of the past,” as the actual experience of individuals and societies (2).

As an alternative Dimock offers the governing concept of “Deep Time”: a kind of space-time continuum whose coordinates extend backwards, forwards, and sideways to bring into alignment languages, peoples, and ideas not connected by common origin, direct influence, or shared political or religious structures. “Understood as temporal length added to the spatial width of the planet,” Deep Time “gives us a set of coordinates at once extended and embedded, as fine-grained as it is long-lasting, operating both above and below the plane of the nation. The subnational and the transnational come together here in a loop” (23). This is the kinship of the archive, as revealed, for example, in the affinities between the Egyptian Book of the Dead (which Margaret Fuller could not have known) and Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Its logic is not causal but associative, multivalent rather than unidirectional.

Such comparisons, as Dimock is well aware, are risky: connections may be banal—the lowest common denominator of resemblance—and provoke a “so what?” response; or if unexpected...