Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian

Washington Irving has been a casualty of chronology. More precisely, he has been a casualty of a particular way of thinking about history: the notion that history progresses through chronological, linear time.¹ For if one of the stories of the literature of the United States is the story of dawning modernity, the best that can be said about Irving is that he represents an incipient phase in the process; his writings and his career are merely harbingers of better things to come, notably, the more mature works of Cooper and then (especially) Hawthorne and Melville. This, at any rate, long constituted the standard view, which described Irving’s work not as “timeless, but temporal” and cast Irving himself as “a man of his time rather than for all time,” belonging “to an outdated phase of culture,” “too remote to engage twentieth-century sensibilities.”²

In this view, Irving would seem to be a victim of the very historical processes his historian alter-ego Diedrich Knickerbocker attempts to forestall in Irving’s first major work, A History of New York (1809). There, Knickerbocker takes on the task of rescuing the history of the Dutch settlement of New York from the “maw of oblivion.”³ If not for the toils of the patient and diligent historian, he insists, faithfully “transmit[ting] their renown to all succeeding time” (380), empires and nations, civilizations and cities, would perish, forgotten. Against the image of the reclusive chronicler poring in solitude over dusty volumes in search of dull facts and compiling his annals, Knickerbocker describes historians as “the public almoners of fame” (662), and likens them to the Creator—“the world—the world, is nothing without the historian!” (380)—or crusaders in the fight against the march of time, against the inevitability of superannuation. The early history of Dutch New York, he declares, would doubtless have been passed over by the forward rush of history had Knickerbocker himself not arrived and “snatched it from obscurity, in the very nick of time” (381). Thus, the bookish antiquarian metamorphoses into an heroic figure: “little I—the progenitor . . . with my book under my arm, and New York on my back, pressing forward like a gallant commander to honour and immortality” (381). But unlike Melville and Hawthorne, Irving has not had the benefit of a historian-champion, a role not even filled by his biographer Stanley T. Williams. For more than 70 years the standard authority (until the 2007 publication of Andrew Burstein’s The Original Knickerbocker), Williams, always careful not to praise his subject, warned against measuring Irving “by the immemorial touchstones of the past, tested by which he is often trivial, or by the standards of to-day, by which he has been outmoded” (xiii). For Williams, Irving “emerges as a talented writer, hardly more” (xiii).

So if the world is nothing without the historian who gives it life, neither is a literary reputation, which is also constantly in danger of being passed over by time. Or to put this another way, literary figures are themselves always in danger of becoming outdated, of seeming anachronistic. Anachronism, in one of its senses, implies the kind of superannuation that Diedrich Knickerbocker combats: the tendency of things—nations, concepts, systems of belief, literary styles—to become “dated.” As time proceeds steadily forward, or so the story goes, such things inevitably fall into disrepute, are superseded or forgotten altogether. The Ptolemaic conception of the universe, the literary form of epic poetry, and the eight-track tape are anachronistic in this sense: they are systems of belief, modes of representation, or technologies no longer in wide circulation. We know them only by their traces, only as relics. Still other creations, however, leave no trace at all; they are “lost in the maw of oblivion.” Thomas Greene has called this process of supercession “pathetic anachronism” (223), which is ultimately “the destiny of all enduring human products, including texts, since all products come into being bearing the marks of their historical moment and then, if they last, are regarded as alien during a later moment because of these marks” (223).

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