"A Literature for the Times"

"A Literature for the Times" ROBERT MILDER He must be a very young critic who supposes that the man of literary genius has any option of the mode in which he shall write for his fellow men. ... It is not choice but his own faculty and the wants of the time which determine the form of literary composition . —Emerson, "Literature" (1837) The Epos is not yet sung. That is the gospel of glad tidings kings & prophets wait for. —Emerson, journal entry, 20 April 1838 F. O. MATTHIESSEN AND THE PROBLEM OF AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY That we are debating the pertinence and adequacy of the term "American Renaissance" after sixty-odd years testifies to the extraordinary resilience of F. O. Matthiessen's configuration of the field, if only as a rallying point for revisionist argument. Before Matthiessen, and flowing into him, were Vernon Parrington , the early Van Wyck Brooks, and Lewis Mumford, whose Golden Day (1926)—"a major event in my experience, " Matthiessen recalled1—first enshrined the canon (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman) later attributed to Matthiessen himself and still at the center of most pre-1900 American literature surveys. Adequacy and pertinence. Possibly a 25°° Page anthology (American Literature: Beginnings through the Civil War) would be "adequate ," but who could teach it in the space of a semester and ESQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2003 193 ROBERT MILDER on what principle beyond mind-numbing inclusiveness? Of necessity we select, omit, organize, and interpret, constructing a version of American literary history hopelessly inadequate to the range of the literature and the countless ways in which it might be contextualized, and pertinent chiefly to some mediation between an ideal of "coverage" and the commitments that drive us personally as teachers, writers, and citizens. Some time ago Jane Tompkins took Matthiessen to task for neglecting "what most men and women were thinking about between 1850 and 1855 '" f°r concerning himself with highbrow literature to the exclusion of best-sellers, for omitting women and non-Anglo-Saxon and non-northeastern males, and for slighting texts concerned with the religious and reformist issues "which preoccupied the country in this period."2 Matthiessen acknowledged this himself—why read Leaves of Grass and not the immensely popular Fern L·avesfrom Fanny's Port-folio? why A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and not Ten Nights in a BarRoom ?—and announced his governing principle as aesthetic. Tompkins's principle was sociological and political: since America's past is polyphonic and its present and future a ground of contention, should competing voices not receive a hearing as a matter of both historical comprehensiveness and presentday usability within the struggle to shape an America-to-be?3 Matthiessen? Tompkins? Both? Or neither? The answer depends partly on what we imagine ourselves doing when we teach or write about "American literary history. " Each of the words is problematic. Whose "America"? What counts as "literary " now that aesthetic standards are widely dismissed as arbitrary , elitist, or politically inspired? And what can we say of "history" if genealogies of the past are taken as fictions or selfserving ratifications of one or another ideological position? A chief difficulty with Matthiessen's canon has always been its nonrepresentativeness as measured by the relative unpopularity of the writings in their own time and by their largely oppositional stance to the dominant culture. Matthiessen himself begged the question through the remarkable assertion that "an artist's use of language is the most sensitive index to cultural history, since a man can articulate only what he is, and what he has been made by the society of which he is a willing or 194 "A LITERATURE FOR THE TIMES" an unwilling part" (AR, xv)—a claim that manages to combine a formalist reverence for the magisterial author with a Foucauldian belief that there can be no authors (in the sense of originators) at all, but only cultural discourses. While drawing on Coleridge, Eliot, and the New Criticism, Matthiessen's notion of "organicism," as William E. Cain observed, was broadly cultural in looking beyond "the organization of the text itselF' to "the whole relation between writer, work, and social context that classic texts aspired toward...