New England, Nonesuch

In 1652, Roger Williams published a book titled The Hireling Ministry None of Christs in London in which he made a theological argument with political implications for the settlement of the New World. “Nations being meerly and essentially civill,” Williams wrote, “cannot (Christianly) be called Christian States, after the patterne of that holy and typical Land of Canaan.” Nations should not think of themselves as “Christian,” that is to say, as favored by God, because, Williams said, the biblical Israel was “a Non-such and an unparalel’d Figure of the Spirituall State of the Church of Christ Jesus, dispersed, yet gathered to him in all Nations” (3). England and its colonies were no second Israel, no exceptions on earth, and no favored nation of God, because there was no parallel for a state’s protection in the New Testament. Members of a nation who made such a claim—much less acted on it—were, as Williams saw it, asking for trouble. The argument was directed at a London audience; Williams was barred from the Puritancontrolled press in the Massachusetts Bay colony, in part for holding ideas such as this one. London, however, was also a center of power that could override colonial controversies and that badly needed spiritual guidance in a time of social upheaval.

Williams’s argument depends on close attention to the material conditions of representation. Like many university-trained Protestants of his day, he considered attentiveness to the Bible and a sense of its early linguistic and material history essential to making scriptural interpretations. Like other colonial subjects, he had to assess the marketplace for political controversy to make an effective argument from tiny, distant Providence Plantations.¹ Because Williams positions it at the nexus of material textual histories and a critique of ideas about national entitlement, the notion of the nonesuch seems historiographically fertile. Its most familiar association for today’s readers might be “The Royal Nonesuch”: the con job performance—substanceless, yet profitable—that earns the Duke and the King $465 in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). A nonesuch is something “unparalleled” or unique. Used by Williams in the context of biblical typology, it posited the unrepeatability of a phenomenon, a temporal uniqueness that isolated an event in history—in this case, to prevent pride and violence, if not damnation, in the present. The nonesuch, for Williams, marks off a utopian past moment as unavailable as a map for the present; through it he demands that his readers do the hard work of generating a legitimately Christian present. A critique of political theology relying on a textual critical interpretive practice, Williams’s argument resonates with debates in and practices of American literary history now. In surveying the potential points of articulation between colonial American literary studies and other conversations in literary history, we might think about Williams’s use of the nonesuch not as an origin but a useful type. We may or may not agree with Williams’s millennial view of the future, but with the idea of the typological nonesuch, he argued for a disjunction with the past that allowed new paths to the future in a way that, structurally, we might find critically inspiring.

I start with New England because its conceptualization is one of the bottlenecks in the intellectual flow between early American literary history and the rest of literary studies. The Puritan origins thesis has been superseded for years, yet continues to inform the relationship between the early and the later periods. While New England is no longer considered, as Philip Gura put it, the omphalos of US culture, neither is it a nonesuch (600). Early American literary studies today often exhibits the focus current in the field of American studies on deconstructing nationalism and exceptionalism, or emerging notions of race, sexuality, and gender, necessarily through a transnational analytical framework. The literary history of colonial New England certainly has come to be understood in terms of hybridity and flows in current research, as only one part of an Atlantic, perhaps even global system. This essay will rotate around New England largely as a scene of historiographical investigation and inspiration...