The American Jeremiad by Sàcvan Bercovitch (review)

Book Reviews Peter G. Beidler, Fig Tree John: an Indian in Fact and Fiction. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. 152 p. $10.50 and $4.95. This book has a two-part structure: "Fig Tree John in Fact: An Independent Cahuilla," and "Fig Tree John in Fiction: A Proud Apache." In his introduction, Beidler concludes that Edwin Code's novel, Fig Tree John, which "grew out of biographical and ethnographic facts, is not biographically reliable or ethnographically complete. It is, however, a good novel" (xxiv). It is about a White River Apache immigrant from Arizona named Agocho, later nicknamed Fig Tree John by his white neighbors, who left his tribe to settle in an isolated area near the Saltón Sea with his young wife and infant son. The historical Fig Tree John was actually a Cahuilla Indian native of southern California, not an Apache, and a leader among his own people. He lived on his ancestral lands in southern California, and was a highly adaptable man. In contrast, Code's John is an interloper on the land, who is unable to adapt to change of any sort. Code also supplied a sensational plot to expand his story, and his major theme is the necessity for the American Indian to assimilate the ways of the white man. Beidler's work details how Fig Tree John in fact differs from Fig Tree John in Code's fiction; he separates the historical facts behind Juanito Razon from the fictions surrounding him in Code's novel. He supplies photographs, journal excerpts, government documents and correspondence , newspaper and magazine accounts and maps to support his study. For teaching purposes, Beidler's comparative study tracing Code's departure from strictly historical fact is useful for a responsible reading of the novel. He presents enlightening study of the two Fig Tree Johns. DORYS C. GROVER, East Texas State University Sàcvan Bercovitch. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 239 p. $15.00. Like his earlier Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975), Sacvan Bercovitch's newest study is a seminal work, one that will change not only the direction of American literary criticism for years to come, but also the way we teach American literature. It is that important. The purpose of The American Jeremiad is to show how pervasive an influence the Puritan jeremiad exerted upon the myth of America. Bercovitch maintains that from the seventeenth century, America has seen itself as the chosen nation and has conducted its affairs with that view in mind. The American Jeremiad centers on the search to understand the origins of America's announced role. To do so, Bercovitch traces the use of the jeremiad from Europe (where it served mainly as a denunciation of the ways of the world) to New England's shores (where it was used as much for exaltation as for castigation). Demonstrating that the jeremiad served as a vehicle to fuse the sacred and the secular, Bercovitch argues that the Puritans created the myth of America as the land of a glorious future to set it above all other nations. As the country grew, this myth also expanded to encompass America's economic as well as spiritual growth. Thus, through268VOL . 34, NO. 4 (FALL 1980) Book Reviews out the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connection between America's self-imposed role as the chosen land coincided with the growth of democracy and capitalism, illustrating, as Bercovitch points out, that the jeremiad "wed self-interest to social perfection." As it became one of the prominent themes in America's literature, Bercovitch discusses this incorporation of Biblical history into the American experience in the writers of the American Renaissance and the later nineteenth century and shows that they felt compelled to use that vision in their writings. In short, what emerges from Bercovitch's study is a new and exciting reinterpretation of the Puritan influence on both American literature and American culture. Bercovitch is our generation's Perry Miller and his work will surely affect our conception of our heritage. JEFFREY B. WALKER, Oklahoma State University Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel, 1554-1954...