Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (review)

The Scottish Enlightenment has received growing attention in the last three decades both as a constellation of writers and ideas distinct from a more sweeping "English-speaking Enlightenment" and as a significant but underexamined influence upon thinking Americans. Like Douglas Adair, Terence Martin, Garry Wills, Andrew Hook, and others who have pointed to the impact Scottish thinkers have had on a wide range of American writers, Susan Manning pursues this line of inquiry, but with a difference. Disavowing "traditional influence-led methodologies," she proposes to explore "more associative and analogical models of comparison initially derived from the structuring principles of the Scottish and American texts themselves" (4). She is not discounting the significant points of influence Scottish Enlightenment writers had on Americans, but she is more interested in teasing out "networks of relationships and analogies" in styles of thinking that occur on both sides of the Atlantic.

David Hume's 1739 Treatise Concerning Human Nature, with its description of fragmented human perception and experience, is a key text both as an object of examination and as an enabling theoretical construct. Hume later described the forms of conjunction that can connect isolated facts and perceptions into one "fable or narration" as "Resemblance, Contiguity, and Causation" (5). By thus focusing on what amounts to a poetics of thinking, what she refers to in the title of chapter 1 as "The Grammar of the Imagination," Manning is able to write extensively on Whitman and Dickinson as authors who participate in this poetics that forged the discourse of modernism, while at the same time she is able to side-step a potentially tedious (and perhaps specious) attempt to prove "influence." Citing Sacvan Bercovitch's portrayal of the "rhetoric of American identity" as defined by its ability to unite disparities, to attain a consensus of "dissensus," Manning takes as her target the problematic "and" that connects national and personal independence, ethnic pluralism and the melting pot, federalism and states rights, but she also suggests a problematic "and" between Scotland and America, problematic because less well-defined, more spectral.

The introduction opens with the image of the cartoon from the Pennsylvania Gazette of 9 May 1754 that portrays the North American colonies as pieces of a dissevered serpent over the injunction "Join or Die." Chapter 1, "The Grammar of the Imagination," begins with a discussion of an anonymous Scottish pamphlet of 1706, "The Comical History of the Marriage-Union betwixt Fergusia and Heptarchus," that joins the debate over the proposed union of Scotland and England that would be created a year later with the 1707 Act of Union. Thus, at the heads of the discursive strands she seeks to isolate in both the Scottish and American traditions are historical and historicized debates about the benefits and dangers of union, or incorporation into a single body, versus those of preserving a distinct presence united to others only on a federative basis. Finessing the details of the supposed relationship between David Hume's 1739–40 Treatise of Human Nature and the political events of 1706–07, she finds in Hume's vocabulary and "the texture of his language" (34) an embedded political analogy that associates ideas about personal identity with those of political bodies. Hume's leading insight here reveals the mind as fundamentally fragmented, "nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions" (37), he calls it, but at the same time the imagination has the authority to connect the fragments into apparent but shifting identities. In other words, says Hume, "I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts" (35).

Manning's discussion of Hume allows her thus to relate conceptions of personal identity to larger societal structures shaped by an imaginative grammar of association that operates on the...