American Literature Internationale

"Drunken Strikers, Ga'InlmUlni,sts, Carleton, 1878), 269. "From Allan Pinkerton, and Detectives (New York: Anleriean Literature Internationale RUSS CASTRONOVO Borders, sovereignty, and war are exacting in their location of the nation along spatial dimensions. Origins, remembrance, and amnesia are equally exacting in establishing the nation along a temporal axis. So, too, international issues are spatial questions , involving the flow of commodities, people, and culture across borders in ways that can be perceived as threatening to sovereignty. But the analogy between national and international contexts breaks down when it comes to temporality. Origins, for instance, do not readily flow from nation to nation, and memory often remains partial and particular. as nations do not exchange founders (Romulus and Relmus can only be suckled by one she-wolf and George Washington can only be born on one Virginia plantation), they rarely coincide in their visions of the future. While the idea of Manifest Destiny found impetus enough from the Louisiana Purchase to the MexicanAmerican War of1846-48 and onward, the prospect of a hemispheric United States never belonged to the voluntary present or future of those peoples incorporated into or conquered by the march of this history. It is thus difficult to think about international time in the same way that one might speak about international issues in terms of geography. This difficulty notwithstanding, the temporal aspect of international thinking is crucial to the language of political possibility . This essay searches for temporal forms of internationalism by reconstructing the time ofAmerican literature. Luckily , we all know the literary history. By the efforts of Herman ESQ I v. 50 11ST-3RD QUARTERS I2004 59 RUSS CASTRONOVO Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, American literature between 1850 and 1855 flourished into a renaissance. And we are equally familiar with updated versions ofthis story: the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Susan Warner, to name just a few writers who successfully adopted popular genres, allows us to speak of that renaissance in much broader and more representative terms. Rationales for lists such as this one always exceed chronology, bleeding into ideology, perhaps beginning with F. O. Matthiessen 's pronouncement that the form and content of these works deeply involve "the possibilities of democracy. "I Although not included in Matthiessen's original list, Douglass, Stowe, and others surely engage democracy as well, whether as an internal project or as an issue of national memory. I begin rnodestly enough, suggesting that we turn our attention to a text that fits squarely in this half decade of literary achievement but falls outside any sense of either "American" or "renaissance." I will reluctantly discard this modesty to argue that this text provides a pivotal methodology for assessing categories of form and content in terms of democratic possibility -that is, for evaluating the political-aesthetic stakes of American literature. Entry into aesthetic discourse necessarily repositions American literature on an international axis given the transatlantic pull of Gennan romanticism and the "sweetness and light" ofAnglophilic taste.'2 But the idea of an international American literature resonates on another plane to evoke "the Internationale," the social project, first imagined in the 1860s, in which the worldwide interests of the working classes would, theoretically, trump the provincialisms of language , ethnicity, and nation. International American literature after this fashion suggests a conversation where the analysis of fOrIn and content would entail critical attention to the political effects, both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary, of aesthetie discourse in an era of mass meetings and anarchist threat. In other words, international Alnerican literature helps us to think about the connections between mass subjectivity, language, and terror. The same year that witnessed the publication of Melville's 60 AMERICAN UTERATURE INTERNATIONALE Pierre and Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, a Gerlman immigrant named Joseph Weydemeyer living in New l:ork laid out forty dollars to print a lengthy pamphlet analyzing the aesthetic dimensions of the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary aftermath of the r848 socialist uprising in France. Its author, Karl Marx, urged quick publication since the events were fleeting , but he seemed pleased when one thousand copies of The Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte were eventually printed in r852. As Marx...