The Present Is a Void: Americanist Criticism, Unfinished and Half in Ruin

How does a study of national culture refrain from committing to the nation as a natural or given form of political and social life? From the standpoint of a critical method, how might the cultural and textual effects of nationhood be seen not through the acceptance or refusal of nations but rather through learning to read the nation as a difficult and pervasive figure? What is the possibility or impossibility of postnational literary and cultural analysis in a world that can no longer accept the nation as a privileged prior object but that cannot afford to ignore the nation's concrete and ideological force? In responding to these questions, I would test a reading strategy derived from the modernist literary and political thinking of Van Wyck Brooks and test such a strategy on Brooks's own writing first of all. Brooks wrote that "the present is a void," and this is the perspective that I adopt and explore here, whereby a criticism may adopt a formalist perspective only after emptying out, or voiding, its historical presumptions. This is also the perspective from which Brooks's own political impressionism might fruitfully be reread and so brought into the present where its negativity can punch holes in today's hard methodologies and harder geopolitics. To read national cultures from the standpoint of a void present means discarding the nation as a necessary form without ignoring the fact that national signifiers have permeated a world of texts.¹ To think transnationally or postnationally, in other words, means learning to read the nation as a rigid and rigidifying category of thought that cannot readily be brushed aside.

POSTNATIONALISM

What indeed is the other side, the verso, of the nation? If the nation is something that can be transgressed or moved past, then what kinds of organization are waiting just beyond? Is it possible to reimagine the conditions for a theoretical study of the American literary past that would be capable of moving around, or beyond, or straight into the nation? I want to reenergize Brooks's old phrase "creating a usable past" not to make the old new again but rather the reverse, to demonstrate how the current conjuncture is built up from the longstanding problem of how to engage in historical creation in any given present. Much recent scholarship in U.S. literary history has become transnational or postnational in its focus. But the postnationalist impulse can be paired with a mode of reading that keeps the form of the nation itself in view: not as a real and self-sustaining apparatus in the world but rather as a residue and a legible text. Is it possible to read the nation in a contradictory fashion, where it is both an outmoded institution rotten at its foundations and an incomplete institution still in its youth? In short, can the nation be read textually, both through and as literature? Can a criticism be responsive to the nation's symbolic force, able to describe and disarticulate it, ready to recognize and name it, and yet resistant to identifying itself with it? Is it possible that historians and theoreticians might assemble a range of diverse national pasts whose very multiplicity both displays and disables the most damaging procedures of nationhood?

To ask these questions is the implicit task of one of the field's earliest critical models, Van Wyck Brooks's practice of "creating a usable past": to imagine how reading the symbolics of American nationhood make for an interpretive strategy, but more than this, also comprise a worldly form of life and a radical poiesis of art and identity. In order to clear the ground and sweep away the stagnant canons that cluttered it, Brooks demanded that his contemporaries learn to see their present as a field in which texts and concepts could actively circulate and collide. He argued that it is for the literary writer—whether novelist, poet, or critic—to stage diverse and spontaneous encounters among such objects as pour into the present from the past, where the "present is a void" and the past is...