Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time

6. Nationalism and Hypercanonization

6 Nationalism and Hypercanonization The Nationalization of Literary Narrative I am not an Americanistby professional formation, and as in the 1980s I came to focus my teaching and reading in American literature, I was struck by what seemed to me, compared with other national literatures I knew or had studied, a state of hypercanonization . By hypercanonization I mean that a very few individual works monopolize curricular and critical attention: in fiction preeminently The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Huckleberry Finn. These works organize innumerable courses in high school, college, and graduate school; they form the focus for many dissertations and books. I have found literary history an important means by which to engage critically with these works and with the professional and intellectual structures that produce their hypercanonicity, to address the works while displacing the terms of address. For literary history, as I try to practice it, these works are not the answers but the problems. My previous chapters have related Huckleberry Finn, and discussions by scholars and journalists about Huckleberry Finn, to a wide range of social and political contexts-from Huck's time in the 1840s, through Twain's time of writing around 1880, and through the twentieth century (especially since 1948). This chapter is more closely literary in focus, although not exclusively so, since its major concern is the connection Americanists have made between literature and national identity. In a recently published portion of the new Cambridge History of American Literature (volume 2, 1995), I was asked to write on "mid133 134 Nationalism and Hypercanonization nineteenth-century American prose narrative." I set myself this problem: How do I account for the emergence, around 1850, of works that count as what readers nowadays recognize as "literature "? I mean here The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick. In contrast to them, other valuable written productions of the time, however much they prove of interest in other ways, do not now widely count as literature. This is not simply an abstract issue of terminology. The designation "literature" is heavy with value. It affects what is studied , taught, and read, and it also greatly determines the terms in which new writing is reviewed in the public press. Books published in the 1990s are praised for resembling Huckleberry Finn but not, I believe, any other single work of the later nineteenth century. My historical exploration of this issue involved two areas: the changing definition of "literature," and its relation to differing kinds of writing , that is, a problem of genre. My solution involved reconceptualizing the emerging literary narrative type as one among several different competing generic types. The major narrative form that preceded literary narrative in ,the United States, and also succeeded it, was what I call "national" narrative, in which the origins, attributes , and future of the United States were made overt themes. At about the time of Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829-37), the historical fiction of James Fenimore Cooper and the History of the United States by George Bancroft defined national narrative. Cooper died in 1851, but Bancroft's History was written, in ten volumes, from 1834 into the 1880s. In relation to national narrative, two important smaller types emerged, which differed from it but would have been impossible without it. First in the 1830s what I call "local" narrative, the line from Washington Irving that includes the so-called southwestern humorists of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee as well as the northeastern moralist Hawthorne in his shorter works; and second, in the 1840s, "personal narrative," which, contrary to Puritan tradition and twentieth-century expectation, proved to be rather extroverted, first-person reports from the margins of the dominant culture. Important examples of personal narrative include Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast (1840), Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail (1849), Frederick Douglass'S Narrative (1845), and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl (1861). In response to the political crisis of 1850, which produced a compromise intended to subdue controversy, Melville and Hawthorne Nationalism and Hypercanonization 135 consolidated elements from their own earlier work and that of Poe and set their works apart from the political optimism and straightforward patriotic address of national narrative. "The CustomHouse " introduction to The Scarlet Letter illustrates the point. Through literary narrative, they developed a freely imaginative space of psychological interiority, on the model of what transatlantic romantic theory and practice had set forth in the previous two...