Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel

Preface

Preface The year 1968 dramatically conjoined culture and politics in Paris, Prague, Mexico City, and many other parts of the world. In my own life as a student, the year framed my first encounter with two great critics, one on the page, one in person, whose work continues to provoke and sustain my thinking about the connections between literature and the conditions of people’s lives—that is, politics. Walter Benjamin’s work entered English at this time, decades after he killed himself (1940) while attempting to flee Hitler, and I began my vocation as a teacher by assisting the course in modern British literature taught at Harvard Summer School by Edward W. Said.1 The critical thinking of these two exiles, the Jew and the Arab, has fueled decades of my explorations.2 Impure Worlds names a zone of inquiry and resource that has shaped my thought for a long time. It stirred me years before I learned of Mikhail Bakhtin ’s work on heteroglossia, before talk arose in postcolonial studies concerning hybridity, and in borderlands theory about mestizaje. Back around 1970, I still had not read Robert Penn Warren’s classic New Critical essay ‘‘Pure and Impure Poetry’’ (1942). Warren favors the impure, surprising most readers now, who imagine that as formalists, New Critics were purists. The power and the striking effects of impure forms animate my reading and set the problems that as a critic and scholar I try to define and explore.3 What I do shares much with recent work in cultural and minority studies, but they tend to focus more exclusively on heterogeneity, while my work is distinguished by attending to heterogeneity in its relationships to form. As I was launching my dissertation in 1970, I was stirred by two closely related books by Richard Sennett that appeared that year: The Uses of Disorder : Personal Identity and City Life is more theoretical and contemporary, Families against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, – more specific and historical. Against the streets of the city, Sennett argued, families strove to produce in their children a purified identity that would, they imagined, protect them against the contaminations of people who vii viii Preface spoke other languages, looked other colors, and came from other national origins than the white Anglophone Protestants who made up his focus. As the grandchild of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, I took the side of impurity. The nineteenth-century writers who compelled my imagination and formed the core of my dissertation, Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, both took pleasure in making big, complicated, messy worlds. So did major writers of my time. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon and The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Four-Gated City (1969) by Doris Lessing crucially shaped the perspective I took in composing my first book, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (1979). I wanted to break barriers, not only to cross the Atlantic but also to connect preferences in artistic practice to meaningful choices in the realms of politics and society. This preference for impurity, and the search to find means of analyzing and explaining it, runs through the essays gathered to compose this book. It also guides my work more distinctly as an Americanist: In Against Americanistics (2011) I mess with exceptionalism, toward goals that are international and comparative. Scholars now take this perspective beyond what I have done here in my chapters that explore Melville’s German connections, or that discuss Dickens and Twain as seen by the Australian Christina Stead. I think, for example, of Dohra Ahmad’s Rotten English (2007), a global reader of literary works written in varieties of English new to the printed page. The chapters that follow pursue the complex entanglements of culture, politics, and society from which great literature arises. This mode of study is ‘‘worldly’’ in the sense that Edward Said developed. He adapted the notion from Arabic philologists and from Giambattista Vico, whose New Science (1744) fed the great historical imaginations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and directly inspired writers, including James Joyce. The literary and cultural critic Edmund Wilson responded to the breakthroughs of Joyce, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and others in Axel’s Castle (1931), the earliest major book about what we now call modernism. Wilson ’s next big book, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History (1940), placed Jules Michelet’s discovery of Vico in...