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Coda: The Scene of Instruction
- University of New Hampshire Press
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A Coda: The Scene of Instruction In his influential analysis of the development of an American republic of letters , The Golden Day (1926), Lewis Mumford constructs a revisionist literary history in which New England’s writers expressed the desire “to prefigure in the imagination a culture which should grow out of and refine the experiences the transplanted European encountered on the new soil.”1 Central to this national canon of the literary avant-garde was Emerson, who Mumford was keen to rescue from accusations of dilettantish idealism, claiming that “it has been misconstrued ” that “he lived in a perpetual cloud-world.” While acknowledging that Emerson had indeed at times withdrawn from the “hurly-burly of American life,” Mumford argued that this was a strategic positioning: “it was a withdrawal of water into a reservoir, or of grain into a bin, so that they might be available later” (100). Emerson’s antisocial inclinations therefore needed to be understood as part of a larger dialectic that incorporated the “thoroughly socialized existence of the New England town” (118) as a check on the excesses of individualism, thereby enabling a politics of self-reliance to function creatively within public life. Mumford felt that the balance between mind and environment, between self and society that resulted would prove to be a most useful model for a United States in need of cultural renewal in the early decades of the twentieth century: The mission of creative thought is to gather into it all the living sources of its day, all that is vital in the practical life, all that is intelligible in science, all that is relevant in 186 / thinking america the social heritage and, recasting these things into new forms and symbols, to react upon the blind drift of convention and habit and routine. Life flourishes only in this alternating rhythm of dream and deed: when one appears without the other, we can look forward to a shrinkage, a lapse, a devitalization. Idealism is a bad name for this mission; it is just as correct to call it realism; since it is part of the natural history of the human mind. (166) Mumford saw no tension between the tangible materiality of Emerson’s existence and the possibility of intellectual work that could refresh and redefine his culture. “Emerson rethought life,” he asserted, “and in the mind he coined new shapes and images and institutions” in which, and through which, thought could best be articulated (99). Mumford’s concern to imagine a location in which ideas are able to prosper is evident in an early short story published in The Forum magazine in 1914, in which he depicts a scene of pedagogical encounter that proves to be disorienting for the tale’s central character, Jarvis, a lecturer in Latin. Already worried about declining standards and increased student power, “Jarvis was wont to lament at faculty conferences that there was a ‘tendency fraught with the greatest danger’ to allow untrained youths to elect their studies—none of which ever, by any chance, proved to be a discipline.”2 The reversal of the conventional—and, for Jarvis, appropriate—shape of the pedagogical transaction generates a wider concern about national vitality, for if the work of intellectual exchange is mishandled at this early stage, the implications are potentially severe. “The absence of discipline caused nations to become soft,” the narrative voice, firmly ventriloquizing Jarvis’s thoughts, asserts. Intellectual rigor is allied with national self-sufficiency and well-being. Its absence “increased the discontent of the masses; was a source of sundry evils in our Public Life; and perhaps in some measure could be connected with the disgraceful sophomore beer-drinking contest.” As this sequence of anxieties makes clear, Mumford encourages the reader not to take his central character entirely seriously. Jarvis both over-dramatizes the decline in standards he laments witnessing and over-values his own status as their intellectual guardian : “For twenty years Jarvis had taught Latin with a full recognition of the immense value of himself and his subject, and of the important part both played in creating a Stable Commonwealth” in the face of “these Sadly Shifting Times” (13). Jarvis’s self-satisfaction is undermined by a classroom unwilling to accept the disciplinary authority of the institution. His students were “always questioning , always urging, always disturbing. Theirs was such an infringing attitude to life.” One in particular, “an aggressive little fellow,” “informed Jarvis, with an irritating confidence, that he was a Vitalist, and he wanted to...