Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

Prologue

Prologue he American Renaissance is defined here as commencing with the magnum opus of Washington Irving and extending to the first (and best) novel of Theodore Dreiser in 1900. I have given special attention to the word "Renaissance" as it denotes rebirth and connotes re-awakening. When F. O. Matthiessen (following the suggestion of Harry Levin) applied it to five canonized male authors of our antebellum Romantic Period, he meant the rebirth on American soil of a number of European values and artistic concerns that had been obliterated by puritanism. Yet in using the term Matthiessen may have sensed in his vision of a "native" American literature the same idea that I have tried to develop in these pages: that the central experience in American literature in the nineteenth century (if not also in the twentieth) is essentially the puritanical desire for the prelapsarian-that second chance of coming into experience anew. Beginning with Irving, the American canon is filled with narrators and characters who keep waking up to the central scene of their adventures and 'not the end of the story. Analeptic instead of proleptic, this pattern gives rise to a literature of recurrent beginnings, stories about narrators who make it home to tell their stories because they never really leave home in the first place. Rather, they travel through a customhouse of the imagination in which the Old World experience of the present is taxed by the New World of the utopian past, where life is always cyclical instead of linear. For this study of American desire in literature, I [i x ] Prologue have selected what I consider the twelve most important American writers of the nineteenth century. The list could have been longer, but not without repetition in terms of charting the psychological (as well as social) landscape as I view it. These twelve are, not coincidentally, the most "canonized" writers of the American nineteenth century. I have followed the canon not only because I believe its best works give the most aesthetic pleasure and philosophical insight but because these texts were the ones to be canonized in our own century-the rapidly fading twentieth. Which is to say that they were chosen, primarily at least, for psychologically-not politically-urgent reasons; chosen for their passages backward in personal history rather than for the voyage forward in public ideology. If my study has another "argument" (in the "political" sense that every analysis of any aspect of our culture must in the post-Vietnam era), it is that the writer is neither an autonomous romantic nor a cultural automaton. Rather, the most original product of his or her imagination comes from the interaction of the individual and society at a crucial juncture in the writer's emotional and intellectual life. In other words, every writer has finally only one great work-toward which every other product moves and which everything written afterwards probably reflects upon. It is a work such as The Scarlet Letter or The Portrait ofa Lady, for example, that is most invested with the writer's identity and identity-theme. My book, therefore, is not a sociological study of literature. I am not interested here in "interpretative communities," "reader responses," or primarily the social forces that "wrote" the books or the "texts" that shaped the political and social landscape in America. In recent years, we have seen a preponderance of such studies in symbiotics, a few of them brilliant, premised generally on Michel Foucault's notion that literature is ideology rather than primarily the work of a creatively charged imagination. To insist in the late twentieth century that every literary act is "political" (or "ideological") is no more persuasive or capable of proof than to say-as the implication went in the age of Emerson and most of the nineteenth century-that every meaningful literary act is "religious." What was meant then, as it may also mean today, is that the act of creative writing, while inseparable from its social context, is an allegory of the personal and psychological, which is finally representative of the human condition and conflict. [ x ] Prologue The emphasis on "material culture" in criticism, of course, licenses the examination of any writing, certainly all the uncanonized literary works. Study in this vein has filled many gaps in our cultural history; one of the best recent examples is Cathy N. Davidson's Revolution and the Word (1986), which argues that...