E Pluribus Unum: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Constitutional Paradox

Notes

Notes introduction 1.Although the one-and-the-many concern runs throughout theEnneads, conspicuous sites include III.8, IV.8–9, V.1–4, and VI.9. Earlier discussions exist in the works of Pythagoras and the preParmenidean school of Pythagoreans (late sixth and early fifth century B.C.E.),but the texts in question are fragmentary and their concern is more strictly cosmological (that is, aconcernwiththedifferentiationoforiginalunity,which,aswewillsee,greatly interests Poe).(For the preSocratic texts noted here,see Kirk and Raven 224, 240–241, 250, and 253.) 2.IshouldaddthatwhenIspeakofa“difference-requirement,”Iamreferring to the idea that even an institution formed in opposition to gradation, practicallyorrepresentationally,hastobeabletodistinguishbetweenthepersons it is declaring equal and so requires some form of differentiation, some categoryofperson(liketheslave)toperformtheinevitablequotaofdifferencework .(Whitman,for example,reassigns the difference-work to Lincoln in the form of an ultimately efficacious sacrificial death of the one on behalf of the many.) It should be clarified that the notion of difference-work’s inevitability is a belief espoused by Lincoln and others of the period.In these texts,there’s no question,at least none that I can detect in any strong form,that difference can be done away with altogether. 3. 1 Cranch (5 U.S.) 137, 2 L.Ed. 60. Other landmark cases for judicial review are Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) and Cohens v. Virginia (1821), details of which are available in Young, Gunther, and most Constitutional casebooks. 4. The satisfactory formation of one from many is a preoccupation which is,ofcourse,notoriginaltotheeighteenth-andnineteenth-centuryAmerican context in which I examine it. Unification is an objective problem only insofar as it is a historically inscribed problem,a state of affairs which is privileged in Western philosophy (first by the pre-Socratics) at the same time that it is deprivileged in Western representation (Homer, for example, equates unification with death because the unification of the world is what the gods fear). What is original to the founding political documents of the United States and to a particular body of American literary texts of the nineteenth century is the attempt to resolve this problematic through the inscriptional and/or fictional modeling of social formations. 5. For the most part, this study is not driven and structured by the direct contesting of critical readings, especially since I am most interested in dealing with neglected texts of major American Renaissance authors or with texts by the same authors which have not been read in light of the one-and-themany problem.Current criticism of these authors seems intent on straddling an ideology-transcendence dichotomy, a balancing act meant to avoid readings that dwell exclusively on either the aesthetic (as Matthiessen does in the landmark American Renaissance [1947]) or the ideological (as Marxist critics of the 1970s did under the assumption that art conceals strategies and agendas which the critic must ferret out).I locate my work within this continuum generally but prefer to focus on an ideology other than the Puritan legacy — to focus on the one and the many, on the relation of selves within a supposedlynonhegemonicsociety .Likethemodelofconsensus,thismodelisrevised and used to the present moment by each writer. The new types of history of American literature have been very vocal in this matter. In the last ten years, the critical ground has included expanding the notion of literature beyond belleslettresandhighart,takingincreasedinterestinhistoricalcontextaswell as in texts not formerly considered literature or within its scope (such as sermons , pamphlets, sensational novels). From Ideology and Classic American Literature (ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen) and Lawrence Buell’s New England Literary Culture, both published in 1986, to Bercovitch’s The Rites of Assent (1993), Elisa New’s The Regenerate Lyric (1993), and the first volume of the new Cambridge History of American Literature (1994; ed. Bercovitch), American literary critics have been intent, as suggested by the title of a 1986 collection of essays, on Reconstructing American Literary History (ed.Bercovitch),which typically means reevaluating the place of ideology in American literature studies. Critics like Bercovitch have foregrounded consensus as the telos and dissent as not counterproductive of but rather in service of that consensus (about how a republic is constructed and how republican relations are conducted): “the summons to dissent, because it was grounded in prescribed ritual forms, circumscribed the threat of basic socialalternatives...[andthereby]facilitatedprocessinsuchawayastoenlist radicalism itself in the cause of institutional stability” (Rites 50). I see the situation as neither so sinister nor involuntary (as if the authors cannot resist...