The Elusive Truths of Literary Narrative

At the moment it is reasonable to ask why anyone should be troubled by the historicity of The Da Vinci Code when its author has clearly presented this narrative—whether in book or film version—as fiction. Dan Brown admits that his plot is pure fabrication. Despite his claims to have accurately described artworks, documents, and rituals, his Code reveals from the first that "all of the characters and events in this book are fictitious." It is nonetheless instructive to consider how much today's cultural skirmishes about the veracity of one popular narrative recall issues that vexed Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Then, as now, the oddly permeable nature of storytelling, its ambiguous relation to historical truth-claims, could be threatening as well as enchanting. A compelling or at least a widely circulated story has a way of swallowing up other narratives, thereby eliding usual distinctions between fiction and fact, fantasy and history.

Thus I think cultural opponents of The Da Vinci Code are right to worry about this story's capacity to distort impressions of historical reality. In itself the book may be just one more ingenious thriller stuffed with pseudo-intellectual musings and hints of momentous disclosure. But, insofar as it invokes other larger narratives along its way, it makes a bid to refashion them, an effort that becomes credible only by virtue of the expectations it arouses for its huge popular audience. Despite its European setting the novel draws on long-standing mass suspicions in the United States—lately heightened by sex-abuse scandals—that there is something sinister, alien, inherently oppressive, and unnatural about Roman Catholicism. Its narrative likewise exploits the larger cultural metanarrative of Christian origins, insinuating but not seriously arguing that the received understanding of this history may itself be fictitious.

In The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860, Jonathan Arac demonstrates the power of narrative to subsume what we might previously have regarded as discrete generic categories of fiction versus nonfiction, or symbolic romance versus the realistic novel. Repackaged from its prior appearance a decade earlier in the Cambridge History of American Literature, Arac's book contends that prose narrative as such, rather than the romance mode, should be regarded as the essential American medium for this antebellum period. Though Walt Whitman declared America itself to be "the greatest poem," it also makes a great story. Arac, in distinguishing among variant forms that he identifies as local narrative, personal narrative, and literary narrative, considers that all three derive from, or somehow reflect upon, the prior category of national narrative.

By "giving formal expression to the inchoate ideas of the American people," the innovative forms of "nation-building narrative" discussed in the book's opening chapter helped not only to tell but also to create the nation's story. For Arac a distinctive feature of this emerging national narrative was its "vision of an America that contained the world." Who, then, are the seminal mythmakers in Arac's tale of how this story took shape by the time Hawthorne, Melville, and the rest engaged it in their own writing? The usual preromantic suspects—Jefferson, Franklin, or New England's Puritans—receive little play here. Arac underscores instead the founding cultural influence of such nineteenth-century writers as William Bancroft, William Hickling Prescott, Alexis de Tocqueville, and James Fenimore Cooper.

In subsequent chapters Arac analyzes writing by some lesser-known regional authors as well as classic works by Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Douglass, Stowe, and Melville. Given the book's overarching concern with "narrative" rather than fiction, I think it would have been worth factoring into his account some consideration of relevant poetic narratives, including Whitman's supremely nation-defining testimony in "Song of Myself." Yet Arac's analysis of major works understood in their cultural context is richly rewarding. Even those well versed in the scholarly literature can...