Essaying Democracy: The Post/Modern Intertexts of Kingston, Rodriguez, and Williams

Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all composition. . . . [A]bility in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness. So the history of Virginia has gone. . . .

—William Carlos Williams, “An Essay on Virginia” (I 322)

In his introduction to Imaginations, Webster Schott observes that the works of William Carlos Williams collected therein—Kora in Hell, Spring and All, The Great American Novel, The Descent of Winter, and A Novelette and Other Prose—enable us to witness “the doctor searching for his art and testing it, the artist tasting life and suffering it . . . the literary heretic rationalizing his schism and anticipating the future” (xi). These works, Schott suggests, offer a different picture than that of “the artist commanding his powers,” the one “we know [as] the titan who created Paterson, as the revolutionary miniaturist of ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ or as the magnificent autumnal lover of ‘Asphodel That Greeny Flower’” (xi). But who is this “we,” this collective knowing subject of Williams’s oeuvre?

For literary scholars like me who came of professional age in the 1990s on the tail end of what Jeffrey Williams has dubbed the “posttheory generation,” it cannot be presumed that “we” would know William Carlos Williams at all. As the other Williams points out, members of the posttheory generation moved through higher education’s most decentralized incarnation, a period when the notion of a canonical literary education had fractured into myriad paths of specialized inquiry guided by some localized mix of theoretical principles.¹ My primary areas of study concerned ethnic and women writers, the genres of autobiography and fiction, and postmodern and trauma theory; as such, the study of Williams had little formal place in my graduate training (an irony given that my department was then home to Paul Mariani, Williams’s biographer). “This is just to say,” then, that “so much depends” on intertextuality. Ultimately, it was the postmodern writers I studied who led me to Williams, specifically via their apparent interest in his extraordinary essay collection, In the American Grain (1925). In this way, Williams appeared to me as a kind of textual refraction, an object in my literary sideview mirror, as it were. From this vantage point, he looks primarily like an essayist and historiographer. While this may be an offbeat construction of the doctor-poet, such is the value of intertextuality: new literary relations may provide fresh insight into the man and his cultural productions.

For contemporary ethnic writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Richard Rodriguez, it was precisely the early Williams “rationalizing his schism” who intrigued them as they sought the forms that could capture the complexities of their experiences as ethnic Americans. Schott’s assessment of the works assembled in Imaginations could equally describe those by Kingston and Rodriguez: theirs, too, are “difficult books [not] to be wished onto desert minds. They churn with giant ideas and powerful feelings, often pursued with the fragile butterfly net of intuition” (xii). Like Williams, these writers are intensely interested in the uses of history and the hybrid forms necessary to capture the truth of American experience. Kingston has often described her mythic history China Men (1989) as a “sequel” to In the American Grain, since her text picks up roughly in the mid-nineteenth century where Williams’s revisionist history leaves off.² She cites Williams’s final image of Abraham Lincoln as “a woman in an old shawl—with a great bearded face and a towering black hat” (AG 234) as a particular inspiration. His representation of the wartorn nation as “a convulsion of bewilderment and pain—with a woman, born somehow, aching over it, holding all fearfully together” licensed Kingston’s own gender- and genre-bending approach to imagining America, as seen in China Men’s opening parable of Tang Ao, a male immigrant captured in “the Land of Women.” In excruciating detail, we learn of his painful feminization, a metaphor for the emasculation and suffering of male Chinese immigrants in the New World:

They bent his toes so far backward...