Introduction: Reexamining the American Renaissance: Some Futures for the Past

From William CuÃ-Ã-en Bryant, The Song of the Sower (New York: Appleton, l8?l), 29. INTRODUCTION Reexamining the American Renaissance: Some Futures for the Past ALBERTJ. VON FRANK One of the ways we have of evading history is, by sheer repetition , to prop up the currency of verbal formulae like "American Renaissance" without attending continuously to the shifting shape of the signified and the conceptual usefulness of the signifier. Such formulae cannot be transcendental fixtures to learn once then lean on forever, but (in the spirit of Emerson's dictum that "all language is vehicular and transitive, . . . good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead") they have to be put and kept in motion, so as to keep pace with the changes in both what we know and what we want to know.1 When I became editor of ESQj A Journal ofthe American Renaissance some dozen years ago, the subtitular phrase pointed for me to a circus of five excellent writers, but at the same time to an extensive, variously textured penumbra of authors of both sexes and of all races, in whom I could take an entirely ungrudging interest, with no sense of having passed a boundary of the national renaissance. In fact my editorial preference trended strongly toward these other writers, as the work directed to the journal on the Matthiessen Five seemed increasingly tired, old-fashioned, and infrequent. It was not, however , until October 1997» when Charlene Avallone's article "What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse" appeared in PMLA, that the convenient, unexamined critical wallpaper of my imagination—that hapESQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2003 1 ALBERT! VON FRANK pily neutral, infinitely expandable American Renaissance—assumed a new and guilty shape. My feeling at the time and since has been that Avallone's argument, important both as incitement and symptom, is, like Jane Tompkins's similar argument in her 1985 Sensational Designs , essentially tendentious: that it fails as much as any of the more traditional criticism to do simple justice to the qualities of the canonical works, which are something more, at last, than an illusion induced and sustained by conspiracy.2 And I would suggest, to go a step further, that the fortunes of "recovered authors" cannot ultimately consist with any misrepresentation or interested denigration of the more familiar names. It is not, of course, the "names" that need protection, but the possibility that they are names at all, and, in the first place, for reasons that might legitimately command respect. When George Lippard said that "literature merely considered as an ART is a despicable thing, " adding that "a literature which does not work practically, for the advancement of social reform ... is just good for nothing at all,"3 he advanced a theory, since elaborated upon, whereby Uncle Tom's Cabin might be valued at the specific expense of The Scarlet Letter—as if there were only just so much literary affirmation to go around. But Leslie Fiedler, who quoted Lippard on this subject, saw the prejudice as the sign of a certain unripeness of the sensibilities, as the selfserving prejudice, put simply, of an over-prolific and undercareful writer. Indeed a theory very much like Lippard's was to become a mainstay of Theodore Dreiser's. The opposite theory (a less immediately accessible one) might be exemplified by Emerson's 1842 observation that "Hawthorn's [sic] reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man."4 The essays contained in the present issue take up in fascinatingly different ways (yet with many areas of unpreconcerted agreement) the question of what an American Renaissance could, should, or might even now comprise. I am struck by the fact that there seem to be no votes for an outright ban on the Renaissance slogan (unless Russ Castronovo's "Death to the American Renaissance" is an exception), but a general sense instead that the phrase, however much worn smooth by long REEXAMINING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE usage, still manages to name something worth thinking about— something that will perhaps...