Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists (review)

American literary study, Randall Fuller shows in his illuminating and compelling Emerson’s Ghosts, has long been haunted by the example of Emerson. For Fuller, these “Emersonian hauntings” (3) reach beyond a more traditional view of major author influence toward the “sense of writing as capable of overwhelming the interpretations of literary-critical descendants through a forceful imaginative power unleashed in literary turns and conundra, in language that is often at odds with itself” (4). Such writing “encourages eccentric reading” and necessitates what Fuller calls a “dynamic understanding of Emerson” that he finds in Whitman (“one of the earliest haunted”) and more recently in Stanley Cavell’s claim that “we do not yet know what this man is and what he wants” (4–5).

Fuller traces the hauntings of Emersonian thought not in Whitman and other literary descendants, but in the twentieth-century literary criticism that relies upon Emerson to constitute and construct American literary scholarship and American Studies. Specifically Fuller focuses on four major critics, each receiving in successive chapters thoughtful and substantial readings that situate their critical projects not simply in relation to Emerson, but more complexly, in terms of their own social and political engagements with the America of their day: Van Wyck Brooks, F. O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, and Sacvan Bercovitch. Fuller’s thesis is twofold. The thread that joins these diverse critics in their differing engagements with American literature and its emergent scholarship is a deep interest in Emerson’s scholar, the crucial Emersonian figure that seeks to join or “convert” (Emerson’s verb) the social with the imaginative, the political with the literary. Moreover, these influential critics are joined in their failure to realize fully this confluence of the literary and the political, a failing that originates with Emerson.

In his first chapter, Fuller locates Emerson’s originary and influential desire to connect poeisis with praxis directly in “The American Scholar,” calling it the “ur-text” of American literary studies (18). Situating the famous 1837 address in the context of social unease (The Panic of 1837) as well as political unrest in the Democratic politics of 1834 (Emerson’s journal observances, in particular, of the New York City Election Riots of April 1834), Fuller contends that a “conceptual shift–from concern with political process to concern with the representation of politics” underwrites “Emerson’s conception of the literary intellectual” (13). Emerson’s scholar, then, is literary not by the genteel conventions of the address; rather, as Fuller argues, Emerson conceives of a scholar whose urgent engagement with his culture and politics is powered through the literary process of writing. Fuller closely reads the dynamic energy of Emerson’s aesthetics of “transitionless juxtaposition” (17) and asserts that, “‘The American Scholar’ is the example par excellence of an Emersonian effort to achieve transformation by means of the wildly destabilizing and contradictory energies of the symbolic and linguistic” (15). Such energies, for Fuller, render an Emerson more politically and socially engaged because of, not despite, his more familiarly recognized (if never fully grasped) literary effects. And if the critics of Fuller’s study also find a more politically engaged example in Emerson’s work, counter to the tradition that until recently set Emerson above the fray of politics, so too are they subject to the same contradictions of the symbolic and linguistic, the “power of open-ended language,” found in Emerson’s sentences (14).

Those contradictions assume a variety of shapes. For Van Wyck Brooks, Emerson’s scholar inspires the critic’s desire to create a “usable past” of writers more socially engaged (Whitman primarily); in doing so, Brooks rejects the genteel canon of fireside poets and writers–a group that would include Emerson–bequeathed by the Gilded Age. This early rejection of Emerson is reversed when Brooks turns to write his celebratory The Life of Emerson later in his career and as Fuller notes, begins a descent into madness precisely at that point. Interestingly, psychological trauma...