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American Literary History 15.1 (2003) 78-86



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"At Long Last Love";
or, Literary History in the Key of Difference

Thomas J. Ferraro

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Werner Sollors once wrote that ethnicity is like a half-filled water balloon: you grab with great expectations at one end and, swoosh! the substance you're after slips through your fingers. I understand the problem, mio amico; I must be a glutton for punishment because here I am, with y'all, trying again. When I teach literature, I often emphasize history: how those related modes of attributive belonging (imagined, all-too-real, or multiplex), intergenerational persistence (always already hybridized, ever procreative), and asymmetric interaction (above all, systemic harm) that we now constellate under the rubric "ethnicity" first came into being and have evolved together over time. Here, in select company, I wish to try out a complementary approach—less proven, overtly value-laden and quality-smitten, and a bit mystical.

Sacvan Bercovitch introduces the Cambridge Forum with anevocative turn of phrase—"the aesthetics of ethnicity"—that is ateaser after my own speculative heart. "The aesthetics of ethnicity" is a category conceit born of two monstrous abstractions and lifted like Emerson's eyeball out of time and space. Two slippery nouns, seriously metered and exquisitely rhymed, are linked by a yet more elusive genitive; the phrase eloquently inveighs against a false dichotomy—aesthetics or ethnicity—but it also, unavoidably, decontextualizes and thus belies the very phenomena it points to. Are we to consider the representation of diversity in art, the place of art within diverse cultures, the effect of diversity on art, the mediation of diversity by art, or the diverse arts of mediation? All of the above in toto—or not at all? Is diversity an ideology that operates aesthetically, or is aesthetics a philosophy that is culturally relative? When and where does scholarship enter: is neutrality requisite to rigor, or the telltale of privilege? are identity papers a sign of reflexivity, or its failure? is style an evidentiary [End Page 78] procedure, or the evidence itself? G-d, the rabbis remind us, is in the details.

"By thy ways thou shalt know and be known." So I, in a leap of anachronistic faith, imagine Jonathan Edwards putting this issue to the test. "By thy ways thou shalt know and be known" is a messianic imperative in the spirit of an eighteenth-century high revivalist orating and oracularizing in the style of the King James version of Exodus. "By thy ways thou shalt know and be known" speaks to the terror of individual predestination under Puritan special election, a matter of being damned-if-you-don't and (possibly) damned-even-if-you-do. A pluralized variation in the formula, "by ye ways ye shalt know and be known," is a concrete instance of the first fundamental theorem of cultural relativism, that any particular practice of otherness-and-belonging (call it an ethnicity) is ipso facto idiomatic (call it an aesthetic), challenging us with the imperious solipsism of its own terms. But the Puritan revival is, of course, no random example.

In common parlance we speak of the Puritan legacy as if it were the repressive cliquishness of 13-year-old girls, à la Congress's reaction to the Monica Lewinsky affair, but the fact remains that our common legacy has power—ideological and social but also aesthetic, ideological and social because aesthetic. The Calvinist call to order is used to reawaken the nation still; the rhythmic syntax and diction of King James's transliteration of the Hebrew Bible continues to burn in our ears; and the truly Levitical form of imperial Godhead—"by My ways ye shalt know and make known"—is just a slip or two of the tongue away. As scholars, we have come to recognize that the Protestant sectarian impulse lies behind peculiarly American forms of self-segregation, internal vigilance, and xenophobia, but our latter-day rhetorics of visionary redress—hang tight, question the Establishment, and do the right thing—are mightily Puritan in inspiration, thank goodness. And...

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