The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown Norman S. Grabo (review)

Studies in American Fiction123 Dos Passos' pivotally important trip to Spain in 1937, perhaps anxious to be free of the writer's hindsights in The Theme Is Freedom and Century's Ebb, and thereby slights the abiding psychic wound upon Dos Passos of José Robles' execution by some unknowable "special section" of the Spanish Republic. Here, both art and politics are grounded on character, longer in the making. The "passionate, decent, immensely curious man" (p. 145) grieves for his friend and is driven forever to tell all passing by that this death is the essential political lesson of our time. Harvey Mudd CollegeDavid Sanders Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981. 209 pp. Cloth: $19.00. A Charles Brockden Brown revival has been occurring among scholars of American literature, although the word revival may not be entirely appropriate since Brown never had a broad group of admirers. The symptoms of interest in Brown manifest themselves in the proliferation of essays on him that have appeared in scholarly journals, particularly in Early American Literature, and in the numerous doctoral dissertations now underway or recently completed. In 1980 and in 1981, G.K. Hall printed respectively a reference guide to Brown and a collection of critical essays on him. The edited works of Brown, begun under the auspices of the Center for Editions of American Authors and continued by the Center for Scholarly Editions, should soon be completely in print. Given the relative consensus among his critics that Brown is a flawed writer, the reason for his sudden popularity in academia may prompt some cynics to say that with better writers having been used up for dissertations and other scholarly activities, academics have started to make a virtue of necessity, dipping lower into the aesthetic barrel , coming up with Brown, and proclaiming him not so messy after all. With the publication of Norman Grabo's The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown a further step has been taken. Brown may seem messy, but the coincidences and the inconsistencies emerge as central to an aesthetic quality that make his "stories ... a stunning accomplishment " (p. 182) . Professor Grabo writes: "Even the admission that Brown would have profited from some good editing after the heat of composition does not imply that he should have rid himself of his improbabilities and coincidences and unlikely resemblances. For they are the badges of his art, his passport to a world apart" (p. 184). So the inconsistencies , improbabilities, and coincidences that pervade Brown's fiction become for Professor Grabo the nexus of Brown's well-wrought art. Having personally participated in the orgy of Brown criticism, I am predisposed to reject the view of the cynics and to welcome confirmation that the attention to Brown is justified. The Comcidentai Art of Charles Brockden Brown brings considerable intellect, dazzling prose, and delicious wit toward confirmation of this premise. Starting with a time-honored convention of literary criticism, Professor Grabo implies that up until now everyone else has been wrong, or almost everyone. He offers to remedy the matter, eschewing the language of much contemporary criticism and preferring "to risk a good deal of New Critical close reading of the sort that some readers will find strained and fanciful " (p. xi). I find his reading neither strained nor fanciful. Professor Grabo plays fair 124Reviews with the text, offering provocative readings of Brown that argue powerfully for the presence of a pattern that he sees: His narrative structures are intentionally flawed. That, it seems to me, is a sign of artistic risk. His faults, like the faults geologists read, become the clues to a prevailing order; they point always to a design and a meaning that the reader is forced to supply. Coincidences and disconnections are his formal keys to right readings. They function beyond the wild grove or the carefully arranged ruin in the formal eighteenth-century garden. They are not present merely to enhance the order by contrast; only by seeing through them can we see the order at all (p. 183). Central to this order is an idea of doubleness or opposities: Sophia and Ormond, Edgar and Clithero...