American Worlds Since Emerson by David Marr (review)

106Rocky Mountain Review they headed"), the Neoplatonist influence of Equicola and Bembo and Castiglione on Ariosto (111-17), the import of equine imagery (163 passim), and the debunking of "the old romantic criticism of DeSanctis and Croce" (187 passim). As an editor, I take pleasure in noting the high quality of editing and proofreading in the reviewed volume, despite a few inconsistencies—e.g., "Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro" (85), "Lodovico Il Moro" (86), and "Ludovico il Moro" (225 ?. 6)—and a variety of errors in the data in the notes: e.g., read "BregoliRusso " for "Bregoli-Rousseau" (218 n. 18); "1954" for "1953" as the date of Robert Durling's article on the Bower of Bliss (222 n. 26); "Luigi Russo" for "Luigi Rosso" (234 n. 41); and "Columbia University" for "Columbus University" (225 n. 1, 234 n. 41, and 242 n. 15). Such errata aside, I recommend the work most highly. MADISON U. SOWELL Brigham Young University DAVID MARR. American Worlds Since Emerson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 234 p. David Marr states that the lesson and argument ofthis book involves both symbol and referent in that "The being thus symbolized accordingly forever stands in peril of being taken as a thing!' Marr suggests that the problems of "American politics and the problems of American literary genius may be said to belong to the same family of problems. The members of this family, past and present, exhibit various transformations of the ancestral idea of Emersonian infinitude and privacy" (39). It is in this framework that the author later leads the reader from the modernism of Herman Melville in Moby-Dick to the totalitarian world created by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale. Basing his premise on Emersonian individualism, Marr wisely provides the reader with a literary-philosophical road map in his introductory chapter "Emerson and After." It is significant that Emerson's essay "Culture" predates Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy by seven years, and that Emerson, as opposed to Arnold, bases his analysis ofculture on "social conditions" rather than "class divisions" (40). In time, a philosophical evolution, with numerous accompanying ideas, follows and points to the supposition that Emerson has founded an American world where American society can open itselfto Nature, thus taking precedence over what we know as civilization and achieving a transcendency that old Europe has not yet achieved. The transcendency is ultimately invested in "the infinitude of the private man" (36). Marr then moves to a discussion ofWalt Whitman and his Democratic Vistas, in which Whitman advances the concept of Emersonian individualism but enlarges it to include a literary aristocracy ruling America—with the country and "democracy" becoming synonymous. Here follows a discussion of the pragmatic philosophy of William James which is again considered an Book Reviews107 expression "ofthe infinitude ofthe private man." Marr relates James' parrying with other past and present philosophers, such as Hegel and Horkheimer, and eventually links him with Emerson; the linkage rests primarily on the condition that James diminishes the past and anticipates a future that must be free ofcontingency so that experience remains a basis ofphilosophical affirmation. Subsequently, Marr turns to the twentieth-century critic, R.P. Blackmur, and the poet, Robinson Jeffers, to illustrate their opposite stances in regard to avoidance or acceptance of "that radical inwardness which is the American literary-philosophical heritage" (122-23). Jeffers escapes from solipsism to transcendence for recognizing one's divine nature, but Blackmur's "bourgeois humanism" does not essentially confront the individualism of Emerson, Whitman, and James; in the end it presents a civilizing power that is merely "homeopathic" (173). The author's final chapter reveals Joseph Heller's Catch-22 as an exploration ofbureaucratic encroachment upon individualism through the use of language and its attendant symbols. Marr also invokes the writing of Ralph Ellison to display the survival of blacks, and whites, in a modern humanity threatened by non-Emersonian thinking. He states that the "republic of letters founded by Emerson and Whitman may be down to one of its last citizens" (209). Marr, with the inclusion of an epilogue, becomes justifiably skeptical and questions whether or not a permanent democracy has ever become an accomplished fact in...