Shelf Life

Leave your screen for a moment, please. If you would, walk over or bike over or bus over to the university or college library you most frequent. Once there, do your best with the windowlessness and the fluorescent lighting, the aged carpeting and bad art, the—let’s face it—smell. And do enjoy the buzz of human labor, the student workers and sunny staff, this stunning and sometimes curmudgeonly reservoir of good will and deep knowledge, this collective, this workshop, this hive. Make your way to the Library of Congress catalogue system’s F 7 area within the, I hope, open stacks. (Stop checking your gadget!) Chances are—insofar as you are reading this article and this symposium—you know where the F 7 section is. If the library had an adequate budget in the mid-1970s, go straight to F 7 .B48. There it is. The first edition of The Puritan Origins of the American Self. Pull it down from the shelf. Leaf through it. I’m serious. Read no further until you’ve done that.

Are you back? Great! And thank you! It was nice, wasn’t it, getting away from the screen? Anyway, you may have found, in the first edition, an errata sheet. Yale University Press issued Puritan Origins with three errors that it corrected with a tipped-in leaf found, in my library’s copy, loudly dressing the table of contents page. But good on Yale for alerting early readers of Bercovitch to these errors, which the press corrected in all later printings, including of course the second edition the symposium is now honoring.¹ What were the errata? One added nineteen words to page 77, another requested quotation marks be removed from page 126, and the third goes like this: “On page 156, the word personal in line 33 should not be italicized.”

In the early modern period the use of italics and capitals for emphasis was called “pointing.” I would like to use the errata sheet’s concern for pointing and the term personal as an occasion to explore certain larger meanings of Puritan Origins. I will begin by describing ways that Puritan Origins valuably prophesies, as it were, paradigms of inquiry following in its wake, not least the field of book studies, which, in part, investigates the kinds of textual variants displayed on the errata sheet. Next, I summarize the monograph’s argument in terms of content, but also with an eye to method, lighting on a signal, audacious achievement, for Bercovitch, of Cotton Mather’s life writing and the ideology it seeds: that it converts rhetoric into fact. Then, I will return to the question of pointing and variants, noting how early modern writers, contemporary readers, and Bercovitch himself address the importance of typography to meaning. However we construe the denial of history that constitutes the American rhetoric of personhood in Bercovitch’s argument, I will suggest that rhetoric itself has a material history, communicated through the physicality of books. The errata sheet, variants between copies and between editions, the textual afterlife of Puritan Origins itself—all open out on to a cavil I have with Bercovitch’s grander designs and a case I make for the history of the book. The field of book studies awakens us to error, surprise, and contingency in the historical record, in contrast to a seamlessness in Bercovitch’s argument that tends to settle meaning in advance. Books live volatile, animate lives on the shelves of our cultural repositories. They tell stories in their material composition that can unsettle the stories they tell in words.

Over the last forty years, Sacvan Bercovitch’s influence on the study of American letters is perhaps unparalleled—and rightly so. His posts at Columbia and Harvard; his searching monographs such as The Office of the Scarlet Letter and Rites of Assent; his editorship of the Cambridge History of American Literature, with, to name just one example, the extraordinary set of essays in volume 1—all have redefined our corner of humanities criticism and research. It is hard for them not to loom over the revisiting of his early work...