The Cosmopolitan Origins of the American Self

Around 1970, while Sacvan Bercovitch was discovering American Puritanism, I visited Machu Picchu with my second grade teacher. Not the real Inca site, of course, but the place of inspiration and imagination that my teacher created in the basement of her home in western New York. She wore a colorful poncho and low black hat from her native Bolivia as she led us on the expedition up the shoulder of a steep wooded road with no sidewalks. To a seven-year-old it felt like a hike up an Andean trail. Perhaps it was the adventure that appealed to me, or perhaps it was my bond with this teacher, who took a great interest in me and taught me some Spanish. The trip resonated so strongly that three decades later I hiked the Inca trail to visit the real Machu Picchu, which more than matched my expectations. My childhood trip to Plymouth Plantation pales by comparison, as does my memory of our Puritan-themed Thanksgiving activities featuring shoe buckles and tall black hats.

The small interest that the Puritan past held for a young American girl compared to the vivid attractions of the ancient Andes hardly disproves the thesis of The Puritan Origins of the American Self. For one thing, Bercovitch’s point there and in his other works on the Puritan strain in American literature and culture is that their impact was principally verbal, not material. As iconoclasts, the Puritans sought to reduce nonverbal aesthetic distractions and shift attention toward words as the primary conduits of meaning.¹ Thus their importance for a narrative of American literary origins, which rests in part on the claim that language held more significance for the Puritans than for other European colonists in the Americas. The Puritans left no great cathedrals, like the Cathedral of Santo Domingo in Cuzco; nor did they build monasteries such as the Convent of Santo Domingo, constructed on the ruins of Coricancha, the Inca Temple of the Sun; neither did they develop a tradition of painting and architecture of equal distinction to the Andean baroque style, which combined Spanish and indigenous influences. At independence Peru inherited a rich material history from its Inca and Spanish ancestors, while the United States of America inherited a verbal colonial culture from the Puritans, which matured in the speeches, declarations, and constitutions of the founding era, propelled the nationalist vision of the American Renaissance writers, and continues to animate US-American aspirations for global empire and democracy.

The Peruvians value their literary heritage as well as their architectural one, as I learned during a chance encounter with a Peruvian literature scholar in a Cuzco rug shop. The histories and ethnographies by Spanish and mixed-race authors such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala have a lively presence in contemporary Peruvian views of their nation’s past.² My acquaintance stressed how extensive this literature of contact and conquest is and how important to the literary history of both Spain and Spanish America, fields that remain closely entwined at least through the eighteenth century. The vast body of colonial writings in English has attracted comparatively little attention, particularly in the British wing of the field, where the works collected by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas are little read. Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions remains a striking exception in this regard. The situation is even worse among students of eighteenth-century British literature, who in contrast to their Spanish counterparts take little interest in the literary development of Britain’s North American colonies. This disciplinary configuration has had a distorting effect on the study of English-language literature, though there have been important efforts to correct the situation. In recent decades Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Paul Giles, David Shields, and William Spengemann have offered critical paradigms designed to integrate British and British North American literature, while Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner have provided an anthology on The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800.

Meanwhile the multilingual paradigm of American literature advanced by Mark Shell and Werner Sollors has...