Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture (review)

At the outset of Surface and Depth, Michael T. Gilmore declares that he is "swimming against the disciplinary tide" by emphasizing "the dominant structures and values that have shaped American experience" in an era more attuned to race, gender, and other forms of difference (xii). Well, maybe. The critique of identity politics has been underway for some time now, and even during difference's heyday the mainstream received plenty of attention. True, Surface and Depth is the sort of sweeping (from John Winthrop to Philip Roth), thematically-organized study that one associates with an earlier era of American Studies, but its return is consistent with the post-identity politics revival of other grand narratives like Marxism. In this respect it's about as "unfashionable" (Ibid.) as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000), another recent book that forthrightly reclaims the power to totalize called into question by the postmodern politics of difference.

Then too, the demise of the big, sweeping study of American literature and culture owes as much to Gilmore's own generation of critics—who made their reputations in the 1980s with historically focused revisions of the classic American Renaissance paradigm—as it does to identity politics. In this respect Gilmore is writing against his own earlier self, although the differences between his first book and the new one are less interesting than the underlying continuity. In American Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985), Gilmore argues that authors like Thoreau and Melville evolved proto-modernist strategies of formal obscurity in response to their problematic experiences with the literary market. "Disappointment," he writes, "impelled the romantics toward textual strategies of difficulty and concealment, causing them to reconstruct in their relations to their audience the alienation they criticized in modern society." ¹ Surface and Depth takes this concern with American culture's precocious modernity even further, returning in fact to the ur-form of this argument: the assertion of thinkers like Tocqueville and Marx that the United States played an exceptional role in world history as the first nation founded outside the feudal order. "As a result of its tardy birth," Gilmore recapitulates this argument, "the New World did not have to be dragged into modernity" but was "the first modern society, a culture that has always been 'enlightened' and entrepreneurial" (x).

As the scare quotes around "enlightened" suggest, Gilmore has learned from his nineteenth-century progenitors the lesson of ambivalence. Surface and Depth proceeds as the unfolding of an historical problem: why did the United States become, in the early twentieth century, the world capital of the seemingly opposed regimes of psychoanalysis and the cinema? For Gilmore this conjunction epitomizes the abiding American preoccupation with making everything—society, the mind, nature itself—transparent, a preoccupation whose (literal) dark side is the countervailing imposition of obscurity upon whatever and whoever falls outside the magic circle. In his opening chapter, Gilmore lays out this pattern via readings of a range of early American texts. John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity," for instance, invokes the confessional mechanism whereby the Puritans cemented a post-aristocratic social contract, but its emphasis on election, on belonging as a function of moral essence, anticipates American canons of race. Set on the trail of American confessionalism by Winthrop, Gilmore runs it to ground in places both expected (Springer, psychoanalysis) and not (the income tax, comparing the American method of self-declaration to the British "Payment as You Earn" system [19]). Some readers might find this sort of trans-historical eclecticism problematic; I found it bracing and suggestive.

Unfortunately, Surface and Depth loses some of its momentum after its opening chapter, as it falls back upon an oversimplified distinction between high art and mass culture. Returning to his earlier concern with the literary value of difficulty, Gilmore argues that high art is characterized by its "attraction to obscurity" (xv), popular...