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  • “Changing by Enchantment:” Temporal Convergence, Early National Comparisons, and Washington Irving’s Sketchbook
  • Michelle R. Sizemore (bio)

“I was written in my own native tongue, at a time when the language had become fixed, and indeed I was considered a model of pure and elegant English.”

—“The Mutability of Literature: A Colloquy in Westminster Abbey,” The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Near the midpoint of The Sketchbook, Geoffrey Crayon makes an astonishing discovery deep within the catacombs of Westminster Abbey—a six-hundred-year-old talking book. Yet curiously, Crayon is less astonished by the book’s miraculous speech than its impertinent assumptions about English literature. Galled by the book’s ascription of literary value to works “of pure and elegant English” (like itself), Crayon disputes all such claims about linguistic “purity and stability,” dismissing those who “talk of Spenser’s ‘well of pure English undefiled,’ as if the language . . . sprang from a well or fountainhead, and was not rather . . . perpetually subject to changes and inter-mixtures.”1 An American writer among the ranks accused of defiling the well, Crayon is obviously served by this principle of mutability. If Edmund Spenser’s English is as much a permutation of the language as, say, Noah Webster’s, then his place as the standard bearer is not really founded on the bedrock of authenticity but on the sands of convention and aesthetic taste. The problem for American letters, as Washington Irving well knew, was [End Page 157] that the fiction of English cultural authenticity was more powerful than the fiction that brought books to life, resurrected headless horsemen, and induced twenty-year sleeps.

“The Mutability of Literature,” though virtually unread today, offers a brilliant rehearsal of the nineteenth-century language debates, revealing in this ceaseless discussion an ideal of European cultural origins that Americans both desired and disavowed. For even as Crayon rails against the idea of an unspoiled English literary tradition, he fancies having come across an extraordinary literary preserve—a place where time has stopped and the living word survives unchanged across centuries. The recovery of European cultural antiquity is an understudied pattern in The Sketchbook. From London alleyways to the Yorkshire countryside, Crayon roams the forgotten corners of modernity, where the remains of old England are safeguarded.2 In these hidden refuges—the backrooms of museums and libraries, old inns and antique shops, tombs and decayed buildings —chronological time halts and the past flashes back to life. Crayon refers to this phenomenon as “enchantment,” an experience involving the sudden convergence of past, present, and future that radically alters his sense of historical time.3

Although best known for his Hudson Valley tales—“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—Irving, in his lifetime, also earned international acclaim for his exploration of European national cultures and world history.4 Early in his career, he experimented with a comparative approach to U.S. literature and history in The Sketchbook, a collection of travel vignettes, essays, and fiction that shuttles back and forth through time to investigate linkages between present-day Europe and the United States and their shared colonial history. Bewildered by the startling velocity of national transformation, Irving scribbles in an 1820 note that the United States seemed to be “changing by enchantment.”5 Like others who possessed sentimental cultural allegiances to Europe, Irving worried that the accelerated rate of change might cause the nation to forget its colonial past.

This essay argues that The Sketchbook’s moments of enchantment not only map out liminal regions between reality and fantasy but also advance new ways of thinking about time and historical processes. As a literary device, enchantment forges relationships across distant times and spaces among ostensibly unrelated peoples and phenomena—demonstrated, for instance, by the confluence of English, Yankee, Indian, and Dutch colonial cultures in “Rip Van Winkle.” By instantly conjoining several non-contemporaneous times in a simultaneous present, enchantment produces a temporal arrangement that problematizes historical thinking founded on linear progressive time. Progressive chronologies, as I show, contributed to a system of faulty diachronic comparisons that reinforced ideas about European cultural supremacy. Enchantment engenders an order of time that revises intercultural comparisons between Europe and the United...

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