Experiment, American Literature, and Jamesian Pragmatism

One of the the key tenets of the philosophy that William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey would later codify as pragmatism was the abandonment of the search for an Absolute Truth, and a commitment to pluralistic truths always open to doubt and new verification. This radical move left a seeming chasm between the pragmatists and the questing American literary romantics who preceded them. In his insightful study of the pre-history of pragmatism, Experience and Experimental Writing, Paul Grimstad questions this break in American intellectual history, locating important anticipations of pragmatism in the compositional processes of Poe, Emerson, Melville, and William James. These authors exemplified the unsettled, experimental openness of what would become the Jamesian worldview. These “romantics” reconceived “experience,” a central term for William James, not only as the cognizance of a given set of conditions and events, but as the act of engaging these points of awareness in an open and inventive way. Experience was for them redefined by experiment through the process of composition, a remaking of event and decision that was both a literary and an existential act.

Grimstad’s argument is well supported in his account of the series of insights that led Poe from his debunking of mechanical thinking in “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (1836) to his invention of the detective story. Poe’s experimentalism arose in part from an innately skeptical inclination to demand an ever-closer analysis of accepted truths. In dismissing Maelzel’s hoax, Poe came to recognize the power of inferential leaps based on close observation, mental events that reflected not only conceptual thinking but also the compositional process. Grimstad persuasively links these leaps in perception not only to Dupin’s detective work in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) but to what Peirce would a few decades later describe as “abduction” [48], flashes of insight produced by continuous observation, comparison, and thought experimentation. Dupin thus prefigured Peirce’s “pragmaticism” [47] by demonstrating “an art of resolution and synthesis” that fuses “perception and memory” into “hypothetical leaps that, if valid, render patterns of apparently disconnected particulars intelligible” [51].

Grimstad associates Dupin’s empirical and experimental procedure with Emerson’s crucial 1833 epiphany in the Paris Jardin des Plantes, where he encountered Georges Cuvier’s arrangement of exhibits showing the relationships among life-forms. Reflecting on the moment in his journal, he exclaimed, “I feel the centipede in me” [22]. As with Poe’s Dupin, the important thing was not the flash of understanding alone but the process of close observation and intense speculation that both preceded and followed it, a record of growing insight that we can follow in Emerson’s successive journal entries. This “experience” both generated, and was generated by, a continuous experimental effort of analysis that was part of the experience itself. In this account of Emerson’s kinship with the pragmatists, Grimstad adds an important insight to the work of Richard Poirier and others, who have reconceived Emerson less as a romantic than as a precursor to William James.

The skeptical, sometimes satirical nature of the experimental spirit embodied in Poe can also be found in Melville’s Pierre (1852), which Grim stad presents convincingly as a deliberately flawed masterpiece. Its self-inflicted defect, he argues, made it an even greater achievement. Melville’s abductive leap of recognition was spurred by the devastatingly obtuse reviews of Moby-Dick (1851) that began to arrive during the final stages of his work on Pierre. The reviews led to the disheartening realization that the reception of his work was doomed by the genteel critical climate of his era, with its insistence on fictional verisimilitude. Melville’s dramatic insertion of “over 160 pages of new material into the center of a nearly finished manuscript” [65] made Pierre “an unmanageably dense—even ‘opaque’—novel about the making of a novel” [68]. His pained and defiant rejection of aesthetic norms transformed Pierre from fiction into a form of coded autobiography, what...