Cooper’s Emblems of History/Fiction
- Cooper’s Emblems of History/Fiction
Ernest H. Redekop, associate professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, is senior editor of The Canadian Review of American Studies. He has written the Historical Introduction to Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe: The Rhine (SUNY, 1986), and has established the text for Cooper’s The Heidenmauer, for which he is also writing the Historical Introduction. His latest essay on Cooper is “Real versus Imagined History: Cooper’s European Novels,” in MOSAIC 22(1989).
Notes
1. According to Robert M. Young, David Hartley, in his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), produced “the first systematic elaboration of an associationist theory of mind and brain” (see Young’s essay “Association of Ideas,” in Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas [New York, 1973], I, 111). Hartley was influenced especially by John Gay’s ethical and psychological ideas, John Locke’s basing of associations in experience and Isaac Newton’s laying of a physical basis for the co-ordination of sensation, memory and association.
While the history of the development of associationist ideas is significant as a background to the ideas I am expressing in this essay, it is the aesthetic ramifications of associationism that underlie my argument. In general, there was a growing emphasis in the eighteenth century on the observer, on the role of perception rather than on the absolute integrity of objects of perception, stimulated by Addison’s Spectator essay #412, Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (1739), Akenside’s poem The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), and especially Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Toward the end of the century, William Gilpin, in his Essay on Picturesque Beauty (1792), explored the relations among landscape, the perceptions of a competent observer and the workings of the imagination in projecting the mind’s associations; other theorists, like Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight continued the examination of the ways in which the mind perceives the world aesthetically. The latter, in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), bases the picturesque on the pleasure derived from associations aroused by paintings. He comes close to describing the kind of cross-fertilization that goes on in Cooper’s mind between the landscapes he imagines and the landscape paintings he has seen and knows. In a sense, he anticipates the idea of a “developed system of schemata,” to use E.H. Gombrich’s term (Art and Illusion [New York, 1961], 87)—what might be called the “language of art” or idiom of painting—in Cooper’s case, those verbal and visual categories that enable him to describe the world he sees or to create the landscapes he imagines.
2. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Albany, Suny, 1983), 137. Further references are to this edition.
3. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Preface to The Last of the Mohicans (Boston, 1875), xxii.
4. See Ian Steele’s essay in this issue, 121–135.
5. James Fenimore Cooper, Satanstoe (Boston, 1876), v. Further references are to this edition.
6. This is a metaphor for the idea that within any dynamic system, apparently minute and seemingly unimportant causes have great and unforeseeable effects which cannot be formulated by linear equations. Lorenz expressed the bchavious of dynamic systems in non-linear equations which may be described graphically by the “Lorenz Attractor.” James Gleick calls this a “magical image, resembling an owl’s mask or butterfly’s wings” which reveals “the fine structure hidden within a disorderly stream of data.” See his Chaos: Making a New Science (New York, 1987), 29.
7. I am grateful to Kay Seymour House, editor of Satanstoe (Albany, SUNY Press, forthcoming), for pointing out to me that Cooper wrote “devise” instead of “desire,” the reading in earlier editions. The original word emphasizes Cooper’s idea of the imagination’s activity in projecting aesthetic qualities onto a natural setting.
8. Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe (Toronto, 1964), 418.
9. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book (New York, 1848), 592.
10. H.T. Tucfcerman, “James Fenimore Cooper,” North American Review, 89 (October...
