Close and Strange Relations: The Signs and Shape of American Literature

Close andStrangeRelations: The SignsandShape ofAmerican Literature )1ichael DavittBell. The Development of 4me1icanRomance: The Sacnfice of Relation. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1980. 291 +xivpp. Giles Gunn.TheInterpretation of Otherness: Laciature, Religion,and the American Imagination. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1979. 250+xpp. John T Irwin.American Hieroglyphics: The Symbolof the Egyptian Hierog{}1 phics mtheAmericanRenaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press,1980.371 + xiipp. ErnestH.Redekop These three critical books deal in diverse ways with the reading of American literature,especially the literature of the nineteenth century. At first glance, theapproaches of the three critics do not offer a clear common denominator. Irwinwrites about hieroglyphics and other linguistic signs, Gunn about religion and "otherness:' and Bell about the mode of romance. But all three focus on the major writers of the period (with the exception of one notable novelist),and all three are concerned with the relation of literature to somethingelse: Irwin, with the relation of linguisitc signs to art and to the world in general, as well as to the works of specific writers; Gunn, with the relationof art, and especially literature, to what he calls the "Other"; and Bell, with the "sacrifice of relation" of literature to the common-sense world in the nineteenth century. The first two critics deal with a number of disciplines:linguistics, psychology, music, theology, literary theory and the historyof religion. Bell, though he is concerned rather more with purely literary questions, begins the study of American romance by considering the Common Sense and Associationist philosophers of the eighteenth century. Irwin's American Hieroglyphics is an impressively erudite study of important themesand motifs in the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorneand Melville, flawed by an organization whose rationale may be lnownto himself but which (to me at least) remains obscure. The subtitle, TheSymbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance is Canadian Review of American Studies. Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 1983, 415-35 416 Ernest H. Redekop both descriptive and somewhat misleading, since Irwin spends a greatdeal of time on symbolism and the making of symbols in general, using the word "hieroglyphic" in a broad sense. Occasionally he falls in love with the critical hieroglyphics he iscreating, so that some parts of the book become deciphering exercises for the reader rather than contributions to our knowledge ofthe authors. These pedantic traps are particularly evident in his chapters on Poe, which constitute at least half the book. Irwin begins with a brief history of Jean-Frarn;ois Champollion's deciphering of the Rosetta Stone in 1821, a remarkable feat which opened up Egyptian history and culture to the world. It was, to a large extent, responsible forthe Egyptian revival period in American architecture and became, for mostof the major American writers, an important linguistic and epistemological symbol. He examines the effect of the deciphering on a whole rangeof assumptions about the origin of language and the origin of the world itself, pointing out a fact often overlooked today, that the deciphering of the hieroglyphics was a severe blow to the credibility of the account of creation in Genesis as interpreted by people like Bishop Ussher-although one may question whether or not this discovery was as shattering as the appearance of Darwin's theory of evolution. In an all too short section on Emerson, Irwin connects Emerson's viewof language with hieroglyphics, stating in a new way Emerson's technique of creating in each of his essaysa series ofmetaphors growing out of afundamental symbol. "An Emersonian essay;' he writes, "is simply the decipherment ofa hieroglyph. The strategy is always the same: he presents the emblem in allits outer complexity and then, through the doctrine of correspondences, he penetrates the emblem to reveal its inner simplicity, to show the hidden relationship between outer shape and inner meaning" (p. 13). Irwin's analysis of Thoreau begins with references to Goethe's Die Metamorphose de Pflanzen, and proceeds through consideration of Thoreau's use of the leaf as emblem in Walden, especially in the description of the thawing sandbank. He is particularly attracted to Thoreau's phonetic interpretation of the words lobe and leaf, in which sound, shape and meaning are related and compressed into a powerful...