Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture

3. Cultures, Canons, and Cetology: Modernist Culture and the Melville Revival

3 / Cultures, Canons, and Cetology: Modernist Culture and the Melville Revival I have argued that culture formed a central problematic for American anthropologists, writers, and critics in the 1920s and 1930s. Even as American artists and critics attempted to redefine the content of a particularly American culture, the form of culture was itself under intense debate, as nineteenth-century definitions of culture as a general process of development or refinement intertwined with new competing definitions of culture as “whole,” “meaningful” ways of life. As American intellectuals struggled to come to terms with the rapid economic, technological, and social changes of the century’s first decades, the dominant metaphors for describing the social scene were those of division/fragmentation and wholeness. In the face of perceived fragmentation on multiple levels, thinkers across a variety of disciplines attempted to locate and define the limits of the meaningful whole—be it a whole poem, a whole nation or political unit, or a whole way of life. In this context, then, this whole, meaningful way of life comes to be, by definition, “culture”—for anthropologists , artists, and literary critics, all of whom I suggest are working on a common project. The tensions within this debate structure both Edward Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” and Willa Cather’s changing use of the image of Indian art from early novels such as The Song of the Lark to The Professor’s House, and the connections among culture, literary regionalism, and national identity that they articulate. These debates are also central to understanding the changing ways literary texts were read and received in this period. This includes both the terms in which they were interpreted and evaluated and the construction 86 / COMPOSING CULTURES of the literary tradition or history in which they were placed. Changes in what counts as culture change what counts as literature, and the way that culture is constructed or, to return to Cather’s term, “designed,” in turn transforms what counts as design in literature. As historians of American literary studies have shown, it is in the 1920s that American literature first became institutionalized in the academy as a separate discipline , and that the modern canon of American literature—with the handful of mid-nineteenth-century writers of what would come to be called the “American Renaissance” at its center—was established.1 It was also the period in which what would come to be called “American Studies ” first appeared.2 These processes, I suggest, occurred around changes in the meaning of both “American” and “literature”—changes reflected in, and in some ways enabled by, changes in the meaning of culture. If the category of American literature underwent a major shift in this decade, then the revival and canonization of Herman Melville in this same period could be said to be the paradigmatic example of this shift. Coming into the 1920s as a brief mention under a section entitled “Cooper and His Contemporaries” in the Cambridge History of American Literature, Melville ends the decade as the subject of three major biographies and several articles in the first year of the new journal American Literature, and being proclaimed as one of the representatives—along with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Whitman—of what Lewis Mumford would call America’s “Golden Day,” a pantheon whose status would become permanently enshrined in F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance in 1941.3 The Melville revival and canonization of the 1920s, then, was located in an almost unique confluence of literary, cultural, and institutional histories. While other authors underwent reevaluation in this period, no other author’s canonization has paralleled so closely the development and institutionalization of American literary studies in the academy through the twentieth century and thus has registered the complexities of the ideological debates that surround it. The study of Melville studies, then, could be said to be the study of American literature as a discipline. And if, as Lionel Trilling puts it, criticism is the “dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet,” the critical reception of Herman Melville is a major intersection where the body count is particularly high.4 Critics promoting the revival during the 1920s denounced their predecessors’ Anglophilic, genteel rejection of Melville; mid-century New Critics and myth critics in turn critiqued the 1920s “liberals” for making his books “directly relevant to their concerns and interest”—namely, their post–World War I critique CULTURES, CANONS, AND CETOLOGy...