Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

1. Irvings Paradigm

1 : Irving's Paradigm robably the most significant and yet paradoxical fact about American literature is that it begins in the middle of its official history and in the work of a dreamer, Washington Irving. Nothing before him in the brooding spirit of the Colonial writers or in the rational wisdom of the eighteenth century quite anticipates The Sketch Book (1819-20) as America's first acknowledged contribution to world literature as well as the first true, or candid, account of the American Self.1 In a nation then committed to relentless industry , American literature begins-wakes up-not in the works of such men of action as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine, but in the idle and apolitical character of a belated and beleaguered aristocrat from "Tarry Town" who chose for many years as his residence and as his theme the nostalgic antiquity of Europe. It originates with a gentleman of leisure (really in a story about another dreamer and lounger) who-as Irving 's literary persona says in the "Author's Account of Himself"- "had longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement-to tread as it were in the footsteps of antiquity-to loiter about the ruined castle-to meditate on the falling tower-to escape in short, from the commonplace realities of the present and lose [himself] among the shadowy grandeurs of the past."2 American literature begins not in a book written by Brother Jonathan or even "Jonathan Oldstyle ," but in one by "Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." who finds the American experience to be essentially prelapsarian .3 It finds its oneiric voice in a transplanted [ 3 ] lroing's Paradigm folktale and in the character of Rip Van Winkle, whose first name serves as an acronym to bid our literary past in England and elsewhere to REST IN PEACE. It is, to be sure, ironic that the book that liberated America's literary present from the past should dwell almost entirely on England. Of its thirty-two sketches, only four are set in the United States. And of those, two (about American Indians) were written much earlier, and the plots of the others were filched from German legend. In one sense, The Sketch Book marks the first time one of our writers went abroad to discover America. Many others had gone on grand tours of the Continent (as Irving himself had done between 1804 and 1806), but as Geoffrey Crayon, Irving went on a night flight into himself. Whereas in the Knickerbocker Papers he had relied on the example of Swift and other English literary precursors, Irving woke up in The Sketch Book as a literary foundling with nothing to write about but "a blank page in existence." In the opening sketch, entitled "The Voyage ," the narrator speaks of "being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world" (p. 11). And so it is in this headless flight, which renders the allthor's "account" of himself as baffling at times as that of Ichabod Crane in the shadows of Sleepy Hollow. With such a literary voyage, the book-and it is a book, America's first tall tale of "human frailty and sorrow"-gets under way in every way that is a departure from the "landlocked" themes of Colonial and eighteenth-century American literature. The first sighting on the seas that Crayon describes as all "vacancy" is appropriately the mast of a nameless ship whose full story can never be known. For nothing can ever be known for sure in The Sketch Book except through the prism of language and memory. Crayonor Irving-wakes up to the stories he sketches much in the way of Rip Van Winkle, who scrambles off to the ancestral Catskills, described significantly as "a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family" (p. 29; my italics). The tale parallels the author's selfimposed exile from America, which allowed him the freedom to conceive of the first American "gentleman," perhaps a laughable but not lamentable creature who sleeps through the best part of his life. As an allegory for the state of American letters and life at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "Rip Van Winkle" also suggests that the Revolution had not yet separated us from our past in English lit- [4 ] lroing's Paradigm erature. Like Rip, the American Scholar had slept through it-as soundly as the town drunks in...