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After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies
America, and American literary studies, have long dreamed of leaving the past behind. We understand this as the drama of American exceptionalism, rooted in the image of a New World. For many of the critics of the foundational epoch of Americanist criticism in the 1950s and 1960s, this myth gave coherence to American literary history, explaining the figures to which novelists and poets obsessively returned: the wilderness, the sea, the city on a hill, the “American Adam.” Unburdened by the weight of the past, Americans could imagine themselves looking forward to a glorious future.
The first sustained challenge to this conception of American literary history came with the historicist turn in the 1980s, spearheaded by critics who called themselves the New Americanists (a term Donald Pease appropriated from a skeptical survey of the new scholarship, appending it to his own book series at Duke University Press). The effect of this revisionary scholarship was profound. By taking seriously American writers’ engagement with their historical moment, it simultaneously created an enormous new range of reference points for American literary studies, while dramatically expanding the archive of writers who counted as important contributors to American literature. Scholars who focused on late nineteenth-century writing found its practitioners of realist and naturalist fiction, authors grappling directly with the sweeping social changes of their era, brought to center stage after decades of lingering in the shadows of the American Renaissance. In new collections like the Heath Anthology of American Literature, their voices were bolstered by those of slave narrativists, immigrant memoirists, female regionalists, and Native American activists, joining to create a new canvas across which to tell a previously unheard account of American literary history.
A quarter century later, that account unquestionably sets the terms for study in the field. Indeed, it may come as a shock to realize we now stand as far from the initial New Americanists’ interventions as they did from many of those of the founding critical fathers of the 1950s and 1960s. Has the time then arrived for the field to take stock once again?
At one level, such reflection may seem unnecessary. Far from standing in an agonistic relationship to their predecessors, many current attempts at field reshaping seem, rather, to build directly on the work of the 1980s and 1990s, as in the case of the “postnational” turn. Other emerging ventures – such as digital humanities and cognitive approaches to reading – do not appear at odds with such scholarship; they might in fact be said to complement it, given their similar aim of bringing American studies “up to date.”
What if, however, instead of simply moving ever forward, we chose to circle back past the New Americanists to reconsider the critical past? As scholars in other fields have begun to point out (in forums like the Representations special issue on “The Way We Read Now,” ed. Marcus and Best), the historicist practice of ideology critique or “symptomatic reading,” by seeking to diagnose texts’ allegiances as the product of a bounded historical moment, can risk shoring up a self-congratulatory narrative of progress toward our own present. As Americanists, however, we may ironically find that, in so doing, we demonstrate how indebted we in fact remain to the past we would seek to overcome, as so much of that past – both critical and literary – has held fast to the same dream of beginning anew.
To begin to develop a framework that might instead acknowledge the continuities between past and present, this chapter returns to the criticism of half a century ago, and particularly to the generic focus so often thought to indicate that criticism’s lack of interest in history: the romance. As I hope to show, a different story might be told about the romance, one that is always already transnational, and that does not disallow a space for meaningful social critique. As we track the progress of romance differently, so might we also begin to recognize the consequences of our own weddedness to the romance of progress.
Achieving a critical perspective on the notion of moving ever forward seems especially urgent at present, as it becomes ever harder for universities to conceive of knowledge making in forms that do not involve notions of innovation and discovery borrowed largely from scientific work. Hence, while this chapter makes an argument for a different narrative of American literary studies, its larger horizon is the future (as well as the past) of literary studies itself. Our work differs from that of the sciences, and also from that of the discipline of history, in its ceaseless return to a past that can never be understood as simply past. Our future, I want to claim, depends on our ability to theorize what is at stake when we find ourselves drawn to look back in time.
For the New Americanists of the 1980s and 1990s, transforming the “field imaginary” of American literary studies entailed skeptically redescribing the critical founding fathers of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, so as to mark a decisive break that would enable the field to constitute itself anew. Both Russell Reising in The Unusable Past (1986) and contributors to the anthologies Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (ed. Donald Pease, 1994) and Ideology and Classic American Literature (ed. Myra Jehlen and Sacvan Bercovitch, 1985) thus gather a broad array of Americanist predecessors – including R.W.B. Lewis, Leo Marx, Leslie Fiedler, Charles Feidelson, Richard Poirier, Harry Levin, and especially F.O. Matthiessen, Lionel Trilling, and Richard Chase – in order to characterize them, as a group, as having been problematically committed to a model of American literature as “escap[ing] social categories” (Graff 106) or “separat[ing]” itself from “the realm of politics” (Pease, “New Americanists” 26). In place of the social or political, these critics argued, the postwar Americanists emphasized the aesthetic, but an aesthetic specifically defined by its interest in subjective interiority, so that individual “human psyches” replaced “economic and political systems” as the most meaningful “ ‘reality’ ” (Reising 95). As such, they upheld a tradition of the American romance: the literary text as a transcendent “world elsewhere” in which, unlike in the public sphere, the “desire for [psychic] wholeness could be fulfilled” (Pease, “New Americanists” 26).
By emphasizing historical context, the New Americanist scholars would “desublimate” the political elements not only of the romance tradition, but also, equally, of the earlier generation of critics who wrote about it. After all, as Pease and Reising in particular emphasized, Chase’s Herman Melville and Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, published in 1949 and 1950, respectively, made their “field-defining” arguments against their own predecessors, Progressive 1930s critics such as V.L. Parrington, for overtly political reasons – to make a Cold War-era case for American freedom against the “totalitarian” idea that “literature should participate directly in the economic liberation of the masses” (Chase, Herman vii). As Pease argues in “Moby-Dick and the Cold War” (which sees Matthiessen’s 1941 American Renaissance as prefiguring these anticommunist critiques in opposing the expansiveness of the American romance to Hitler’s fascism) and, later, in his writings on C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, Melville criticism became an especially popular platform for mid-twentieth-century literary scholars to intervene directly in one of the most charged ideological struggles of their time.
Looking back after another quarter century, however, it seems fair to say that, just as Trilling did with Parrington, the New Americanists tended to oversimplify their predecessors’ arguments in order to clear the scholarly ground. The Cold War lens assumes that the 1950s critics valorized the American romance, yet the contrasts that Chase and Trilling delineate between the American tradition and the “social” one predominant in Britain hardly aim to favor the former, which even Chase described as “morally equivocal” and obviously lacking in the “complexity” of, say, a Dickens (American 1, 6). Trilling, who in fact once critiqued the antireferential stance of the New Critics by claiming that “literature is of its nature involved with ideas because it deals with man in society,” never celebrated antisocial fiction; instead, he repeatedly championed the nineteenth-century American writer whom he felt most powerfully diverged from the romance tradition and toward the British alternative, Henry James (Reising 102). Conversely, Trilling’s infamous attack on Theodore Dreiser in “Reality in America” faults the novelist chiefly for his excessively “literary” language and the fact that his “dim, awkward speculation” concerning such matters as “ ‘beauty,’ ” “ ‘sex,’ ” and “ ‘life itself’ ” bears insufficient relation to “political practicality” (“Reality” 26, 28).
How, then, did writings like Pease’s and Reising’s manage to cast Trilling as the definer of an American literary tradition built on the avoidance of the “world of politics” (Pease, “New Americanists” 8)? In retrospect, the New Americanists appear to have persistently conflated two terms, “politics” and “ideology,” that Trilling (as well as Chase) intended very much to keep distinct – because, in their view, the latter actively worked against the former. (For example, Reising sees it as an unacknowledged irony that Trilling, “opponent of any ideological thinking,” uses literary analysis as a form of “oblique political criticism” [101].) Trilling thus explained in the 1970s that he wrote against Stalinism in The Liberal Imagination because of its “clandestine negation of the political life” (qtd. in Murphy, Politics 369). Like James’s Princess Casamassima in his 1884 novel of the same name, the American left seemed to him to have become ideological in the sense that it substituted moral arguments for political ones; wrapping itself in the cloak of “political innocence,” it professed to operate not in the name of power but only in that of “virtue” (Trilling, Liberal 95). As a result, it could only ever remain blind to the less generous psychic investments lurking behind its own “good impulses” – an argument intended less to undermine the impulses themselves (as Trilling puts it, “There is nothing so very terrible in discovering that something does lie behind”) than to caution that the refusal to acknowledge such motivational complexities could result in an imperious disregard for those of others as well (Liberal 213).
It probably served the New Americanists well not to dwell on these features of Trilling’s criticism, since they continue to pose a meaningful challenge to the mode of political criticism that has been the 1980s’ continuing legacy to critical practice. Indeed, Trilling’s remarks here display a surprising commonality with Wendy Brown’s Nietzschean critique of the late twentieth-century academic left for an “ambivalence about freedom” that led to a rhetoric of sheer “resistance,” one that advertises the “moral goodness” and “reason” of its proponents rather than their own political “will to power.” Along related lines, Eve Sedgwick has called into question the “paranoid” stance of ideology critique for tending to “disavo[w] its affective motive and force” and instead “masquerad[e] as the very stuff of truth” (Touching 138).
The disavowal of an affective dimension within historicist criticism derived, of course, from the distance it hoped to take from an American romance tradition said to emphasize the psychological – “all those dark, inner, asocial drives of the self” – at history’s expense (McWilliams 74). And yet, as evidenced by the two subsections in Pease’s anthology – titled “The Desublimation of Romance” and “The New Historicist Return of the Repressed Context” – a Freudian vocabulary in fact remained central to the historicist project. What Fredric Jameson, following Althusser, termed “symptomal” reading is, after all, a practice that conjoins Marxist and psychoanalytic interpretive techniques. In either case, the critic resembles the scientific analyst, whose expertise uncovers the deeper affective logic that the patient’s – or the text’s – representational edifice is designed to occlude. Hence, it is perhaps unsurprising that in many historicist readings, entrapment within a historical “moment” (versus the critic’s own transcendent freedom) can begin to appear as a form of psychological pathology. This is true when the author in question – say, Melville – is critiquing the dominant views of his time, as in Susan Mizruchi’s essay on Billy Budd in Pease’s anthology (where those views appear as “anxieties” if not outright “irrational terror” at a changing social landscape [292]); it is equally true when he himself is said to emblematize the dominant views, as in Wai Chee Dimock’s new historicist reading of Moby-Dick (where Melville himself appears wracked by “obsessiveness” and “anxiety”).
The emphasis in Trilling, as in Brown and Sedgwick, then, is less on the hubris of this critical position than on the way it tends merely to “mirror the mechanisms and configurations of power … which [it] purport[s] to oppose” (Brown 3) – which, in this case, entails not simply possessing unacknowledged affective motivations (paranoia, as Sedgwick notes, being itself a manifestation of “anxiety” par excellence [128]) but also covering these over, precisely via the discourse that attributes them solely to one’s historical subjects of study rather than oneself. The chief concern for all these commentators, however, is less the potential for critical obtuseness as such than the risk of “scapegoating” (LaCapra 72). In its place, Sedgwick’s “reparative” criticism offers the same alternative suggested by Trilling in The Liberal Imagination: to make our judgment a function not of our moral superiority but of our “love” (Sedgwick, Touching 128; Trilling, Liberal 210).
Part of the 1950s critics’ argument with their Progressive predecessors, after all, concerned those predecessors’ tendency to separate out certain writers from what Parrington called the “main current of American thought,” and specifically the broad collective project of “democracy,” via recourse to a psychological vocabulary: specifically, through procedures of pathologization. Thus, Trilling notes that, for Parrington, Poe’s “gloom” was “merely personal and eccentric,” inseparable from his “dipsomani[a]” (Liberal 21). In fact, Parrington’s dismissal was stronger: “It is for abnormal psychology to explain” Poe’s evident “ ‘neural instability,’ ” he wrote – as Henry James’s tendency to project “figment[s]” of his “fancy” in place of the “realities of life” made clear he was “shut up within his own skull-pan” (240–1). Similarly, Chase’s Melville book aims to take seriously the thought of a writer dismissed by Parrington and Van Wyck Brooks as “ ‘morbid,’ ‘pessimistic,’ ” and done in by his own “obscure, abiding neurosis” – at best, “a kind of primitive man – a natural or unconscious genius’” (Chase ix–x). Although Pease argues that Chase valorized romance for its projection of a reassuringly “whole self,” Chase in fact contrasted the American tradition’s production of “fragments,” its “poetry of disorder,” to the “massive unities,” the movement toward “harmony” and the “normative,” that he found in the British novel. Rather than merely celebrate American writing, Chase thus begins from the difficulty of taking it seriously at all, given the tendency to view the romance merely in pathological terms. As he writes of the Americanist criticism of D.H. Lawrence,
[L]ike all the observers of American literature we are citing in these pages, Lawrence was trying to find out what was wrong with it … he thinks that the American novel is sick, and he wants to cure it. Perhaps there is something wrong with it, perhaps it is sick – but a too exclusive preoccupation with the wrongness of the American novel has in some ways disqualified him from seeing what, right or wrong, it is. (Chase, American 9)
The commonality between Chase’s and Trilling’s stance here and Sedgwick’s call for a reparative criticism may in fact be less surprising than it appears. Within the politicized criticism of the last quarter century, queer theory stands out for the tension it must negotiate between projects of collective identification and a suspicion of the normalizing technologies that produce those identity categories in the first place. Albeit in very different ways, recent queer studies such as those of Heather K. Love (Feeling Backward) and Scott Herring (Queering the Underworld) deliberately focus on those historical figures who, like Trilling’s Poe or Chase’s Melville, resist inclusion in larger collectives, dwelling instead in a space of negativity and eccentricity that is inseparable from the achievements of their art. (Less surprising in this context, then, is the casualness of Chase’s admission, nearly 300 pages into his 1949 Melville book, that of course Herman preferred men.)
In these construals, it is the demand for collective identification, rather than the turn away from the social to the individual, that goes hand in hand with the insistence on an integrated selfhood. This is actually more in keeping with Geraldine Murphy’s strikingly counterintuitive accounts of the mid-twentieth-century struggles over Melville’s writings – in particular, his late unfinished novella Billy Budd in addition to Moby-Dick – which differ from Pease’s in two significant respects: (1) Rather than narrate a continuum linking the pro-American, antisocial stances of all of the field-defining critics from Matthiessen going forward, Murphy’s essays establish Chase and Trilling as reacting against the stance of American Renaissance; and (2) more provocatively, they argue that Matthiessen, the more Progressive critic, developed what has come to be known as the “conservative” reading of Billy Budd, and that Chase and Trilling reacted specifically against that reading.
As Murphy explains, Matthiessen’s Popular Front politics led him not to condemn the hanging of Billy Budd as an antidemocratic miscarriage of justice (as later New Historicists would); rather, he emphasized the story’s ultimate, religiously inflected themes of “unity, reconciliation, and harmony” as the characters arrive at a common understanding (Murphy, Politics 356). (As Gerald Graff comments, Matthiessen realized that “there need be no necessary connection between the [Romantic] aesthetics of organic form” and a reactionary political stance [106].) For Chase, in contrast – as for Hannah Arendt and a number of others who have commented since on Melville’s novella – the character of Billy demonstrates the necessary impossibility of inhabiting a morally “innocent” stance in a political situation. Most interestingly, Murphy points out, Trilling made the politics of reading Billy Budd a core concern not in any of his critical writings but in his lone published novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947). Therein, a former Soviet “fellow traveler” turned arch-anticommunist (modeled on Whittaker Chambers, the accuser of Alger Hiss) writes an article on Billy Budd that, like Matthiessen’s reading, simply affirms the story’s conclusion. While Trilling’s autobiographical hero wonders “how someone once so devoted to social justice could now ‘make so impassioned a plea … for the status quo … the rule of force,’” the novel’s unrepentant Stalinists have no trouble with their political enemy’s reading, similarly affirming that innocent men may sometimes end up sacrificed to the higher purpose of “ ‘Law in the world of Necessity’ ” (Murphy, Politics 370).
In his acknowledgment of the commonalities linking opposed ideologies here, Trilling draws surprisingly close to a figure who might easily seem his own opposite, the C.L.R. James to whom Pease has valuably reintroduced present-day readers. In Pease’s own account, James appears as a renegade Melville reader from the same midcentury era that produced the canonical Americanist interpretations – one who, had his words been heeded, could have charted an alternate genealogy for American studies scholarship. Specifically, Pease argues, by integrating his experiences as a deportee on Ellis Island into his study of Moby-Dick, James transformed the text from an American classic into a work with a significance “transgress[ing] national boundaries” (“Introduction” xx). James as described here thus becomes a forerunner of the postnational criticism of the present day.
In fact, however, James’s very “postnationalism” can point up how dependent on the category of the nation-state, and specifically on “America,” contemporary scholarship arrayed under the postnational banner can at times remain. The opposition that Pease posits between James’s Melville reading and that of Richard Chase, for example, depends on reading the former as a protest against an American state power that the latter, as a Cold Warrior, wrote to defend. Yet James’s characterization of Melville’s relation to Progressive reform actually well nigh mirrors that of Chase: both see him as, in James’s words, “the mortal foe of any kind of program by which mankind should act to achieve salvation. If he were alive today, he would turn in horror from Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Trotskyists,” and so forth (James 20). In what is very much a paean to, not a critique of, Melville’s text, James quite explicitly asserts that the Pequod’s crew is “not to be confused with any labor movement. … They are not suffering workers, nor revolutionary workers” (20, 22).
What leads to the critical confusion here? One might suggest it is the very postnationalism of James’s reading. Rather than the American state, James specifically articulates, as the object of Melville’s critique, that feature of transnational (though importantly Western-influenced) modernity that Max Weber would so influentially theorize as “rationalization.” It is this emphasis that accounts for his portrayal of capitalism and state communism as twinned formations, rather than opposed ones. In both cases, a cadre of “administrators” and “executives” works with one aim only, that of implementing “the Plan,” a massive project of rationalized industry, “productivity quotas,” and so on (James 14, 56). The result is a “mechanization” not merely of everyday life but also, eventually, of “human personality” itself (11).
To recognize James’s chief target as rationalization has at least two important effects. One, it implicates us as readers today. A critique of the anticommunist, anti-immigrant state need not do so; we have politics, we can easily think, while “they” (then and now) have ideology. Yet what is our relation to rationalization? The university, in the years since James and Trilling wrote, has become more and more a business like any other, with productivity quotas of its own. Americanist scholars trained in the methods of the past 25 years must come to grips not simply with our participation in this structure, but also with the possibility that the very critical methods taken on for antihegemonic purposes have in many ways served hegemony’s ends. If we admire James’s arguments, we must admit (as William Cain does) that their highly “personal” mode of presentation, their distance from “academic routine” and imitability, stands as far from our own scholarship today as that of Trilling, if not farther (Cain 270). In contrast, our historicizing practices and eager pursuit of “new” and “leading-edge” scholarly techniques dovetail quite nicely with the transformation of the humanities into a research-driven enterprise modeled on more explicitly empiricist fields.
The point is not simply to demonize or abandon such approaches; yet we must recognize their usefulness for a bottom-line-driven scholarly world. Hence, C.L.R. James’s work, with its Weberian focus on rationalization, becomes timely in a heretofore unexplored way, one in which its resonances with, rather than only its differences from, the 1950s and 1960s Americanists can come to the fore. These resonances might lead us to modify Pease’s question about an alternative genealogy for Americanist scholarship: what might that scholarship look like if Weberian analysis were to play a larger role? One surprising possibility is that we might reconsider, with an eye toward its transnational as well as American instantiations, the critical capacities of that category so important to mid-twentieth-century scholarship: the romance.
As the French-Brazilian scholar Michael Löwy argues in Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, his 1992 book with Robert Sayre, romance’s quest for a “world elsewhere” may be understood as more than merely escapist or aestheticizing if grasped as a mode of utopian critique; in Löwy and Sayre’s words, “utopia will be Romantic or it will not be.” Used as a term to encompass not only literary Romanticism but also earlier modern references back to medieval romans as repositories of “exalted sentiments,” “the marvelous,” and “extravagance,” romance appears here a child of the Enlightenment that revolts against its parent: specifically, against a modernity defined in distinctly Weberian terms as the “disenchantment of the world,” “instrumental rationality,” “bureaucratic domination,” and “dehumanization” that arise out of the “spirit of capitalism.”
Weber himself, of course, strove for “value-neutrality” in describing these phenomena. Yet he shares with his fellow turn-of-the-twentieth-century sociologists Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, and Émile Durkheim (not to mention with Friedrich Nietzsche) a commitment not only to questioning the self-evidences of progress – the spiritless specialists who fancy they have “attained a level of civilization never before achieved” (182) – but also, in doing so, to taking seriously the losses modernization inevitably entails. In Löwy and Sayre’s view, this perspective stands in ongoing tension, in twentieth-century Marxist thought (including, for them, that of the “Romantic critic” C.L.R. James [152]), with a more thoroughgoing commitment to progress as such. The career of Weber’s student Georg Lukács, the great twentieth-century Marxist critic, is here exemplary: having repudiated his own earlier romantic tendencies to embrace a party-line Stalinism in the late 1920s, he recants again a decade later in works like The Historical Novel, which critiques realism for its inability to look beyond the present moment to acknowledge the “endless field of ruin” and “broken social formations” that were the “necessary pre-conditions” of that present’s coming into being (54).
The contemporary critic most influenced by Lukács’s account of literary history has been Fredric Jameson, whose 1981 The Political Unconscious – with its opening invocation to “Always historicize!” – has often been read as galvanizing the turn toward historicist criticism and ideology critique. Yet despite this association, Jameson, too, affirms the utopian capacity of romance to “liberat[e]” the literary text from its “generic confinement to the existent,” to the “real” – and specifically to the “historical present” (Political 104). Interestingly enough, the late nineteenth century, the era most associated with realism in the United States, appears as an especially crucial moment in this regard. On the one hand, intellectually speaking, it indeed represents the high-water mark of positivism triumphant, which for Jameson as for Lukács finds its literary expression in the naturalism of Émile Zola, with its hope of finding deterministic laws equally able to govern “the stones of the roadway” and “the brain of man” (Zola 17). As the “ ‘realistic’ option” thus begins to feel to the seeking imagination like “an asphyxiating, self-imposed penance,” Jameson writes, romance “once again comes to be felt as the place of … freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realist representation is the hostage” (Political 104).
Yet Jameson’s account also depicts the late nineteenth century as auspicious to romance for a different reason. As he writes, in countries that saw especially rapid industrialization and urbanization during these years, we recognize a “transitional” phase “in which two distinct … moments of socioeconomic development” may be seen to “coexist” – such that we see “an organic social order in the process of penetration and subversion, reorganization and rationalization, by nascent capitalism, yet still, for another long moment, coexisting with the latter” (Political 148). This kind of prolonged period of transition is presented as romance’s “ultimate [historical] condition of figuration” (148).
American literary history, of course, has rarely associated the late nineteenth century with a “revival of romance” of the kind used to explain the resurgence of, say, Gothic fiction in 1890s Britain. Realism and naturalism have instead been presumed ascendant in these years. When critics such as Amy Kaplan have occasionally acknowledged the glut of titles like When Knighthood Was in Flower on the decade’s bestseller lists, these have typically been dismissed as nostalgic attempts at escapism from contemporary struggles, if not veiled apologias for the government’s imperialist adventuring in “exotic” lands. In sum, the notion of a critical investment in romance as a protest against the limitations of a realist era, as Jameson and others describe, has seemed nearly impossible for politically minded Americanists to imagine.
An important exception in this regard, albeit from outside the field of literature, was a study published around the same time as the original New Americanist interventions: T.J. Jackson Lears’s cultural history No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981). In Lears’s Weberian account, American thought during these years might best be understood through the concept of “antimodernism,” a “revulsion against the process of rationalization” – “the reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated by rational technique” – and a quest to regain the immediacy and sense of broader meaning thought to be slipping away (7).
One of the many enduringly powerful features of Lears’s analysis is how readily it can be broadened beyond both national and temporal boundaries. This does not mean that the turn of the twentieth century does not remain a crucial moment; as Jameson puts it in an early essay on Weber, “Nothing is quite so striking as the simultaneous appearance, within the various national situations at the end of the nineteenth century, of comparable visions of the crippling of energies” (“Vanishing” 5). Robert Pippin, in his still unrivaled Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, similarly dates to “sometime around the latter half of the nineteenth century” the full ascendance of the suspicion (which he, too, recognizes as rooted in Romanticism) that the move from the ancient reflection on “what ought to be” to the modern orientation toward “the way things are” – with its concomitant emphasis on “natural science and technology” and “a progressive, liberal democratic culture” – was in fact “enervating and spiritually destroying that very culture” (5, xii).
As we see here, equally common to Pippin, Jameson, and Lears is a period-specific language of modernity as specifically generating distinct psychic disturbances – whether “anxiety,” “melancholy,” or, in Lears’s account of fin-de-siècle United States, the rise of the diagnosis of “neurasthenia,” a condition of breakdown or withdrawal that the era’s own medical men traced to the ravages of modern life. Yet while this reframing of modernity as a “malady” (Löwy and Sayre 251) might seem one of the strongest arguments one could make against the unmitigated salutariness of progress, No Place of Grace remains especially brilliant in its account of how such diagnoses in fact paved the way for many antimodern critiques to dissolve into narrowly “therapeutic” discourses – essentially, precursors to contemporary New Age rhetorics – that collapsed the critique of progress into another kind of progressive storyline.
Lears’s account of the rise of the therapeutic has been powerful enough that antimodern or romantic expressions in late nineteenth-century American writing – Sarah Orne Jewett’s sketches of a dying rural New England, for example, or Henry Adams’s paeans to the Virgin of Chartres – have routinely been read as merely attempts at escape from hard historical realities into the soothing balm of nostalgia. We see the same dismissal at work in the New Americanists’ claim that the romance appealed to 1950s critics as a way to recapture “an ersatz wholeness for their authentic selves” (Pease, “Introduction” 8). Yet an opportunity is missed here to recognize that such writers – no less than a Lukács or C.L.R. James – might both indulge in a therapeutic vision of wholeness and offer a meaningful critique of modernity’s commitment to planned obsolescence at one and the same time. Understanding this era’s antimodernism as more than merely a historical “symptom” – or, better, understanding, as did William James, the ways our symptoms might augment the work we accomplish rather than merely inhibit it – allows the past to speak meaningfully to the dilemmas of the present. At the same time, it furthers the New Americanist project of imagining a diversely populated American literary landscape – one that could encompass texts from Maria Amparo Ruíz de Burton’s rewriting of Don Quixote to Zitkala-Sa’s School Days of an Indian Girl – that can and should be read in tandem with contemporaneous global writings, from the Latin American historical romance to the studies of Weber and his cohorts in European sociology.
In Löwy and Sayre’s words, “That [the Romantics] have often presented [their] penetrating diagnosis in the name of an elitist aestheticism, a retrograde religion, or a reactionary political ideology takes nothing away from its acuity and worth – as a diagnosis” (251). Indeed, one could go farther still, and note, as Gerald Graff did over 25 years ago, that “continued recourse to the Left-Right antithesis as a way of making sense of the cultural situation blinds opposing factions to common attitudes and interests” (105). Thus, one form of conservatism should be recognized as having long been as disgusted by capitalism as its putative opposite on the left. Hence, Parrington’s regret that Henry Adams never met up with William Morris – or, more recently, Kenneth Warren’s at Henry James’s failure to see that his interest, in The American Scene, in uncovering “that part of the national energy that is not calculable in terms of mere arithmetic” was in fact shared at the time by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Du Bois, himself a New Englander and a Harvard man, remains one of the few avowedly progressive – and, of course, nonwhite – writers of this period whose work has been recognized as part of a broader strain of antimodern critique. (Shamoon Zamir’s Dark Voices is an especially important study in this regard.) Yet the groundbreaking work done by the historian Wilson Julius Moses in Afrotopia (1998), if taken up by literary scholars, would enable a much broader recognition of the role of what Moses explicitly defines as a utopian “antimodernism” in African American thought from the nineteenth century through the present day. Although much of his study concerns intellectual history rather than literature, Moses does spend some time with Pauline E. Hopkins, whose political deployment of Gothic modes in such novels as Of One Blood (1903) predates Du Bois’s own experiment with utopian fantasy in works like his 1928 Dark Princess. Were such texts to be joined by Charles W. Chesnutt’s conjure tales, one could well begin to make the case for a critically minded “revival of romance” in 1890s American fiction.
And one might note, then, that the “romantic” elements Moses discerns in Afrocentric critiques of Western modernity – a celebration of “communalism” and “harmony” with the natural world – do not differ greatly from those qualities for which a “Nordic” writer like Jewett so wistfully longs in Country of the Pointed Firs. In either case, one may critique the nostalgic idealization – or, alternatively, take seriously Raymond Williams’s distinction between the “residual” and the merely “archaic,” and recognize the former as a mode of nostalgic thought possessing a legitimate critical force.
In fact, however, even in the work of writers often accused of the apparent sin of nostalgia, an antimodern stance need not entail an idealization of some glorious lost past. Indeed, at its most scathing, it aims its barbs equally at past and present alike – ending up, like Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee or Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods, affirming above all a tragic view of human relations, a view that others, such as Edith Wharton (not to mention Jackson Lears), have portrayed the Progressive-era United States as uniquely unable to entertain. From this vantage, the greatest distinction of Henry Adams may lie in his understanding that, despite what he termed Americans’ chronic ignorance of “tragic motives” (416), the intractability of such problems as “the fiendish treatment of man by man” (458), if denied by Progressive-era thought, might be explained with terrifying new clarity by the scientific revelations of the same epoch. Put otherwise, modernity might explode its own optimistic premises by pressure not from without but from within.
Tragedy, too, has recently received renewed attention from anything but conservative critics such as Terry Eagleton and Rita Felski for the challenge it poses to “modern dreams of progress and perfectibility.” In Felski’s words, if “modern history extends the promise of self-actualization to an ever-widening circle of persons,” tragic texts see therein a democratization of “opportunities for human … miscalculation and error,” to say nothing of the “agony of being torn apart by conflicting desires and values” (11, 9). If the pitfall of the tragic perspective might be said to lie in its sense of the hopelessness of any prospects of meaningful reform, this at least allows it to deliver an acute critique of the narcissistic quick fixes of therapeutic culture, as we see perhaps most scathingly in Wharton’s underappreciated late novel Twilight Sleep (1928). For its antiheroine Pauline Manford, the worries of modern life require a round-the-clock schedule of “patient Taylorized effort” combining spiritual and hygienic cleansing (98). She is, moreover, certain that all the world’s ills might be salved were children never to be told they were naughty and were all military toys to be banned.
Here, then, we might return at last to Billy Budd, for Melville, writing his final tragic novella in the era of high realism, could stand as the eminence grise of the lineup of antimoderns we’ve been discussing. If so, however, he must be seen as not simply a man out of time, but, as such, as a man of that later moment as well – indeed, even, I hope finally to suggest, of our own.
Although it is customary to view the aging Melville as a romantic holdout amid the late nineteenth century, the readings of him by those purported champions of American romance, Chase and Matthiessen, actually share a nearly opposite claim: that the Melville of the 1850s was already speaking toward the turn-of-the-twentieth-century future. Matthiessen thus conceives him as a proto-Darwinian naturalist whose portrayal in Moby-Dick of nature’s “brutal energies” marked his distance from the more utopian Romanticism of the Transcendentalists; yet even as Melville affirmed what would later appear as a scientific rebuke to such Pantheisms, he “could at no point rest content with the kind of truth that was to be found in science” (407). As Chase puts it, Melville already in “I and My Chimney” (1855) was critiquing the “ways of practical science,” or rationalization, that would become firmly hegemonic during the postwar years, in the form of an “unquiet, baneful spouse who measured all things with her meaningless tape measure” (291). In Billy Budd, then, the equal suspicion of a world of measurable progress and its “enchanted” opposite leads the narrator to alternating disavowals of both realism and romance.
Unquestionably, however, the text’s own romanticism has always been easiest to identify. From its opening paean to the “time before steamships” forward, the narrative seems obsessively to linger on the glories of a lost past – from the “symmetry and grand lines” of the superseded battleships, their “poetic reproach” to the “ironclads” of the more “prosaic” present, to the heroically self-sacrificing actions of Lord Nelson at Trafalgar, which are depicted as belonging more to an epic tradition than a novelistic one.
Yet if Billy Budd himself seems at first like an emissary from an even earlier, prelapsarian moment, we are quickly told his story should in fact be understood as “no romance” – the proof of this lying in the habit of stuttering that will lead inexorably to the Handsome Sailor’s execution. As Arendt and others have emphasized, the stutter represents the hinge where Billy’s pagan combination of “strength and beauty” stands revealed as inseparable from an “elementary violence.” In direct contrast, his highly civilized nemesis, Claggart, derives his menace from a nearly complete self-restraint. His nefarious ends are thus pursued persistently via indirection, even in the accusation scene (“ ‘Be direct, man,’ ” snaps Captain Vere); this, too, the narrator informs us, is a hallmark of the civilized, and specifically an outgrowth of democracy, in that “unobstructed free agency on equal terms,” with individuals whose status is unknown, “soon teaches one that [a] ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness” represents the most prudent approach to social relations. And yet we cannot help but notice that indirection is also, of course, explicitly named as the narrator’s own rhetorical mode.
Aside from Billy’s stutter, the other moment in the novella when the narrator explicitly rejects romance occurs during his extended probing of the mystery of Claggart’s motivations. No “romantic” backstory of a past encounter with Billy can account for them, we are assured. And yet, with its scorn for those who would attempt to plumb the depths of “human nature” via mere “knowledge of the world” – not to mention the deleted barb at contemporary “medical experts” who were increasingly wont to diagnose away criminality as brain disease – this section remains equally chary of “realist” alternatives. We must, the narrator states, grasp in Claggart a condition that is “in its very realism … charged with that prime element of Radcliffian romance, the mysterious”: “a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason” goes hand in hand here with a “heart [that] riot[s] in complete exemption from that law.” What we find, then, is that this very paradoxical state is what modernity has wrought: “Civilization, especially of the austerer sort, is auspicious” to the development of such natures, the narrator affirms – meaning, in effect, that a historical unfolding toward the rational or prosaic seems to generate (or, at the very least, to harbor) that which it is constitutively unable to explain.
If in Claggart, then – unlike in Billy or Vere – the “exceptional” is explicitly understood as the pathological, the pathological exception is also at once reconceived as the historically representative. This may seem a near impossibility, until we remember that it is merely the way both Richard Chase and C.L.R. James understood the function of the similarly “monomaniacal” Captain Ahab; as an apotheosis of capitalist modernity, he was, of necessity, mad. The weakness of both readings could then be said to lie in their equal refusal to remain with what they at moments acknowledged as Melville’s genuine ambivalence toward the madness and the modernity alike – in sum, with his darker Romanticism – in favor of a reassertion of the therapeutic alternative: an unfraught commonality, the healing of the social divide. Yet this act of healing comes at a familiar price: James’s portrayal of Moby-Dick’s crew as emblematic of a whole self – a “total, complete being,” characterized by its “sanity” and an “unfailing humanity” necessary to suturing the fragments of modern society – generates as its pathological other a “divided personality,” of the kind exemplified by Ahab and Ishmael, which is explicitly labeled “degenerate” and “diseased” and is more than once specifically aligned with homosexuality.
In this light, it is again worth noting the crucial role played by queer theory, in the form of Eve Sedgwick’s paradigm-shifting reading of Billy Budd, in turning criticism’s gaze at last on the therapeutic impulse itself. And yet for all that reading’s power, it is telling how little it (like, indeed, many revisionist accounts from the 1980s and 1990s) can say about Melville’s persistent situating of the drama of the Bellipotent amid the larger historical arc of modernity. The critique of therapeutics, I would insist – which is also the critique of a certain narrative of progress conjoining “old” and “new” American literary studies – requires that arc as well. For the error of therapeutic antimodernism lies in its belief in a harmonious marriage of realism and romance, a seamless merger between pragmatic progress and mystical nostalgia. The more it insists on this merger’s possibility, the more the fundamental conflict between the modern and antimodern worldviews – the subject matter of Billy Budd – threatens to fall away.
That conflict remains front and center, however, in “Science as a Vocation,” the 1918 talk in which Weber first used the phrase “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt), along with “rationalization,” to describe the “fate of our times” (155). Lecturing at Munich University, Weber addresses himself to the youth of the day, who have embraced a romantic sensibility, one with which many of Jackson Lears’s antimodern turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans, from Henry Adams to William James, would have been sympathetic: “They crave not only religious experience but experience as such,” “redemption from the intellectualism of science in order to return to one’s own nature and therewith to nature in general” (143, 142). In the classroom, these students thus long not for intellectual guidance so much as for a “prophet” who will lead them forward toward the utopia they imagine.
What makes “Science as a Vocation” such an enduringly powerful work is that Weber himself understands these students’ concerns. Today, he admits, who indeed “still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?” (142). Indeed, to the extent other university disciplines have modeled themselves on the sciences, they, too, eschew such questions. To the contemporary Americanist, their methods may sound familiar: “They teach us how to understand and interpret political, artistic, literary, and social phenomena in terms of their origins. But they give us no answer to the question, whether the existence of these cultural phenomena have been and are worth while” (145; emphasis in original).
Yet perhaps, Weber suggests, this is not such a bad thing. Consider the (again remarkably “contemporary”) case he cites of the American college student, who in no way seems to be suffering for lack of a guru in the classroom:
The young American has no respect for anything or anybody, for tradition or for public office – unless it is for the personal achievement of individual men. This is what the American calls “democracy.” … The American’s conception of the teacher who faces him is: he sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father’s money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage. And that is all. To be sure, if the teacher happens to be a football coach, then, in this field, he is a leader. But if he is not this … he is simply a teacher and nothing more. … Now, when formulated in this manner, we should reject this. But the question is whether there is not a grain of salt contained in this feeling. (149–50)
That “grain of salt” is what the rest of “Science as a Vocation” goes on to adduce.
The American, as Weber portrays him, represents all that the German youth are striving against: he is a self-satisfied creature of capitalist modernity. For him, the questions the others are asking cannot arise even as questions. And yet he has apparently also gotten something right. Teachers should not be in the business of telling students how to live, Weber says. This is because, in his words, “the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other,” and thus will “struggle with one another, now and for all times to come” (147). There will never come a moment, put otherwise, when we will be able definitively to “ ‘refute scientifically’ the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount” (148). The task of the teacher, then, is to bring such conflicts, as conflicts, before the student, to enjoin him to give “an account of the ultimate meaning of his own conduct” (152; emphasis in original).
It may seem a curious feature of “Science as a Vocation” that Weber brings this task forward as the most important contribution “science” can finally make to society. Earlier on in the essay, he pointedly distinguishes scientific work from that in the arts by stating that the former is “chained to the course of progress … it asks to be ‘surpassed’ and outdated,” whereas “in the realm of art there is no progress in the same sense”: we do not say that a later period’s better grasp of perspective renders it of greater value, or success, than a medieval painting (137–8). And yet the model Weber gives of the teacher who recognizes the historical irresolvability of the “value spheres of the world” – for which his ultimate example, indeed, is “science” versus “the holy,” or the modern versus the premodern (154) – scarcely seems in keeping with the notion of science as inexorable progress. Might it not better describe those disciplines that keep turning back to the works of the past, and not simply for data about the way people once lived, or so as to “manipulate [them] by rational technique” – that is, our own?
If Weber is right, we should affirm our distance from knowledge production that simply rests on the model of progress, but precisely not in favor of endorsing timeless truth or beauty; that would make us prophets after all. Instead, ours would be understood as the classrooms where, following Weber’s injunctions, the ongoing conflicts of the spheres of value may be made flesh. The struggle between genres – sometimes within a single work – speaks to those conflicts among Weltanschauungen. Such struggles require literary analysis for their detection, the lesson that texts – even texts as reassuringly familiar as novels – are not contourless containers of information or “content,” but full-fledged miniature worlds, shaped by implicit choices about the most fundamental things: what a person is, what counts as making meaning, how to think about space and time. Here we remember what might be a much more lasting lesson of The Political Unconscious and its precursors in novel theory: the living struggles we unearth by taking seriously questions of form.
When Weber depicts what we might call humanistic work as a variant (albeit perhaps one now fighting for its life) of the scientific vocation, he reminds us that we, too, are resolutely creatures of a modern epoch. Only modernity’s own “value-freedom” makes possible the perspective that ranges critically over the worldviews of centuries – that which confidently “historicizes” these, and that which might also question the hubris of its own historicizations. Yet how to understand that position of apparent objectivity? As Jameson argues in his own early work on Weber, we must not confuse it with either “that tolerant coexistence ritually invoked by modern liberal apologists” or the “positivistic objectivity” of the sciences (Jameson, “Vanishing” 11). For Weber, we must always remember, a “pluralism” of value systems means not “peaceful coexistence” but the combat of those values across a “Homeric battlefield” (Jameson, “Vanishing” 11).
Thus is the novel once again charged with the energies of the epic – the more so, as we uncover those traces within its modern realism of counterdiscourses from another time. This was the “objectivity” (his own term) that Lukács ascribed to Scott’s historical novel, which in his view differed from romance in its sobriety, and from realism in its remembrance of a history when the present we now presume was merely a contingent possibility. In Billy Budd, similarly, because of that feature that reveals it as modern, its “indirection” – the very fruit of mistrust, and of the impossibility of immediacy – modernity has a facet that turns ever awry, even backward, ever consumed with the unfinished work of the past.
References and Further Reading
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1918. New York: The Modern Library, 1931.
Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Cain, William. “The Triumph of the Will and the Failure of Resistance: C. L. R. James’s Readings of Moby-Dick and Othello.” In C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies (pp. 260–73). Eds. Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William Cain. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957.
Chase, Richard. Herman Melville: A Critical Study. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. London: Blackwell, 2002.
Felski, Rita. Ed. Rethinking Tragedy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Graff, Gerald. “American Criticism Left and Right.” In Ideology and Classic American Literature (pp. 91–121). Eds. Myra Jehlen and Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985
Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. 1953. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Jameson, Fredric. “The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller.” In The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 (pp. 3–34). Vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Jehlen, Myra, and Sacvan Bercovitch. Eds. Ideology and Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Kaplan, Amy. “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s.” American Literary History 2, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 659–90.
LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985
Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Love, Heather K. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. 1992. Trans. Catherine Porter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. 1937. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Marcus, Sharon, and Stephen Best. Eds. “The Way We Read Now.” Special issue. Representations, no. 108 (Fall 2009).
Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
McWilliams, John. “The Rationale for ‘The American Romance.’ ” In Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (pp. 71–82). Ed. Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and Other Tales. New York: Signet, 1961.
Mizruchi, Susan. “Cataloging the Creatures of the Deep: ‘Billy Budd, Sailor’ and the Rise of Sociology.” In Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (pp. 272–304). Ed. Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Moses, Wilson Julius. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Murphy, Geraldine. “Ahab as Capitalist, Ahab as Communist: Revising Moby-Dick for the Cold War.” Surfaces 4, no. 201 (1994): 1–21.
Murphy, Geraldine. “The Politics of Reading Billy Budd.” American Literary History 1, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 361–82.
Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: Volume 3. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
Pease, Donald E. “Introduction: C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways and the World We Live In.” In C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (pp. vii–xxxiii). Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001.
Pease, Donald E. “Moby-Dick and the Cold War.” In The American Renaissance Reconsidered (pp. 113–55). Eds. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Pease, Donald E. “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon.” In Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (pp. 1–37). Ed. Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Pease, Donald E., ed. Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Pippin, Robert. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. London: Blackwell, 1989.
Reising, Russell. The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature. New York: Methuen, 1986.
Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950.
Trilling, Lionel. “Reality in America.” In Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (pp. 3–21). Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950.
Warren, Kenneth. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1930. London: Routledge, 1999.
Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (pp. 129–56). Eds. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.
Wharton, Edith. Twilight Sleep. 1928. New York: Scribner, 1997.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford, 1977.
Zamir, Shamoon. Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Zola, Émile. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. Belle M. Sherman. New York: Cassell, 1893.