16
Transatlantic Returns
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1841), Grandfather tells the story of American colonial history through the history of a chair that moves through it. Carved from a tree in the park of the earl of Lincoln, it crosses the Atlantic in 1630 and passes through a succession of owners who also happen to command a place within the “two or three centuries” of transatlantic history that the chair assumes simply by giving them a seat (209). The chair belongs to Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, John Winthrop, John Eliot, and many others before it belongs to Grandfather; it belongs to George Washington during the American Revolution, but also to the British colonial governors who preceded him in “the chair of state” (32). The figures who occupy the chair link it to the wider world of the British Empire that occupies them and from which they derive their commissions to serve in colonial Massachusetts, for example, or the war with France, or from which they otherwise choose to secede. All the while, we find the story of an antiquated English chair “intertwining” not only with the “great events that have befallen” the colonies on their way to independence but also with the lives of writers, merchants, sailors, and soldiers that help connect the colonies to each other and to the networks of trade, religion, literature, medicine, and politics that extend over and around the Atlantic to Canada, the West Indies, and elsewhere (65). More importantly, for Grandfather at least, his chair’s archaic presence on the colonial scene speaks to the connections and people that are sacrificed to the progress of events but that leave their marks on its worn surface as accidentally as the black slave who, in the act of cleaning it, rubs the “gilding” off this thing that stands in the place of American history (136). The “cold policy” of war drives Acadians from their homes, and Tory exiles cry; through it all, says Grandfather, “here stood the chair” with “its old Lincoln coat of arms” (128, 66). Its persistence “here” from another time and place enlarges our understanding of American progress to include the experience of loss until it finally seems that we have access to nothing less than a “whole history” of the Atlantic struggle for dominion on the North American continent, including the perspective of the subjects who no longer seem to belong there. But, Grandfather says to the children who listen, “I am merely telling the history of a chair” (33).
Why does the history of America become the historical romance of a chair? After all, when little Alice asks Grandfather to tell “some more stories about [his] chair,” she really means that she is ready for the next episode in his narrative history of America from sometime before 1630 through 1803 when it leaves off (73). The history that Grandfather tells sounds much like a version of Atlantic history as we have come to understand it. Insofar as it is a “whole history,” it suggests a belief in an immensely complex but still integrated and cohesive field of relations across and around the Atlantic in which people travel, migrate, trade, compete, plunder, exchange, and communicate, and in which both things and people are bought and sold: “Our ancestors,” says Grandfather, “not only bought negroes from Africa, but Indians from South America, and white people from Ireland. These last were sold, not for life, but for a certain number of years, in order to pay the expenses of the voyage across the Atlantic” (109). Events in one place reverberate in others; nothing affects the policy and liberties of the “remote colonies” so much as the temperament of monarchs, the wars in Europe, and the English revolution of the 1640s – even during times when the outposts of its empire were “left to take care of [themselves].” Grandfather speaks primarily of Massachusetts, but since all the North American colonies are tied to each other through their common dependence on the English empire, the children know that he “might have gone on to speak of Maryland and Virginia” as well and that the strength of their interconnection is also defined by their sense of difference from the French in Canada and the Dutch who remain in New York (30).
Merchants and adventurers pass over imperial and national lines within an ocean-space that is constitutive of their trading and traveling patterns and also a “deeply historical location whose transformative power is … material and real” (Klein and Mackenthun 2). The tales told from Grandfather’s chair, in other words, touch on many of the histories that scholars identify with the early modern Atlantic world and the economies of exchange that pattern the way we understand the work that culture did in its own expanded travels through the period. Most of all, the tales represent an early variation on the performances of memory and creative survival that respond to the impossible recovery of “the submerged and the drowned” records of violence, theft, and trauma in the cross-currents of the ocean (Boelhower, “The Rise” 95). When Sir William Phips, before trying to capture Quebec, charges Indians to dive for treasure in a sunken Spanish galleon off the West Indies – among “the skeletons of the ancient Spaniards … whose bones were now scattered among the gold and silver” – Grandfather reminds the children that “there is something sad and terrible in the idea of snatching all this wealth from the devouring ocean” (61). It would be better, he suggests, to acknowledge its loss. The gold that Phips recovers explains why, years later as governor of Massachusetts, he has the means to redecorate his Boston mansion and to embellish Grandfather’s chair with the varnish and gold that the black slave rubs off.
The children hear not only of people who cross the Atlantic, of their commerce and politics, but also of the diseases they carry: sometimes the smallpox arrives with “poor sailors” or “lay[s] hidden in the cargoes of ships, among … costly merchandize that was imported for the rich to wear,” and sometimes it follows in the train of imperial administrators who come over from England (100). We learn that Cotton Mather discovers how to inoculate for it by reading a letter he finds by an Italian physician describing how the method was commonly practiced in Turkey and Greece and also by “the negroes of Africa” (101). Thus the “informal connections” that Bernard Bailyn suggests created a dynamic “mental” network in the early modern Atlantic beyond the economies and politics of empire include, in Hawthorne too, a “flow of ideas that shaped the manifest world and bound it together” (Bailyn, Atlantic 51–2; Bailyn, Soundings 42). Grandfather’s story is a straightforward history in which early events, sweeping forward to later outcomes, explain the progress of the United States in time; but it is also offset by a variety of transnational and transimperial perspectives that reach out laterally in space and give life to the people and things who no longer figure when the nation is independent of them and when Grandfather can only look back from where he sits in his chair.
But, again, this is not a national history; it is also not a colonial history that suggestively evokes the density of encounters and conflicts around the Atlantic basin that our scholarship now tracks with increasing momentum under the disciplinary label of “Atlantic studies.” Hawthorne’s history is the history of a chair. If, as Nietzsche suggests, “the final trait of effective history is its affirmation of knowledge as perspective,” then at least we know we can say we have nothing to affirm but the singular perspective of a chair (Foucault 90). As Grandfather’s chair changes hands, it accrues meaning through the way it is used, shared, transported, defaced, and refinished, and from where (a ship, a Tory mansion, a coffeehouse, beneath the Liberty Tree). It is one of the many objects in Hawthorne’s book that circulates in colonial networks of exchange and whose deep and layered genealogy speaks to the way that relations between people are embedded and inscribed in the relations they have to their possessions. Yet the chair in the tale is not only a relic of history but also the figure of history, which is why the children mean that they want to hear stories of America when they think they want stories of the chair and also why Grandfather seems to suppose “that the whole surface of the United States was not too broad a foundation to place the four legs of his chair upon” (30). I could reverse what I said earlier to just as easily say that, in Hawthorne’s tale, it takes nothing less than a “whole history” of the Atlantic struggle for dominion on the North American continent to give an adequate picture of a chair.
Hawthorne seems to be suggesting that Atlantic history is a fantasy of relation that is not transmitted across time so much as embraced through the imagined origins of material from a vanished world that is neither American nor British in ways that later generations will come to understand the difference between a nation and its antecedent empire. Grandfather’s chair is perhaps the least significant symbol for this wider Atlantic history that Hawthorne can conceive, which is why the unlikely charm of its persistence as a “cultural atom,” to borrow an idea from Erich Auerbach, can express such a textured and diverse network of associations, travels, economies, and politics that brought so many peoples into contact (Boelhower, Atlantic 21). The transatlantic world that returns with Grandfather’s old chair is in part a fiction that tries to recapture the impossible complexities of an historical epoch that can only be possessed through the figures that are left behind as it recedes. Its story suggests not just a teleological progress from the past into modernity, but also a literary romance of fugitive events and individuals once connected by the same geography that disperses them. I will return to the chair below, but it is already possible to see how the most useful term for illuminating the cultural difference we look for when we return to the contours of a “whole” Atlantic world may be an anachronism of it – one that reflects an impulse to imagine histories beyond the presence of the nation that an earlier moment (indeed, Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century moment) has passed down to us. His fiction points to the ways in which any version of the transatlantic we might imagine can only be romantically revived.
Space and Time
What is the place of literary studies within Atlantic studies? In the past decade, the question has been hard to answer because, insofar as “the new Atlantic studies” sees its subject as an object that is also a space – the Atlantic Ocean and all that it holds, carries, and touches on in time – no discipline seems more equipped than any other to represent the experience and meanings it suggests. “Certainly,” writes William Boelhower, “there is no urgent mandate to shoehorn the new Atlantic studies matrix into yet another traditional academic disciplinary asset” (“The Rise” 87). At the upper limit of its challenge to what Boelhower describes as the “institutionalization” of historical knowledge within the structure of the university, Atlantic studies rejects the idea that even the most sophisticated and self-conscious scholarship based on traditional categories of humanistic inquiry (national literatures, historical periods, and conventional modes and genres) can capture the irreducible “fluidity” of the Atlantic world. Indeed, such invocations of the ocean and its material form provide Atlantic studies with a powerful symbolic language for registering the degree to which the archive of the Atlantic world itself is shaped by “unpredictable natural flows” that immerse us like “the equinoctial tides.” Thus, studying Atlantic history and culture can become its own version of a “rendez-vous … with the sea,” and while we take the poeticism for what it is, the interdisciplinary ambitions and energies of the new Atlantic studies are hard to understand without taking seriously the homology between the unfathomable complexity of the ocean as both a natural environment and field of human action, and the “oceanic order” that it conditions across centuries of history (as cited in Boelhower, “The Rise” 98). Like the figure of the “historian-traveler” who Roland Barthes describes, in his work on Michelet, as “swimming” in an archive of materials – “I am rowing,” writes Michelet, “through Louis XI” – scholars of the Atlantic world, trying to navigate the density and expanse of Atlantic history, finally realize that their “plunge involves an incomplete assimilation” of what it yields (22). In recent years especially, Atlantic studies has defined an “epistemological style” in keeping with the diverse ecology of its many archives, which demand a range of disciplines and methodologies not just in the humanities but in the social and physical sciences as well; attending from a sense of what Eric Slauter calls the “inherent multidisciplinarity” of Atlantic history, scholars have sought to incorporate “the dizzying shifts that come from viewing familiar phenomena from different angles, [and] different geographies,” within the texture of their writing by embracing the work of economists, anthropologists, cartographers, oceanographers, meteorologists, and more (161).
Almost every scholarly attempt to define the scope of Atlantic studies suggests that the unbounded history of the ocean in its midst requires multiplying points of view. “No one historian,” writes Alison Games, “can have the competence or expertise that scholars desire” (“Atlantic” 750). As Atlantic studies draws on a greater set of methodologies and approaches, the desire for even more flexible responses to an archive whose scale, at last, is oceanic has inspired the sense that its scholarship must operate with an appropriate magnitude. Bailyn observes that in the first years of the field’s development, the urge to formulate outsized intellectual projects of Atlantic history was almost a recursive phenomenon in which the sheer “force of scholarship itself” encouraged a “rescaling of perspective”; he cites, for example, Pierre Chaunu’s “four-volume interpretation of seven volumes of data” from the 1950s on Seville’s transatlantic commerce as representing, in a phrase that may say more than Bailyn realizes, the only sort of “titanic oeuvre” that could claim to cover at least a portion of the ocean’s massive history (Atlantic 30–2). “Large-scale spatial orbits developing through time,” Bailyn writes of this formative period, “were becoming visible as they had not been before,” and after demographics, statistics, epidemiology, migration studies, and other quantitative methods of analysis began to make significant contributions to the field, many efforts in Atlantic history emerged in the form of censuses and databases that accumulate details toward a vast “panorama” of transatlantic history (30). “The question,” says Wai Chee Dimock of transatlantic and transnational scholarship, “is very much a question of scale” (6). What began after World War II, in Bailyn’s account, as an effort to enshrine a North Atlantic alliance within an historical relationship between the United States and Britain, has been expanded and dispersed into a broadening “matrix” of territories and peoples that meet and collide in North America and Europe, as well as South America, Africa, and all the islands in between (Esty 102). Recently, the areas that surround the Atlantic on four continents have seemed too narrow a frame for representing the imperial flow of people, information, and ideas that also reach past the rims to borderlands, transfrontier regions, and continental interiors, where native groups, for example, though “often far removed from maritime littorals,” still feel their effects (Morgan and Greene 13–14). But now critics also are learning that Atlantic commodities circulated in a much larger world and that the laborers who produced them, and the merchants and sailors who transported them, suggest more global currents of trade even in the early modern period. Adventurers, promoters, ambassadors, and ministers circled the planet, conjoining Western Europe to “the rest of Europe, the rest of Eurasia, indeed, Afro-Eurasia,” while conjoining Atlantic routes to Pacific ones in ways that remind us that oceans themselves are interconnected (Coclanis 729). Thus, Atlanticists are always vulnerable to the charge that they have not explored the connections from the connections they have already made. While some scholars are earnestly trying “to assume a scale of analysis broad enough to encompass the entire circuit” of the Atlantic world (McGill, The Traffic 1), others argue that Atlantic history “is a slice of world history,” that other areas impinge on and shape its developments (Games, “Atlantic” 748), and that the Atlantic finally “lacks the kind of coherence” that we need to establish a field of inquiry in the first place (Wïgen 718). “Might the Atlantic,” writes Games, “be too small a unit of analysis?” (“Beyond” 676).
“Really, universally,” writes Henry James, “relations stop nowhere.” Perhaps the accumulative impulse is best seen in the massive Transatlantic Slave Trade database, which, as of January 2008, contained details of 34,934 documented slave voyages, an estimated 80 percent of all the ventures that set out for Africa from Britain, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and North America to obtain slaves. The database supplies the information for David Eltis and David Richardson’s comprehensive Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, in which the slave voyages are mapped, along with their destinations, their ports of origin, the coastal origins of slaves, and the links they all provide between Africa and the Atlantic world. The database and atlas suggest a logic of accretion, in which the traumatic history of the African diaspora is vividly reproduced in a scale of information that makes equally palpable the scale of loss. If the African diaspora provides the greatest number of voyages, migrations, and trades around the Atlantic (the British, for example, carried three Africans to the Americas for every European through the early nineteenth century), then it also points to the atrocities that leave gaps in the archive and a scarcity of resources where the statistics speak most. Atlantic studies responds to these absences through the immensity of its efforts to chart them, seeing the proliferation of materials and perspectives as a challenge to binary categories of centers and peripheries – including postcolonial scholarship that preserves them from the peripheries – and other paradigms of knowledge that fail to capture the complexities of diasporic experience. The closer we look, the more we find exceptions to official archives that subsume slaves within slave societies or to earlier histories that only recognize, in Vincent Brown’s words, “violence, violations of personhood, dishonor, and namelessness as the fundamental constituent elements of slavery” (1233). The exceptions include Brown’s sense of how funerary rituals among slaves defy “totalizing definition[s] of slavery” as “social death” (and so make death “as generative as it was destructive”) (“Social” 1239; The Reaper’s 4); they also include Joseph Roach’s sense of how performative acts of forgetting substitute histories of violence with the cultural memories that reinvent them. When Ian Baucom calls Atlantic projects “an invitation to assemblage,” he means that the innumerable contingencies that increase our understanding of the ocean world also demand their own textured aesthetic in our work (“Introduction” 7), making it fair to say that Atlantic studies “is more than simply the study of a geographical unit; it is also a style of inquiry” (Games, “Atlantic” 749). For Boelhower, the fact that Atlantic studies aims to resist the inherited blindness and rigidity within institutional structures of knowledge makes our choice of its nontraditional style an ethical imperative. The fact that the particular archives of slavery and the black Atlantic make this need for new epistemologies most obvious signals to him nothing short of an “immediate and utter” call for rethinking the organization of the university itself (Esty 106).
In suggesting the discontinuities inherent in Atlantic history, the idea of “black Atlantic” history ruptures the narratives of modernity, national development, and Enlightenment rationality that underwrite a Western system of racial hierarchy. In this sense, Atlantic studies derives from black Atlantic studies in particular its characteristic modality: a provocation away from ideologies of modernity and progress that are put at sea. Like Nietzsche’s sense of the marine horizon, “every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again” (199). The Atlantic is not an empty space against which a series of events unfold, but “a workplace, home, passage, penitentiary and promise” whose experience never conforms to ideas of linear movement – between old and new, past and present (cause and effect), on separate sides of an ocean – that enact a decisive shift forward from one epoch to the next (Blum 670). For Paul Gilroy, the black Atlantic is a “counterculture of modernity” in which movements between Africa, Europe, and the Americas should be appreciated as “configurations” of flows and circuits that often double back to their own points of origin, or that wander far from their intended trajectories (1). The “impurity” of Atlantic history, he suggests, finally prevents it from ever being assimilated for “nationalist or ethnically absolute” ends; he thus charts a dizzying variety of cultural aesthetics and politics that displace both Enlightenment teleologies of progress in which Africa is always behind, and later black anxieties of authenticity in which Africa can never be revisited (2, 15). For Ian Baucom, the “black-Atlantic philosophy of history” is also necessarily a critique of finance capitalism and the perverse “modernity” of the slave trade itself that abstracted human beings into calculable instances of profit or loss (Specters 327). Taking as his central case the infamous Zong massacre – in which sick slaves were thrown overboard so that their owners could recoup their investment under the “jettison clause” on the ship’s insurance policy – Baucom discovers in the cultural responses to the affair a “romantic counterdiscourse” of trauma and melancholy that sets itself “against the tide of modernity” by relentlessly insisting on emotional and psychic losses at sea that no amount of rationalization can move beyond (Specters 33).
To the degree that Gilroy, Baucom, and others have accustomed us to think about the Atlantic as a “system of cultural exchanges” in restless movement everywhere within its layered geography, they return us to a language that derives from Fernand Braudel, whose exemplary studies of the Mediterranean world set the terms for understanding how spatialized histories can look for patterns that are too slow, too large, and often too pervasive to capture in conventional accounts of change and progress (Gilroy 14). Braudel’s approach to the Mediterranean and the people who lived within its shadow marked a radical turn away from narrative accounts of the region that proceeded by tracing out national histories and filling in the dates that punctuated them over seemingly critical spans of years or decades. Braudel proposed instead that history operated on a scale of time that beggared such small units of temporal meaning, and famously turned his attention to what he called the longue durée in order to suggest both the enlarged scale and slower pace of the events and phenomena that shaped the culture of the Mediterranean over several centuries. More importantly, Braudel refused to slice and subdivide his very long time spans into linear sequences of unfolding epochs; thus, in his most influential work for later scholars of the Atlantic, the densely textured totality of the “Mediterranean world” cannot be circumscribed within the years that technically bound his subject (the age of Phillip II from 1550 to 1600) because this isolated moment is at once layered over with the residues of earlier periods, and also powerfully resonant for the centuries that follow. The “vast, complex expanse” of the sea provides the sense of a spatial constant whose presence across time is, from the perspective of the succeeding nation-states that flourish and then fail along its rim, effectively unchanging (18). Or, put another way, for Braudel it only makes sense to write the history of a maritime world by adopting the temporality of its dominant figure, which is to say, the sea itself. So his own analyses return and overlap within a single cartographic and figurative space from multiple disciplines – geography and ecology, social and economic history, politics and military history – that illuminate different aspects of the Mediterranean world as their various discoveries accrete across the vast expanse of Braudel’s massive books. History becomes visible not as a narrative of superseding events, with the present arriving as the past fades away, but rather as an accumulation of meanings that remain perceptible long after their originary moments. If modernity conceptualizes history as a serialization of causes and effects that advance along strict chronologies of universal time, the oceanic world, to borrow from Bruno Latour, has never been modern: its spaces show too much wear and evidence of pasts that continue to inflect its present; time within the pull of the sea feels asynchronous and uneven, and much of what is lost on one occasion or another ends up returning unexpectedly to bring distant periods and cultures into relation with each other.
As early as the 1950s, Atlantic historians incorporated and extended Braudel’s spatial emphases to reconstruct the larger oceanic world that Europe, Africa, and the Americas shared in the early modern period. The new Atlantic studies especially register the extent of Braudel’s importance even in projects that seem far removed from his often empirical accounts of the tectonic patterns that shape cultures and mentalities over long durations. If, as Bailyn observes, the impulse behind Braudel’s project was “poetic,” reflecting his own “love of the Mediterranean world,” it has also provided a model for understanding how a sense of asynchronous or spatialized time can capture some of the more harrowing legacies of transatlantic history (Atlantic 5). Baucom, for example, describes the Atlantic as a “form of time” that is, more radically, a “ghost-haunted, apparitional now,” centuries long and still burdened with “the moment of loss” that slavery represents; invoking Derrida’s late turn to “hauntology” to describe the spectral power of past forms in presents where they are clearly anachronistic, Baucom in effect renders Atlantic studies as an expression of melancholia in the place of Braudel’s “love” (“Introduction” 8). In such models of Atlanticism, the geography of the present is overwritten with traces of the past, and nothing that crosses the ocean is ever really lost to time so long as it is remembered somewhere within the larger circuits of culture and feeling that constitute the historical aesthetic of the ocean world. The aesthetic does not need to operate on the largest scale to produce the sorts of temporal discontinuities and anachronisms that Braudel observed; Baucom’s granular account of a single historical incident of the slave trade ramifies out to later episodes in global capitalism’s exploitation of factory workers in Vietnam, which, poetically at least, becomes a phenomenon of “the late-eighteenth- to late-twentieth-century development of an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation” (Specters 80). In The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker similarly expands a single transatlantic artifact – the slave ship as a “wooden world” unto itself – into an elaborately synecdochic construct that materializes not just the whole of the Middle Passage but also the translation of African cultures to the Americas, and the plantation economies that demanded so much human cargo at unimaginable cost. Rediker treats the slave ship as a small world (or microcosm) that contains within it an astonishingly complete reconstruction of the social codes, material practices, and emotional dramas that characterized the space of the Atlantic in its most extreme form (67).
Transatlantic literary studies has proven to be particularly well equipped for thinking through the complex field of relations across time and space that Braudel calls the longue durée since literature, always in conversation with other literature, “never inhabits positions of pure autonomy” (Manning and Taylor 21). While literary culture, from the nineteenth century forward, has been central to the expression and constitution of national traditions by providing, as Schlegel describes it, “the aggregate mass of symbols in which the spirit of an age or the character of a nation is shadowed forth,” it is also the case that the literary artifact is never as trapped in its national or institutional moment as Schlegel suggests (Schlegel 1:274). “Literature,” writes Wai Chee Dimock, “is the home of nonstandard space and time,” and by this she means, in her discussion of the “deep time” of American literature for which Braudel provides the model, that literature both in its material forms of transmission and in the ideas it contains travels in unpredictable and often accidental ways (4). In and out of geographies, languages, and cultures, literature binds “continents and millennia into many loops of relation” because the particular timelessness of literary texts – either universal in appeal or adaptable in meaning – works “against the official borders of the nation and against the fixed intervals of the clock” (3, 4). Thus “American literature emerges with a much longer history than one might think” (4): in Emerson, for example, we find words and ideas from eighteenth-century Germany in Goethe and, through Goethe, the lyric forms of fourteenth-century Persia in Hafiz. Hafiz affects our understandings of Emerson as much as Emerson adapts and appropriates Hafiz, and so the meanings of both (new and old, present and past) are created at once as each readjusts to the other. It is no surprise that transatlantic literary studies often seems like an expanded version of influence studies in which forms, genres, and language flow erratically between generations, so that multiple and foreign traditions combine to create what once seemed to be a single national heritage.
After all, as Stanley Cavell writes, “geographical proximity is a poor, let’s say vulgar, measure of intellectual intimacy” (458). Beyond the idea of influence as a single lineage of great authors within the same tradition – each rising to the challenge or agonizing against the burdens of precedent – the life of the mind that Dimock and others describe admits an open-ended tangle of impressions that are often hard to predict or trace, but whose influence within a single text brings together Emerson, Goethe, and Hafiz or any other combination of people and ideas who would otherwise be temporally distinct. Transatlantic literary studies is also not a version of classic comparative studies in which the literature of one nation exerts cultural force over another, but rather attends from a sense of influence that stays true to the liquid origins it shares with the idea of transatlanticism itself: “In its historical [or etymological] meaning, from which we take our present use,” writes Lionel Trilling, “influence … means a flowing-in, but not as a tributary river flows into the main stream at a certain observable point” (187–8). Or, as Mary Orr suggests,
By remembering that influence is quintessentially a metaphor of motions and fluids, applied to waters that swell a greater river or freeze as blocks in seas, its many … uses need to be reinstated not least for its power to map flow, force, currents, divergence and convergence. (93)
Transatlantic literary studies describes the ways in which “the present is present to more than itself” by tracing the multiple influences and confluences of literary traditions and genres as they criss-cross the Atlantic (Baucom, “Introduction” 8). In the work of Meredith McGill, for example, we see how the practices of reprinting and “piracy” that dominated the antebellum book trade call into question the rights of a nation, both legal and symbolic, to own its literary expressions; books function, for much of the period, as one of many commodity forms whose value was often a measure of how far they had traveled from a lost point of origin somewhere abroad. Both Paul Giles and Amanda Claybaugh chart the mobility of genres and styles that may emerge on one side of the Atlantic or the other – neoclassical poetry, sentimental novels, or novels of reform – but soon come to flourish over great distances and to alternate ends, and are often transformed, upon echoing back, by the material networks that sustain their effects and resonance over time. The literary systems of influence and innovation that they describe are predicated on the lateral dispersion of precedents throughout an imagined geography of shared aesthetics and political purposes that finally cannot be mapped onto the story of a single national culture. In Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940, Laura Doyle traces the idea of Atlantic modernity back to a seventeenth-century myth of Anglo-Saxon freedom in order to show how black and white Anglophone writers lay claim to an inheritance of English liberty that is racialized at its inception. For all these critics, questions of influence are not answered with simple claims of derivation or descent, but instead provide occasions for the kind of genealogical reflections that demonstrate, as Foucault writes, the “heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself” (82). More importantly, we begin to see that the project of transatlanticism is almost impossible to conceptualize, in literary terms at least, without a sense that its character as an intellectual practice is essentially genealogical: alternative lineages are claimed for figures rarely pictured in relation; multiple inheritances for texts are accumulated but left unresolved as if to confirm that genealogy “opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’ ” in favor of “the details and accidents that accompany every beginning” (Foucault 77, 80). Thus, even as Atlantic studies is increasingly confident about asserting where it is coming from – Boelhower identifies one strain of Atlanticism with Edward Said by way of Eric Auerbach by way of Vico – it is possible that the field’s own genealogical pursuits are a measure of the romance about beginnings that distinguish so many of its projects. Or, put differently, for all the ways that historians find predecessors for the transatlantic sensibility that is now prominent across the disciplines, literary studies might be the discipline best able to appreciate the romance at the origins of “transatlanticism” itself.
Periodization
After Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Hutchinson recovers Grandfather’s chair from a garret and restores it to the fireside where it belongs, he sits down to write the colonial history of Massachusetts. “No doubt, the dim figures of the former possessors of the chair flitted around him as he wrote,” inspiring him with the knowledge of what they had “done and suffered” and then with a “reverie” that amounts to a counterfactual history of the revolutionary period to follow: looking ahead, he sees, not a progress into modernity, but “visions of hereditary rank for himself and other aristocratic colonists. … He [sees] stars, garters, coronets, and castles” (137, 139). Years later, when an angry mob approaches his house to retaliate for the Stamp Act, Hutchinson rests in Grandfather’s chair, “unsuspicious of the evil that was about to fall” on him; surrounded by his “beloved family” and the portraits of ancestors he “honorably remembered,” he takes some time to “[lay] aside the cares of state” (155). By the moment of the American Revolution, Grandfather’s chair is not so much the seat of power as the place to sit out history, which perhaps explains why, during the war itself, the chair goes missing: “the manner of its departure cannot be satisfactorily ascertained,” and meanwhile, “during the mysterious non-appearance of our chair,” Americans and British fight in the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (183). Like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, who sleeps through the revolutionary break that separates the past from the present, the chair only reappears in the present as the untimely figure of a period that is lost. What persists with the chair, even to the present when it belongs to Grandfather, is an archive of relations and attachments within the colonial era that seems as archaic and strange as an old chair with a coat of arms, but that invests the contemporary moment with a sense of its difference.
The tales Grandfather tells are always sympathetic to the shadow “forms of departed friends” and “vanished scenes” that, from the perspective of the chair, seem “almost as real as what was actually present” (121). The children who listen cry for the Acadian refugees whose “hearts had been torn asunder by separation” from their families and homes, and then they cry for Hutchinson and other Tories when they become “homeless” too (125, 159). (“ ‘Alas! for the poor Tories!’ said Grandfather.”) They also cry at the Boston Massacre, not so much because people die, but because they learn that the Revolution itself could have been avoided and that “the ancient bonds of brotherhood” between America and Britain “would again have been knit together, as firmly as in old times” if the first shot had never misfired (191, 169). The stories of colonial Atlantic separations stand in relation to the stories of American progress from which Grandfather says they are themselves “inseparable” (128); they offer alternative origins for a national moment that seems inevitably to have arrived by forgetting the sources that diverged from it. The point of the “whole history,” in fact, is to recover these lost connections within an enlarged human context, so when Grandfather’s silent chair is finally given a voice – in Grandfather’s dream at the end – it says that the “all-important secret” of history it hopes to teach is, along with truth and justice, “Love!” (209).
In Hawthorne’s tale, the history of the chair is discontinuous, since the children keep moving on from it to other things for “two or three months” at a stretch, after which Grandfather can pick it up again. Playing in “the gladsome sunshine of the present,” they lose sight of “the shadowy region of the past, in the midst of which stood Grandfather’s chair”: “How strange that we should have forgotten it so long!” says Clara (74). A gold watch “pilfered” from the enemy during the French and Indian War and “still in existence” continues to mark “each moment of time, without complaining of weariness, although its hands have been in motion ever since” (131): it registers the linear, teleological time that cuts the “whole history” into a sequence of homogeneous moments as it advances to the present. The history of the chair, in fact, can never keep up since months pass while Grandfather is telling it, so he is urged to “make haste, or [the chair] will have a new history to be told before we finish the old one” (147). The tale, in other words, is always out of sync, registering a different phenomenology of time that slows down or accelerates according to the children’s increasing sympathies to the figures of history as Grandfather reflects on them. When little Alice is uninterested and falls asleep, she misses 18 years of history in the space of a nap, and so do we. Against the modern progress of the nation is the historical romance that “cuts anywhere with equal ease,” so that American history appears in strange, uneven, and overlapping shapes – even in the shape of a chair (Kubler 2).
The history of Grandfather’s chair ends not in 1841, where it currently is, but in 1803, when Samuel Adams, its last owner, dies. Grandfather purchases the chair at the auction of the Adams estate to help pay for his funeral. Why 1803? Adams dies in early October of that year, just weeks before the United States ratified the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, acquiring from Napoleon the wide expanse of Western land that doubled the nation’s size and turned its attention to the future of the continent. France sells the Louisiana territory to focus its resources on the Haitian slave revolt against colonial rule, but by the end of 1803 Haiti had won its independence. We could say that the story of the chair ends at the moment when a whole interconnected colonial history that linked European empires with colonies in the Americas and the coast of Africa gives way to the primacy of national histories. After 1803, in other words, the paradigm of a “whole history” as a unified concept or space that suggests the contours of an integrated Atlantic experience, and for which an ocean (or a ship or chair) becomes a figure, loses its hold when the American colonies secede and when the modern course of nation building begins. As Bailyn writes,
The birth of the American nation-states in the independence movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not the goal toward which Atlantic history had been inevitably tending, but the opposite: it marks not the fulfillment but the demise of the world that had gone before. (Soundings 2)
Well by the time Hawthorne writes his tale, the Atlantic had become an anachronistic model of relations, not because people, ideas, and things did not continue to traverse it (in fact, with the invention of the steamship and telegraph, they traversed it more), but because, with the wars of independence, the Atlantic basin and all it encompassed was no longer valid as “a single functional unit” of analysis and experience, if it ever was beforehand (O’Reilly 67). Either the nations surrounding it became independent of it or with the accelerating pace of modernity – and the new global frameworks necessary to think through its systems of capital, technology, and imperialism – the Atlantic seemed less a “world” unto itself, and more a part of the world as such. Historians suggest “that the expansion of European imperialism and the spread of commerce after 1800 make a global framework of more utility than an Atlantic one for those who are not content to operate within traditional national and imperial frameworks” (Morgan and Greene 21). Thus, it is not just the specific set of relations – to the British, for example – that Grandfather reassembles when he reflects on his chair, but also the virtual experience of completeness, including the feelings of belonging to people and homelands elsewhere, that is perhaps the last form in which the totality of an Atlantic world that is never coming back might still be known.
It is worth remembering that, as Joyce Chaplin points out, before the mid- to late eighteenth century, the Atlantic was called by the names of its individual “seas” (e.g., the North Sea and the Ethiopian Sea) and that it took a while for the people around the Atlantic “to convince themselves that the ocean at the center of their attention deserved a distinctive name” (45). Transatlantic is similarly a late eighteenth-century word, and its popularity rises dramatically by the beginning of the nineteenth century: a keyword search in the American Periodical Series electronic database shows no instances of the word before 1780 and eight instances before 1800; but there are 242 uses of the word between 1800 and 1820, and 1,755 uses between 1820 and 1840, more than seven times as many as the previous two decades in less than twice the number of periodicals. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the origins of the word as encompassing an Atlantic oceanic region to Thomas Jefferson in 1782 when, during the Revolutionary War, he invokes the “trans-Atlantic ties” that he is trying to dissolve. Transatlanticism is always a belated category whose own dominant, relevant time was already behind us at the moment we become aware of it. In this respect, both new Atlantic history and the literary criticism it now informs are propelled ahead by the imaginative power of a concept that was invented to look back at the texture of a world that remains apart from the modernity it helps to make. Transatlanticism, to put this differently, is a variety of historicism as it was conceived in the nineteenth century: a way of understanding how the past is a space that is entirely its own and knowable when we feel how far we traveled from it even if, according to the clock or calendar, time may not have moved so much as we have.
References and Further Reading
Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Bailyn, Bernard, and Patricia L. Denault. Eds. Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Barthes, Roland. Michelet. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987.
Baucom, Ian. “Introduction: Atlantic Genealogies.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 1–13.
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Blum, Hester. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 670–7.
Boelhower, William. “Atlantic Studies Complexities: Routes across Cultures.” In “The Sea Is History”: Exploring the Atlantic (pp. 11–23). Eds. Carmen Birkle and Nicole Walker. Heidelberg: Universitätssverlag, 2009.
Boelhower, William. “The Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix.” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 83–101.
Braudel, Fernand. 1949. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 2. Trans. Sian Reynolds. Glasgow: William Collins, 1973.
Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Brown, Vincent. “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery.” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1232–49.
Cavell, Stanley. Little Did I Know. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Chaplin, Joyce E. “The Atlantic Ocean and Its Contemporary Meanings, 1492–1808.” In Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (pp. 3–34). Eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Coclanis, Peter. “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World.” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 726–42.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Eltis, David, and David Richardson. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
Esty, Jed. “Oceanic, Traumatic, Post-Paradigmatic: A Response to William Boelhower.” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 102–7.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader (pp. 76–100). Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Games, Alison. “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 741–57.
Games, Alison. “Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections.” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 675–92.
Giles, Paul. Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair. In True Stories from History and Biography. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972.
Klein, Bernhard, and Gesa Mackenthun. Eds. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962.
Manning, Susan, and Andrew Taylor. Eds. The Transatlantic Literary Studies Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
McGill, Meredith L., ed. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
McGill, Meredith L. Ed. The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Morgan, Philip D., and Jack P. Greene. “Introduction: The Present State of Atlantic History.” In Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (pp. 3–34). Eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard William. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
O’Reilly, William. “Genealogies of Atlantic History.” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 66–84.
Orr, Mary. Intertextuality. Cambridge: Polity, 2003.
Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Schlegel, Frederick. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. Trans. J. G. Lockhart. Philadelphia: Dobson, 1818.
Slauter, Eric. “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World.” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2008): 135–61.
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954.
Wïgen, Karen. “Introduction.” American Historical Review 1113, no. 3 (2006): 717–21.