National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature 9781503626416

Citation preview

NationalMelancholy

National Melancholy Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature

m itch ell br eitw i eser

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2007

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert, 1953National melancholy : mourning and opportunity in classic American literature / Mitchell Breitwieser. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5581-8 (alk. paper) 1. American literature--History and criticism. 2. National characteristics, American, in literature. 3. Melancholy in literature. 4. Loss (Psychology) in literature. I. Title. PS169.N35B74 2007 810.9’358--dc22 2007019470 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/12 Bembo

Contents

Preface      x 1. Introduction: The Time of the Double Not      1 2. Early American Antigone: Anne Bradstreet      57 3. Thomas Jefferson’s Prospect      84 4. Who Speaks (and Who Writes) in Walt Whitman’s Poems?      122 5. Henry David Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod      144 6. Losing Deephaven: Sarah Orne Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss      160 7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and the Puzzle of Inherited Mourning      247 8. Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation      263 Notes      281 Works Cited      305 Index      317

Preface

with the exception of the introduction and the essay on Sarah Orne Jewett, none of the essays in this book were written to be parts of a larger whole. Instead, most of what follows was written for various occasions— invitations to participate in a conference or contribute to an anthology of critical essays, or the desire to set straight my thoughts on some book or writer I had recently discussed with students. But several years ago I began to feel, in retrospect, that there might be enough common concern among these projects to investigate the possibility of gathering them into a book. As Emerson wrote, it’s often not till you reach port that all those zigs and zags turn out to have been a plotted course, though the metaphor presumes that you’re not the pilot. Helen Tartar, then Humanities editor at Stanford University Press, found my proposal feasible but asked me to write an introduction laying out the common concerns among the components. Norris Pope, Helen’s successor, has ably concluded her work with my manuscript. The manuscript was read with sympathy, generosity, and intelligence by Tom Ferraro from the English Department at Duke University and Jay Fliegelman from the English Department at Stanford University. Among other remarks, Jay observed that the manuscript as it then stood included discussions of authors from the colonial period through the 1950s but neglected 1860–1920. He proposed a new chapter, an invitation I accepted gladly because I had for some time wanted to write about Sarah Orne Jewett, about The Country of the Pointed Firs, I thought, but really about Deephaven, as it turned out. Carolyn Brown, production editor at Stanford University Press, was extremely helpful, full of good cheer and good ideas, and adept at helping me understand the process of making a book out of a manuscript in the twenty-first century. Cynthia Lindlof was the best copyeditor I’ve ever encountered: her care for my manuscript—the quality and degree of her attention—was amazing.

viii   Preface

The time span between the first written and the last written of these chapters is twenty-six years. When I proposed this book to Helen, I confessed that I didn’t think that I could rewrite the already-done work, or that, if I could, it would get better. As a result, though I have done some spackling, sanding, and retrofitting, tone, style, method, and emphasis shift and jump quite a bit. Although each chapter pursues an argument, the book as a whole, it must be said, has motifs and obsessions where there might have been a thesis. A medley, perhaps. There’s some repetitiousness, particularly in passages where I tried to work out each time what I thought mourning really was. I regret that relevant scholarship and criticism published since the original versions appeared are not discussed or cited. Because these essays were written over that stretch of time, the list of those who read them and helped me with their comments would also be long, and I would inevitably leave out several whose help had been important. So I will simply thank all who have helped me with this work, singling out Mike Cartmell, Peter Homans, Greg Jay, Julia Stern, and Bryce Traister for contemporary thanks because they read and commented vigorously on the most recent parts. I presented an earlier version of the essay on Jewett at the University of Arizona in the spring of 2005: the questions and comments from the audience, especially a question from Eric Hayot, were quite helpful in the transition to the current version. Kay Royal did some prescient delving for me in Harvard University’s Houghton Library at a time when I was unable to travel there myself. The staff of the Houghton Library were subsequently quite helpful in preparing for me a photostatic copy of Sarah Orne Jewett’s manuscript diary, and thanks are due to the Houghton Library for permission to quote from the diary. Thanks, too, to the National Gallery of Art for permission to use Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening on the cover of this book. Poems by Emily Dickinson, “Rehearsal to ourselves” ( J379), “To fill a gap” ( J546), and “Renunciation is a piercing virtue” ( J745), are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Earlier versions of some of the essays included in this volume were previously published. My thanks to the following for permission to republish: Bucknell Review, for “Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?” which appeared in Bucknell Review 18 (1983): 121–43. Cambridge University Press, for “Jefferson’s Prospect,” which appeared in Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 10 (1985): 315–52.

Preface   ix

Louisiana State University Press, for “Early American Antigone,” which appeared in Joseph Kronick and Bainard Cowan, eds., Theorizing American Literature: Hegel, the Sign, and History (Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 125–62. Oxford University Press, for “Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation,” which appeared in American Literary History 12 (Fall 2000): 359–82. Trustees of Boston University, for “Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod,” which appeared in Studies in Romanticism 20 (Spring 1981): 3–20. University of Virginia Press, for “Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and the Problem of Inherited Mourning,” which appeared in Peter Homans, ed., Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century’s End (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 43–61.

National Melancholy

r 

Introduction: The Time of the Double Not

1

Classic American Literature I don’t mean for the word classic in the subtitle of this book to imply that the literary works I examine here are aesthetically superior to other American works not ordinarily included in the category “classic American literature.” Though I find Anne Bradstreet’s poetic elegies, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and Jack Kerouac’s fiction deeply absorbing, and though I find among these and a number of other American works the coherence and the increasingly self-conscious recursiveness of a tradition, I do not mean that they compose a “Great Tradition,” the metropolis of American literature, with the other traditions rusticated to regions and peripheries. Enough recovery and analysis have now been done with the other American literary traditions: their adjacent achievement doesn’t require defense or demonstration. Perhaps I should have chosen “classicized” American literature, but that term is too arch, and D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, a perennial work, is the source of my interest in the term. Anyway, in ordinary use, classic means “something that has become durably interesting and important to a cadre of devotees” so that we can readily say, for example, that a certain recording by Peggy Lee or John Lennon, even a certain Coke recipe, has “become a classic” without judging its merits either way. The continuing popularity of the writers I discuss makes them all, in this sense, “classics.” But works from other traditions qualify as “classics,” too, and I fear that this part of my subtitle confuses (or offends) more than it clarifies or reveals. So maybe I should have put the word classic between quotation

   The Time of the Double Not marks—“classic” American literature—or even sous rature, as used to be said not so long ago. Either of these would allow me to indicate a body of writing that was once considered the whole story but that has turned out to be only a part of the whole story—but still, a part, or a chapter, of American writing, an array of writings that has more holding it together than commonalities of class, race, or region among their authors. Perhaps the absence of a ready name for what was once classic American literature is a marker of ex-majority. In any case, I feel that there are sufficient internal recurrence, resonance, and dialogue among these works for them to qualify as a describable entity, and my hope is to make a contribution to that description. In this I follow, roughly, Lawrence Buell: One obvious way of compensating for the temptation to overgeneralize about the cultural importance of post-Puritan New England influences in the face of an increasingly pluralistic American reality is to demystify the former as a provincial ideology—however far-reaching its aspirations, however wide its prestige—and thus substantially on the same footing with America’s other regional and minority cultures, though at a historical advantage because of its early start and its early strength.

My “classic American literature” is not solely determined by what Buell calls “the Puritan ‘gene’ in American culture,” but I concur with his contention that the tradition of previously canonical American literature can be particularly identified and analyzed in terms of its characteristic engagement with a universalizing claim: “In short, the provincialism of New England Renaissance culture is confirmed by the very element that seemingly argues against it: New England’s willingness to equate itself with the national spirit.”1 A national spirit, I will add below, that was itself frequently equated with human historical fulfillment. My expectation is that the more work done analyzing the DNA of TALFKAC (the American literature formerly known as classic), the richer will be our understanding of the forms of communication—inspiration, derivation, revision, citation, critique, satire, transliteration, subversion, adaptation, hybridization, mutation, transfiguration, disfiguration, allegorization, and more—between this and the other strands of American writing.

National Melancholy To begin to sketch this tradition, I’ll start with an intriguingly apposite work, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Written more than two hundred years after the American Revolution, every cubic narrative inch crammed full of the cultures of South Asia, observing the aesthetic protocols of postmodernism rather than Enlightenment,2 Rushdie’s novel nonetheless richly reprises some of the most urgent issues of early American

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writing. It does so because its animating concern is the relation between individual identity and the new nationality of a large and diverse social body: How do the vicissitudes of national self-understanding and personal self-understanding affect one another? More exactly, how is the understanding of oneself as participant in or particle of a nation affected when there is weakness, vicissitude, or fracture in the idea of the nation? Does weakness in the idea of the nation install weakness in individuals, or does it instead inflame preexisting historical and personal sorrows by obstructing the solace of a distracting fantasy? By what means does the precariousness of the national subject get cycled back into a renewed dependence on, allegiance to, nation? Does renewed allegiance succeed by converting the burden of loss into an appetite for sacrifice or atrocity? Finally, what is there to discover in the world—or, what world is there to discover—if the reabsorption into desperate patriotism doesn’t take? “That view from below,” E. J. Hobsbawm contends, “i.e. the nation as seen not by governments and the spokesman and activists of nationalist (or non-nationalist) movements, but by the ordinary persons who are the objects of their action and propaganda, is exceedingly difficult to discover.”3 Rushdie labors mightily to remedy this defect of historical reality. Our hero and narrator, Saleem Sinai, born at the instant of Indian/­Pakistani independence—midnight, August 15, 1947—is the man to whom history happens, so much the object of nationalist action and propaganda as to be almost only that, a passive and immobilized receptacle of cant, violence, and spectacle. The nation (as Lauren Berlant writes concerning Nathaniel Hawthorne) “dominates his represented relation to his activity, his knowledge, his affect, his very body.” For Saleem, the nation, as for Berlant’s Hawthorne, is “intimate”: In humorous and deeply serious moments, then, Hawthorne depicts national fantasy as fundamental to the political and everyday life of all Americans, whose “Americannness” is as central to their sense of entitlement and desire as any family name and tradition and sensation might be. The nation’s presence in the generic citizen’s daily life is more latent and unconscious than it is in his incidental, occasional relation to national symbols, spaces, narratives, and rituals: still, whether consensually or passively transmitted, national identity requires self-ablation. Citizenship becomes equivalent to life itself and also looms as a kind of death penalty: both activity in and exile from the political public sphere feel like cruel and unusual punishment. It is apparently a quality of nations to inspire identification and sacrifice, as well as to make citizens feel violated in public and private. Thus the complexity of Hawthorne’s tone: the pain and pleasure of his citizenship and the sublime jocularity of his exile.4

When most of the members of Saleem’s extended family are killed and their possessions destroyed in the 1965 India-Pakistan War, the survivors

   The Time of the Double Not are Saleem, his sister (more about her later), and a battered silver spittoon (inlaid with lapis lazuli) that becomes Saleem’s totemic thing, the image of himself as he understands himself, history’s spittoon: “O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as of spittle-juice!”5 It’s hard for me not to hear Whitman’s jubilant address echoing in that sentence (“You Chinaman and Chinawoman of China! You Tartar of Tartary!” 6 ) or in these: And there are so many stories to tell, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me. (MC, 4)

(“I am large . . . I contain multitudes!”)7 Like Whitman, Saleem claims to be the inchoate and inarticulate mass emerged into speech, rendering Hobsbawm’s view from below positively and explicitly, entering it in the literary record. When he announces that he contains multitudes, Whitman nominates himself for the position of the great American poet, the job description having appeared in his preface to the 1855 (first) edition of Leaves of Grass: Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good, and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less.8

Saleem morosely embodies all of Whitman’s rebuffed attributes—grotesque, eccentric, failing in both sanity and fit proportions, especially by the end of his tale: Nine-fingered, horn-templed, monk’s-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed, castrated, and now prematurely aged, I saw in the mirror of humility a human being to whom history could do no more, a grotesque creature who had been released from the pre-ordained destiny which had battered him until he was half-senseless; with one good ear and one bad ear I heard the soft footfalls of the Black Angel of death. The young-old face of the dwarf in the mirror wore an expression of profound relief. (MC, 515)

Having arrived at what he hopes is the end of his afflictions, the point of ultimate physical and emotional crumbling, or at least a pause, Saleem has begun to write, at length, a mutilated Scheherazade attempting to postpone further dissolution. Saleem’s misfortunes do not preclude his election to the post of nationally representative self, however, but rather ensure it, his own physical and psychological disassembly (not to mention

The Time of the Double Not   

his incessantly split-prone and digressive narrative) mirroring “our ancient national gift for fissiparousness” (MC, 459). To be sure, at an earlier age he had aspired to be the Whitman of India: “At the end of 1947, life in Bombay was as teeming, as manifold, as multitudinously shapeless as ever . . . except that I had arrived; I was already beginning to take my place at the centre of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would give meaning to it all” (MC, 144). But if, as Whitman promises, “To the perfect shape comes common ground,”9 Saleem is by the end a complete failure of the promise. Rather than compelling India/Pakistan to assume form, the linkage between self and nation compels him to accept his own undeniably incoherent being, the final failure of Whitmanian aspiration. For the sake of contrast I have reduced Whitman to the announced program of the 1855 preface, and this isn’t fair to the deep interest of his writing, “as tangled as any canebrake or swamp.” For example: Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest, Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight, Toss, sparkles of day and dusk . . . toss on the black stems that Decay in the muck, Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.10

In Whitman’s later years somber moments like this one might indicate either personal disappointment or national agony, or a conjunction of the two. Such melancholy representativeness has some Saleem Sinai in it, except that Whitman is always either exuberant or melancholy, never exuberantly melancholy, which Saleem almost always is (he is much closer to Herman Melville’s Ishmael than to Whitman’s persona; Midnight’s Children has a lot to do with Moby-Dick, with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as go-between). His humorous desperation may well issue from the profound relief felt by the dwarf before the mirror, the relief of a clear measurement of his loss rather than a discovery that he is, after all, comely. This levity indicates something about Saleem’s motives for writing the book—its exploration of the historical origins of his contorted being and its survey of the extent of the damage—indicating also the way in which his political vision differs from Whitman’s. For Whitman the notion of the perfect sociopolitical shape retains its power to the end: if his melancholy ranges between wistfulness and violent despair, it is nevertheless always about the failure to achieve perfect national form, always linked to an ideality that never ceases to measure an actual world’s deficiency. For Saleem, though, perfect form is a lethal and potent fantasy. Before the hour of independence, the city was poised, with a new myth glinting in the corners of its eyes. August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna’s birthday and Coconut Day;

   The Time of the Double Not and this year—fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve—there was an extra festival in the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agree to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God. (MC, 124–25)

Against the deployment of such a fantasy, the exhibition, or even the parading, of Saleem’s mutilated form represents an attempted check or brake. Saleem depicts the machinery by means of which fantasy is deployed for mass consumption in the story of his sister, first nicknamed “the Brass Monkey,” then renamed Jamila Singer when her mesmerizing voice carries her rapidly to a prodigious celebrity as a singer of patriotic melodies: “Purity—that highest of ideals!—that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister’s songs!” (MC, 377). Emerging from the same alembic, her fervor and idealism seem to separate her from her melancholiac family, from “the detachment which came to afflict us all (except Jamila, who had God and country to keep her going)—a reminder of my family’s separateness from both India and Pakistan” (MC, 377). However readily Saleem here differentiates himself from his sister’s affirmations, he has told us earlier that he responds deeply to her singing, probably because her singing is not purged of the minor chords playing through their family’s history: With her first note, the Brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name; she, who had talked to birds (just as, long ago in a mountain valley, her great-grandfather used to do) must have learned from songbirds the arts of song. With one good ear and one bad ear, I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was afterwards compared to that of Muhammed’s muezzin Bilal, issuing from the lips of a somewhat scrawny girl. (MC, 336)

The sorrows upon which Jamila Singer’s voice draws are familial—failures in love and business, depression and alcoholism, destroyed political hopes, religious confusions, migrations from Kashmir south to Bombay then north to Karachi—all of which are a prelude to the death of the family members in the 1965 war and to Saleem’s subsequent wanderings and sufferings. But Jamila’s popularity derives from her ability to generalize

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sorrow rather than to communicate her own singularity, to articulate by proxy the enormous burden of mourning produced by the recent history of the two fledgling nations: the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, in which the British occupation forces killed four hundred protesters and wounded twelve hundred others; partition, which bisected a society and forced massive migration, and during the course of which approximately half a million died; the 1947 and 1965 Kashmir wars; the Bangladesh secession; the internal political violence perpetrated by various administrations in both nations; racial and religious violence within both societies. When the reader pauses to consider the magnitude of historical affliction in the background of Midnight’s Children, the trauma behind Saleem’s humor becomes clear: it’s as though Joseph Conrad’s Marlow had responded to his own horror by joking his way through the story of his passage into the heart of King Leopold’s Congo (as if, too, Marlow were an African), joking with such an unabating consistency that the horror could be glimpsed only after various extrapolations and triangulations. Perhaps Saleem’s greatest testimony to Jamila Singer’s ability to enter sorrow rather than to shun it is his willingness, as a narrator, to be lyrical, plangent, rather than jocular-baroque, for the moment he spends describing her song. Saleem’s diagnosis of his family’s and his society’s suffering does not commence, however, with the loss of life. The novel begins in 1915, when Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam Aziz, returning home to Kashmir from studying medicine in Switzerland, attempts to bow to the ground in prayer, bangs his nose (making it bleed), and admits to himself that he has lost his faith. European modernity has deprived him of the ability to reinstall himself into a way of life, but it has not supplied him with a replacement: “He resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history . . . He became— what?—a stupid thing, neither this nor that, a half-and-halfer” (MC, 4, 13). Accounting for Aadam Aziz’s vulnerability to women would take me too far off track, but I want to underline Saleem’s assertion that there are varying degrees of vulnerability to history. If as Fredric Jameson ­famously remarked, history is what hurts, there are more and less capable ways of emotionally metabolizing the hurt, and history also affects these metabolic systems. History hurts the ability to survive the hurt of history: Saleem’s narrative begins not with the consequence of violence but with an erosion of the capacity to assimilate the consequence of violence, so when the fatalities commence, there is nothing that can be done with them; they simply pile up, and stay. A “half-and-halfer,” Aadam Aziz is the prototype for his family and nation(s), an inhabitant of what Martin Heidegger called “this realm of Between,” “the time of the gods that have fled and of

   The Time of the Double Not the god that is coming. It is the time of need, because it lies under a double lack and a double Not; the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.”11 The date of Heidegger’s essay, 1936, reminds us of the desperate remedies that are attempted in “the time of need,” homicidal or genocidal coercions that confess the quandary they can’t rectify (not thereby redeeming themselves). In Rushdie’s novel this sort of recoil-by-means-of-atrocity often takes the form of a fundamentalist antimodernism designed to annul the alienation that Aadam Aziz imports, as a sort of virus, into his homeland. Though American culture is itself periodically convulsed by a fundamentalist antimodernism from the eighteenth century on, the writers that concern me in the essays collected here are focused on the image or fantasy of the splendid future, the spiritual nation on the verge of achieving itself, the not-(quite-)yet rather than the no-more. Melville’s Wellingborough Redburn, always only a step or two ahead of his own private sorrows, but also almost always (therefore) upbeat, expresses this feeling of a national prospect quite succinctly when, contemplating the ethnic heterogeneity of his fellow Americans and their concomitant lack of strong national feeling, he consoles himself by thinking of approaching restitution plus fabulous interest, a nation more national than any before: On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and people are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearthstone in Eden. The other world beyond this, which was longed for by the devout before Columbus’ time, was found in the New; and the deep-sea-lead, that first struck these soundings, brought up the soil of Earth’s Paradise. Not a Paradise then, or now; but to be made so, at God’s good pleasure, and in the fullness and mellowness of time. The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our children’s children, on the world’s jubilee morning, shall all go with their sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they shall speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the regions round about; Italians, and Indians, and Moors; there shall appear unto them cloven tongues as of fire.12

Which brings us back to Jamila Singer’s performance, since she moves her audience by way of an appeal to the nation, the future on the other side of the time of the double Not, rather than to tradition, the recoverable splendor of ancient culture. Of particular interest here, to me, is the means of her appeal. Rather than turn away from atrocity as her brother does, she presents it directly but alternates tones of suffering with images of national glory: “the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness

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of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God.” Though Jamila doesn’t sing about Pakistan, national triumphalism is present symbolically as the purity of wings and the flying of eagles—purity, as Saleem reminds us repeatedly, is in the name of the nation (Pakistan = Land of the Pure). The technique of the song, therefore, is oscillation: presence/absence/presence/absence/glorious presence; or, nation/loss/ nation/loss/national triumph. If each citation of loss indicates that Jamila Singer can face trauma when her brother cannot, the structure of her song indicates that she can do so because the idea of the nation functions as an imaginative consolation for loss, and because it does so not by modeling or precipitating the gradual acknowledgment of loss that allows the mourner to proceed out of the time of the double Not and back into life but by proposing the nation as an imminent substitute or compensation for what is lost, proposing it as the cure, generating thereby what Benedict Anderson calls “unisonality,” “the echoed physical realization of the imagined community.”13 This fantastic recompense undergirds what Sacvan Bercovitch calls the American Jeremiad. For Bercovitch, Elizabeth Dillon argues, while geography is meant to incarnate the truth of America, its failure to do so is reinscribed within a teleological, prophetic narrative in which landscape embodies not the truth of America but the promise of the incarnation of this truth. In short, self-division and failed incarnation are temporally displaced into a narrative structure which implies that such a division will be overcome with time. Autobiography thus assumes the form of “prophetic fulfillment” in which the failure of incarnate truth is “not divisive but progressive.” Bercovitch concludes, “For Puritan and Transcendentalist alike . . . auto-American-biography meant simultaneously a total assertion of self, a jeremiad against the misdirected progress of the ‘dead’ present, and an act of prophecy which guaranteed the future by celebrating the regenerate ‘Americanus.’ ” While Bercovitch emphasizes the collapse of sacred and secular narratives as well as the conjoining of personal and “federal” eschatology, his account of autobiography indicates the extent to which a “jeremiad”-like structure informs the narrative of the liberal subject as well: the loss and self­d ivision experienced by the subject are interpreted as evidence of a prophetic narrative in which loss is countered by gain, suffering is evidence of election.14

There is no loss, really, only a reinvestment of riches. In this scheme, the hole in the self turns out to be the space reserved for the coming glory, and the patriot is on the very verge of emerging complete and full. The intractable fact of loss is converted to the negotiable fact of desire. At the cost, of course, of the knowledge of one’s mutilation, the knowledge necessary for an advance into a real future rather than into an embalming fantasy: putting down the tools of the work of mourning to pursue a phantom of quick repair, neglecting the work, leaving the tools out in the

   The Time of the Double Not yard, rusting. Thus, though Saleem’s break into brief lyricism acknowledges the power of his sister’s summons, the swift resumption of his style’s abiding malformity signals allegiance to another law, one expressed in Emily Dickinson’s wisdom: 546 To fill a Gap Insert the Thing that caused it— Block it up With Other—and ’twill yawn the more— You cannot solder an Abyss With Air.

Saleem’s paraphrase of the emotional structure of Jamila’s song is analytic, as if to analyze were to escape the Siren’s allure, a strategy that confesses, in turn, that there is an allure, because it needs to be resisted. This tacit confession deepens Saleem for us, suggesting he is not simply tone deaf to “mighty fantasies” such as God or nation but rather responsive and horrified at once, like Ishmael recalling Ahab’s charisma, at the susceptibility to destructive conversion that lies at wait in faith, a liability that is not eliminated by simply doing away with faith, which probably isn’t possible, or good, anyway. Such a deep division in response to the song of the nation, to the way it “hails” many in their deepest layers, and in response to the cost of participation, underlies the essays that follow. When I think back on my young self, I recall my own divided response to the American call. At a time when adolescence and the Vietnam War were driving me away from patriotic exercises such as the Pledge of Allegiance, when recruiting officers from the U.S. military were invited to make their pitch during pep rallies in my high school gym before football games—a time when several of us who studied disaffection and cultivated ostracism as a badge of honor aimed our version of that derisory omniscience particular to teenagers at war and football (think globally, act locally)—I responded then nevertheless, with great fervor, to literary evocations of America, Whitman, but even more in those days, to Thomas Wolfe’s “The Promise of America,” the final chapter of You Can’t Go Home Again: “And we? Made of our father’s earth, blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh—born like our fathers here to live and strive, here to win through or be defeated—here, like all the other men who went before us, not too nice or dainty for the uses of this earth—here to live, to suffer, and to die—O brothers, like our fathers in their time, we are burning, burning, burning in the night!”15 When I began at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1971, the antiwar movement was still strong, and I joined in, though I was guilty of

The Time of the Double Not   

some Hawthornian loitering around the margins, probably guilty, too, it must be confessed, of being in it (like Hawthorne’s faint-hearted hippiebefore-the-fact Miles Coverdale) for the social and erotic opportunities as much as for the cause. I can recall, though, even during this time of what felt like strong and unequivocal commitment, a division of feeling that I attempted to rectify, in at least one heated conversation, by arguing that America could be innocent of the political crimes of the United States, that the spiritual entity was not identical with its current political avatar. This insistence, which I remember putting forward while playing pool in a bar with an unyielding Stalinist from Pennsylvania, returned to mind fifteen years later when I read Bercovitch’s essay “The Music of America,” where he observes that oppositional thinkers from Thoreau to Martin ­Luther King Jr. have commonly phrased their indictments in terms of “disparities between the theory and the practice of Americanness” between present political reality and an imminent America: “They had thought to appropriate America as a trope of the spirit, and so to turn the national symbol, now freed of its base historical content, into a vehicle of moral and political renovation.”16 America wasn’t really at risk in my heart either, so when I finally got around to reading The Great Gatsby during the spring of my senior year (Nixon having resigned, with my approval, the previous summer), I was completely and utterly absorbed— without any worry that I was compromising my politics (not that my politics weren’t compromised by any number of factors, only that I wasn’t worried about it)—by its fervent revival of national wonder, especially in the aria/anthem with which it closes. I’ve included this little memoir as a rough indication of what I brought to the writers discussed in these essays, of what I found in their works, of the reasons why I think I may have chosen to write on these writers, these poems and books. A quick glance at the table of contents reveals the limits of my group: all are European American, all are men except Bradstreet and Jewett, all are Northern except Jefferson, all are of Protestant and English descent except Fitzgerald and Kerouac. Only Whitman can be said to have come from the working class. (The question of sexual preference [or lack of the same] is more complicated, given the closet, given also differing understandings of same-sex love.) Because the group is drawn from what was at one time considered the canon of American literary achievement, I should repeat the point I made in my discussion of the “classic” that the coherence of concerns among these writers—their persistent exploration of a cluster of issues—is not for me the coherence of the Great Tradition but rather the coherence of one among several strands. Almost certainly, I think, the sorts of questions I explore concerning nationality and subjectivity would be less urgent, or take a different form,

   The Time of the Double Not among writers who, less beckoned to by nationalist fantasies, were less disturbed by weaknesses in national identification but more at risk for violence perpetrated or allowed by the more nationally minded. A different sorrow—different but linked causes and outcomes, the locked door or mutilating entryway rather than the empty room, perhaps, other forms of solace, and other forms of fantasy.17 The fact remains, though, that academic critics did extricate this particular strand from the entire array of American writing and put it out front of the rest. Though I do not wish to perpetuate the aesthetic ­supremacism of Great Tradition rhetoric, it may be that my arguments concerning these works can contribute to an understanding of the causes for such rhetoric. By identifying the forms of personal and social desire addressed in these works, we may be able to understand more about the desire or anxiety—rather than the objective judgment—that results in a canon: What is the nature of the taste of those who respond to this song? To what need did these works respond best? What does it tell us about such works that such a need seizes upon them? How is needy understanding defective or partial? With such questions we do not scuttle the works that made up the canon but rather return them to the heteroglot archive from which they were conscripted, which makes them still more interesting, because speculative answers to these questions might, in turn, help us understand more fully the specific differences between canonized works and other American literary practices. When Harriet Jacobs, for example, ends her narrative with “tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea,”18 she declines to practice conclusion by appeal to futurity, the open closure of works as disparate as “Song of Myself,” Walden, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby. The more we know about the connection of futurity with nation, and about the structure that switches grief over the lost into desire for the elusive, the more we will be able to appreciate the majesty of Jacobs’s decision to end with a pledge of allegiance to particular remembrance. The line of American writing that has concerned me in these essays is therefore finite, as it were, in textual space, bounded on all sides by other expressions and genres. Elisa Tamarkin, for example, has excavated a considerable archive of cultural phenomena from the antebellum period in which the slightness of American nationality is supplemented by surprisingly fervent Anglophiliac identifications, rather than by the consolation of an America about to be.19 The tradition that concerns me is finite, too, in literary history, coming to final expression in Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, maybe John Updike, ultimately receiving a fond autopsy (or maybe not, maybe not fond, or maybe not

The Time of the Double Not   

an autopsy) in Pynchon, jumping from there to Rushdie, whose admiration for Pynchon is strong: “Vineland, Mr. Pynchon’s mythical piece of Northern California, is of course also ‘Vinland,’ the country discovered by the Viking Leif Eriksson long before Columbus, ‘Vineland the Good’; that is to say, this crazed patch of California stands for America itself. And it is here, to Vineland, that one of America’s great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly home.”20 Rushdie is no fan of national homecomings, and the cadence of this passage is surprisingly triumphal, but perhaps the suggestion that the “crazed patch” is a synecdoche—a part that expresses the gist of the whole, like Emerson’s Representative Man, or like Saleem Sinai—for America allows Rushdie to celebrate without irony. Rushdie is probably contrasting the ending of Vineland with the ending of The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa Maas loses her faith that a crazed patch of southern Californian sprawl contains within itself the possessible essence of a true America: “San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant, spherical, the sound of a stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck lightly), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her; became a name again, was assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle.”21 When he concludes this sentence with a reference to the North American lithospheric plate, Pynchon invites the reader to think that Oedipa has moved from great expectations to lost illusions, after the pattern of the classic novel, matured, as Georg Lukács put it. But she is not relinquishing fantasy for sobered realism: rather, the loss of San Narciso is the loss of her belief that she has come to the end of a series of premonitions or clues, arrived at the essence they had been prognosticating. The loss of this belief, therefore, does not end the pursuit but rather sends her back into an infinite (and infinitely branching) series of clues, each leading to the next, without arrival (at least before the last page): San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment’s squall-line or tornado’s touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—stormsystems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America . . . If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have found the Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she’d looked. She stopped for a minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if to sniff the air. Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on—knowing as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how

   The Time of the Double Not these tracks ran on into others, knowing they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around her.22

Remanded to the network of clues, Oedipa resumes her transit through an American evermore-about-to-be, the pursuit of a national essence that flees across a chain of signs, infinitely deferred, never achieved or arrived at. Pynchon’s deferred America was a preliminary point of connection between American literature and poststructuralist theory, 23 with the difference that Jacques Derrida, in those days at least, didn’t include “nation” in his catalog of obscure objects of desire: “It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence—eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.”24 “And so forth” leaves room for “America” in the list, but a full articulation of Derrida’s thinking with American literature had to wait for Bercovitch’s insight into the structure of the jeremiad, its perpetually maintained distinction between the current imperfect, prefigurative avatar of America and America in its pure state, the avatar and the clue indicating a future that incites renewed pursuit, like Dashiell Hammett’s massively possessive Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, named after his own desire, rising from the current leaden avatar to continue along the bird’s line of flight. I’m echoing Philip Kuberski here: Each American literary movement is coincidental with a thing that, by offering a theory of why writing has lost its authenticity, returns as guarantor of a new attempt at telling the truth about . . . things. The thing leads a charmed life, appearing at crucial moments whenever our culture fears that it has become too much of a product of words, designations, or myths. But the charismatic return of the thing is not without its risks: the thing resists language, especially a cultural language content to refer to its own effaced references as true and authentic (i.e., not language). The thing is then a charm, but a dangerous one because it redeems only by chastising, like the “American jeremiad” that Bercovitch sees in American culture’s consistent self-criticism for losing its mission and authority.25

For Bercovitch and Kuberski, as for Pynchon, the clue, the ordinary thing supposed to bear an ulterior indication of an irresistible but perpetually elusive—in flight along a line of subsequent clues—nation, this particular permanent futurity of the nation, rather than the imagined land waiting at the end, is itself the crucially American thing. If therefore, Rushdie is right, and Vineland is a Pynchonian arrival, even if to “a crazed patch,” this would mean that Pynchon believed himself to have passed out of a tradition of writing he had expressed and analyzed so fully in The Crying of Lot 49, a fond autopsy, as I suggested above.

The Time of the Double Not   

The last pages of The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), concerning disappointment and the continent, are rich in allusion, to On the Road (1957), for example: I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess—across the night, eastward over the plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent.26

Recalling the “college-age subculture” of his Cornell years, Pynchon writes: “Against the undeniable power of tradition, we were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer’s essay ‘the White Negro,’ the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.” “I enjoyed only a glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement.” “We were at a transition point, a strange post-Beat passage of cultural time, with our loyalties divided.”27 Some of the more sinister facets of The Crying of Lot 49 may invoke Rabbit, Run (1960): After a hum a beautiful Negress sings [on the radio] “Without a song the dahay would nehever end, without a song.” Rabbit wishes for a cigarette to go with his cleaned-out feeling inside and remembers he gave up smoking and feels cleaner still . . . He accelerates. The growing complexity of lights threatens him. He is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world, they live on poisoned water, you can taste the chemicals . . . He is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can’t move without killing somebody . . . And then, as if the world were just standing around waiting to serve his thoughts, a broad road to the right is advertised, ROUTE 100 WEST CHESTER WILMINGTON . . . this was another world. It smells differently, smells older, of nooks and pockets in the ground that nobody’s poked into yet . . . He drives to Lancaster and all the way his good airy feeling inside is spoiled . . . The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system, Baltimore now instead of Philadelphia, reaching for him . . . He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, is it just these people I’m outside, or is it all America? 28

   The Time of the Double Not Updike himself had complicated relations with Kerouac’s novel: “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose: Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road—the people left behind get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave. Arriving at so prim a moral was surely not my only intention: the book ends on an ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our heart’s stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace. The title can be read as a piece of advice.”29 Updike is as jumpy and ambivalent about Kerouac as Rabbit is about running away from his wife. But the novel’s ending, the “ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open,” sides with the road: Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and window-sills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heaving on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.30

If Kerouac and Updike are on Pynchon’s mind in the last pages of The Crying of Lot 49, his most pointed allusion is to Fitzgerald. Oedipa’s loss of belief in San Narciso, “the loss pure, instant, spherical, the sound of a stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck lightly,” recalls this passage from The Great Gatsby: His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.31

The incarnation, the presencing arrival of a long-deferred future: Pynchon changes the tuning fork, which is struck on the verge of arrival, to the chime, which rings as loss begins—the pause just before, the pause just after. Disappointment is inevitable, according to Fitzgerald, because the elusive future, the not-yet, is being substituted for the lost no-more, trying to fill a gap with something other than what caused it: Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made

The Time of the Double Not    way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.32

Kerouac’s reprise: So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father who was never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.33

If Oedipa looks forward to finding “the Tristero anywhere in her Republic,” to a tryst—a consummate encounter, as didn’t happen between Gatsby and Daisy or between Dean Moriarty and his wandering father— she fails to recognize that Tristero is sorrow—elle est triste—the past. Midway through the novel, one of Oedipa’s collaborators offers her a glass of wine made from dandelions picked in a cemetery that has since been paved over to make way for a freeway: “It’s clearer now,” he said, rather formal. “A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered.” No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones could still rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine. 34

Notice how sorrow and longing switch off with one another, the as if summoning slight possibility, with that hope, with hope the possibility of looking at loss because it doesn’t feel like hopeless loss, the revival. The

   The Time of the Double Not end of The Crying of Lot 49: “She heard a lock snap shut; the sound echoed a moment. Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of Lot 49.”35 The ending of The Great Gatsby: Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.36

“Sometimes at college,” Pynchon writes in a memoir of his friendship with Richard Farina, “we also succeeded in getting on the same literary wavelength. We showed up once at a party, not a masquerade party, in disguise—he as Hemingway, I as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the other had been through a phase of enthusiasm for his respective author. I suppose by then I was learning from Farina how to be amused at some of my obsessions.”37 The imaginative emphasis on continental vastness in Pynchon, Kerouac, Updike, and Fitzgerald brings to mind the long tradition of thinking about classic American literature in terms of land, landscape, and American nature rather than in terms of a certain temporality or imaginative futurity, a tradition that inspired, in literary criticism, the work of writers such as Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and many others. I do not mean to dismiss or impugn that tradition of thought in order to promote my own, so perhaps I should simply say that I don’t really see an opposition between the two. In the tradition of thinking about continental space as determining factor, that formative openness is what lies just on the other side of a frontier, that is, of the point of furthest current reach in an ongoing, meaningfully oriented movement. The frontier is the present in the fullest sense of a no-more/not-yet, and the territory ahead is the future. This becomes clear in what I consider the culminating critical work of the “Virgin Land” tradition, Myra ­Jehlen’s American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, the Continent, when ­Jehlen cites ­ Argentinian and ­ Canadian writers in order to demonstrate that the American way of thinking about New World land as temporalized space is far from inevitable. Margaret Atwood, Jehlen’s favored Canadian writer, argues, for example, that if “every country or culture has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core . . . a system of beliefs (it is a system of beliefs, though not always a formal one) which holds the country together and helps the people in it to co-operate for common ends, the symbol for America is the Frontier; for England, the Island; for

The Time of the Double Not   

Canada, Survival, la survivance.” The key feature of the Frontier is, for Atwood, its temporality: Possibly the symbol for America is the Frontier, a flexible idea that contains many elements dear to the American heart: it suggests a place that is new, where the old order can be discarded (as it was when America was instituted by a crop of disaffected Protestants, and later at the time of the Revolution); a line that is always expanding, taking in or “conquering” everfresh virgin territory (be it the West, the rest of the world, outer space, Poverty or the Regions of the Mind); it holds out a hope, never fulfilled but always promised, of Utopia, the perfect human society. Most twentieth century American literature is about the gap between the promise and the actuality, between the imagined ideal Golden West or City Upon a Hill, the model for all the world postulated by the Puritans, and the actual squalid materialism, dotty small town, nasty city, or redneck-filled outback. Some Americans have even confused the actuality with the promise: in that case Heaven is a Hilton hotel with a Coke machine in it.38

Atwood is summing up the American attitude in order to contend that it is not the Canadian attitude, that in Canadian literature the response to continental vastness is vastly different. Therefore, according to Jehlen, though the American decision to see the not-yet-settled as the site of imminent and wondrous communal transformation—“the idea that the ethos of liberal individualism inheres in the American continent”—has certain potent historical effects, such a supposition nonetheless arises independently of an empirical collective “experience of the land,” arising rather in an experience of a social need, defect, or deficiency that the supposition of a future arises to remedy by means of promised compensation (or overcompensation, a reward vastly more glorious than the loss). 39 Having evoked the American time of the double Not so precisely at the end of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald approached the question of America from a different direction in Tender Is the Night, where the American is not the incarnation of an ideality and a temporality but an array or aggregate of national traits adjacent to other such aggregates—the French aggregate, the British aggregate, the Italian aggregate, the Russian aggregate: They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they had repose—Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them—not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.40 So the well-to-do Americans poured through the station onto the platforms with frank new faces, intelligent, considerate, thoughtless, thought-for. An occasional English face among them seemed sharp and emergent. When there were enough Americans on the platform the first impression of their immaculacy and

   The Time of the Double Not their money began to fade into a vague racial dusk that hindered and blinded both them and their observers.41

A complex passage: the Americans are a kind of distinctive “race,” but their particularity is apprehensible only when there is a sufficient multitude for contrast, in this case, English faces. But the association of race and dusk also evokes, momentarily, the question that runs throughout the novel, the degree to which American bodies and American culture are differentiated from English bodies and English culture by the active inner presence of Africa. In either case, though, Fitzgerald’s object in passages such as these is to itemize American traits. In part this itemization is motivated by Fitzgerald’s cosmopolitanism, grown considerably since The Great Gatsby, carefully modeled after the example of Gerald Murphy, by his concrete experience of the behavior of non-Americans, and by his inclination to project a certain sort of blasé demeanor (“no American men had any repose, except himself ”). Beneath these motives, though, there is the deeper current of the novel’s postidealism, its peculiarly gloomy excitement in the wake of exploded transferences, including the national one. “The ‘BIG FAULT’ of The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald wrote to Edmund Wilson (who had praised the novel) was that he “gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of ) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However, the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby’s past and by blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it—tho everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name.”42 Calling lack by the wrong name—calling it “America” rather than “the dead”—is what I’m trying to get at here, so Fitzgerald’s remark is worth considering for a moment. After Nick expedites the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy, that rainy day when they meet in his cottage for tea and then walk over to Gatsby’s mansion, ultimately to admire his shirts, Gatsby and Daisy disappear from sight, the parties cease, the staff is replaced by gangster types. This makes sense, because an affair has commenced and privacy is required, also because fledgling sexual intimacy tends to leave even the close friends out in the cold. So the reader does not object when the narration also stays outside, for a while, until reentering interiors—the Buchanans’ house, the New York hotel room, George Wilson’s garage— on the day of the catastrophe. But the letter to Edmund Wilson reminds us to wonder, what must it have been like between the lovers during those weeks of secrecy? Specifically, how could it be that prolonged close contact, a regular experience of the reality of Daisy as a person, did not damage or destroy the image of Daisy stored up in Gatsby’s ghostly imagination? The answer, I think, is that the dream of Daisy couldn’t have survived extended encounter, not because Daisy is crass but because she is real: disappoint-

The Time of the Double Not   

ment would be, in the logic of Fitzgeraldian desire, inevitable, so the only way to keep the novel out of a slough of despond is to keep the narration away from the couple, to say that, weeks later, desire is intact, unchanged, going strong. Catastrophe, an external destruction that implies no flaw in desire, can then supplant disappointment, the mark of desire’s inevitable flaw. To be sure, there are hints and suggestions that Daisy would have disappointed Gatsby, and they’re enough to render the affirmations of the last pages equivocal. Equivocal, but not impossible, still strong enough to maintain a song of the future, including some minor chords, but as in Jamila Singer’s performance, these add a somber resonance to affirmation without canceling it. In Tender Is the Night, however, Fitzgerald seems to me to have resolved not to throw blankets over disappointment, not to allow its muffled sound to be mistaken for the call of a desirous destiny. Shaped in part by the disappointments in Fitzgerald’s own life, the novel is an honest and courageous attempt to engage with a liability that had been present in Fitzgerald’s writing from the first, the inability of his stylistic glamour to survive a full and open encounter with the fatality that, under suppression, had fueled the glamour. “I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his gloomiest piece, “Experience,” and I see a similar grim determination as Fitzgerald works his way through the many convoluted drafts and revisions of Tender Is the Night. Idealized erotic desire is, of course, the most immediately noticeable casualty of this resolve, Dick and Nicole Diver’s tortured duet replacing the Gatsby-Daisy rapture. But, again, America (and the American ego) subsides, too, an allied and parallel waning, into a sedimented conglomerate rather than the unity of a fervent allegiance; involuntary manifestation of national features rather than redemptive participation in a national commitment; a distinctive nation and national self but not an exceptional one, the belief in one’s exceptional nationality being a trait, or tic, of the American ego, a fantasmatic consolation that dictates certain specific behaviors, a belief that, though it has real effects, has no truth. For example, an American notion of the relation of ego and setting, rather than practical considerations, dictates a difference in the infrastructure of travel: Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the garden. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.43

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald had already begun to contemplate the imaginative liaison between egos and transportation, the role that the ­de­sirous

   The Time of the Double Not self-imagination of Americans played in vehicle and road design: remember, the novel’s hell, the Valley of Ashes, is the place where the commuter train has to stop. The ashes and cinders in the passage above, the phrase “absorbed in an intense destiny of their own,” which might have been plucked from a description of Gatsby and Daisy—these evoke the earlier novel directly, but less to stimulate or revive a transcendent national drive than to indicate the sociomaterial deposit of a certain manner of self-imagination. The American train differs from the French train not in being more transcendent but in having a fantasy of transcendence as an effective factor in design deliberations. For this later Fitzgerald, dreams don’t originate in individual dreamers; rather, dreamers become instances of generic national dreams: Dick got up to Zurich on less Achilles’ heels than would be required to equip a centipede, but with plenty—the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people; illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely, that there were no wolves outside the cabin door.44

Concerning this passage, John F. Callahan writes: Make lies continuous over generations, and they’ll become basic to consciousness and become fixed myths. Magnify a mother’s whisper that everything is all right, there are no wolves in the woods, magnify this lie over generations, and you’ve got an assertion about reality. Loosen the assertion from its particular context, and one makes an Emersonian denial of hostility and conflict, a denial of the power of circumstance. Such an attitude leads one to project his own illusions on to the world. Illusions—they include Diver’s sexual and historical heroic—shape a brittle mold for personality. And, if nurtured too long, they leave no new arrangements open to the pieces of self shattered in the inevitable disillusionment.45

Perhaps, then, self-preservative urges provoke Fitzgerald’s late-career use of writing as an archaeologist’s shovel for excavating collective illusion, sedimented, realized fantasy, rather than as an amplifier for a renovated evocation of what Americans want to believe about themselves. Also an archaeologist of the present, Fitzgerald after The Great Gatsby studies the new myths spewing from the apparatuses of the American mass culture industry, from the fantasy factory, film, which interests him for the first time in Tender Is the Night, but also from the recorded music industry. Like cars, records and radio were potent ambience in The Great Gatsby— Fitzgerald may have been the first writer to realize that mentioning the name of a hit song, “The Beale Street Blues,” for example, will evoke for many readers an exact memory of that year, that time of year, that gang I was hanging with, and so on, because radio (and records bought in response to

The Time of the Double Not   

the radio) had created an unprecedented mass, widespread, nearly simultaneous experience upon which fiction could ride piggyback, a mass that film did not catch up with until the thirties, despite premonitions, Valentino, the “It Girl,” and so on. When Fitzgerald returns to records in Tender Is the Night, however, he makes them an object of attention rather than an ambience, as he did the train, examining them as incarnations of fantasy: Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come. They went to the cache where she had left the phonograph, turned a corner by the workshop, climbed a rock, and sat down behind a low wall, facing miles and miles of rolling night.46

(“[Gatsby] did not know that [his dream] was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”)47 They were in America now, even Franz with his conception of Dick as an irresistible Lothario would never have guessed that they had gone so far away. They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarreled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care—yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad.48

It may be that Fitzgerald’s growing understanding of the rhetoric of mass culture, the way it identified and deployed fantasy, made him aware of American national fantasy as such and led him toward fiction that took an archaeological rather than an expressive relation to national fantasy. Be that as it may, in his later fiction he separates himself from the project of mass culture and devotes himself to analyzing the national penchants he had earlier attempted to reactivate and embody. In the case of Nicole Warren’s phonograph records, beneath all the vicissitudes of boy meets girl runs the deep, subliminal melody that Jamila Singer would pick up: “The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison, twisted upon the Valais night.”49 To savor the demystification implicit in Fitzgerald’s rendition of American traits, we might follow the word back to Emerson’s English Traits, an 1856 account of a trip to England and of the characteristics found there. In his account of arrival, Emerson concedes that the first impression is of power: The problem of the traveler landing at Liverpool is, Why England is England? What are the elements of that power which the English hold over other nations? If there be one test of national genius universally accepted, it is success; and if there be one successful country in the universe for the last millennium, that country is England.50

   The Time of the Double Not This power tends to disable effective judgment or measurement in those who lack it and feel it from the outside: But we have the same difficulty in making a social or moral estimate of England, as the sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try some cause which has agitated the whole community, and on which everybody finds himself an interested party. Officers, jurors, judges have all taken sides. England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, and intelligence, and tastes; and, to resist the tyranny and prepossession of the British element, a serious man must aid himself, by comparing with it the civilizations of the farthest east and west, the old Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal standard, if only by means of the very impatience which English forms are sure to awaken in independent minds. (ET, 21)

I presume that “prepossess” here means both “to impress favorably” and “to occupy the mind to the exclusion of other elements,” evidence of the compelling interior effect of English cultural power, which bullies the imagination as English political and military powers assert themselves in external political and social spaces. If, therefore, all people resent English power, they resent as well the admiration it arouses within, resent, as provincials do, the ease with which they are overawed, despite themselves, by the splendor of the capital. Acquiring a capacity for objective assessment, therefore, requires a renunciation of awe, or at least of this sort of awe, a declaration of independence from a lingering addictive Anglomania, an independence expressed in the insinuation that England, however charismatic and prepossessing, is nevertheless a jailed criminal awaiting a fair jury. To qualify himself for that jury—and there’s little doubt that a hanging waits at the end of the process—a “serious man” such as Emerson must dethrone the England within, remand it to the dustbin of history with other bygone splendors, viewing it as a curio, one of history’s odd growths, a knot or burl on the tree of humanity. If, therefore, the political and military powers of England are still vast, its cultural power is susceptible to diminishment before the authority of a serious man who can survey objectively the cultures of the past and represent, or act on behalf of, those who have been significantly affected by England, that is, everyone, humankind. To diagnose England is therefore to evidence the commencement of its decline. There is cultural aggression not in the specific observations— The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. (ET, 49) The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal article in the social bill of rights, that every man has a right to his own ears. (ET, 79) The English race are reputed morose. I do not know that they have sadder brows than their neighbors of northern climates. They are sad by comparison with the singing and dancing nations: not sadder, but slow and staid, as finding their joys at home. (ET, 74–75)

The Time of the Double Not   

—but in the exuberant assertion that Englishness is a temperament, a behavior that can be an object of observation, analysis, and prediction based on probability rather a sovereign subjectivity, the keen observer of the other nations, the alert manipulator of the global whole. I don’t know whether Emerson is in this book specifically mindful of British travel accounts such as those of Mrs. Trollope, Harriet Martineau, or Charles Dickens, but the struggle concerning who will observe whom runs throughout his book, and the emergent “serious man” is not Emerson individually but rather American man, who can look full at the British sun and describe it as a mass of potent eccentricities rather than as a pure expression of human spirit. Fitzgerald’s catalog of “American Traits,” therefore, intimates an end to an epoch of American self-imagination, despite the emergence of American geopolitical potency after World War I, or perhaps because of it, muscle obviating the need for metaphysics. For Hobsbawm, “nationalism comes before nations”; the assertion of an imaginary national entity precedes the arrival of a general rough feeling of national coherence: “ ‘the nation’ as conceived by nationalism can be recognized prospectively; the real ‘nation’ can only be recognized a posteriori.” If Fitzgerald replaces the imaginary nation of The Great Gatsby with the “real nation” of Tender Is the Night, this change may mean that the United States had met Hobsbawm’s three conditions for the existence of a real nation recognized a posteriori: “historic association with a current state or with a fairly lengthy and recent past,” “the existence of a long-established cultural elite, possessing a written national literary and administrative vernacular,” and “a proven capacity for conquest. There is nothing like being an imperial people to make a population conscious of its collective existence as such.”51 Certainly by the late 1930s, projects such as Carl Sandburg’s American Songbook, Alan Lomax’s field recordings, and the Works Progress Administration American Guide series would have made it clear that Americans could feel American by referring themselves to an intricate and diverse common past as well as to, or rather than to, a visionary future. In presenting the United States as a real nation fully arrived on the world stage, then, the Fitzgerald of Tender Is the Night is also revoking his nation’s transcendentality, substituting a variably conscious array of behaviors and attitudes for the idea of an intensely aware, fervent, heartfelt, and unified allegiance. He does to the United States what Emerson had sought to do to England, dismissing from duty the hope that Alexander Hamilton had announced in Federalist No. 1: It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government

   The Time of the Double Not from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.52

Henceforth “American” will be a particular variety of “accident and force” (read “history”) rather than the fulfillment of the world’s deep hope. Hamilton confesses the early American predicament when he implies that governments that don’t stand on reason therefore stand on accident and force. However conservative we may find him, or however conservative he may have found himself, as an American conservative Hamilton was unable to avail himself of the foundations of order that Edmund Burke would invoke a few years later when replying to Thomas Paine—custom, precedent, the antiquity of a coherent common culture. The relegation of other political, more venerable, systems to the category of “accident and force” is an attempt to paper over the worries that James Madison would articulate in Federalist No. 49: In the next place, it may be considered as an objection inherent in the principle, that as every appeal to the people would carry an implication of some defect in the government, frequent appeals would in great measure deprive the government of that veneration, which time bestows on every thing, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability. If it be true that all governments rest on opinion, it is no less true that the strength of opinion in each individual, and its practical influence on his conduct, depend much on the number which he supposes to have entertained the same opinion. The reason of man, like man himself is timid and cautious, when left alone; and acquires firmness and confidence, in proportion with the number with which it is associated. When the examples, which fortify opinion, are antient as well as numerous, they are known to have a double effect. In a nation of philosophers, this consideration ought to be disregarded. A reverence for the laws, would be sufficiently inculcated by the voice of an enlightened reason. But a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato. And in every other nation, the most rational government will not find it a superfluous advantage, to have the prejudices of the community on its side.53

Madison is arguing against frequent appeals to the people because they show the emperor in his new clothes, the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain: keep the curtain drawn while we allow some antiquity to accumulate, a congenial prejudice that will eventually afford government its requisite mystification and prestige. Like Macbeth, who in gaining the crown destroys the charisma that made it worth having, Madison and his compatriots were unable to exploit politically the feelings that Ernst Renan would judge to be the soul of nationality: A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Only two things, actually, constitute this soul. One is in the past, the other is in the present. One is the possession in

The Time of the Double Not    common of a rich legacy of remembrances; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the heritage which all hold in common. Man, sirs, does not improvise. The nation, even as the individual, is the end product of a long period of work, sacrifice and devotion. The worship of ancestors is understandably justifiable, since our ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, of great men, of glory (I mean the genuine kind), that is the social principle on which the national idea rests. To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have accomplished great things together, to wish to do so again, that is the essential condition for being a nation. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices which one has approved and for which one has suffered. One loves the house which he has built and which he has made over. The Spartan chant: “We are what you make of us; we are what you are” is simply the abbreviated hymn of the Fatherland.54

Contra Renan, Benedict Anderson does believe that people improvise when they envision nations: But amor patriae does not differ . . . from other affections, in which there is always an element of fond imagining. (This is why looking at the photo-albums of strangers’ weddings is like studying the archaeologist’s groundplan of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.) What the eye is to the lover—that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with—language—whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue—is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.

If the nation is improvised or fantasized, however, it must draw from real experiences in order to produce the feeling of absolute connection to indubitable origin: Something of the nature of this political love can be deciphered from the ways in which languages describe its object: either in the vocabulary of kinship (motherland, Vaterland, patrias) or that of home (heimat or tanah air [earth and water, the phrase for the Indonesians’ native archipelago]). Both idioms denote something to which one is naturally tied. As we have seen earlier, in everything “natural” there is always something unchosen. In this way, nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era—all those things one can not help. And in these “natural ties” one senses what one might call “the beauty of gemeinschaft.” To put it another way, precisely because such ties are not chosen, they have about them the halo of disinterestedness.

“It is useful to remind ourselves,” Anderson warns, that “nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.” But the American ties were chosen, elective, unequipped with the sorts of automata Anderson describes as the stuff of nation-imagining. Anderson puts Madison’s predicament this way: “Dying for one’s country, which one usually does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the

   The Time of the Double Not American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International can not rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will.”55 By 1882, the time Renan wrote his essay, the Americans had certainly begun to partake of such a sense of nation (much less so, though, for groups such as the white Southerners, the former slaves, the relocated ­Native Americans, the Californios, Nuevomexicanos and Tejanos, or the Chinese and Japanese laborers, fishermen, and farmers), a sense founded in large measure on the sacrifices made by the revolutionary generation and on the political house it built. But those common experiences were in Madison’s time still fresh and lacked the general sentimental resonance they would eventually acquire. Much of American cultural and political production during the first century after the Revolution—Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, the Fireside Poets, Daniel Webster’s Bunker Hill speech, his joint eulogy for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—therefore proceeded from an attempt to install the timbre of a common history in the hearts of the early Americans. Berlant calls this “the nationalist mnemotechnique—a form or technology of collective identity that harnesses individual and popular fantasy by creating juridically legitimate public memories”: The movement toward creating an “indigenous” American culture aimed to rectify a weakness in the relation between the state and the nation, for without the operation of an indigenous cultural system of self-expression the state itself would not be perceived to be integrated with the nation as a whole, for there was no stable set of customary references that constituted the expression of an “American people.”56

But in the end there isn’t really much you can do about antiquity except wait for it, hence the complaints from Charles Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Henry James, and others about the skimpiness of the historical materials to be worked up. The American predicament is inadvertently confessed in a story that was widely taught in American public schools not that long ago, “The Man Without a Country.” The son of Nathan Hale, Edward Everett Hale was a Boston minister who had been active in the antislavery movement in the years before he wrote the story, which was, according to Douglas R. Angus, composed in response to a recent scandal: In 1863, an ex-Congressman from Ohio by the name of Vallandigham had made a vitriolic speech against the Federal government for which he had been arrested and sent to jail. However, Lincoln changed the sentence to deportation back into Confederate territory. When some of Vallandigham’s sympathisers nominated him for governor of Ohio, Hale was so incensed that he wrote “The Man Without a Country” to illustrate how a man exiled from his country for life would eventually come to realize how much his country meant to him.57

The Time of the Double Not   

The problem with such an intent in 1863, of course, was that there were for many Americans two countries, the loss of one being the gain of the other. What Hale really intended, therefore, was to produce a feeling that the Confederacy was nothing more than a loss or lacking of nationality, as sin is for Augustine a lacking of God, without any consequent gain. To accomplish this, Hale would therefore need to establish the Union as a positivity, as a thing that the Confederacy has lost, and to establish that loss as the Confederacy’s crucially defining or constitutive feature. The protagonist is Philip Nolan, a near homonym of an equally common name, Noland, no land. Tried as a minor participant in the Aaron Burr secession conspiracy, Nolan, upon conviction in 1807, loudly exclaims, “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” (MWC, 7). His punishment is exactly that: the judge is so outraged, as Hale had been outraged by Vallandigham, that he sentences Nolan to exile on board American naval vessels, ordering that he be perpetually transferred from incoming to outgoing ships, never stepping on American soil but never naturalizing himself to another country either, suspended in the double Not. In addition, Nolan is denied access to any information concerning the United States: “Right in the midst of one of Napoleon’s battles, or one of Canning’s speeches, poor Nolan would find a great hole, because on the back of the page of that paper there had been an advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap from the President’s message” (MWC, 11). The sentence is affirmed by then-president Thomas Jefferson and upheld by subsequent administrations until Nolan’s death in 1863. Nolan thus becomes the opposite of Melville’s Bulkington, for whom “[t]he land seemed scorching to his feet.”58 Nolan’s longing to quench his feet with the earth of America transforms him, over the years, from a trite young man into a living emblem of national melancholy, his self hood defined, like the newspaper page, by its glaring hole, his lacking growing in pace with his nation’s having: “Lieutenant Truxton told me that, when Texas was annexed, there was a careful discussion among the officers, whether they should get hold of Nolan’s handsome set of maps, and cut Texas out of it—from the map of the world and of Mexico. The United States had been cut out when the atlas was brought for him” (MWC, 21). The story is written to persuade us that our country is one of those things that we take for granted until we lose them, finding an excruciating loss where there had been only a complacent unawareness. This message is relayed to us rather directly by the story’s narrator, Fred Ingham, who begins to write the story upon seeing Nolan’s obituary in a newspaper. The obituary, he remarks, is terse and tells the reader nothing of Nolan’s enormous pathos, a lacking-of-Nolan, as Nolan’s newspaper had

   The Time of the Double Not been a lacking-of-America, a deficiency Ingham is seeking to remedy by telling Nolan’s story. He is moved to the task by his memory of Nolan: he’s a longtime naval officer who got to know Nolan around 1820, when he served as a young midshipman on board one of the vessels conveying Nolan from nowhere to nowhere. Ingham recalls having been deeply moved by his conversations with Nolan, especially one immediately following a successful raid on a Portuguese slave ship. Nolan persuades the captain to take the liberated Africans back to Africa, shortly afterward exhorting Ingham to become conscious of country: “No matter what happens to you, no matter who flatters or abuses you, never look at another flag, never let a night pass but you pray God to bless that flag. Remember, boy, that behind all these men you have to do with, behind officers, and government, and people even, there is the Country Herself, your Country, and that you belong to Her as you belong to your own mother. Stand by Her, boy, as you would stand by your mother, if those devils there had got hold of her today!” (MWC, 20)

This, of course, is Hale telling us what we need to do, the focus of the story’s unembarrassed didacticism. But the fact that we need to do this means that we are, for the moment, men and women without the feeling for country: though we have country, we lack appreciation of our having, a lack that the story makes us aware of. We might even envy Nolan his sharp awareness, or perhaps use him as an imaginative route to a feeling we can’t quite access within ourselves. We are to use Nolan as a hypothetical guarantor that a certain emotion can be felt, even though we cannot, or at least do not or will not, at least for the moment, find it within ourselves to feel it. Nolan, that is, demonstrates that national feeling is a possible future for us, maybe even a likely one, perhaps just seconds after we finish reading the story, but, for now, a not-yet. To prepare for this moment-just-after, Hale packs his story with an enormous amount of U.S. history: approximately twenty-one pages long in my edition, it includes references to the Revolution, early dealings with Spain and France, the Burr conspiracy, the War of 1812, the slave trade, the acquisition of California and New Mexico, military involvement in the Marquesas, finally to the Battle of Vicksburg, a history-perpage average that probably exceeds even Rushdie’s. Frequent references to then-and-now— The other boys in the garrison sneered at [the young Nolan] because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for [Burr] the time which they devoted to Monongahela, hazard, and high-low jack. Bourbon, euchre and poker were still unknown. (MWC, 6)

The Time of the Double Not    People do not [sit on deck smoking and reading aloud] so often now; but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so. (MWC, 11) How they ever [held a dance] on board the Warren I am sure I do not know. Perhaps it was not the Warren, or perhaps ladies did not take up so much room as they do now. (MWC, 13)

—emphasize change, but emphasize it as development enclosed within American time, that is, they strive to establish an American venerability or antiquity, much as Irving had attempted to do in “Rip Van Winkle.” In an 1876 preface to the story, Hale invoked in passing Sir Walter Scott’s formula “’tis sixty years hence” (MWC, 5), signifying a conscious parallel between his own and Scott’s determination to produce nationality by literary means, the fictional generation of an almost-tactile sensation of our past. (Early in his exile, Nolan is moved to tears by lines concerning love of country from Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel.) Hale is also determined to crowd in as much American geography as possible. When he reads Nolan’s obituary, Ingham is “stranded at the old Mission-House in Mackinaw, waiting for a Lake Superior steamer” (MWC, 5), an important index, because it makes us conscious of the border of American space from the first, an impression on the reader that is extended by references to Washington state, California, Texas, New Orleans, the Bermudas, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. There isn’t much topographical information given in the story, and there isn’t much reference to the American interior: Hale’s geographical imagination is preoccupied with beltlining the nation, just as he uses then-and-now to draw its temporal borders, the two combining in the citation of the moving frontier—“that distant Mississippi Valley, which was [in 1805] farther from us than Puget’s Sound is today” (MWC, 7)—our time, in which we have moved through our space. Hale has specified the location and duration of a drama, but so far the protagonist has only the blankness of demographic force. Hale therefore attempts to assert a disctinctive personality for his collective actor: Only when some English lady—Lady Hamilton, as I said, perhaps—called for a set of “American dances,” an odd thing happened. Everybody then danced ­contra-dances. The black band, nothing loath, conferred as to what American dances were, and started off with “Virginia Reel,” which they followed with “Money-Musk,” which, in its turn in those days, should have been followed by “The Old Thirteen.” But just as Dick, the leader, tapped for his fiddles to begin, and bent forward about to say, in true negro state, “  ‘the Old Thirteen,’ gentlemen and ladies!” as he had said “ ‘virginny Reel,’ if you please!” and “ ‘MoneyMusk,’ if you please!” the captain’s boy tapped him on the shoulder, whispered to him, and he did not announce the name of the dance; he merely bowed, began on the air, and they all fell to—the officers teaching the English girls the figure, but not telling them why it had no name. (MWC, 14)

   The Time of the Double Not The distinctively American here is pretty clearly at least facilitated, as Fitzgerald would assert, by the inmixture of the African, by a second borrowing. The blend, or reciprocal inflection of Africa and Britain, Hale may be asserting, supplies our distinction, a striking historical perception. Though this performance spares Nolan the added fate of being the Man Without Country Music, it is probably not, for the ordinary reader, the stuff from which to manufacture the strong national self-identification that Hale labors mightily to incite. American space/time is traversed by diverse human herds that emit diverse and anomalous cultural products, and the only truly coherent element running through the American ensemble is Nolan’s melancholy. If the furiousness with which Hale piles up American things is an episode of what Freud called denegation—a denial so stressful and adamant as to confess the truth of the thing denied—this confession invites us to contemplate Nolan differently, as the Man Without a Country to Be Without, not in exile from America but America in exile from nationhood, a wanderer among nations glimpsed over the rail of the ship, never arrived at, always sent out again when about to arrive home, the State Without a Nation. As the story progresses, Nolan becomes a sacred object for those who meet him, and over the years, a number of officers who have been, like Ingham, stirred by the chastened Nolan’s fervent patriotism petition the U.S. government for a pardon, but it’s never given. This Yahwistic or bureaucratic hard-heartedness is not dictated by the Vallandigham prototype and seems an odd element to put into so patriotic a story. It makes more sense, though, as a part of the story’s narrative unconscious, not the U.S. government’s cruelty or administrative inertia but history’s brutal and unrelenting withholding of American nationhood amid the horror of the Civil War. Vallandigham was championed, after all, in Ohio. Confessing americalessness, then, Hale seeks to bring americanness into being. For all of its invocation of a collective American past, Hale’s story is really an attempt to catalyze a feeling that is just about to be. As Ernest Gellner remarks, “A rolling stone gathers no aura”59 —the prestige of a coherent past is hard to come by. The charisma of an immense future, though, is ready to go, dependent only on the eloquence of someone able to convince us of that future’s real imminence. Such a relocation of security motivates Emerson’s adaptation, in “Nature,” of the figure of the sepulchre from Webster’s Bunker Hill speech. Webster: If, indeed, there be any thing in local association fit to affect the mind of man, we need not strive to repress the emotions which agitate us here. We are among the sepulchres of our fathers. We are on ground, distinguished, by their valor, their constancy, and the shedding of their blood.60

The Time of the Double Not   

Emerson: Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.61

From consecrated ground to new lands: rather than an us now, here that is coherent and satisfying by virtue of intense, unbroken connection with a heroic past, an us that secures its vigor from the rapt thought of what it is very soon to be.

Mourning and Opportunity Notice though, that, despite their differences, neither Webster nor Emerson invites us to contemplate the deadness of the dead, the cadaver in the sepulchre. Webster shows us the abstract character of the heroes—valor, constancy, sacrifice—and implies, unmistakably, that, should we practice the same virtues, the dead will live on in us: their blood will soak into the ground, but the resolve that was the central truth of the hero is alive, and current. Thus controlling the meaning of the dead, Webster creates a world that is somber but not horrible, a world in which what matters endures, vessels passing away. Such a rendition of the sepulchre denies, or rather discredits, strong grief, because it intimates that strong grief is an excessive attachment to features of the dead that the dead had themselves relegated to secondary status, intimates, that is, that strong grief is disloyal to the dead, that it is a betrayal of their commitment, that it is, finally, affectively homicidal rather than preservative. For his part Emerson calls attention to the work that Webster and others are doing—building the sepulchres, writing the biographies—in order to reject it, to claim that the energy expended on these tasks is wasted, that it should be withdrawn and reinvested in the future. Rather than the partial disinvestment Webster calls for, therefore— separating one’s heart from what perishes in order to maintain in one’s heart what still lives, the heart as sepulchre—Emerson calls for a complete disinvestment, corpse, sepulchre, memory: all of these are traps or snares. If Emerson’s futurity seems brighter, in one light, than Webster’s filio­ piety, Emerson also seems, in another light, to be more terrified by the

   The Time of the Double Not dead, less able to approach them in memory. When his wife, Ellen, died in February 1831, Emerson wrote to his aunt Mary that “I am alone in the world & strangely happy,” presumably because his wife’s sufferings were over but also because “she is present with me now beaming joyfully upon me.” The question of the dead, though, was not settled: The strangest of all revelations, however, is Emerson’s entry in his Journal for March 29, 1832: “I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.” That is the complete entry, without the slightest clue to this strange action. It has been suggested that it was only a dream, but we have no reason to make this assumption. Besides, Emerson had not been able to dream of Ellen since February 11, 1831, three days after her death. The terseness of the notation is similar to his brief recording of her death, when he was under terrible emotional strain.62

Or perhaps the inability to dream, the inability to go there, even in sleep, or to remember if one does, accounts for the entry into the tomb, going there physically in order to force oneself to go there emotionally, to force one’s way through countless layers of muffling intercessions: People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scenepainting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is how to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate—no more. I cannot get it nearer me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.63

He hates his coldness so much; it is hard to imagine feeling more selfdamned than this. But notice how much coldness is associated with safety, security, immunity from vicissitude. It is a defense, potent in response to the potency of the provocation, intransigent to make up for the absence of other ways of handling the assault, and therefore testimony to the abject terror that is always there, felt in its effects rather than in itself. But the coldness is a defense grown worse than the defended-against: if Emerson were completely cold, there would be none of him to grieve grief, to

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know that something has gone wrong. I agree, then, with Sharon Cameron, who mistrusts Emerson’s “stupor of dissociation” in “Experience”: “Feeling survives the complaints of its being canceled. Emerson is conceding with one part of himself what he is disputing with another.”64 This awful passage is from the essay “Experience,” which is, again, “the chapter” in which Emerson has “set his heart on honesty,” perhaps, Cameron contends, in order “to extricate grief from the numbness to whose spell consciousness has consigned it.”65 In the nerve-pulling discussion of his son’s death, Emerson’s frightening candor conspicuously lacks the vigor with which he ordinarily summons us to view all of our present attachments as “caducous” inhibitions obstructing the arrival of a glorious destiny: “Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of those deceived and deceiving persons with whom we converse. Say to them, ‘O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s.’ ” As Christ allows himself to seem cold when he makes such demands for sacrifice, Emerson implies here in “Self-Reliance,” I allow myself to seem cold, in the name of a higher warmth: When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way: you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons are its forgotten ministers.66

The author of “Experience,” though, says, no, it’s not apparent coldness in the name of a glorious outcome; it’s just coldness; the assertion of a splendid future to follow is made only to hide from itself the bleakness of an empty self. In “Experience,” self-reliance is the invulnerability of an inert unresponsiveness, not the practice of a plastic and versatile independence, and, or so Emerson claims in this “honest chapter,” that’s what it always was. There is another important difference between these passages from “Experience” and “Self-Reliance.” In the former, the separation of self from others is a matter of loss and in the latter, of sacrifice; in the latter, “you take the way from man,” and in the former, others take their way from you. As “Experience” refigures independence as coldness, perhaps, too, it replaces sacrifice—the relinquishing of lower attachments in order to enable the higher attachment—with loss, the incessant deprivation, beyond the will or power of the loser, that enables no more than a stunned or insensate homeostasis. Sacrifice, Emerson might be saying, is another of the distracting illusions, allowing one to imagine that loss is not a ­human heritage to be suffered but rather the deliberate consequence of a decision aimed at a distinct goal. Even without a goal, sacrifice would not be

   The Time of the Double Not a waste, because it allows one to suppose a universe in which there is a measure of control, if without fulfillment, a universe that permits the substitution of a discipline for incessant, unpredictable victimage. I’m steering Emerson toward his most acute reader, Emily Dickinson: 379 Rehearsal to Ourselves Of a Withdrawn Delight— Affords a Bliss like Murder— Omnipotent—Acute— We will not drop the Dirk— Because We love the Wound The Dirk Commemorate—Itself Remind Us that we died.

The art of subtraction works over loss, converting it by rehearsing it into an intentional thing, affording the bliss of design rather than suspense or surprise, omnipotence in dispossession. Even without a spiritual gain in compensation for sacrifice, sacrifice is itself a gain, not in otherwise lost objects but in the tolerability of one’s understanding of loss, a defensive structure: he or she who sacrifices doesn’t lose. Sacrifice allows the reimagination of the time of the double Not as practice rather than as historical outcome but with the belief in the gain added on to the illusion of control, a splendid opportunity, a loss of loss that one doesn’t need to grieve: 745 Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue— The letting go A Presence—for an Expectation— Not now— The putting out of Eyes— Just Sunrise— Lest Day— Day’s Great Progenitor— Outvie Renunciation—is the Choosing Against itself— Itself to justify Unto itself— When larger function— Make that appear— Smaller—that Covered Vision—Here—

In an early chapter of Moby-Dick, Melville’s melancholy narrator, selfstyled Ishmael, concerned about and confused by the irritable gloominess

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that draws him toward the sea, steps into a sepulchre full of emptiness. Though the previous chapter had concluded with an untypical affirmation—“roses bloom only in summer; whereas the fine carnation of [New Bedford women’s] cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens” (MD, 33)—chapter 7, “The Chapel,” returns to typical gloom, the thought of perennially blossoming cheeks having proven infirm, considerably less perennial than the cheeks themselves: “The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist” (MD, 33–34). Ishmael looks to a comfort deeper than bluff cheer: “In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not” (MD, 33). The outbound sailor’s hopes for dread reduction are, however, bound for disappointment, at least initially, because the mood of place is not one of Christian buoyancy and confidence but of deep, immobile sorrow: “Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm” (MD, 34). If the storm’s shriek seems to propose or model an open expression of misery, the contrasting silence of the people in the church emphasizes the constraint of lamentation in the human world: “Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived: and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit” (MD, 34). Melville is inviting us to meditate on the oxymoron with which he began this description of the inside of the church, a “scattered congregation,” a dispersed gathering, an archipelago or nonsociety, spatial proximity serving to italicize rather than challenge or remedy isolation. Charles Olson, one of Melville’s fiercest admirers, ends the overture poem of his epic, The Maximus Poems, with an allusion to this passage from Moby-Dick: Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I, Maximus, address you You islands Of men and girls67

The absence of a period at the end of the poem, together with the direct address to the reader, indicates that Melville is being blended with Whitman here: I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.   .  .  .

   The Time of the Double Not Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you68

These are Whitman’s most magisterial attempts at democratic enactment, so when Olson splices Melville’s archipelago with Whitman’s summons at this decisive moment in his own poem, he underlines this passage from Moby-Dick, telling us to see it as a moment of fundamental social diagnosis with the same textual stature as Whitman’s opening and closing petitions. Olson’s highlighting of Melville’s passage supports Neal Tolchin’s view of Melville: “Throughout his work, the moments when his unresolved grief surfaces are often those textual sites in which he radically critiques social codes.” I argue that a double bind characterized Victorian American mourning rituals, which at once prolonged the process of mourning and blocked the expression of feeling in bereavement. The antebellum mourner suffering from deep conflicts toward the dead found that his or her culture forbade a public expression of these negative feelings. Instead, conflicts were driven underground, thus setting the scene for lifelong chronic grief, in which the mourner often performed a pathological identification with significant behavior of the deceased, especially a last illness.69

Tolchin here draws on “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which Freud argues that mourning is a gradual and incremental encounter with the full complexity of our intimate relation with what we have lost, a progressive, meticulous construction of a memory that allows us to be conscious of what it is that we have lost—an immense task, given the conflicted, diverse intricacy of our human connections—a precise accounting of what is lost that is, therefore, simultaneously a precise accounting of what survives to move forward into an altered future. If, as Tolchin proposes, conscious memory is confined to sanctioned portions of the full array of influence and response, the labor of construction is retarded or even permanently disabled, stranding the survivor in the immobility of the melancholia that Freud contrasts with mourning. Tolchin’s final observation concerning identification with the dead suggests a further turn of the screw, the possibility that the disabling of mourning might even seem desirable, because it postpones or obviates a final relinquishing. The dead die in the outer environment but persist within, introjected entities, frail beings cushioned and tended to by the melancholiac. This arrest of loss brings Dickens’s Miss Havisham to mind, or, Tolchin proposes, Queen Victoria: “The preeminent chronic griever of the period was also its most prominent symbolic figure, Queen Victoria. For twenty-two years after Prince Albert’s death, Victoria had his clothes laid out each evening with

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hot water and a clean towel. Immediately after his death, she had his room carefully photo­graphed, hung his wreath-draped portrait over his empty pillow, slept with his nightshirt in her arms, and had a plaster cast made of his hand, which she kept within reach by her bedside.” 70 The surfacing of unresolved grief in Melville’s writing is for Tolchin, therefore, necessarily a radical critique of social codes, because the codes Tolchin is referring to result from attempts to regulate grief. The reason full mourning is interdicted may be that a genteel society is afraid of the antipathies that haunt love, that it longs for a utopian love, unmottled by conflict, and that it fears that an untrammeled appetitive malice is the only alternative, a fear that Melville embodies in Moby-Dick as the shark, the nadir or null point of the soul, willing to eat even its own entrails when wounded. The cold violence of slavery, capitalism, and Indian relocation impressed itself on Melville’s imagination early in his life, beginning with his father’s business failure, lunacy, and death when Melville was twelve; and the imminent, hotter violence of the Civil War could be glimpsed without special prescience by the time the novel was composed.71 Melville’s society had reason to fear aggression and greed (and the impairment of social mechanisms set opposite to aggression and greed), and the attraction of unequivocal commemoration was therefore considerable. Hence the pure sorrows that made sentimental fiction so popular: if fantasy is usually more or less about the transcendence of death, one can nevertheless have fantasies about kinds of sorrow that transcend, at least, bad death, equivocal, murky, unintelligible, polluted. But again, melancholia has another layer of allure, not only the annulment of complicated feelings toward the dead but also the annulment of the deadness of the dead, the installation of the beloved in a sustaining and preserving inner chamber. Hence the peculiar dissociation, detachment, or apparent torpor of the melancholiac, who is furiously devoting enormous energies to the maintenance of the walls of the chamber, walls constantly endangered by the soul’s infidelity, its stalwart inclination to reestablish connection with the exterior. One can resist mourning out of fear of what it will tell about one’s true feelings, but also in response to an illusion of power, a secret hope that having to surrender and move on is not a destiny, only one in a repertoire of outcomes. The reticent, incapacitated melancholiac is a tyrant, a psychological insight at the foundation of Moby-Dick, himself the victim of his own tyranny. Fixing a hole where the rain gets in stops the mind from wandering. The marble tablets eyed by those in the New Bedford chapel commemorate sailors lost at sea. They are placed on the interior walls of the chapel in lieu of gravestones, indicating absent bodies as well as absent souls, intensified signs of nothing, therefore, perhaps, but maybe not: lacking the

   The Time of the Double Not body, one does not know beyond a doubt that the sailor is dead; lacking a burial, one has not had to look with living eyes at dead eyes, to set his or her living future opposite the pure pastness of the dead one, to relinquish and recommence one’s passage along the way. The lingering chance that the sailor might really be alive is shadowed by the flickering fantastic vitality of the sailor in the mourner’s heart: “So plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unbleeding hearts, the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh” (MD, 35). Ishmael is himself a confessed melancholiac, and his deep interest in the unceasing grief of the women suggests that a torture as perpetually fresh as the cheeks of the young girls of the previous chapter is not limited to those who haven’t recovered the bodies of dead loved ones: Oh! Ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immoveable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here. (MD, 35)

Plainly, and both Ishmael and Melville know this, the full range of despair itemized here is available to those who have been to funerals where the corpse was present. The funeral symbolically foreshadows or suggests an eventual relegation of the dead to a particular cherished space, local within the world and outside of the survivor, freeing the world to be something other than a ubiquitous deficiency and the survivor to be something other than a sepulchre. But pointing the way does not guarantee arrival, and the obstructions of mourning that Tolchin describes—obstacles or interferences between the funeral and what it symbolizes—ensure that the depression of the women in the chapel is available to all. Melville’s richly perceptive portrait of intransigent grief in chapter 7 is preparation for the arrival of Father Mapple in chapter 8 and his sermon on Jonah in chapter 9, in which the islands of men and women, the “scattered congregation,” will become an audience: “Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority, ordered the scattered people to condense” (MD, 39). Like Olson’s Maximus and Whitman’s I, Mapple proposes to bring about something truly social, communicative, and mutual, and Ishmael wants us to join him in assessing Mapple’s rhetoric: How well does he understand the affliction that governs those spread out before him? How well and by what means does what he supplies attach itself to that af-

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fliction? And to what course of feeling, thought, or action are they turned as a result? Ironic disavowal puts us on this trail: “Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage” (MD, 38). And the sermon itself is so richly eloquent and vivid as to be always on the verge of making the reader think of it as a textbook example, like the sort of bravura performance in a movie that isn’t good acting, really, because it makes us think about bravura performance rather than about character, plot, suspense, or feeling. I don’t think Mapple’s sermon is way over the border into this sort of self-disabling self-display, but I do, at points, lose track of the matter because I’m attending to the manner, for example, the calculation of alliteration and rhythm, dragging or skipping, at decisive moments: “Miserable man! Oh! Most contemptible and worthy of all scorn” (MD, 41); “In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers” (MD, 43); “Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep” (MD, 44). Melville’s intention here is not to make us think of Mapple as the sort of coolly cynical confidence man he would be creating a couple of years later; like Ahab, Mapple seems to spin his rhetoric from his own agony. But it’s rhetoric nonetheless, the use of one’s self-matter as a guide to the other’s matter, with an eye to manipulation. Manipulation, too, can be benign, and on this score we might prefer Mapple to Ahab. But Ishmael won’t quite let us surrender to Mapple. For example, after informing us that Mapple’s pulpit is shaped like the prow of a ship, Ishmael enthuses: What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is that the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow. (MD, 39)

Laboring to work out the intricacies of his conceit, Ishmael forgets, perhaps (probably not), that the congregation is not behind Mapple on his ship but rather in front of it and that the ship is plowing into them: Wet, drenched through and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not much more than its length.

   The Time of the Double Not Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern. (MD, 224–25)

Lifting up your eyes, beware of rescuers. At first reading, Mapple’s address to the scattered congregation may seem inept because, rather than soothe grief, he castigates obstinacy: Jonah did not submit to God’s will, did not sacrifice his preferences, and therefore he was punished. But how could the call to sacrifice be anything other than an insult to the pain of loss? To be sure, the story of Jonah’s captivity in the whale would tend to evoke, typologically, the thought of the sailors dead at sea, but in so doing Mapple would be suggesting that they died because, like Jonah, they had failed to heed spiritual duties and that, unlike Jonah, they had failed to repent when given the chance. Their deaths, the sermon implies, were deserved and appropriate: As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of God consists. (MD, 40)

Mapple’s approach is hardly new. The warning that what we will not relinquish will be taken from us is a fundamental and repeated motif of the Gospels—Luke 17:32–33: “Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it.” In looking back at the destruction of Sodom, was Lot’s wife really seeking to preserve her home or, since keeping it was plainly impossible, to mourn it? But, if mourning it, was she seeking to relinquish her attachment or to bring it within for melancholiac preservation? Her punishment, conversion to a pillar of salt, the immobile, durable remainder after the flow of tears, suggests the latter, as if she, like Hale’s Nolan, became pure grief. The verse may therefore be taken as a gentle exhortation, a reminder that one will need to move on from loss. The more typical interpretation of the passage, however, would take it as a blunt condemnation, the woman’s love for her home labeled unholy selfishness. Mary White Rowlandson, who confessed her emotional identification with Lot’s wife in her captivity narrative, accepted, partially and fitfully, the concomitant indictment of her life’s loves, such as home and family, both ruined in King Philip’s War, and her pleasures: For though I had formerly used tobacco, yet I had left it ever since I was first taken. It seems to be a bait, the devil lays to make men lose their precious time: I

The Time of the Double Not    remember with shame, how formerly, when I had taken two or three pipes, I was presently ready for another, such a bewitching thing it is: but I thank God, he has now given me power over it; surely there are many who may be better employed than to lie sucking a stinking tobacco pipe.72

Those of us who have struggled to quit smoking will concede the weed’s diabolical allure, and even if we believe that affliction justly visits undisciplined hearts, we might still feel that the enormity of Rowlandson’s suffering is out of proportion with what she considers her failures, even when we throw a couple more items onto the failure side of the scale, for example, not paying enough attention in church. The pain and loss that descend on her seem too much by any conceivable reckoning. We want her to let herself off the hook; but to understand her narrative fully, we need to see that she did not simply accept this view of herself—she desired it, as the people in the New Bedford chapel desire Mapple’s harsh indictment of Jonah. Desire harsh self-understanding because it seems to import a measure of control into a world that is otherwise pure insensate concussion: I remembered how on the night before and after the Sabbath, when my family was about me, and relations and neighbors with us, we could pray and sing, and then refresh our bodies with the good creatures of God; and then have a comfortable bed to lie down on: but instead of all this, I had only a little swill for the body, and then like a swine, must lie down on the ground. I cannot express to man the sorrow that lay upon my spirit, the Lord knows it. Yet that comfortable scripture would often come to mind, For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.73

Loss is an explicable and predictable outcome of certain behaviors, such as sucking the stinking pipe, so that one element of grief, at least, the sense of utter helplessness, can be abated: before I didn’t really believe it would really happen, but now I do, and I’ll act in such a way that it won’t happen again; loss is not undone, but the present is not its domain, and the future holds great mercies. Those who have suffered heavy losses know life is harsh and won’t be told otherwise but might believe that there is a choice between harshnesses, the one that comes like a thief in the night, any night and many nights, and the one that is a controlled and willed practice. Religious harshness toward human love is perhaps fiercest where the material circumstances of life are harshest toward human love. Perhaps even without the promise of great mercies the practice of sacrifice calls to us with the promise of modulated and regulated loss, sparseness rather than explosion. If “the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh” (MD, 35), we need to remember that the members of the congregation have brought themselves to the tablets,

   The Time of the Double Not rewounding themselves, self-inflicting repeatedly a wound that was otherinflicted at its inception. Mapple only captures, expresses, and shapes a self-administered violence that suffuses the sanctuary before he enters. This imaginary escape from helplessness into power reaches a crescendo when Mapple insists that those who submit to the Lord have the right and the duty to defy mighty earthly powers, and the distinct hope of prevailing when they do so. Regardless of the outcome, evoking the image of a c­onqueror-self on the other side of sacrifice permits Mapple to reverse all of his images of downward movement, plunging, diving, dropping, and so on: “But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of the earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the sea of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who, coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s or my own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?” He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place. (MD, 47–48)

As Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent point out in their notes on this scene (MD, 619), Mapple’s repeated phrase “Delight is to him” cites and reverses the phrase “Woe to him” in the preceding paragraph, an echo that underlines and facilitates the conversion of misery into violent exultation here, a conversion that Mapple had adumbrated in the hymn that preceded the sermon: “[His silent prayer ended], in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy” (MD, 40). Like Jamila Singer, Mapple is an adept in the art of addressing melancholy, eliciting it, and transforming it into fervent ­a llegiance. Though Mapple does not summon the members of the congregation to nationalism—the justification of political defiance and the pointed

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call to be a patriot of heaven seem specifically intended to preclude such an identification—Melville is here interested in delineating a certain structure of feeling that can be adapted to other ends, most notably by Ahab. Howard P. Vincent and T. Walter Herbert see Mapple as a premonition of Ahab.74 And many critics have taken Ahab to be Melville’s embodiment of American or democratic man, taken the Pequod to be the ship of state, taken the novel to be, among other things, an allegory of the dangers of demagoguery in modern political life;75 C. L. R. James goes further, seeing the novel as a premonition of fascism.76 But democratic leanings are not among the traits Mapple shares with Ahab: Ahab defies all gods and commodores; Mapple, all except one. And Ahab is more inclusive with his defiance. Readers familiar with Moby-Dick may already have noticed that I have misrepresented the end of Mapple’s sermon: though the members of the congregation are invited to contemplate or vicariously enjoy “delight,” in fact that delight belongs only to Mapple: “[The story of Jonah] is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God” (MD, 41). The members of the congregation gain access only to the bleak stability of sacrifice; exultation is reserved for the spiritual pilot. Mapple’s insistence on this point may be the reason he physically sequesters himself both before and after the sermon and avails himself of the ritual of the ladder after climbing into the pulpit: “For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec” (MD, 38). The distinction Mapple seeks to draw between himself and his parishion­ ers reappears in the antidemocratic sentiment that follows hard upon his defiance of political authority—“Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the sea of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages.” This association of mob with billows makes explicit the physical situation I mentioned earlier, the congregation in front of the prow rather than behind Mapple. Mapple’s antiauthoritarianism, Melville suggests, is hardly democratic but rather the product of a spiritually aristocratic contempt for democratically constituted authority. We might suspect that Ahab is guilty of a similarly mandarin attitude (Starbuck, his mate, thinks so); but Ahab needs to get something done that he can’t do without everyone’s help, so, unlike Mapple, he descends completely into his men’s midst, and, also unlike Mapple, he invites them to join him as full participants in the exultation he imagines at the end of his quest. Ahab’s “scene of persuasion,” therefore, as Donald Pease ably puts it, reflects the political rhetoric and environment of Jacksonian America in a way that Mapple’s doesn’t.77 But the tonal resonance between Mapple and

   The Time of the Double Not Ahab suggests to me that Melville wants us to think of Ahab’s rhetoric as a retooling of religious devices, his adaptation of the institution of Holy Communion, for example, as a modernization that directs the energy of grief by way of old means to a new end, one that will literalize the destruction figuratively envisioned by Mapple. Ishmael describes the crew of the Pequod in terms that echo the “islands of men and women” in the New Bedford chapel: How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever came back. (MD, 118–19)

Referring chiefly to Melville’s reading of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Mansfield and Vincent report that Jean Baptiste Cloots, a Prussian baron who changed his name to Anacharsis, “gathered from the coffeehouses, soirées and dives of Paris—Swedes, Spaniards, Polacks, Turks, Chaldeans, Greeks, Mesopotamians” and presented them to the French National Assembly on June 19, 1790, “ ’the Collective sinful posterity of Adam . . . come to claim place in the grand Federation, having an undoubted interest in it’ ” (MD, 669–70). Cloots’s point, presumably, was that a nation composed by political reason was human rather than French. Melville took great interest in this reproof of Gallocentrism—Cloots is mentioned again in The Confidence Man and Billy Budd—because it implied that a nation chosen by history “to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice” would most properly be multiethnic in order to preclude the equation of nationality with ethnicity.78 Hence Whitman’s phrase, “the Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth”:79 American reason is universally present in all, but present in a part of them that is independent of their cultural self hood. The American public sphere, like the deck of the Pequod, rather than enacting a cultural identity stages an interaction between cultural identities that allows the universally human, the American, to shed its ethnic skin and emerge in a pure state. Michael Warner describes the development of this notion of public space: Before the middle decades of the eighteenth century, and also in the ongoing contexts of customary law, the political sphere of the colonies depended on its continuity with common social exchanges. Built in the discourse of [ John] ­Adams’

The Time of the Double Not    later perspective, a public sphere had come to be distinguished by definition from the common exchanges of society and did not depend on an entire congruence between its norms and those observed in custom. Because it was distinct from personal relations, it could be the arena for adjudicating conflicts even over basic norms, as in sectarian religious conflicts.80

For Hobsbawm, the neutralization of traditional or customary norms is a defining feature of American nationality: The original, revolutionary-popular, idea of patriotism was state-based rather than nationalist, since it related to the sovereign people itself, i.e. to the state exercising power in its name. Ethnicity or other elements of historic continuity were irrelevant to “the nation” in this sense, and language relevant only or chiefly on pragmatic grounds . . . [T]he French revolution, which appears to have used the term in the manner pioneered by Americans and more especially the Dutch revolution of 1783, thought of patriots as those who showed the love of their country by wishing to renew it by reform or revolution. And the patrie to which their loyalty lay, was the opposite of an existential, pre-existing unit, but a nation created by the political choice of its members who, in doing so, broke with or at least demoted their former loyalties . . . The revolutionary concept of the nation as constituted by the deliberate political option of its potential citizens is, of course, still preserved in a pure form in the USA. Americans are those who wish to be.81

But, Melville suggests, the practice of adjudication and an attachment to a functional state are not enough to incite national love: intenser fusions will be demanded, and will be supplied. The ethnic is the no-more, and once again the American is the not-quite-yet. And again, the relative underdevelopment in the United States of a feeling of communal attachment to a collective past is converted from a deficiency to an asset, to a longing. The phrase “federated along one keel,” makes the political allegory of the Isolatoes passage pretty explicit, referring to the many debates over diversity and national commonality that the word federalism (and its imminent cognate confederacy) would have brought to mind in antebellum readers. By averring that there was no “common continent” on the Pequod (that there were therefore only islands of men without women), that the public space of the stage/deck did not adumbrate a deep common being, Ishmael cues us that, as in the New Bedford chapel, federation will be an event in response to a performance: I, Ishmael was one of the crew: my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of hatred and revenge. (MD, 175)

   The Time of the Double Not Ahab’s excitation of his men is effected, to return to Pease’s phrase, in a scene of persuasion rather than of revelation, persuasion that will need to be repeatedly renewed in response to the inertial waning that besets all spiritual energies and that will need to be pursued along a number of avenues, threats, promises of monetary reward, magic tricks, intimidation, heretical transformations of religious ritual. For all of his passion, Ahab is a conscious, calculating performer, aware of the array of tools in his repertoire, choosing the right one for the right moment, that is, adjusting words and symbols to the subjective need of his men but not thereby giving them what they need. When Ishmael describes the men as “Isolatoes,” therefore, he is trying to guess what Ahab must have discerned, to ascertain how Ahab’s performance could have been so intensely and disastrously potent, bypassing his dread, Starbuck’s religious compunctions, and so on, moving so directly to the heart of a constitutive misery that compliance was indubitable, automatic, and unconscious: one did not decide to do it, only woke up afterward, having done it. This fundamental misery is the men’s grief: though each has lost something particular, the abstract fact of loss is general, as is the common refusal of the comfort of home. They’re all melancholiacs, and they’ve all walked or paddled away from their own kind to end up here, as, perhaps, were Cloots’s specimens, who were not representative samples plucked out of Poland, Turkey, Greece, and so on, by Cloots but rather were gloomy expatriates wasting away in Paris dives. Perhaps Cloots meant to say that grim souls need to be reawakened by reason; but, Ahab thinks, superstition, fear of authority, greed, and revenge are better than reason for motivating his men for the hunt. I find Melville’s creation of this scene of persuasion frighteningly brilliant, especially so in his decision to have Ahab deploy a sequence of devices, nailing a Spanish doubloon to the mast as a promised reward for the first sighting of Moby-Dick; the presentation of his own woe “with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose” (MD, 160); and finally the celebration of the heretical Holy Communion, which retroactively identifies the entire performance as a ritual event detached from the ordinary realities of the whale fishery. Though the performance ends, the participants do not dissolve back into the real as they do after Mapple’s sermon but remain in the hyperreal zone Ahab has created for them once he has cut them loose from the real. The crucial moment in this declaration of independence is the transition from the doubloon to revenge. Money responds to lacking with the promise of access to anything, and we need to remember that in Melville’s society people were sold and that for Melville “free labor” wasn’t different in kind from slavery. To be sure, as Marx says, money can buy everything, but not all of everything; as soon as it’s spent, its infinite promise is

The Time of the Double Not   

d­ epleted. For Ishmael and his not-too-affluent companions, however, the doubloon still represents a large sum of untarnished potency (and of secure potency: as a result of chronic shortages and fluctuations in Melville’s time, Spanish coins were accepted as legal tender, so Ahab’s doubloon stands above vicissitude and was probably selected for that reason). Money can grant access, however, only to anything that exists or will exist: the lost and dead are immune to purchase. The real limit of the doubloon’s imaginative power is the grief of the men, their realization that money can’t solve need, not because the doubloon won’t be enough money to solve need but because what’s needed isn’t available for sale. Ahab forces this realization when he nails the doubloon to the mast—all of the men see and feel its mutilation, and most of them would feel more specifically Christ’s mutilation. Though the doubloon is still valuable, and will remain desirable and fascinating to the men, it is visually ruined, and this performance of ruination, in which Ahab is the one who ruins, gives way immediately to the shockingly candid exhibition of his own physical and spiritual humiliation, Saleem Sinai without the anesthetic of humor. In part he shows himself in order to awaken sympathy and identification, but Ahab’s flagrant use of his suffering is also impelled by his need to exit the position of mutilator that he brought into imaginative being when he hammered the doubloon to the mast, then to fill that vacant position by producing Moby-Dick as the cause of human suffering. Having demonstrated that money is not the universal redeemer it seems to be, having then enacted the shock of mutilation, he brings forward the whale as the universal mutilator, finally reviving the crucifixion motif with the performance of communion ritual. Though the pagan harpooners require some extra mumbo jumbo, the majority of the crew members, feeling the vibrations of the half-conscious resonance that Ahab has contrived between what they’ve just been through and Christianity’s tender and immense meditation on flesh, suffering, and hope (a resonance from which humility, faith, and love are omitted), feel the solemnity and meaning, the promise of repair, in what Ahab offers them. The thought that this particular whale wasn’t the cause of my particular suffering becomes an unthinkable thought, because to think it is to return to misery, to lose again, to lose the precious thing, Ahab’s gift. So I don’t think Ishmael is being straight with us when he claims not to know how Ahab did it, or perhaps not straight with himself for fear of inquiring too deeply into his own motives and weaknesses, despite his fears about where they will lead him: How, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the

   The Time of the Double Not i­ncompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask? Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him in his monomaniac revenge. How was it that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life—all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill. (MD, 184–85)

Ahab the miner digs toward a chamber Søren Kierkegaard describes: From whence comes love, where does it have its origin and its source; where is the place, its stronghold, from which it proceeds? Certainly this place is hidden or is in that which is hidden. There is a place in a human being’s most inward depths; from this place proceeds the love of life, for “from the heart proceeds life.” But this place you cannot see, no matter how far you thrust in; the source withdraws itself into remoteness and hiding; even if you have thrust in as far as possible, the course is still always a bit farther in, like the source of a spring which just when you are nearest to it is farther away.82

Though Ishmael claims that the feeling Ahab imparted was “mystical” and “sympathetical,” affirmations of the soul and heart have little to do with what turns out to be an imaginative transformation of the recipient of violence into its perpetrator. Compare Ahab’s life: Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. (MD, 199)

To the whale’s: “Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along the fish’s flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance

The Time of the Double Not    into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, over-wrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day. And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst! “He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo. “Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made. (MD, 285–86)

Woe begets woe: misery makes company; those whose life-spot has been touched seek the life-spots of others; a horror that runs through fiction by Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones as well as through Melville’s, the melancholiac’s alacrity when cruelty calls— whether directed toward the self, in acts of sacrifice, or toward another, in holy revenge—explains for these writers the hardy persistence of America’s historical nightmares, the long strings or series of self-replicating and self-proliferating atrocity. Channeling melancholy into aggression, Ahab has brought a nation forth from his Isolatoes but uses it only to make nothing, or almost nothing, leaving only a slight figure against an undifferentiated ground: EPILOGU E “A N D I ON LY A M ESCA PED TO TELL TH EE.” Job. The Drama’s Done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck. It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve, till gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy,

   The Time of the Double Not rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. FINIS. (MD, 567)

Inveterately loquacious, Ishmael is almost laconic at the end of his tale, almost restricting his narration to bare explanatory function, as if such austerity could express the chastening awe he felt at the Pequod’s destruction. The Rachel mentioned in the last sentence is a whaling ship that the Pequod had encountered several days before Ahab and his men located and began the attack on Moby-Dick. The captain of the Rachel, a Nantucket acquaintance, begs Ahab to help search for a whaleboat that had been lost with a number of hands, including his son, on board. This had happened the day before the encounter with the Pequod, when the whaleboat with the son on board lowered to chase Moby-Dick, who may have sunk the boat or may only have towed it out of sight. Ahab, enthralled to hear that his quarry is near, refuses to interrupt his search for the whale, revealing plainly to all with eyes to see that the lessening of human misery was no longer his real motive, if ever it were, only a grudge, the rectification of an imbalance. The outcome of events, the destruction of the ship devoted to revenge while the ship dedicated to salvation survives, has the feeling of providential allegory, as does Ishmael’s salvation by the coffin-becomelifebuoy, sprung from the vortex’s life-spot, and the atypically shy sharks, like the lions with Daniel. The cultivation of this feeling of allegory might be another reason for Ishmael’s uncharacteristic austerity, securing clear emblematic force by curtailing narrational, descriptive, or characterological details that might prove distracting. Ishmael fortifies the allegory by typologically connecting the circumstances at hand with the book of Job. The phrase “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee” is pronounced by four different messengers notifying Job that he has lost his oxen, his sheep, his camels, and his children by hurricane, fire, and enemy attack. None of the four claims that there was a reason why he in particular happened to be the one chosen to escape and tell, and by this Ishmael implies that it was happenstance that he didn’t go down with the rest, that if there is any design in his being alive, it has to do with the tale he was to survive to tell rather than any merit of his own. (“I, Ishmael was one of the crew: my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild,

The Time of the Double Not   

mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.”) Interestingly, the choice of this phrase puts us readers in Job’s position—“I only am escaped to tell thee”—hearing of disasters that have befallen us. The messengers are not mourners, but they bear notification that Job is. The feeling of allegory is further strengthened by the personification of the Rachel as a mother searching for her children. Ishmael refers to Rachel, wife of Jacob, renamed Israel after he wrestles the angel, mother of Joseph and Benjamin, both abandoned to Egyptian captivity by their brothers. Rachel died in childbirth—“We last see Rachel, suffering in hard labor, and then in a final motherly act, naming her son Ben-’ônî, ’son of my sorrow’ ”—and therefore did not live to see the additional affliction of her sons’ betrayal. But in Jeremiah 31:15, Rachel is resurrected as an allegorical figure of a national mother suffering the loss of the tribes of Joseph and Benjamin to Babylonian exile: 83 This is what the Lord says: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children And refusing to be comforted, Because her children are no more.”

And in Matthew 2:17–18, when Herod orders the execution of the firstborn: Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children And refusing to be comforted, Because they are no more.”

The particular woman Rachel from Genesis is twice amplified into an abstract figure or type of mourning, universalized as the personification of a people’s mourning. Ishmael is thus pulling up in the rear of a line, equipping the woes of the whale industry with cosmic trappings, intimating a connection between the Pequod disaster and a transcendent human exile, diaspora, or orphanage, a ubiquitous and insuperable condemnation to affliction, impervious to parole or repatriation. “What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?” (MD, 396). But should Rachel refuse comfort? The Jeremiah and Matthew passages offer different perspectives. The Israelites in Babylonian exile, like

   The Time of the Double Not J­oseph and Benjamin, can return, and there is therefore hope for restitution within history— This is what the Lord says: “Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded,” declares the Lord. “Your children will return to their own land.” ( Jeremiah 31:16)

—whereas the firstborn in Matthew are dead, and beyond worldly reunion. Melville has found a fracture or fissure in biblical meaning, just as he did in the contrary valuations assigned to Rahab-Leviathan, and emphasizes that discrepancy by having his Rachel search for, rather than weep for, her lost children. Taken together, the two references to Rachel and her lost children conduct us back to Mapple’s church, to those parishioners silently thinking of beloved persons who might be dead but who might still walk in someday, the vacillating temporality in which grief and hope swap places incessantly. This is what Ruthie, the narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, finds when she gets in the Rachel line behind Melville, exile in the time of the double Not, tempered only by the Gatsby Maneuver, the no-more mirrored back as the not-yet, a fantasy of repair that sustains a refusal to mourn—an American structure, despite, or because of, its tone of universality: Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep with our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.84

Or maybe Melville meant for the allegory to attach itself to his historical epoch rather than to more abstract American movements of grief and longing. Deceived by their father, Jacob (Israel) married both Rachel and Leah, who were sisters. In later years, he favored Joseph, the eldest of Rachel’s two sons, a favoritism that earned Joseph the hatred of Leah’s ten sons, who sold him into slavery. Though Hagar was a concubine rather than a wife, and though the rivalry in the story of Joseph is between sons rather than between mothers, the story of Joseph nonetheless recalls the story of Ishmael—a national patriarch’s divided lineage, the patriarch’s

The Time of the Double Not   

uneven love, resentment, rivalry within the familial group, partition, ­exile, slavery. Both stories evoke the tensions that would culminate in a ruined nation within a decade. Though Ishmael is less expansive than usual here at the end, his considerable skill as a rhetor is still in play as he deploys allegory to effect a swelling and majestic finale. But emblematizing, take Lot’s wife, for example, doesn’t always drive off lingering questions about the people and situations lifted into abstraction; in the case of Ishmael’s epilogue, for example, questions such as, What were Ishmael’s thoughts and emotions during the voyage back? How is his decision to write the book a fruit of those thoughts and emotions? How does the writing of the book emerge from the memory of his own wholehearted participation in the lunacy of the chase? The final allegory gets smudged still further if we think a little more about the Rachel. The reality before allegorical amplification is that the captain is searching for his son rather than that the ship is searching for her children: “Rachel searching for her lost children” is a kind of upside-down synecdoche, the whole (the ship) standing in for the part (its captain). The father cannot be said to be mourning, properly speaking, since he is still searching and does not know that his son is dead. Hope remains: the son will be found soon; the son has made it to safety and will find his way back someday. The father, that is, is yet another committed to the position of the semi- or quasi mourners in Father Mapple’s church, contemplating plaques rather than gravestones, melancholiacs by external circumstance rather than internal design, but melancholiacs nonetheless, like Ishmael. Considered this way, the captain of the Rachel provokes his own set of questions. How did he react when he first heard that a castaway had been spotted? How did he react when he learned it was “only another orphan”? Did he find his son? If not, how and when did he call off the search? Did he then, in his brooding, having now lost mightily to the whale, become another Ahab? What part is played in his future by the memory of Ahab refusing him aid? The most vivid unwritten scene might well have been the one that took place immediately after “FINIS,” when Ishmael was hauled on board (did they bring the coffin up, too? does Ishmael still have the coffin?), exhausted but elated at rescue, the captain close by, his intense excitement giving way in a second to crushing disappointment, turning his back to the rescued man. He or she who doesn’t mourn approaches each encounter with the demand that it appease anguish, discarding the stranger when it fails to do so, staying on course toward an ever-deferred future. But once the stranger is released from the demand that it be the missing one,

   The Time of the Double Not the encounter, staged in a depatriated zone, may produce a peculiar and unexpected interest, a nonfulfilling wonder, an odd opportunity: But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight. floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts. “Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him fast!—Who line him! Who struck? Two whale; one big, one little!” “What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck. “Look-e here,” said Queequeg pointing down. As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. (MD, 386–87)

 r 

Early American Antigone: Anne Bradstreet

2

i should make it clear from the start that my title refers to G. W. F. Hegel’s reading of Antigone in The Phenomenology of Spirit rather than to Sophocles’ play. Whether the concerns and meanings that Hegel imputes to Sophocles are native or imposed, what Hegel made of Antigone provides a useful means of contextualizing Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, of highlighting her poetry’s bearing toward the proto-national religious culture that enclosed her. I think that this is so because American Puritan and Hegelian thought grow from a common problem: given that Protestantism has defined God’s transcendence of human sense as the fundamental religious truth—John Calvin’s “unknown God”—how can Protestantism be put to the task of legitimating a sociolegal order, since such legitimation requires specific positive codes, norms, and precepts rather than a devout contemplation of the empty vanity of injunctions and interdictions not found in the ­Bible? Despite important historical and theoretical differences—notably the insuperable segregation between the saved and the damned maintained in Puritan predestinarianism—the crucial energy for both Puritan and Hegelian thought is generated by the challenge of a Protestantism seeking to enter politics without sacrificing its intrinsic quality. According to Richard F. Lovelace, Cotton Mather was in his later years contemplating German Pietism as a specimen of the sort of socialized spirituality he felt New England was in the process of forgetting, and Mary Fulbrook and Lawrence Dickey have suggested lines of common concern between early British Puritanism and the Pietist Lutheranism of areas such as the ­Württemburg of Hegel’s youth.1 The “delay,” as it were, may be attributed to the different rates of national political unification, which kept

   Early American Antigone German Protestantism from the opportunity to apply itself directly to social administration until the mid-eighteenth century, and then only in certain zones. Thus, whereas Anglo-American philosophy during the second half of the century conveys the moderate pragmatist tranquilities of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Scottish common sense, German philosophy during the same period grapples with the Calvinist turmoil around the force of the negative; and whereas Immanuel Kant attempted to resolve the quandary in his first critique by debarring the absolute from representation (save figuratively, in the aesthetic, according to the third critique), Hegel commenced his work as a demonstration of the manner in which the Protestant “abrogation of externality” can pass into an explicit political culture without crucial self-loss—a demonstration, in fact, he hoped, of the inferiority of spirituality that holds itself back from articulation for fear it will lose the purity it enjoys when it remains in potentia. My reason for comparing American Puritanism and Hegel’s philosophy is not for its own sake but to reveal something that Puritanism by itself does not. By virtue of his decision to impersonate dramatically the voices, the specific local rationalities, of the social forms annulled in the march of spirit toward its historical consummation, Hegel imagines the cogency and the pathos of such superseded human ways, sometimes, as Henry ­Sussman argues, to the detriment of the credibility of what Hegel is seeking to establish as progression rather than as repression or suppression. 2 Such a dramatic staging of the march of Protestant politics offers insights absent from the stark binarism of Puritan rhetoric—internal appreciations of the antagonist as a form of reason rather than as an inchoate hostility to be assailed without hesitation, recognition, or self-critique. Hegel’s ­staging of historical conflict offers, or at least permits, an understanding of the lines of tension and relation between the Protestant whole and the distinct socialities it bears in its midst rather than labelling such distinct bodies outbreaks of chaotic declension in order to interdict communication and its transformative power, a power Puritanism could see only as loss of focus. In this essay, I will use Hegel’s rather divided and even tormented or guilt-ridden view of one such imagined opponent, Antigone, as a paradigm for the theoretical challenge to Puritanism developed in the course of Anne Bradstreet’s poetic career. Antigone is of interest to Hegel because it depicts political life as a struggle over representation, specifically over the power to control the proper manner of remembering the dead, an issue that had been of great importance to Protestantism since Martin Luther first objected to the way mourning was theologized in the sale of indulgences and in the doctrine of purgatory itself. If the stresses Hegel puts on the text of Antigone (and the meanings he projects into it) carry his reading of the play away from

Early American Antigone   

Greek society, they do so in order to allegorize a confrontation endemic to Protestantism; if Hegel’s Creon is in several aspects not Sophocles’ Creon, this transmutation of Sophocles’ intention is performed in order to pre­sent a Creon gripped by the problems of a Protestant sovereign. 3 To this end, Hegel imagines a Creon eager to control representation, to legitimate the postwar Theban regime he heads by engaging in the manufacturing of legends, vaunting the civic heroism of Eteocles and denouncing the noxious infamy of Polyneices in order to promote a socially accepted genealogy of virtue to which he is the remaining heir. As Hegel remarks, this ideological labor is extremely problem fraught, given the rival brothers’ tenuous claims to sole possession of the throne and the consequent difficulty of seeing either one as a hero. Creon’s legends are precarious, and he is nervous but at the same time aware of the tremendous power of exemplification, one of the central topics of the Phenomenology, as Jacques Derrida contends.4 Creon risks raising the question, because if he can persuade the citizens to accept a general veneration of Eteocles (and a vilification of Polyneices), he will have devised a putatively dialectical ideology that can move between an abstract notion of right (defense of the city as a source of virtue in the absence of a clear claim to the throne) and the memory of concrete experience. The example declares that the personal singularities of the brothers are only vehicles or vessels bearing their standings with respect to virtue; exemplification negates or annuls this extrinsic singularity in order to preserve in unobstructed form what is declared to have been the essence of their personal being. The example in this way implies that the negation of at least a portion of experience is an expression of experience rather than an imposition from without or above. The example lays claim to being an immanent representation, an embodiment of what is posited as the gist of the social whole, rather than an aggressive individual participant within a diverse community. If the battle between the brothers allegorizes the damage that ensues from attempting to unify a heterogeneous society under a single head (an issue of great concern in Hegel’s Germany, as in seventeenth-century England), Creon’s labor proves to be not a reconsideration of the project of forcible unification but a search for a more sophisticated tool, absorption and transcendence in place of war—a search that will be seriously compromised by Antigone’s insistence that Creon’s way is an extension of the recent war rather than a way of making peace. Antigone’s defense of the right and duty of mourning emerges for Hegel as the most radical possible challenge to exemplification per se (by radical I mean “at the root” rather than “from the left”). Throughout the subsequent analysis of social history in the Phenomenology, Hegel will depict struggles between competing orders of exemplification, such

   Early American Antigone as between the Christian saint and the Roman patriot, because Creon’s origination of collective spirit has established exemplification as the axiom of political conflict. But unlike later antagonists, Antigone does not stand for a counter-exemplification—her argument is not that Polyneices was the true hero or that both brothers were heroes. Rather, according to Hegel, her allegiance in mourning is to the singular “personalities” of the two brothers, to a full memory that includes those aspects of the dead that the example would annul or declare extrinsic to what is posited as the lesson each has to offer. From the vantage of mourning, the discrimination among and the hierarchization of the traits of the dead amount to an opportunistic meddlesomeness, a termination rather than a refinement or enhancement of memory. For mourning, the social dialectic of the example is an episode of repressive violence—of semiotic war—rather than of adequate and satisfying transumption. Antigone thus refuses to comply out of respect for what is inassimilable by Creon’s rhetorical order (but not by representation itself ). She becomes for him an area of darkness in the midst of his domain, and Hegel often joins his voice to Creon’s, calling her nature, an underground, a primordial obscurity. But the Hegel who thus demonizes Antigone is the Hegel concerned with the progress of his book toward its denouement in the moral state—an impatient Hegel eager to get on because lingering will endanger the project, and the danger here is precisely his own hesitations about the necessity of branding Antigone. As Derrida argues, the truly inassimilable force in this chapter is the entropic proclivity of matter, which manifests itself in the decay of Polyneices’ body or in its consumption by birds and beasts of prey, and in the concomitant danger that he might be forgotten, metabolized by oblivion. Antigone’s task, as Derrida summarizes it, is to represent “pure singularity: neither the empiric individual that death destroys, decomposes, analyzes nor the rational universality of the citizen, of the living subject.”5 Both Creon and Antigone oppose such oblivion, Creon with condemnatory exemplification—Polyneices should be remembered as being unworthy of the basic respect of burial, remembered as being unworthy of remembrance, which is not the same as being forgotten—and Antigone with the homage of mourning, symbolized by the dirt with which she seeks to cover the corpse, an homage that does not avail itself of canons of civic value. Both of them, therefore, are engaged in ethical work, purposive activity guided by a sense of obligation and directed against a resistance. However much the “progressive” Hegel depicts the contest between Creon and Antigone as a duel between reason and nature in order to set a tone of regretful necessity, another Hegel sees the scene in its complexity as a confrontation between two conflicting ethical teleologies, both directed against the resistance of nature and the added

Early American Antigone   

resistance of the other. If Antigone represents a darkness within Creon’s ethics—seems to him like nature in being repellent to his project—she is not alien to ethics as such. This is perhaps why Derrida’s search for Hegel’s final horror, an X that will not yield to consciousness, leads his argument away from attending to the theoretical contest between Antigone and Creon, toward the carrion. But though Creon and Antigone both represent ethical order, there is a dissymmetry in their conflict that was not present in the battle between Eteocles and Polyneices. Creon begins with a superpersonal type—hero or traitor—and fits the person to the type. The possible ends are determined in the beginning, and subtle portraiture would only dilute the bluntly homiletic representation he seeks. Antigone, however, apprehends primarily the surviving ego’s ruination, the self as crater, and must construct in slow memory a portrait of Polyneices that is adequate to her extensive experience of her brother. Such a portrait would honor Polyneices by preserving him, translating him from the shame of being unable to control the exhibition and corruption of his body, a labor begun in the attempted burial, which does not remove him from thought but on the contrary covers his unbounded shame with what Hegel calls an assertion of the “right of consciousness.” And, in so honoring Polyneices, she restores herself, not by recovering wholeness but by transforming the placethat-was-Polyneices from a ruination of representation into an object of representation. The area of zero or space left by Polyneices’ departure is not closed in postmourning subjectivity, but neither is it an impassable obstacle to the capacity to form representations and engage in purposive living. The labor of mourning, like the labor of the slave earlier in the Phenomenology, is neither sudden nor supreme but abject and gradual, a point on which Hegel foreshadows Sigmund Freud.6 Working on an inscrutable schedule, mourning is a summoning of numerous memory bits, each of which adds to, deepens, and challenges the representation of the dead the mourner has constructed to this point, compelling revisions to the image—revisions that frequently feel similar to what Jacques Lacan calls second deaths, repetitions of the first loss rather than labor exerted against it. But if the memories assault the image, so, too, does the image challenge the memories, stripping away what were the emotions that dominated the remembered moment in order to reconstrue the moment as significant anecdote, as incremental contribution to the emerging notion of who Polyneices was for her. And what more complete image could there be than that made from the memorial archive of the family member, who remembers even when he or she fails to be uniformly fond, given that mournful memory incessantly interrogates what sentiment might direct one to remember, and given that desire and love are operating under

   Early American Antigone a stern injunction that Hegel calls divine and Lacan calls the law of the unconscious, an injunction to take account of what was rather than of what the mourner might otherwise want to have been the case. In this scheme, the family member’s power of objectification is not compromised by fondness but guided by an extensive knowledge that interferes with expedient simplicities such as Creon’s exemplifications: the family member guards and ensures the truth of the dead, in hope that the dead will be known to have been. Antigone’s labor is thus in a sense also a process of exemplification after all, a search to mark out how her moments of having experienced her brother were examples of what she is coming to define as what he was, again, for her, but not a specification of how Polyneices was an example of a superpersonal ideological type. Polyneices is for her the end, not the means, of a teleological hermeneutic. Her labor differs from Creon’s, therefore, in four ways: (1) the representation that it seeks does not relinquish the person as its telos; (2) though the question Antigone seeks to answer—who was he?—is posed at the outset, the answer sought is generated in the process of inquiry rather than selected from a repertoire of possibilities that precede the question and govern the inquiry; (3) the image and the moments that are to exemplify it undergo reciprocal dialectical transformation, whereas Creon’s image subdues the moment to its demand; and (4) whereas Creon’s image is immediately ready, Antigone’s is, at the time of her death, only begun, its date of completion unpredictable, had she lived. Her defiance of Creon, therefore, can state only that his representation is simple and factitious but cannot at this point propose a not-yet-existent alternative. Hegel finds it important that Antigone’s defiance is a response to Creon’s initiative in prohibiting the burial, not an independently chosen course. The prewar society Hegel imagines was ethical and harmonious but not unified around a single notion. Rather, it was ethically heterogeneous, its internal differences latent, not brought to crisis but also not resolved. Creon’s prohibition of alternative or nonaligned sociality is consequently for Hegel a dialectically productive project, and his desire for a single social ethic informing the whole of social life becomes a first draft of what Hegel hopes history will accomplish, the adequate and fully inclusive unification of society under the sunlight of reason. Creon’s first draft of Sittlichkeit, however, though it is the origin of the idea, is nevertheless preliminary and prefigurative, and therefore partial, because it is repressive and exclusionary; it is not preservative with respect to all the elements of spiritual worth present in the initial social array: its cancellations yield a partial and restricted field rather than a summa purged of inconsequentialities. In approaching such a judgment against Creon, Hegel postulates that, were it not for Creon’s oppression, the ethic of political exemplification and the

Early American Antigone   

familial ethic of mourning might have remained simply adjacent, alongside each other, perhaps with relations of communicative exchange. By prohibiting the burial, Hegel contends, Creon creates Antigone’s defiance as a politically articulate antithesis instead of leaving it be as some other thing happening somewhere else in the city, or just outside its walls. Sophocles suggests several reasons for Creon’s anxious and jealous prohibition: he is perhaps a less forceful figure than were the brothers, or fears that he will be perceived as such; he lacks a pedigree as clear as theirs, not being one of Oedipus’s sons (hence his emphasis on patriotism rather than lineage as the essence of political virtue); or perhaps he fears that Antigone’s rebellion, rather than its specific character as mourning, will reveal him as a man bested by a woman. No matter which or what combination of these motives drives him, however, until the last moments of the play he sees Antigone as a specimen of stubborn and irrational intransigence, not as the proponent of an ethic. Hegel also assumes Creon’s blindness to Antigone’s commitment but constructs a nonSophoclean explanation for Creon’s intensity. The incidental dividend of the war, Hegel contends, was Creon’s discovery of war’s power to cancel the separate lives of relatively autonomous bodies within the polis in order to make their energies available to the urgent cause: war inaugurates society unified under the idea. Hegel suggests that Creon is so entranced by this by-product of group self-preservation that he seeks to perpetuate it. He is, in a kind of dark version of William James’s “moral equivalent of war,” striving to prolong into peacetime the consolidating force of crisis. For Creon, therefore, adjacent energy is lost energy: allegiances such as Antigone’s mourning are not simply other actions in addition to patriotism but episodes of hoarding or squandering, a sequestering or wasting of affective funds he feels should properly be at his disposal for investment in the unified future. Hegel’s Creon is thus less a weakling and a despot than a state theorist who anticipates Freud’s theses on civilization and sublimation—the perception of society as a quantitatively limited supply of energy that, if prevented from following its diverse innate courses, will flow in a single stream toward the higher cause, though remaining prone to break its levees and dissolve the whole should vigilance relax. But the theory of socio­ libidinal economic sublimation that Hegel projects onto Creon’s thought differs from Freud’s: Creon seeks not to annul and absorb eros directly but to annul and absorb the mourning that arises from an eros destroyed by another source (though he eventually becomes the primary destroyer as well as the ideological parasite). Since mourning is an attempt to sublimate partial memories into a comprehensive image of the dead one, Creon is seeking to sublimate a labor of sublimation, not a simple, primary, intact

   Early American Antigone love. The contest between Creon and Antigone, therefore, is not a contest between a direct desire and a repressed desire returning in the form of social identification but a contest between two uses of memory to respond to the fact of death.7 The sublimation and the sublimated are much closer to phenomenological isomorphism in Hegel’s theory than they are in Freud’s. Hence the allure of Creon’s way, as it registers in Ismene’s and Haemon’s hesitations: they do not have to forgive or accept Creon’s extinction of love (again, at first), because the deaths of the brothers were not his deed—he is only a fellow survivor; and the representation of the dead that Creon offers, were it to prove satisfying, were it to prove solicitous as well as innocent, would be a welcome gift, because it would bring to a prompt completion what would otherwise be the painful and prolonged course of mourning. Exemplification seems to offer the benefit of mourning without the full cost, and only Antigone’s apparently stubborn, willful, ungrateful insistence that the two orders of memory are distinct, that exemplification mimics or simulates mourning rather than helping it along, can reveal Creon as other than magnanimous, thereby provoking him to tip his hand, to reveal the hermeneutic violence implicit in the reductive simplicity of the example by allowing it to come into the open as the political violence he wreaks upon Antigone. Although exemplification thus shows itself as a structurally necessary insensitivity to mourning’s complex care, it represents itself to mourning as generosity, offers itself as a sufficient surrogate that spares the mourner her renewals of pain and thus establishes its credentials by an appeal to desire, not by a command to suppress desire, and reveals itself as force only after a careful critique has rebuffed its generosity.8 It is not quite correct to contend that Hegel’s Creon wishes to eliminate mourning. Rather, he wishes for sorrow to commence, for the mourner to feel the vastness of her affliction, then to allow that feeling to flow over into the coffer he prepares for it: sublimation is not hostile to, but in fact depends upon, the energy over which it hopes to preside; it is hostile only to affect flowing in unsanctioned directions. The autonomy of mourning, therefore, lies not in its force of emotionality but in its ethical—that is, rational, dialectical, and teleological—channeling of emotion toward the composition of a representation of the dead in his or her singularity. Mourning is consequently a work of consciousness and not of nature. But, Hegel argues, Creon’s suppression makes mourning into something that resembles nature—melancholia. By burying Antigone, Creon exiles the inevitable obligation she stands for from the city, even from the surface of the earth, commits it (he hopes) to oblivion, to a deep and unbreachable privatization and exclusion from public discourse that will leave exemplification as the sole standing order of remembrance. Antigone, however, is

Early American Antigone   

buried alive, which for Hegel means that Creon cannot eliminate an Antigone effect from the polis but can only transform that effect from a dialogical ethical contestant into a mute virulent contagion that haunts public logic without respite or relief—a new historical player, the spectre that shadows the end of Sophocles’ play in the rapidly burgeoning sequence of new griefs that march inexorably toward Creon’s own house and heart. Now he understands what mourning was—but too late, because it is that no longer, because he has transformed it into an area of vindictive darkness impenetrable by, and unresponsive to, any ethical lucidity.9 Rather than dialogue between his project and another, there is now only his project and a vindictive, relentless force of adulterating resistance, irony: Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy—womankind in general. Womankind, the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community, changes by intrigue the universal activity into the work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the family.10

Hegel’s essentializing equation (mourning = ironic perversion = ­nature = woman) is not at this point in his argument a retraction of his earlier view of mourning as a human and ethical act because the equalization of woman, mourning, and irrationality is Creon’s deed, the result of his violence, a demonization of women and mourning and not their phenomenologically original condition. Once it is posited that the community can exist only by interfering with the family, that a community that is not universal and totalized is not a community at all, then any perception of individuals as anything other than the state’s universal property will necessarily seem cloyed, frivolous, and perverted. As with the American Puritans, anything even simply alongside the errand is a force of declension. With the ascendancy of such reasoning to full power at the end of Antigone, all who spoke for mourning are gone, so the undone work manifests itself only as the sociosemiological terrorism of vindictive deformation, odd slants of black light that introduce unaccountable fractures into meaning but no longer issue from a discernible ethical source. Though the previous passage is not a contradiction of earlier statements when it calls mourning and women nature, its tone does turn toward Creon in vaunting his premises and in a certain misogynist horrification. Whatever one Hegel thought about the ethics of mourning and its demonization is here usurped by what another Hegel considers necessary in order to move on with the historical march of the universal community that Creon has initiated, an eagerness that mandates a repression of the knowledge of ­repression, a hiding of

   Early American Antigone evidence to make the dead seem to have been satisfied and to have grown irritated with the petty intransigence of women. To be sure, this second Hegel promises that there will be a moral state that accounts for, or makes reparation to, the ironic underground, that sublimates without ironic residue; but insofar as the reader is asked to wait patiently, insofar as a reunion between Antigone’s vehement ghost and a Creon enhanced and edified by his progression throughout history is yet to occur, the resentment of melancholia is presently unappeased, and all the second Hegel can do is perform uncomfortable closures that fail to satisfy precisely because they transcend by a force of anxious denial rather than by the sovereign competence of Aufhebung, failing to appease a remainder that Hegel has himself brought forward. When Hegel returns to Antigone in The Philosophy of Right, this tonal duplicity will have been almost entirely remedied by a scrupulous avoidance of the topic of mourning.11 As an origin destroyed to commence collective spirit’s march toward the moral state, Antigone’s mourning poses certain problems for the Hegelian system. The prewar harmony, according to Hegel, was ethically heterogeneous: it depended on inner disparities remaining latent or demotic, in the form of both/and rather than either/or. The reconstruction after the war, however, brings disparity into the open by its contrast with the preceding unity and thereby instigates the work of mediatory unification, which will replace harmony on a higher level. But the events of the play— which constrain Hegel precisely because he knows that he feels himself responding to them so strongly—lead to questions about the inevitability of seeing disparity as contradiction rather than as what Paul Zweig calls “a broad miscellaneous esthetic”: Creon forces disparity into contradiction in pursuit of his desire to preside over a unity with nothing outside itself, so the contradiction that seems to call for the arrival of social unification turns out to have been precipitated by the desire for social unification, a monomania-induced circularity that seriously compromises Hegel’s assertion of the necessity and inevitability of the progression.12 Creon produces conditions he calls crises and then uses them as a mandate, a ploy that suggests it might have been otherwise: the harmony of ethical heterogeneity is not intrinsically or dialectically flawed (as is sense-certainty), not in itself in need of remedial supplementation from above, only vulnerable to the insurgent and intransigent exclusivism of one of its members, the semiosis of the legend. Mourning, therefore, does not fail because of some inadequate theorization that calls for transcendental reformulation but is only defeated, and not even completely. Not a form of naïve satisfaction oblivious to the negative, mourning is an activity of careful reciprocal mediation between the representing subject (the mourner) and the represented object (the dead) and is thus more dialectical than exem-

Early American Antigone   

plification, which fits the object to a category ordained before the object is engaged—a procedure Hegel elsewhere calls bad infinity, the night in which all cows are black. The initial existence and demonized survival of mourning therefore haunt the founding act of the Phenomenology’s history of the collective subject, exposing it to view as a form of diminishment and self-aggrandizing repression rather than of dialectical enhancement or improvement. The existence of mourning challenges the core of Hegelian politics, its wishful longing that misery be an edifying passage to a higher stage. Would that it were so; but is such a supposition adequate to what is the case, or is it a flight into a disastrous imagination of remedy? Hegel’s reading of Sophocles is quite revisionary, highlighting some features of the play and overlooking others, extending faint suggestions, at several points adding ideas that are not present in the text; and so, too, is my reading of Hegel’s reading. As he wishes to use Antigone as an allegory to reveal certain problems at the foundation of the idea of the moral state, so I wish to use his reading of Antigone as a paradigm in order to sketch three points about Puritanism: (1) the political importance of typological exemplarism in American Puritan social thought; (2) the utility of a sublimated mournfulness to the project of Puritan exemplification; and (3) the power of a certain kind of lyric moment to shine a rare light into Puritanism’s central ideological endeavor. Puritan studies have for some time now recognized the central importance of typology, the exercise of perceiving persons and events in terms not of their singularity but of abstract spiritual types recurring through history. Puritanism challenged Augustine’s belief that sacred history stopped with Christ and asserted its extension into the present. The Protestant critique of Catholic allegorism, in which the concrete vehicle seemed to evaporate into abstraction, resulted not in what we would now see as realism but in a historical scheme that searched for abstraction realized or actualized in present circumstances: the abstract was concrete; it relinquished its nervous celibacy and organized the world. At its most intense moments, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, American Puritanism postulated that the present instance of the type was not merely a recurrence but the purest and least encumbered actualization of the abstraction, so history amounted to a series of imperfect adumbrations. In the dual movement that also underlies Hegel’s historicism, the past announces and legitimates the present, and the present renders explicit the hidden meaning of the past.13 The sophistication and complexity of the typological connections developed by Puritan writers, especially Edward Taylor, have been taken as evidence that the American Puritans did not oppose or fail to feel the power of poetic figurality as such but instead set bounds within which

   Early American Antigone the play of figurality was not only permissible but even desirable, though Taylor’s concealment of his verse reveals anxiety attendant upon setting and maintaining the border of permissibility.14 The fear of poetry slipping over into unregulated areas reveals that for the Puritans themselves there was an outside-of-the-type, which, though it could be labeled sin or error, was nonetheless a real factor in signification and had considerable force. This antagonism between the type and some unsanctioned X reveals and displays the intentional structure of the type, its crucial function as a manner of addressing experience by annulling and then absorbing alternative representation of the real. Typology takes up a concrete experience of a person (including oneself ), thing, or event; highlights a trait that reveals the referent’s participation in a preordained and historically repetitive category; and then declares the referent’s other traits (those that might make the referent’s emblematicalness seem partial, unimportant, secondary, or derived) to be inconsequential for ascertaining the referent’s state of being—at best, pleasantly ornamental; at worst, a blurring or obfuscation of the true. Thus, typology is antithetical not to experience per se but to those aspects of experience that do not confirm it: representation that concerns itself with the other-than-exemplary is lost in the woods, wilderness being for Puritanism an emblem for what is outside emblematicalness; the type annuls wilderness thought in order to edify it, to draw the soul to the path for which it has been searching. The discord between the type and experience, therefore, results not from the type’s unreality or lack of concreteness, its falsehood, but rather from its insistence on exclusivity and totality, on being the whole story, the only path through the forest of memory. The negational abstraction of the type does not accept the status of being one order of mimesis among others in a socially heterogeneous amalgam but insists on its status as representation’s ultimate instance, with all the other modes either arrayed in proper subordination below it or improperly straying into forgetfulness, the autonomy of error. If the type were not intentionally antithetical in this manner, it would subside to the status of mere member of an eclectic array. Because it is intentionally anti­thetical to the other ways of formulating experience, typology can bid for the sovereign power to be a Protestant version of Plato’s science of ­sciences, to acquire the capacity to assemble discourse into a centered whole, and thereby to accomplish the dream Puritanism extracted from the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the fledgling British bourgeoisie—the creation of a homogeneous ­social space, but in the case of Puritanism, grounded on manifested spirit rather than on sheer political power, staged personal charisma, or a developed commodity market. The type mobilizes the Protestant politics of Hegel’s Aufhebung, negating not experience but alternative modes for representing experience, preserving what is declared to have

Early American Antigone   

been the unconscious essence of each, the ligaments of their connection with truth. The unrest produced by experience resistant to typification, therefore, broaches the problem of anti-, non-, or counter-ideology, the problem that vexes Hegel’s Creon, who, though he proposes martial and civic rather than theological exemplars, nonetheless seems to me to be Hegel’s most heartfelt portrait of the discontents of those who preside over the type—and fear that the divine may lie on the side of mourning. My emphasis on the actively positive character of typology departs some from the work of Perry Miller, whose allegiance to postwar negative theology led him away from what was in his time the prevailing view of Puritanism as a static body of dogmatic affect and into the dialectical energetics that he called the marrow of Puritan divinity.15 According to Miller, the critics with whom he disagreed failed to perceive Puritanism’s resolute devotion to Calvin’s unknown God. A presence manifested as inscrutable force, known by its turbulent impact on cognition and significance, this God demanded a fealty that in practical consequence resulted in taking all explicit formulations of truth to be flawed and inadequate, however useful for regulating the conduct of ordinary life. God is an interruption of sense: his mark in the world is a crater. In New England, however, pressed upon by the urgencies of social administration, the Puritans allowed such provisional formulations, sanctioned by the idea of the Covenant, to multiply, to receive considerable emphasis, and to absorb the Puritans’ attention so fully that they came to be taken as sufficient articulations of spirit despite lingering perfunctory gestures toward Calvin’s abandoned legacy. Thus, a figure such as John Winthrop is for Miller a melancholy figure, a beautiful soul compelled by his concern for the world to betray his vision; and those critics who associate the marrow of Puritanism with the surrounding bone—the body of ecclesio-social dogma—mistake a nobly tragic adulteration of the thing for the thing itself. The true Puritans, for Miller, are those such as Williams and Edwards who sought to stem or arrest the decline into rationalization and earned exile as payment for their fidelity. The problem with Miller’s argument is that he uses a negative dialectic to appraise a positive one but often presents the former as if it were the dominant Puritan dialectic. This mingling of appraisal with analytic paraphrase creates certain confusions, for instance, in his analysis of declension after the first generation: whereas Puritans such as Increase Mather see declension as a falling off from the first generation’s adequate codification of spirit, Miller sees such codification itself as a falling off. Miller is therefore wrong, but only at those moments when he represents his thought as a synopsis of mainline American Puritanism rather than as an evaluation from the perspective of a stern but sympathetic critique.

   Early American Antigone If we fail to make this distinction, we will also fail to understand Puritanism’s characteristic attitude toward the type, its Creonism. For Miller, typology’s social regulative intention would reveal it as an expedient device peripherally appended to the fear and trembling that was the marrow, and thus not distinguishable on theological grounds from all other such homiletic encodings of eupraxis. Miller’s supreme negative would result in a liberal tolerance when it came to distinguishing among definitions of good society, a tolerance that sprang from an indifference toward such lower things. But the American Puritans did not practice liberal tolerance, because for them the negative was a passage between lesser and greater notions of sociality rather than a destination. The negative was a cancellation of false discourse preparing the way for the sufficient articulation of the true, not a thoroughgoing evacuation of homily, maxim, and example as such. Again, I am neither questioning nor affirming Miller’s powerful and lifelong explanation of what he found to be the value and pathos of Puritanism. I am distinguishing what he valued in Puritanism from the central attitudes of the Puritan establishment, which did not see the type as a falling back from the pristine into a recurrence of the excessive worldliness of the Anglican past but instead saw the negation of the Church of England as a preliminary moment of the passage into the splendid lucidity of the type and of the holy society it imaged. This distinction is important for our understanding of those who felt the pressure of the type against their mental and discursive representations of their own experience: they did not feel themselves confronted by an order of representation that was confessedly as provisional as their own, equidistant from an unknown god; on the contrary, Puritan exemplarism presented itself to them as the pipe through which the Word arrived, as an order of representation that was their truth, a truth they would acknowledge could they only relinquish their weak eyesight and sickly loves.16 Extratypological defenses of experience were rare feats, not logical consequences of an epistemologically and semiologically humble concession of the shortcomings of all paradigms. This explains why there are so few of them in the literary archive and why discourse such as that of Anne Hutchinson exists only in court transcripts. For Puritan theory, then, negation was a passage from inferior wisdom to the perfection illustrated in the type rather than the ultimate moment of the dialectic. This understanding of the negative is most explicitly represented in Puritan meditations on death, which used mortality as an emblem for the passage into emblematicalness. One’s own death, of course, whether immediately or at the last judgment, whether with body intact or not, was a refining event, the shedding of obfuscatory biographical detail in order to reveal the life’s stark truth—Elect or Damned?17 At the ultimate moment, God will not dally with subtle representations, which

Early American Antigone   

he will dismiss as evasions and prevarications. More useful, though, for Puritanism’s social ambition, was the contemplation of the deaths of others, which was made into an occasion for determining their status with respect to exemplarity. In this, Puritanism returns to the Protestant origin: Luther’s Ninety-five Theses assailed not just the profiteering motive behind Johann Tetzel’s indulgences but also their easing of the purchasers’ discomfort at the thought of their own or others’ deaths, their reassuring implication that the negative could be placated by something less than a total and meticulous reform of the self—personal singularity is the only adequate sacrifice; money is like Cain’s vegetables. The hermeneutic of the type dominates New England biography in the seventeenth century as it had dominated the medieval saints’ lives, testing the life against a grid of abstract categories.18 But the Protestant pressure for actualized types, for a passage out of celibate allegorism by surrounding abstraction with an ambience of concretion and specificity, risked the real to a much greater extent than did the more hermetic saints’ lives and thereby embroiled biography in an environment where stray or dissonant constructions were more likely, almost endemic. Puritan rhetoric, therefore, required an image of tremendous force to discredit its competitors, an image of death that could avail itself of deepest fears and sorrows to prop up the credibility of an ingenious argumentative circle: the exemplary life worthy of praise was characterized as an unflagging allegiance to higher things and by an indifference to the selfish distractions of personal or other nonspiritualized love. The survivor’s intensity of grief, therefore, which was affixed to the singularity of the dead person, turned out to be unfaithful to what was legitimately lovable about the dead person. True remembrance, true mourning, would be an emulation of the exemplarity of the dead and would entail a relinquishing of selfish grief, a feat that would become less difficult once the survivor accepted the contention that emulation of what is postulated as the essence of the dead in fact preserves the dead. Nothing had died: only the extrinsic vehicle of the virtuous trait, itself inconsequential except as a means of making virtue manifest to enfeebled visions, has dropped away, its mission completed; henceforth, discourse and emulation will replace the dead person as vehicles for what the dead person was. In the manner delineated in Hegel’s theory of sublimation, love is not jeopardized directly by the pressure to sublimate. Rather, the almost unimaginably regular arrivals of seventeenth-century American death—through disease, childbirth, starvation, freezing, fire, war, in addition to the massive losses of the Native Americans through epidemic and war, which pressed themselves into the thoughts and feelings of European Americans in complex ways—yielded an incessant call for grieving, a torrent of loose energy that ideology then diverted from its intrinsic course

   Early American Antigone toward intense identifications with the values it proposes. This diversion succeeds not primarily because it is intimidating but because death is intimidating, because it claims not to negate desire but to negate the negation of desire posthaste, to supply a vantage or Pisgah from which to see that all that is of worth survives here, not just in heaven, through concrete activity in service to the holy community, that only what is of no matter drops away. Puritanism bridges mournfulness and the state by way of a desirably repressive sublimation of the mournful response to the undesirably repressive force death exerts against desire, a bridge that may be Puritanism’s major bequest to American psychopolitics, however much the values exemplified may change. From Whitman’s direction of elegiac teleology toward the assertion that “there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life”19 to the addresses in the wake of the Challenger disaster, grief has been one of the major resources of consensus formation.20 And grief has therefore been one of the major grounds of contest in American renegade or recusant literature, from Ishmael at Mapple’s sermon, later rescued by the mournful Rachel; through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sharply tortured “Experience” and Emily Dickinson’s verse; 21 in Huckleberry Finn’s lonely thanatos and the implacable derision Mark Twain aims at the sentimental nobility Emmeline Grangerford’s odes bestow on the brutality of the feud; in the anomalous sad wonder of Deephaven and The Country of the Pointed Firs, to Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite Housekeeping and Toni Morrison’s magisterial Beloved. That such works are predominantly, but not exclusively, produced by women, may be the result of a domestic ideology that assigns stereotyped mourning to women in a gender division of labor but thereby inadvertently risks an opening of a critical potential of a mournfulness not tamed by exemplarity: being confined to an area, as Hegel argued in his investigation of the consciousness of the slave, one is more apt to find the circumscribed terrain’s secret places than is the master who simply looks at the map. 22 In such works, there is no quick passage from grief to sublimated identification with socially stipulated values but instead an insistence on the ethically and emotionally necessary task of a prolonged and painful construction of the dead in its complexity. Such arts of memory are not specimens of sentimental antiquarianism, though they involve sentiment, but attempts to outwit melancholia, the mute remainder of the obligation left after sublimation has taken what it needs. Characteristically, American grieving literature does not simply rebuff ideology, because it feels the deep and seemingly salvific allure of the circle of emulation, but rather postpones it, reducing it to the status of a possible future for the text’s present tense, quarantines that future so that the present of the literary act is protected as a place for engaging the work of mourning. To recall Martin Heidegger’s phrase,

Early American Antigone   

the grieving text occupies the anomalous or mutant temporality of nomore / not-yet, the sheer experience of what Friedrich Nietzsche called “time and its it was.” The grieving text drags its heels, procrastinates in the face of a looming future, and avoids getting caught up in the velocity of a rhetoric nervously aware that the mourner might realize that the exemplary image of the dead is at best an allegory, a personification of a catachresis rather than a full representation—at best, a crude foreshadowing of what the mourner seeks to construct. If this nonexemplarity does not oppose ideological projects with the force of a clear stance or course of action, its hesitations are nonetheless significant because they call into question fundamental means of clarification: nonexemplarity insists that there was a real that was other than what is said to have been and thereby preserves the possibility of subsequent counter-exemplifications where there would otherwise only have been, on the one hand, an order of exemplification seemingly coterminous with life itself and, on the other hand, the aimless, ironic, incessantly retributive fury of melancholia, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Grieving literature thus unveils the anxiety subtending much of the precipitous velocity of American society, a velocity inaugurated in part by the Puritan funeral sermon, which mentions grief and the singularity of the dead very briefly, as it must, to conjure the energy it seeks to use, then makes haste to exemplification, a more loquacious, leisurely, and expansive cataloging of the virtues displayed during the life just ceased. A similar hastiness pervades the funeral sermon’s major generic ally, the poetic elegy, the most common sort of poem in seventeenth-century New England. The linguistic stylization of the elegy mimics death by interrupting prose discourse, signaling the transcendence that is the poem’s concern—a meticulously explained transcendence whose emulability is enhanced by the poem’s metrical memorizability, its capacity to remain etched in thought despite the vicissitudes of subsequent attention.23 Poetry’s power to break from the currents of the prosaic and to leave a durable mark vanquishes quotidian discourses, which are to disappear without significant remainder, like the body of the dead. The formal and rhetorical devices of the sermon and the poem speed representation along the way toward a high plateau, an elevated city, a site of carefully extricated contemplation in the pure sun of wisdom. My intention here is not to explicate Anne Bradstreet’s work at length (it has been done quite well) but to outline its importance as one of the founding episodes of American mournful literature.24 Bradstreet’s early poetry, collected in the first edition of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), is not Puritan in either matter or manner, but it is markedly exemplaristic. The bulk of the volume is taken up by her “­Quaternions”

   Early American Antigone (“The Four Elements,” “The Four Humours,” “The Four Seasons,” “The Four Ages of Man,” and “The Four Monarchies”), the first four of which use Renaissance “characters” or allegorical types as dramatis personae in various quarrels concerning their relative excellences, dialogues that were to have added up to an encyclopedic schematic representation of the sum of human and natural phenomena—not to be taken as science but to be admired for its inclusive virtuosity. The poem reduces concrete phenomena to the instances of either one of the types or one of the quarrels and thus promotes itself as (to use Jean Baudrillard’s term) a total simulation, a Renaissance compendium, a poetic analogue and ­rival to the world.25 A catalog of abstract personified attributes deployed across a three-­dimensional and geometrically symmetrical armature with all the diagonals accounted for, the poems of “The Quaternions” assimilate reality to a rigorous scheme, though the components of the scheme were secular personae such as ­Choler rather than Puritan types such as the Reprobate Woman Writer. The verse, however non- or anti-Puritan and however consequently threatening to Puritan representation’s aspiration to exclusivity, bids to compete with Puritanism (as well as with other poetic encyclopedias, such as Guillaume du Bartas’s Week of Creation) on its own terms of transcendent ­mimesis, vies with Puritanism to be an equally (or more) imaginative (if not virtuous) feat of abstraction without significant unprocessed remainder. Bradstreet hoped that success in this encyclopedic venture would render her exemplary, again, not in Puritan terms but as a member of a pantheon, a model poet such as she saw Edmund Spenser and du Bartas to have been, a splendid specimen of the energetic poetic traits she found outlined in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Affiliating herself with the only conception of achievement available in her cultural repertoire that had the prestige and legitimacy necessary to rival or at least stand alongside Puritanism, a conception of discourse performance that seemed to offer greater range to her imagination and a greater tolerance for her gender, Bradstreet expected that the more completely she demonstrated her prowess at composing a system of explanatory “characters,” the more thoroughly she would show herself to be the Sidneyan Poet rather than the often sick, melancholy, and helpless being who speaks in the various short lyrics that were written during this period but were for the most part excluded from the first edition. And she seems to have succeeded in attaining to legitimacy, though the laudatory remarks of figures such as Nathaniel Ward and Cotton Mather are etched with anxiety, succeeded perhaps because her rather dour father, Thomas Dudley, sometime governor of Massachusetts who was remembered in large measure for having been considered too strict by John Winthrop, found poetic composition morally permissible, having himself apparently composed a poem entitled “The Four Corners of the World” (since lost).26

Early American Antigone   

This “first Bradstreet,” then, is attempting to hold Puritan mimesis at a distance, to clear a space of uninfected thought, to legitimate an order of composition not coordinated with her society’s dominant moral significations; but her device for performing this sequestration mimics what it resists in its sovereign indifference toward the singularities of the real, in its commitment to escaping by outdoing. Such a definition of achievement is as inclined toward exclusivity and as disinclined to mutuality and heterogeneous two-way exchange as is the Puritan doctrine of sola scriptura. Although Bradstreet’s voice continually mediates among the aggressive voices of the characters within the universe she controls, mediation between this universe and others is unlikely. If the mark of the poet’s achievement is ultimate comprehensiveness and mimetic finality, how can there be several poetic encyclopedias? There could only be either a not-yet-decided contest or a victor whose example demotes the others to being more or less inferior prefigurations of, or afterwords to, the one. The inevitable propulsion of her idea of sufficient achievement toward exclusivity seems to have worried her to an increasing degree as her career developed, as she perceived her axioms moving toward their ineluctable consequences. The fifth “Quaternion,” “The Four Monarchies,” itself a violation of the shapely “four by four” she had initially projected, relinquishes the compositional principles she had observed in its predecessors: none of the monarchies has a clear character distinct from the other three; and none of them, therefore, is amenable to personification, to voicing its superiority over the rest. 27 Rather than a dialogic mediation of speaking emblems within the work, “The Four Monarchies” is a meandering annal of history as incessant, violent tyranny, a work that draws cynicism from Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World and echoes tonally with the weary despair of Jacobean revenge tragedy and the ­seventeenth-century Trauerspiel.28 Strung together by the parataxis of the list rather than by a tight plan, “The Four Monarchies” is an unfinishable and wrecked poem, not because Bradstreet’s talent or interest flags but because she has come across the role of exclusivistic ambition in wrecking the world. The ambition that propelled the first four “Quaternions” has been almost entirely expurgated from Bradstreet’s motivation, reappearing as an object of representation—the supreme and splendid homicides, the insatiable and uncontrollable acquisitiveness of figures such as Alexander or Semiramis with her four-gated city (itself an allegory for Bradstreet’s own quadrilaterals, the formidable space she had sought to protect against the force of external encroachment but now perceived as not different in kind from the encroachment). Her critique of Puritan exclusivism has been transformed into a critique of exclusivism per se, of its proclivity toward hermeneutic if not actual violence—into

   Early American Antigone a perception that such desire results not in the temple or palace of the whole but in continually unbalanced reciprocities of senseless force, in history as concussion. Each of the monarchies—Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and ­Roman—like all the tyrants that make them up, equals no more than the current redundant avatar in a sequence of sterilization; history is reduced to the repetition of wreckage, and the only transitions the poem can manage are on the order of “and then there was . . .” Most important, the poem holds out little promise that the arrival of Christianity, Protestantism, or Congregationalism will redeem history.29 This depressed vision—depressed by the dwindled but lingering allure of the tyrants—arises from Bradstreet’s perception that her defense of poetry was complicit in the demand she was defending against and calls for a new ground on which to mark off an unassimilated space. A matter of dismay as it gains expression in “The Four Monarchies,” the transformation of secular exemplarism from a mode of ambition into an object of scrutiny may arise from her internal pursuit of the logic of her desire, perhaps from the news of political violence such as the antinomian debacle, the English Civil War, or the Thirty Years’ War, perhaps from personal traumas such as the death of her father, or from meditation and event intertwined.30 Whatever the source, the poems written after the publication of the first edition are in the main markedly briefer (though she continues to work at the manuscript of “The Four Monarchies” and to revise earlier poems), less taken with the ingenious construction of impersonal personae and more preoccupied with moral theology, whereas their predecessors had played with the secular psychology of humoral character. Bradstreet criticism seems to me to be about evenly divided on the question of whether the later poems are devout or ironically satirical with respect to Puritan moralism, a division that suggests that interrogating them for an unequivocal stance regarding such morality may be a misguided means of approach. In one of her few theological allegories, “A Dialogue Between the Flesh and the Spirit,” before commencing the verbal duel between the two voices, Bradstreet presents a nonallegorical voice—presumably her own, Bradstreet as concrete person rather than president of the work—as she who overheard the dialogue and locates itself “on the banks of the lacrim flood.”31 If Flesh and Spirit represent two ways of rendering experience lucid to abstraction, the quiet initial voice positions itself between these paradigms, on the location of grief. The unabashed hedonism of Flesh is no longer cogent because Flesh is rather brashly oblivious to the streaks that failure and death put through life; the easy transcendentality of Spirit is not fully compelling because its harsh and insulting dismissals of other-than-transcendent love are too easy and oblivious—Spirit slides too rapidly and opportunistically from

Early American Antigone   

love’s fragility to a denunciation of its corruption. Spirit’s view has allure, because it suggests both that what is lost need not be mourned since it was not worth loving to begin with and that future restrictions of affection will transfer love to higher things that are more durable if not vastly more qualitatively desirable. However, this allure is not sufficient for the tone of the poem, an unrest that lingers between the dead and an exemplary representation of the dead that is a possible, but not an inevitable, outcome for the poem’s present tense. Bradstreet thus constitutes the anomalous time of the grieving voice, of a subjectivity that might become exemplary before it has become so, a time of waiting and a pre-Puritanism, Puritanism’s human material, a complex field in which exemplification is not the master voice but a contestant, an option under consideration. Bradstreet’s elegiac verse, then, is engaged in setting out the conditions exemplification would have to meet to gain allegiance. 32 To this end, the poem is composed as an act of concrete mournful memory, exploring the overdetermination and manifold reality of the lost in order to set the terms for an adequate hermeneutic, what it would have to tally with to establish its credibility and to avail itself of the energy it desires. Bradstreet was fully aware of the generic specifications of the Puritan elegy: her poem written after the death of Dorothy Dudley, her mother, though heartfelt and showing more stylistic competence than is usual in such poems, where an overingenious attenuation often prevails, is a simple list of abstract attributes defining the pious wife and mother and an assertion that the mother will be best remembered as someone who met all the criteria: Here lies, A worthy matron of unspotted life, A loving mother and obedient wife, A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor, Whom oft she fed and clothed with her store; To servants wisely awful, but yet kind, And as they did, so they reward did find. A true instructor of her family, The which she ordered with dexterity. The public meetings ever did frequent, And in her closet constant hours she spent; Religious in all her words and ways, Preparing still for death, till end of days: Of all her children, children lived to see, Then dying, left a blessed memory.33

But her later elegies reverse the direction of demand: the mourner no longer fits memory to generic requirements but now requires genre to demonstrate its suitability to what is remembered. Such poems are not

   Early American Antigone moral and generic but are about morality and genre. They do not conclude whether exemplification will or will not pass the test, because in the raw freshness of new loss the work of mournful memory is only commenced, and exemplification has to wait until its test has been prepared. Bradstreet’s elegies therefore contest Puritanism, not with equally lucid and sufficient abstractions but with the strength of a confusion, an allegiance to remains, and an insistence that the dialectic prove its claims to annul nothing of merit, to preserve the sum of what is worth remembering. By putting typology on probation, Bradstreet composes an archival memory of an extra-exemplary experience that is not automatically in need of redemption by the imaginative triumphalism of Puritan ideology; Bradstreet does not permit the thought of the transient to slide into a moral representation of chaos. 34 The radicalism of her constitution of the real in the poem of mourning does not put her to the left of Puritanism in a counter-ideology such as familism or antinomianism—this is not a defense of Polyneices’ political virtue. But by representing the real in the poem of mourning, Bradstreet puts exemplification on trial and asserts the existence of a piece of complex sociality—between the mourner and the dead—that a counter-ideology would require in order to have something to correspond to, though it would be subject, in turn, to a similar test of adequacy. Bradstreet’s challenge is therefore not purely a resort to irony, the force of deformation that Hegel associates with melancholia, with mourning forestalled and preempted. Her challenge has a positive content, if not a stance or thesis, and consequently it is not condemned to being a marauding vacuity. Furthermore, it would not be entirely individualistic or private, though it is lyric, because the composition of a poem is an exemplary act of anti-exemplarism, a well-plotted and edifying example of how one might mourn that does not mandate form, content, or pace, a public acknowledgment and legitimation of the right and necessity of mourning. Bradstreet’s boldest defense of mourning is, I think, “Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666,” because the lost object of love is here a possession rather than a person. 35 Disengagement from the lost ought thus to seem easier, with the pressure to view lingering attachment as a selfish willfulness growing correspondingly greater. Or perhaps, since houses cannot be promoted to edifying example without considerable risk of ludicrous personification, mourning for a lost house may capture the feel of actual mourning for a real person: because a house is a vessel rather than a being, it cannot be summed up, and its contents have to be recalled serially. So at least Twain seems to have felt when he tried to describe his reaction to a cablegram bearing the news of his daughter Susy’s death: It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it.

Early American Antigone    The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential—there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost . . . It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.36

Though there will be another house that will duplicate this one’s function as shelter, another house will not bear the load of life and family memory this one bears. Just as with, for instance, a dead grandchild, the notion of either heavenly or mundane replaceability presumes fungibility, which in turn presumes the essential equality of the lost with something else under the sign of categorical being, essentially a repudiation of its singularity. The doctrine of compensatory consolation promises a surrogate that, though not unwelcome, is not equal to what is lost, and the doctrine therefore must be supplemented with a systematic derision of what remains unduplicated in the surrogate. The poem struggles to hold at bay this derision. Bradstreet begins with an episode of fright, the forcible interjection of vacuum into a world that had shortly before been replete: In silent night when rest I took For sorrow near I did not look I wakened was with thund’ring noise And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice. That fearful cry of “Fire!” and “Fire!” Let no man know is my desire. I, starting up, the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry To strengthen me in my distress And not to leave me succourless. Then, coming out, behind a space The flame consume my dwelling place.

She dramatically reconstructs the emotional density of the time of the blow, the heart pointing back to what it is rapidly learning is no more and forward to some imaginable redemption that will negate the event’s negativity and restore whatever plenitude she felt upon going to sleep—what was “dwelling”? and what could “succor” possibly be? The desire that the disaster not be, or that it prove to be of little consequence, moves the voice

   Early American Antigone onward, off the thought of the loss, into a homiletic rationalization that displays the mechanical sententiousness of the orthodox Puritan elegy: And when I could no longer look, I bless his name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust. Yea, so it was, and so ’twas just. It was his own, it was not mine, Far be it that I should repine. He might of all justly bereft But yet sufficient for us left.

She enters this zone of dogma not simply from a sense of ought or from a fear of tempting renewed disaster by complaining but also from desire, because dogma will lay the event to rest, restore the sensations of regularity and trust that are part of an experience of home, remake living into an unruffled surface—obviate the need for “repining.” But the heart’s other vector, pointed toward the lost, is not appeased. The inertly repetitive recitation of maxims indexes the presence of an unconvinced segment of herself that needs to be preached to, a segment that returns to voice in the ambiguity of the last couplet’s verb: he did leave us something that is sufficient (religious consolations); or he might have left us something that was sufficient (a large part of the house unburned) but chose not to do so and destroyed it all. The ambiguity turns precisely on the unanswered question, what suffices? The tonally subtle resentment expressed in the second option brings forward an antithetical voice that proceeds to do what shortly before had been declared unnecessary—repining: When by the ruins oft I past My sorrowing eyes aside did cast, And here and there the places spy Where oft I sat and long did lie: Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, There lay the store I counted best. My pleasant things in ashes lie, And them behold no more shall I.

The day after the disaster and the day after that, Bradstreet tours the ­ruins, her eyes turned aside, looking away from theological renderings of the event in order to permit the progression of pangs that will at some future point culminate in a sufficient representation of the life for which the house had been a rich vehicle. (Among the pangs may have been the thought of the loss of the manuscript of an extended version of “The Four Monarchies,” perhaps referred to in the phrase “the store I counted best.”)

Early American Antigone   

But this intervening time is the time of the ghost, the time of memory reaching an intensity that seems to equal presence only to collide with the knowledge of absence. The sheer pain of this prolonged series of alternating phantasmal gratifications and disturbances by fact threatens to extend into an infinite future, replaying rather than tempering the first agony. The pain thus prompts her to a renewed desire to terminate mourning, this time with blunt negatives instead of rationalizing aphorisms: Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy table eat a bit. No pleasant tale shall e’er be told, Nor things recounted done of old. No candle e’er shall shine in thee, Nor bridegroom’s voice e’er heard shall be. In silence ever shalt thou lie, Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity.

The harsh dismissiveness of the last clause bespeaks her desire to close the book on mourning, to clarify and so to be able to disregard the event, to go on to some life governed by something besides pertinacious memory. But the overinsistent iteration of the negatives (like the nevermore of “The Raven”), the incipiently idolatrous apostrophe both to the house and to the part of her that is with the house, the obvious love for the personal past that is her (and our) only real possession (despite the predatory alienability that is exemplification’s founding premise), and the emphasis on transience rather than moral demerit all keep faith with the insistence of mourning in the face of the desire to escape. Escape, therefore, will require a stern castigation of both the house and the part of her that loved it: Then straight I ’gin my heart to chide, And did thy wealth on earth abide? Didst fix thy hope on mold’sring dust? The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the sky That dunghill mists away may fly.

The reduction of the lost to dung, an imaginative preemption of the obliviating power of physical decay, readies the stage for a view of adequate substitution: Thou hast a house on high erect, Framed by that mighty Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fled. It’s purchased and paid for too

   Early American Antigone By Him who hath enough to do. A price so vast as is unknown Yet by His gift is made thine own; There’s wealth enough, I need no more, Farewell, my pelf, farewell my store. The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above.

In a maximal typological act, the loss of the house is likened to Christ’s relinquishing of his body, an utter agony but an utterly necessary agony that purges the true of its encumbering vehicle in order to show it in its pristine state. When the type invades the dialogue between the antitheses of feeling, mourning becomes synonymous with a regret that would have hidden Christ from humanity, letting history go its way without a beacon. Mourning becomes a profoundly unconscionable ingratitude and a monumental selfishness—a threat to the revelation of being. The objects to which it clings are “pelf,” stolen goods, fetishes. But they are also “store,” a concrete transcript of personal history, of her life as it was rather than as a rationalized echo with an ancient misery. The replacement of “pelf ” by “store” recalls mourning from the crypt to which the type assigns it, signifying in a packed word her way of living and helping to instigate the task of now patiently closing up or putting away that life. The familial is thus still present to memory, not under the Puritan conceptions of domestic virtuous economy and their various relations of authority and subordination, but as a mode of the social and the human with modest intrinsic dignity requiring hermeneutic respect and sophistication from any candidate bidding to represent the extent and meaning of the loss. If the familial life recalled in mourning does not assail the theocratic state’s adjunct image of the patriarchal authoritarian family, mourning at least remembers that there is something else, that ideology and sociality are not isomorphic. Bradstreet’s protection of the memory of a social reality against the encroachments of exemplification results, in “Contemplations,” in a thoroughgoing critique of exemplarity. 37 Several natural and human entities are proposed as emblems for divine might, only to be exposed as frail and partial things in contrast with an intransigently mysterious force that scores all things with their brevity. The process of contemplation, therefore, is a matter of considering possible types but then realizing that they are products of fancy or of human figuration rather than of a figurality that a covenant god built into the order of things. Bradstreet’s career thus comes round to a version of Miller’s negative theology, to a centralization of awe, but with an important difference: rather than an accent on the ways in which divinity is sullied by attempts to embody it in human vehi-

Early American Antigone   

cles, the consequence of awe for Bradstreet is that the real is released from the task of being vehicular—riddled by moralities without relief or appeal but pervaded by numerous incomparable aesthetic and emotional singularities, such as the strikingly direct erotic love she expresses in her poems for her husband, which operates at such a level of intensity as to render both Simon Bradstreet’s public exemplarity (Husband, Father, Governor) and Puritan conceptions of the proprieties of marital service and subordination beside the point: If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if ye can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold Or all the riches that the east doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere That when we live no more, we may live ever. 38

“Authority without wisdom,” Bradstreet wrote in one of the meditations she composed for her children, “is like a heavy axe without an edge: fitter to bruise rather than polish.”39 This maxim expresses succinctly the vision her literary development reached, the demand that the representations of experience upon which power bases itself be wise, that is, adequate to the real, however desirable it might be to accept without question. If such skepticism fails to represent a coherently defined challenge, this failure perhaps results less from timidity than from what Bradstreet had come to see at the end of the aspiration to transcendental representativity—not an inclusive and pacifying sunlight but either the incoherence of uncommunicating ambitions or the forced coherence of a supremacist social epistemology. In order to impede movement along these disastrous vectors, Bradstreet sought to preserve an area of the real, not a zone free of ideological determinations or fully informed by a lucid alternative to Puritan domination, but an aggregate of experience recalled at a pitch that precludes the ability to subsume it, that recalls what was, which is hard to do even if you can remember how to do it.

 r 

Thomas Jefferson’s Prospect

3

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. —Herman Melville, “Cetology,” Moby-Dick

the argument for including Jefferson in the pantheon of Enlightenment heroes has been frequently bolstered by the use of sight as a metaphor for understanding: if we can only clear our thinking of the accumulated lumber of passion, prejudice, ambition, and history, Jefferson’s example seems to demonstrate, our apprehension of the natural and human worlds will be as clean, plain, and immediate as the act of looking at a physical object. As early as the 1780s, a decade that began for Jefferson with confusion, defeat, fear, dismay, slander, injury, mourning, and the composition of Notes on the State of Virginia, the Marquis de Chastellux felt that he had discovered a figural relation between Jefferson’s intellectual outlook and the view from the hilltop site of Jefferson’s home: “It seems as if from his youth he had placed his mind, as he had done his house, on an elevated situation from which he might contemplate the universe.”1 Monticello, according to Chastellux, was a self-chosen symbol for Jefferson’s able intelligence, as well as a product of that intelligence. The view may, in fact, have been a key consideration for Jefferson, because Monticello’s site was an unusual choice, given that most Virginian estates, such as the Byrds’ Westover, were at riverside for convenient transportation. As a young man, Jefferson had instigated the clearing of the Rivanna for commerce as far as Milton, but goods still had to be taken the remaining ten miles or so overland to Monticello. Perhaps for Jefferson, who at an early age enjoyed the view from the nearby mountain Pantops, the connotations of an elevated prospect outweighed the practical difficulty. Detached, even remote, the site of Monticello may have emblematized induction, intelligence removed from the turmoil là-bas but able therefore to understand the world that

Jefferson’s Prospect   

much more clearly. At Monticello, to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase, the axis of vision would be coincident with the axis of things: however much the troubles of office made Jefferson yearn for the peace of home, Monticello was never his retreat into monastic self-­absorption but instead the clear prospect, a comprehending gaze unvexed by perturbations of fear, desire, conformism, or ambition. Monticello would signify Enlightenment, that mental gaze at a world no longer snarled in the selfserving obscurities of priests, ministers, and despots. At Monticello as in sound induction, actual, particular surroundings and the edifice of intelligence were consonant and adequate to one another. As I. T. Frary suggests, “Jefferson’s architecture is . . . a direct adaptation of classical models to present and local needs.”2 Continuing this symbolism, Merrill Peterson argues that “simplicity of line, reasoned order and proportion, and chaste dignity, at once ancient and new, beautiful and virtuous, served the civic culture of the young republic. Jefferson’s columns rising before the wilderness framed an ideal of workmanship, beauty and civility in the rough and tumble American world.”3 Peterson refers to the view at the west portico, where Palladian columns bracket the wild of the Piedmont. Like his portico, Peterson implies, Jefferson attends to the actual and unformed rather than excludes it, instead elevating it to a formal beauty that is attentive and appropriate rather than ostentatious or discordant. The edifice is as comely as any deduction from inherited principles—more comely, in fact, because it is founded on diligent respect for the real surroundings. This inductive ideal is continued within the edifice, where clean classic lines are evenly blended with innovative pragmatism, as in the stately fireplace whose sides contain dumbwaiters to the wine cellar. According to John Dos Passos, “Monticello embodied in its structure the basic plan of his life, and of the lives he wanted for his friends and neighbors. When the [Palladian] style was adapted for the British noblemen . . . the practical features that had attracted the frugal Italian were forgotten. It’s highly typical of the quality of Jefferson’s mind that in his design for Monticello he went back to ­Palladio’s practical villa; which was essentially a farmhouse flanked by sheds, and by skillful use of his hilltop managed to go Palladio one better by establishing the working part of the building in wings built into the hill and lighted by loggias that could be used to shelter his equipment. Their roof he used as a terrace from which to enjoy his unobstructed view.”4 Comments such as these perpetuate the ongoing myth of Jefferson, of a mind in which experience and abstraction are perfectly wed. Adrienne Koch, recapitulating Gilbert Chinard’s celebration of Jefferson’s “practical idealism,” states the myth succinctly: when discussing Jefferson, “the kind of protocol that demands that [pragmatism and wisdom] be kept

   Jefferson’s Prospect apart” is “unwarranted”; “no headway can be made” in understanding Jefferson “if we consider theory as opposed to experience.”5 But the pair pragmatic/wise is not synonymous with the pair experience/theory, though Koch tries to make it so. The transition from the first to the second pair, taken for granted by Koch, hides the logical ellipsis that enables the myth of Jefferson: the unacknowledged and unexamined equation of Jefferson’s versatile competence for both instrumental and speculative theorization with the assertion of an intelligence in which theorization is perfectly at one, by means of induction, with the reality it experiences. The same slippage underlies Dos Passos’s remark, which moves from the relation between aesthetic and pragmatic design within the house to the relation between the house and the landscape viewed from it, but does not acknowledge this as a change in topic. The guiding assumption is that instrumental or technical reason is neutral, that it is based on a pure sight of the facticity of things and that it is capable of infusing more abstract speculative reason with this same hardheaded and sober neutrality. When both are practiced harmoniously by one man, instrumental reason inhibits the potential for error and extravagance that lurks in its speculative companion, keeping the whole true and real. But instrumental reason is no more neutral than speculative reason. The ingenuities at Monticello, for example, presume a slave economy while simultaneously expurgating signs of labor as often as possible: the hidden stairways; the slave passages to the kitchen; laundry and stables hidden (not “sheltered,” as Dos Passos contends) beneath the terraces; the dumbwaiters, invisible within the fireplace, that obviate the need to have wine carried into the room; the ladder that folds so that it does not look like a ladder; and the seeming door that revolves to reveal shelves of hot food but conceals the servers. As if there were some sort of shame at work, Jefferson’s instrumental innovations at Monticello are aimed at projecting a sprezzatura that denies the labor that permits Monticello to be: it is a magic place. Instrumental and speculative reasons are both strata of historically determined mental activity: neither of them is closer to the real and therefore capable of purifying the other of ideological bias. Assuming the inductive neutrality of instrumental reason, however, the myth of Jefferson transforms Jefferson’s obvious and enviable capacity to indulge in different orders of thought into an assertion of the unity of mind and world. The myth of Jefferson is not a conceptual assertion but an amplification of the fact of Jefferson’s versatility into an emblem of unchallengeable induction, an exemplification, to recall the previous chapter, not of saint­ liness but of elegant reasonableness. Koch uses both Jefferson and Franklin as signs of unified “pragmatic wisdom,” but Jefferson is a better example. Whereas the myth of Franklin projects a wholesome indifference to archi-

Jefferson’s Prospect   

tectonic grandeur, the myth of Jefferson promotes grandeur and plain facts together, without a seam, and implies that grandeur without plain facts is decadence and rote imitation. If diligent and brilliant enough, inclusive democratic induction—a theorist not afraid to mix himself with the commonplace manipulation of matter—can reach to splendor, duplicating the heights of an effete past while shedding the exclusionary haughtiness that had marred the systems of the past. Robert Ferguson describes this Jefferson, “whose professed heroes were Bacon, Newton, and Locke, and whose empiricism, in consequence, assumed that facts properly collected would inevitably lead through inductive reasoning toward unified theory and larger vision.”6 The low supports the high, immediately, rather than sullies it. The ellipsis that permits the myth’s assertion of immediate unity between thought and world is not itself inductively motivated, since it draws an excessive conclusion from the fact of Jefferson’s versatility; rather, it is affectively and ideologically motivated by questions of self-conception and authority, by the desire to ameliorate the anxiety of history with the promise of a pure prospect onto the common world and of an end to division between sophisticated schemes of order and the daily existence such schemes claim to represent. The myth does not explain how such fusion can occur but merely stands as the image of its possibility. This deliberate vagueness allows the myth to underwrite all sorts of projects and schemes, even some that may go against the specific inclinations of Jefferson’s thought. For example, when Frank Lloyd Wright castigated the proposed design for the Jefferson Memorial (which drew heavily on Jefferson’s plans for Monticello and the University of Virginia), he used the Jefferson myth against the historical Jefferson: Thomas Jefferson? Were that gentleman alive today, he would be the first to condemn the stupid erudition mistaken in his honor . . . I imagine I see the sarcastic smile with which his shade must receive this fashionable design proposing to drag his mortal remains to the surface of the present . . . in terms of the feudal art and thought that clung to him then, deliberately to make of him now, a fashionable effigy of reaction instead of a character appreciated by his own people as a noble spirit of progress and freedom.7

According to Wright, the unmistakable classicism of Monticello, like the leaves and curlicues that cluttered the facades of Louis Sullivan’s most progressive conceptions, was a kind of unexamined historical residue contrary to Jefferson’s free genius. The truly Jeffersonian edifice would be the sort of organic induction Montgomery Schuyler thought he saw in Wright’s buildings, rising adequately and homogeneously from the people’s life and experience on the land. Such a monument would offer itself as a focal reflection of that life, and the popular assent would prove it.8

   Jefferson’s Prospect Many of Jefferson’s own writings and designs do express both an inductive attitude and a desire to be remembered as a calmly inductive thinker, and he can therefore be said to have supported the myth in advance, perhaps even to have launched it. However, there are other writings in which the idea of inductive prowess is affixed to a suspicion that the claim to speak from a position of inductive purity might be the mask of a subtler despotism. Part of Jefferson’s diffuse oeuvre supports the myth, but only part; there is also a wariness that tempers the desire for inductive authority with an attention to that desire’s potential for abuse or degradation: Jefferson’s dream of induction is a participant in a complex intellectual array rather than the governor of the oeuvre. In his more wary writings, Jefferson joins theory and experience, as Koch and Chinard suggest, but he joins them in an antithetical unity in which the role of experience is to upset theory, to challenge it by exposing its reductiveness, and to instigate further revision rather than to advertise theory’s adequacy. The myth of Jefferson promises innovative human forms that are infused with the rectitude and necessity of ordinary human nature, but we should remember that Jefferson’s most memorable assertion of self-evident truth was composed to challenge a theoretical justification for a form of society, monarchy, not to support it—to announce the discrepancy between nature and what was being done in nature’s name. Despite Koch’s warning, we make considerable headway if we regard experience as opposed to theory in Jefferson’s writing, not in the sense that they are mutually exclusive activities but that they are bound together in a dynamic, internally contradictory whole, in which the role of experience is to interrupt and resist thought’s tendency toward complacent self-enclosure and self-consistency. Experience is anti-inertial. The concept of antithetical unity allows us to admire Jefferson for his diligent attention to experience and for his versatile facility at both instrumental and speculative theorization without postulating an inductive empiricism, where pure perceptions proceed smoothly through successively greater strata of trimmed and pruned abstraction. Like Locke, Jefferson is indebted to Baconian thought, but the difference between Lockean and Jeffersonian experimentalism reveals the ambiguity of the Baconian legacy. In actual experimental practice, the use of experience to support hypotheses and the use of experience to challenge hypotheses are reciprocal and indissociable methods. However, when the Baconian method is amplified into an ethos—the experimental spirit—the two reciprocal procedures produce very different ideological positions. On the one hand, there is Lockean confidence, the assertion of mind as a nonintrusive receiving medium that abstracts without adulterating. Opposed to this empiricism, which suffuses the myth of Jefferson, there is negative empiricism Karl

Jefferson’s Prospect   

Popper claims to have discovered in David Hume’s philosophy. According to Popper, the fact that experience can agree with theory does not prove that experience engenders theory in a passive intelligence. Instead, according to Popper, the role of experience is to falsify hypotheses—however they may happen to have originated—and a hypothesis in accord with experience is not yet falsified rather than true.9 In the first case, we have an empiricism that is ideologically self-authorizing; in the second, an insistence on the recurrence of discrepancy between experience and its cognitive representation as the source of intellectual vitality. This is not to say that Popper recommends that we seek theories that do not match experience but that the suspicion that theory does slight the fact should be at the crux of methodological resolve. The advantage of Popper’s empiricism over Locke’s is that it can acknowledge the historical and psychological provenance of theories without thereby disqualifying them, and without succumbing to an abyssal relativism. This is a useful perspective to bring to bear on Jefferson, whose desire to comprehend is joined to a rigorous suspicion that paradigms for comprehension, including his own, are historically particular. In his youthful notebook copyings from Bolingbroke, Jefferson concentrated on empiricism as refutation rather than as a proof,10 an early inclination that, by the time he wrote Notes, had grown into a complete sensibility that is more consistently affiliated with Popper than it is with Locke. Notes, therefore, represents a moment of American dissent from the ideology of Enlightenment as it was asserted by figures such as Franklin or Charles Thomson—the assertion that the obtuseness of the past can be shed in a collective social accession to the plain clarity of the real. Jefferson’s insistence on discrepancy may be detected in the design of Monticello if we substitute the relation between edifice and site for the relation between theory and experience. Wright’s contention that the classical elements in Jeffersonian architecture were an undigested, otiose survival is not tenable. In his account of a tour he took of English gardens (on which he was accompanied by John Adams and by a copy of Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening), Jefferson deplores gardens planed to the level, or governed by the straight line and right angle, because they “show too much art.” In America, he contends, the noblest gardens can be made “without expense” because “we have only to cut out the superabundant plants.”11 On this score, Jefferson is following Whately, who thought that the best gardens were virtually pure reflections of the land in an untouched state. According to Whately, modern gardening was “released from the restraints of regularity,” and the planner’s task was to “discover and to shew all the advantages of the place upon which he is employed”: “His first enquiry must be into the means by which those effects are attained in nature, which he is to produce; and into those

   Jefferson’s Prospect properties in the objects of nature, which should determine him in the choice of them.” The gardener does not invent nor adhere to principles of geometry; the art of gardening is rooted in observant, inductive study, and the garden is an essentially homogeneous representation of the natural object. As an admiring reader of Whately’s book, therefore, Jefferson was enthusiastic about an early version of Wright’s organicism, and his enthusiasm is embodied in the fluid lines and in the convexities and concavities with which the Monticello gardens hold to the contour and the flora of the mountain. But induction was not the consistent principle of the entire estate. In his account of the tour of English gardens, Jefferson never objects to the obelisks, pyramids, and ruins set down in the midst of the gardens. This incongruity is deliberate rather than inadvertent: Jefferson does not merely fail to extend the principle of induction to the architecture; rather, with Whately, he found the disparity between the organicism of the site and the regularity of the edifice to be the most satisfying principle of the whole. An edifice, according to Whately, “diverts the attention at once from the sameness of the extent; which it breaks but does not divide; and diversifies, without altering its nature.” Buildings are “so observable, so obvious at a glance, so easily retained in the memory, they mark the spot where they are placed with so much strength, they attract the relation of all around with so much power, that parts thus distinguished can never be confounded together.” Like Wallace Stevens’s Tennessee jar, Whately’s edifice conforms powerfully and strikingly to the desire for form and thus exists in a reputably compelling tension with the contrived uniformity of the site. But this disparity should never become so acute that disparity becomes divorce, where “variety” degenerates into “inconsistency, and contrast into contradiction.”12 Accordingly, at Monticello, a carefully secured effect of horizontality in the design of the house contrasts with the irregular declivities of the gardens, but it does not break the overall line of the mountain; the angularity of the columns and the corners is mitigated by the dome, which both caps the mountain and schematically represents it. Monticello’s design is thus an application of the theory Jefferson would encounter in Joseph Heely’s Letters on the Beauties of Hagley, Envil and the Leasowes. With Critical Remarks: and Observations on the Modern Taste in Gardening, a copy of which Jefferson purchased in the late 1780s: “Architecture and gardening, may be called sister arts, though diametrically opposite in their principles; the excellencies of the first are founded in a mathematical exactness, and regularity: in the latter, an assemblage of scenery without either: yet when both unite, each graces the other so powerfully, and affords so striking a contrast, that, it is much to be lamented, that they are ever seen but in an inseparable connection.”13 The unity Heely describes is not homogeneous,

Jefferson’s Prospect   

as in induction, where the intellectual construction is purely consistent with its material site. On the contrary, though the builder must, of course, understand the nature and layout of the ground, the finished estate is to project a focal disparity between form and matter, a tensed ensemble that does not degenerate into mutually exclusive alternatives. As an emblem of the situation of the mind in the world, the estate signifies a vital and creative incongruity between the experienced world and the forming designs the mind brings to bear on it. The analogy between estate and mind is taken up in the flirtatiously sentimental dialogue between the Head and the Heart that Jefferson wrote for Maria Cosway in 1786. The Head has been using a European tour to study domes and arches in order to amass structural patterns to take home to an underbuilt new world, but the Heart fondly remembers the beauty of that underdevelopment: “And our own dear Monticello, where has ­nature spread so rich a mantle under the eye? Mountains, forests, rocks, rivers. With what majesty do we there ride above the storms! How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! and the glorious sun when rising as if out of a distant water, just gilding the tops of the mountains, and giving life to nature.”14 The enraptured tone here is a rhetorical veneer, a confection for Cosway’s pleasure, but the dialogue is nonetheless a serious proposal of the necessity for dialogue between incongruous pragmatisms. The utilitarian pragmatism of the Head, like Lockean induction, assumes the sufficiency of its prospect onto social existence and considers itself entitled to assert its standard of the useful against what it can confidently deride as obtuse, obstructive, or delusory modes of knowledge. On the other side, the pragmatism of the Heart, like Popper’s negative empiricism, asserts that the object of the gaze is rich because its fabricated abundance exceeds comprehension and exploitation. According to Burke, the sublime threatens with annihilation. Although the Heart’s rapture is free of such terror, Burke’s kernel assertion is preserved: at the moment of sublimity, the observer and the observed are explicitly disjoint. This might very well seem to threaten the Head’s vital integrity, insofar as the Head seeks to maintain its authoritarian appearance of disinterested union with the object. However, the Heart’s bemused pragmatism, exempt from the ambition to triumphalism, is also free of terror, because it has not staked its clarity on an aspiration to inductive sufficiency. This second pragmatism, emphasizing physical obstacles to development and climatic limitations to the line of sight, humorously acknowledges that the Head’s devotion to usefulness is a necessary human activity; but it also recognizes that standards of usefulness, like all articulations of value, are historically determined and provisional, and that they are inevitably diverse from and

   Jefferson’s Prospect reductive toward the object—life—that they seek to comprehend. Like Anne Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit,” the dialogue between the Head and the Heart does not reach a synthesis or agreement, except perhaps an agreement to continue the dialogue, maintaining an interactive discrepancy: the Head’s theory formations must proceed, but the Heart’s attention to limit must teach the Head the extent to which it neglects or reduces what it claims to describe. Rather than a synchronic inductive unity between mind and world, there is to be a temporal sequence of relative prospects onto a never fully comprehended object. The Head’s pragmatism is the major voice in Jefferson’s memoranda from his tour of rural France, with one exception. Mindful of the situation of American agriculture, Jefferson appraises the quality of the soil, the seasons of growth, and the organization of labor and commerce, to the conspicuous neglect of everything else that might have been included in a travel narrative: untilled sublime landscapes are present as “waste,” and cultural and historical remarks are generally absent. At a winery called the Hermitage, near the village of Tains, he records the height of the hills, the color of the soil, the use of dung, the spacing of the plants, the pricing and aging of the wines, and the proportion of red to white produced. But he concludes enigmatically: “Portage to Paris is seventy-two livres the piece, weighing six hundred pounds. There are but about one thousand pieces of both red and white, of the first quality, made annually. Vineyards are never rented here, nor are laborers in the vineyard hired by the year. They leave buds proportioned to the strength of the vine; sometimes as much as fifteen inches. The last hermit died in 1751.”15 The final item, which closes the entry, breaks context and is incongruous, even stray or skew. The purpose informing the Head’s prospect onto the Hermitage is the gathering of useful information, perhaps even for Monticello, but the Heart’s mysterious, brief interjection relativizes that prospect, intimating that the rational view, though necessary, is reductive—that its itinerary involves editing out the aspects of a complex object that do not bear on its purpose, the slight trace of a lost world. This does not condemn the Head but instead sets it in dynamic juxtaposition with the real. The insistence on discrepancy plays a very small part in the French memoranda, but it is the compositional center of Notes. Robert Ferguson and Wayne Franklin have underlined the frequent incongruity between theory and experience in that book, and they have thus challenged the conclusion, suggested by the myth of Jefferson, that Notes is an inductive masterpiece. According to Ferguson, the book is a transcript of induction defeated rather than triumphant: the personal and political turmoil of the years before Jefferson began writing the book led him to seek clarities and certainties in writing that eluded him in life; obscurity and

Jefferson’s Prospect   

uncertainty encroach even in the early section on natural history and geography, however, and Jefferson writes the sections on law, history, and politics in search of the mathematical exactitude of a moral science. Ferguson’s Jefferson is “obsessed” with the search for intellectual “control,” and the perpetual errancy of the real provokes a “combination of assertion and anxiety,” “manic-depressive tendencies” that are a “proto­ type for understanding literary involvement in post-­Revolutionary America.” Franklin replaced Ferguson’s Ahabian Jefferson with a Jefferson who anticipates D. H. Lawrence. Franklin’s Jefferson apprehends a landscape “not as it is ‘called’ but as it is: three-dimensional, local, alive with force.” In the landscape, Franklin’s Jefferson finds “a certain ferocious quality, a frightening dimension to abundance itself.” He reacts with an “uncomfortable mixture of longing and design. He both fears and desires an unmediated contact.” This “kinetic and close” attitude, the “drama of impulse and resistance,” however, finally gives way to the stability of economic and cartographic modes of representation: “The transfixed wanderer is allowed to retreat into design as a habit of perception or as a plan of action.” This retreat, “determined by the narrow arc of ‘use,’ ” is reductive with respect to the turbulence of wonder, which for Franklin is a full immersion in the real: “What is lost in the process is a sense of the real terrain as a place of action rather than a grand plot.”16 Ferguson and Franklin thus brave Merrill Peterson’s assertion that to portray Jefferson as a “figure of contradiction” is to succumb to “overwrought interpretation,” when the true task is to explain “the underlying unity and coherence.”17 For Ferguson and Franklin, Notes is not a celebration of induction but a record of the inductive aspiration upset by its experiences. The difference between them is that for Ferguson the movement away from such contact is a matter of relief, whereas for Franklin it is a matter of regret and nostalgia. postscript ( 2006 ) . In the original version of this essay (1985), I dis­ regarded Ferguson’s contention that Notes reflects and expresses the anguish from which Jefferson was suffering when he wrote it, and I now think I was wrong to do so, if only because in the 1787 advertisement for the book Jefferson alluded to the close association in his memory of agony and writing: “To apologize for this by developing the circumstances of the time and place of their composition, would be to open wounds which have already bled enough” (N, 2). His afflictions had been sore and numerous: Virginia was invaded by the British while Jefferson was governor, putting Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries in danger of arrest, imprisonment, possible execution; the government of Virginia, in retreat, nearly

   Jefferson’s Prospect dissolved; when Jefferson retired from the government, accusations that the invasion was the result of his inaction and ineptitude were in circulation; he was injured in a fall from his horse; and his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, died after the birth of their third daughter. According to Peterson, “Days and months of anguish, eighteen dreary months, descended on Jefferson after his retirement.” When the Virginia Assembly cleared Jefferson of blame for the invasion, Jefferson remarked that “the wound, being to the spirit, could ‘only be cured by the grave.’ ” In a “long and pathetic” letter to James Monroe, Jefferson “revealed the tortures of his soul,” and the anguish multiplied infinitely when his wife died: When she died on September 6, according to [ Jefferson’s] eldest daughter’s recollection, he fell into a state of insensibility from which it was feared he would not revive. When he did, his torment was indescribable. “He kept to [his] room three weeks, and I was never a moment from his side. He walked almost incessantly night and day, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted, on a pallet that had been brought in during his long fainting fits . . . When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain, in the least frequented roads, and just as often through the woods. In those melancholy rambles, I was his constant companion,” Patsy said, “a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.”18

I ignored all this because I felt that suffering and grief were incompatible with the intellectual curiosity and avidity I sensed throughout the book and concluded that mournfulness could therefore not serve as a useful explanatory tool. I erroneously assumed mourning would inevitably culminate in the sort of dejected text Ferguson described, fragments shored against Jefferson’s ruin, membra disjecta, the anxiety of a world spinning out of control. Jefferson’s suggestion in the advertisement that the Notes require an apology indicates that he thought in retrospect that they partook of the chaos of the time of their origin, but within the book itself there is little or no expression of dismay at the course the writing is taking, and there is a continual effervescent interest in the accumulated strangeness of the Virginia he brought into textual being, the anomalies and asymmetries, the skewed lines of force, and the drastic unevenness of things and beings. As F. Scott Fitzgerald discovered, cracking up can also be cracking open: when Jefferson suffered through a course of human events that profoundly upset his trust in the intelligibility of experience, he responded as a writer by attempting to assimilate that upset, not by trying to refurbish and immunize intelligibility but by cultivating a healthy respect for the partiality and historicity of explanatory hypotheses and an alert interest in the mysteries of his only occasionally or imperfectly intelligible life in the world. If, like Anne Bradstreet, Jefferson was compelled by circumstance to relinquish his architecture—his Palladian sequel to her

Jefferson’s Prospect   

four-gated city—the consequence was for Jefferson not a defeated work but something more baroque: If we begin to look at these great naked planes in the Parthenon or Versailles, their boundaries marked by columns, we see that their value is in their proportions: they create a sort of geometrical harmony in which filled and vacant spaces are equally important. In the Parthenon, the space between columns is as important as the columns themselves. I would go so far as to say that the column serves to mark the boundaries of empty spaces, the spaces of air . . . We have, on the other hand, the baroque, a constant of the human spirit that is characterized by the horror of the vacuum, the naked surface, the harmony of linear geometry, a style where the central axis, which is not always manifest or apparent (in Bernini’s Saint Teresa it is very difficult to determine a central axis), is surrounded by what one might call “proliferating nuclei,” that is, decorative elements that completely fill the space of the construction, the walls, all architecturally available space: motifs that contain their own expansive energy, that launch or project forms centrifugally. It is art in motion, a pulsating art, an art that moves outward and away from the center, that somehow breaks through its own borders.19

If in his grief Jefferson continually exiled himself from Monticello and launched himself into compulsive exploratory motion, such violently restless mourning may have been a pursuit of encounter rather than of exhaustion, a desire to go out and rub consciousness against the rough surface of a real world glimpsed through the cracks in a broken illusion. It would prove stylistically awkward to weave in references to loss and mourning throughout the original essay, so I will remark here, and hope that my reader will keep it in mind, that Jefferson has come to me to seem to be a writer who found an opportunity in mourning—an encounter with a reality that was at once odd and intimate. Exposure isn’t always, or isn’t always only, something one suffers from. The problem underlying both Ferguson’s and Franklin’s arguments is that, though they argue with Peterson’s position, they accept his premise that to discover contradiction is also to discover a disunified and incoherent Jefferson. They conceive only of an either/or, of a Jefferson forced to choose between the chaos of the real and the insular solacing/stifling enclave of form and clarity. However, disunity is not the only alternative to the homogeneous unity of induction: there is also the option implied in Heely’s aesthetic, the “inseparable connection” of a contrastive or antithetical unity, of a mind simultaneously allied with the consolidating tendencies of a hypothesis and loyal to the interruptive power of the real—a unity based on resolute disposition rather than logically pure coherence. If the tendency toward hypothesis is selected as the sole vital principle of

   Jefferson’s Prospect thought, then the recalcitrant face of experience will necessarily come to seem a distressing and exterior danger (as happened between Creon and Antigone); if, however, the tendency toward hypothesis is thought to be vulnerable to a deranged excessiveness, to an exclusionary self­aggrandizement, then the experiential enigma will be an interior check to such derangement—a member of the total economy—rather than a danger from beyond the pale. The sort of mind put on display in Notes is neither a homogenization of experience and theory through induction nor a polarized disjunction: it is an antithetical unity, a regulating discrepancy, a separation of powers. Jefferson’s delineation of this intellectual disposition originates in the book’s rhetorical circumstances. François Barbé-Marbois, secretary to the French legation at Philadelphia (and later Napoleon’s agent in the sale of Louisiana), had compiled a list of queries concerning Virginia, presumably to investigate the object of his government’s investment. The queries were forwarded to Jefferson for reply, and he seems to have composed detailed and careful answers with an eye to asserting the gravity and maturity with which the Americans had opted for revolution. The choice for revolt, Jefferson implies, was not giddy, anarchic, or newfangled, and therefore the Revolution was not a bad investment, because the Americans had the fiber and dedication to persevere. The Revolution was not an innovation but instead a conspicuous political manifestation of a habit of revolution—in the broad sense of the word—that had been the regular and central characteristic of American life from the first settlements. The curiosity and mystery of a new world, together with a relative absence of reliable precedents, required minds that would not be upset when fundamental premises were falsified and that were acclimated to having their conceptions of order recalled and jeopardized by the real: much that had been assumed was put in question. This habit of revolution became the Revolution only because the factitious rigidity of the British government had begun to make noninductive conceptions of the proper nature of American life into binding laws that restrained the American character: the Revolution, therefore, was actually a restoration of the plasticity that was the American trait, a plasticity that had prepared Americans to fight the Revolution. Throughout the book, Jefferson presents the agility of a mind whose impulse to theoretical explanation—whether of the natural or social worlds—is stopped short by common experience so that Barbé-Marbois will know that the Revolution originates in the primary character of Americans and that it is being conducted by men who are conversant with the art of living at the juncture between the partly comprehended and the tentative. Jefferson’s implicit generalization concerning American character is moot, but his rhetoric is primarily demonstrative rather than expository:

Jefferson’s Prospect   

he offers his own mental activity in replying to the queries as a specimen, so whether or not his polemical contention about American character is valid, Notes is nonetheless a self-portrait that is much more revealing than his autobiography. The intelligence demonstrated in the book is guided by two methodological practices: a regular pairing of the attempt to explain with frequent notations of the limits of explanation; and the development of a repertoire of diverse, even inconsistent, explanatory paradigms. If the arrogance of a self-aggrandizing coherence is the primary danger—the instigating cause of the Revolution—then dissatisfaction with provisional and unaligned explanation is a lesser price. As Dumas Malone contends, Jefferson’s mistrust of consolidation was greater than his fear of disorder. For Jefferson, however, these were not the only options; in fact, he considered this polarity to have been produced by despotism, which claims that its orderliness is the only orderliness and thus convinces its critics that anarchy is their only choice. In America, Jefferson hoped, the habit of diligent attention to the enigma of experience would culminate in a form of government in which an awareness of the provisionality of political representation—its discrepancy from the population it aims to represent—would be structurally central.20 Nature has not arranged her productions on a direct line. They branch at every step, in every direction, and he who attempts to reduce them into departments, is left to do it by the lines of his own fancy.21 —Jefferson, to John Manners, 1814

Barbé-Marbois’s queries were arranged miscellaneously, probably in the order in which they happened to have come to mind. As Ferguson contends, Jefferson rearranged them into a series that is orderly and developmental: in the first half of the book demonstrating the habit of attention America requires, and in the second half explaining the form that habit assumes when it manifests itself politically. The first query to which Jefferson replies—“An exact description of the limits and boundaries of the state of Virginia?”—was third on BarbéMarbois’s list. This shift is appropriate, since it places the spatial definition of the object at hand at the beginning of the treatise and introduces Jefferson’s thematic treatment of discrepancy between representation and reality. According to Jefferson, Virginia is the area of land bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, on the north by a series of lines, and on the south by a line at 36˚ 30´. ­Virginia, therefore, does not exist except as a political construct, and the map is not a representation of something that is there. An obvious point, perhaps, but in Jefferson’s Virginia, unlike Barbé-Marbois’s France, the

   Jefferson’s Prospect sense of abstract boundary had not blended with the experience of the land, a discrepancy that would come up again in Jefferson’s rather meticulous attempt to describe the boundaries of Louisiana: geographical lines had not attained to fixity and familiarity, and some dislocation of self-identification would therefore have been a regular part of experiencing the land, no matter how familiar one was with the terrain. This situation would have emphasized what is always the case, the nonderivation of boundary from topography. Listing the various royal and colonial laws that have determined or constructed the Virginia of the moment, Jefferson is not gazing at the real but at the means by which the real is processed for political use. Inductive mapping, which suits boundary to physical features, may in fact be less efficient: “It is to be observed, that the nations of Indians distinguished their countries one from another by natural boundaries, such as a range of mountains, or streams of water. But as the heads of rivers frequently interlock, or approach near to each other, as those who live upon a stream claim the country watered by it, they often encroached on each other, and this is a constant source of war between the different nations” (N, 204–5). The Native Americans, that is, fail to realize that these supposedly natural boundaries are in fact abstractions—noninductive decisions about what is or is not part of one or another river—and the supposition that the boundaries originate in the terrain is thus only a source of confusion rather than of sure clarity. The arbitrariness of the Virginia boundaries is underscored by the fact that the “exact description” Barbé-Marbois requests is impossible because, as Jefferson notes, the south line has not been completely surveyed. Although a map of Virginia can be drawn, the map has not been installed in the real land, and at least a handful of Americans do not know whether they are Virginians or Carolinians. (At his most exasperated, William Byrd would disagree by drawing a different sort of natural boundary: he contended that the Carolinians had eaten so much pork that they had become pigs in feature and character, and thus the Virginians would recognize them whether the line had been surveyed or not.) 22 Jefferson was intimately familiar with the circumstances of the Carolina line. The latitude 36˚ 30´ had been established in 1724, but only after forty-four years of dispute: the 1665 charter for North Carolina, making the mistake of Native American political geography, had set the line running west from Weyanoke Creek, but by 1680 there was no longer general agreement as to which creek was Weyanoke Creek. According to Byrd it had “lost its name,” though we might say that the name had lost its creek, which had subsided back into the inchoate, like the place that had been known as Croatan. Once the boundary was settled at 36˚ 30´, the surveying remained, first by the expedition across the Great Dismal Swamp, with all

Jefferson’s Prospect   

its odious effluence, which was chronicled in Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line; and then in 1749 or so, by Joshua Fry and Jefferson’s father, Peter, whose map of Virginia is cited as the most reliable at the beginning of the reply to the fourth query. Dumas Malone reports that many years later Jefferson’s grandchildren were still recounting Peter Jefferson’s exploits as a surveyor,23 so we may assume that the treatment of political cartography in the reply to the first query has such lore behind it. Although this first reply is terse and to the point, Jefferson’s attention to the nonempirical incompleteness of mapping is involved with a theme that will resurface throughout the book—experience as an alienation from familiar or habitual modes of clarification. This sense of discrepancy was an inevitable part of the profession of surveying: no matter how precise the measurement taken with the chain or perambulating wheel, it is at best a crude approximation of adequate measurement; and the line of sight through the scope of the theodolite will always be—deliberately—an exclusion of all that the eye would normally gather.24 The invisible line carried through the landscape involves a willful occlusion of the real terrain and of the animal and human life that occupies the terrain, and it is thus not an inductive survey that derives the abstract from the particular. The line and the land are arrayed against one another. This is especially striking in Thomas Lewis’s journal of the Fairfax line surveying party (which included Peter Jefferson), where the spare notations of distance that express the expedition’s purpose are a strikingly discordant companion to Lewis’s affective chronicle of the land’s hostility to muscle and hope: “This Day Several of the Horses had like Been Killed, tumbling over Rocks and Precipices & ourselves often in the outmost Danger this tirable place was Calld Purgatory,” presumably because the wilderness would be only a temporary damnation. Mental orientation is imperiled: “It was a very Discouraging Circumstance, to find all the Waters Runing to the left hand or West ward and Directly Contrary to our Expectation So that Instead of Crossing the Branches of Potowmack we Crost those of Missisipia which made Us ConClude we were Considerably to the West Ward of the head Spring of Potowmack.” Lewis’s use of single proper nouns (“Potowmack,” “Missisipia”) is a virtual animistic personification of the land’s seeming animosity, which constantly upsets expectations and prevents the clear view of reason: “This River was Cald Styx from the Dismal appearance of the place being Sufficen to Strick terror in any human Creature ye Lorals Ivey & Spruce pine so Extremly thick in ye Swamp through which this River Runs that one cannot have the Least prospect Except they look upwards.” Lewis’s account is more plain and visceral than Byrd’s history (Byrd skirted the Great Dismal while his surveyors disappeared into its midst), but they concur in ­presenting

   Jefferson’s Prospect a demonic land that seems imbued with vile intention. The moments of clarity are modest and rare, and this makes them almost precious: “To make an Exelent Blew Take fine white Chaulk The Juce of Elder Berry full Ripe to which put a little alum Water & the Thing is Done.”25 Lewis’s parataxis is eloquent, revealing that the passage from land to map is not a summation but instead a discrepancy: clarity is a flight from rather than a summation of such experience, and representation is a reductive relief. Jefferson does not begin his book by invoking Robert Beverley’s pastoral haven, which exists in nearly pure readiness to conform to human plans, 26 but by touching on a mode of knowledge that is not true or grounded on the bewilderment of experience, which it must forget if it is to proceed. Such reduction is imperative, but not inductive; though not capricious or abusive, the construction of the line is an arbitrary and interested political activity rather than a disinterested sighting. If, as Malone contends, Jefferson “could not hold himself within the boundaries of Virginia” in his replies to Barbé-Marbois,27 it may be that he had concluded that the geographical limits set to the Virginia legislature’s authority were not ­pertinent to other modes of scrutiny. The land is a complex object that permits, perhaps even prompts, a repertoire of disparate surveys. In the second through sixth replies, which are concerned with water­ ways, mountains, and animal and vegetable life, Jefferson mixes the pastoral home described in Beverley’s history with the intractable terrains described in Lewis’s and Byrd’s accounts. There are two parallel tensions running throughout these replies: between the commercial exploitation of the land and the land’s resistance, and between the mental appropriation of the land and its resistance to comprehension. This is not a single measured appraisal but two voices, as it were—a planner, and an empirical observer who knows the limits and frailties of plans. The same ambiguity will recur in Jefferson’s survey of Louisiana: his statement to Congress concerning the expedition of Lewis and Clark emphasized the commercial appeal of the purchase, but according to Peterson, in his correspondence with confidantes he called such an appraisal almost “incidental,” stressing that this was to have been a “literary” journey that surveyed from disparate perspectives. Even the hardheaded utilitarianism of the “Description of Louisiana” that Jefferson communicated to Congress in 1803 was punctuated by discordant remarks on the Mississippi cliffs that “afford the appearance of a multitude of antique towers,” on the fate of the Acadians, and on the 180-mile-long salt mountain rumored to exist along the upper reaches of the Mississippi.28 This discrepancy within perspective repeats the tensions of Notes. On the one hand, there is a Jefferson bent over a map, a rough sketch of the west, dreaming a future: the development of short portages and canals, he predicts, will facilitate a complete and co-

Jefferson’s Prospect   

herent network of waterways, with goods going out down the Mississippi system and coming in through the Potomac, the Hudson, and the Great Lakes. But the expansive projective tone is repeatedly interrupted by the empirical voice, which attends to the gap between such a prospect and the land as it is: “Above the Chickamogga towns is a whirlpool called the Sucking-pot, which takes in trunks of trees or boats, and throws them out again half a mile below. It is avoided by keeping very close to the bank, on the south side” (N, 11). The most specific and descriptive passages complicate or even annul portions of the dream. These empirical intrusions are not occasions for dismay but instances of a countervailing principle that tempers the futurism: “There are other places at which, like some of the foregoing, the laws have said that there shall be towns; but nature has said that there shall not, and they remain unworthy of enumeration” (N, 109). The human use of the landscape is not a discovery or expression of its nature, as Beverley implied, but a recurrently tentative and partial reduction to commercial scale. Jefferson develops a related tension in his description of the task of comprehending the land—the activity of mental appropriation that must precede physical exploitation. Sites must be named, distances determined, and areas bounded. But Jefferson is careful to show that such forming acts are interested and constitutive: although they conform to physical features, they are not reflections of something extant. This activity is not primarily fanciful, at least not in any trivial sense, but neither is it a fruit of pure observation. Accordingly, Jefferson reveals the arbitrariness of some current renderings of the land: “At Fort Pitt, the river Ohio loses its name, branching into Monongahela and Alleghany” (N, 14). This “loss” is not a physical event but an efficacious fiction that reveals the discursiveness of naming. What is called the Missouri River, Jefferson contends, might more reasonably be called the Mississippi, since it is the largest of the three tributaries converging near what is now St. Louis. Here, the empirical observation—that the Missouri is the largest—does not inspire the theoretical principle—that the smaller of two rivers at a fork should be called a different river—which is set by considerations of cognitive efficiency rather than inductive judgment. In his reply to the fourth query, Jefferson argues that naming the eastern range the Appalachians is not apt, since the Apalachicola River drains only from the southern section of the whole range. He attributes the misnomer to “European geographers” who “extend the name northwardly,” and adds that inhabitants of the area never use the name Appalachians (N, 18). Here a local, empirical consciousness is set next to the deracinated factitiousness of Europe, but not because it is inductive. Again, the principle—that naming should not proceed by way of metonymy—is produced by the necessity of efficient self-orientation,

   Jefferson’s Prospect not by passive observation of the terrain. The names of the Missouri and of the Appalachians are less expeditious, not less true or adequate, than Jefferson’s alternatives. Insofar as these are inductions, they are judgments about what Americans must do to get on with their business, not summations of the physical object, which remains in a relation of disparity with that business. At this point, modern pragmatism, which owes a great deal to Franklinian and Jeffersonian thought, might attempt to close the discussion with the claim that the question of the true is a chimera and that there are always only ontically arbitrary contextual communities that evaluate for efficiency in accord with their constituting principles. Although Jefferson might concede this, he would be interested in going further by exploring what it is about the branching complexity of the objects with which human knowledge concerns itself that prevents “reduc[ing] into departments,” that provides a site for the aggregate of communities and projects, and that instigates unrest or discontent with prevailing representations, thereby provoking the structured conflict of communities that is society in its historical dimension. Jefferson acknowledges the productivity and soundness of the impulse toward self-validating canons of appraisal, but he pairs this acknowledgment with an attention to the plurality and mystery that is the “nature” of objects of knowledge—the two principles bound together, in a single, dynamic, and thoroughly historical intelligence. To this end, Notes is as much a self-critique as an experiential criticism of others: the tendency to a “power of eloquence” that “takes any hypothesis whatever, or its reverse, and furnishes explanations equally specious and persuasive” (N, 275) is a peril to thought in general, like the vices Polybius believed to lurk in all forms of government, rather than merely a conscious and deliberate prevarication used by clerics, ministers, and despots to gull a prerational citizenry. Jefferson distinguishes himself from the thinkers of whom he disapproves, therefore, not on the ground that his hypotheses originate in the light of day, or that he is free of self-interest, but by contrasting a kind of thought enclosed in the satisfaction of its feeling of adequacy with a kind of thought that is vigilant and concessive with respect to its sincerest conclusions. It might also be argued that Jefferson’s attention to bounding, naming, and other such forms of orientation cannot be used as an argument with induction because the theory of induction did not succumb to cratylic fallacies in eighteenth-century thought. In the third book of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, for example, Locke contends that abstract terms can be traced back to perceptual terms (spirit/breath) but adds that both orders of words are “perfect arbitrary impositions.” Induction applies to rational relations, primarily causality and categorization, rather than to

Jefferson’s Prospect   

modes of representation such as naming or surveying. But the important consideration is the amount of space Jefferson allocates to such noninductive modes of representation in the first half of Notes. This will be clear when the first half is compared with the French memoranda or even with the “Description of Louisiana,” in which the utilitarian survey of soil, terrain, and technique proceeds to the virtual exclusion of the other kinds of mental appropriation. For the American mind delineated in the first half of Notes, however, the discovery of causal relations or of sufficient categories is only part of a diverse cognitive repertoire, and the other members, such as naming or surveying, are characterized by their discrepancy from the object rather than by the adequate prospect that discovers the object’s rational crux. The most prominent of these companions to logical explanation, perhaps, is a kind of description that Jefferson’s readers would have considered literary because it is concerned with affective response and because it calls attention to the relativity and personality of the point of view. Before objecting to the naming of the Appalachians, for example, Jefferson describes them: “To the south-west, as the tract of country between the sea-coast and the Mississippi becomes narrower, the mountains converge into a single ridge, which, as it approaches the Gulph of Mexico, and gives rise to some of the waters of the Gulph, and particularly to a river called the Apalachicola, probably from the Apalachies, an Indian nation formerly residing on it” (N, 18). The spatial array of mountains is temporalized (becomes, converges, approaches, gives rise to), in the form of a heuristic narrative: suspense builds to climax and then relaxes or tapers off. But this is, of course, not an induction but a contingent and relative product of an inclination to compose imaginatively. Spatial synchrony is converted to sequence, the direction from north to south is chosen, and the relation of width to distance from the northern commencement is selected as the salient attribute of the moments in the sequence. Although the narrative conforms to facts in its details, and although it facilitates envisioning the mountain range, its principles do not arise from empirical observation. The narrative of the Appalachians is more plainly noninductive than the discussions of bounding and naming because its arbitrariness is personal rather than social. I think that this is an intentional effect, because in two related passages—the descriptions of the Natural Bridge and of the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge—Jefferson presents different vantages onto the site, each prospect producing its own effect. These passages have been amply examined by literary critics, so I will report only the common conclusion, which seems to me to be valid: ­Jefferson calls attention to the physical position of the observers—from the top of the bridge or looking up at it, gazing from the breach in the

   Jefferson’s Prospect ridge toward the mountains or toward the sea—and demonstrates the variations in response—vertigo and headache or admiration, sublime awe or pacified contentment.29 Garry Wills has attempted to discourage such analysis by claiming that Jefferson was merely miming commonplaces of landscape description in these passages.30 But Notes is only sporadically, or occasionally, conventional, so we may assume that these are conventions whose implications Jefferson had realized and judged useful at those points in the overall work of composition. Rather than rote imitations, these sentimental descriptions are highlightings of the book’s crucial disposition. Sentimental description is not chosen because Jefferson is unthinkingly imitative, nor is it chosen because it is somehow more adequate to reality than rational thought; on the contrary, sentimental description, by emphasizing the relativity and the relationality of the prospect, makes the general condition of knowledge open and explicit. The proliferation of vantages onto the Natural Bridge and the Potomac breach exposes the reductiveness of each single gaze and concedes the object’s elusive excess over and above the gazes brought to bear on it. The Natural Bridge and the Potomac breach are each a possibility of many surveys, not a foundation stone for the adequate view that triumphs over the obscurantism of its competitors. Jefferson’s notes in margin and appendix, for example, replace sentimental perspectivism as a whole with a skew prospect, analogy, by intimating a likeness between the American Revolution and the geographical cataclysms that resulted in the bridge and the gap. When Jefferson does venture into the area of knowledge where induction would be in order, he is most frequently not inductive. Contrasting Notes with the French memoranda is once again illuminating, because it reveals how seldom Jefferson does advance from experience to confident rational representation in the former work. Instead, he spends a great deal of time describing phenomena whose singularity baffles both causal explanation and abstract categorization, such as a hot spring, bituminous wells, shells on the mountaintops, an albino African American, looming, the Natural Bridge, and so on. In such passages, Jefferson does insist on empirical observation—“but when we appeal to experience we are not to rest satisfied with a single fact” (N, 48)—but in such a way as to demonstrate the enigma, prodigiousness, and incommensurability of the thing experienced. The primary function of his appeal to experience is not to justify his own theories but to falsify others’, notably (but not exclusively) those of the Comte de Buffon, who, according to Jefferson, based his clarities on a shortage of fact. When Jefferson advances from such insufficient and nonempirical conclusions to the more likely substitutes he proposes, his tone is tentative and provisional, emphatic with a sense of its own limit, rather than victorious. With Popper, he might say that these theories are

Jefferson’s Prospect   

not yet falsified rather than true: “It is said there is a current in [the natural well] tending sensibly downwards. If this be true, it probably feeds some fountain, of which it is the natural reservoir, distinguished from others, like that of Madison’s cave, by being accessible. It is used with a bucket and windlass as an ordinary well” (N, 37–38). Here, Jefferson distinguishes between experience and utilitarian pragmatism, which, finding a source of water, is simply indifferent to the mystery of the well, which is real but which is irrelevant to pragmatic considerations. Both utilitarian pragmatism and abstract explanation are opposed by the well as singular fact: Jefferson’s intelligence, moving past the self-absorption of use, is also wary of inductive complacency. To this end, admitting hesitation or confusion is a sign of vigor, not defeat. In replying to Buffon’s thesis that the diminishment of species in America is a function of poorer soil, Jefferson offers evidence disputing the claim of diminishment, but he abstains from causal assertion: “The truth is, that a pigmy and a Patagonian, a mouse and a mammoth, derive their dimensions from the same nutritive juices. The difference of increment depends on circumstances unsearchable to beings with our capacities” (N, 47). And refuting Buffon’s second thesis, that the diminishment is due to moisture conditions, Jefferson again uses empiricism to falsify but not to replace the erroneous explanation: “The hypothesis, after this supposition, proceeds to another; that moisture is unfriendly to animal growth. The truth of this is inscrutable to us by reasonings a priori. Nature has hidden from us modus agendi. Our only appeal on such questions is to experience; and I think experience is against the supposition” (N, 48). Experience controverts such deduction but does not present a suitably satisfying induction; Jefferson differs from Buffon in his cognizance of the limit that experience sets to his power to explain. He avoids Buffon’s error, in the large sense, as well as Buffon’s errors. Jefferson’s concessions of ignorance do not always represent it as the intractable conditions of “beings with our capacities.” After distinguishing various explanations for the presence of the fossils of seashells on mountaintops, including both the Bible’s and Voltaire’s theories, Jefferson asserts that “there is a wonder somewhere” and suggests that “we must be contented to acknowledge, that this great phenomenon is as yet unsolved” (N, 33). This reference to the future—“as yet”—is an expression of personal hope that knowledge will advance to a point where true inductions are commonplace. At the end of his reply to the sixth query, Jefferson identifies this hypothetical science of the future with America: replying to the Abbé Raynal’s contention that America has not produced “one able mathematician, one man of genius in a singular art or a single ­science,” Jefferson cites George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and ­David ­Rittenhouse. These men do not demonstrate that American ­science has arrived, however: “As

   Jefferson’s Prospect in philosophy and war, so in government, in oratory, in painting, in the plastic art, we might show that America has already given hopeful proofs of genius” (N, 64–65). The word proofs is deceptive here, because these are intimations or foreshadowings. Jefferson is asking us to overlook the preponderant evidence, to overlook experience, in order to believe that the exception is a prolepsis of what will be the case. American genius does not yet exist, except perhaps in a promissory state, the raw material or climate of general libertarian sentiment that will allow genius to occur when its native time has come: “The spirit in which [Britain] wages war, is the only sample before our eyes, and that does not seem the legitimate offspring either of science or of civilization. The sun of her glory is fast descending to the horizon. Her philosophy has crossed the channel, her freedom the Atlantic, and herself seems passing to the awful dissolution whose issue is not given to human foresight to scan” (N, 65). The compliment to France, given the quarrel Jefferson has been conducting with Buffon and Raynal, may be taken as a curtsy to Barbé-Marbois, because it jars with the central metaphor: the setting English sun does not rise on the French horizon. The real tenor of this passage is the application to America of the solarphylogenetic topos of the translatio studii, of the westward movement of cultural essence, which permits Jefferson to discard present circumstances in favor of his hope that the democratic gemütlichkeit of the Americans is a dawn or childhood of an eminent American future. The science of the future, which will attain to inductive adequacy, will be American. Patriotic hope, not disinterested observation, directs Jefferson to gaze at his nation through the lens of the translatio studii. Jefferson’s theoretical forecast of the future of inductive theory is itself not an induction but an imaginative prospect, like the navigational network, and it is thus disparate from what experience says is currently the case: “Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong” (N, 33). Confronted with the array of enigma that is American nature, Jefferson cannot claim sufficient experiential knowledge. American philosophy is not something achieved but a desideratum, a trajectory of history posited by Jefferson’s hope with the aid of the idea of the translatio studii but restrained by experience. The forecast, therefore, does not replace his assertion that the present condition of knowledge requires tentativeness and an abiding attention to the discrepancy between explanation and fact. Instead, the hopeful forecast and the diagnosis of the present exist side by side in Notes, in dialogue, like the Head and the Heart. This is particularly clear in Jefferson’s ­extended discussions of what he takes to be the cultural underdevelopment of the Native Americans and the African Americans. Any evaluation of Jefferson’s opinions on these questions ought to be accompanied by an

Jefferson’s Prospect   

understanding that his statements of opinion include a recognition on his part of the influence of bias in their formation: Jefferson candidly acknowledges that the distinction that he draws between the two groups is less a conclusion drawn from disinterested observation than it is an eighteenthcentury Virginian’s choice to apply different explanatory paradigms, and that the choice of paradigm directs the selection and representation of evidence, rather than vice versa. The vagaries and vicissitudes of Jefferson’s personal encounters with members of the two groups, together with the degree of his emotional identification with them, may have summoned the paradigm he selects in each case, but both paradigms originate outside his experience of the subject of analysis, and they are thus no more inductions than are the narrative of the Appalachians, the name of the Missouri, or the headache caused by scaling the Natural Bridge. The Native Americans are viewed through a scheme of the progressive evolution of human societies, which leads him to attribute their underdevelopment to the present moment of their society; but the African Americans are classified in terms of the static mathesis of eighteenth-­century natural history, which attributes their underdevelopment to racial essence. The distinction between the two groups derives from a decision by authorial fiat concerning whether each group has a meaningful future, a decision that precedes the evidence it will edit, collate, and organize. A. O. Lovejoy and Michel Foucault argued that the last years of the eighteenth century saw a transition, or epistemic rupture, in European thought in which the prevailing classification of entities in terms of a static, simultaneous, and replete array was replaced by classification in terms of a successive, historical order. 31 According to Hayden White, this transition became a focal dilemma for the thinkers of the late Enlightenment,32 a dilemma that reached its most rigorous articulation in Immanuel Kant’s third critique. However, inconsistency between paradigms, which insinuates that both competitors are interested constructs rather than disinterested perceptions, will develop into dilemma only if it is demanded that one of the competitors should discredit the other by demonstrating its own sufficiency. Jefferson employs both paradigms in Notes, but as useful choices from a repertoire of available intellectual tools. For Kant, aesthetic judgment mediates between freedom and mechanism by allowing us to feel as if we possessed the object; Jefferson’s negative pragmatism, forswearing such full possession, even in the aesthetic realm, resigns adequacy and consistency in favor of the toolbox. In his concessions of ignorance, for example, he attributes the shortcomings of theory to the present state of a progressing science (“this great phenomenon is as yet unsolved”) and to the human place in a static order of being (“the difference of increment depends on circumstances unsearchable to beings with our capacities”). When he

   Jefferson’s Prospect criticizes Britain’s brutality, taking it as a sign of national degeneration, his premise is that Britain is a temporal rather than a static entity. But when he mentions the mastodon bones found near the Ohio River and attempts to account for the absence of mastodons, he is not willing to consider extinction: “It may be asked, why I insert the mammoth, as if it still existed? I ask in return, why should I omit it, as if it did not ­exist? Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken” (N, 53–54). If there are no mammoths, he concludes, the reason is that they have not yet been found, but there is no doubt that they do inhabit the void of the New World terra incognita. Neither the forecasted British future nor the living mammoth is an induction from observation: both are speculations concerning what is absent, speculations shaped by the noninductive choice of a paradigm. Britain declines from its innate tendency toward senility, but the mammoth is sempiternal: the mode of a life span, Jefferson decides, applies to a society but not a species. The difference between society and species is clear with respect to Britain and the mammoth, but it is not clear with respect to the present conditions of the Native Americans and the African Americans, which Jefferson treats as potentially related phenomena. Jefferson’s defense of the Native Americans begins as a reply to Buffon, who attempted to derive their underdevelopment from their physical nature. If he concedes this approach, Jefferson realizes, the argument is lost, because the Native Americans’ present state becomes a direct expression of an immutable physical fact. Consequently, he rebuffs the choice of natural history, citing instead the “want and hazard” that discourage development among “every barbarous people.” In this way, Jefferson can concede Buffon’s point concerning underdevelopment while reducing it from an essential trait to an accident of historical circumstance. At the same time, the choice of an evolutionary paradigm justifies an attention to rare or occasional specimens of art among the Native Americans, such as Chief Logan’s speech, because the paradigm allows these to be considered premonitions. Jefferson’s procedure in his discussion of the African Americans is the reverse of this. His comments on what he calls their inferiority refer for the most part to the African Americans’ nature as a species in the economy of nature, the strategy he rejected in Buffon’s theory of the Native Americans. Consequently, whereas his discussions of the Native Americans emphasized their specimens of art as intimations, his discussions of apparently similar exceptions to the prevailing underdevelopment among the African Americans display a harsh, vehement inclination to consider such exceptions to be completely without importance. The African Americans’ underdevelopment is a direct expression of their racial station in the order of

Jefferson’s Prospect   

being, so exceptions imply nothing: the poetry of Phillis Wheatley is no more than a nonaesthetic indulgence of childish religiosity, and the letters of Ignatius Sancho are an aggregate of incoherent sentiment. Jefferson even speculates that Sancho’s writings, bad as he considers them to be, have been improved by white hands. This is a surprising accusation, because when Jefferson was later accused of having ghostwritten Logan’s speech, he supplied, in an appendix to Notes, documents testifying that Logan did make such a speech, but he also concedes that the speech had been passed through several hands and translated before it reached him, a significant concession, because he includes the speech not only for its noble clarity but for its rhetorical ingenuity and its use of parallelism, variation within parallelism, apposition, grammatical inversion, trope, and metrical sophistication. The suspicion he directs toward Sancho’s writing is completely missing from his discussion of the English text of Logan’s speech, and it is replaced by a possibly unrealistic credulity. Point for point, Jefferson’s choice to differentiate by applying different paradigms results in incongruous methods of inquiry and representation, even at the elementary level of deciding what does and does not constitute significant evidence. And the choice, Jefferson reveals, is interested, rather than inductive. Buffon’s description of the Native Americans, especially when combined with Raynal’s derogatory remarks, has a hidden agenda: it is not really an appeal to an economy of nature at all but an environmentalist argument that the New World drains vitality and commences atrophy. This disguised premise implies a degenerative future for the Anglo-Americans, or so Jefferson suspects, though private anxieties may be responsible for the suspicion. Jefferson’s defense of the Native Americans, in other words, is pervaded by the question of his own self-image as a leading member of a fledgling nation embarking onto history; though he uses empirical evidence to challenge Buffon and Raynal, his stake, pride, is no less personal than theirs. But his is not so carefully masked: the difference between Jefferson and Buffon or Raynal is that he leaves explicit the interest that is disguised by their pretense to purified theory. On the other side, Jefferson’s strongly pejorative remarks about the ­A frican Americans express his determination to avoid any contaminating association between them and his self-image, even though he had implied similarities between slavery and monarchical oppression in the Declaration of Independence draft. Although I disagree with Fawn ­Brodie’s assumption that the complexities of Jefferson’s acts and attitudes toward the African Americans can be meticulously charted, I agree with her general premise that the African Americans played a profound part in his consciousness: the fact that his first memory was of being carried on horseback by a slave suggests that his later attitudes were rooted in the obscurity

   Jefferson’s Prospect of his elemental emotional life, in a crucial ambiguity of mastery and dependence.33 Jefferson’s remarks on African Americans in Notes are therefore less interesting as an intellectual position, perhaps, than as a register of how deeply and confusingly Southern consciousness was permeated by the vexation of the slave, by a tenuous sovereignty, and by a desire for self-exoneration. Jefferson himself makes a somewhat similar point in his remarks concerning the devious and nearly imperceptible influence of lordship and slavery on those who play such roles. postscript (2006). The controversy concerning Jefferson’s African American descendants was not out in the open when I wrote this essay (1985), though Fawn Brodie had written speculatively about Jefferson and Sally Hemings in Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) 34. Rather than weave what we now know the facts to have been into my original text, I’ll say here that knowing how fully Jefferson played the part of slave owner renders his argument concerning the intellectual inferiority of the African Americans still harder to bear and deepens the pathos of his remark on the seed of corruption that slavery plants in the slave owner. I hope my reader will consider those parts of my essay where I discuss Jefferson’s views on race and slavery italicized, or underlined, by time and what it has brought to light. The relationship between Jefferson and Hemings is not thought to have begun at the time that Jefferson was writing Notes. Whatever the deeply rooted interest at work in his pejorative remarks, however, Jefferson diligently concedes that his theoretical observations on the nature of the African Americans are no more than tentative and provisional, as if he were well aware of the possible warping bias. At the beginning of his eighteenth reply, concerning the manners of the Virginians, Jefferson conceded that custom and prejudice can be so ingrained as to seem natural, and thus can be undetectable as custom or prejudice: “It is difficult to determine on the standard by which the manners of a nation may be tried, whether catholic or particular. It is more difficult for a native to bring to that standard the manners of his own nation, familiarized to him by habit” (N, 162). His prime example is the Virginian boy’s inculcation with the habit of dominance over the human beings his father owns: “Man is an imitative animal” (N, 162). When he begins in this way to consider that a Virginian slave owner’s view of his slaves may have been produced by history and culture rather than by indifferent objective judgment, his explanation of the difference between the races alters

Jefferson’s Prospect   

significantly. Rather than appeal to natural history, he speculates that the characteristics of both Anglo-Americans and African Americans are generated by the institution of slavery, and he even asserts that slavery causes the African American “to lock up the faculties of his nature” (N, 163). The eighteenth reply does not dispel the racism of the fourteenth, but it does pair the Jefferson who voices historically particular attitudes with the Jefferson who suspects that his attitudes are historically determined rather than inductive. This will not be enough for those who consider themselves to be free of historically determined prejudices, but it is preferable to racism posing as objective science. No matter that multiple sightings are taken, there is always the possibility of an elusive, untreated excess: To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the anatomical knife, to optical glasses, to analysis by fire or solvents. How much more then where it is a faculty, not a substance, we are examining: where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of its existence are various and variously combined; where the effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me add too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. (N, 143)

The gruesome implications of this passage should not be minimized: on the next page, Jefferson transcribes the Virginia penal code without protesting that dissection after hanging is disproportionate penalty for petty treason. In the previous passage, his sense of the magnitude of consequences and of the possibility of error is not paired with any awareness that classification on a scale of beings might be an inappropriate cognitive mode. Nevertheless, he does concede that this object of analysis, like nature in the letter to Manners, may be complex beyond the capacity of inductive attention, and his assertion is consequently circumspect: “I advance it therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both body and mind” (N, 143). Here, retaining his overall suspicion, Jefferson almost lets go of the paradigm that brought him to it. At other points in the book, natural history does give way to other paradigms, such as aesthetics—his distaste for their skin’s tone (it is interesting to recall the albino at this point), environmental psychology—the degrading influence of the institution of slavery, and theology—the belief that the judgment of God will rectify the problem if the Americans do not. Jefferson’s candid admission of a personal stake in his discussions of the Native Americans and of the tentativeness in his discussions of the African Americans makes it unwise to conclude wholeheartedly with John Chester

   Jefferson’s Prospect Miller that “Jefferson regarded himself as an impartial, wholly objective observer who viewed ‘the gradations in the races of animals with the eye of philosophy’ ” when he discussed ethnic differences.35 Although he does not refrain from the explanations that seem to him the most likely and suitable, Jefferson also suspects subtle influences on his own prospect and refrains from claiming the authority of adequate induction. His maintenance of an antithetical unity between theorization and attention to the complex real object demonstrates a mind conscious of itself as a historically specific set of attitudes and purposes rather than a pure gaze. Jefferson provides an emblem of the activity of this sort of consciousness in his account of a visit to a Native American burial mound. Such barrows, Jefferson admits, are possible exceptions to his assertion that there are no monuments or signs of labor “on the large scale” among the Native Americans. That the mounds are for burial is indisputable, but Jefferson wonders how so many corpses came to be in one place. He enumerates various hypotheses he has heard, such as that the mounds are on battle sites; that bodies were exhumed, collected, and reburied; or that the bodies were buried one at a time by tunneling. He decides to see for himself: “There being one of these in my neighborhood, I wished to satisfy myself whether any, and which of these opinions were just.” He begins with random sampling: “I first dug superficially in several parts of it, and came to collections of human bones, at different depths, from six inches to three feet below the surface. These were lying together in the utmost confusion, some vertical, some oblique, some horizontal, and directed to every point of the compass, entangled and held together in clusters by the earth” (N, 98). This charnel amalgam yields little to support a theory, though the presence of infants’ skeletons may discredit the theory of a battle site. So he tries another slice: “I proceeded then to make a perpendicular cut through the body of the barrow, that I might examine its internal structure. This passed about three feet from its centre, and was opened to the former surface of the earth, and was wide enough for a man to walk through and examine its sides” (N, 99). He finds successive strata of bones separated by layers of stone and dirt. Through this archaeological disembowelment, Jefferson (like Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques) discovered a spatialization of the procedure of time: he mentally appropriates a history in a single gaze. But this transcendent and rather cold view is interrupted by another vantage, a mystery that obliquely crosses Jefferson’s clarity: “But on whatever occasion they have been made, they are of considerable notoriety among the Indians, for a party passing, about thirty years ago, through the parts of the country where this barrow is, went through the woods directly to it, without any instructions or inquiry, and having staid about

Jefferson’s Prospect   

it for some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow, they returned to the high road, which they had left about a half dozen miles to pay this visit, and pursued their journey” (N, 100). As in the reference to the last hermit in the French memoranda, the analysis is succeeded by something skew, diverse from what the analysis can render clear, some ulterior passion. The privacy and silence of intuition and sorrow are not dismissed as superstitious, irrational, or obtuse, but rather the intuition and the sorrow are adjacent to the gazing Jefferson, cutting the barrow at a different angle; the barrow itself is the involuted possibility of both the analytical gaze and this other, this peaceable and still enigma that eludes Jefferson’s faculties but qualifies for his respect, and perhaps for his interest, sorrow drawn to another sorrow. The perception of the mind being most aptly explained by words relating to the sight, we shall best understand what is meant by clear and obscure in our ideas, by reflecting on what we call clear and obscure in the objects of sight. Light being that which discovers to us visible objects, we give the name of obscure to that which is not placed in a light sufficient to discover minutely to us the figure and colours which are observable in it, and which, in a better light, would be discernible. In like manner, our simple ideas are clear, when they are such as objects themselves from whence they were taken did or might, in a wellordered sensation or perception, present them. —John Locke, “Of Clear and Obscure, Distinct and Confused Ideas,” Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Jefferson makes his way from the first half of the book to the second, which is concerned with Virginian society, government, and political history, with the aid of the analogy that is central to Locke’s thought—­political thought that fails to attend to the average life of the population it claims to represent is similar to abstract logical explanations that neglect the simple perceptions in which they originate. Republicanism is empirical government. Jefferson calls government the “head” of the political body, and as with individual heads such as Buffon’s or Raynal’s, he locates error in representations that stray from the real in order to consolidate and aggrandize factitious schemes that aim to “fascinate the eyes of the people.”36 Neither Locke nor Jefferson, however, considers this to be merely a happy illustrative analogy. For Locke, factitious representations of simple perception are the primary source of social disagreement, and disinterested attention to the simple and plain will eventuate in consensus as well as in clear individual minds: so long as there is “opiniatrety,” “zealous votaries to bulls

   Jefferson’s Prospect and monkeys” will contest their differences in blood rather than accept the universal resolution of common reason.37 At many points in his writings, Jefferson affirms the Lockean idea that government should be a disinterested inductive reflection of the will of the governed. Writing to Henry Lee in 1825, he claims that the Declaration of Independence had been just such a digest: “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”38 The good governor is a personification, or pipe, through which the population speaks itself: “Cast your eye over America. Who are the men of most learning, of most eloquence, most beloved by their countrymen and most trusted and promoted by them? They are those who have been educated among them, and whose manners, morals, and habits, are perfectly homogeneous with those of the country.”39 This attraction to homogeneous government appears in Notes as the objective virtue of the agrarian citizen: The poor unable to support themselves, are maintained by an assessment on the titheable persons in their parish. This assessment is levied and administered by twelve persons in each parish, called vestrymen, originally chosen by the housekeepers of the parish, but afterwards filling vacancies in their own body by their choice. These are usually the most discreet farmers, so distributed through their parish, that every part of it may be under the immediate eye of some one of them. They are well acquainted with the details and economy of private life, and they find immediate inducements to execute their charge well, in their philanthropy, in their approbation of their neighbors, and the distinction which that gives them. (N, 133)

“The immediate eye” knows the “details and economy of private life,” and its conclusions are not warped by bias, because its only passions are civic rather than self-interested. The satisfaction the vestrymen might take in fidelity to ethical principles and in just renown does not detract from the objectivity of the prospect: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth” (N, 164–65). Good government will be a pyramid built firmly on this ground: “It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm by himself, by placing everyone under what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.” 40 The relation of man to farm is the elementary unit of republicanism, as the simple perceptions are the elementary

Jefferson’s Prospect   

units of the clear Lockean mind. The combination of such immediate local experience with an austere and restrained abstracting faculty promises inductive government, a homogeneous unity of life and its political representation. But the derivation of Jeffersonian republicanism from its Lockean predecessor is problematic, as are the derivations of Jeffersonian empiricism and pragmatism from their Lockean predecessors. The unusually expansive euphoria of the passage celebrating the agrarian fire renders its place in Notes somewhat insular, like the visions of the navigational network and of the philosophical America of the future. This is a wishful prospect, a personal desideratum of Thomas Jefferson, and therefore subject to recall by experienced fact. When Jefferson shifts his gaze from the America he hopes will be to the experienced America, he detects contaminations of (or divergences from) the agrarian virtue that was to have been the single ground of representation: manufacture, which would sever the unity of labor and planning by locating the two functions in separate persons; 41 urbanization, which would divide man from the physical terrain; immigration, which would bring in licentious multitudes untutored by the tradition of reputable political participation; international commerce, which might lure the nation into war; and crisis, which might provoke a panicky nation to surrender itself to those who promise order. This last exigency hovers in the background of a great deal of the second half of the book, because the Virginia Assembly, meeting at Staunton in June 1781, exasperated with the inefficiency of the revolutionary government, had considered electing a dictator, perhaps with the prompting of Patrick Henry. After such developments, which would adulterate and pluralize the agrarian base, inductive government would not proceed from the farmer’s “temperate liberty” (N, 85), which is the “peculiar deposit” or “focus” of virtue, but from passions Jefferson considers spurious, meretricious, weak, selfish, or anarchic. Although he dreams of an agrarian republic, experience teaches him that the dream is only that and provokes him to look for a kind of government that would be neither dictatorial nor reduced to a “heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass” by pure induction from the passion of the moment. Faced with this more Hobbesian pessimism, Jefferson attempts to represent all of these adulterating eventualities as intrusions from the outside, as if he wanted to put American virtue, like the mastodon, on a static classificatory table where change results from exterior force or catastrophe rather than from some innate principle of degradation. Consequently, the Jefferson who longs to maintain a reputably inductive republicanism proposes various restrictions and quarantines, for example, on immigration and commerce, and commences his lifelong dedication to education in citizenship.

   Jefferson’s Prospect The Staunton Assembly, however, demonstrates to Jefferson that such measures may not prove sufficient, and his later writings are filled with anticipations of the sun setting over agrarian republican America: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” 42 As declensions from temperate agrarian liberty multiply, the fortunes of republicanism will be reduced. This melancholy Jefferson is still tied to the dream, because he sees the pluralization and stratification of consensus as a declension, and his pessimism may underlie his inquiry into the origins of languages in search of a primitive uniformity before difference began (N, 100–101). But at other moments Jefferson realizes that his agrarian commitment is itself a historically determined bias, and this complicates his desire to make patrician distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate inductions from the popular mind. In his second treatise, Locke’s only recourse in such a predicament is the “appeal to heaven.” Locke tolerates this vagueness because he assumes throughout the treatise that there is a primary consensual human community that agrees on the conclusions of natural reason—such as that men, being “abler and stronger,” should “rule” women (though without the power of life and death), or that modern property relations can be derived from the natural formula of person plus land plus work. Because he takes this consensus for granted, Locke considers the despot who pursues policies that are divergent from the popular will to be the greatest danger. Once such manifest heteronomy is curtailed, government will be pure “image, phantom, or representative of the commonwealth.” In such a republic, the separation of powers would be only an efficient distribution of functions overseen from a single adequate perspective.43 Benjamin Franklin, whose anticipation of an imminent diffusion of practical reason throughout the American population led him to oppose the separation of powers and the bicameral legislature as cumbersome superfluities, and Thomas Paine, who ridiculed separation of powers as a logical absurdity in Common Sense, may be taken as American culminations of the principles of Locke’s second treatise. Though Jefferson dreamed of an agrarian consensus, he came to concede the reality of a differential society that could not be reduced to a unanimity to be reflected in inductive government. In 1811, he contended that the efficiency required from the executive made an executive committee impossible, since disagreement was “the nature of man”; 44 and in 1813, he wrote that “it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all.”45 In such assertions, as in the letter to Manners, nature, in this case human nature, is a complex object that prevents the ascendancy of the single adequate view. A population, the object of government’s survey, is a heterogeneous and differential entity

Jefferson’s Prospect   

in a process of constant self-redistribution. This insight, together with his willingness to consider the presence of historically particular influences on his own reason, leads Jefferson to a kind of republicanism based on the structural prevention of apparently adequate prospects rather than on inductive mimesis that constructs a natural clarity it can claim to have found. Wise government abjures stipulating the true and concentrates instead on preventing particular notions of the true from controlling the field: Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature. Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there is danger that the larger men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. (N, 160)

The republicanism that seeks to forestall uniformity would be one in which the separation of powers would be more than an efficient distribution of function. It would be a “gradation of republics,” an amalgam of prospects in which “double deliberation” would “break up all cabals”: “The powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by others” (N, 120). To those who object that such an attempt to contain social difference by institutionalizing it within political representation is futile, Jefferson would reply that uncontainable social difference is generated in the first place by representation that insists on homogeneity. Because they develop from a recognition of this danger, the separation of powers and the guarantee of rights are not reflections but legislated boundaries to the self-consolidations and self-aggrandizements of political points of view, such as the movement in favor of an American dictator, which was not a clear violation of the popular will of the moment. To be sure, Jefferson argues, the Virginians who sought a dictator were swayed by a feeling of emergency, but again, who would distinguish spurious emotions from reasonable sentiments as a ground for political induction? Such questions temper Jefferson’s agrarianism with the Baron de Montesquieu’s pessimism: “In an extensive republic the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views; it is subordinate to exceptions, and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is more obvious, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses have less extent, and, of course, are less protected.”46 The discrete homogeneity of the agrarian locale cannot survive amalgamation into a vast frame; only a small group can have a distinct concept of itself as a real

   Jefferson’s Prospect entity and so ensure that its political representation is homogeneous with it. In larger groups, abstraction will necessarily adulterate: the sense of the whole will be no more than a diffuse gemütlichkeit, and private interest will be proportionately more able to foist itself on the population as a public reason. Jefferson agreed with Montesquieu: “I doubt if [direct republicanism] would be practicable beyond the extent of a New England township.” 47 In larger groups, the aggrandizement of power would not have the clear heteronomy Locke supposed it would. It might even be imperceptible to whoever pursues it: It is not enough that honest men are appointed judges. All know the influence of interest on the mind of man, and how unconsciously his judgment is warped by that influence. To this bias add that of the esprit de corps, of their peculiar maxim and creed, that it is the office of a good judge to enlarge his jurisdiction, and the absence of responsibility; and how can we expect impartial decision between the general government, of which they themselves are so eminent a part, and an individual state, from which they have nothing to hope or fear?48

Seeking to “consolidate” power under a single point of political view, the “corps of sappers and miners” may not even be aware that they are at odds with the general will—or they may not even be at odds with it at certain moments. The solution Jefferson proposes is an extension of the character he demonstrates in the first half of the book—which acknowledges that its representations are necessarily reductions of the enigmatic complexity of the object and that it functions most soundly when its impulse to explain is coupled with recurring attention to the discrepancy—to the manner of governing. The American habit of cognitive revolution that the British have compelled to become the Revolution can remain as a kind of regulated unrest in the post-Revolutionary state. Writing to François d’Ivernois in 1795, Jefferson found himself disagreeing with Montesquieu’s pessimism: “I suspect that the doctrine that small States alone are fitted to be republics will be exploded by experience, with some other brilliant fallacies accredited by Montesquieu and other political writers.” 49 The Spirit of Laws itself, as well as experience, might have furnished a reply to the pessimism concerning large states. Some four pages earlier than the passage just quoted, Montesquieu contends that the government of Crete escaped corruption not because the Cretans’ clear filial patriotism was reflected in government but because this patriotism issued in periodic tolerated insurrections against the principal magistrates.50 A recurring antithetical relationship between the population and its political representation can work as well as a homogeneous relation in small states. This conclusion is echoed in several rightly famous letters Jefferson wrote to James Madison, Ezra

Jefferson’s Prospect   

Stiles, and William S. Smith in 1786 and 1787, on the occasion of Shays’ Rebellion. Jefferson is conspicuously nonplussed by this turbulence in this republican utopia, contending that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” that “if the happiness of the mass of the people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then, or even of a little blood, it will be a precious purchase,” and that the “tree of liberty must be refreshened from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”51 To be sure, the frequent diminutives in these passages do betray background anxiety. But Jefferson is nevertheless noticeably calmer than most of his contemporaries on this issue, demonstrating his conclusion that an antithetical relation between the political object and the political representation can be a sign of vigor rather than of failure. Actual insurrection, however, is not the keystone of Jefferson’s politics. He felt that such violence was a proportionate product of the singleminded despotism of government: “The European governments have resisted reformation, until the people, seeing no other resource, undertake it themselves by force, their only weapon, and work it through blood, desolation, and long-continued anarchy.”52 Creonism culminates in a mutually exclusive antithesis rather than an antithetical unity. The solution, for Jefferson, was revolution institutionalized as the key structural principle of government, in the form of multiple deliberation that breaks up cabals. The tension between object and representation would be an unforgettable factor in all calculation. In the letter to d’Ivernois, for example, Jefferson contends that large republics will be the most successful, not because the general reason will be inductively reflected but because the multiplicity of prospects, strengthened by a mandatory separation of powers, will disable all “local egoisms.” The peculiar deposit and focus of such a republic, or amalgam of republics, would not be the virtue of the good citizen at the base of the pyramid but the mandatory exposure or falsification of spurious claims to personify American identity. Jefferson lauds agrarian virtue, but he does not depend upon it: his dream of adequate induction is present in Notes as a relativized prospect—as the desire of the Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, expressing his sentiments to Barbé-Marbois—rather than as a true sighting. This is proved by the fact that Jefferson’s political theory is not based primarily on restrictions of commerce or suffrage that would preserve agrarian domination but on devices he hoped would secure a permanent vital tension between theoretical assertions of the nature of the popular will and the conflictual, historical heterogeneity of a population. Political representation will perforce always be coupled with the concession that it is a provisional and reductive prospect onto the body it surveys. Such representation does not promise a faithful reappearance of the gist of

   Jefferson’s Prospect the citizen on the political stage but, instead, free argument between the stage and the world. The real citizen, like the burial mound, will be cut at diverse angles—as a member of a ward, as a member of a geographical region, as a member of a national population, as a subject of law, and as a mediator between law and experience. The prime political idea in Notes is not separation of powers, however, but the mandate that no legislature can pass an act transcending the power of subsequent legislatures (N, 122–25): no provisional representation of the population can promote itself above history and immunize itself against subsequent revision or recall. To fortify this position, Jefferson challenges “the magic supposed to be in the word constitution” (N, 124), the connotative implication that a legal constitution expresses the superhistorical essence of a people. Although in physics the word constitution may have that meaning, in legal affairs it is synonymous with ordinance, and a constitution is therefore amenable by the subsequent legislative intentions that history brings to the political stage. Political devices, like the opinions they are designed to circumscribe, are themselves not to be insulated against the impact of death’s annulments: But can [constitutions] be made unchangeable? Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession forever? I think not . . . The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which composed their bodies make part now of the bodies of other animals, vegetables, or minerals of a thousand forms . . . A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.53

The contemporary attempt to argue for either the obsolescence or the continuing utility of Jeffersonian opinions and devices, therefore, is a labor encouraged by Jefferson, who conceded that the inductive reason of the Enlightenment, like predecessor worldviews, is a product of particular circumstances rather than a procession into the universally human, and that it can therefore be binding as well as releasing. Even after the disparate republican cuts through the barrow of man have been made, there is the elusive remainder, like the lamentation, intuition, and mystery of the other visitors to the barrow; but the conclusion that other cuts remain to be made does not annul the Jeffersonian resolve, which pairs its convictions with the historical sense as Lukács defines it: “And the nature of history is precisely that every definition degenerates into an illusion: history is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the forms that shape the life of man.”54 Jefferson’s political prospect onto the population, like his scientific prospect onto the American landscape, is not announced as inductive but

Jefferson’s Prospect   

is instead marked by the acknowledgment of the recurring discrepancy. So, too, the view from Monticello: Having had occasion to mention the peculiar situation of Monticello for other purposes, I will just take notice that its elevation affords an opportunity of seeing a phenomenon which is rare at land, though frequent at sea. The seamen call it looming. Philosophy is as yet in the rear of the seamen, for so far from having accounted for it, she has not given it a name. Its principal effect is to make distant objects appear larger, in opposition to the general law of vision, by which they are diminished . . . I am little acquainted with the phenomenon as it shows itself at sea; but at Monticello it is familiar. There is a solitary mountain about forty miles off in the South, whose natural shape, as presented to view there, is a regular cone; but by the effect of looming, it sometimes subsides almost totally in the horizon; sometimes it arises more acute and more elevated; sometimes it is hemispherical; and sometimes its sides are perpendicular, its top flat, and as broad as its base. In short, it assumes at times the most whimsical shapes, and all these perhaps successively in the same morning. (N, 80–81)

Even without such meteorological interference, the object yields itself to the view from Monticello only in part: “Of prospect I have a rich profusion and offering itself at every point of the compass. Mountains distant & near, smooth & shaggy, single & in ridges, a little river hiding itself among the hills so as to shew in lagoons only.” Such reservation, however, is not distressing. The danger is the Head’s tendency toward a stale fixity, and the cure for this is a multiplication of views, like the succession of designs that governed the construction of Monticello during its long preparation, rather than the single pinnacle: “To prevent a satiety of this is the principal difficulty. It may be successively offered, & in different portions through vistas, or which will be better, between thickets so disposed as to serve as vistas, with the advantage of shifting scenes as you advance on your way.”55

 r 

Who Speaks (and Who Writes) in Walt Whitman’s Poems?

4

Why even speak of “I,” he dreams, which interests me almost not at all? —William Carlos Williams, Paterson

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”

the word I in Leaves of Grass seems to be taken up by two speakers: one timid, gentle, frequently disconsolate; the other large, all-inclusive, affirming. The division between these two voices and the fact that they occasionally address one another suggest that they are separate dramatic persons rather than one person of variable mood. This distinction within poetic voice corresponds by Whitman’s design to the opposition between particular or special interest and general representativeness that was the premier concern of American politics in Whitman’s time. The plurality of voice in Leaves of Grass should be taken as a deliberate image and exploration of the quandary of political division. Whitman’s variety of transcendentalism and the sense of urgent vo­ cation that accompanied it were “brought to a boil” by his reading of Emerson on what he called the Representative Man. In the concluding pages of “The Poet,” Emerson contended that America lacked its needed sequel to Plato, William Shakespeare, Emanuel Swedenborg, and so on and hence had heretofore failed spiritually to coalesce. George Washington had symbolized American social orderliness, but his austere probity was hardly a general trait; the Benjamin Franklin of the Autobiography (first published in English by William Temple Franklin in 1818), had

Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?    

transcended factionism and summed up the American character in what seemed a more affable and available model, but his universal representativeness, founded on ingenuity, thrift, and industry, must have seemed to lack the dense, fusing, spiritual quiddity that Emerson felt was necessary if nineteenth-century division were to be healed. Whitman took Emerson’s complaint to be an anticipation of Leaves of Grass, though Emerson may have been thinking of Bronson Alcott, and Whitman borrowed Emerson’s apothegmatic declarativeness, and his ­cadences, for the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Consequently, Whitman’s receipt of an admirer’s letter from Emerson after the first edition was issued got him excited enough to publish it as advertisement in the second, offering it to the reading public as Emerson’s nunc dimittis. From then on, until the 1870s at least, Whitman put himself up for Representative Man, a “poetic president.” He promised that as a poet, he would satisfy Emerson’s requirement by embodying and displaying an authentic common characteristic that would elude the blandness, prevarication, or shortsightedness that comes of being all things to all people, the malaise of the presidency in the antebellum period. He offered himself as the man who had found the secret, the man in whose person would be resolved all the particular characters of Americans. In him, the general would come into view, but not at the price of neglecting the diverse and particular lives of those so represented. This determination to reveal the general without eliding the particular explains Whitman’s interest in Hegel, in Democratic Vistas and elsewhere. Though he remained indifferent to the subtleties of Hegel’s careful descriptions of the logical, self-aware mind,1 Whitman did pay close attention to the view of contradiction that lies at the center of Hegel’s dialectic, in the word aufheben, which means both “to cancel” and “to preserve”; just so, in Whitman’s representativeness, the sharp edge of individuality among American isolates (or “sporades,” as he called them)—the drunks, the onanists, the wounded, the poor, the slaves, the wage-slaves, the selfpreoccupied, the avaricious, the inhibited, but also the president, socialites, sportsmen, everyone—would be annulled; at the same time, the native vigor of individuality would be distilled out and preserved to make the universal self firm fibered and real. Like Hegel, Whitman sought an infinity that was not a simple opposite to what is merely finite. This copresence of cancellation and preservation is the key to Whitman’s “great songs of death.” For all of their mournful plangency, for example, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” are not typical specimens of Whitman’s verse because the intensity of the grief, despair, and anxiety they express contradicts the affirmation that remained the major note of Whitman’s sensibility.

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? But even these poems end with affirmation, as if to bring the reader to the threshold of that major note. The solitary despondency of the speaker is rendered amenable to reunion with community at the same time that his circumspections are retained: Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song, As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night, Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet bursting with joy.2

Recall the “faultless voice” of Rushdie’s Jamila Singer, “filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God.” The modulations in the song, from the lamentation of the solitary griever to the informed joy of reunion, allow it to contain at once both the cancellation of grief and its memorial preservation as a deepening and realizing element in what might otherwise be flat assent. Whitman, with Hegel, calls attention to tragedy in the local instance, and comedy in the larger unfolding pattern. 3 This is his version of aufheben: though there is no corresponding satisfying word in English, Whitman’s frequent use of tally was a result of his search for such a word. Tallying individuals (himself among them), Whitman explores the contours of their specificity, while directing them toward a passional fusion that is the reason for the poem. When the poem is a mournful remembrance, such as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” or “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” there are two speakers, two “I’s,” the one who is tallied (“Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning”), and the one who tallies (“and yet bursting with joy”). Whitman’s depictions of painful arrivals at passionate fusion was meant to have political implications. Thomas Jefferson’s presidential experience led him to concede that the dream of consensus among yeomen he shared with J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur might not survive into the nineteenth century, and Whitman’s journalistic encounters with virulent controversy and the fracturing of the Democratic Party would have been further confirmation of the obsolescence of the Jeffersonianism his father so much admired. As Justin Kaplan has written, “The time of Whitman’s growing up was a long farewell salute to the receding world of the founders, a series of remarkable deaths, days of national mourning, acts of patriotic commemoration.”4 Though the dream of consensus may have been shown to be impossible as early as the arguments between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in Washington’s cabinet, it nevertheless remained a regular article of American rhetoric, as Sacvan Bercovitch has shown.5 Whitman absorbed this

Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?    

rhetoric, though Leaves of Grass is not a recapitulation but rather, as Bercovitch suggests, a “diffusion” or “deflection”: 6 in Leaves of Grass Whitman transposed the opposition of sect and consensus to a wider frame by asking what agreement could be found that would reveal American solidarity and provide the locus standi (“To the perfect shape comes common ground”) for a genuinely representative man, and by moving this inquiry away from politics construed in the ordinary sense toward common denominators—the individual’s need to believe in the legitimacy of his or her life, sex, death, and the use of the word I. A great many of Whitman’s readers have been attracted to his poems by his attention to what Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination, praised in Sherwood Anderson’s writing: “The small legitimate existence, so necessary for the majority of men to achieve, is in our age so very hard, so nearly impossible, for them to achieve.” 7 Whitman’s poems are likewise full of attention to the fragile sanctity of the careful, common lives of plants and animals as well as of men and women. He celebrates the small, stalwart heroism of seemingly undistinguished labor, of the life firmly in place. But Whitman’s accompanying celebrations of sex and death head in an opposite direction, representing sex and death as forces that fracture whatever small, tender security self-protection may have achieved. Sex is the infinite, fusing, equalizing life of the community, as death is, and like death, it seems to terminate whatever small preserve a hostile world has previously tolerated: It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them. It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are licked by the indolent waves, I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath, Steep’d amid honey’d morphine my windpipe throttled in fakes of death. (LG, 56)

Though as a gay man Whitman would certainly have worried that his sexuality put him at permanent risk of loneliness and persecution, passages such as the one above depict desire itself, rather than desire’s social outcome, as a danger. His throat constricting, Whitman experiences extreme anxiety: contact is peril, an interruption of personal continuities that were at best insecure. This is what led Henry Adams to contend that Whitman was one of the very few American artists “who had ever insisted on the power of sex.” Adams cast Whitman as an alternative to his own confessed debility in the face of force. But, as Whitman makes sex deathly, so, too, he makes death sexy: Double yourself and receive me darkness, Receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without him.

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? I roll myself upon you as upon a bed, I resign myself to the dusk. He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover, He rises with me silently from the bed. Darkness, you are gentler than my lover, his flesh was sweaty and panting, I feel the hot moisture that he left me. (LG, 426–27)

Death is a “strong and delicious word”: by affiliating sex and death, Whitman at once makes sex more grave, and death not terminal. Together, virtually indistinguishable songs of love and songs of death oppose what the individual had been or had guarded. They dislocate the familiar, transpose it. And they preserve as well as cancel, in a finer key. Afterward, in the postcoital, posttraumatic calm that Whitman implies is the best mood, it turns out that only the crud of the self has been purged, that some part of the self survives, a part that keeps to the particular while at the same time emerging onto the common ground on which consensus may begin: “At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, / And that we call Being” (LG, 56). Or: Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a keelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff and drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein, and ­poke-weed. (LG, 33)

This scene is immediately preceded by another in which fellatio is bestowed on the body by the soul, a climax reprised in the notice given to the stiff and drooping leaves. Let up from the grip, the throat loosed, the poet arises and spreads, echoing the Christian benediction (“the peace that passeth all understanding”). He is rid of encumbering self-insistence, available to the thousand beckoning affinities that now offer themselves up to be tallied. The motion toward the expansive and the liturgically declarative relinquishes predication in favor of simple listing: the poet keeps hold of the real in the citation of humble weeds. Love, then, is not an antidote to death, or even opposed to it, because both have the power to release from confinement and to cancel while preserving the best of what is surpassed. As love or death approaches, according to Whitman, one will ­ resist

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them, sensing their hostility to the uneasy safety his life’s work has erected. In the calm that follows the onslaught, however, the resistance will have disappeared, because he will have realized that there is strange preservation, too. He is released from the private hell of the small self in which he was bound: “Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones” (LG, 158). Now, his loosed attention is a traveler: distilled from out of the small self, he acquires the unselective because unprejudiced attention to small things—elder, mullein, poke-weed—that contain the secret of places and show “perfect rectitude”: I believe in those wing’d purposes, And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me, And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional, And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else, And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me, And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me. (LG, 40)

The silliness is shamed out of him, that is, he is released from the predicament that William James describes in a lecture that pays tribute to Whitman: We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives.8

For Whitman, sex and death split this narrow stupidity and institute the wider view James describes: “It seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life’s meaning on a large objective scale.”9 So, at the end of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his grief tallied by the “knowledge of death,” the poet has acquired the large vision that can only follow the seeming extinction of the small man: “While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, / As to long panoramas of vision.” Let out from his bondage in stupidity, however, he is not attentive only to abstract generality; rather, his attention to particular things is more perfect because it is not adulterated by an “axis of vision,” to borrow from Emerson, that is not “coincident with the axis of things.” The release from the confining particular life does not condemn him to a cloudy existence among visions of unformed infinity. Instead, it gives him a more exact bearing toward

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? things, because they are not constantly received and registered with relation to a personal project. He comprehends each thing’s unique, irreproducible structure, and also its place in the overarching design. He tallies. He is, then, at once, a particular man, with a past and a name, and an unknown traveler, an observer who has been wrenched loose from the familiar codes of home, thereby enabled to record objectively life as it goes on in the places he visits. Consequently, the word I as it is used in Leaves of Grass varies in its denotation. On the one hand, it is used to amass and represent the whole of Walt Whitman’s personal history as a sort of confession. On the other hand, it expresses a picaresque anonymity, not tied to self-protective individuality, a kind of voided receptacle able to receive and appreciate without constantly puzzling meaning based on personal usefulness. In the first case, “I” gives us Walt Whitman, a “knot intrinsicate,” a feeling, wanting individual; in the second, it gives us the alert traveler who, after suffering the catastrophe that ejected him from comfort (“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”), has left his preoccupied self hood behind (“Song of the Open Road”). The second “I” cancels the first—shames it out of its silliness—but preserves it as one of the countless essential data that are tallied. This second “I” cannot, properly, be called Walt Whitman: O take my hand Walt Whitman! Such gliding wonders! Such sights and sounds! Such join’d unended links, each hook’d to the next, Each answering all, each sharing the earth with each. (LG, 137)

Here, that which was “I,” Walt Whitman, has become a “you” addressed by the loose observer that had been gestating within him: What widens within you Walt Whitman? What waves and soils exuding? What climes? What persons and cities are here? (LG, 137)

Whitman, the first “I,” mothers the “earth,” the second “I,” the meeting place of analogies and particulars, of all that could conceivably be known. The awareness of this larger frame—preposterously—says “I” and addresses the bearer of the proper name “Walt Whitman” as “you.” Thus, the word I shuttles between the small self that Trilling describes, intent on its legitimate claims to safety, and the attentiveness that survives the twin catastrophes of sex and death. This second “I” cancels the first’s insistence on its own centrality, but it lovingly preserves respect for that small self ’s irreproducible placement among its countless companions. Searching for a common denominator on which to base consensus, Whitman found opposed impulses—legitimacy and catastrophe. This is

Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?    

his poetic “deflection” of the political opposition between divisive, selfprotecting particularity and magnanimous, representative generality. The small, unsafe “I” of Leaves of Grass and the terrestrially large “I” are Whitman’s equivalents to the options that guided American political thought. I follow quickly. . . . I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff. —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ”

in that cavern, that profound cleft, a flickering green inspiring terror, watching . . . And standing, shrouded there, in that din, Earth, the chatterer, father of all speech. —William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Whitman’s major poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “This Compost,” Calamus, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Drum-Taps, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—are crisis poems meant to show Americans how the first, familiar “I” is cloven to open the way for a terrifying infant, the second “I.” This is the importance of terror in Whitman’s poems of growth: Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses. It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor. It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. (LG, 369–70)

The Earth is a vitality bank that loans wonder to matter, reclaims it at death, when that wonder is both canceled and preserved in new forms, such as the lilacs that might grow above Abraham Lincoln’s “good manure.” In the passage above, the speaking “I” fears the awful cleaving, but the reluctant admiration building through dactyls in “prodigal, annual, sumptuous” signals the imminent affirmation, when “I” will be the Earth speaking rather than the man who fears its disdainful “innocence”: I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and long-threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots, And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, And call anything close again when I desire it. (LG, 59)

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? Here, Whitman becomes the ecosphere that elsewhere terrified him. He is large, prolific, indifferent to instances of life, able to produce satisfactory duplicates if whim so chooses. These two treatments of the Earth, juxta­ posed, show the difference between Whitman’s “I’s.” His crisis poems depict the motion of voice between them, from the timid “I” of the first passage—fixed to special loves, terrified of force—to the “I” of the second passage—cruel, blithe, transcendent. Whitman succeeds as a poet not only when he delineates either the first or the second “I” but when he narrates the vertiginous transit from the first to the second, when he dramatically depicts the cancellation of individuality that is also its preservation in a painfully depersonalized wonder. Whitman’s assertion that the best survives and that fear and grief are therefore misguided evidences the abiding influence of the Puritan exemplarism that Anne Bradstreet confronted. Whitman’s transcendentalism, as his interest in Hegel suggests, calls for a sublimation of mourning, rather than for mourning itself, for the reorientation of fear and grief toward a supersocial metaphysical ideal that will more than compensate for loss: as Whitman puts it, there is no loss, only ceaseless transformation, a point on which he echoes Jefferson: But can [constitutions] be made unchangeable? Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession forever? I think not . . . The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which composed their bodies make part now of the bodies of other animals, vegetables, or minerals of a thousand forms . . . A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.10

But Whitman goes beyond Jefferson in proposing not just an acceptance of, but a full identification with, that rich, churning reality, an identification that obviates grieving. Before Whitman is associated too closely with Bradstreet’s Puritan interlocutor, however, three things need to be noted: that despite Whitman’s leanings toward the radical faction within the Democratic Party, the social ideal of Leaves of Grass could not be contained by any actually existing American political entity; that no Puritan would subscribe to the proposition that one might become, rather than revere or emulate, the absolute; and that, as I will argue, Whitman’s proposal concerning a compensatory identification that obviates mourning is deliberately extravagant, even fantastic, because it is proposed as a provocative what (would follow) if? rather than as an attained spiritual state. Whitman’s crisis poems, like Bradstreet’s elegies, are expressions of an ejected self: though he floods his poems with assurances concerning what’s just around the corner, he’s never quite there yet, the plaintive cadences

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of his elegies therefore never quite dissolved in his brightest sunshine. Though not typical, Whitman’s elegies may nevertheless be fundamental, like “Experience,” Emerson’s “honest chapter.” Whitman’s desire to present an extravagantly transcendent self drew his attention toward the linguistic peculiarity of the word I, an interest he shared with Hegel: Nature does not bring its . . . [nous, mind] into consciousness: it is man who first makes himself double so as to be universal for a universal. This first happens when man knows that he is “I.” By the term “I” I mean myself, a singular and altogether determinate person. And yet I really utter nothing peculiar to myself, for everyone else is an “I” or “ego,” and when I call myself “I,” though I indubitably mean the single person myself, I express a thorough universal . . . “I” is the vacuum or receptacle for anything and everything: for which everything is and which stores everything in itself.11

Each makes himself double when he uses the word I: that is, he collects his experience, unifies it, and designates himself as a subject or knower, as a project, or bundle of intentions, as well as something to be known. In common usage, “I” is the self-designation of each such individual subject, excluding all others. But Hegel notices two things. First, “I” circulates freely among the members of the human conversation, traveling across the continent of human possibility. Second, it signifies anew at each moment of its use, it connotes nothing intrinsic about the person who uses it for self-designation, and it does not refer to any abstract concept. From this, Hegel suggests that we may get a sense of collective mind, the anonymous “vacuum or receptacle of anything and everything,” if we imagine that “I” does correspond to a concept, or a stuff, I-ness, that it has a meaning independent of the instances of its use, and that it does convey something intrinsic about what it refers to even without any accompanying reference to the biographical, historical, and geographical circumstances in which it is spoken. Such a universal would be like Whitman’s speaking Earth: “And I know I am solid and sound / To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, / All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means” (LG, 47). Such an “I” would cancel the exclusiveness it has for each individual speaker—including Walt Whitman, Brooklyn, 1855—and “release” the anonymous knowing subjectivity that is its latent actual content. This is Whitman’s boldest proposition, his second “I” independent of any speaker and any specific conversation in which it might be used. Like “leaf,” this second “I” could exist as a potentiality: what if all the uses of the word I, upright like leaves of grass spread across the face of the earth, were outgrowths from a single rhizome, a question Whitman invites with the term leaves, rather than blades, of grass? It would grow freely, branching below and rising into the conversations of Americans, but not contained

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? in those conversations. This would be an “I” for whom all imaginable speakers of the word I would be instances, as each leaf is an instance of the concept denoted by the word leaf. “I” would be a conceptual term, and this “I,” giving such “divine materials to men,” identity, accepting such “leavings from them at last,” would be a subjectivity bank (as the earth is a vitality bank), loaning reflecting doubleness to matter at birth, reclaiming it at death. Emile Benveniste reveals that from the linguist’s position, “I” cannot be classed as a potentiality along with abstract nouns. Calling the word I a “unique but mobile sign” (what better description of Whitman’s second persona?), he suggests that intimations of an objectively constant “I” are linguistic nonsense: Each instance of use of a noun is referred to a fixed and “objective” notion, capable of remaining potential or of being actualized in a particular object and always identical with the mental image it awakens. But the instances of the use of I do not constitute a class of reference since there is no “object” definable as I to which these instances can refer in identical fashion. Each I has its own reference and corresponds each time to a unique being who is set up as such . . . I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it, and by that alone . . . It cannot admit of any potential or “objective” form.12

Nonetheless, this is what Whitman proposes: an “I” for which complete dependence on specific individuality is canceled; in which doubleness, or knowing subjectivity, is preserved without exclusive individuality; the “Earth,” from which all “I-sayers” draw their life, itself saying “I.” As the corpse returns to the earth, so the individual “I” returns to this subjectivity bank, but the large “I” is not silenced, as the concept “leaf ” does not perish with every leaf. This is Whitman’s second “I,” a postmortem cousin to postcoital bliss, let up from exclusive individuality, able to enter and animate all Americans and even the insentient among common things. We should not confuse it with any persona meant to convey the tender historical man Walt Whitman. This is the poetic president who has survived the holocaust that lifted him out of self-interested singularity and made him able to represent all such singularities. A close corollary would be the eerie selfindication of a dead man. But unlike the “I” of Hamlet’s ghost or the “I” in a will read out loud by a lawyer to survivors, the dead man’s “I” would have to be imagined without any spectral grudge or intention, completely divested of the pursuit of particular interest and released from the need to protect his “small legitimacy”: “I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.” Metaphysically, this may be nonsense: linguistically, it certainly is. At various points, Whitman called Leaves of Grass both a “language experiment” and a “new bible.” Put them together: these incongruous

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assertions lead us to wonder whether Whitman’s ontology of the self may not be founded upon planned linguistic “deflection.” When Benveniste refers to an “instance of discourse,” he means a moment of speaking: “I signifies ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I.’”13 At this moment, “each speaker takes over all the resources of the language for his own behalf.”14 Benveniste ignores the problem that arises when the word I is written, particularly when the partners in the conversation do not share a single geographical and temporal “instance,” in favor of a simpler analysis of the word I spoken in the shared presence of face-to-face conversation. Whitman, though, brings that problem to the fore by calling attention to his poems as writing while at the same time simulating spoken conversation, a feeling of a shared moment between Americans, with the word you recruited to travel the road with the frequent I. We are to be there with him: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself. / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (LG, 28). At the beginning of his poem, Whitman “takes over all the resources of language for his own behalf ” and presents himself as a speaker and the poem as a shared time and place. He generously anticipates the reply, and the ensuing, swelling conversation in which affectionate interchange will so blur the boundaries between the alternating “I’s” and “you’s” that separate individuality will grow indistinct, “atoms” that had been private property will fraternize, and above the hum and buzz of this concordia discordans, the second “I” will tally and rise. The conversation will be a “common ground” for the “perfect shape,” the poetic president. Whitman describes this dialectical transcendence: Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world, Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. (LG, 31)

The participants are knitted together (cancellation of individuality) yet remain distinct (preservation of individuality), and from this union the infant second “I” is born. Two lines later, the infant speaks for itself: Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. (LG, 31)

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? In the last of these lines—“I and this mystery here we stand [now]”— “I” is joined by three words—this, here, and, implicitly, now—that also lack “objective” independence and depend instead on an “instance of discourse.” They require a hearer’s or reader’s colloquial participation to give them meaning. As Benveniste writes: By simultaneous ostention, this will be the object designated in the present instance of discourse and the reference implicit in the form . . . which associates it with I and you. Outside this class, but on the same plane and associated in the same frame of reference, we find the adverbs here and now. Their relationship with I will be shown by defining them: here and now delimit the spatial and temporal instance of discourse containing I.15

All of these words—I, here, now, this—lack “objective” definition, and can only be relationally defined: “I am he who is here, now, indicating this.” And they conspire to enlist the reader’s inclusion in the semblance of conversation. In this series of words, you is essential: “I am he who he is here, now, with you, indicating this.” Without a “you” spoken to and, consequently, a shared time and place, all sense is lost. But the “you” whom Whitman addresses reads this feigning of speaking. He or she is not at the same place and time with the fervently uttering poet. Whitman often emphasizes both his ruse of shared colloquial presence and the unknown distance between a writer and a reader. This bifurcation in rhetorical strategy can be seen in poems such as “Recorders Ages Hence” or “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” or in lines such as these: “This hour I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you” (LG, 47). A reader might feel specially chosen, for a moment, but only until it occurs to him or her that the next reader of these lines would be entitled to feel just as chosen: you, like I, is an empty receptacle, always, but plainly so when written in a published text. When readers encounter the words Benveniste discusses (“deictics”), they require contextual information, such as the proper name of the speaker, the proper name or latitude and longitude of the place, the time and date. Given these, they may accede in a suspension of disbelief, an imaginative dismissal of the time and place when and where the reading transpires, and pretend that they are there, then, actually hearing this. They stride over the confusion latent in written deixis and imaginatively live in a time before their births, in a place they may not have visited, listening to a man who may since have fertilized lilacs. Whitman’s first literary enthusiasms were Sir Walter Scott and the Arabian Nights, so he would have been familiar with readerly self-projection into lost times and places such as Baghdad or the Highlands “sixty years hence,” but he does not want his readers to make that stride so readily. On occasion, the reader does accompany Whitman’s roaming “I” to past scenes—the Alamo, or

Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?    

the Bonhomme Richard—and to distant places—the Sierra, for example (which Whitman had himself only imagined). But there is no consistent center for imagined contemporaneity. What would be the real center at which a reader could imaginatively join him before beginning these forays? The copyright page suggests Brooklyn, 1855. But 1855 is compromised by the present tense in the last line of “Song of Myself ”: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fiber your blood. Failing to catch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you (LG, 89)

The temporal center of these lines shuttles between Whitman’s time (“I bequeath myself ”), his imagination of the reader’s time (“You will hardly know”), and the reader’s actual time (“I stop somewhere waiting for you”). There is also no spatial center: imagining his future decomposition and dispersion (“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”), Whitman is at no single place but instead is in the grass and in the blood of countless readers. The amassing and consolidating performed by the spoken “I” is in contradiction with the mortal dispersion of time and place between the written “I” and the reading “you,” an ambiguity further exploited in these lines: When you read these I that was visible am become invisible, Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me, Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade, Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.) (LG, 136)

Though spoken deixis implies at least two people who are both compact and visible at the same time and place, written deixis calls out attention to the fact that either the writer or the reader is discernibly compact and visible, but not both: “Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?” (LG, 89). Written deixis is an image of spoken presence, split off from it and thereby rendered uncanny. In this it is like the eidola that Whitman made note of in his reading of Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe: Now I will embark on an explanation of a highly relevant fact, the existence of what we call “images” of things, a sort of outer skin perpetually peeled off the surface

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? of objects and flying about this way and that through the air. It is these whose impact scares our minds, whether waking or sleeping, on those occasions when we catch a glimpse of strange shapes and the phantoms of the dead.16

Written deictic words are eerie images peeled off the vitality of conversation and invested with ghostly power. From among John Keats’s “Posthumous and Fugitive Pieces”: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is— I hold it towards you.17

Written deixis is the presence of an absence, an impossible colloquiality. As the atoms of the body bequeathed to the earth acquire ubiquity and become once more eligible for infinite transformation, so the “I” bequeathed to writing loses the specificity it keeps when spoken in particular present “instance of discourse.” When a reader encounters “I” in Whitman’s writing, unhedged by clear geographical, temporal, and biographical supplements, he or she encounters the self-designation of a dead man in the present moment and witnesses a perplexing widening of the contradiction latent even in the spoken “I,” a “unique but mobile sign” (italics added). Feigning conversation, as in the first lines of “Song of Myself,” Whitman calls attention to the writer’s deadness for the reader; he emphasizes the transtemporal and transspatial mobility of “I,” which cancels the unique exclusiveness of the spoken “I” but preserves that perplexing “I-ness.” Whitman’s exploration of the fault line between speaking and writing enables him to evoke some sensation of the meaning of the large “I” postulated in his meditations. “I” and its concomitant “here,” “now,” and “this” are without particular content in themselves. Unless they appear in an “instance of discourse” or are supplemented by a proper name (Walt Whitman), and an identified time and place (Brooklyn, 1855), they are adrift on a flood of times and places, like the Brooklyn ferry. They are in such cases uncanny, because they necessarily cause the reader to contemplate their meaning independent of identifiable instance. Their common use, essential to verbal performance, is “deflected” or “diffused,” as will be any rhetoric of consensus that uses such an evasive presence as its foundation. Never contained in a single imaginable person, place, or time, the “mobility” of these words, present even in their verbal use, comes to the fore and mimes the conceptual independence

Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?    

Benveniste calls absurd: they seem to indicate the eidetic bearing (here, now) of the “vacuum of receptacle for anything and everything” (I) toward the world on which it doubles back (this). Though this may be linguistic nonsense, it is a nonsense latent in spoken deixis and manifest in written deixis not controlled by the conventions of reading. Whitman frequently denies his reader the ability to avoid this nonsense because confronting it generates some feeling for his representative man, the second “I” that speaks in his poems: on the one hand, it is intimate, because the deictics beckon with the close hug of two persons sharing a time and a place and appropriating the whole of the language for their purposes; on the other hand, it is forbidding, because the intimacy turns out to be placeless, timeless, abysmal. The common ground is no ground: “Afar down I see the huge first Nothing.” The common ground is not a plain but a “fissure in a cliff,” “a profound cleft,” a fissure in spoken being that “inspires terror,” a vacancy where Earth speaks. The writing in a book cancels: Come closer to me, Push close my lovers and take the best I possess, Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess. This is unfinished business with me . . . how is it with you? I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us. (LG, 628)

And it preserves, too: Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip. Carry me when you go forth over land or sea; For thus merely touching you is enough, is best, And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally. (LG, 116)

In the first of these passages, “I” is the particular compact man, Walt Whitman, mindful that writer and reader do not share an intimate “instance of discourse” that can be verified by touch; in the second, “I” is the book speaking, the gravesite of no-longer-live intention, a sublation of the man into personalized anonymity, like the speaking Earth. Impossibly, the printed volume Leaves of Grass is said to identify itself and to love the throbs from the person carrying it, as the leaves of grass in section 6 of “Song of Myself ” are said to be the “uttering tongues” of the fertilizing corpses buried beneath them. This, like the objectively independent “I,” is non-sense, or better, a planned catachresis meant to upset the reader’s comfort with the notion of a universally representative man.

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? Beginning with the first lines of “Song of Myself,” Whitman is constantly attentive to and curious about what his reader must be thinking, as if they were both alive at once and could talk it out. He is eager not to impose a truth or a point of view so much as to elicit a response. Though in those lines he writes that “what I assume you shall assume,” he later writes that “he most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher” (LG, 84). Though he frequently lectures, the purpose of his address is not indoctrination: it is to provoke the reader to quick thought, to being a partner in agile conversation, to “wrestle” with the teacher. To do this, Whitman assaulted the conventions of sense, rectitude, and reading, whether by outraging, offending, seducing, or confusing the reader. His subversion of the conventions that usually circumscribe written deixis is one example of this attempt to upset readerly passivity. Encountering a text that makes a common place and time one of its first premises at the same time that it adamantly emphasizes the impossibility of a common place and time between author and reader, the reader is unable to simply receive. He is to find himself in contradictory modes of being toward the poet, and so, like a traveler on a Moebius strip, always to find himself on the reverse side of where he was the last time he was there. Instead, then, of simply receiving, the reader can either be puzzled or willfully overlook some large part of the poem’s complicated presentation. By suffering such puzzlement, the reader is to be at once abstracted from the particular time and place that had seemed to be what Bertrand Russell called the “sharp point” of his “essential privacy,”18 and notified of how baffling and elusive transtemporal and transspatial identity would have to be. Stranded, deflected from both particularity and generality, he is to be newly conscious both of his own prior “partiality” and of the limitations of a claim to representativeness such as, for instance, Daniel Webster’s announcement that he spoke “not as a Massachusetts man, not as a Northern man, but as an American” in 1850.19 Whitman’s reader is to apprehend the awful magnitude of the transcendental egotism explored in Leaves of Grass, to realize the factitiousness of previous political claims to representativeness, to become, in what Whitman would consider the fullest sense of the word, a true citizen, educated for informed choice. Whitman’s meditations on the part and the whole are abstract renderings of the problem convulsing American politics, transpositions or deflections of the crisis into another frame: the range of tension between region or party on the one hand and nation on the other is amplified into a tension between individuality and universal spirit so that the crisis can be encountered on what Whitman considered to be its native ground. This is why arguments over whether Whitman did or did not mean for us to take his idea of a poetic president seriously miss the point: his aim

Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?    

in dwelling on partiality and representativeness is to uncover the complexity of a notion present in common thought and to dispel what he considered to be the illusion of simple and merely political choice. The idea of a poetic president implicates a political ideal in questions of sex, death, pathos, language, and identity, all lowest common denominators in a universal politics. Rather than present the reader with propositions that elicit assent, then, Whitman aims at an irresistibly unsettling way of posing the problem in order to incite the agile, imaginative disposition of a citizen: A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning. Has anyone fancied he could sit at last under some due authority and rest satisfied with explanations and realize and be content and full? To no such terminus does the great poet bring . . . he brings neither cessation or sheltered fatness and ease. (LG, 727)

Such a desire to foment uncertainty is especially clear in Whitman’s 1856 poem “Respondez!” Here, as the title suggests, Whitman demands that the “you” addressed at the beginning of “Song of Myself ” take up its part and respond—demands that the reader accept responsibility by becoming an interlocutor. To this end, every sentence in this curious poem is in the imperative mode, like the title, taking the general form “Let X happen,” though this is a curious imperative, because it commands inactivity, leaving the reader to worry, correctly, that the poem is a satire of the reader’s passivity, a sarcastic jeremiad concerned with the degeneracy that follows when citizens do nothing: the poem depicts the results of neglect, or of a populace that fails to respond vigorously. But if it tells the reader to do something, it isn’t very clear about what is to be done. In part this is the consequence of a poem that is nothing but imperatives, without any direct use of propositions that could be judged true or false: imperative statements such as “Close the door!” do not assert, and hence do not lie. The poem is entirely performative; none of it is constative.20 It is demand, an order, not a claim or a treatise. But imperative statements do imply collateral assertions. “Close the door!” may imply “The hall is noisy,” “The noise interferes with our conversation,” and so on. Ordinarily an implied constative stance can be derived from imperative statements. But not for this poem: the assertions implied in Whitman’s imperatives refuse to be brought to the bar of consistency. Some of the recommendations accord with what we expect from Whitman: Let the cow, the horse, the camel, the garden-bee—let the mid-fish, the lobster, the mussel, the eel, the sting-ray, and the grunting pig-fish—let these, and the like of these, be put on a perfect equality with man and woman! (LG, 592)

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? Though this proposition resembles some opinions expressed in, for instance, “Song of Myself,” the grotesqueness is disturbing, like this command: Let us all, without missing one, be exposed in public, naked, monthly at the peril of our lives! Let our bodies be freely handled and examined by whoever chooses! (LG, 592)

Many of the imperatives seem opposed to what might be called familiar Whitman dogma: Let a man seek pleasure everywhere except in himself! Let a woman seek happiness everywhere except in herself! (LG, 594)

Others seem completely undecidable: Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! Let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands!

Or: Let the she-harlots and he-harlots be prudent! let them dance on, while seeming lasts! (O seeming! Seeming! Seeming!) (LG, 593)

A delirious poem. Any attempt to sort out the straightforward from the ironic, to interpret toward a coherent stance, will fail. Hermeneutic rendering is impossible when confronted by such dislocation: “Play up there! the fit is whirling me fast” (LG, 426). The reader is not allowed to receive, and then accept or reject; the reader is to act; though again, it’s not clear what is to be done. Satirizing the usual passivity of readers, “Respondez!” is a refusal to take a coherent stance—it puzzles; it was meant to be an outrage: “let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” (LG, 592).21 This is the most explicit development of Whitman’s desire to write a poem that would not bring the reader to a “terminus.” The tacit “I” that makes these propositions is certainly a general representative of American humanity, insofar as every reader should be able to find at least one proposition to approve. Though it reads as a kind of stump speech, the poem’s ultimate effect is to complicate and confuse the reader’s loyalty to any particular stance (including the ones the reader may previously have identified as Whitman’s) without providing a general substitute position with the coherence that could elicit assent and found consensus: the poem is irreducibly heterotopic. Thus, like the written “I” not clothed by the conventions of reading, “Respondez!” aims to expel the reader from self-protective par-

Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?    

ticularity (“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”) without providing an abstract and facile substitute such as Webster’s “I Am an American.” The original title of “Respondez!” was “Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness,” but very few of the propositions are actually concerned with being without clothes. “Nakedness,” then, would have to be the reader’s unsheltered state, a distressing nakedness, as in “The Sleepers”: O, hotcheeked and blushing! O foolish hectic! O for pity’s sake, no one must see me now! . . . my clothes were stolen while I was abed, Now I am thrust forth, where shall I run? (LG, 626)

In the 1830s and 1840s, Webster, realizing that the Federalist Party could no longer provide a viable base for power, became the spokesman for union, for Americanness free of particular interest. In repudiating John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification, he was also implicitly repudiating his own earlier interest in the New England particularism of the Hartford convention. His later support for the Fugitive Slave Law, however, suggested to many Americans that he was pursuing breadth of appeal by bobbing and weaving rather than by bringing transcendent character into the political domain. His opportune variability on social questions that would not be ignored seemed to be the only option for politics other than Calhoun’s fervent particularism or the nondescript shallowness of much of the political class at large. Before the 1850s, Thomas Carlyle and Emerson had lauded Webster as an instance of the kind of elemental, charismatic hero they felt divided times demanded, an admiration that fueled Emerson’s vehement sense of betrayal after Webster supported the Fugitive Slave Law. Webster’s choice showed Emerson how prone to perversion his idea of general representativeness was when it was politically developed, and it may have contributed to trepidations already present in “Politics” and to the repudiation of political charisma in “Demonism.” In its political manifestation, the transcendentalist idea of a Representative Man had come to seem dubious and even dangerous. Whitman’s political awareness developed during the period when the eminence of the early presidents—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson, Van Buren—was collapsing, leaving puerile successors—Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, with Buchanan, in 1855, yet to come. The idea of general representativeness was being brought out for dingy purposes every four years, and the idea of consensus was being conspicuously cheapened. Rather than back away like Emerson, however, Whitman concluded he had to lift general representation up from political idea to poetic image, positing deeper coherences

   Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems? and fusions. To do this, he extended the idea of divisive particularity past class and region to its extremity—self-interested and self-protective individuality—and he extended the idea of general representativeness to its extremity, an “I” that impersonally receives and knows the entirety of being. He took the opposition that was the usual stuff of political rhetoric and resituated it in an imagistic, associative frame where implications are vaster and simple choices are impertinent. So, five years after Webster claimed to speak “not as a Massachusetts man, not as a Northern man, but as an American,” Whitman made a similar claim: I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others. Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, One of the great nations, the nation of many nations—the smallest the same and the largest the same, A southerner as soon as a northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable, A Yankee bound my own way . . . ready for trade . . . my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth. (LG, 44)

If we see this passage as an exposition of the problem latent in the common idea of general representativeness rather than as a proposition meant to elicit assent, as a text meant to make us aware that a devastating cancellation of familiar personality would have to lie between the particular and the general “I,” we will see the difference between Webster’s and Whitman’s stances. General representativeness is not opposed or refuted here. Instead, it is made into an image rather than a proposition; as such, it has the power that Gaston Bachelard contends is generally proper to images:22 it is less a member of an existing structure of thought than it is a fresh vantage on that structure as a whole. Rather than have Americans wonder whether Webster or Harrison is a general representative, Whitman tried to compel his reader to probe and contemplate general representativeness itself, and to extricate himself from contemporary political renderings of democratic humanism, to think about the idea rather than accept the idea and think about specific candidates. Whitman’s proposition in this passage is hyperbolic and outrageous; but the outrageousness of such propositions, which have often been the locus of objections to Whitman’s thought, is their reason for being. What does it mean, really, to be an American? The written “I” that is broken out of specific speakers, the delirious “I” implicit in “Respondez!,” the Earth or America saying “I” as in the passage above—all of these are preposterous assertions of what is to amass itself into consensus and then represent itself. But their preposterousness is explicit, unlike Webster’s, and

Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?    

as images, they propose the metaphysical extravaganza that is latent though unacknowledged in American political rhetoric. In “Starting from Paumonok,” Whitman promises to “make a song for the ears of the president, full of weapons with menacing points.” Whitman’s second “I” is such a blade (of grass? they are, after all, tongues) because it shows how large, transcendent, and cruelly impersonal and innocent a genuinely inclusive “I” would have to be, and how utterly immune to loss and sorrow. But the difficulty Whitman put in the way of identifying with the whole was not intended to encourage a relapse into the complacency of the solitary part, either the “planter nonchalant” or the “Yankee bound [his] own way.” Though Whitman would nod in agreement with Sherwood Anderson’s celebration of the small man’s self-insistence, he would still conclude that particularity, like representativeness, is unsatisfactory in itself. As the huge claims of the second “I” that speaks in Leaves of Grass complicate acquiescence in representativeness, so the terrified resistance to harsh wonder expressed by the speaking personae of the crisis poems complicates easy identification with the first “I.” The second “I” includes so much it no longer seems the personal self-designation of a possible man; the first “I” is convincingly possible, but it includes too little wonder and warps what it does include to its purposes. Our sense of the humanly possible, based on the first “I,” is to leave us incredulous toward the second; our sense of the wondrous and diverse, based on the second “I,” is to leave us dissatisfied with the first. Neither of the two “I’s” that self-declare in Leaves of Grass is left unperturbed by the other. This is why Whitman’s great poems, as I have argued above, are crisis poems that concern themselves with being between these possibilities, in Heidegger’s “the time of the double Not,” “the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.”23 Always already expelled from the Eden of safe and settled legitimacy, the released “I” never reaches the India it tends toward. It remains naked, unclothed by either self-centered particularity or representative inclusion, always a traveler sorrowfully ejected from home, heading in a direction but not arriving, meanwhile curious about the actual glory of “elder, mullein, poke-weed,” and the thousand other compensating things suddenly available to catastrophically freed attention. The word I in Leaves of Grass is the self-designation of two entities, one a single member of the wide spectrum of American possibility, the other a reverse prism that, after such single members have painfully resigned their warped centrality, collects them and emits the plain friendly light of day: “He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing” (LG, 713). What we call “Whitman” is always in transit between the blessing sun and the ­naked, helpless, bereft things it blesses.

 r 

Henry David Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod

5

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions. —Walt Whitman, “This Compost”

thoreau was at work on what would become Cape Cod (though it is not clear that he had intended to write a book rather than a series of essays) soon after he finished Walden. He published the first four chapters in separate issues of Putnam’s Magazine in 1855, the same year as the first Leaves of Grass. Posthumously edited by the younger William Ellery Channing, the book appeared in late 1865. The composition of the work as we have it therefore continues from the publication of Walden and the earliest manifestations of Thoreau’s tuberculosis until his death. Death, as a topic and as an intruding fact, seems to have been a constant consideration in the writing. As a result, Cape Cod is fragmentary, but not entirely miscellaneous: Thoreau’s death intervened in his meditation on death, inadvertently recapitulating the somber thematic and symbolic contemplation of writing and wreck that he was interspersing among his memories of Cape Cod’s desolation. It would have been a book, perhaps, about death, and about writing’s complex necessary involvement in subjunctive moods, had he not died; a book narrated by a melancholy beachcomber, a neutral voice with something of Whitman’s second “I” to it, something of the tone of an already-dead man. The reader must salvage what can be salvaged, using Walden as an aid, wondering in what way Cape Cod might be called a sequel. Announcing his purpose in making his trips to the Cape, Thoreau writes: “We wished to associate with the Ocean until it lost the pond-like look it wears to a countryman.”1 The ocean is yet more profound, and sublime, than the elusive bottom of Walden Pond. A further adjustment of sight is required, as is a willingness to wander off not only from Concord specifically but from the society of the happily living in general: As we looked off, and saw the water growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the farther we looked, till it was awful to consider, and it appeared to have

Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod    no relation to the friendly land, either as shore or bottom,—of what use is a bottom if it is out of sight, if it is two or three miles from the surface, and you are to be drowned so long before you get to it, though it were made of the same stuff as your native soil? (CC, 123)

He balks but will look again, even if such contemplation demands a tolerance for fright. Herman Melville wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, concerning Pierre, that, though Moby-Dick had told the terror of the leviathan, there were still krakens. So Thoreau, in Cape Cod, pursues a more radical investigation of the stringent need to divest oneself of encumbrances than he did in Walden. In “Spring,” for instance, he had claimed to have been “cheered” by the sight of the vulture eating carrion, to have understood the compensation at work when “tender organizations” are “serenely squeezed out of existence like pulp,” to have been impressed with this “universal innocence,” and to have concluded that “compassion is a very untenable ground.”2 This most severe Thoreau is the man who loiters on Cape Cod, averting his eyes from the ocean only to pick among those scraps the ocean has finished with. He thinks about the harshness of compensation and argues that a complete divestiture of affection—including self-affection—may be the condition for what F. O. Matthiessen called the “actual glory” of his prose: “It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and for the time lamentable shipwrecks may thus contribute a new vegetable to a continent’s stock, and prove on the whole a lasting benefit to its inhabitants” (CC, 166). Thoreau, tired of and cramped by available ways of writing, tried to nourish a new growth on the continent of literature. He felt such a new style would come as a compensation, as an unexpected return gotten from the wreck of the past, but a return that might remain unexploited were one to remain in the sorrow of severed affections, of which Thoreau had had a number. No loss is without eventual repair, but one must be ready, and attentive, to receive the repair. In his journal for March 16, 1852, he wrote that “decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.” Past the various appropriate sorrows, the further result of wreck is the accumulating loam in which new literature prospers. Cape Cod, he suggests, may have accumulated this way: Hitchcock conjectures that the ocean has, in the course of time, eaten out Boston Harbor and other bays in the mainland, and that the minute fragments have been deposited by the currents at a distance from the shore, and formed this sand-bank. (CC, 20)

The roost of not a few plovers, partly covered with poverty-grass and small shrubs, the spotted, sandy ground of Cape Cod is not land, really, but a gathering of the wrecks of land, at least according to Edward Hitchcock’s Report on the Geology of Massachusetts, “a work which, by its size at least,

   Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod reminds one of a diluvial elevation itself ” (CC, 133). Thoreau’s book, Cape Cod, is also diluvium deposited by a harsh ocean full of churning information, but it is less massive and comprehensive, less continental. Its elevation, like Cape Cod’s, is more tenuous: “Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad of little cables of beach-grass, and if they should fail, would become a total wreck and erelong go to the bottom” (CC, 209). Cape Cod is the scant, cast-up residue of the slow destruction of real land. And its shores, Thoreau repeatedly tells us, are, to use his pun, a m(a)us(ol)eum of the discarded and destroyed, of what is left after the sea is done with it. Upon first approaching the Cape, he sees, not the sweep of sea and shore but coffins and a crowd collecting bodies: I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen and mangled body of a drowned girl,—who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family,—to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half-concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck, the coiled up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless,—merely red and white,—with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, deadlights; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand. Sometimes there were two or more children, or a parent and child, in the same box, and on the lid would perhaps be written with red chalk, “Bridget such-a-one, and sister’s child.” (CC, 7)

The reader may properly ask whether it is the thing observed or the observer that is truly “bloodless” in this passage. In a motion that suggests the large thematic development of the book, the observer likens the girl’s body (“who probably had intended”) to other wrecks (“to which some rags”), reducing soul to something anonymous (“Bridget such-a-one”). He achieves a neutral tone (“merely red and white”) that hints of the beginning of some aesthetic metamorphosis in the observer’s sense (“marble feet”). At no point does he consider the former person, the immigrant’s hopes, the young girl’s heart. It may be unsettling to read Thoreau telling of turning that careful, measuring eye toward the corpses with no more remorse than when he turns it to the shells of sea-crabs. Yet both are wrecks, and to nominate the corpse for special sentiment is to yield to untenable compassion. Divesting himself of such preference, Thoreau goes so far as to celebrate wreckage as a condition of new vision and of the book to express it. This inaugural moment at Cohasset, Thoreau eyeing the refuse left from the Irish ship the St. John, establishes the tone for the rest of the book: the frequency of shipwreck on Cape Cod, as an event and as a figure, is never left far from the reader’s attention. Like Cape Cod, the pages of Cape Cod are littered with wreckage. Two disasters in particular, the wreck of the St. John and of the Franklin, are repeatedly

Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod   

spliced into the observer’s monologue, sometimes as chilly exempla, more often as common chat with the reader or with the various acquaintances made by the narrator during his tour. Cape Cod is a book in which many sorrowful things are described but in which there is little sorrow: “It is the individual and private that demands our sympathy. A man can attend but one funeral in the course of his life, can behold but one corpse” (CC, 11–12). Indeed, there is some outright cruelty in the narrator’s attraction to the sublimity of the sea’s murdering force: “The ocean did not look, now, as if any were ever shipwrecked in it, it was not grand and sublime, but beautiful as a lake. Not a vestige of a wreck was visible, nor could I believe that the bones of many a shipwrecked man were buried in that pure sand” (CC, 18). The aesthete’s division of the sublime from the beautiful is ridiculed some few pages later when the narrator comes upon it in a tour book: “Of the wide prospect of the Bay afforded by the summit of this hill, our guide says, ’the view has not much of the beautiful in it, but it communicates a strong emotion of the sublime.’ This is the kind of communication which we love to have made to us” (CC, 27). Thoreau’s sarcasm is here directed not against the idea of the sublime but against its banalization in the tour book. The tour book displays no sense of the terror that Edmund Burke says sublimity will provoke or of the cruel indifference in preferring it. Though sublimity “admits of being treated with levity,” it “cannot be so disposed of ” (as Thoreau says of economy in Walden): Thoreau will use the word sublimity, construed in a more severe sense—after Immanuel Kant, Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—to accentuate sharply what affirming the sea’s indifference requires from a human heart, the strenuous discipline of its allure. Thoreau values the sublime’s destructive power for its opposition to civilization’s trivial beauty: Another writer speaks of this as a beautiful village. But I think that our villages will bear to be contrasted with one another, not with Nature. I have no great respect for the writer’s taste, who talks easily about beautiful villages, embellished, perchance, with a “fulling-mill,” a “handsome academy,” or a meeting house, and “a number of shops for the different mechanic arts”; where the green and white houses of the gentry, drawn up in rows, front on a street of which it would be difficult to tell whether it is most like a desert or a stable-yard. Such spots can be beautiful only to the weary traveler, or the returning native,—or, perchance, the returning misanthrope; not to him who, with unprejudiced senses, has just come out of the woods, and approaches one of them, by a bare road, through a succession of straggling homesteads where he cannot tell which is the almshouse. (CC, 20–21)

Thoreau here conflates the most immediate sense of economy—industry—with the larger meaning borne in its etymology—the well-ordered

   Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod household. The town is a single, coherent home, the regular motion of machines in the mills of a piece with the regular layout of houses. But he differs with the anonymous writer about the effect of the whole: to the naïve, the weary, or the repentant, the town may seem beautiful, but only if nature’s disrupting sublimity is never known or willfully forgotten; to the still-defiant man with “unprejudiced senses,” however, its central, pervasive aspect is poverty. Seen from within, the town is regular and intact; from without, disheveled and mean. Beauty is enjoyed by the closed mind: the destructive power of the sublime, made known to the unrepentant, opposes itself to all this industry, to the complacent beauty of town, family, and sentiment. Nature is, according to Thoreau, beyond the approach of words. It might be functionally designated as the limit of words and no more, since even if there is more, words could not tell of it, even through figures and indirections. So Thoreau attends to nature in its results, the wrecks it leaves at the margin of comfort. The beach, then, with its prospect onto the sublime, is the more proper symbolic location for the exercise of the imagination, since there Thoreau can gaze on the wrecks and keep the sea as a peripheral vision: Objects on the beach, whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually are. Lately, when approaching the seashore several degrees south of this, I saw before me, seemingly half of a mile distant, what appeared like bold and rugged cliffs on the beach, fifteen feet high, and whitened by the sun and waves; but after a few steps it proved to be low heaps of rags,—part of the cargo of a wrecked vessel,—scarcely more than a foot in height. (CC, 107)

The presence of the ocean in the scene alters perception toward the more marvelous, and the gain is a fresher world unrestrained by the twin bindings of habit and money getting. Things seen here, ripped from their intended context, are new again. The effect is lost when the gaze comes so close to the thing that it cannot include the ocean in the same glance. At other times, though, the marvel increases rather than disappears when the distance is narrowed. The narrator continues this paragraph by revealing the provenance of his aesthetic attention. Remembering a corpse he found while executing Emerson’s charge to search for Margaret Fuller’s body, he experiences the falling away of old prejudices and an astounding transfiguration of the awful into the exquisite: Once also it was my business to go in search of the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks, which had just been cast up, a week after a wreck, having got the direction from a light-house: I should find it a mile or two distant over the sand, a dozen rods from the water, covered with a cloth, by a stick stuck up.

Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod    I expected that I must look very narrowly to find so small an object, but the sandy beach, half a mile wide, and stretching farther than the eye could reach, was so perfectly smooth and bare, and the mirage toward the sea so magnifying, that when I was half a mile distant the insignificant sliver which marked the spot looked like a bleached spar, and the relics were as conspicuous as if they lay in state on that sandy plain, or a generation had labored to pile up their cairn there. (CC, 107–8)

Perhaps remembering Emerson’s declaration that “even the corpse has its own beauty,” he proceeds to describe the appropriate divesting of confining sentiments and the resultant entry into the alien mystery of the scene. The wonder indicated already in the word relic does not diminish, this time, with his approach: Close at hand there were simply some bones with a little flesh adhering to them, in fact, only a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore. There was nothing at all remarkable about them, and they were singularly inoffensive to both the senses and the imagination. But as I stood there they grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there were an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies. The dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it. (CC, 108)

In this passage, Thoreau reveals the stations along the way to clear attention. First, potential tragedy is reduced to a “slight inequality” in the scene; then, the small disturbance is perceived again emitting hints of a cosmic order that the still-human narrator can barely suspect. The reduction of “snivelling sympathies” felt at the time of the experience is necessarily prior to a partial apprehension of larger “understanding” felt at the time of writing. First, you must be ascetic, and write spare prose. The neutral narrative tone mutes the radical upheaval in the small apocalypse it recalls, but that revelation emerges, indirectly. There is new sight: “For the pupil shall be enlarged by looking; there never was so dark a night but a faithful and patient eye, however small, might at last prevail over it” (CC, 77). But the dilation of the pupil has a price: affection and friendship, along with habit and money getting, belong with the sniveling sympathies, with beauty that cannot bear contrast with the sublime; and the author divests himself of them as a prerequisite to attaining to an understanding of the awful sympathy between the corpse and its setting. In this passage, Thoreau tells us that there is no essential difference between the restless nineteenth-century society and any other society of embodied souls—between Concord and concord—a radical criticism of individuated life that, in Walden, is really only made in the chapter ­entitled “Higher Laws.” Human society is an encumbrance, like the larval remnant on the

   Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod butterfly’s abdomen, retarding the sense of the sublime. His divestiture of human affection is, at least occasionally, thorough, and beyond the reach of many of us. Christ exhorted the young man to forget his riches and his family, just as he himself repudiated his mother’s claim to special love. The sublime is demanding.3 In short, Thoreau presents us with a coded account of the genesis of his attitude. Cape Cod, the transcript of one man’s exemplary encounter with the fierce landscape, is not only the testimony of one with an “unprejudiced” power of attention; it is also a traversing through symbols of the distance between sentiment and the intuition of the sublime. To this end, the narrator offers several allegorical emblems of himself and his writing. First and most obvious among these surrogates are the wreckers, men who make a living collecting the wreckage, immune to the mystery it emits, among them this old man, himself a wreck: We soon met one of these wreckers,—a regular Cape Cod man, with whom we parleyed, with a bleached and weather-beaten face, within whose wrinkles I distinguished no particular feature. It was like an old sail endowed with life,—a hanging-cliff of weather beaten flesh,—like one of the clay boulders which occurred in that sand bank. He had on a hat which had seen salt water, and a coat of many pieces and colors, though it was mainly the color of the beach, as if it had been sanded. His variegated back—for his coat had many patches, even between the shoulders—was a rich study to us when we had passed him and looked around. It might have been dishonorable to him to have so many scars behind, it is true, as if he had not many and more serious ones in front. He looked as if he sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort; too grave to laugh, too tough to cry; as indifferent as a clam,—like a sea-clam with hat on and legs, that was out walking the strand. He may have been one of the pilgrims,—­Peregrine White, at least,—who have kept on the back side of the Cape, and let the centuries go by. He was looking for wrecks, old logs, water-logged and covered with barnacles, or bits of board and joists, even chips which he drew out of the tide, and stacked up to dry. (CC, 59)

Like Wallace Stevens’s snow man, this wrecker matches the blank without with an inner blankness revealed in his appearance. In what may be an indirect reference to his own prose, Thoreau notes that the old man’s exterior is of a kind with the materials he works in. He is a visible emblem of his profession, a wreck whose sorrow has faded into sodden indifference. His heterogeneous, found apparel is a sign of his wreckage: the patches are scars. The reference to Peregrine White, the first Puritan born in the New World, indicates the somewhat ironic homage rendered in this passage to the Puritan supposition that a man’s inward state will be revealed in visible external signs. He is far from society, and he is a “rich study,” the sandy Cape embodied.

Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod   

Yet closer to the narrator is another old man busying himself near ­Cohasset, where the St. John was wrecked: In a little cove, within half a mile, there was an old man and his son collecting, with their team, the seaweed which that fatal storm had cast up, as serenely employed as if there had never been a wreck in the world, though they were within sight of the Grampus Rock, on which the St. John had struck. The old man had heard that there was a wreck and knew most of the particulars, but he said that he had not been up there since it had happened. It was the wrecked weed that concerned him most, rock-weed, kelp and sea-weed, as he named them, which he carted to his barnyard, and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him. (CC, 10–11)

Indifference, and now serenity. Thoreau’s vignettes work to identify an attitude—attentive serenity—with a profession—collecting the stray bits of wrecks. These collectors observe (to use a word gotten from the “Higher Laws” chapter of Walden) a strict chastity: they are bachelors, at least in a symbolic sense, preserving a saving aloofness not from death but from being surprised by it. Thoreau, tubercular, would not have been surprised by it; and he knew that as a writer collecting visions, he, too, was at once a wrecker and a wreck. He nods to those elements common to his work as a writer and the work of the citizens of Cape Cod. Acknowledging that common vocation, the narrator withholds comment, and failing to judge the old man’s attitude, he agrees with its aloofness. All three wreckers are beyond affection, untrammeled by it. “A man can attend but one funeral in his life, can behold but one corpse.” The corpse at Thoreau’s one funeral, perhaps his own corpse, goes unidentified: whoever it was, however, the beholding of it, even if imaginatively enacted, and the sorrow, were over before the book was begun. So the decimation of an old life must precede the beginning of a new one: As I looked over the water, I saw the isles rapidly wasting away, the sea nibbling voraciously at the continent, the spring arch of a hill suddenly interrupted as at Point Allerton,—what botanists might call premorse,—showing, by its curve against the sky, how much space it must have occupied, where now was water only. On the other hand, these wrecks of isles were being fancifully arranged into new shores, as at Hog Island, inside of Hull, where everything seemed to be gently lapsing into futurity. (CC, 15)

Soon enough, the sick Thoreau would be premorse, an adjective meaning “abruptly terminated,” like Point Allerton: knowing this with fair certainty, he may be punning in this passage, suggesting also a remorse before the fact, an acceptance enabling the imaginative expansion from the lifetime of the individual to the larger time of the life of continents. The best

   Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod examples of such gradual new land are Cape Cod—a new world as well as a newly discovered world—and Cape Cod—a prosy bar pieced together from a collection of wrecked matter. “Premorse” counters hope: the particular “futurity” of Thoreau’s prose is no new continent replacing an old one only to be itself eroded in the recurring pattern. Premorse, always already wrecked; to those still ensconced in the merely beautiful, unable to bear the knowledge of sublime murder, able to react only with sorrow or hope, the sandy, serene indifference of premorse is profoundly alien, a bare bar: Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned: and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit. (CC, 71)

This is where Thoreau’s anomalous futurity dwells, here where solidity is “disrobed and rising.” The wrecker retains the sign of his genesis out of the aboriginal chaos, signs that also allude to his return. The citizens of Cape Cod do not seek “dry land,” that is, an impossible solidity safe from wreck. Rather, they live in the wreck, in the midst of it, marked by it, themselves such pieces of affection as the items they collect are. Nevertheless, this anomaly is new sight, not a redemption in the present of the wrecked ambitions of the past. It is the power to be undeceived, and to see freshly, purely, originally, free of vision clouded by affection old or new—the power, that is, to write this book: It is not as on a map, or seen from the stage-coach; but there I found it all out of doors, huge and real. Cape Cod! as it cannot be represented on a map, color it as you will; the thing itself, than which there is nothing more like it, no truer picture or account; which you cannot go further and see, I cannot remember what I thought before that it was. They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a Humane House alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for a landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it. (CC, 65)

Thoreau here likens the wreck of ships to the wreck of human representations such as maps, pictures, or accounts, identifying the beach as the locale of a kind of writing alert to the numinous source of astonishment. His vision goes further than which you cannot go, to an uncelebrated extremity, out where human devices—maps, metaphors, books, adjectives, sentiments—are wrecks, where the thing is before any subsequent description, before its singularity weakens into analogy. To be and its conjugations (“I cannot remember what I thought before that it was”) are the simple frontier of description, the indices of mystery upon which later cognition is propped.

Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod   

Having seen this mystery—“disrobed and rising,” not without its own voluptuousness—he forswears, with Stevens, any “barefoot philandering” that would lead him to forsake “the maiden for the maids.” Strict, anomalous, bachelor devotion leads the writer to shed not only society in the present but all of the scripts and books of the personal and cultural past that provide society with its coda. The vision of the sublime wipes the memory clean: “I cannot remember what I thought before that it was.” Surviving the wreck of the past, he rises from the ancient sedimentation of merely beautiful perceptions—history, even at its finest. He sees and hears for himself: “I put in a little Greek now and then, partly because it sounds so much like ocean,—though I doubt if Homer’s Mediterranean Sea ever sounded so loud as this” (CC, 67). He is the primary man, to whom the voice of the ocean speaks directly rather than through the filtering admonishments of old wisdom: The attention of those who frequent the camp-meetings at Eastham is said to be divided between the preachings of the Methodists and the preaching of the billows on the back side of the Cape, for they all stream over here in the course of their stay. I trust that in this case the loudest voice carries it. With what effect may we suppose the ocean to say, “my hearers!” to the multitude on the bank! On that side some John N. Maffit; on this, the reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa. (CC, 67)

But this is Thoreau we hear, not the ocean. How does Thoreau save himself from being another Maffit, sententiously distracting us from surrounding being? “But what is our account? In it there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth” (CC, 269). Having rejected not only specific books but also the idea of the Book— reality premorse, between covers, the idea that writing can be so wellmade that it is an adequate substitute for the thing at its extremity—he writes something that might have been meant to be something like a book. We must conclude that he writes without the familiar pretensions. The Age of the Book is past: Thoreau writes in the Age of the Wreck of the Book, when miscellanies are not gathered into a new and perfect artifact. This new disposition is not to be easily had, without a necessary preliminary bereavement and the willingness to remain a cipher or fragment collecting fragments: The stranger and the inhabitant view the shore with very different eyes. The former may have come to see and admire the ocean in a storm; but the latter looks on it as the scene where his nearest relatives were wrecked. (CC, 160)

The ocean sheds its “pond-like look” when it is seen as the murderous sublime, not the picturesque sublime. Cape Cod indirectly recounts the

   Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod learning of the former sense, revealing it in symbol and (as I will argue) style. Writing begins in a severely stoical and constant attention to death’s sublimity. To see naked nature is to acknowledge the ascendancy of death over affection (including, crucially, self-affection): The seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-traveled and untameable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squawl and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime. (CC, 186)

The narrator, to repeat, is not aloof from death but aloof from being surprised by it: It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with crabs, horseshoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up,—a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds, and tucks fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature,—inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray. (CC, 182)

We should remember that in Walden Thoreau had claimed to be cheered by this view of nature’s universal cannibalism (to borrow from Melville). The writer is another sort of scavenger, his material a constant reminder that the dreadfully sincere beach withholds that one compliment from which others derive: you are immortal. Though it does not flatter the author, it gives him his book. As the other wreckers collect scraps of wood and bits of iron, he pursues the craft of beachcombing in search of the wrecks of human life, including pieces of memory and stories of woe: If the roadsteads of the spiritual ocean could be thus dragged, what rusty flukes of hope deceived and parted chaincables of faith might be windlassed aboard! Enough to sink the finder’s craft, or stock new navies to the end of time. The bottom of the sea is strewn with anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small link of iron cable still attached,—to which where is the other end? So many unconcluded tales to be concluded another time. So, if we had diving-bells attached to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding-ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find,—not to be Chatham men, dragging for anchors. (CC, 162–63)

He declines to seek a strong anchorage and safety from the sublime, taking these wrecks as so many testimonies to folly. He proceeds to call wrecks

Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod   

“the annals of this voracious beach,” making yet more explicit the symbolic connection of wrecked ships and the wrecked Book. And he explains that the wrecks are not valuable, really, not treasures but ironic mementoes, reminders that hope and sorrow will make new narratives only to be wrecked again. His book will not repeat the error of trying to find a firm anchor safe from the force of the sublime but rather will try for an acknowledging adjustment to that force: though gathering those anchors could yield the material to “stock new navies to the end of time,” he is more concerned that windlassing them aboard might imperil his own slight craft. His treasure is the discovery of an attitude that does not aspire to an immunity from wreck. He lives in the midst of junk—a man on a dump—and does not try to revive or redeem the deceived ambitions of past authors. The beach is a m(a)us(ol)eum of the fragmentary bits of these authors’ books and stories. Thoreau would mime that state—from the start, his axis of vision brought to coincide with the axis of things, to recall Emerson’s phrase. The frequency of allusion in Cape Cod is significant in this context. Thoreau quotes and refers often. This would seem to contradict his resolve to see for himself rather than to listen to others. This contradiction, however, dissolves into a deeper resolution; the works cited are wrecks, curios, not influences, emblems of deceived conceptions of what writing does—jetsam that imperfectly adumbrates the common glory of his modern treasure: A great proportion of inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or another, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade. (CC, 140–41)

The record of Jason’s exploits might overshadow the wonder in the ordinary; “taken aboard” the modern book, it might sink it. Seen as a wreck, however, it won’t endanger the attentive perspective. To put this differently: In Walden, Thoreau chastises those who avidly read newspapers for news of distant events while they ignore the wonder around them; but in both Cape Cod and A Week on Concord and Merrimac, he reports that he often found old newspapers, some that had been used to wrap food, and read them through eagerly; they excite him as soon as he feels that their authority to insert themselves between him and the common surrounding mystery is defunct—as soon, that is, as he knows that they are wrecks. His book exempts itself from being wrecked by being wreckage from the start. It is not, in its large execution, convincingly sequential, narrative, or unified in any demanding sense. Walden is structured as an incremental progression toward insight in the pattern of Emerson’s “Nature.” Compared even with Walden then (to say nothing of, for instance, The Scarlet Letter), Cape Cod is truly extravagant and peripatetic, partly because

   Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod Thoreau died, but only partly, because this method is a direct result of the book’s themes as well. To write the book is to acknowledge, without regret, that the information strewn across the beach—or across the shelves of an old, bad-smelling used bookstore—is wreckage, fragments. The writer of the wrecked book abjures the temptation to save the fragments and to build a new navy. Instead, writing is a tour of the beach, idly fitting piece to piece without regard to their heterogeneous origin, immune to sorrow and hope, not hammering together a new schooner. Possessed by premorse, he settles for a patched dinghy: the writer, too, will die, or is in a sense already dead, so his book is a posthumous collection by an itinerant wrecker. (In this light, Channing’s labors on the manuscript are a sort of uncanny confirmation.) This patching together, according to Joseph Wood Krutch, was Thoreau’s regular means of composition. Krutch tells us that Walden was written this way: striking passages were extracted from the journal; they were not necessarily from the section of the journal in which the experiences that the book recounts were originally narrated; and they were recombined in a manner dictated more by a consideration for the effects of juxtaposition than of exposition. The effect of wreck that dictated the structure of the book as a whole is mirrored in the composition of the paragraph: Obviously, then, Walden was a pastiche composed of bits which had, from the beginning, been set down in the hope that some use would eventually be found for them. The Journal, it must be remembered, was not a complete record of the events of his life (indeed, few of what are ordinarily called biographical facts get into it), and neither was it written exclusively for his own satisfaction. It was a storehouse, a giant notebook, and it continued to retain something of that character even through the later years when the author saw less and less likelihood that the materials still being accumulated would ever be used. While at Walden, he himself wrote in it: “From all the points of the compass, from the earth beneath and the heaven above, have come these inspirations and been entered duly in the order of their arrival in the journal. Thereafter, when the time arrived, they were winnowed into lectures, and again, in due time, from lectures into ­essays.” But he was nevertheless aware that he was not really achieving consecutive coherence, for he goes on; “And at last they stand, like the cubes of Pythagoras, firmly on either basis; like statues on their pedestals, but the statues rarely take hold of hands. There is only such connection and series as is attainable in the galleries. And this affects their immediate practical and popular influence.”4

Likewise, attributing this “disjoint” dimension of Thoreau’s “gnomic style” to his “habit of journalizing,” Van Wyck Brooks concludes that the journal was “a beach on which the waves might cast their pearls and seaweed.”5 At one point in Cape Cod Thoreau himself seems to suggest to us this analogy between what the sea tosses onto the shore and what

Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod   

experience leaves in his journal. “The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wreck of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may vomit up. It lets nothing lie, not even the giant clams which cling to its bottom” (CC, 115). Lest we miss the vividness of the image here, it suffices to note that earlier Thoreau had eaten a whole clam, not knowing that one part of it causes nausea, and was compelled to excuse himself from company as a result. The fragments originate in an upheaval that effaces their former use, scattering them, leaving them to be collected by the wrecker. This is a different kind of inspiration to write. The recombined bits in the wrecked Book were not necessarily selected and joined according to the principle that guided their initial inscription. Indeed, the reuse was often at odds with the former intention. And the later recombination—Thoreau’s gallery of statues that don’t join hands—seems to be marked by a deliberate avoiding of a pure resolution into a consistent, sequential sense. The fragments retain their littoral identities (unlike the shells Emerson tells of bringing back from the beach in “Each and All”), preserved by a method, to repeat, that uses juxtaposition over exposition. The result may be the capture of what Keats called a “fine isolated verisimilitude” in the midst of mystery, an approach by parallax, as it were, as in the rightly renowned paragraph in Walden that begins “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Comprehending the specific sentences, the reader is compelled to puzzle out the logic within a paragraph, or between paragraphs, wondering what the fugitive sense is—making them take hold of hands. Another example, from Cape Cod: This dense, “gnomic” paragraph is provoked by Thoreau’s having peered through a knothole in a “humane house,” a shelter provided for exposed victims of a wreck: Turning our backs on the outward world, we thus looked through the knot-hole into the Humane House, into the very bowels of mercy; and for bread we found a stone. It was literally a great cry (of sea-news outside), and a little wool. However, we were glad to sit outside, under the lee of the Humane House, to escape the piercing wind; and there we thought how cold is charity! how inhumane humanity! This, then, is what charity hides! Virtues antique and far away, with ever a rusty nail over the latch; and very difficult to keep in repair, withal, it is so uncertain whether any will ever gain the beach near you. So we shivered round about, not being able to get into it, ever and anon looking through the knot-hole into that night without a star, until we concluded that it was not a humane house at all, but a seaside box, now shut up, belonging to some of the family of Night or Chaos, where they spent their summers by the sea, for the sake of sea-breeze, and that it was not proper for us to be prying into their concerns. (CC, 78)

Thoreau’s conceit is complex. It begins—not without complications from the first—by resuming the author’s familiar cantankerous resentment of

   Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod philanthropic sentiments. But the sudden turn (beginning at “night without a star”) to images of primordial disorganization, then to the facetious reference to summer vacations, leaves the reader puzzled about the intended topic and tone. This makes better prose, Thoreau implies, prose to be turned around and looked at like some odd thing found on the beach. This opinion might account for his interest in the wreck of the Franklin, a sea disaster that is mentioned as frequently as the wreck of the St. John. The Franklin, unlike the St. John, was deliberately wrecked: We soon after met a wrecker, with a grapple and a rope, who said that he was looking for tow-cloth, which had made part of the cargo of the ship Franklin, which was wrecked here in the spring, at which time nine or ten lives were lost. The reader may remember this wreck, from the circumstance that a letter was found in the captain’s valise, which washed ashore, directing him to wreck the vessel before he got to America, and from the trial which took place in consequence. (CC, 73)

In another edition, Dudley C. Kane notes: These damning letters—one read, “Dr. Sir this will be the Eternal Making of us all, if not it will damn us forever”—were produced before the United States Commissioner in Boston on March 16, 1849. This proceeding led to the indictment and trial of the owners, James W. Wilson and Charles W. Crafts. Wilson turned states evidence, but in the end the jury remained unconvinced of Crafts’ connection with the conspiracy.6

Thoreau’s interest is elicited by the possibility that wrecking a ship may yield a greater return than bringing it to port. In addition to the dubiously gotten gains that accrued to Crafts, though, there was a still greater gain, a real contribution to the flowering of Cape Cod, the land that isn’t, the prospering transcript of wreckage: Another, the same who picked up the captain’s valise, with the memorable letter in it, showed me, growing in his garden, many pear and plum trees which were washed ashore from her, all nicely tied up and labelled, and he said he might have got five hundred dollars’ worth; for a Mr. Bell was importing the nucleus of a nursery to be established near Boston. His turnip-seed came from the same source. Also valuable spars from the same vessel and from the Cactus lay in his yard. In short the inhabitants visit the beach to see what they have caught as regularly as a fisherman his weir or a lumberer his boom; the cape is their boom. I heard of one who had recently picked up twenty barrels of apples in good condition, probably part of a deck load thrown over in a storm. (CC, 114–15)

Insurance companies are designed by human society to compensate for those times when the normal circulation of life and commerce is wrecked. Thoreau here testifies to his belief in a more celestial insurance company

Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod   

whose compensations—stranger, more wonderful—are not of a kind with what is lost, that may seem paltry to those still bereaved by the loss. With this insight we open Thoreau’s valise and find the letter within: wreck may be less a lamentable than a desirable and exhilarating event, if we can only know it. Cape Cod, and Cape Cod, may be poverty-grass, Hudsonia tormentosa, a neglected flower like Williams’s asphodel, so-called because it “grew where nothing else would” (CC, 23). Beginning and prospering in trash, the place and the book are themselves wrecks, sparse new worlds, nourishing in sandy soil the jetsam from a deliberately scuttled ship: A man traveling by the shore near there not long before us noticed something green growing in the pure sand of the beach, just at high-water mark, and on approaching found it to be a bed of beets flourishing vigorously, probably from seed washed out of the Franklin. Also beets and turnips came up in the seaweed used for manure in many parts of the Cape. This suggests how various plants may have been dispersed over the world to distant islands and continents. (CC, 166)

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Losing Deephaven: Sarah Orne Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss

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in luke’s gospel, a disciple brings a request to Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples” (11:1). The disciple does not ask, teach us a prayer, but rather, teach us how to pray. Paraphrasing this passage, François Fénelon, one of Sarah Orne Jewett’s favorite authors, writes, “Give to thy child that which he knows not how to ask.”1 A puzzling request, because the disciple must have prayed with Jesus already, many times, and he must have been familiar with Hebrew prayers, the Psalms, for instance. He therefore appears to believe that prayer requires an art or technique to be learned from a teacher, that prayer is not an untutored proclamation: though complaint and petition appear to break forth from the depths of David and Job, addresses to the Lord, the disciple supposes, require structure. And many commentators have taken Jesus’ injunction concerning the prayer in Matthew’s Gospel—“pray in this way” or “you should pray like this” (6:9), rather than “pray this”—to mean that the prayer is to be thought of as a formula or template—a way of grouping and sequencing praise and petition—as well as, or perhaps even more than as, a particular set of words to be memorized and recited. Method does not necessarily diminish feeling but at best enriches it, articulating nuance and complexity, even contradiction, where there might otherwise be only simple and extreme emotional noise. He or she who prays properly attends to an expressive rhythm shaping need to pattern. Perhaps grieving, like prayer, needs to be learned. In the African American musical tradition, a “moan” is a distinct type of blues song as well as the low cry that breaks from a person suffering mightily. To name a genre after a cry is to suggest that even, or especially, in extremity there are rules to be heeded in order to achieve a deepening and sustaining expression, a

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more fulfilling expression linked to the memories and aesthetic intuitions of a community that receives the performance and returns recognition. Though sorrow, shock, fear, fury, and despair are probably universal human experiences, the orchestration or arrangement of those feelings that we call mourning might (like the capacity for a happy life, a related skill) be an acquired technique inculcated via instruction, emulation, and tacit or explicit formal ritual. But arts get lost: that which needs to be taught is at the mercy of ­neglect. Contemporary grief theorists building on Erich Lindemann’s seminal essay “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief ” argue that there are several inevitable phases of the grieving process—denial, anger, despair, acceptance—an assertion that implies an innate itinerary, a healing procedure as autonomic as the body closing cuts or expelling thorns.2 A comforting thought, but this theory doesn’t explain the existence or function of the practice of grief, its form and sociality, and those who advance the theory often seem to treat social practice as epiphenomenal or supernumerary. Perhaps this is the allure of the theory: even lacking the art of grief, we will nevertheless be able to grieve successfully; or if we can’t, there is a remedy, medical intervention that dissolves impediments to a natural process rather than cultural or ritual forms that transmit a practice: Religious agencies have led in dealing with the bereaved. They have provided comfort by giving the backing of dogma to the patient’s wish for continued interaction with the deceased, have developed rituals that maintain the patient’s interaction with others, and have counteracted the morbid guilt feelings of the patient by Divine Grace and by promising an opportunity for “making up” to the deceased at the time of a later reunion. Although these methods have helped countless mourners, comfort alone does not provide adequate assistance in the patient’s grief work. He has to review his relationships with the deceased, and he has to become acquainted with the alterations in his own modes of emotional reaction. His fear of insanity and his fear of accepting the surprising changes in his feelings, especially the overflow of hostility, must be worked through. He will have to express his sorrow and sense of loss. He will have to find an acceptable formulation of his future relationship with the deceased. He will have to verbalize his feelings of guilt, and he will have to find persons around him whom he can use as “primers” for the acquisition of new patterns of conduct. All this can be done in eight to ten interviews.3

Lindemann’s vision of what mourning requires is compelling—a fundamental acknowledgment of the absolute loss at hand and a gradual assembly of recollections into an understanding of what the dead was for the survivor, an act of intimate memory that extricates the survivor from the dead and enables a reengagement with the world, a reconnection established through conscious loyalty to the dead rather than through forgetting. But

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss is this work a human instinct? For Lindemann, however untutored we are, we’re probably fine, because we’re hardwired. Cultural participation in grief is reduced to the brief comforts of the funeral, with the subsequent hard steps taken in solitude, following an intrinsic map, society intervening only in cases of medical emergency. But why would there ever be grief gone wrong, with the consequent need for medical intervention? When Lindemann returned to the themes of his 1944 essay in a 1968 essay (he had in the meantime been among the doctors to whom Sylvia Plath had been taken by her mother), he sought to broaden his portrait of loss to include cultural loss and its effect on the ability to mourn, a task necessitated by the central argumentative failing of the earlier essay, the absence of any explanation for the failures of mourning that mandate medical intervention.4 In this chapter I will argue that Sarah Orne Jewett began her career as a writer with the insight that Lindemann was reaching for in 1968, that grieving could be and needed to be taught by practice and example, and that such teaching depends upon the vigor of certain formal and informal vernacular cultural institutions, without which mourning is endangered and rampant melancholia is risked. Throughout Deephaven, her first book, Jewett notes and itemizes the local arts of a country town, including tea service; weather forecasting; the tying of maritime knots; the identification, collection, and brewing of medicinal herbs; and crewel embroidery.5 Her concern for these cherished arts suggests an affinity between her writing and early manifestations of what would come to be called the arts and crafts movement; for example, the Deerfield (Massachusetts) Society of Blue and White Needlework, which was started in 1896, with the intention of reviving the traditional embroidery of the Colonial period, and of establishing a village industry. Much study of the old pieces of decorative needlework preserved in family chests, showed that the designs, coloring and stitches owed their origin to England, where in the Elizabethan manors and farm houses similar bed and window furnishings are still found, these in turn being direct in descent from the famous early Anglo Saxon embroideries. Transplanted in our first Colonial states the designs derived fresh vigor from the Orient, for the printed and woven fabrics brought through “the China trade” furnished many an inland draughtswoman with new motives to add to the traditional English variants of the rose, thistle, lily and carnation; thus enriched the work continued, each spread or curtain being drawn, free-hand, upon the homespun linen and wrought in hand-spun threads of linen or wool dyed in madder, indigo and fustic, until superseded by fine white embroidery and lacework, its production ceasing before 1830.6

At one point in Deephaven, embroidery intersects mourning: “There were some mourning-pieces by way of decoration inscribed with the names of

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Mrs. Patton’s departed friends,—two worked in crewel to the memory of her father and mother, and two paper memorials, with the woman weeping under the willow at the edge of a monument.” 7 Two kinds of demanding and delicate work combine: embroidering, the mourner is withdrawn from the world, remembering, stitching, extruding an artifact that she can put down, but not put away, on the mantel, a fond reminder that does not, or does not always, engulf her. Jewett is as fastidious in noticing such workings of grief as she is in her attention to the other endangered arts: “[The elderly women] wore to church thin, soft silk gowns that must have been brought from over the seas years upon years before, and wide collars fastened with mourning-pins holding a lock of hair” (D, 42). Grieving in the town of Deephaven is a culturally embedded and nourished skill. The juxtaposition of the mourning-pins and the silk gowns brought back from overseas intimates that these women in the church are widows and that the locks of hair may belong to the husbands who fetched home the gowns. In addition, the reference to the vanished heyday of Deephaven seafaring intimates that the women’s mode of grieving may be, like the gowns, antique, carefully preserved but visibly belonging to a prior affective epoch. A number of social historians would support Jewett on this: drawing on the work of Philippe Ariès, they see what Ariès called a “brutal revolution”—“death, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become painful and forbidden.”8 Ariès believed that this revolution began in the United States in the years following the Civil War. A number of explanations could be adduced: the Civil War itself, which in its excruciating brutality may have overtaxed the national capacity to assimilate loss; the intrusion of market forces and national media into local life; increased skepticism concerning the afterlife, intensifying the horror of death; the collective desire to participate in the fantasy of a comprehensive, unstymied national power. Whatever the genesis of the interdict on death, according to Charles O. Jackson, “The living demanded that its harsh reality be reduced, muted, and beautified. Those alive became less willing to conclude their relationship with the deceased and would seek comfort through a substantial reduction in social distance between the living world and the dead world.”9 James J. Farrell continues this argument: “Between 1830 and 1920 American conceptions of death changed in a process which an English author of 1899 called ‘the Dying of Death.’ By this phrase he meant not ‘the annihilation of continuous existence here and hereafter,’ but ‘the practical disappearance of the thought of death as an influence bearing upon practical life,’ not the banishment of biological death, but the cultural circumvention of dread of death.”10 Surveying the landscape of American

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss funerary practice, Farrell sees a single unfolding agenda: the replacement of coffins by caskets, which, when closed, more fully obscure the shape of the corpse, and, when open, suggest a sleeping chamber; machines to lower the casket into the hole; the dirt dug from the hole covered with a tarpaulin; the dirt left in a pile by the side of the grave until after the mourners have departed; the removal of caskets and other funerary items from the parlors of funeral homes; the preparation of the body by a professional undertaker rather than a member of the family; embalming; abbreviated funeral services; the sequestering of the family’s grief. Some people even considered the funeral itself responsible for grief and for the fear of death. “More than half the fear inspired by death is ascribable to the somber trappings and accompaniments,” wrote one observer. “Everything is done to make it doleful; ingenuity is strained to lacerate the feelings of the bereaved. We remember the dead with affection and gratitude, mayhap with cheerfulness; the ceremonies which follow death are hideous to recall, and cannot be forgotten. Every bright image of the loved that rises in our minds is darkened and driven away by recollection of dismal rites and hollow pageantry . . . Not the act of ­dying, always quick and swift, but the garniture, parade, and sequel of death is painful and shocking.” The old funeral rites impeded the progress of civilization. As religion centered on love, as science spread rationality, and as psychology stressed boosterism, the continuation of funeral services which elicited fear and loathing seemed anachronistic. People rejected ‘the false ideas of death’ and substituted instead a ‘proper’ idea of death.11

At the end of his book, Farrell ruminates on the cost of the dying of death: Keeping death out of minds cuts people off from an important fact of their physical, mental and spiritual existence. If knowing that we will die is part of what makes us human, then forgetting that we will die threatens our humanity. In the same way, the denial of death in American society also cuts people off from our common humanity, keeping them at such a distance from the deaths of others that they cannot grieve or mourn, except in the culturally prescribed “way.” The paraphernalia of the American way of death keep such people at one remove from their own feelings. When they want to focus their minds and emotions on the loss in their lives, they find only a dead social convention designed to constrain and contain their grief.12

Grief was deprived of focus and self-knowledge: the suppression of the art of mourning condemned the untutored individual and the culture at large to a general melancholia, to an affect so pervasive as to seem an inevitable color or aroma of consciousness rather than a predicament to be identified and engaged. Paula Blanchard anchors the Jewett family’s grieving practice in an

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earlier cultural configuration, New England stoicism, finding the family to be an exceptionally capable participant: But the list of family deaths in her childhood, and the unusual fluctuation from mourning to joy and back again, reminds us of the continual disruptions and realignments children and families experienced in the last century (one thinks of the Emersons, the Dickinsons, and the Brontës) and the need to develop a more solid defensive armor than we have today. Without being in the least dour or rigid—that is, without being in the least the stereotypical Yankee family—the Jewetts possessed a truly impressive degree of sangfroid. Like most traditional New England families they minimized and denied grief; but they seem to have carried their denial to the point of actual defiance. The death of a loved one often would be followed by a celebration of some kind—a wedding or a trip abroad. Funerals, so important in Jewett’s fiction as community rites and solemn festivals, were central events in her own childhood. The funeral of a Jewett or a Gilman was a wholehearted affair, and the funeral of Grandmother Jewett, unlike her death, held no terrors for small Sarah. On the contrary, it gave her “vast entertainment” and was “the first grand public occasion in which [she] had taken any share.” The whole town attended, and there were eulogies followed by genteel feasting, and afterwards dozens of condoling letters to answer. The expression of grief was all packed into that event, and within days the ordinary discourse of life was briskly resumed and outward grieving was discouraged except for the wearing of mourning and the use of black-bordered stationery. The beginnings of Sarah Orne Jewett’s emotional calm, including that aversion to ordinary evil and squalor for which she is so often criticized, can be seen early in the habitual family attitude toward grief and loss.13

The “briskness” here seems more like the attitude Farrell describes than it does like late Puritanism—they were not “in the least a stereotypical Yankee family.” Blanchard’s praise for the family’s staunchness and for Sarah’s aversive “calm” is undercut by the points of comparison she chooses—Emersons, Dickinsons, Brontës—and the alacrity she describes feels like the speediness of avoidance, a velocity Farrell takes to be symptomatic of an American avant-garde. In her account of her father’s death in her diary, Jewett finds comfort but is far from brisk or calm: “The day the telegram came and the next day, until I saw my father’s face late in the afternoon I was so hurt—in such terrible stunning bewildering agony that the positive physical pain was the least of it.” Eventually, she comes to feel that “dying is no such shock and mystery and unnatural thing after all. There is a terrible pathos and sadness about a life that is finished here.” Despite this somber resolution, “sometimes the sight of some little thing that belonged to father or the remembrance of something he said, or the mere longing that comes over one to see him again is almost more than I can bear. I try to get used

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss to seeing his grave but it is the one terror to me for it neither belongs to his being here nor his being in heaven.”14 In several of the other sections of this book, I contend that American public culture has at times depended in part upon the disruption and attempted appropriation of grief, and I’m inclined to see the “dying of death” as a new moment in that ongoing intrusion, as an appropriation effected by means of investment in an image of social and technological power rather than an image of virtue. But my focus in this chapter is not primarily on the genealogy of such appropriation—for example, on the transition from New England stoicism to the cheerier “dying of death”— but instead on Jewett’s desire to publicize and preserve a surviving alternative. In the gathering twilight of the New England tradition, surrounded by implicit companions such as Emily Dickinson, Alice James, Clover Adams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jewett unveils an imperiled but still effective social order whose solicitude for the lorn individual is unfeigned, magnanimous, stringent, and effective. If regionalism since Scott has been emotionally impelled by the thought of human culture’s endangered species, Jewett argues that it is not just a quaint charm that is at risk but also the healing formulae such cultures carry deep within themselves, particularly in a religious tradition that allows the realization of loss to occur: the major difference between Jewett and the others I write about in this book is that in advancing an image of successful mourning, Jewett takes faith to be a means rather than an obstacle to mourning, a commitment I find deep, convincing, moving, and, in the American tradition, rare, American religion being what it has been, too often, especially in its Puritan-patriarchal mode. The nearest analogue I can think of is Marilynne Robinson’s extraordinary novel Gilead. I therefore agree with Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse that Jewett is not a tourist or an anthropologist manufacturing the regionalist souvenir but that she is deeply invested in and half belongs to the culture that she writes about, and that the value she finds there is that culture’s ability to teach emotional intelligence.15 Jewett’s regionalism is motivated by the imminent loss of successful loss, of structures that enable people to articulate loss and extricate themselves from its jealous and excluding domain.

Regional Feeling Though no one envies another’s grief, one can envy another’s ability to grieve. Recall Emerson’s confession of a cold soul: People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss    painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is how to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate—no more. I cannot get it nearer me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous.

The avoidance of particular affection and consequent immunity to sorrow that Emerson claimed in most of his writings as the prerequisite for spiritual amplification is here recast as simple coldness, not the neutrality of Whitman’s innocent voracious earth or of Thoreau’s beachcomber­collector, just coldness without expansive sequel. Or consider John Marcher in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” at the grave of May Bartram, his generous, long-standing, and underappreciated friend—“he had never thought of her . . . but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use.” Some months after her death, somebody comes along: He knew that even of late his ache had only been smothered. It was strangely drugged, but it throbbed; at the touch it began to bleed. And the touch, in the event, was the face of a fellow-mortal. This face, one grey afternoon when the leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into Marcher’s own, at the cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a blade. He felt it, that is, so deep down that he winced at the steady thrust. The person who so mutely assaulted him was a figure he had noticed, on reaching his goal, absorbed by a grave a short distance away, a grave apparently fresh, so that the emotion of the visitor would probably match it for frankness.

Marcher “[catches] the shock of the face”: His neighbor at the other grave had withdrawn as he himself, with force in him to move, would have done by now, and was advancing along the path on his way to one of the gates. This brought him near, and his pace was slow, so that—and all the more as there was a kind of hunger in his look—the two men were for a minute directly confronted. Marcher felt him on the spot as one of the deeply stricken—a perception so sharp that nothing else in the picture lived for it, neither his dress, his age, nor his presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep ravage of the features that he showed. He showed them—that was

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss the point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either a signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to another sorrow.

At this point, James has us expecting that the grief of the other might catalyze Marcher’s, eliciting the conscious sense of loss that has to this point eluded him. But that’s not what happens: What Marcher was at all events conscious of was, in the first place, that the ­image of scarred passion presented to him was conscious too—of something that profaned the air; and in the second that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment looking after it, as it went, with envy. The most extraordinary thing that had happened to him—though he had given that name to other matters as well—took place, after his immediate vague stare, as a consequence of this impression. The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder in pity what was wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man had to make him, by the loss of it, so bleed and yet live?

Marcher answers his own question with an Emersonian explanation— coldness: Something—and this reached him with a pang—that he, John Marcher, hadn’t; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher’s arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage? . . . He had seen outside of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself; such was the force of his conviction of the meaning of the stranger’s face, which still flared for him like a smoky torch. It had not come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience; it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of an accident.16

This passage is achingly memorable, as frightening as Emerson’s confession, and I imagine its force draws on James’s own worry that, like Marcher, he ought to be “stupefied at the blindness he had cherished.” For the moment before he retires into the sparse comfort of recriminatory self-examination, Marcher feels, first, pity and then, amazingly, envy. The meditation on frigidity commences in answer to simple questions: Why can he grieve, if I can’t? What does he have that I lack? Whence the capacity to grieve? The power of this passage resides, perhaps, in these questions rather than in the answer that arises to meet them. And the stranger moves on with his deep enigma intact, like the Native Americans Thomas Jefferson imagined at the burial mound: “Marcher felt him on the spot as one of the deeply stricken—a perception so sharp that nothing else in the picture lived for it, neither his dress, his age, nor his presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep ravage of the features that he showed.” Without some knowledge of this stranger, Marcher can only

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hunt through any and all deficiencies he might find or imagine in himself in order to try to answer the question, what does he have that I lack? In his explanation of psychoanalytic transference, Jacques Lacan employs the phrase sujet supposé savoir, usually translated as the “subject supposed to know,” but also as the “supposed subject of knowledge.” We suppose the analyst to be the embodiment of a subjectivity inevitable in fantasy life, a replete consciousness possessing full knowledge of our failings and deficiencies. That no analyst can actually be what the fantasy demands that he or she be is less important for Lacan than the fact that the patient supposes the analyst to be so, and that certain useful effects flow from the supposition, a transference facilitated by the therapist’s neutrality or reserve. There’s a related fantasy at the end of “The Beast in the Jungle.” The stranger in the cemetery is conspicuous only in his grief. For Marcher he is otherwise blank—“Marcher felt him on the spot as one of the deeply stricken—a perception so sharp that nothing else in the picture lived for it, neither his dress, his age, nor his presumable character and class”—and therefore is available as a kind of emblem, a sujet supposé sentir, subject supposed to feel. Though James only hints, we should take the hint and consider the things Marcher doesn’t notice, the man’s age, class, clothes, and character, which are unnoticed only because Marcher is transfixed by the other’s open grief, not because they might otherwise have been taken for granted: May Bartram was not wealthy, her grave marker is a simple “low stone table” or “slab,” and in her area of the cemetery the “leaves were thick in the alleys,” all intimating that the feeling man may well not be of Marcher’s class. Some clue to the man’s capacity to feel might be suggested here: had Marcher been less stricken, and therefore able to notice that the man was of a lower social stratum, he might have speculated that the man’s capacity to feel was related to his status, that he was more intact or integral by virtue of having been spared some of the affective calamity of modernity. We can trace this sujet supposé sentir back at least as far as “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” when William Wordsworth, discovering that adult contemplation can’t recapture the intense contact of youth, turns to look at his sister, contemplating her rapt and undivided contemplation of the scene as a vicarious and partial compensation for his own defect. In American literature we can advance from James through the Nick Carraway / Jay Gatsby and Sal Paradise / Dean Moriarty pairs to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which a nun tells Jack Gladney that she doesn’t believe in angels and he replies, “ ‘But you’re a nun. Nuns believe these things. When we see a nun, it cheers us up, it’s cute and amusing, being reminded that someone still believes in angels, in saints, all the traditional things.’ ” To which the sister rejoins, “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.’” 17 Though the feelings preserved vary in each of these instances, the common thread is that the subject supposed to feel amounts to a kind of wildlife preserve, intact because undeveloped, spared coldness by virtue of gender, class, ethnicity, age, or in the case at hand here, region. Wordsworth wrote in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads: Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

According to Schiller: There are moments in our lives when we extend a kind of love and tender respect toward nature in plants, minerals, animals and landscapes, as well as to human nature in children, in the customs of country folk and the primitive world . . . They are what we were; they are what we should become once more. We were nature like them, and our culture should lead us along the path of reason and freedom back to nature. Thus they depict at once our lost childhood, something that remains ever dearest to us, and for this reason they fill us with a certain melancholy . . . This sensitivity to nature expresses itself in the most universal manner and in a particularly powerful fashion when it is occasioned by those objects, for example, children and primitive peoples, that are more closely connected to us, placing in sharper relief for us a retrospective of ourselves and what is unnatural in us.18

Compare Wordsworth and Schiller with Jewett, writing seventy years later: “I wonder,” said I, “why it is that one hears so much more of such things from simple country people. They believe in dreams, and they have a kind of fetichism, and believe so heartily in supernatural causes. I suppose nothing could shake Mrs. Patton’s faith in warnings [of danger communicated telepathically across distances between family members]. There is no end of absurdity in it, and yet there is one side of such lives for which one cannot help having reverence; they live so much nearer to nature than people who are in cities, and there is a soberness about country people oftentimes that one cannot help noticing. I wonder if they are unconsciously awed by the strength and purpose in the world about them, and the mysterious creative power which is at work with them on their

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss    familiar farms. In their simple life they take their instincts for truths, and perhaps they are so instinctive and unreasoning they may have a more complete sympathy with Nature and may hear her voices when wiser ears are deaf. They have much in common, after all, with the plants which grow up out of the ground and the wild creatures which depend upon their instincts wholly.” (D, 103–4)

If Jewett is echoing Wordsworth here, she’s also expressing the rationale for a genre thriving in her own time; according to Richard Brodhead, Deephaven “went through twenty-three editions in its first nineteen years” and was not unique in its popularity. Seventy years after the great ­Romantic theorists, the desire for news from the plainer life is widespread, and a readily identifiable, transmissible, and reproducible type of fiction arises in response. Regionalism is truly generic, in the manner that comes to typify American popular writing in the late nineteenth century. Individual regionalist works, though perhaps less readily interchangeable than many of our contemporary cultural artifacts, are nevertheless consistent enough among themselves, according to Brodhead, to offer the pleasure of serial reading to the many who had discovered that they liked that kind of thing: “Since this form was heavily conventionalized in formulas that barely changed from the 1860’s to the century’s end, it did not require the more highly elaborated writerly skills other forms asked for their successful performance. (The fact that authors in this mode typically had their first efforts published suggests how little special training the form required, how adequate it was found in its most conventional versions.)” Citing the translocal political, economic, and infrastructural amalgamations transforming American experience after the Civil War, Brodhead contends that the cultural work of nineteenth-century regionalism, the emotional and conceptual service this writing performed that made it meet a profound social need—for the historical demand for regionalism bespeaks not just a taste but need—has been assumed to be that of cultural elegy: the work of memorializing a cultural order passing from life at that moment and of fabricating, in the literary realm, a mentally-possessable version of a loved thing lost in reality. Nineteenth-century regionalism can be said to have manufactured, in its monthly-renewed public imaging of old-fashioned social worlds, a cultural version of D. W. Winnicott’s transitional object: a symbol of union with the premodern chosen at the moment of separation from it.19

According to Amy Kaplan, regionalism’s eager readers were “solidified as an imagined community by consuming images of rural ‘others’ as both a nostalgic point of origin and a measure of cosmopolitan development.”20 In the wake of the Civil War and in the midst of the sorts of bewildering social transformations that William Dean Howells would capture in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), regionalism furnished an endearing image of a simpler and more coherent time, reassuringly intact for the time

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss b­ eing, available for rejuvenating vacations, while at the same time providing, via a shared wistfulness, the feeling of a contemporary national we, of a tentative and hesitant American modernity. As Sandra A. ­Zagarell argues, “Because regionalist affirmations of the authenticity of rural life were motivated by a desire to establish a contrast with the present day, what regionalist literature deemed authentic always already inscribed the elements of the contemporary from which the region supposedly offered escape.”21 The nationalist sensation that regionalism affords is thus a significant exception to projective nationality, the derivation of the we from the anticipation of a common future, and to vindictive nationality, the foundation of the we in the hatred of an enemy. Though fictional and more prosy, regionalism has several features in common with ethnography, as Brodhead, Kaplan, and Bill Brown have argued: both imply an ability to discern representative artifacts and practices; both put their specimens on display for an audience that approaches with a mixture of curiosity, interest, tacit condescension, and a desire for surrogate or vicarious exotic experience; 22 and both proceed from the assumption that the represented culture is static and archaic. Regionalism is therefore fair game for the sorts of challenges that anthropologists began to pose to themselves in the last quarter of the twentieth century. “  ‘Cultures’ do not hold still for their portraits,” James Clifford remarks, for example, and the belief that they do, he argues, tells more about the observer than it does about the observed: What would it require, for example, consistently to associate the inventive, resilient, enormously varied societies of Melanesia with the cultural future of the planet? How might ethnographies be differently conceived if this standpoint could be seriously adopted? Pastoral allegories of cultural loss and textual rescue would, in any event, have to be transformed.23

What is the observer’s stance or stake in seeing the scene as he or she does? How does observation shape the raw material of an actual culture to manufacture what is displayed as something observed? What does the observer bring to the encounter that shapes or even coerces the encounter? Why might one desire “pastoral allegories of cultural loss and textual rescue”? What disappointment would ensue if Melanesia or Deephaven were thought of as an inventive and resilient society oriented toward an emergent future? Regionalism differs from traditional ethnography in that it frequently presents the represented culture by means of a narrative of the observer’s sojourn among the observed, emphasizing the observer’s feelings toward and reactions to the locals. This display of the observer—his or her affability, urbanity, loquacity, sympathy, humor, adaptability—is designed

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss   

to establish informal authority, to render the representation of the culture more credible by virtue of an established bond of trust with the reader founded on the observer’s manifested responsiveness. But every call for trust implies that we might mistrust, and this possibility, though perhaps ­latent, remains in mind. Because it risks this question of trust for the ­observer-narrator, regionalist fiction has most in common with the subgenre of ethnography that seems to intrigue Clifford most, the fieldwork account, which tends to feature the observer’s subjective engagement in and with the scene: Experienced objectivity yields to that of the autobiography and the ironic selfportrait . . . The ethnographer, a character in a fiction, is at center stage. He or she can speak of previously “irrelevant” topics: violence and desire, confusions, struggles and economic transactions with informants. These matters (long discussed informally within the discipline) have moved away from the margins of ethnography, to be seen as constitutive, inescapable.24

The complications latent in observer accounts are liable to come forward when the writer has some connection with the studied culture. Like Zora Neale Hurston, who was trained as an ethnographer, who was partial to fieldwork accounts, and who went on to write regionalist fiction, Jewett has one foot in the observer culture and the other in the observed culture; and because they are therefore cognizant of the politics of observation, their fiction capitalizes on the opportunity to observe observation, to question its informal authority. But whereas Hurston chose to drop first-person narration in favor of a dialogized third-person narration in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jewett keeps to the first person, staying on the same limb with the fieldwork narrator, but farther out on it, rendering her observer increasingly conspicuous. The opinions expressed in Deephaven concerning the credulity of country people, for example, are expressed first in conversation and later transcribed for inclusion in the book by Deephaven’s author-narrator, Helen Denis: by thus explicitly embedding those opinions in two separately dramatized forms of statement, Jewett emphasizes she who pronounces the opinions as well as the opinions themselves, thereby intimating that Helen’s views are not necessarily Jewett’s own. If the comparison of people with “plants which grow up out of the ground and the wild creatures which depend upon their instincts wholly” ruffles some readers’ feathers and feels more complacently arrogant than Wordsworth and Schiller, this may well be an invited reaction. Jewett, that is, means for us to take Helen with a grain of salt when she waxes regionalist. As Brodhead contends, “When Jewett . . . assumed the position of a well-to-do urban vacationer in Deephaven, she [was] not expressing her own actual relation to her subject—she was still a resident of

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss the world she described as a visitor. Instead she had been mastering a convention of her genre: fictively projecting herself into the cosmopolitanized point of view from which the local is ‘seen’ in local color fiction.”25 The difference Jewett wishes to put between herself and Helen is clear in a letter written to Mrs. Henry Lee Higginson in 1877, especially when that letter is juxtaposed to another, written to Willa Cather in 1908, when Jewett was fifty-nine years old: You said one thing in your letter which made me very glad; that you thought I had not made country people ridiculous. I should have been so sorry if I had done that, for I have always liked my out-door life best, and in driving about ever since I can remember with my father, who is a doctor, I have grown more and more fond of the old-fashioned country-folks. I have always known their ways and I like to be with them. Deephaven is not the result of careful study during one “summer’s vacation,” as some persons have thought, but I could write it because it is the fashion of life with which I have always been familiar.26 I want you to be surer of your backgrounds,—you have your Nebraska life,—a child’s Virginia, and now an intimate knowledge of what we are pleased to call the “Bohemia” of newspaper and magazine-office life. These are uncommon equipment, but you don’t see them yet quite enough from the outside,—you stand right in the middle of each of them when you write, without having the standpoint of the looker-on who takes them each in their relation to letters, to the world.27

The letters do not contradict one other, but they emphasize contrary dangers, distance in 1877, immersion in 1908, the difference between them echoing the (probably embarrassed) condescension toward her younger self on display in her preface to the 1893 edition of Deephaven: The writer frankly confesses that the greater part of any value which these sketches may possess is in their youthfulness. There are sentences which make her feel as if she were the grandmother of the author of Deephaven and her heroines, those “two young ladies of virtue and honour, bearing an inviolable friendship for each other,” as two others, less fortunate, are described in the preface to ­Clarissa Harlowe. She begs her readers to smile with her over those sentences as they are found not seldom along the pages, and so the callow wings of what thought itself to be wisdom and the childish soul of sentiment will still be happy and untroubled.28

Jewett’s 1893 self-assessment and her letter to Cather are echoed in Carlos Baker’s appraisal of Jewett’s maturation: The growth between Deephaven and The Country of the Pointed Firs can be measured by seeing how observation has matured into insight, and how her attitude toward both her people and her art has subtly deepened. In the early book the narrator seems (though she was not) a summer resident in search of the quaint and

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss    unique; without looking down on the people she is never quite at one with them, and her experiments with scenes are sometimes tentative and unsure. By the time of the Pointed Firs and its epilogue-story The Dunnet Shepherdess, she knows how to understand and therefore how to present her people; she has learned the great trick of true realism; to combine depth of sympathetic involvement with artistic detachment, reaching unity through the establishment of a point of view. Deeply responsive to a look or a word from people like Almira Todd the gatherer of pennyroyal, or William Blackett the taciturn islander, she can still see that look or word as only one thread in the fabric of her total impression. An emotional experience is thus never felt to be the end in view, but only an indispensable contribution to that end.29

Baker gets himself mixed up in some difficulties here. He contends that “the narrator seems (though she was not) a summer resident in search of the quaint and unique”: the grammatical antecedent for “she” is “narrator,” so the sentence means, the narrator seems a summer resident in search of the quaint and unique, but she, the narrator, was not. Though this is what his syntax says, I don’t think it’s what Baker meant: Helen was a summer resident, but Jewett was not. The ambiguity is worth noting because we need to know whether it is Helen or Jewett who, in the next sentence, is “without looking down on the people . . . never quite at one with them,” and whose “experiments with scenes are sometimes tentative and unsure.” The next sentence answers our question, because “she” is revealed as author of The Country of the Pointed Firs. I linger over this grammatico-­argumentative bramble because of what underpins it: Baker recognizes the distinction between persona and writer, but nevertheless decides that the narrator’s failings are also the author’s rather than that they are deliberate constructions. Would he entertain such a thought about “My Last Duchess” or The Great Gatsby? I disagree with Baker’s and Brodhead’s contention that the Jewett of Deephaven is trying out or practicing a voice she would later perfect, a contention that depends on equating Jewett and Helen as writers. Jewett’s quite proud claim in the 1877 letter that hers is not a summer’s vacation knowledge shows that she did not want to be confused with her narrator and that she therefore had a clear motive for supplying Helen with recognizably distinctive ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and writing. I do not mean that there is no Jewett in Helen, just as one cannot say there is no Fitzgerald in Nick Carraway, only that in both cases the voice seems to me to have been rendered. Helen mentions that one of the old favorites among the books that she and Kate brought along that summer was A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life, by Adeline Dutton Train Whitney (D, 138), and Jewett shared that affection: “I think no book ever did me more good than that blessed ‘­Leslie Goldthwaite,’ ” she wrote to Anna Dawes in 1876. “The older I get

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss the more I find in it.”30 However fond Jewett may have been of it, though, Whitney’s novel is a breezy story of a teenaged girl’s summer trip to the White Mountains, characterized by peeks, glimpses, and overheard snippets of local life, a book that we might suppose Helen to have taken for a model but a clear example of the sort of superficial contact that Jewett disavowed in the 1877 letter to Mrs. Higginson. Though Jewett and Helen mention only Leslie Goldthwaite, Whitney in fact wrote a number of books about and for young women readers—Faith Gartney’s Girlhood; We Girls: A Home Story; The Other Girls; Patience Strong’s Outings; Friendly Letters to Girl Friends—revealing that a certain kind of reader’s eager expectations from this kind of thing—girls’ and young women’s fiction, from Louisa Alcott through L. M. Montgomery and Frances Hodgson Burnett to the present—were sufficient to constitute it as a familiar genre. In which case, Deephaven might seem to be a kind of spliced work, regionalist in what it sees, young women’s novel in how it sees, except that the tones of the young women’s novel are thematized as Helen’s authorial choices— as aspects of her writerly character. Such a conspicuous elaboration of a first-person narrator-observer is not an intrinsic feature of either genre, and this in itself contributes to making Helen conspicuous, a highlighting made all the brighter by having her write in a manner that Jewett’s contemporaries would have found readily noticeable. The distinctive and conspicuous character of Helen’s narrative is not a symptom but a sign, not evidence of Jewett’s immaturity but the constructed result of an array of culturally familiar signs amassed and organized to render the narration visible, to display a desire to sample and preserve simple rural charm. The deliberate elaboration of narratorial character, as Zagarell argues, “showcases Helen’s position as a cosmopolitan consumer; it thus rejects the common regionalist practice of claiming for narrators the status of disinterested observers.”31 Zagarell, along with Margaret Roman, Marjorie Pryse, and Judith Fetterley, is one of the few who credit Deephaven with being more complex and accomplished than it is generally thought to be, and, as should be clear by now, I agree: the majesty of a mature writer sometimes tempers or even quells intensities of thought and feeling that it nonetheless presumes, and the gain is not necessarily so without cost as Baker would have it be. The jazz pianist Bill Evans once remarked that he didn’t play melodies but rather indicated them; maybe in this sense The Country of the Pointed Firs, so clearly a deliberate revis(itat)ion of Deephaven, indicates Deephaven, its younger older sister. If, as Baker and Ann Romines argue, observer and scene do not flow into each other as fully and richly in Deephaven as they do in The Country of the Pointed Firs, 32 if there’s an abiding tension between observer and scene in the earlier work, a less consummate encounter, then perhaps the achievement of the

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss   

older writer entails or develops from her cognizance of the problem she explored so carefully when she was younger, and therefore presumes the earlier work.

Depression and the Journey Out A brief summary of the book: near the end of a Boston winter, 1875 or so presumably, Helen receives a note asking her to come to the house of her friend Kate Lancaster. Both are twenty-four years old, unmarried and with no suitors mentioned, well-off, and living with their families— Helen with her father and her aunt Mary, Kate with both parents and two brothers. They have been close friends since childhood. Kate tells Helen that her parents are going to England for the summer, that her brothers will vacation near Lake Superior, and that she dislikes both options. She proposes instead that she and Helen, together with domestic help, spend the summer in Deephaven, a small town on Maine’s southern coast, in the house formerly occupied by Kate’s mother’s deceased aunt, also named Kate. Helen, facing equally unstimulating options, happily agrees, and the two spend the summer in continual company with one another, exploring the landscape and seeking to make acquaintances, which they do readily, as a result, Helen believes, of Kate’s great tact. They find these encounters charming, moving, and enriching, so much so that when autumn arrives, they toy with the idea of remaining for good but opt for bittersweet return. In the final chapter Helen mentions that a number of relatives and friends visited over the course of the summer, but these interlopers are otherwise unmentioned, the narration being given over to a series of sketches of various lengths of a dozen or so inhabitants of Deephaven and the surrounding countryside. The characters Helen and Kate may have been drawn from Jewett’s life. In an October 3, 1872, entry in her diary, Jewett confesses to having been upset that Helen Gordon has said “that Kate said last summer in Narragansett that it was strange that I couldn’t come there as well as go to the mountains.”33 The “Kate” in this entry is probably Kate Birckhead, whom Jewett loved deeply during the years when she was writing Deephaven and whom she held to be something of a spiritual mentor. I have been unable to identify Helen Gordon, but Jewett had a friend named Grace Gordon, who lived in Boston and whose family home was “a regular winter refuge” for Jewett and her sister.34 Perhaps Helen was another member of the family. Narragansett, Rhode Island, became an elegant beach resort after the end of the Civil War, so it is at least possible that events of the summer of 1872, or perhaps previous summers, supplied the dramatis personae for Deephaven. An early draft of “The Shore House,” the first of three Atlantic

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss Monthly installments that were to become Deephaven, was read by William Dean Howells and returned with suggestions for revision on March 11, 1871, probably before that Narragansett summer. But Howells’s suggestions for revision focused on the need for more extensive development of the two main characters, 35 and the narrator of “The Shore House” was named Elinor rather than Helen, so it may well be that the Helen and Kate who summered at Narragansett once when Jewett didn’t join them became the Helen and Kate who go to Deephaven in the finished novel. If so, the borrowing of Helen’s name might have accentuated, at least in Jewett’s own mind, the difference she was building between herself and her narrator. It’s worth noting that Helen Gordon and Kate Birckhead were from urban centers, Boston and Newport, Rhode Island (which is quite close to Narragansett), and therefore, perhaps to Jewett at this point in her life, they may have seemed more cosmopolitan than she was. Before the note from Kate arrives at breakfast, Helen wakes up ­depressed: I had been spending the winter in Boston, and Kate Lancaster and I had been together a great deal, for we are the best of friends. It happened that the morning when this story begins I had waked up feeling sorry, as if something dreadful were going to happen. There did not seem to be any good reason for it, so I undertook to discourage myself more by thinking that it would soon be time to leave town, and how much I should miss being with Kate and my other friends. My mind was still disquieted when I went down to breakfast; but beside my plate I found, with a hoped-for letter from my father, a note from Kate. To this day I have never known any explanation of that depression of my spirits, and I hope that the good luck which followed will help some reader to lose fear, and to smile at such shadows if any chance to come.(D, 7)

The good luck that follows from Kate’s note, Helen says, had she known that luck was coming when she woke that morning, might have lifted the depression; and recounting that good luck might allay the fear that such shadows impose on those who are prone to feelings like hers. Helen notifies us that she could not at the time locate the cause of the depression, and still can’t, a predicament that Jewett shared at that time in her life. According to Margaret Roman, the depression that opens Deephaven may echo Jewett’s own emotional experience: “In 1877, the year Sarah Jewett published her first book, Deephaven, she was twenty-eight. The characters of her book, Helen Denis and Kate Lancaster, are both twenty-four. Jewett chronicled her ‘restless and unhappy’ emotions in her diary entry of 17 July 1872, and she wrote of her ‘loneliness’ and ‘unaccountable melancholy’ in 1874 at the age of twenty-five”36 —the “unaccountable melancholy” of the diary anticipating the sorry feeling for which there is no good reason. Helen hopes for a letter from her absent father, and she anticipates

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss   

separation from Kate and other friends, but neither of these separations causes the depression; in fact, she deliberately contemplates the separation from Kate to discourage her spirits further because she can’t think of a reason for the depression, giving her depression a local habitation and a name in order to concentrate and elucidate it, converting general dread, anxiety, into specific dread. The sensation of a bleak future is lightened, and mishap is limited to a distinct area within the general field of future experience. She labors to decontaminate the future—“I undertook to discourage myself more”—but because in the narratorial present the narrator still does not affirm the thought of Kate’s departure as the cause of the depression, the attempt to elucidate the depression as a response to Kate’s departure is bound to fail as a source of relief. “To fill a Gap / Insert the Thing that caused it— / Block it up / With Other—and ’twill yawn the more— / You cannot solder an Abyss / With Air”: deep in her depression, the narrator cannot insert the causing thing, because she cannot say what it is or was, whether it is gone forever or close at hand. 37 And if Kate’s departure isn’t the source of the depression, the good luck can’t be the simple fact that the anticipated separation from Kate didn’t occur, and this only makes sense, because the thought that Helen had her friend’s company after all is of little consolation to depression-prone readers, at best a platitude, that things don’t always turn out as badly as you think, and there are few kinds of people more platitude resistant than depressives. The good luck, like the cause of the depression, has to be something other about the summer than simply having been with Kate, something experienced by Kate and Helen, deeper than a platitude but still transmissible to the reader, not confined to their particular experience, something that has to do with a means of relief, which makes her good news available to be someone else’s, too. “It happened that the morning when this story begins I had waked up feeling sorry.” The word sorry is a nest of meanings: according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “1. Feeling or expressing sympathy, pity, or regret: I’m sorry I’m late,” and this is really two meanings, because regret or remorse—“I’m sorry I’m late”—is quite different from pity or sympathy—“I’m sorry you don’t feel well”; “2. Worthless or inferior; paltry: a sorry excuse”; and “3. Causing sorrow, grief, or misfortune; grievous: a sorry development,” this third meaning being fortified by the echo between the words sorry and sorrow. Upon first reading Jewett’s sentence, I assumed that sorry meant “remorseful,” but when no misdeed or ill thought was confessed, I decided that a milder version of meaning 2, something like “I awoke feeling poorly,” was intended. But if so, the word sorry is an odd choice because it evokes the whole cluster of meanings, whereas “I awoke feeling poorly” would not, and because it therefore requires us to run

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss through the four possible meanings in order to decide upon the intended one; and I suspect that I’m not the only reader who has backed off from a first take only to rotate among the options—sorrowful and pity laden, guilty and remorseful, contemptible and ashamed. All of the above meanings of sorry are in play simultaneously, and it may be that the word is a kind of Rorschach diagram, the reader being notified of something by the meaning chosen in the first take. Remorse and guilt have the advantage of belonging to an intelligible and at least partially manipulable domain. Such a desire to gain control of dark feeling rather than merely to experience it surfaces in the next sentence: “There did not seem to be any good reason for it, so I undertook to discourage myself more by thinking that it would soon be time to leave town, and how much I should miss being with Kate and my other friends.” An undertaking is a project, and if she intentionally discourages herself more, then there will be a reason for feeling sorry: she will be back in the land of cause and effect. But not really, since there will only be a reason for feeling more sorry than she was before, with the original sorryness still unintelligible. She will still be a sorry thing, worthless or inferior, paltry, unable to undertake successfully. So what can she do? This feeling of being at the mercy of ruthless emotional happenstance is clear in the diary: —I know this is true of me: At times I drift into an unaccountable melancholy. I am morbid and dreary with self-analyzing—with a dread of the future and remorse for real and imagined mistakes in the past. But a little thing blows away all this fog like a fresh wind and I am fearless and happy—strong with the free strength of an untamed creature—and the sunshine of the world comes to me from a clear blue sky and warms me through and through. So my days go— shadow and sun—shadow and sun. And the evening and the morning are the first day and the second—and will better last. But it is only in the dark that I see the stars— I know that the later loneliness is harder to bear than the despair that comes at first. It clings to me so, and lies so heavily on one’s heart and such a sorrow is the thing that says good morning and good night and follows one all day long. 38

Jewett’s complaint is not limited to this passage: at other points she laments that she is “more in the dark, and more bewildered than ever,” that she is “blue and despairing and unreasonable,” and that “I have long dark days when I am far from God.”39 Though such passages are greatly outnumbered by Jewett’s expressions of religious gratitude, the depression feels like a lurker throughout, supplying affirmation with its fervency, emerging and being transfigured in the story of her mourning for her father, with which the diary ends. The only critics I’ve encountered who concentrate on Helen’s depres-

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sion are Roman and Judith Fetterley, who contends that Helen loves Kate and that the joy of the summer’s adventure cannot completely temper the depression because she is “a lesbian woman in love with a heterosexual woman willing to take time off before getting married to play, but only to play, with an alternative.” As a result, “the mood of Deephaven remains depressed.”40 Through a careful reading of the diary and of the original sketches from the Atlantic Monthly that were gathered into the book, ­Marjorie Pryse confirms what Fetterley demonstrates, that Helen’s love for Kate is at the book’s core.41 From the diary: I believe I am not like other people in anything and it never will amount to anything, all this trouble and perplexity and sorrow I have gone through with . . . I have all that old feeling back again which used to come so often when I first knew Kate [Birckhead], when I used to wish with all my heart that I could die and end it all. I would not live a day longer if it were not for my friends being troubled.42

Jewett’s feeling for Kate Birckhead involved great admiration, as does Helen’s for her Kate, so the despair may combine feelings of inferiority with fears of loss or of unreturned love. Jewett’s feelings for Kate “flared into something close to veneration in 1871–2,” according to Paula Blanchard, with Kate coming to serve as Jewett’s “spiritual confidante and mentor.” Jewett may well have spoken to Kate Birckhead about her blue times: a letter from Kate, transcribed into the diary, counsels Jewett on the help that faith can supply “when these dark days come again.” From the diary: “It would have been one of the bitterest things in all my life, for to lose Kate would be losing a powerful influence for good, and an influence which enters not merely into great things but into my little every-day interests . . . I think she cares more for me than she used, and she tells me she enjoyed my visit, and that a letter of mine helped her, and all this makes me so happy.”43 Jewett’s friendship with Kate Birckhead awakened the intensities and complexities of late-adolescent passion, the admiration, the fear, the sensation of feelings almost too strong to bear, but also too precious to have been spared. From the diary again: “Ah, my dear darling Kate! What lovely days those four were! The walks and talks by sunlight and starlight—and at midnight in the house. The sea and the sunshine and the delicious Newport air and the kind charming people I saw, and that blessed Kate herself!” Or: “Kate is like a very tall white hyacinth (& Ellen is like a pink one), and Kate is like spring violets—the very fragrantest sweetest ones and knowing her is as good as having them bloom all the year round!”44 Jewett may be inviting us to see a similar bond between her protagonists when she has one of their summer acquaintances, a warmhearted and well-meaning old fisherman named Dinnett, exclaim warmly, “ ‘Bless

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss your pretty hearts!’ said he; ‘may ye be happy, and live long, and get good husbands, and if they ain’t good to you may they die from you!’ ” This is the end of a paragraph, and the next moves immediately to other matters, Dinnett’s remark allowed to subside with the tactful and respectful comment of no comment, though the distance this remark puts between Helen and Kate and this man they liked so much surely contributes to the book’s sadness. Summarizing what she surmises Jewett’s feelings on this matter to have been, Blanchard writes that “young women married and left their families—under what compulsion Sarah did not know, having never felt it, but evidently it struck swiftly and no adolescent girl seemed entirely safe from it. A new allegiance swept family and friends ruthlessly aside, and the ties of childhood were never the same afterwards. The only way to defend oneself against this threat and stay within the loving circle of the family was to emulate, or anticipate, Peter Pan and never grow up.”45 Or, as Deephaven’s Helen and Kate try to do, to remain girls within the loving circle of the friendship. But Helen writes that her depression wasn’t all about Kate, that lacking Kate didn’t cause it, though being with Kate had a lot to do with the relief. Impossible passion can cause a despair so great that consciousness hides from it. But such despair is nevertheless sharper, closer to knowledge than is the source of depression: where despair strives not to see, depression strains to find an object for causeless woe. Despair belongs more to the present world than does depression, which has its roots in the sufferer’s most archaic strata. Helen’s dismayed remark that she couldn’t light upon the source for the feeling she awoke with, her half-humorous but insightful remark that she thought about Kate to give her misery a locus, and the contradictory complex of meanings invested in the word sorry all attest to an ancient distress rather than a present frustration, or rather, to modern frustrations that wake the ancient monster: to say that strong feelings about present circumstances activate depression is not the same as to say they cause it. According to Blanchard, Jewett did struggle with depression during the period of her friendship with Kate Birckhead, but it waned and then returned for a second bout, which lasted “about six years longer, gently lightened and disappeared after the publication of Deephaven.”46 During the second bout, Kate Birckhead remained a close friend in whom Jewett confided, but her “personal ascendancy” had waned.47 The diary entry that resonates with the first paragraph of the book was written at least two years after Jewett’s feelings for Kate Birckhead had subsided. Freud contended that melancholia is unmourned loss, the mind conceding that something or someone is gone but the heart and spirit not giving up the point. Rather, Freud argued, a phantom simulation of the lost is retained in the mourner, a cherished internal object, clasped tightly, but

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also an inner interlocutor with whom the survivor can exchange recriminations concerning abandonment and unworthiness—the melancholiac is for Freud fully sorry, destitute, pathetic, and remorseful. Subsequent work has accepted Freud’s view but added that for depressives in particular the provoking loss typically lies at the foundations of subjectivity, in the very early relations with the parents, especially, but historically rather than biologically, the mother. If for whatever reason the mother’s recognition of her child’s distinctive being is absent or slight, the child’s ability to acknowledge and mourn the loss of the primal bond and transfer attachment to the world is obstructed by the fact that what is lost was never really had, and that what’s mourned is not a distinct thing in the world but the world itself as a possible home for the child—the darkness of the affective field rather than an area of darkness within the field. In the place of an eagerness for life’s great adventure, a sensation of fundamental unprotectedness and unwelcomeness congeals as the dominant and durable attitude toward being because the child has not been sufficiently welcomed to his or her life.48 Melancholy, as Melville believed, is radical orphanage. As Jacques Hassoun puts it, “The melancholic never belonged to anyone, any place. He cannot separate from his exile and join the new world. This is his ­catastrophe.” The conditions of the depressed person’s life have combined “to transform loss into an enigma, plunging the subject into the infinite sorrow of an impossible bereavement.” “The image that would best suit the melancholic’s talk would be that of a walled, rock-laden fortress standing guard before some horrible desert where nothing ever happens, no event could or should occur, under pain of prompting a disorder that might reveal the original nature of this ostensibly impregnable castle.” “The absence of the lost object, the impossibility of mourning it, in short, the missing inscription of the signifier mourning that, however enigmatic it’s become, still continues to beckon—these are synonyms of the disorder melancholia, an ailment that fills the subject with the image of a wonderful yet lugubrious object, the breast the mother hasn’t lost [in the act of giving it to the child],”49 the vague and inadequate symbol of ungiven welcome. In his introduction to Hassoun’s book, Michael Vincent Miller writes that “to suffer the loss of loss means nothing less than to lose one’s opportunity to have a world.”50 Remember Emerson and Marcher, and also the “dying of death” in post–Civil War America. It is tempting to think of what Farrell described as a kind of collective national depression, especially given the drastic rise of depression in industrial and postindustrial societies, but little speculation is required to observe that a society that mutes the evidence of death’s reality offers little help to one who suffers from an inability to acknowledge loss. The cheer of Helen’s first paragraphs, perhaps an attempted imitation

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss of Leslie Goldthwaite’s stylistic levity, is an odd contrast to the emotions recounted, so much so as to sound almost chirpy, certainly forced and false. This is a perceptive choice on Jewett’s part, evoking the static disconnection between the melancholiac’s inward woe and her diminished expressive capacities. If, as Helen avers, she and Kate “do not mind growing older, since we have lost nothing that we mourn about, and are gaining so much” (D, 24), this may in fact seem true to her, with respect to herself at least, since she is not able to put her finger on losses to which she can pin sorrow. But sorrow is nonetheless strong; to maintain itself, Helen’s hollow cheer requires her to avoid provocative emblems of loss: “There is something piteous to me in the sight of an old boat. If one I had used much and cared for were past its usefulness, I should say good by to it, and have it towed out to sea and sunk; it never should be left to fall to pieces above high-water mark” (D, 40). As noteworthy as the bright tone in the book’s first paragraph and throughout the early pages is the absence of any mention of Helen’s mother. We know that her father is away, because she looks for a letter from him that first morning, and she later lets us know that her life has been an unsettled one because her father is in the navy (D, 24). Her aunt Mary lives with her, spends her summer in the Berkshire Hills (D, 10), and visits Deephaven once (D, 137). Helen’s list of the summer plans for all the members of both families makes her unmentioned mother an irresistible question for the reader—presumably, her mother is dead, but she might be mentally or physically disabled or divorced from Helen’s father—and Helen’s complete silence concerning her mother’s absence here and throughout Deephaven installs a gap in the book. Helen cannot or will not speak of her mother’s absence, and as I will argue, unmentioned and absent mothers abound in Deephaven, an omission that silently expresses the predicament of depression. “The melancholic is tormented not by loss,” Hassoun contends, “but by the lack of possibility for naming and designating this loss.”51 Jewett compounds Helen’s familial sorrow: she is an only child, her father is often away, Aunt Mary seems to be an uneven or distant presence, and her family moved often when she was a child, with the ensuing disruption of partially compensatory friendships. Making the best of it, Helen writes, “I think it is easy for me to be contented, and to feel at home anywhere. I have the good fortune and the misfortune to belong to the navy—that is, my father does—and my life has been consequently an unsettled one, except during the years of my school life, when my friendship with Kate began” (D, 24). Though it’s tempting to think that Kate supplies what’s been lacking for Helen, she’s more sisterly than motherly, and what she gives is shared orphanage rather than homecoming: she provides partnership and the idea of the quest, the beginning of an active rejoinder to loss. Kate was, after

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all, also warehoused to what we must presume was a boarding school, and though she is fully equipped with parents and brothers, the summer dispersal of her family does not suggest strength of attachment but instead casual or diverted attention as a kind of family style. Soon after Helen and Kate arrive in Deephaven, they meet Mrs. Patton, longtime friend and helper of Aunt Kate, who reveals a bit more about Kate’s family: “‘the memory of the just is blessed’; that’s what Mr. Lorimer said in his sermon the Sunday after she died, and there wasn’t a blood relation there to hear it. I declare it looked pitiful to see that pew empty that ought to ha’ been the mourners pew. Your mother, Mis’ Lancaster, had to go home Saturday, your father was going away sudden to Washington, I’ve understood, and she come back again the first of the week. There it didn’t make no sort o’ difference, p’r’aps nobody thought of it but me. There hadn’t been anybody in the pew more than a couple o’ times since she used to sit there herself, regular as Sunday come.” And Mrs. Patton looked for a minute as if she were going to cry, but she changed her mind upon second thought. (D, 29)

Kate is orphaned, too, to a degree at least, and she and Helen are, from the inception of their friendship, castaways together. But Kate is less drastically affected, it seems, because she can rouse Helen from the stasis of depression by summoning her to the adventure: “She sang a bit from one of Jean Ingelow’s verses: ‘Will ye step aboard, my dearest, / For the high seas lie before us?’ ” (D, 9). Less the cure than the companion, Kate is the friend whose company is sheer affluence and delight, a partner in continual enjoyment, reciprocal solicitude and encouragement, and the richness of an ongoing conversation extended over several months of shared exploration in a world of bright possibility: When we came down from the lighthouse and it grew late, we would beg for an hour or two longer on the water, and row away in the twilight far out from land, where, with our faces turned from the Light, it seemed as if we were alone, and the sea shoreless; and as the darkness closed round us softly, we watched the stars come out, and were always glad to see Kate’s star and my star, which we had chosen when we were children. I used long ago to be sure of one thing,—that, however far away heaven might be, it could not be out of sight of the stars. Sometimes in the evening we waited out at sea for the moonrise, and then we would take the oars again and go slowly in, once in a while singing or talking, but oftenest silent. (D, 23)

To consider the feelings and thoughts that give rise to and that are expressed in Deephaven, it’s helpful to juxtapose the textual history of the book with the course of Jewett’s life as she was writing. She appears not to have begun with a book in mind. Rather, she wrote a short story concerning Elinor’s (Helen’s) and Kate’s trip to Deephaven and several of

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss their early encounters. The first draft of this story, “The Shore House,” was read by Howells in early 1871, which would mean that Jewett probably began writing it perhaps midway through 1870. Once revised, “The Shore House” appeared in the September 1873 issue of Atlantic Monthly. It was well-received, and a sequel, “Deephaven Cronies,” appeared in the September 1875 issue, followed by “Deephaven Excursions” in ­September 1876. According to Paula Blanchard, Jewett may have begun to envision some sort of eventual collection as early as 1873,52 but the real work of making the book was done between the completion of the third installment and April 1877, when the book was published by James R. Osgoode and Company of Boston. To prepare the book, Jewett joined the three Atlantic Monthly pieces together, revised throughout, and added some new material: “In January of 1877 Sarah reported to [Theophilus] Parsons that she had a new beginning and a new last chapter and ‘ever so many bits to put in all the way along.’ With a last furious sprint she met the deadline for the final draft of the 240 page book.”53 She was therefore writing Deephaven from early in her twenty-first year to midway through her twenty-eighth year, a difficult time of life for many, as uncertainty persists but possibility contracts, a time especially tumultuous for Jewett. According to Blanchard, “Sarah’s feelings toward ‘my dear dear darling Kate’ flared into something close to veneration in 1871–2, resembling the earlier meteoric love for Cecily Burt and the later one for Harriet Preston,” and “her depression can be roughly divided into two phases. The first, lasting about two years, culminated in her 1871 confirmation [in the Episcopalian faith]. The second, lasting about six years longer, gently lightened and disappeared after the publication of Deephaven.”54 Jewett was just turning twenty-four when “The Shore House” appeared, the same age she sets for Helen and Kate, an indication from her of the intertwining of the book and her life. Several points are worth noting in particular. Revising for final publication in 1877, Jewett draws depression out of her 1874 diary and positions it at the head of the first chapter. The original opening of “The Shore House” in Atlantic Monthly (1873): “While Aunt Mary and I were living in Boston last Spring, I found with my other letters one morning at breakfast a note from one of my friends, which was evidently written in a very excited state of mind.”55 Lighter in tone, but “The Shore House” ended with a passage excised from the final text that quite abruptly emphasizes a heavy and chronic familial sorrow: “My father came home, and my hope of having him posted to or near Boston was scattered to the four winds. It was a sorrow, for Boston seems more like home than any of my numerous abiding-places; for the Denis family are wanderers upon the face of the earth.”56 The reference is to Genesis 11:4, the preparation for Babel: “And they said, Come, let us make a town, and

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a tower whose top will go up as high as heaven; and let us make a great name for ourselves, so that we may not be wanderers over the face of the earth.” The biblical allusion thus associates the Denis family collectively with the curse of expulsion and exile from paradise, and with doomed attempts to remedy that plight, an evocation of loss that will predominate in the new opening written for the book. The 1874 diary entry is written between the first two Atlantic Monthly installments, and “Deephaven Excursions,” the last installment (September 1876) is markedly bleaker than its predecessors. Chapter 8, “The Circus at Denby,” one of the most significant of the new “bits” written as part of the preparation of the book in 1876–77 and spliced into the midst of Deephaven, shares the somber feel of “Deephaven Excursions.” Biographical and textual evidence together thus suggests that the period from first composition to completed book may have been a time when Jewett was, as Thoreau put it, “pursuing a descending and darkening way.”57 But it might also be that Jewett had during that time decided to make her book be about depression, to confront and explore it, to try to write her way out of it—in her diary, her sense of writerly vocation growing, Jewett quotes Carlyle’s Past and Present: “The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done.”58 Recall Blanchard’s claim that Jewett’s second depression “gently lightened and disappeared after the publication of Deephaven.” It may be that Jewett decided to put bleakness at the beginning of the narrative to feature it: since the new beginning does not affect the unfolding of the plot, it seems likely that Jewett intended it as an overture, a premonition of an emotional motif to follow. Whether this is so or not, Helen’s depression, though she doesn’t mention it again directly, surfaces several times as one of her experience’s common tones, as Margaret Roman contends,59 the first time upon arrival. In the stagecoach that carries Kate and Helen twelve miles from the train depot to Deephaven, they meet Mrs. Kew, the lighthouse keeper’s wife, “a very large, thin, weather-beaten woman” who looked “tired and lonesome and good-natured” (D, 10). Helen strikes up a conversation with her, discovering that she is weary from having traveled to visit her mother in the Vermont hills, an affectional commitment that may for Helen contrast with the slighter hold in her own family. Mrs. Kew impresses them with her humor and warmth, both signified as country traits by dialect and other indicators—“We both liked the odd woman, there was something so straightforward and kindly about her” (D, 11). If Mrs. Kew’s verbal customs are for them slightly discordant, Helen’s affirmations predominate by the end of this sentence, as if to dramatize prejudice set aside in order to make room for admiration. From this point on such an unbiased and ready competence becomes Kate’s and Helen’s goal, with

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss the warm affection that Mrs. Kew exemplifies as its reward. Mrs. Kew is a partial prototype for Mrs. Todd in The Country of the Pointed Firs, the summer’s central and defining encounter, so the beginning of this friendship also marks the commencement of the adventure, the critical point at which the cultural worldview that would find Mrs. Kew “odd,” together with its attendant emotional chill, loses its hold on our protagonists, replaced by the simple munificence that will be the summer’s frequent tone, its general atmosphere throughout a large percentage of the narrative. “I had given up my seat to [Mrs. Kew], for I do not mind riding backward in the least” (D, 11). But the spirit that flowers in the stagecoach with Mrs. Kew is quickly annulled by the gloom of Aunt Kate’s house: “I do not know that the Brandon house is really very remarkable, but I have never been in one that interested me in the same way” (D, 14). She carefully differentiates this singular “interest” from appeal: “It is a house with great possibilities: it might easily be made charming” (D, 14). If it needs to be made so, it isn’t so currently, and this remark gently contradicts what Kate had told her when first proposing the adventure—“ ‘the house is a charming old house’ ” (D, 8)—and even contradicts Helen’s own first impression—“I liked the house from the first sight of it” (D, 13). The unclassifiable interest of the house is distinct from charm and is perhaps elusive because uncanny. The feature that Helen singles out is the house’s inhospitality: It was impossible to imagine any children in the old place; everything was for grown people; even the stair-railing was too high to slide down on. The chairs looked as if they had been put, at the furnishing of the house, in their places, and there they meant to remain. The carpets were particularly interesting, and I remember Kate’s pointing out to me one day a great square figure in one, and telling me she used to keep house there with her dolls for lack of a better playhouse, and if one of them chanced to fall outside the boundary-stripe, it was immediately put to bed with a cold. (D, 14)

Herself childless, Aunt Kate was unable or unwilling to make a house that invited a child to enjoy. Helen particularly emphasizes the lack of physical versatility that would allow a child to convert or customize: the railing remains a railing and will not become a slide; the chairs will not reconfigure into mountains, trees, or a maze; and the open room will not become the outdoors for the personalized dwelling of the playhouse. Imagination strains to make up the difference by raising walls up from the square in the carpet but settles for enacting upon the dolls the inhospitality from which it suffers. Helen’s reaction to the house gothicizes it, probably as a consequence of her sympathy for her friend: rather than appraise the Brandon house as base camp for the summer’s expedition, she attempts to imagine how

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oppressive it must have been for Kate to have come here for visits in summers past. Her reaction to the house, that is, is presented to us as the product of the kind of assessment that Helen, on some level, chooses to direct toward the house. It is the consequence of a chosen subject-position, that of a hypo­thetical child, conjured out of recollection into presently occupied domestic space. Whether or not Kate felt this way when she was young, the current presence of this affect is the gray fruit of a deliberate imaginative deed, and Helen has already cued us to look for the motives of such deeds: “There did not seem to be any reason for it, so I undertook to discourage myself more by thinking” (D, 7). She cues us more specifically to the undertaking at hand with the remark about the stair-railing. Helen does not remark that the railing is too high for a child to have slidden down it but rather, simply, that it’s too high: this might mean either that Helen finds it too high for sliding even at her current size or that this remark is spoken as if she were imagining herself to be the child whose reaction is being imagined. In either case, she is, in her imagination, sliding down a railing. Several critics have commented on the reversion to childhood in the early pages of Deephaven,60 and Helen is herself quite unabashed about announcing that this is what they’re up to: in trying to persuade Helen to join her for the summer, Kate had observed that “it might be dull in Deephaven for two young ladies who were fond of gay society and dependent upon excitement, I suppose; but for two little girls who were fond of each other and could play in the boats, and dig and build houses in the sea-sand, and gather shells, and carry their dolls wherever they went, what would be pleasanter?” (D, 8). The childhood into which Helen slides when she enters Aunt Kate’s house is not, however, the idyll that Kate had evoked in order to recruit her for the adventure but the cold frame the abandoned child finds in a world that doesn’t welcome her, that doesn’t arrange an invitation for her, that adamantly rebuffs her own attempts to arrange for herself: “The chairs looked as if they had been put, at the furnishing of the house, in their places, and there they meant to remain.” Matter imbued with ancient, foreign, and unmoving purpose: in her evocation of the gothic house, the house suffused and structured by alien intentions that predate and ignore the child, Helen figures to herself the anger and fear that depression’s nullity otherwise conceals from her. If the gothic is often a story about someone who arrives at a dwelling that encases a secret—of Heathcliff, of Rochester—the visitor’s intrigue, his or her desire for the inside story, results from the inhabitants’ complete absorption in an intense drama that predates and excludes the visitor, a perfect figure for the depressive’s predicament, arriving on the scene, treated as an irritant if noticed at all. The visitor’s intrigue is therefore not idle

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss but urgent, a search for an avenue into the secret, into the world, a way to be a participant rather than a deject. Perhaps as a kindly gesture, or perhaps as a joke, Helen and Kate make such a bequest to future travelers: “We wrote, between us, a tragic ‘journal’ on some yellow old letter-paper we found in the desk. We put it in the most hidden drawer by itself, and flatter ourselves that it will be regarded with great interest some time or other” (D, 15). Imagining themselves into the position of someday having been former inhabitants, they bequeath to subsequent inhabitants a transcript of their self-absorption rather than a welcome, thereby imposing on such hypothetical successors the situation into which they have themselves been thrown: Of one of the front rooms, “the best chamber,” we stood rather in dread. It is very remarkable that there seem to be no ghost-stories connected with any part of the house, particularly this. We are neither of us nervous; but there is certainly something dismal about the room. The huge curtained bed and immense easy-chairs, windows and everything were draped in some old-fashioned kind of white cloth which always seemed to be waving and moving about of itself. The carpet was most singularly colored with dark reds and indescribable grays and browns, and the pattern, after a whole summer’s study, could never be followed with one’s eye. The paper was captured in a French prize some time in the last century, and part of the figure was shaggy, and therein little spiders found habitation, and went visiting their acquaintances across the shiny places. The color was an unearthly pink and a forbidding maroon, with dim white spots, which gave it the appearance of having molded. It made you low-spirited to look long in the mirror; and the great lounge one could not have cheerful associations with, after hearing that Miss Brandon did not herself like it, having seen so many of her relatives lie there dead. There were fantastic china ornaments from Bible subjects on the mantel, and the only picture was one of the Maid of Orleans tied with an unnecessarily strong rope to a very stout stake. The best parlor we also rarely used, because all of the portraits which hung there had for some unaccountable reason taken a violent dislike to us and followed us suspiciously with their eyes. The furniture was stately and very uncomfortable, and there was something about the room which suggested an invisible funeral. (D, 15)

The careers of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary Wilkins Freeman, H. P. Lovecraft, and August Derleth intimate that there is generic compatibility between regionalism and the gothic, but the most striking point of comparison for this passage would be with “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published fifteen years after Deephaven, not only because Charlotte Perkins Gilman makes similar symbolic use of decorative patterned figures but also because Gilman, like Jewett, cues the reader that the grotesqueness of the site is a consequence of the narrator’s troubled predilection to see such things rather than an inherent feature of the décor. Jewett’s gothic, like Gilman’s, is psychologized: the components of the visual field are suitable vehicles

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for expressing states such as anxious incomprehension, emotional nausea, disgust, shame, morbidity, and bondage to socially mandated gender and gender choice, and the effect of the first-person narration is to provoke us to wonder about the observer’s motive for producing this disturbing affective array within herself. Though Helen assures us that neither she nor Kate is “nervous,” a code word for hysteria in late-nineteenth-century America, the abrupt remark, “It made you low-spirited to look long in the mirror,” as if the image of herself on the wall partook of the vaguely revolting tone of the rest of the décor, suggests that she cannot differentiate herself from the surrounding negativity, or even feels herself to be more objectionable, because even the mirroring eyes on the portraits have taken a marked dislike to her. Though Helen tries to lighten the passage some with various conceits and slight gusts of humor, “low-spirited” here recalls “that depression of spirits” with which the book began. Helen, though, unlike Gilman’s narrator, is a member of a we: “We are neither of us nervous”; “taken a violent dislike to us.” Though Helen reverts to a gloomy childhood, it’s a gloomy childhood shared with Kate, as it was when they were together at boarding school; and her intentional imaginative production of queasy gothicism seems less perverse when we notice that the adverse environment in this passage resurrects the brave solidarity of two neglected young girls. For there to be a haven, as Gaston Bachelard argues, there has to be a surrounding hostility: “The house derives reserves and refinements of intimacy from winter; while in the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action. The dreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because of the diminished entity of the outside world, experiences all the qualities of intimacy with increased intensity.”61 “The wide window which looks out on the lilacs and the sea was a favorite seat of ours” (D, 15). “There was the largest sofa I ever saw opposite the fireplace; it must have been brought in in pieces, and built in the room. It was broad enough for me and Kate to lie on together, and very high and square, but there was a pile of soft cushions at one end” (D, 17). The window seat and the sofa, like the playhouse that Kate used to imagine rising from the square in the carpet, are cozy interiors within the house, havens, and Aunt Kate’s house is not a haven within the world but an emblem of the world in its loathsome and oppressive phase: the ensemble—Brandon house versus window seat / sofa—is a microcosm, a performance of adversity and bluff defiance that Helen and Kate use to focus and define the character of their relationship. The gothic interlude furnishes a sharp image of the depressive misery to which the summer is to be a rich response: it sets an agenda and is a necessary part of a beginning rather than

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss a digression from the charm gained or gathered when they met Mrs. Kew on the stagecoach. The gothic mood disappears as abruptly as it arrived, perhaps because it has done its job, a transition marked by a narrative move to the west parlor, their favorite downstairs room, which contains only one slight reminder of the dispiriting atrocities that had preceded it: “I used to fancy the portraits liked our being there. There was one young girl who seemed solitary and forlorn among the rest in the room, who were all middleaged. For their part they looked amiable, but rather unhappy, as if she had come in and interrupted their conversation. We both grew very fond of her, and it seemed, when we went in the last morning to take leave of her, as if she looked at us imploringly. She was soon afterward boxed up, and enjoys society after her own heart in Kate’s room in Boston” (D, 17). Again the fanciful lightness of Helen’s tone fails to conceal the underlying misery: “For their part they looked amiable, but rather unhappy, as if she had come in and interrupted their conversation.” “The melancholic never belonged to anyone, any place. [She] cannot separate from [her] exile and join the new world. This is [her] catastrophe.” But there is relief in joint exile, which is convertible to adventure: the passage suggests that a company of two relieves the affliction of neglected children, and the rescue of the painting amounts to a kind of invitation to the girl in the painting to join their company. Perhaps guilt as well as sympathy explains the rescue: the adults who scorn the young girl smile upon Helen and Kate, as if they had betrayed the young girl by crossing over to the others’ side. Or maybe it’s not about children and adults but about two kinds of adults. Helen uses the paintings as she has used the house in toto, as a device to think with, emblematizing and therefore eliciting otherwise occluded feelings concerning rejection and acceptance, concerning the world’s orientation toward her arrival on the scene, that great mystery at depression’s foundation. Perhaps the contradiction between the rejection of the young girl in the painting and the welcome extended to them is a contradiction between two kinds of receiving worlds, the one they grew up with and the one they’ve come to, a warm and welcoming world, a deep haven. Having imaginatively defined their predicament and their adventure, Kate and Helen now are freed to turn outward for their engagement with Deephaven. Though Kate and Helen will retain a kind of joint subjectivity throughout the book, internally diversified but not divisible, their typical stance will not be face-to-face but side by side, facing together toward Deephaven to receive the delights it freely and magnanimously distributes to those who are prepared for them: “Kate and I stood in the wide doorway, arm in arm, looking sometimes at the queer fisherman and the porgies, and sometimes out to sea” (D, 58).

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Treasures: Sketches, Souvenirs, and Collections From this point on, Helen and Kate will be eager sensoria. They have experiences, rather than vice versa, experiencing experience as acquisitive, or as I will argue, repossessive: “It was curious to notice, in this quaint little fishing village by the sea . . . “ (D, 39); “As for our first Sunday at church, it must be in vain to ask you to imagine our delight when we heard the tuning of a bass-viol in the gallery before service” (D, 42); “There were two or three old men who sat near us . . . Have you never seen faces that seemed old-fashioned?” (D, 44); “We found [Captain Lant] had his pet stories, and it must have been gratifying to have an entirely new and fresh audience” (D, 52). Such reminders that everything that reaches us is gleaned and rendered by Helen and Kate make us conscious of the medium through which we observe Deephaven, lightly thematizing the act of looking and bringing to mind the question of regionalist self-positioning, alerting us to the fact that they are processing experience, locating an angle of view that will establish an experience as an episode, instance, or example of rural charm: It was such a delight to have tea served this way. I wonder that the fashion has almost been forgotten. Kate and I took much pleasure in choosing our tea-pots; hers had a mandarin parading on the top, and mine had a flight of birds and a pagoda; and we often used them afterward, for Miss Honora asked us to come to tea whenever we liked. “A stupid, common country town” some one dared to call Deephaven in a letter once, and how bitterly we resented it! That was a house where one might find the best society, and the most charming manners and good breeding, and if I were asked to tell you what I mean by the word “lady,” I should ask you to go, if it were possible, to call upon Miss Honora Carew . . . [W]e told each other, as we went home in the moonlight down the quiet street, how much we had enjoyed the evening, for somehow the house and the people had nothing to do with the present, or the hurry of modern life.” (D, 47–48)

Though she doesn’t use the word here, Helen’s memory of the visit to Miss Carew’s is one of her treasures. Elsewhere, this word appears twelve times in the text, always as something happened upon and kept rather than taken or earned, like the castaways and wrecks on Thoreau’s Cape Cod. “So began a friendship which we both still treasure, for knowing Mrs. Kew was one of the pleasantest things which happened to us in that delightful summer, and she used to do so much for our pleasure, and was so good to us” (D, 12): I am sure Kate Lancaster and I must have spent by far the greater part of the summer out of doors. We often made long expeditions out into the suburbs of Deephaven, sometimes being gone all day, and sometimes taking a long afternoon stroll and coming home early in the evening hungry as hunters and

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss laden with treasure, whether we had been through the pine woods inland or alongshore, whether we had met old friends or made some desirable new acquaintances. We had a fashion of calling at the farm-houses, and by the end of the season we knew as many people as if we had lived in Deephaven all our days. (D, 105)

Perhaps Jewett chose to have Helen make frequent use of the word treasure because it has maritime associations, but another source of appeal may be the fact that it can be either a verb or noun and that with respect to memories and memory-tinged objects, the act of treasuring is what makes the treasure a treasure: the piece of driftwood does not typify my day at the ocean of its own accord; I have to supply its preciousness, using its material characteristics as a support. If Helen’s and Kate’s experiences are a treasure trove—from Old French trover, “to find”—things come upon rather than captured or earned, they are nonetheless in need of the labor that will establish them as treasures: when it is not a question of objective treasure, gold, jewels, and so on, the labor shifts from acquisition to appreciation, the connoisseur serving as the medium that reveals the treasureliness of the treasure—being present at the site, being open and alert, and maintaining the capacity to appreciate, keeping the mirror polished, as it were. Unlike the correspondent who called Deephaven a “stupid, common country town,” Helen and Kate have cultivated an adjustment of vision; and Helen’s frequent reminders that she and Kate are viewing are probably meant to remind us of their capacity for adequate reaction, thereby certifying the tableau. It is, however, a typical fate for first-person narrators that just when they’re assuring us of their reliability, or just because they are assuring us of their reliability, as I suggested above, we begin to wonder what ulterior stake they might have in the rendition of the scene. I don’t mean to posit a sinister side for Helen, only to suggest that her involvement is not limited to connoisseurship, or rather that the pleasure that connoisseurship yields is complicated, particularly when it is a mode of intersubjective relation. To establish an encounter such as tea at Miss Honora Carew’s as an episode, instance, or example of an abstraction is to assert that the other person’s typical features—his or her variety of deephavenness, male or female deephavenness, genteel or working deephavenness, all positions within a single coherent world—are key features, the crux or essence of identity, and that individuating features are secondary and nonessential or nondefining or ornamental variations within type. Since subjectivity, whether rural or urban, is a medley of typifying and individuating features, or rather a unique and infinitely complex intersection between a number of typifying orders, processing another person as an episode, instance, or example of an abstraction is an editorial act, an ex-

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cising simplification of the other person that renders him or her readily possessable. To be sure, we are seldom if ever capable of engaging full persons, even or especially when they are ourselves; but the ordinary pragmatism of our daily engagements differs from regionalist recollection in the tranquility and finality of the latter, which seeks to bottle the other’s nectar. It might be salutary at this point to return to Brodhead’s remark that Jewett was at this point in her life more an inhabitant of New Berwick than she was of Boston, that she would have sampled Boston enough to know how it looked at New Berwick and that she had acquired the capacity to observe that way, but that her strongest identification would be with the nectar. Bill Brown and Louis A. Renza suggest that Jewett’s story “A White Heron,” in which a young country girl declines to help a man from the city locate a white heron because she knows he will kill it, stuff it, and add it to his collection, is a kind of allegorical meditation on regionalist representation.62 Though I won’t indict Helen for taxidermic zest, Jewett nevertheless implies that there is something possessive and reifying about her way of holding onto Deephaven. For example, as Helen and Kate are preparing to leave: In the front yards we saw the flower-beds black with frost, except a few brave pansies which had kept green and had bloomed under the tall china-aster stalks, and one day we picked some of these little flowers to put between the leaves of a book and take away with us. I think we loved Deephaven all the more in those last days, with a bit of compassion in our tenderness for the dear old town which had so little to amuse it. So long a winter was coming, but we thought with a sigh how pleasant it would be in the spring. You would have smiled at the treasures we brought away with us. We had become so fond even of our fishing-lines, and this very day you may see in Kate’s room two great bunches of Deephaven cat-o’-nine-tails. They were much in our way on the journey home, but we clung affectionately to those last sheaves from our harvest. (D, 140)

The reference to the flowers kept within a book and the recurrence of the key word treasure here signal that these retained objects are figures for collected memories preserved in Helen’s writing, and the following two paragraphs (which are the last in the book), concerning leave taking, fond memories, and hopes for returning someday, make the analogy between preserving harvested things and writing up cherished memories explicit. Both activities are forms of synecdoche, as Brown argues, parts taken as figures or emblems of the whole they belong to, and I agree with him that Jewett is at least “ambivalent” about “a ‘synechdochic relation’ between place and person, that equates the quality of a character with the quality of the context by which that character is contained.” “But of course

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss ‘things,’ ” Brown writes, “things just as they are, can disclose only the heterogeneity of the world. Writing things to make them meaningful—to make them legible—requires rhetorical work.” Specifically, “the collection of underplotted sketches that comprise The Country of the Pointed Firs, as they work synechdochally to represent a self-contained culture, may be said to depend on those ‘poetics of detachment’ that Barbara KirshenblattGimblett describes as the requisite work for producing the ‘ethnographic object’: the act of excising a fragment that, reappearing as part of a collection, comes to express the culture as a whole.”63 Unlike the ethnographer and the man who hunts the heron, Helen is openly fond of her object, even loves it, though this difference does not differentiate her completely from other collectors: perhaps her more open emotions grant readier access to the issue of the collector’s desire. At one point, Helen calls her book “my account of Deephaven society” (D, 49), but at that point in the Atlantic Monthly prototype, her phrase was “my sketch of Deephaven society.”64 I presume she made the change in preparing the book because the book was too copious to be called a single sketch: in the preface, she refers to it as “sketches” (D, 3). According to Paula Blanchard, “By the time [Horace Scudder, editor of Atlantic Monthly] had written to congratulate [ Jewett] on ‘Deephaven Cronies’ (1875) [the second Atlantic Monthly installment], the word sketch had become a comfortable term between them, as indeed it had with Howells, and she had settled into the genre at which she excelled and which she perfected for American literature.”65 A quick title-phrase search for “Sketches of . . .” or “Sketches from . . .” at a university library Web site will turn up numerous titles and demonstrate that Jewett and Helen are referring to a familiar and widespread literary genre practiced by Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Herman Melville, Ivan Turgenev, and William Faulkner, among many others, a genre frequently associated with travel and local-color writing, and a genre of which Helen, at least, considers herself a practitioner. Sketch is a borrowed term, a metaphor, so it’s worth noting the features of the pictorial sketch that are likened to features of the literary sketch. The metaphor is not based on the implication that the written piece is a trial run for a more sustained composition but rather that the artist is on-site for a quick capture of the essence of a mobile reality: sketch, like treasure, is a verb as well as a noun. The term emphasizes the brevity of the encounter, the knowability of the sketched object, and often or even usually the typicality of that object, its synecdochal expression of its environment. The visual sketch, according to Alison Byerly, is “a rapidly drawn picture that sacrifices aesthetic finish for a sense of spontaneity,” and it “anticipated photography in its attempt not simply to interpret or

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render a scene but to reproduce it. The sketch was a material replacement for the scene itself ”: The sketch was credited not only with expressive freedom but also with unmediated accuracy of representation. Both the content and the form of the sketch seemed to place it closer to reality than more formal artistic productions . . . In theory, the sketch represented the realistic record of the artist’s experience. Its value was derived primarily from its faithfulness to that experience, rather than from its technical merit: it presented itself as the off hand work of an amateur or of an artist away from his easel. Its casual style was the hallmark of its irrelevance as an aesthetic object; its true significance lay in the scene it evoked.

Concerning Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, Byerly argues that the scene [the literary sketch] portrays is supposedly one that has randomly caught the artist’s interest, rather than one that he has deliberately sought, yet his decision to record the scene invests even trivial details with meaning. The visual sketch’s focus on a few isolated yet representative elements of a scene is replicated in Dickens’s sketches, which are all characterized by careful attention to the significance of material objects . . . The sketch is valuable not simply as a representation of experience but as a memento of experience, a vivid “sample” of the reality it depicts. When real or imagined experiences are woven together into an extended narrative, their meaning rests on the relation between them. But when they are presented as isolated sketches, they generate meaning and value as autonomous objects. The sketch form turns experience itself into a commodity.66

Jewett’s sketches differ in that her interest in the scene is less idle or incidental, less happened-upon, and because the scene is more cherished, the rendering is less fully alienable, and therefore less a commodity but still a “sample.” According to Brown, “Jewett herself, even while writing with such apparent faith in the capacity of objects to disclose meaning, raises considerable doubt about their legibility.”67 Jewett doubts, not Helen; but even for Jewett the practice has interest and even allure despite the worry that it provokes, an attachment that survives doubt because it responds to and seems to satisfy a certain longing. For Sandra A. Zagarell, “Deephaven’s knowability is tantamount to its being acquirable, imaginatively and emotionally, and, by extension, materially.”68 Deephaven known is Deephaven held, rather than sold, Deephaven brought home and brought inside, cherished, protected and preserved, or so it feels: depression is an inexplicable lacking that looks for promising objects that can be brought within in hopes that they will fulfill, and since what the depressed person has lost is the possibility of a world, worlds—towns, cultures, landscapes—can seem especially promising. Though Helen’s memories are immaterial, memories in Deephaven, as in The Country of the Pointed Firs, seem almost materialized, to have texture,

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss fragrance, or tone, to be glazed by writing, burnished by fond revisitation: because each memory is chosen for its power to typify Deephaven, it is a souvenir, not the sort we buy at the gift shop but more akin to the piece of driftwood or rounded stone that we bring home with us to remind us of that fine day at the shore, a mnemonic prompt. Susan Stewart writes: Within the development of culture under an exchange economy, the search for authentic experience and correlatively, the search for the authentic object become critical. As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted, the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence. “Authentic” experience becomes both elusive and allusive as it is placed beyond the horizon of present lived experience, the beyond in which the antique, the pastoral, the exotic, and other fictive domains are articulated.69

To understand Helen’s affective investment in her souvenirs, notice the spatiality of Stewart’s concluding sentence—beyond the horizon, the beyond, domains: the past is past here where we stand, in the metropolis, but it is not intractably lost, because it still exists now, only elsewhere. Deephaven endures: “For somehow the house and the people had nothing to do with the present, or the hurry of modern life. I have never heard that Psalm since without its bringing back that summer night in Deephaven, the beautiful quaint old room, and Kate and I feeling so young and worldly, by contrast, the flickering, shaded light of the candles, the old book, and the voices that said Amen” (D, 47–48). That which one had thought to be gone is really only elsewhere: though Deephaven is not what Helen has already lost in her young life, not her unknown object, the transformation of temporal into geographical distance, of mourning into longing, nevertheless speaks the possibility of miracle to her impoverished spirit—hence her wish to feel that to return to Deephaven is to return to childhood. (Schiller: “They are what we were; they are what we should become once more. We were nature like them, and our culture should lead us along the path of reason and freedom back to nature. Thus they depict at once our lost childhood, something that remains ever dearest to us, and for this reason they fill us with a certain melancholy.”) However, though currently intact and true to itself, its ways, its habits of speech, its ceremonies, Deephaven is waning: There were some schooners and a small brig going to pieces by the wharves, and indeed all Deephaven looked more or less out of repair. All along shore one might see dories and wherries and whaleboats, which had been left to die a lingering death. There is something piteous to me in the sight of an old boat. If one I had used much and cared for were past its usefulness, I should say good by to it, and have it towed out to sea and sunk; it never should be left to fall to pieces above high-water mark. (D, 40)

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Though Helen here seems to want to put Deephaven out of its misery, her more common strategy toward Deephaven’s dilapidation is salvage rather than euthanasia, rescuing precious objects from the wreck before its final breakup, rafting them back to her island. The trip to Deephaven is a trip to a world on the verge of being lost rather than a world that is merely secluded, to a cultural split second, no time to save the whole but time enough to come out with an expressive part that stands for the vanishing whole. According to Stewart, “The antique as souvenir always bears the burden of nostalgia for experience impossibly distant in time: the experience of the family, the village, the firsthand community . . . As commercialism and industrialism transformed the British landscape, the artifacts and architecture of a disintegrating rural culture became the objects of middle- and upper-class nostalgia.” More than simply a reminder, the souvenir is a relocation that preserves by internalizing: “The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into the miniature, that which can be enveloped by the body, or into two-dimensional representation, that which can be appropriated within the privatized view of the individual subject. The photograph as souvenir is a logical extension of the pressed flower, the preservation of an instant of time through a reduction of physical dimensions and a corresponding increase in significance supplied by means of narrative.” A nullification of loss’s full force, therefore a mitigation of the encounter with loss that is mourning, the souvenir is an imaginary alternative route that spares one the bumpy ride, a wish fulfillment that temporarily relieves depression, refreshing it, and reviving its power: “What is this narrative of origins? It is a narrative of interiority and authenticity. It is not a narrative of the object; it is a narrative of the possessor.” “The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.70 The souvenir’s consoling effect is amplified if it is added to a collection of souvenirs, not simply because there are more souvenirs but because they are assembled into an array that becomes something of a world of its own: one of melancholy’s primary manifestations, from Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne through Melville and Thoreau to W. G. Sebald, is collecting, which is not a form of avarice, because the miser bows down before what an external world designates as value, whereas the melancholy collector builds her own world from the materials found on the wreck. For Stewart, collecting is a different sort of pleasure than souvenir keeping is. The replacement of particularity by typicality that the souvenir begins is much further advanced: There are two movements to the collection’s gesture of standing for the world: first, the metonymic displacement of part for whole, item for context; and second,

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss the invention of a classification scheme which will define space and time in such a way that the world is accounted for by the elements of the collection. We can see that what must be suppressed here is the privilege of context of origin, for the elements of the collection are, in fact, already accounted for by the world. And we can consequently see the logic behind the blithe gesture toward decontextualization in museum acquisitions, a gesture which results in the treasures of one culture being stored and displayed in the museums of another.

The collector’s avidity is focused not on the world that the thing is from but on the new world that is made from the things, Crusoe’s meticulously organized cave, rather than the wreck: In contrast to the souvenir, the collection offers example rather than sample, metaphor rather than metonymy. The collection does not displace attention to the past; rather, the past is at the service of the collection, for whereas the souvenir lends authenticity to the past, the past lends authenticity to the collection. The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricism. The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world . . . The collection is a form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context. Like other forms of art, its function is not the restoration of origin, but rather the creation of a new context, a context standing in a metaphorical, rather than a contiguous relation to the world of everyday life. Yet, unlike many forms of art, the collection is not representational. The collection presents a hermetic world: to have a representative collection is to have both the minimum and the complete number of elements necessary for an autonomous world—a world which is both full and singular which has banished repetition and achieved authority.71

Perhaps, though, it’s useful to think of the souvenir and the collection as the extreme points of a spectrum, both responding to loss, souvenirs clustering around the pole of origin, collections around the pole of second creation, with melancholy collections, collections of souvenirs, somewhere in between, expressing both a desire to rescue from loss and a desire to construct a modest environment, to be something of a locale or place or world to compensate the souvenirs for the lost world from which they came, to offer them a haven, as Kate does for the disconsolate little girl in the painting. In such sentimental and melancholy collections, a greater affective involvement in the circumstance of origin, provoked by the collector’s experience of personal involvement with that circumstance, might be matched by a relative underdevelopment in structuration—the classification scheme, the identification of gaps in the collection, the labor of filling those gaps, the desire for a complete collection. The sentimental or melancholy collector might be like Melville’s Ishmael, who, jocular

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concerning the perfect classification of his things (“Cetology”), is apt to sigh and settle for his things being in a jumble (“Extracts”), a jumble he secretly loves. Whereas Crusoe builds clear and efficient shelving for what he rescues from the wreck, the melancholy collector will have piles of things that remind him of beloved former worlds. Both of these forms of longing are present in Helen’s authorial labor—orphans can be greedy— and both of them issue from a single deeper longing for the nullification of loss, a future, rather than the labor of mourning, the absolute past, a hopeful impulse that works itself out in the labor of composing a collection of fond sketches. Concerning The Country of the Pointed Firs, F. O. Matthiessen remarked that “you do not remember her characters as you do the atmosphere that seems to detach from their rusty corduroys and the folds of their gingham dresses.” 72 If this is flatly untrue to the reading experience of many, including myself, Matthiessen is nonetheless right to aver that Jewett intended us to experience many of her characters as particularized instances of a geographically and historically specific type, as subjects encompassed by their environment. The predominant characterizing feature that Helen emphasizes in her sketches is the open, ready, and forthcoming warmth of those she encounters, the ease and eagerness with which the people of Deephaven welcome Helen and Kate into their homes, lives, and hearts. The friendship with Mrs. Kew that is well-founded during a short stagecoach ride is not the only quick friendship: In the course of a walk inland we made a new acquaintance, Captain Lant, whom we had noticed at church, and who sometimes joined the company of the wharf. We had been walking through the woods, and coming out to his fields we went on to the house for some water. There was no one at home but the captain, who told us cheerfully that he should be pleased to serve us, though his womenfolks had gone off to a funeral, the other side of the P’int. He brought out a pitcherful of milk, and after we had drunk some, we all sat down together in the shade. The captain brought an old flag-bottomed chair from the woodhouse, and sat down facing Kate and me, with an air of certainty that he was going to hear something new and make some desirable new acquaintances, and also that he could tell something it would be worth our while to hear. He looked more and more like a well-to-do English sparrow, and chippered faster and faster. (D, 50)

Captain Lant’s eagerness echoes the welcome that seems to emanate from the “portraits [that] liked our being there.” He has the time and the inclination to put down whatever he was doing and to construct the impromptu setting requisite for some brisk and pleasant back-and-forth, a readiness in striking contrast to the always-too-busy preoccupation of Helen’s and Kate’s parents. Welcomings such as this one occur so frequently as to become a lead motif of the book, a hallmark of Deephaven’s

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss quiet splendor, its readiness to attend and share, to enclose the stranger within a warm conversational circle. But the feeling of warm invitation is annulled by the last line, in which Captain Lant is compared to a chippering sparrow. This trope is not unique: Mrs. Patton, Aunt Kate’s old friend and attendant, “was very short and straight and thin, and so quick that she darted like a pickerel when she moved about” (D, 26); Mrs. Patton “chattered all day to you as a sparrow twitters” (D, 32). As someone who still lived among and loved people such as these, Jewett surely meant for us to pull up at Helen’s practice of diminishment. The thing to notice in particular is that Helen’s narratorial attention seems to flicker, for a moment expressing involvement in conversation, then stepping back to comment on the other person’s characteristic conversational style. Many of us (me at least) tend to oscillate between listening and breaking faith with the other in order to observe him or her in the act of speaking, and Helen can go back and forth in the space of a sentence: “There was a story which [Captain Lant] told us that first day, which he assured us was strictly true, and it is certainly a remarkable instance of the influence of one mind upon another at a distance. It seems to me worth preserving, at any rate; and as we heard it from the old man, with his solemn voice and serious expression and quaint gestures, it was singularly impressive” (D, 52). Captain Lant’s story concerns his belief in dream knowledge that reports on distant family members in danger, and reflects his feeling for the excruciating times that often visit families. Helen is plainly drawn in, but just as plainly intent on standing outside: Is the story “worth preserving” because it is “singularly impressive” in its “solemn” feeling, or because of the “quaint” credulity of Captain’s Lant’s thesis concerning dreams? There are many passages like this one, where evocation and nullification cohabit, where the quiet emotional majesty of conversations is splashed with the cold water of diminutives, animal imagery, and words such as cherish, quaint, charming. Even treasure objectifies, and perhaps this is its function, if, as Lacan argued concerning Freud’s Dora, the figure of a precious object is an attempt to mediate the contradiction between an intersubjective relation and an objectifying relation with another.73 An object, but a precious object rather than a mere object: “‘A stupid, common country town’ some one dared to call Deephaven in a letter once, and how bitterly we resented it! That was a house where one might find the best society, and the most charming manners and good breeding, and if I were asked to tell you what I mean by the word ‘lady,’ I should ask you to go, if it were possible, to call upon Miss Honora Carew.” It’s useful to think of this contradiction in terms of circumscription: if Captain Lant, in setting up the chairs, inscribes a circle, the space of conversation, that

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encompasses the three of them, Helen’s diminutives encompass Captain Lant, with Helen, Kate, and the reader standing outside the circle looking at its contents. Deephaven is a human world, but a demarcated human world that the artist can hold in view and for which she can inscribe a circumference line, rather than a major world that encloses her. And as soon as there is a circumference, there is an object, albeit a treasure: the circumscribing of the world betrays and breaks the very thing for which the world was admired, its provision of a site for reciprocal expression. According to Schiller, we “feel ourselves compelled to respect the object that we smiled about earlier and, since we cast a glance back at ourselves at the same time, we also cannot avoid feeling the need to complain that we are not like that. In this way there emerges the quite unique feeling in which cheerful patronizing, respect, and melancholy flow together.” 74 The mixture of feelings, he suggests, is the culmination of a sequence—smiling about the object, coming to respect it, needing to differentiate ourselves from it, melancholy from the sacrifice we require from ourselves. If for Helen Deephaven is a paradise, it’s a paradise from which she expels herself rather than suffering expulsion—“I undertook to discourage myself more”—and a paradise that she believes herself to be bearing within her, a wanderer on the face of the earth but carrying a true home in a box, to be revisited at need in reminiscence.

Observation Troubled and Supplanted I’ve been this long and this emphatic about Helen’s regionalism because I believe Jewett wants us to pick up on the compensatory longing that Helen has to unlearn in order to learn what Deephaven has to teach about addressing oneself to loss. If Deephaven is, as Fetterley and Pryse argue concerning The Country of the Pointed Firs, a story of learning, then it is also a novel of development rather than a collection of sketches; though both Jewett and Helen call it a such a collection, the movement of transformation gives the book a trajectory or impulse that belies its segmented and episodic appearance. The episodic character of the narration—its start-and-stop sketchiness—is entangled in the first-person narration, in Helen’s desire to devise containers for experience; and because that sketchiness is an integral, psychologically motivated function of a dramatized narration, it should be taken as an object for rather than a means of readerly contemplation, as an element in the diegetic play rather than as a firm sign of the book’s genre. Beneath the sketchiness, there is a process of development: as Helen advances out from condescension, the souvenir’s uneasy compound splits, and two new sorts of experience commence, episodes in which spectatorship itself becomes an object of attention and

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss assessment, and episodes in which the self-narration of those whom Helen and Kate meet affects them strongly, startling them into intersubjectivity—identification, compassion, and admiration for their hosts’ cultural and emotional wisdom, their literacy in matters of loss. With time, Helen and Kate come to seem sheepish or embarrassed about observation: “We said how much we should like to go back to that funeral, and we even made up our minds to go back in season, but we gave up the idea: we had no right there, and it would seem as if we were merely curious, and we were afraid our presence would make the people ill at ease, the minister especially. It would be an intrusion” (D, 119–20). This self-awareness concerning spectatorship commences early in the book in an ambiguously lighthearted encounter. One day while Helen and Kate are visiting at the lighthouse, Mrs. Kew spots a boatload of outof-towners approaching and asks Helen and Kate to show them around, because her ankle is hurting. They agree and, because Helen and Kate have for comfort dressed in gray skirts, blue sailor jackets, and worn boots, the visitors mistake them for locals, asking them questions that presume that those who live in such a place must be lonely and limited, and offering to pay them for the tour. Finally, one of the girls, Mary Wendell, tells Kate about the shop she works for in Boston and offers to send for Kate when there’s an opening. At this point, Kate reveals that she, too, lives in Boston and that she and Helen are in Deephaven only for the summer, thereby informing Mary not only that they are not local but also that they are of a higher class than she is, because they don’t work for a living. She offers Mary her hand, revealing a ring that had been turned round before but seems now to have been turned back out for the sake of the gesture. Mary blushes, Kate reassures her, Mary hurries away, and Kate announces to Helen that she will look Mary up when she returns to Boston, because Mary is “such an honest little soul” (D, 21–22). Fetterley holds Mary’s proposal to be erotic,75 but this does not keep the entire encounter from being an unpleasant power play, directed by Kate. Mary erroneously assumes that as a city girl, she is invested with a worldview that allows her to encompass and comprehend what she takes to be Kate’s provinciality: her offer to introduce Kate to the city is an offer of the gift of amazement and consequent enlargement. Helen and Kate are momentarily the objects rather than the subjects of the cosmopolitan gaze, knowing what it means to be condescended to. But rather than immediately rectify the error and establish a humorous equality between city folks, Kate allows Mary to persist in her error, to become visible as not knowing that she is in error, to become conspicuously unaware: thinking she is the looker, she is all the while the looked upon. Allowing Mary to continue in error, Kate ensures that Mary will be doubly embarrassed by having been voluble and

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persistent in her unawareness; and by turning the ring back outward and remarking that she and Helen are summering in Deephaven, Kate deepens the embarrassment still further by making Mary aware not only that she had been unaware of Kate’s equality in urban sophistication but also of her superiority in class, of a worldview still more capacious than a shopgirl’s. Helen assures us that Kate had been “touched” (D, 22) by Mary’s proposal, but her summary comment on the experience sounds triumphal to me: “ ‘then you heard it all. That was worth having!’ ” Though we commonly speak of having had experiences, the possessiveness of this exclamation anticipates the diminution that follows: “ ‘she was such an honest little soul, and I mean to look for her when I get home’ ” (D, 22). Mary is charming—encompassed and comprehended by Kate, with Helen as audience for the deft play. I don’t mean to imply that Kate is a shrew, that this episode annuls all that Helen praises her for, but I do think the episode is meant to complicate and deepen our imaginative relation with Kate. And Helen’s inclusion of the episode is also noteworthy, partly because it is about Kate and another girl but also because it is the only narrated encounter with someone not from Deephaven or the surrounding countryside in the entire book: it is not a sketch but a dramatization of what sketching entails—who gets to sketch whom—an intradiegetic emblem of the rest of the book. Rather than a story of looking-at, it is a story of being-looked-at, and of parrying that approach—which is to say, though Helen doesn’t say it outright, that looking at the locals is pleasurable at least in part because it aggrandizes the looker. A more fully developed exposition of the ethical complications involved in looking emerges midway through the book, when Helen and Kate go to the circus at Denby with Mrs. Kew and find themselves inside a sideshow exhibit of “the Kentucky Giantess,” advertised as weighing six hundred and fifty pounds. Fetterley and Pryse see this scene as “a moment when one can recognize the consequences of the gaze,” 76 as an occasion when seeing is seen, a kind of grotesque caricature of regionalist spectatorship, the platform and the tent framing the Giantess, as a cage near to her in the tent frames several monkeys, and furnishing a disturbing satirical allegory for a literary apparatus that puts charming yokels before the readers of Atlantic Monthly. Fetterley and Pryse’s argument is fortified by the fact that “The Circus at Denby” did not appear in the Atlantic Monthly installments but was composed as part of the book preparation in 1876–77: though it is located about halfway through the book, the story of the Kentucky Giantess is among the last parts of the book written, a final encounter, and it may therefore very well be a kind of summary retrospective statement. I would emphasize that the guilty unease with spectatorship that pervades this chapter is felt by Helen herself, and that

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss her discomfort at this point is not unique but echoes instead with other moments of hesitation about looking and watching, such as the decision not to intrude upon the funeral: “Kate and I felt ashamed of ourselves for being there. No matter if she had consented to be carried round for a show, it must have been horrible to be stared at and joked about day after day; and we gravely looked at the monkeys, and in a few minutes turned to see if Mrs. Kew were not ready to come away” (D, 77). It’s not uncomfortable to stare at monkeys because they’re not persons: this episode does not distinguish good staring at people (regionalism) from bad staring at people (the freak show), but rather it is a step in the incremental advance of Helen’s awareness that spectatorship and exhibition that divide the observer and the observed by kind are degrading, for the spectator as well as for the stared-at. Jewett prepared the reader to think of the displaying of the Giantess as a kind of bestialization by means of an overheard conversation a couple of pages earlier: There were two old farmers whom we had noticed occasionally in Deephaven; one was telling the other, with great confusion of pronouns, about a big pig which had lately been killed. “John did feel dreadful disappointed at having to kill now,” we heard him say, “bein’ as he had calc’lated to kill along near Thanksgivin’ time; there was goin’ to be a new moon then, and he expected to get seventy-five or a hundred pound more on to him. But he didn’t seem to gain, and me and ’Bijah both told him he’d be better to kill now, while everything was favor’ble, and if he set out to wait something might happen to him, and then I’ve always held that you can’t get no hog only just so fur, and for my part I don’t like these great overgrown creatur’s. I like well enough to see a hog that’ll weigh six hundred, just for the beauty on ’t, but for my eatin’ give me one that’ll just rise three. ’Bijah’s accurate, and he says he is goin’ to weigh risin’ five hundred and fifty. I shall stop, as I go home, to John’s wife’s brother’s and see if they’ve got the particulars yet; John was goin’ to get the scales this morning. I guess likely consider’ble many’ll gather there to-morrow after meeting. John didn’t calc’late to cut up till Monday. “I guess likely I’ll stop in to-morrow,” said the other man; “I like to see a han’some hog. Chester White, you said? Consider them best, don’t ye?” But this question never was answered, for the greater part of the circus company in gorgeous trappings came parading in. (D, 74–75)

The exhibition of the Kentucky Giantess and Helen’s sketches of Deephaven are meant to arouse very different feelings, but they are not therefore different in kind—both are exhibits. Freak shows often paired large persons with small persons, and though the smaller one might be found pretty, a “living doll,” as a generation before the present one was wont to say, her charm would be nevertheless her mode of freakishness. Charm, like other forms of extraordinariness, divides beheld from beholder, by

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miniaturization rather than gigantism. Susan Stewart writes: “The miniature offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby particularized and generalized in time—particularized in that the miniature concentrates upon the single instance and not upon the abstract rule, but generalized in that that instance comes to transcend, to stand for, a spectrum of other instances. The miniature offers the closure of the tableau, a spatial closure which opens up the vocality of the signs it displays.” 77 Whether in a human figure, a dollhouse, a landscape, or any of its other manifestations, the miniature charms because it is contained within an area that occupies a comfortably small portion of the observer’s visual field and that is therefore available for comfortable ocular possession. The miniature’s unique charm depends upon a framing that not only clearly divides the beholder from the beheld, as all frames do, but that also clearly states the size differential between the beheld world and the beholder’s world: she who observes and comments upon the charm of another does not usually count herself charming, not because she counts herself repugnant but because charm is unselfconscious and diminutive and naïve, whereas observation is capacious and knowing. Though attractive rather than repulsive, charm is an oddity or queerness, a marked difference from a basic prevailing norm: Often referred to as a “freak of nature,” the freak, it must be emphasized, is a freak of culture. His or her anomalous status is articulated by the process of the spectacle as it distances the viewer, and thereby it “normalizes the viewer as much as it marks the freak as an aberration” . . . [W]hile the freak show may seem, at first glance, to be a display of the grotesque, the distance it involves makes it instead an inverse display of perfection. Through the freak we derive an image of the normal; to know an age’s typical freaks is, in fact, to know its points of standardization.78

It’s useful at this point to recall Amy Kaplan’s and Sandra Zagarell’s remarks concerning regionalism: “[Regionalism’s readers were] solidified as an imagined community by consuming images of rural ‘others’ as both a nostalgic point of origin and a measure of cosmopolitan development.” “Because regionalist affirmations of the authenticity of rural life were motivated by a desire to establish a contrast with the present day, what regionalist literature deemed authentic always already inscribed the ele­ments of the contemporary from which the region supposedly offered ­escape.” 79 The charming thing charms because it is a refreshing exception in a cynical world—and therefore, however much one enjoys it, one still always differentiates herself from it, or enjoys it because she differentiates herself from it: one can’t identify with the charming person, only indicate that one knows the difference between that which charms and the rest of a shabby world and is willing to stand up for what charms. Because it brings

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss forward the freakishness of charm, the Giantess’s girth is like an inversion at the heart of a dream of Deephaven’s petite quaintness; and if it assaults Helen, sets her head spinning, it has the same effect on the book that surrounds (but does not encompass) it. “The freak must not be linked to lived sexuality but to certain forms of the pornography of distance.”80 The representational constitution of the freak, the odd, and the queer is an exercise in disidentification, no matter whether the produced entity is found to be charming or repulsively fascinating. The experience of the intervening vacuum is necessary to the effect: And since the spectacle exists in silence, there is no dialogue—only the frame of the pitchman or the barker. Even when, as is sometimes the case in smaller and poorer carnival operations, the freak delivers his or her own “pitch,” there is an absolute separation between the tableaulike silence of the freak’s display and the initial metacommentary of the pitch. This separation is poignantly felt by the viewer as a hesitation: the pause before the curtain closes or before the viewer walks on. And the viewer must go on; dialogue across that silence is forbidden, for it is necessary that, like the aberration, the normal must be confined to the surface, or appearance, of things.81

But what if you do speak with the person you’ve paid to look at? Kate and I felt ashamed of ourselves for being there. No matter if she had consented to be carried round for a show, it must have been be horrible to be stared at and joked about day after day; and we gravely looked at the monkeys, and in a few minutes turned to see if Mrs. Kew were not ready to come away, when to our surprise we saw that she was talking to the giantess with great interest, and we went nearer. “I thought your face looked natural the minute I set foot inside the door,” said Mrs. Kew; “but you’ve—altered some since I saw you, and I couldn’t place you till I heard you speak. Why, you used to be spare; I am amazed, Marilly! Where are your folks?” (D, 77–78)

A remarkable passage: Moving across the chasm between the viewer and the freak, Mrs. Kew, guided and drawn by the voice, traverses the interdictions that structure spectatorial space and replaces the Kentucky Giantess with a woman named Marilly. When Mrs. Kew introduces Marilly to Helen and Kate, Helen praises Kate’s tact: “I am proud to say that I never saw Kate treat anyone more politely than she did that absurd, pitiful creature with the gilt crown and many bracelets. It was not that she said much, but there was such an exquisite courtesy in her manner, and an apparent unconsciousness of there being anything in the least surprising or uncommon about the giantess” (D, 79). A harsh passage: Though Kate had orchestrated the open dis-

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play of the shopgirl’s embarrassment, she here thinks—or at least this is what Helen thinks Kate thought—to spare Marilly shame by acting as if she were unaware of what she surmises would cause Marilly shame if she knew Kate were noticing it and thinking about it, Marilly’s weight. But this strategy supposes that Marilly will be deceived by Kate’s polite manner, an unlikely possibility, since the trio were drawn into the tent by signs calling Marilly a giantess and claiming that her weight was six hundred and fifty pounds. The most likely effect of Kate’s tact on Marilly would be to make her feel that she is so hideous that the topic of her body must be kept from conversation. If Kate’s tact is a kind of politeness, this means that Marilly’s body is rude and therefore not to be dignified, affirmed, or even forgiven by spoken discourse, a negation cemented by Helen’s description of Marilly as “that absurd, pitiful creature with the gilt crown and many bracelets” and by her decision to conclude the paragraph by writing that Kate acted as if there were nothing “in the least surprising or uncommon about the giantess,” rather than “about Marilly,” or “about Mrs. Kew’s old friend.” By contrast, Mrs. Kew almost immediately raises the topic: “Why, you used to be spare; I am amazed, Marilly!” In my experience, country people generally are more forthcoming about their bodies and the vicissitudes thereof—think of Lyndon Baines Johnson hauling up his shirt for reporters after his gall bladder operation in 1965; and recall that as a girl, Jewett accompanied her father the doctor on his country rounds, so she would have well known how people talked about their bodies and understood the insult within Kate’s skittish politeness. Talk of injury, affliction, and death is ordinary among country people and includes considerable interest in detail: “Hate-Evil Beckett was tellin’ me the other day—she that was Samanthy Barnes, you know—that one of the boys got fighting, the other side of the mountain, and come home with his nose broke and a piece o’ one ear bit off. I forget which ear it was” (D, 110). “There was a picture of a huge snake [on a circus poster] in Deephaven, and I was just wondering where he could be, or if there had ever been one, when we heard a boy ask the same question of the man whose thankless task it was to stir up the lions with a stick to make them roar. “The snake’s dead,” he answered good-naturedly. “Didn’t you have to dig an awful long grave for him?” asked the boy; but the man said he reckoned they curled him up some. (D, 74)

Though Marilly’s body does not differ from a hypothetical norm in a typical way, variation from the norm is itself typical in rural life, where injuries, many of them extreme, are frequent, as are wasting diseases and addictions. By raising the issue of Marilly’s weight, Mrs. Kew acknowledges

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss their common membership in a form of life where such things happen, where the visible reminders of human physical vulnerability are a routine ordeal. Mrs. Kew does not raise the issue idly, however, as if it were so typical as to be of no matter. Rather, her intent is therapeutic: if Marilly cannot be so neatly divided from her body as Kate would like, she nevertheless stands to profit from achieving some contemplative distance from her problem, to think of it as something that has come upon her somehow, and Jewett makes it clear that for Marilly at least, such reflection is not the product of an Emersonian withdrawal but instead the consequence of a galvanizing conversation with someone who remembers her when she was spare, who cares for her, and who digs no self-protective or self­congratulatory ditch between them. Successful therapy requires accurate diagnosis, and this may explain why Mrs. Kew follows her remark about the change in Marilly with the question “Where are your folks?” “I don’t wonder that you are surprised,” said the giantess. “I was a good ways from this when you knew me, wasn’t I? But father he run through every cent he had before he died, and ‘he’ [Marilly’s husband] took to drink and it killed him after a while, and then I begun to grow worse and worse, till I couldn’t do nothing to earn a dollar, and everybody was a coming to see me, till at last I used to ask ’em ten cents apiece, and I scratched along somehow till this man came round and heard of me, and he offered me my keep and good pay to go along with him. He had another giantess before me, but she had begun to fall away consider’ble, so he paid her off and let her go. This other giantess was an awful expense to him, she was such an eater; now I don’t have no great of an appetite”—this was said plaintively,—“and he’s raised my pay since I’ve been with him because we did so well. I took up with his offer because I was nothing but a drag and never will be. I’m as comfortable as can be, but it’s a pretty hard business. My oldest boy is able to do for himself, but he’s married this last year, and his wife don’t want me. I don’t know’s I blame her either. It would be something if I had a daughter now; but there, I’m getting to like traveling first-rate; it gives anybody a good deal to think of.” (D, 78)

Marilly’s complaint draws us toward a diagnosis of which she seems half aware, that her eating is a response to loss: as her world grows smaller, her body grows larger; as more is taken from her, she takes more within. Hunger substitutes for grief, supplying an unacknowledged figure for grief: though Marilly’s losses are utter, absolute, and irrevocable, hunger is always, if only temporarily, amenable to repair. She can do something about hunger; but because each slight resurgence of hunger brings with it the emotional charge of the losses it stands for, hunger requires a constant solicitous address, an incessant recourse to the solace of food lest the full weight of loss present itself for her attention. At the price of her body, the

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fort-da game of hunger and eating supplies Marilly with a sensation of control, an irresistible temptation for one who has suffered the concussions and detonations that she has. Perhaps Marilly does not fully acknowledge the symbolic identification of hunger with loss because to do so would be to lose the ability to believe that addressing hunger is a way of addressing loss, and therefore to be required to face loss; but failing to disidentify eating and grieving gives her more to grieve, her body, her home, her self-respect, her contact with her son. Her response to loss magnifies loss, a feedback loop that delivers unbroken aggrandizements of misery, and a feedback loop that is not particular to her, given the compulsive prodigality of the father and the alcoholism of the husband. If her son and her daughter-in-law keep their distance from Marilly, their motive may be more a fear of a familial contagion than simple embarrassment over Marilly’s appearance: the family’s failure to mourn, the fatuous arrogance of its belief that it can gain an advantage over loss, precipitates more loss, thick dark loss that overflows from the cup of one member of the family into the cup of another.82 Marilly says she likes traveling because it gives her a lot to think about, attempting to put the best face on her separation from her son and from former friends such as Mrs. Kew, and on the brutality of her relation with those who pay to see her. But thinking does not relieve her suffering. As James’s Marcher learned, solitude does not inevitably culminate in selfknowledge: in isolation, inner devices such as Marilly’s romance with hunger thrive, seeming to rescue, but in reality postponing and prolonging the horror of encounter, perhaps forever, but in the meanwhile condemning the afflicted one to the slow drip of affect-loss. Expressing loss to another, however, dissolves avoidance and precipitates the encounter, because to state loss is to look at it, to identify it, to pick it out from the array of remembered experience and hold it up so the other can see it, to assert the reality and the gravity of what has happened: “ ‘I believe I’d rather die than grow any bigger. I do lose heart sometimes, and wish I was a smart woman and could keep house. I’d be smarter than ever I was when I had the chance; I tell you that!’ ” (D, 79). I find this remark almost unbearable, and I think Jewett means for us to feel that Marilly finds it so, too, but not so unbearable as not talking: “ ‘It has done me sights of good to see you,’ said our new acquaintance; ‘I was feeling down-hearted just before you came in. I’m pleased to see somebody that remembers me as I used to be’ ” (D, 79). Anticipating that the safety of apathy will crumble during conversation makes conversation seem like loss itself, or loss again, rather than a report of loss, and it is quite clear why one would, for example, eat rather than talk, gain rather than sacrifice consolation. But in the aftermath talk turns out to have been gain, a partial and ­initial

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss rapprochement with reality and the human world, companionship, courage, and peace rather than, again for example, food. As Peter Shabad suggests, perhaps “it is this very transformation of experienced suffering into a witnessed reality at the moment it occurs that inoculates experience against traumatization. For if . . . trauma can be known only ‘after the fact’ through its residual trail of post-traumatic communication, it suggests that being alone and not being able to convey one’s experience immediately are intrinsic to the transformation of suffering into trauma.” Lacking a witness to receive one’s story, the afflicted takes “up the slack for the witness who was supposed to be there but was not,” attempting to become “a camera photographing its own injury”: “When no one is there to offer comfort to suffering children, they ‘adapt’ by learning how to go it alone and rely on their own resources, a stoic self-reliance that all too often seems to be one of the residual effects of growing up. Without another person to validate the ‘event’ of our suffering, we are forced into the awkward, involuted position of bearing witness to our own experience.” But “as long as we do not find the realization of experience that can be discovered only through the eyes of another, inner battles to maintain a safe grip on the real will linger, unbeknownst to any outside observer.” Unknown unless, as Shabad argues, symptomatic behaviors and their physical consequences announce the suffering in a plea for witness: Marilly’s body speaks her suffering, but her audiences don’t know the language; Mrs. Kew reminds Marilly of her native tongue.83 For her part, Mrs. Kew has something to grieve now, too, the loss of her connection to Marilly, and she is forthright in saying so as soon as they leave the tent: “She’s had a hard time of it, according to her account,” said Mrs. Kew. “She used to be a dreadful flighty, high-tempered girl, but she’s lost that now, I can see by her eyes. I was running over in my mind to see if there was anything I could do for her, but I don’t know as there is. She said the man who hired her was kind. I guess your treating her so polite did her as much good as anything. She used to be real ambitious. I had it on my tongue’s end to ask her if she couldn’t get a few days’ leave and come out to stop with me, but I thought just in time that she’d sink the dory in a minute. There! Seeing her has took away all the fun,” said Mrs. Kew ruefully; and we were all dismal for a while, but at last, after we were fairly started for home, we began to be merry again. (D, 79–80)

With Mrs. Kew’s guidance, their party rights itself again, and the correction, like Marilly’s relief, follows upon the expression of loss, the open mapping of its particular character and the acknowledgment of its ­irremediability. Such open confessions of loss are abundant in Deephaven—almost all of those whom they meet are surprisingly quick to relate the stories of lost

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lovers, friends, family members, and animals and the effect of loss on their lives. Aunt Kate’s old friend Mrs. Patton, for instance, recalling her husband and his alcoholism, tells them that “ ‘ he set everything by me when he was himself. I don’t make no scruples of speaking about it, everybody knows how it was, but I did go through with everything. I never knew what the day would bring forth,’ said the widow, as if this were the first time she had had a chance to tell her sorrows to a sympathizing audience. She did not seem to mind talking about the troubles of her married life any more than a soldier minds telling the story of his campaigns, and dwells with pride on the worst battle of all” (D, 33). There’s no need for me to walk through all of the stories Helen and Kate hear; I will simply note only that they supply Deephaven’s bittersweetness: “ ‘I always set a good deal by Andrew; we used to play together down to the great cove; that’s where he was raised, and my folks lived there too’  ” (D, 122). Their sorrows differentiate Helen’s locals from Schiller’s: We then see in nonrational nature only a more fortunate sister who remained at home with her mother, while we stormed out into an alien world, arrogantly confident of our freedom. With painful urgency we long to be back where we began as soon as we experience the misery of culture and hear our mother’s tender voice in the distant, foreign country of art. As long as we were mere children of nature we were happy and complete; we became free and lost both happiness and completeness.84

Helen’s and Kate’s Deephaven friends do not epitomize the plenitude that might be expected of them because they are themselves neither happy nor complete. Most of them have suffered defining losses, events that made their lives essentially and particularly what each of their lives has turned out to have been; all of them seem to comprehend that losses suffered sculpt a life, that self-knowledge therefore requires an exact knowledge of the particular chisel strokes, and that knowledge is cultivated by means of conversational reminiscence; and none of those who speak of loss themselves get lost in the shadows of melancholy. They are not more complete than Marilly, but they are more able to state their own lack. The general sadness of the place gains expression in the many collections of treasures that Helen and Kate get a chance to view. Almost everyone they meet keeps cherished things: “My aunt found no pleasure in the society of noisy children who upset her treasures.”(D, 8) There was a large cabinet holding all the small curiosities and knick-knacks there seemed to be no other place for,—odd china figures and cups and vases, unaccountable Chinese carvings and exquisite corals and sea-shells, minerals and Swiss wood-work, and articles of vertu from the South Seas. (D, 16–17)

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss [The letters] were in a drawer with a locket holding a faded miniature on ivory and a lock of brown hair, and there were also some dry twigs and bits of leaf which had long ago been wild-roses, such as still bloom among the Deephaven rocks. (D, 18–19) I s’pose that mug would be considerable of a curiosity to anybody that wasn’t used to seeing it around. My grand’ther Joseph Toggerson—my mother was a Toggerson—picked it up on the long sands in a wad of sea-weed; strange it wasn’t broken, but it’s tough; I’ve dropped it on the floor, many’s the time, and it ain’t even chipped. There’s some Dutch reading on it and it’s marked 1732. (D, 27) Miss Carew and Mrs. Dent had a great treasury of old brocades and laces and ornaments, which they showed us one day, and told us stories of the wearers, or, if they were their own, there were always some reminiscences which they liked to talk over with each other and with us. (D, 47) “I’ve got a lot of old stuff stowed away here that the women-folks don’t want up to the house. I’m a great hand for keeping things.” And he looked round fondly at the contents of the wide low room. “I come down here once in a while and let in the sun, and sometimes I want to hunt up something or ’nother; kind of stow-away place, ye see.” And then he laughed apologetically, rubbing his hands together, and looking out to sea again as if he wished to appear unconcerned; yet we saw that he wondered if we thought it ridiculous for a man of his age to have treasured up so much trumpery in that cobwebby place. There were some whole oars and the sail of his boat and two or three killicks or painters, not to forget a heap of worn-out oars and sails in one corner and a sailor’s hammock slung across the beam overhead, and there were some sailor’s chests and the capstan of a ship and innumerable boxes which all seemed to be stuffed full, besides no end of things lying on the floor and packed away on shelves and hanging to rusty big-headed nails in the wall. I saw great lumps of coral, and large, rough shells, a great hornet’s nest, and a monstrous lobster-shell. The cap’n had cobbled and tied up some remarkable old chairs for the accommodation of himself and his friends. (D, 64–65)

I think Jewett loves her characters most when they show their collections because this is such an intimate occasion and says so much about the heart’s ongoing negotiations with personal, familial, and historical pasts. While describing Captain Sands’s collection of maritime oddments, Helen remarks that “we both felt a great sympathy for this friend of ours, because we have the same fashion of keeping worthless treasures, and we understood perfectly how dear such things may be” (D, 65). This is a moment of remarkable insight, remarkable because she recognizes Captain Sands (and by extension, all the other collectors) not as Schiller’s full subject but as a fellow griever, rescuing what he can, creating a compensatory plenitude, the world of the collection consoling him for the lost world. His warehouse and all the boxes in it are “stuffed full,” like Marilly’s body, which

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is the cabinet in which she keeps her food collection. The collection bespeaks a great pathos, a point on which Deephaven echoes Cape Cod: We went to see where a ship had been driven ashore in the night, all hands being lost and not a piece of her left larger than an axe-handle; we visited the spot where a ship had come ashore in the fog, and had been left high and dry on the edge of the marsh when the tide went out; we saw where the brig Methuselah had been wrecked, golden with her cargo of lemons and oranges, which one might carry away by the wherryful. (D, 105–6)

But Helen and Captain Sands seem to have different bearings toward their collections: “ ‘Do you mind if we look round a little?’ I asked doubtfully, for I knew how I should hate having strangers look over my own treasury. But Captain Sands looked pleased at our interest, and said cheerfully that we might overhaul as much as we chose” (D, 65–66). Some treasuries, like Helen’s, are sequestered, retired, protectively withdrawn from the world, introjected: “ ‘My aunt found no pleasure in the society of noisy children who upset her treasures.’ ” Others, however, are projected, socialized, used as platforms or occasions for shared rumination on all that has gone by: “There were always some reminiscences which they liked to talk over with each other and with us”; “The cap’n had cobbled and tied up some remarkable old chairs for the accommodation of himself and his friends.” Helen understands the bond between loss and collection but has still to learn about an unembarrassed display that seems to violate the reverent and recessive spirit of the treasury. Still more surprising than the ease with which Captain Sands shows off his stuff is the ease with which the Deephaven friends reveal their sorrows. If this quickness to tell of woe initially seems itself a little morbid, as if these people were collectively overpreoccupied with loss to the exclusion of other possible conversations, we need to recall the frequency of injury, separation, and death in rural and seafaring cultures, as well as the sorrows of an economically dwindling culture—waning institutions such as the churches, attenuated customs, the exodus of the young—and the amplification of loss by those whose self-destructive responses to loss further damage a precarious world. There is much to metabolize, and the amount of loss being worked over (and over) in talk needs to be understood in relation to the amount of work needing to be done. If, on the other hand, rather than morbid, the talk of loss feels too forward, undignified, or unembarrassed, feeling so may reflect a sensibility that, though seemingly more decorous or urbane, is in fact, as Ariès, Jackson, and Farrell argued, conspicuously phobic concerning expressions of woe. The countryperson’s alacrity in telling of sorrow, by contrast with the emergent dying of death in American national culture, is an exercise

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss of emotional freedom despite the fact that the tale it tells is of bondage to loss, or rather, because it tells that tale, since the emancipation that is the fruit of the work of mourning blossoms from concession and acknowledgment rather than denial and defiance. Reminiscing, the people of Deephaven recall characteristic styles, deeds, or reactions that typify the person—the way he used to X, the time she did or said Y—insider sketches that bring intimate associations to mind, a “trace of the [dead person’s] passage through our world.”85 Rather than a report from a conscious and accomplished memory of the dead, the act of reminiscing summons the typifying recollection into awareness for both the teller and the told to, adding the new reminiscence to predecessors, to be added to, in turn, in an ongoing accretive process that culminates not in phantasmatic repossession—she lives on in our memory—but in a meticulous and complex consciousness of dispossession, an adequate inventory of what was had and enjoyed (or suffered or endured) but no longer is. Reminiscence is a paced surrender that extricates the living from the lost, eventually, not a reclamation. If these tales of woe strike Helen as endearing but sometimes a little embarrassing, the regularity with which she reports having been told such tales reveals the interest she took in the tales at the time and the importance they retain in memory, an abiding intrigue for one who, as she makes clear in the early pages of her book, cannot tell her own tale of woe. The people of Deephaven seem to have an aptitude or a knack that magnetized her interest and continues to do so. The regularity with which Helen tells of having heard these tales, in addition to indicating her particular interest in them, suggests that such telling is a knack, a local practice, a collective custom rather than an ­eccentric inclination of the individual teller. Recalling a visit to a cemetery, Helen writes that “some of the epitaphs were beautiful, showing that tenderness for the friends who had died, that longing to do them justice, to fully acknowledge their virtues and dearness, which is so touching, and so unmistakable even under the stiff, quaint expressions and formal words which were thought suitable to be chiseled on stones, so soon to be looked at carelessly by the tearless eyes of strangers” (D, 36–37). Reading below quaintness, Helen discerns a collective intention informing the design of the several stones, “that longing to do [the dead] justice, to fully acknowledge their virtues and dearness,” calling it that tenderness, that longing, rather than a tenderness, or a longing, as if it were something of which we need only to be reminded, not informed, something we once knew and can still access, not the lost plenitude but a way of addressing lack. Importantly, full acknowledgment is a desirable service rather than a strenuous obligation, and it is not limited to a homiletic emphasis on the virtues of the dead: the citing of virtues portrays the dead as a combina-

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tion of abstractions, but the evocation of his or her dearness has to be an intricate expression of the dead not as he or she objectively was but as he or she was for the survivor, how he or she was dear to me. Doing justice to that takes more time and words than an epitaph affords, both because the stone couldn’t hold all the words and because the portrait of dearness doesn’t leap into being but requires considerable memory work. Along with the sermon, the epitaph is a prospectus for the survivor’s testimony concerning the dead—it cannot satisfy the longing it organizes, since the work requires additional, gradual, supplemental testimony, ongoing reminiscence, perhaps during regular visits to the cemetery, a common country practice. It may be that Helen is reading backward, using a conclusion she has reached about the volume of reminiscence she has encountered in Deephaven to shape her reaction to the cemetery, or perhaps thoughts of the epitaphs came to mind when hearing tales of woe. In either case, the fact that despite their diversity, so many of the people of Deephaven step briskly forward with a report on loss intimates that active reminiscence is an acquired and culturally instigated practice for responding to “that longing to do [the dead] justice, to fully acknowledge their virtues and dearness,” a practice perhaps transmitted through observation and emulation rather than explicit instruction, but nevertheless still learned. And being learned by Helen and Kate: after reporting that she and Kate initially found some of the questions they were asked about themselves to have been rather forward, Helen remarks that this boldness turned out to be a distinctive cultural style—“We did not understand, for some time, with what a keen sense of enjoyment many of those people made the acquaintance of an entirely new person who cordially gave the full particulars about herself; but we soon learned to call this by a different name than impertinence” (D, 105)—and a similar adjustment is required in order to accept and understand the facility with which the story of a life is ventured rather than requested: the equal exchange of personal stories seems to be in obedience to a cultural mandate and to serve the purpose, at least in part, of keeping loss within the circuits of talk. After Mrs. Patton shares her reminiscences of Aunt Kate and her funeral, for example, Kate begins to reminisce, too: “ ‘But once in a while when she had been quiet all day and rather sad—I am ashamed that I used to think she was cross—she would open the piano and sit there until late, while I used to be enchanted by her memory of dancing-tunes, and old psalms, and marches and songs’ ” (D, 30). The dour, inhospitable, rather gothic Aunt Kate of the early pages dissolves in the bath of spoken memory, and another woman is installed in her place: “ ‘I have remembered so many things about my aunt since I have been here,’ said Kate, ‘which I hardly noticed and did not understand when they happened. I was afraid of her

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss when I was a little girl, but I think if I had grown up sooner, I should have enjoyed her heartily. It never used to occur to me that she had a spark of tenderness or of sentiment, until just before she was ill, but I have been growing more fond of her ever since’ ” (D, 30–31). At the circus, before visiting Marilly, Kate recalls that when she was seven, her uncle Jack took her to the circus, that they dined alone together when they returned late, and that he sat up late with her in her room, telling her stories and smoking a cigar, while she lay in bed. “Ah, poor Uncle Jack! He was so good to me! We were always telling stories of what we would do when I was grown up. He died in Canton the next year, and I cried myself ill; but for a long time I thought he might not be dead, after all, and might come home any day. He used to seem so old to me, and he really was just out of college and not so old as I am now. That day at the circus he had a pink rosebud in his buttonhole, and—ah! when have I ever thought of this before!—a woman sat before us who had a stiff little cape on her bonnet like a shelf, and I carefully put peanuts round the edge of it, and when she moved her head they would fall. I thought it was the best fun in the world, and I wished Uncle Jack to ride the donkey; I was sure he could keep on, because his horse had capered about with him one day on Beacon Street, and I thought him a perfect rider, since nothing had happened to him then.” (D, 76)

At unpredicted moments memory projects a meticulously detailed tableau, exact and exacting, because the regaining of lost time and the sense of utter loss are simultaneous, and the difference between the little girl who thought her dear uncle was invulnerable and the woman who knows he wasn’t is established as absolute. The important thing to note here is that Kate’s tale of loss is told and that it is one of many in the novel, preceding Marilly’s, for example, by two pages: Jewett emphasizes the emotional productivity of the act of telling when she has Kate exclaim, “ah! when have I ever thought of this before!” and she identifies such telling as an established and recognized social practice when, after Kate completes her recollection, Mrs. Kew offers in her turn a tale of lost youth, of a trip to the circus with her husband, who was in those days “a light-minded young man”: “It doesn’t seem more than five years ago, and what would I have thought if I had known ‘he’ and I were going to keep a lighthouse and be contented there, what’s more, and sometimes not get ashore for a fortnight; settled, gray-headed old folks!” (D, 76–77). Mrs. Kew’s measurement of the distance between herself then and herself now reprises Kate’s feelings for the seven-year-old she was, and though Mrs. Kew’s loss might be less sharp than the death of Uncle Jack, her recollection of a more naïve time nonetheless offers the modestly comforting reminder that if to remember having had is to have to remember having lost, such remembering is nonetheless a necessary part of getting on with things,

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while at the same time doing Uncle Jack justice, fully acknowledging his virtues and dearness, a knack Kate seems to be catching on to.

Out of Town Isolatoes But reminiscence is a knack that must elude Helen because, depressed, she lacks specifically identifiable losses to account for her sorrow, no Aunt Kate or Uncle Jack to rise up before her, so far as she can tell. Hence her interest, in the later part of the book, in people who do not find relief in talk, whose mourning is stumped or balked.86 Marilly, for example: when, at the conclusion of her account of the episode, Helen relabels Marilly “the giantess” and calls her “that absurd, pitiful creature with the gilt crown and many bracelets,” she seems tone-deaf to what had been ventured and achieved in Marilly and Mrs. Kew’s conversation, as if she reports without understanding, as if she were emotionally obtuse. But there’s another way to view Helen’s brusqueness: Marilly eats as a way of doing something about sorrow other than mourning, just as the Helen of the first paragraph tries to make herself feel worse as a way of doing something about depression. Though Marilly can name her many losses, whereas Helen seems unable to do so, though Marilly has lost just about everything in the world, whereas Helen suffers from an originary loss of the world itself, and though Marilly inhabits a differentiated and navigable landscape of woe, whereas Helen lives on an even and bare plain, both seem to believe, or at least half believe, that there are devices that can arrest misery. Helen’s depression neutralizes affect rather than manipulates want, but Marilly’s subjective cluster—ubiquitous loss, exposure, shame, isolation, familylessness, self-denigration, remorse, hopelessness—is sorry enough to resonate, as Judith Fetterley suggests: “In Marilly’s lament for the daughter she never had, we may hear Helen’s lament for the absent mother, the blank space in her story like the blank space on Miss Chauncey’s wall; for, like Marilly’s, Helen’s narrative contains no portrait of her mother. Does Helen mean to suggest that if she had a mother she would not fear becoming a freak?”87 Like Marilly, Helen tries to fill herself, in her case trying to escape depression by internalizing—having—experiences of rural charm, a quest that is acquisitive and consumerist. Identification with Marilly explains Helen’s obvious interest in Marilly’s story but also her rather brutal annulment of Marilly, the brutality not of obliviousness but of disavowal, of an urgent need to deny that Marilly reminds her of herself, that in Marilly she sees herself writ large, as she who fails to mourn. In the waning pages of Deephaven, failed mourning overshadows productive reminiscing. If before the circus Helen had seemed to encounter with surprising regularity people who negotiate loss at least fairly well,

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss she now seems just as prone to encounter people who are incapacitated by their losses, who have lost loss and become self-made emblems of what becomes of those who think they are saving themselves by turning away from the violence of their lives. These meetings take place outside Deephaven, in the countryside or in the still smaller nearby town of East Parish, places where economic hardship seems greater or to have hit with greater effect by virtue of isolation, and where both hardship and isolation seem to have greatly impeded the ability to mourn losses—hardship by its incessant claim on attention, isolation by the loss of the chance to talk. As Julia Bader writes of Jewett, “When the crucially sustaining [sexual, familial, and communal] roles are missing, threatened or breaking down, the protagonists of these stories are shown to misperceive and misinterpret their surroundings; social, sexual and psychological dislocations are reflected in a wavering, fading or blurring of vision.”88 “ ‘Do you see that house over on the p’int?’ he asked. ‘An old fellow lives there that’s part lost his mind. He had a son who was drowned off Cod Rock fishing, much as twenty-five years ago, and he’s worn a deep path out to the end of the p’int where he goes every hand’s turn o’ the day to see if he can’t see the boat coming in’ ” (D, 116). The story of the old man who lost his son is found in a deeply bleak chapter entitled “In Shadow.” Taken on a drive along the coast road, Helen and Kate travel through land “so poor that even the trees looked hungry,” noticing especially that the farms were “scattered wide apart.” Intending to hike along some high rocks, they leave the horse at a farmhouse, stopping to visit for a while before beginning the hike. “Seeing us seemed to be a perfect godsend to the people whose nearest neighbors lived out of sight” (D, 114). Helen is considerably affected by both the plight and the dignity of the family: They looked thin and pitiful, but even in that lonely place, where they so seldom saw a stranger or even a neighbor, they showed that there was an evident effort to make them like the other children, and they were neatly dressed, though there could be no mistake about their being poor. One forlorn little soul, with honest gray eyes and a sweet, shy smile, showed us a string of beads which she wore round her neck; there were perhaps two dozen of them, blue and white, on a bit of twine, and they were the dearest things in all her world. (D, 115)

The father has just met Helen and Kate, but he is nevertheless forthcoming with a tale of woe, though by this point in Deephaven such readiness is less surprising: “I hope ye may never know what it is to earn every dollar as hard as I have. I never earned any money as easy as this before [the money for keeping the horse]. I don’t feel as if I ought to take it. I’ve done the best I could,” said the man, with

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss    the tears coming into his eyes, and a huskiness in his voice, but everything seems to have been ag’in’ us; we never seem to get forehanded. It looks sometime as if the Lord had forgot us, but my woman she never wants me to say that; she says He ain’t, and that we might be worse off,—but I don’t know.” (D, 115)

Brutal circumstance proves the wife right. When Helen and Kate have a chance to revisit the farm in late October, just before leaving Deephaven, they learn that the wife had died nine weeks earlier of a fever, followed by the husband, from alcohol, two days before Helen and Kate’s visit: “He faded right out” (D, 122). They arrive the morning of the funeral, at the end of which the children are to be divided from each other, to be raised by relatives and neighbors. The husband’s despair was already evident, during the first visit, when he confessed that he felt abandoned by God and revealed the wife’s crucial role in maintaining the family’s faith and pride. With lucid empathy, Kate imagines the man’s plight: “ ‘theirs was such a little world; one can understand how, when the man’s wife died, he was bewildered and discouraged, utterly at a loss. The thoughts of winter, and of the little children, and of the struggles he had already come through against poverty and disappointment were terrible thoughts; and like a boat adrift at sea, the waves of his misery brought him in against the rocks, and his simple life was wrecked’ ” (D, 120). When Jewett wrote “The Circus at Denby” to add to the original Atlantic Monthly sketches, she included an echo of the poor farm family. As Helen, Kate, and Mrs. Kew arrive in Denby, they see a dismal sight: “There was a forlorn horse standing near, with his harness tied up with fuzzy ends of rope, and the wagon was cobbled together with pieces of board; and the whole craft looked as if it might be wrecked with the least jar. In the wagon there were four or five stupid-looking boys and girls, one of whom was crying softly. Their father was sick, some one told us” (D, 71). This man, Mr. Craper, is thin and ghastly pale from his illness, which Helen guesses must be tuberculosis: “He was pitiful, poor fellow, with his evident attempt at dressing up. He had the bushiest, dustiest red hair and whiskers, which made the pallor of his face still more striking, and his illness had thinned and paled his rough, clumsy hands. I thought what a hard piece of work it must have been for him to start for the circus that morning, and how kind-hearted he must be to have made such an effort for his children’s pleasure. As we went out they stared at us gloomily. The shadow of their disappointment touched and chilled our pleasure” (D, 72). Someone turns the wagon around and points it toward the family home, thinking Mr. Craper is not strong enough to make it to the circus, but he insists, turns the wagon round again, and heads off. At the end of the day, their understanding of Mr. Craper’s problem is clarified: “We passed the Craper family whom we had seen at the store in the morning: the ­children

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss looked as stupid as ever, but the father, I am sorry to say, had been tempted to drink more whiskey than was good for him. He had a bright flush on his cheeks, and he was flourishing his whip, and hoarsely singing some meaningless tune” (D, 80). Mr. Craper’s story brackets Marilly’s story, inviting the reader to associate his drinking with her eating and to wonder if he grieves (or avoids grieving), too. The story of Mr. Craper also anticipates (though it was written later, it appears earlier in the novel) the story of the poor father whose wife died, not only because it’s about alcohol but because it features a man with no wife and with neglected children. We’re given no information about Mrs. Craper, but her absence from the scene is felt even though it’s not mentioned, an eloquent silence that repeats Helen’s silence concerning her own mother in the early pages of the book, suggesting that these two stories concerning motherlessness, despair, and failed mourning may be intensely interesting to Helen because they emblematize her own family’s plight. (“The Denis family are wanderers on the face of the earth.”) But if this is so, it’s important to note that both stories are focused on the father’s plight: though the orphaning and emotional neglect of the children are attended to in both stories, the fathers’ misery and its effect on their ability to care for the children is the major empathetic locus; and if Helen is in fact drawn to these stories of motherlessness by her own motherlessness, refocalization toward the fathers’ pain might represent a step out from depression, not because it suppresses the thought of her own pain but because it is an attempt to understand that part of her pain born from her father’s distraction and consequent inattention—a step toward representing loss, which turns out to involve representing his as well as hers: understanding yields compassion and forgiveness, which in turn dissolve anger and resulting guilt. Helen’s interest in these melancholiacs, and her pity for them, is a kind of meditation, or rumination, that mitigates her depression by means of understanding rather than phantasmatic fulfillment. Thinking about melancholia is a way of not thinking melancholically but of stepping out as a preliminary to moving through and past, of relinquishing an attitude toward the lost object if not relinquishing that still-unknown object itself. The act of observing melancholy circumscribes melancholy as a locale or region within the general field of possible responses to loss. Deephaven’s melancholiacs are introverted recidivist enclaves scattered at intervals across its landscape rather than an omnipresent shadow of the sort Ariès located in late-century America; and if they are more common outside of town, on Deephaven’s periphery, this uneven distribution identifies Deephaven proper as a cosmopolitan area, a repository of comprehensive emotional knowledge. People from town can address their own grief, and

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even, sometimes, as in the conversation between Mrs. Kew and Marilly, the entrenched grief of the isolated outsider, a dynamic process Helen has observed carefully. During the course of a foray to the satellite town of East Haven, Helen and Kate spot “a fine old house which had apparently fallen into ruin years before” (D, 125). The house is sufficiently intriguing to bring them to the verge of trespass: “Suppose we go in,” said I; “the door is open a little way. There must surely be some stories about it’s being haunted. We will ask Miss Honora [Carew, a Deephaven friend].” And we climbed over the boards which were put up like pasture-bars across the wide front gateway. Just as we stood on the steps the door was pulled wide open; we started back, and well-grown women as we are, we have confessed since that our first impulse was to run away. On the threshold there stood a stately old woman who looked surprised at first sight to see us, then quickly recovered herself and stood waiting for us to speak. She was dressed in a rusty black satin gown, with scant, short skirt and huge sleeves; on her head was a great black bonnet with a high crown and a close brim, which came far out over her face. “What is your pleasure?” said she; and we felt like two awkward children. (D, 126)

They beat a hasty retreat, intrigued enough to enquire about the spectre upon their return to Deephaven. Miss Sally Chauncey, they learn, is insane, the victim of her family’s misfortune: ruined in business, her father died poor and insane, a brother committed suicide, another brother became so violently insane he had to be chained in one of the upper chambers for years—another mother-lacking story. Miss Chauncey herself fell victim to mental illness and was incarcerated; her guardian, thinking there was no hope of recovery, sold the contents of the family home to pay the hospital. Miss Chauncey recovered, though, but when she returned to the house to find it emptied, she fell back into mental illness, but this time of a kind that their friend Miss Carew considers benign: “ ‘she has been alone many years, and no one can persuade her to leave the old house, where she seems to be contented, and does not realize her troubles; though she lives mostly in the past, and has little idea of the present, except in her house affairs, which seem pitiful to me, for I remember the housekeeping of the Chaunceys when I was a child’ ” (D, 127). The gothic tone of their first encounter with Miss Chauncey recalls Helen’s first feelings toward Aunt Kate’s house, and the story of Miss Chauncey in several ways reprises and revives the story of Aunt Kate, who turns out to have been Helen’s first case study in melancholia. Like Miss Chauncey, Aunt Kate had lost much: There was a box in the lower part which Kate was glad to find, for she had heard her mother wonder if some such things were not in existence. It held a

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss crucifix and a mass-book and some rosaries, and Kate told me Miss Katharine’s youngest and favorite brother had become a Roman Catholic while studying in Europe. It was a dreadful blow to the family; for in those days there could have been few deeper disgraces to the Brandon family than to have one of its sons go over to popery. Only Miss Katharine treated him with kindness, and after a time he disappeared without telling even her where he was going, and was only heard from indirectly once or twice afterward. It was a great grief to her. “And mamma knows,” said Kate, “that she always had a lingering hope of his return, for one of the last times she saw Aunt Katharine before she was ill she spoke of soon going to be with all the rest, and said, ‘though your Uncle Henry, dear,’—and stopped and smiled sadly; ‘you’ll think me a very foolish old woman, but I never quite gave up thinking he might come home.’ ” (D, 19–20)

There was a sailor lover, too, perhaps lost at sea, and a friend: “[The letters] were very few, and were tied with black ribbon, and marked on the outside in girlish writing: ‘My dearest friend, Dolly McAllister, died September 3, 1809’ ” (D, 19). Aunt Kate’s losses were perhaps less brutal than Miss Chauncey’s (though the scale that measures the relative weights of losses is yet to be invented), and she was judged to be stately rather than insane. But her response to loss anticipates Miss Chauncey’s in its commitment to immobility, to a flash-frozen life in which no new attachments will rearrange the furniture that remains from the former life: “The chairs looked as if they had been put, at the furnishing of the house, in their places, and there they meant to remain.” In both cases, Helen’s and Kate’s researches into these lonely women’s lives seems intrusive, for example, when they read some of the letters they find in Aunt Kate’s escritoire, or when they first see Miss Chauncey’s open front door, or when, while revisiting Miss Chauncey, Helen spots “a tall, handsome chest of drawers, which I should have liked much to ransack” (D, 131). This remark betrays some nervousness about the ethics of Helen’s treasure hunting, but it’s also clear that by contrast with most of Deephaven’s loquacious citizens, Aunt Kate and Miss Chauncey carry their stories deep within themselves and therefore stimulate the desire to delve; they keep their stories sequestered, enveloped, protected, because the telling of the stories would precipitate the resumption of the open knowledge of loss, which feels like, but isn’t, the resumption of loss itself. The two lonely women bookend Deephaven, their attachment to a phantasmatic emotional technology italicizing the others afflicted by illusion—Marilly, Mr. Craper, the man who comes to the cliff looking for his son, the country widower, Helen’s analogues—and highlighting by contrast those who can speak their losses, Helen’s teachers. Helen and Kate visit Miss Chauncey several times, and they are deeply

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss   

affected and awed by the degree to which she has managed to nullify time: “ ‘I can’t believe I am an old woman. It seems only yesterday,’ said she, thoughtfully. And then she lost the idea, and talked about Kate’s great-grandmother, whom she had known, and asked how she had been this summer” (D, 131). Helen says this is good: Poor creature! It was a blessed thing that her shattered reason made her unconscious of the change in her fortunes, and incapable of comparing the end of her life with its beginning. To herself she was still Miss Chauncey, a gentlewoman of high family, possessed of unusual worldly advantages. The remembrance of her cruel trials and sorrows had faded from her mind. She had no idea of the poverty of her surroundings when she paced back and forth, with stately steps, on the ruined terraces of her garden; the ranks of lilies and the conserve-roses were still in bloom for her, and the box-borders were as trimly kept as ever; and when she pointed out to us the distant steeples of Riverport, it was plain to see that it was still the Riverport of her girlhood. If the boat-landing at the foot of the garden had long ago dropped into the river and gone with the tide; if the maids and men who used to do her bidding were all out of hearing; if there had been no dinner company that day and no guests were expected for the evening,—what did it matter? The twilight had closed around her gradually, and she was alone in her house, but she did not heed the ruin of it or the absence of her friends. On the morrow, life would go on again. (D, 131–32)

Perhaps one of Helen’s most revealing moments, this excursus on the mercifulness of Miss Chauncey’s mental illness recalls Helen’s own desire: It seemed as if all the clocks in Deephaven, and all the people with them, had stopped years ago, and the people had been doing over and over what they had been busy about during the last week of their unambitious progress. Their clothes had lasted wonderfully well, and they had no need to earn money when there was so little chance to spend it; indeed, there were several families who seemed to have no more visible means of support than a balloon. There were no young people whom we knew, though a number used to come to church on Sunday from the inland farms, or “the country,” as we learned to say. There were children among the fishermen’s families at the shore, but a few years will see Deephaven possessed by two classes instead of the time-honored three. (D, 42)

Hence Deephaven’s charm: though Helen does not erase entirely the evidence of attrition, she labors to ignore the deep streaks of wear and tarnish that years of want have put on Deephaven so that she can maintain her belief in an old world as fresh as Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon, a remote, immensely endearing, deeply refreshing Highlands village that appears once every hundred years, advancing one day in age, then returning to protective oblivion. This miracle was granted to Brigadoon’s minister, who, sometime in the seventeenth century, prayed that the town’s “customary ways” be spared the impact of “all the evils that might come

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss to Brigadoon after he’d left it,” including, presumably, modernity. Even Superman, hero to Metropolis and nation, afflicted with infantile melancholy, is soothed by place, the city of Kandor. Miniaturized, bottled, and abducted by the villain Brainiac, an avid collector of cities from many planets, Kandor is the last intact sociocultural chunk of Krypton, the home planet from which the baby Kal-El, later Superman, was expelled by his parents, in an escape rocket with room enough only for him, shortly before the planet exploded. A sorrowful tale: the relics of his home planet, the green ones at least, are lethal, the only substance able to penetrate the armor of Superman’s invulnerability; and his power is contingent on exile—in the light of a sun such as Krypton’s, he has no special ability. But there is solace: Superman recovered Kandor from Brainiac, its citizens alive and doing what they always did, without apparent transformation, and Superman preserves it in his secret Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic; he can’t restore it to its original size, but wouldn’t that cost it its charm and risk change? The melancholiac devotes himself to the proposition that the past must be intact, alive, and bright, somewhere, with only a few cobwebs needing to be brushed away, ready for repossession. Even Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane might be said to desire not the lost sled Rosebud, an object, but the world that was taken from him when the sled was torn from his hands: when he dies, it’s not an object that slips from his hand, properly speaking, but a miniaturized world, a snow globe, his lost world. Or see the heartbreakingly beautiful ending of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. For deep melancholiacs, according to John Bowlby, “the object is recognized to be missing, but it is judged nevertheless to be recoverable. Given energy and perseverance, the husband or father can be found again, and reunion attained. There is loss, admittedly, but it is only temporary. It is the permanence of the loss that is denied.” As a result, they often fall victim to “compulsive wandering,” or “pathological wandering, searching, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, for the lost figure they believe still exists somewhere.”89 When near the beginning of the book Helen associates the trip to Deephaven with a return to girlhood, she likens Deephaven to her own lost paradise, not lost down time’s hole but only elsewhere on earth, over the next hill. Concerning patients who suffer from “early object loss,” Paul M. Lerner writes: In treating several such adult patients I have repeatedly observed a particular phenomenon that seems coincident with a good treatment outcome. Specifically, it has been my experience that the treatment process itself sets in motion within the patient a compelling need to set out, rediscover, and then symbolically reclaim the lost object in the real world. These patients are not satisfied with simply experiencing the object anew transferentially in the person of the therapist.

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss    Rather, they seem bent on capturing something more concrete and more directly related to the object, and their quest invariably takes them beyond the bounds of the treatment setting.90

Such equations of the lost world with currently existing worlds are exercises in fuzzy math, like Marilly’s association of food with her own losses, the imprecision of the equation being deliberate, the means of its efficacy: the vagueness of the liaison permits a feeling that one does “then symbolically reclaim the lost object in the real world,” discover “something more concrete and more directly related to the object.” The strategy of imaginary repossession works especially well in Helen’s case, perhaps, because the lost thing is lost to consciousness as well and therefore unable to aid in identifying the disparity between itself and its surrogate. Maintaining the liaison between the lost world and the world at hand, however, still requires a rendering of the world at hand: Helen comes to the table often over the summer to feast on living charm and invites the reader to join her, but the pleasure of the meal requires that the guests not think about how the food was prepared, the real matter cut, seasoned, and simmered. If Helen’s past lacks the power to demonstrate its difference from Deephaven, Deephaven always threatens to be something other than what Helen labors to make it be, threatens to be a wholly other thing than the bright regional object. And perhaps Deephaven’s failure to be what Helen desires it to be accounts in part for her growth: transferences cure when they are broken, and the afflicted one can advance out of the fixation and the longing that the transference had brought to consciousness. Perhaps Lerner’s patients came to life not because for them the experience of pilgrimage was repossessive or acquisitive, bringing them to the current location of what they had been searching for since the beginning of time, but because their experience was dispossessive, because the particular autonomy of the places they came to—new places rather than the lands of their dreams—brought them to acknowledge the futility of the desire for death-defying surrogation. Helen’s willingness to relinquish her insistence that Deephaven is what she had desired it to be, her capacity to accede to its reality, indicates that she, like Kate, is learning to mourn. Over the course of the novel she loses Deephaven, not the friends, their woes, their melancholy and their wisdom, all of which she gains, but the Deephaven of her imagination, which she is able to lose because of what she gains from the real Deephaven. The clearest evidence of this salutary loss is that the gloom of “The Circus at Denby,” “In Shadow,” and “Miss Chauncey,” all composed ­either as part of the third Atlantic Monthly installment or of the final book preparation, largely replaces the charm of the earlier chapters, not because Helen is herself growing gloomier or more depressed, seeing the world through

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss dark glasses, but because surrendering the Deephaven she was intent on finding, she discovers the somber truth about these people who affect her so deeply. Despite the variety of their woes, there is a single truth running through all their stories, the misery of the place, brought on by its economic decline: Marilly’s father, who had “run through every cent he had before he died”; the poor farmer, who’s forced to depend on poor land because he’s “a boat-builder by trade, but the business’s all run down” (D, 115); Miss Chauncey’s father, who “was utterly ruined at the time of the embargo; then he became partially insane, and died after many years of poverty” (D, 126). Though the forms of their misery are manifold, they are manifold ramifications from the single awful cause of economic collapse, and the loss of their charm is among the local peoples’ lesser worries, if a worry at all. Alison Easton contends that Jewett’s upper-middle-class values prevail in Deephaven, pointing in particular to the encounter with Mary, the Boston shopgirl whom Kate embarrasses. But that moment of cruelty is affirmed by Helen, not Jewett, and the episode might well be intended to indicate another of Helen’s limitations: Deephaven’s more fortunate citizens never behave in such a way toward the less well-off, and Helen and Kate’s treatment of Mary may be meant to illustrate an urban and contemporary decline in the civility of relations between classes. Traditional and affectional hierarchies are not the same as modern, efficient, and cold hierarchies, and Jewett’s heart goes out to the former. In any case, Jewett’s social bearing does not prevent her from depicting the ways in which want percolates into the soil of consciousness. As Easton contends, Jewett consistently displays a sensitive and complex understanding of the history and the consequences of class difference,91 a social vision that Helen comes to acquire as she relinquishes the insistence on charm. It’s fair to say that by its end Deephaven is a less regionalist work than The Country of the Pointed Firs, less consistently guided throughout by a tone of quiet but eloquent appreciation, and the disparity between appreciation and starker things in Deephaven is not evidence of imperfect authorial control but rather of an inquiry into the function of appreciation. Jewett may well have intended to tip us to this while she was writing “The Circus at Denby.” Though Helen’s and Kate’s hopes for the day start out high, the circus turns out to be ramshackle and seedy, consigned to traveling from poor town to poor town, the best circus that Denby can afford, and Denby the best kind of town that the circus can hope to entertain. Even before Helen and Kate enter the tent of the Kentucky ­Giantess, the entire experience is oppressive, a lesson in what the poor have to settle for: I cannot truthfully say that it was a good show; it was somewhat dreary, now that I think of it quietly and without excitement. The creatures looked tired, as if

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss    they had been on the road for a good many years. The animals were all old, and there was a shabby great elephant whose look of general discouragement went to my heart, for he seemed as if he were miserably conscious of a misspent life. He stood dejected and motionless at one side of the tent, and it was hard to believe that there was a spark of vitality in him. (D, 73)

Another of Helen’s melancholiacs, but in her leap of sympathy Helen is herself quick and moving rather than depressive. At several points, Helen’s attempt to celebrate their excursion is strained or labored: “It was very pleasant to see a person so happy as Mrs. Kew was that day, and I dare say in speaking of the occasion she would say the same thing of Kate and me—for it was such a good time!” (D, 74). The circus was like all other circuses, except that it was shabbier than most, and the performers seemed to have less heart in it than usual. They did their best, and went through with their parts conscientiously, but they looked as if they never had a good time in their lives. The audience was hilarious, and cheered and laughed at the tired clown until he looked as if he thought his speeches might be funny, after all. We were so glad we had pleased the poor thing; and when he sang a song our satisfaction was still greater, and so he sang it all over again. (D, 75)

The clown is as depressed as the elephant: it’s not much of a circus; even the Kentucky Giantess, advertised as weighing six hundred and fifty pounds, weighs four hundred at most (D, 78). By emphasizing their exertions—to influence the clown to do better, or to coax themselves into thinking they’re having a fine time—Helen implies that anticipation is realized in appreciation only by nullifying the truth of the scene, by work. Most important, she tells us that now, when she writes, she presents what was rather than what she had then hoped would be: “I cannot truthfully say that it was a good show; it was somewhat dreary, now that I think of it quietly and without excitement.” There are several other places where Helen refers to the book she’s writing. As she moves toward conclusion, for example: “It is bewildering to know this is the last chapter, and that it must be long. I remember so many of our pleasures of which I have hardly said a word” (D, 137). But her announcement that she will tell the truth about the shabby elephant is one of the very few places where Helen comments on her current emotional state, and it may indicate a purpose—truthfully telling what was instead of resurrecting forced excitement—that has been coming to suffuse her writing at large rather than only at the point of describing the circus animals. “The Circus at Denby,” recall, was written nearly last, ensuring that Deephaven’s major concerns were salient.

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss

Mourning and Religion Blessed are they that are homesick, for they shall come at last to the Father’s house. —transcribed in Jewett’s 1874 Diary

Shortly after praising the mercifulness of Miss Chauncey’s madness, Helen reverses course, conceding that the madness turned out to be grotesque, an additional affliction: It seems that after much persuasion she was induced to go spend the winter [after Helen and Kate have left Deephaven] with a neighbor, her house having become uninhabitable, and she was, beside, too feeble to live alone. But the fondness for her old home was too strong, and one day she stole away from the people who took care of her, and crept in through the cellar, where she had to wade through half-frozen water, and then went up stairs, where she seated herself at a front window and called joyfully to the people who went by, asking them to come in to see her, as she had got home again. After this she was very ill, and one day, when she was half delirious, they missed her, and found her at last sitting on her hall stairway, which she was too feeble to climb. She lived but a short time afterwards, and in her last days her mind seemed perfectly clear. She said over and over again how good God had always been to her, and she was gentle, and unwilling to be a trouble to those who had the care of her. (D, 133)

Those skeptical about Christianity might argue that in her delirium Miss Chauncey substituted illusion for denial, comforting herself with fairy tales rather than openly facing the circumstance of her life. But Jewett was not a skeptic: though, according to Paula Blanchard, her religious life became “gentler and more easy-going” as the years went by, she was consistent in her belief throughout her life and quite immersed in religion during the period she was writing Deephaven.92 It is therefore difficult to suppose that Jewett meant for us to view Miss Chauncey’s faith as delusional. She affirms Miss Chauncey’s faith and suggests that it tempers her insanity. But to acknowledge that Jewett was intent on being a Christian writer is to say little. The character of faith is not standard from person to person, so an understanding of Deephaven requires a close reading of Jewett’s faith and of its relation to the book’s other core concerns. In the story of Miss Chauncey, the relief that faith affords is intimately related to the particular character of her affliction, the sudden shock of the moment when, having recovered from her first madness, she walks into the emptied house and immediately succumbs to time denial, holding fast to the stripped and decaying mansion, living in the past, with little idea of the present (D, 127). The strength of this reaction may be due to its being a second shock, reawakening the force of its predecessor: “ ‘One of Miss Sally’s brothers, a fine young officer in the navy, asked her one day if she

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss   

could get on without him, and she said yes, thinking he meant to go back to sea; but in a few minutes she heard the noise of a pistol in his room, and hurried in to find him dead on the floor’ ” (D, 127). She can no longer permit a moment to be a moment, because all events are lethal bolts from the blue, immune to any kind of prediction or anticipation. The only possible preparation or readiness is a complete interdiction of eventfulness itself, of time. If the knowledge of alteration ceases, alteration seems to cease, too, and no further losses can present themselves for attention. But she is not entirely unconscious of time: “Mr. Lorimer [Deephaven’s minister] spoke of her simple goodness, and told us that though she had no other sense of time, and hardly knew if it were summer or winter, she was always sure when Sunday came, and always came to church when he preached at East Parish, her greatest pleasure seeming to be to give money, if there was a contribution” (D, 133). Miss Chauncey’s consciousness of time, Jewett suggests, was constant but ignored or suppressed, rather than absent, in order to self-immunize against shock. The thought of worship allowed her to ease the suppression, to concede to time some of its flow, to allow a carefully circumscribed bit of movement into the still life she has made of the world. But Mr. Lorimer’s comment doesn’t explain why worship allowed Miss Chauncey to relax her guard against time. Shortly before this, Helen recalls that Miss Chauncey often read to them from scripture when they would come to visit, remembering in particular some psalms and some chapters from Isaiah, but most vividly one golden twilight when “Miss Sally had opened the great book at random and read slowly, ‘In my ­Father’s house are many mansions’; and into the window-recess, she repeated it: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.’ Then she went on slowly to the end of the chapter, and with her hands clasped on the Bible she fell into a revery, and the tears came into our eyes as we watched her look of perfect content. Through all her clouded years the promises of God had been her only certainty” (D, 132). The word mansions indicates that Miss Chauncey has the King James Bible, since the word is otherwise generally translated as “rooms” or “dwellings.” But mansions is more effective, because it seems to remind Miss Chauncey of her own once-stately house and to promise eventual repair for her ruin. The word mansions, that is, allows Miss Chauncey to phrase to herself what it is that she has lost. In this chapter Jesus promises, “I go to prepare a place for you” ( John 14:2; italics added), not a uniform cubicle but a dwelling that is lovingly suited to she who will come there. This attention to the singularity of the individual person runs throughout the Gospels: “ ‘Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows’ ” (Luke 12:6–7). The promised mansion is to be lovingly designed with reference to the lost mansion, so to contemplate the promise is to contemplate the loss as well, in its particularity, to do the dead justice, to begin to fully acknowledge their virtues and dearness: if the blueprint of her lost paradise has been preserved to be used as a plan for reconstruction, she can unroll it and look it over rather than having to devote herself completely to the task of unthinking the uniform blankness of pure dissolution; freed of the horrible and tedious burden of emblematizing absolute zero, her losses can emerge into richer contemplation—she can number the hairs on lost heads. Miss Chauncey’s religious feelings may seem less than hardheaded about grief, reducing loss to an interlude and thereby avoiding the sort of candid encounter that mourning requires, but the interlude is life itself, a stringent fact: for the duration of life, loss is irreversible, the future is empty of return, and some new form of active engagement is required; if tears are to be wiped from eyes someday, this day remains and requires attention rather than melancholy neglect. Though Miss Chauncey’s moment of remission is short and soon rescinded, though it does not unfold into a course of mourning but succumbs to renewed melancholia, the reverie that the fourteenth chapter of John permits seems to be a peaceful contemplation of the truth of her life rather than an excited or elated expectation of sorrow’s imminent end. Miss Chauncey’s religious life unfreezes her, opens her for an iota of mourning, an abatement that recalls Aunt Kate: “ ‘But once in a while when she had been quiet all day and rather sad—I am ashamed that I used to think she was cross—she would open the piano and sit there until late, while I used to be enchanted by her memories of dancing-tunes, and old psalms, and marches and songs. There was one tune which I am sure had a history: there was a sweet wild cadence in it. And she would come back to it again and again, always going through with it in the same measured way’ ” (D, 30). Perhaps hope and deeply felt grief enable, rather than preclude, one another. Frederick Douglass, for example, observed this in the sorrow songs: “They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.” 93 And George Eliot, in her depiction of the worship of the rural Methodists, remarked upon “that strange blending of exultation and sadness which belongs to the cadence of the hymn.” 94 At the ­f uneral for the widowed father, “we heard the people in the house singing ‘China,’ the Deephaven funeral hymn, and the tune suited well that day, with its wailing rise and fall; it was strangely plaintive” (D, 122). Oliver ­Wendell ­Holmes rendered jocular testimony to the hymn’s woe-

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss   

fulness in The Guardian Angel: “That mournful ‘China,’ which one of our most agreeable story-tellers has justly singled out as the cry of despair itself, was ­often sung at The Poplars, sending such a sense of utter misery through the house, that poor Kitty Fagan would cross herself, and wring her hands, and think of funerals, and wonder who was going to die,—for she fancied she heard the Banshee’s warning in those most dismal ululations.”95 Timothy Swan’s tune (1801), somber, august, plangent, and undeserving of Holmes’s rather facile satire, is strikingly at odds with Isaac Watts’s consoling lyrics (1707), which promise reunion in order to declare grief superfluous: Why do we mourn departing friends, Or shake at death’s alarms? ’Tis but the voice that Jesus sends, To call them to His arms. Why should we tremble to convey Their bodies to the tomb? There the dear flesh of Jesus lay, And vanished all the gloom. Thence He arose, ascended high, And showed our feet the way; Up to the Lord our souls shall fly, At the great rising day.

By themselves, the lyrics might seem to epitomize the pallid evasion of suffering that many see in religious addresses to mourning, but the vigor of the hymn resides in the contrasting moods of poem and tune, which accentuate rather than revoke one another. (“China” was included in the Sacred Harp songbook, so shape-note singing may be another among the country arts recorded in Deephaven. Though Sacred Harp is commonly associated with the American South, I have been assured by contemporary practitioners [via e-mail] that it was to be heard in nineteenthcentury Maine as well. Buell E. Cobb Jr. remarks that “New England can claim many of the origins of the [Sacred Harp] singing tradition and much of its repertory,” adding later that “in a limited sense, the Sacred Harp is a final stage of the singing-school movement which began in New England in the eighteenth century and gradually spread into the West and South.”) 96 Jewett invites us to contextualize the promise of the mansion by considering its full setting (“Then she went on slowly to the end of the chapter, and with her hands clasped on the Bible she fell into a revery, and the tears came into our eyes as we watched her look of perfect content”), suggesting that the chapter as a whole rather than only the promise ­affects Miss

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss Chauncey. Like many another chapter in the most elusive and enigmatic of the four Gospels, John 14 is hard to grasp, a trait it shares with the man whose life it recounts: “And the light shineth in darkness: and the darkness comprehended it not”(1:5; King James version); “And some of them would have taken him; but no man laid hands on him” (7:44); “ ‘Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word’ ” (8:43); “Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by” (8:59); “This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what things they were which he spake unto them” (10:6); “Therefore they sought again to take him: but he escaped out of their hand” (10:39). Jesus speaks of this elusiveness in 3:8: “ ‘the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’ ” This verse, according to James S. Stewart, attests to “the inscrutable origin of the Spirit,” and its “sovereign freedom”: “Always that elusive and intractable Spirit of God keeps embarrassing our preconceptions.”97 The world of John is a world of constant motion and fugitive presence, as well as the place where Jesus’ humanity compels him to experience grief: “Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, ‘Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.’ When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, And said, ‘Where have ye laid [Lazarus]?’ They said unto him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, ‘Behold how he loved him!’ ” (John 11:32–36). Wept, despite the promise of resurrection, and in his case the power of revival, because he loved. The themes of elusiveness and grief converge in the fourteenth chapter, where Jesus reminds the disciples of his coming death, now less than a day away. He has been warning the disciples of the day now at hand all along: “Then said Jesus unto them, ‘Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto him that sent me. Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where I am, thither ye cannot come’ ” (7:33–34). Throughout chapter 14, Jesus reminds the disciples of their imminent loss by repeatedly saying, “I am going”: even the promise of the mansion contains the loss—“ ‘I go to prepare a place for you.’ ” He knows that the disciples have given up the lives they had to follow him and that they are soon to lose the presence they consider their reason for living, to have been a fulfillment beyond any possible comparison. Jesus feels more than they do what approaches—“ ‘­Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me’ ” (14:30). And perhaps he foresees the feeling of pointlessness that will descend upon them after he dies: “Simon Peter saith unto them, ‘I go a fishing.’ They say unto him, ‘We also go with thee.’ They

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss   

went forth, and entered into a ship immediately; and that night they caught nothing’ ” (21:3). John’s portrait of Peter and some of the others in the immediate aftermath, attempting to resume their former lives, captures the excruciating bleakness of the survivor facing an empty world. Anticipating this, Jesus’ words are an attempt to prepare them, teaching them now how to mourn as he had previously taught them to pray. The promise of reunion and the mansion are not all he has to offer. The repeated references to coming and going, recapitulating the motif of elusiveness, represent a kind of inversion of Freud’s fort-da, an imaginary representation of incessant departure and arrival that teaches about real loss to come, rather than an attempted annulment after the fact (Marilly, for example, tirelessly regulating the alternation of hunger and intake). And there is another promise, in addition to the mansion, the paraclete: “ ‘And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you’ ” (14:16–18). Jesus here echoes John’s overture—“The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not under­stood it”—to underline the centrality of what is being said in chapter 14. The Counselor is different from Jesus—another Counselor—but is him, too: “ ‘I will come to you.’ ” As it is throughout John, divinity remains elusive, in and out of understanding’s pocket. The clear point, though, is that the paraclete is a teacher: “ ‘These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you’ ” (14:25–26). In Acts, the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is the beginning of the disciples’ ministry, the moment when it is completely clarified for them that their lot is not to be despondent and unsuccessful in their daily work but founders of a religion. And here Jesus indicates their work to come, assuring them that the paraclete will help them remember the teaching, in order to be able to repeat it as teachers themselves. Unlike the mansion, which is a promise of rest, reunion, and fulfillment after life’s end, the promise of the paraclete is a promise of help with the long work to come in life, which will involve, in addition to the loss of Jesus, continual hardship, scorn, pain, and in several cases, violent death. Discussing translations of the word parakletos, William Barclay writes: Always a parakletos is someone called in to help when the person who calls on him is in trouble or distress or doubt or bewilderment. Now the word Comforter was once a perfectly good translation. It actually goes back to Wicliffe; he was the first person to use it. But in his day it meant much more than it means now. The

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss word comforter comes from the Latin word fortis which means brave; and a comforter was someone who enabled some dispirited creature to be brave. Nowadays the word comfort has to do almost solely with sorrow; and a comforter is someone who sympathizes with us when we are sad. Beyond a doubt the Holy Spirit does that, but to limit the work of the Holy Spirit to that function is sadly to belittle Him. We have a modern phrase which we often use. We talk of being able to cope with things. That is precisely the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes to us and takes away our inadequacies and enables us to cope with life. The Holy Spirit substitutes victorious for defeated living.98

Jesus emphasizes the coming mission throughout chapter 14: “ ‘verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father’ ” (14:12); “ ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’ ” (14:15:); “‘the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me’ ” (14:31); and then, ending the chapter, “ ‘Come now; let us leave’ ” (14:31; New International Version; italics added). The only miracle reported in all four Gospels is the feeding of the five thousand, perhaps because it captures the writers’ feeling of inadequacy in the early days after the crucifixion, of woefully slight personal resources at the beginning of an enormous mission. John suggests that such feelings were an early phase in a work of mourning, acknowledging the full horror of the loss, doing justice to the dead, so far as possible fully acknowledging his virtues and dearness, returning to an engagement with the world that remains, with the addition that for the disciples the work, the mode of reengagement with the world, is the act of acknowledgment itself, spread out over their lifetimes. John 14 is solemn rather than jubilant, as is Miss Chauncey after she reads it: Jewett implies that its effect on her was due not only to the promise made in the second verse but also, or perhaps even more, to the instruction the chapter as a whole offers in grieving, particularly to the intimacy of Jesus’ care in preparing the disciples for what was coming, a solicitude that might touch her especially because her complete lack of preparation for the sudden losses that came upon her is what has provoked her interdiction of time, of movement in the aftermath of loss. She can set down her refusal of loss not because John 14 negates loss with illusion but because it suggests a way of continuing in life, and promises a teacher. Helen and Kate had experienced a similar teaching in the previous chapter, when they witness the funeral of the forlorn man whose wife had died. As they have been throughout the book, they are in this chapter still observing, recording, and preserving the ways of country people, as they were even when they looked upon Miss Chauncey in her reverie. But only in these last chapters does what they see present itself to them

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as moving and mysterious, as spiritually sophisticated. Early in the book, Helen had described Deephaven funerals with some bemusement: [Mrs. Patton, Aunt Kate’s friend and helper] had no equal in sickness, and knew how to brew every old-fashioned dose and to make every variety of herb-tea, and when her nursing was put to an end by her patient’s death, she was commander-in-chief at the funeral, and stood near the doorway to direct the mourning friends to their seats; and I have no reason to doubt that she sometimes even had the immense responsibility of making out the order of the procession, since she had all genealogy and relationship at her tongue’s end. It was an awful thing in Deephaven, we found, if the precedence was wrongly assigned, and once we chanced to hear some bitter remarks because the cousins of the departed wife had been placed after the husband’s relatives—“the blood-relations ridin’ behind them that was only kin by marriage! I don’t wonder they felt hurt!” said the person who spoke; a most unselfish and unassuming soul, ordinarily. (D, 31–32)

At first charming, then a little petty, this formality seems to Helen childish and off the point, unmindful of death and grief. A few pages later, in her account of their visits to the cemetery, Helen is willing to concede that the “tenderness for the friends who had died, that longing to do them justice, to fully acknowledge their virtues and dearness, which is so touching, and so unmistakable even under the stiff, quaint expressions and formal words which were thought suitable to be chiseled on stones, so soon to be looked at carelessly by the tearless eyes of strangers” (D, 36–37; italics added)—the formality of expression obscuring and impeding, but finally failing to obstruct, the intended emotion. At the widower’s funeral, Helen once again attends closely to meticulous ritual, but this time without condescension or critique. Her heightened respect for the solemnity of the occasion is evident from the first when she and Kate decide that since they were not among the dead man’s close relations, they ought not to come inside the house for the funeral service: “We had no right there, and it would seem as if we were merely curious, and we were afraid our presence would make the people ill at ease, the minister especially. It would be an intrusion” (D, 119–20). This remark, like her confession that she would have liked to “ransack” Miss Chauncey’s chest of drawers, reveals Helen’s growing sense of the subjective magnitude of the people she meets, and of her snoopiness as an abuse of their quite remarkably open trust, a trust kept open by careful collective maintenance rather than by innocent nature. As the mourners emerge from the house and form a procession to the grave site, Helen and Kate watch from a ways off, noting the minutiae of ritual, but this time feeling its power: We heard some one scold in a whisper because the wagon was twice as far off as it need have been. They evidently had a rigid funeral etiquette, and felt it important that everything should be carried out according to rule . . . We saw

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss the dead man’s eldest son, of whom he had told us in the summer with so much pride. He had shown his respect for his father as best he could, by a black band on his hat and a pair of black cotton gloves a world too large for him. He looked so sad, and cried bitterly as he stood alone at the head of the people . . . The minister and some others fell into line, and the procession went slowly down the slope; a strange shadow had fallen over everything. (D, 123)

Helen emphasizes that the funeral was for her a moment of great discovery, one of the summer’s crescendos. It teaches her to pronounce internally the word that melancholiacs subject to devotional prohibition: “We had never seen what the people called ‘walking funerals’ until we came to Deephaven, and there was something piteous about this: the mourners were so few, and we could hear the rattle of the wagon wheels. ‘He’s gone, ain’t he?’ said some one near to us. That was it—gone” (D, 123). The funeral announces the widower’s intractable exit, asserting death’s absolute fact, but its solemnity, and entitlement, rather than its ­illegitimate, intrusive obscenity. Before the people had entered the house, there had been, I am sure, an indifferent, business-like look, but when they came out, all that was changed; their faces were awed by the presence of death, and the indifference had given place to uncertainty. Their neighbor was immeasurably their superior now. Living, he had been a failure by their own low standards; but now, if he could come back, he would know secrets, and be wise beyond anything they could imagine, and who could know the riches of which he might have come into possession? (D, 123)

Helen here speculatively inhabits the mourners’ thoughts, imagining what thoughts were provoking their awe but preserving the slight self­d ifferentiation that free indirect narration furnishes. But her own reaction (and Kate’s) turns out not to be greatly different: To Kate and me there came a sudden consciousness of the mystery and inevitableness of death; it was not fear, thank God! But a thought of how certain it was that some day it would be a mystery no longer. And there was a thought, too, of the limitation of this present life; we were waiting there, in company with the people, the great sea, and the rocks and fields themselves, on this side the boundary. We knew just then how close to this familiar, every-day world might be the other, which at times before had seemed so far away, out of reach of even our thoughts, beyond the distant stars. (D, 123)

The funeral effectively levels the difference between Helen and Kate on the one hand and the country people on the other, or perhaps even demonstrates the country people’s advantage, because the practice of their art of mourning helps them to an acknowledgment of their own limitation. The contemplation of the widower in heaven revives the promise of the mansion and adds the promise of perfect understanding

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in the afterlife, the satisfactory resolution of why. But at the same time, the thought of the afterlife consigns the living to their glaring imperfections, their mortal bodies, their demanding and loss-riddled lives, their lack of understanding. The difference here between the two city women and the country people is not that Helen and Kate transcend such limitation but that they are less readily cognizant of it. As in Anne Bradstreet’s “Contemplations,” the spectacle of universal limitation levels out intrahuman inequalities, metropolis/region, in Jewett’s case, rather than male/female. The funeral divides consciousness into three possible states: the transcendent consciousness of the dead, the limited but self-aware consciousness of the funeral-goers, and the limited but unaware consciousness of others. Those unaware of their limitations, erroneously but charmingly imagining themselves to be boundless or expansive, childlike in their illusion, are, in Schiller’s terms, naïve; but in the configuration of human possibility laid out by the funeral, the naïve consciousness would be the one that fails or refuses to mourn, the melancholiac who doesn’t know himself to be such, perhaps because he imagines himself to be a hardheaded and clear-eyed skeptic. The country people who do mourn are also limited but know themselves to be such, and are therefore not naïve, because they have traveled to the boundary of their land and know that they are encompassed and contained; but they go no further, because that border is closed and cosmopolitan knowledge interdicted. “The spiritual faculties,” as Jewett’s friend and counselor Theophilus Parsons wrote, “unless grievously perverted, are humble. They know their own feebleness, their own immaturity, their own limitations. They know the infinitude of truth. They know that it must come to us and be seen by us only gradually; and that, come as it may to any beings anywhere, it must so come, that, when its infinitude is remembered, it is seen to come only little by little.”99 However suffused with the hope of heaven, Helen’s account of the funeral clearly emphasizes that it tutored her in negation rather than showered her with imaginary compensations. At the end of her chapter, she looks back: “I think to-day of that fireless, empty, forsaken house, where the winter sun shines in and creeps slowly along the floor; the bitter cold is in and around the house, and the snow has sifted in at every crack; outside it is untrodden by any living creature’s footstep. The wind blows and rushes and shakes the loose window-sashes in their frames, while the padlock knocks—knocks against the door” (D, 124; italics added). As in the middle section of To the Lighthouse, the thought of the empty house realizes death by emphasizing that our artifacts outlive us, waiting faithfully to be of use or comfort to those who never return, gradually falling into dilapidation. But, though Virginia Woolf probably intended to convey

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss godforsakenness, Jewett doesn’t: the funeral has allowed Helen to grant entry to negation and bestowed on her an image that, however stark, or rather, because it is stark, serves as an emblem—an abstract index—for her own unknown loss, her own empty house, for whatever it may have been that she knows to be gone. The funeral affects her so deeply because it helps her on her own way, and the bleak conclusion of the chapter does not retract its richness and vitality: It was a beautiful morning, and we walked slowly along the shore to the high rocks and the pitch-pine trees which we had seen before; the air was deliciously fresh, and one could take long deep breaths of it. The tide was coming in, and the spray dashed higher and higher. We climbed about the rocks and went down into some of the deep cold clefts into which the sun could seldom shine. We gathered some wild-flowers; bits of pimpernel and one or two sprigs of fringed gentian which had bloomed late in a sheltered place, and a pale little bouquet of asters. We sat for a long time looking off to sea, and we could talk of almost nothing beside what we had seen and heard at the farmhouse. (D, 119)

Death fissures the land and their thoughts but does not therefore prevent a quiet appreciation. As in Notes on the State of Virginia, the discovery of one’s own provinciality opens an expansive prospect: “And there was a thought, too, of the limitation of this present life; we were waiting there, in company with the people, the great sea, and the rocks and fields themselves, on this side the boundary.” Compare Jewett’s country funeral to Toni Morrison’s, in The Bluest Eye: The funeral banquet was a peal of joy after the thunderous beauty of the funeral. It was like a street tragedy with spontaneity tucked softly into the corners of a highly formal structure. The deceased was the tragic hero, the survivors the innocent victims; there was the omnipresence of the deity, strophe and antistrophe of the chorus of mourners led by the preacher. There was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of order in nature at the graveyard. Thus the banquet was the exultation, the harmony, the acceptance of physical frailty, joy in the termination of misery. Laughter, relief, a steep hunger for food.100

Though Jewett’s Yankees are more laconic, the interaction of structure and emotion is strikingly reminiscent. In both cases, the funeral transcends what Lindemann found to be the shortcomings of religious ceremony (see p. 161 earlier in this chapter). But perhaps Jewett and Morrison do not disagree with Lindemann so much as they indicate by counter­ example that Lindemann is appraising a dwindled remainder rather than the thing itself.

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In “Last Days in Deephaven,” the final chapter, Helen and Kate reflect on what Deephaven has taught them about loss and change. They let go, fondly, of their hope of possessing the Deephaven that longing made, instructed by the example of Deephaven as it is: “ ‘Dear old Deephaven!’ said Kate, gently, after we had been silent a little while. ‘It makes me think of one of its own old ladies, with its clinging to the old fashions and its respect for what used to be respectable when it was young. I cannot make fun of what was once dear to somebody, and which realized somebody’s idea of beauty or fitness’ ” (D, 136). To this point, Kate sees Deephaven as an aggregate Miss Chauncey, clinging to a lost past, refusing to acknowledge the passing of time. Though she claims she cannot make fun of it, this remark concedes that another, less generous, might well do so, because unselfconscious anachronism can easily be made to look ridiculous, pitiful, or grotesque. The conversation with Mary, the Boston shopgirl, revealed that Kate is apt at and sometimes ready for sharp humor, but she here abjures that talent, rising above it, without, however, forswearing condescension. But when Kate goes on to concretize modernity in the idea of a modern town, her view of Deephaven alters to adjust: “ ‘I don’t dispute the usefulness of a new, bustling, manufacturing town with its progressive ideas; but there is a simple dignity in a town like Deephaven, as if it tried to be loyal to the traditions of its ancestors’ ” (D, 136). Now, modernity’s charismatic novelty is amnesiac, and Deephaven’s connection to the past is a conscious endeavor rather than an ignorant persistence. Deephaven is cognizant of time’s disaster and the depredations of cultural loss and has a talent for holding together: “It quietly accepts its altered circumstances. If it has seen better days, and has no harsh feelings toward the places which have drawn away its business, but it lives on, making its old houses and boats and clothes last as long as possible’ ” (D, 136). In her list of the books they brought along for the summer, Helen writes, “I am sure we had ‘Fenelon,’ for we always have that” (D, 138). Kate’s praise for Deephaven’s quiet acceptance of its altered circumstance may be an echo of Fénelon, whose “Quietism” was a call for acknowledgment and acceptance of the circumstance that presents itself: “That piety which is sanctified, and which is a true devotion to God, consists in doing all his will precisely at the time, in the situation, and under the circumstances, in which he placed us.” I quote from Eliza Cabot Follen’s Selections from the Writings of Fenelon, which was Jewett’s edition, so we may be fairly sure that she was familiar with this passage, or another, where Fénelon expresses his feeling for the velocity of circumstance: Life is like a torrent; the past is but a dream; the present, while we are thinking of it, escapes us, and is precipitated in the same abyss that has swallowed up the past;

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss the future will not be of a different nature, it will pass as rapidly. A few moments, and a few more, and all will be ended; what has appeared long and tedious, will seem short, when it is finished.

Or another, in which he demonstrates his familiarity with the course of mourning: I have not the strength you impute to me. I have felt my irreparable loss with a despondency, that proves that my heart is very weak. Now I am more calm, and all that remains is a sort of bitterness and languor of soul. But this humbles me as much as my more violent grief. All that I have felt in both these states was selflove. I acknowledge that I have wept for myself, in mourning for a friend who made the delight of my life, and whose loss I feel continually. I find an elevation in the lassitude of grief, and my imagination, that was excited by a blow so unexpected, has become accustomed to the thought, and is now calm.101

For Fénelon, to be quiet is to cease rebellion against circumstance, to accommodate oneself respectfully to harsh developments, to mourn, to accomplish what Deephaven has accomplished. Kate’s comment on Deephaven’s acceptance provokes Helen to reflect on the human torrent that has flowed through the town: It is impossible not to remember how many people have walked the streets and lived in the houses. I was thinking to-day how many girls might have grown up in this house, and that their places have been ours; we have inherited their pleasures, and perhaps have carried on work which they began. We sit in somebody’s favorite chair and look out the windows at the sea, and have our wishes and hopes and plans just as they did before us. Something of them still lingers where their lives were spent. We are often reminded of our friends who have died; why are we not reminded as surely of strangers in such a house as this,—finding some trace of the lives which were lived among the sights we see and the things we handle, as the incense of many masses lingers in some old cathedral, and one catches the spirit of longing and prayer where so many heavy hearts have brought their burdens and have gone away comforted? (D, 136)

Helen revives the feeling of kinship with fellow mortals that came upon her at the funeral but extends it to include those who have gone before, passing through the house, altering it, leaving their deposit, the artifacts abandoned by a tenant who has gone becoming the treasures added to the collection of one who follows. Helen’s image of the generations that have passed through the cathedral leads inexorably to the thought that the present tenants will depart in their turn, will lose Deephaven, and Helen’s reference to their predecessors’ abandoned treasures provokes Kate to think of the loss of her own: “When I first came here,” said Kate, “it used to seem very sad to me to find Aunt Katharine’s little trinkets lying about the house. I have often thought of what

Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss    you have just said. I heard Mrs. Patton say the other day that there is no pocket in a shroud, and of course it is better that we should carry nothing out of this world. Yet I can’t help wishing that it were possible to keep some of my worldly goods always. There are one or two books of mine and some little things which I have had a long time, and of which I have grown very fond. It makes me so sorry to think of their being protected and lost. I cannot believe that I shall forget these earthly treasures when I am in heaven, and I wonder if I shall miss them.” (D, 136–37)

Kate worries that this is “a very low view of heaven” (D, 137), and it must be added, slightly heterodox, too, since there are to be no tears there (though nothing is said concerning wistfulness). Fénelon is more orthodox: “When we awake from the sleep of death, we shall find our hands empty, and shall be ashamed of our [former] joy [in our possessions].”102 Despite the impulse to cling, however, both Helen and Kate have come to acknowledge that there is no foolproof pocket even on this side of the boundary and that trying desperately to save treasures from risk restricts mobility and life: “ ‘Do you believe that codfish swallow stones before a storm?’ asked Kate” (D, 62). A piscine Marilly: We went over to the hull of an old schooner which was going to pieces alongside one of the ruined wharves. We looked down the hatchway into the hold, and could see the flounders and sculpin swimming about lazily, and once in a while a little pollock scooted down among them impertinently and then disappeared. “There is that same big flounder that we saw the day before yesterday,” said I. “I know him because one of his fins is half gone. I don’t believe he can get out, for the hole in the side of the schooner isn’t very wide, and it is higher up than flounders ever swim. Perhaps he came in when he was young, and was too lazy to go out until he was so large he couldn’t. Flounders always look so lazy, and as if they thought a great deal of themselves.” (D, 84–85)

Kate’s concern, though, is not only for her loss of her treasures but also for their loss of her, the relegation of a life’s fond project to the status of untended litter: what would become of our collections if we didn’t come home one day? We mourn on their behalf for the day they will have to make do without us. “I suppose there are thousands of dollars unclaimed in New York banks, where men have left it charged to their false names; then they get lost at sea or something, and never go to get it, and nobody knows whose it is” (D, 68). But cherished goods, unlike money, bear the traces of their owners and can be respectfully taken up again in turn, turned to a new end, altered, but preserved in the movement of respectful and appreciative transformation. Culture is the precipitate of successful mourning, not the product of retentive repetition: you can rearrange the furniture. Helen teaches in her turn, releasing Deephaven from the requirement imposed by regionalist longing that it maintain a static consistency. Though they undercut certain fond notions of the place and its people, fluidity,

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss adaptation, and transformation are conservative, continual despite the vicissitudes in the lives of those who pass through: “I think the next dwellers in this house ought to find a decided atmosphere of contentment,” said I. “Have you ever thought that it took us some time to make it your house instead of Miss Brandon’s? It used to seem to me that it was still under her management, that she was its mistress; but now it belongs to you, and if I ever were to come back without you I should find you here.” (D, 137)

Deephaven Sunsets Though Helen says nothing about whether she continued to suffer depression after her return from Deephaven, a moving passage added to the book manuscript during final preparation suggests that Helen’s old and familiar adversary is now open to some negotiation: Twice from the lighthouse we saw a yacht squadron like a flock of great white birds. As for the sunsets, it used to seem often as if we were near the heart of them, for the sea all around us caught the color of the clouds, and though the glory was wonderful, I remember best one still evening when there was a bank of heavy gray clouds in the west shutting down like a curtain, and the sea was silver-colored. You could look under and beyond the curtain of clouds into the palest, clearest yellow sky. There was a little black boat in the distance drifting slowly, climbing one white wave after another, as if it were bound into that other world beyond. But presently the sun came out from behind the clouds, and the dazzling golden light changed the look of everything, and it was time then to say one thought it was a beautiful sunset; while before one could only keep very still, and watch the boat, and wonder if heaven would not be somehow like that far, faint color, which was neither sea nor sky. (D, 23)

This may well have been among the passages Paula Blanchard had in mind when she wrote, Jewett’s world is that of the Luminists, whose small, deceptively modest landscapes and seascapes are suffused with light and seem to emanate a silent tranquility. New Englanders all, most of them living on the coast, the Luminists painted ordinary salt marshes and brooks slipping over granite edges, each object exquisitely realistic yet expressing a quiet transcendence. They painted ships in calm harbors, floating in their own pure reflections, and harmless curled wavelets breaking on pebbled shores—all frozen like the figures on Keats’s urn . . . The confidence of the time is seen nowhere more clearly than in its paintings, which like Jewett’s stories reflect not only the objects seen but the faith that each has its place in a larger and more permanent spiritual order.103

Certainly the whole passage is luminist in its concern for the quality of light given texture by the materiality of the atmosphere, and the descrip-

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tion of sunsets generally, of the sensation of being near the heart of light, evokes the sensuous and spiritual wonder of complete presence. But the sunset she remembers best now is the unusual one, and we might just assume she remembers it best simply because it was unusual had the book’s first paragraph not alerted us to depression’s negativity and to her need to find something to do about it. Jewett twice calls the clouds a curtain between light and self, and exclusion is emphasized; rather than a “yacht squadron,” the bare waters host only one small boat, itself black like the curtain, ambiguously purposive, perhaps moving toward the distant light, perhaps just drifting; and what light there is is quelled, “palest, clearest yellow” rather than glorious. The emergence of the sun from its eclipse at the end is immensely reassuring, but memory won’t relinquish completely the dark time—“it was time then to say one thought it was a beautiful sunset; while before one could only keep very still, and watch the boat, and wonder if heaven would not be somehow like that far, faint color, which was neither sea nor sky.” She returns to and ends with the thought of the dark time, though, not to affirm its greater truth over the moments of glory but to underline the need to be contemplative and resolute, to maintain one’s hold on a slight thread of hope or faith by fixing attention on the pale, clear, yellow light that sets a border below the curtain, rendering the curtain an element in the visual field rather its general condition: the curtain is the most prominent part of the visual field, but still only a part. And the knowledge that it is bounded below intimates that it is bounded behind, that it does not extend infinitely into the deep field of the west—that the boat might be aimed for something that the narrator doesn’t currently see but can at least posit. These feelings are achievements: though grace arrives at the end, work is required—“keep very still,” “watch the boat,” “wonder if heaven would not be somehow like that far, faint color, which was neither sea nor sky.” Resolute and patient attention does not summon glory, but it prepares the way for glory to take effect: it might have gone unnoticed. Sprung narrative renders what painting couldn’t, attendance followed by arrival—motion. The evocation of heaven in this passage suggests a religious meaning for the word glory. In one of the two references to specific Bible passages in Deephaven, Helen remarks that the King of Glory Psalm (number 24) is her favorite (D, 49), and we might suppose it to have been on her mind when she watched the sunset: “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, / The world, and all who live in it; / for he founded it upon the seas / and established it upon the waters.” In the last paragraph of the book, she includes among her few most precious memories “the glory of the sunsets; the wail of the Sunday Psalm-singing at church” (D, 140).

   Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss Glory is the flowering or realization of faith, the little black boat’s tenacity, a simple but moving emblem, the hope for relief from venerable despair. In the words of the Psalm: “Lift up your heads, O you gates; / be lifted up, you ancient doors, / that the king of glory may come in.” There is little reason to suppose that Jewett means for us to think that watching the sunsets causes Helen’s relief, but rather that she uses the sunset to supply herself with an emblem for the art she found with Kate in Deephaven and for the transformation it worked within her. A moment of thanksgiving, a sudden recognition of the gift: neither she nor life is sorry. Glory is the thought the depressed person never had before, that existence is magnanimous: “I know this is true of me: At times I drift into an unaccountable melancholy. I am morbid and dreary with selfanalyzing—with a dread of the future and remorse for real and imagined mistakes in the past. But a little thing blows away all this fog like a fresh wind and I am fearless and happy—strong with the free strength of an untamed creature—and the sunshine of the world comes to me from a clear blue sky and warms me through and through. So my days go—shadow and sun—shadow and sun. And the evening and the morning are the first day and the second—and will better last. But it is only in the dark that I see the stars—”104

 r 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and the Puzzle of Inherited Mourning

7

excavating a writer’s beginning is unpromising work: perhaps the greatest limitation of literary biographies is the skimpy documentation from childhood, the time of life that most powerfully determines personal destiny. Though one’s own memory persuades one of the existence of intensely influential self-historical events during the first five years, biog­ raphies typically discuss that period briefly, with the writer setting off for Princeton, Oxford, the French Revolution, or the whale fishery by the end of the first chapter. (The onset of biographical narratability is, of course, different for many women writers.) It could not be otherwise, because so little is perceived as significant enough to be recorded: the account of childhood, in its brevity, emblematizes the mystery of early consciousness, and the biographer’s spare treatment represents a principled attempt not to crowd out the reader’s speculations. The aim of psychoanalysis is in part to fill in this generic hiatus in biography, recovering by complex and ingenious means the events that set the self in play. Think, for instance, of such Alfred Hitchcock movies as Marnie and Spellbound, in which the successful recollection of a childhood experience renders intelligible a well-documented but puzzling adulthood. But what if the determining event happened to someone other than the subject whom it came to determine? In a 1937 sketch entitled “­Author’s House,” F. Scott Fitzgerald takes an unnamed companion on a tour through his consciousness and memory, allegorically represented as the several areas of a house. In the “dark damp unmodernized cellar” where the tour begins, Fitzgerald seeks to explain the origin of his career: “The intangibles are down here. Why I chose this God awful métier of sedentary days and sleepless nights and endless dissatisfaction. Why I would

   Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning choose it again. All that’s down here and I’m just as glad I can’t look at it too closely.”1 Premier among these things down in the cellar are the deaths of two sisters: “Three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all though I don’t know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer.” 2 Notice the ambiguous phrasing: “I think that came first of all.” To what previous noun does the pronoun that refer? None, directly, but to the two sisters’ deaths, presumably. Actually, though, not really to the two sisters’ deaths, but rather to the mother’s loss of the two sisters: “Three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all.” The mother’s loss, three months before the son was born, of two daughters he never knew, determined the course of his life, “all though I don’t know how it worked exactly.” To what does the word it refer? It should refer to the same thing as that, to the other’s unnamed sorrow, but it means somewhat more, the process whereby the mother’s grief developed into the life the son led. Though he is unaware, or unwilling to be aware, of the steps of transmutation between the experience of one and the profoundest identity of another, Fitzgerald is convinced that his career begins in mourning, but not his own. Revisiting in memory the sites of his own losses will not dissolve the spell of trauma because the spell was cast three months before his own power to lose began: he is a string of pronouns with no noun to anchor them. How does one receive the transmission of another’s grief? What is the mechanism or procedure whereby the subjective configuration of one becomes the identity of another? From the first, critics of Fitzgerald’s fiction have faulted him for failing to sustain fully imagined nonautobiographical characters: Dick Diver, for example, the protagonist of Tender Is the Night, begins as a fictional re-creation of Fitzgerald’s elegant friend Gerald Murphy but quickly subsides into a fictionalized F. Scott Fitzgerald. But if in his writing the blurred boundary between oneself and another seems to have resulted in little but self, in his life as he understood it Fitzgerald found himself to be a self that was little but the other. A year before writing “Author’s House,” Fitzgerald wrote two essays together entitled The Crack-Up, in which he concentrates on the dangers that identification poses to identity. Announcing that in reaction to a breakdown, he had retreated from society, Fitzgerald explains he was seeking “absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy.”3 Notice that he is not seeking the source of his own sadness, melancholy, or tragedy but rather the source of his emotions toward those emotions. The next phrase clarifies somewhat the origins of these second-order

Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning   

feelings: “to think out why . . . I had become identical with the objects of my horror or compassion.” He has a sad attitude toward another’s sadness, a melancholy attitude toward another’s melancholy, a tragic attitude toward another’s tragedy. He becomes the other’s feeling: “Identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps insane people from working.” Because he is under the influence, he fails to achieve the temporally sustained egoic poise required to experience himself as a distinct agent acting within and upon the world—working. “So there was not an ‘I’ any more—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect—save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self—to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing he wanted to do.”4 His retirement, then, was not a reflective interlude but rather a panicked flight from the awful drowning power that identification had over his ability to believe in his own distinctive existence: “But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life—I was an average mixer, but more than average in my tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that I came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved—in a single morning I would go through all the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.”5 The trace of paranoia that appears with the term “inscrutable hostiles” may express the paradoxical danger of affection: the stronger the affective connection, the greater the threat, as if the friends secretly and inexplicably sought to dissolve him. The Crack-Up essays imply that the disaster of identification erupted during a period of middle-aged psychic sag. But when Fitzgerald returns to the issue of identification in the 1937 remark on his mother’s sorrow, the problem has come to seem primordial rather than a midlife intrusion into a previously successful self.6 This more radical and frightening possibility is foreshadowed, perhaps, in the first paragraph of The Crack-Up: Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.7

Perhaps the remark on his mother’s sorrow implies that he never was as good a man before: the fatal inner blow occurs at the commencement of

   Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning the self, or rather oneself is this crack or wound of the other’s, and the “crack-up” is only the “realization” or final manifestation of this fundamental debility that Fitzgerald felt himself to be. But what, then, gets cracked in a crack-up? Not a real and distinct self to which one can return in recovering from the breakdown. But if there is no there there, perhaps then what’s lost is a fantasy of a self, a fantasy into which he has poured enough fervent belief to have sustained, till now, work: you do not need to have a self to work; you need to believe that you have a self to work. In “Author’s House,” before leaving the basement, the author’s companion notices a “too recent mound of dirt” and demanding an explanation, gets this: “That is where I buried my first childish love of myself, my belief that I would never die like other people, and that I wasn’t the son of my parents but a son of a king, a king who ruled the whole world.”8 By imagining himself to have sprung from the Platonic conception of himself, to borrow a phrase he had used to describe Jay Gatsby a decade before, Fitzgerald contends, he was able to avoid having to concede the disastrous power of his mother’s emotion—until recently. Notice that the fantasy of omnipotence is buried beneath a recent mound of dirt; though the fantasy is his first childish love of himself, it has only just lost its efficacy. The crack-up, then, which in the earlier cluster of essays was thought of as damage done to a true self, is now thought of as the failure of protective illusion. This possibility is explored again at the end of “Author’s House,” when the author takes the companion up to a turret or watchtower that seems to return to the theme of the fantasy of a regal self: It is small up there and full of baked silent heat until the author opens two of the glass sides that surround it and the twilight wind blows through. As far as your eye can see there is a river winding between green lawns and trees and purple buildings and red slums blended in by a merciful dusk. Even as they stand there the wind increases until it is a gale whistling around the tower and blowing birds past them. “I lived up here once,” the author said after a moment. “Here? For a long time?” “No. For just a little while when I was young.” “It must have been rather cramped.” “I didn’t notice it.” “Would you like to try it again?” “No. And I couldn’t if I wanted to.”9

If the towering self of Fitzgerald’s early success and famous youth is now lost, the loss is not entirely regrettable, since the vistas of possibility it had offered had been accompanied by a restricted space for actual movement. If, however, the fantasy of the tower is both broken and relinquished—

Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning   

that is, if it is satisfactorily mourned—self-understanding returns not to a matured or humbled real self but to the deeper and still unsolved mourning from which the fantasy was intended to distract it—the mother’s grief inherited as a self, the profound puzzle of his being: “I can’t look at it too closely”; “I don’t know how it worked exactly.” I would like to think about how it might have worked. I have four hypotheses, none of which I prefer to the others. And the four do not seem to me to be mutually exclusive. Perhaps they are four ways of stating the same thing. Hypothesis 1. Fitzgerald commented in a late piece that his mother was “half insane with pathological nervous worry,”10 specifically with worry that he would develop tuberculosis: as an infant he suffered from recurrent bronchitis, and his mother’s father and sister had had TB. As a result of his mother’s anxious attention to his health, Fitzgerald was said to have been “spoiled.” But Molly McQuinlan Fitzgerald was also remembered as distracted and eccentric. Perhaps, then, the mother was recessed, as mourners tend to be, except when some turn for the worse in the boy’s health excited the exorbitant anxiety that is another regular feature of unresolved mourning. If so, then, with the aptness of all children, the boy would have learned that sickness had the power to lure the mother out from her grotto, to entice her to bathe him in meticulous attention, an attention that, however immediately consoling, arose elsewhere, in a drama that occurred before his birth, a drama in which, when it recurred, he figured as a symbol or a cipher of the dead rather than as a person. Distant as such anxiety might be from love, it has to suffice if the alternative is parental obliviousness and the child’s consequent intuitions of his nullity. So love such as it is can only follow from sickness: this becomes a fundamental axiom of consciousness, and a life of insistent, unyielding, deliberate self-injury commences. Self-injury, not self-destruction, becomes Fitzgerald’s project, in the sense Jean-Paul Sartre uses that word: the self cannot die, because then it will cease to attract anxiety. But what if the fountain of anxious attention dies? Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok suggest that fantasy of a person can be incorporated as an inner person, that one can bring one’s notion of another within and experience what one supposes the inner other’s emotions to be.11 So as still-a-boy Fitzgerald injures himself, mother-within grieves for her suffering boy. The grief that was the other’s is now, though still felt as the other’s, within and one’s own. Hypothesis 2. In several later essays, Abraham and Torok take their interest in the incorporation of an alien subjectivity toward what they call “the phantom.”12 As a part of assimilating the parents’ worldview, they contend, the child can incorporate in himself the symptoms of a neurotic structure—emotional tones, reaction patterns, tics and rituals,

   Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning physiological signals—without having undergone the experience that generated the neurosis. As their translator Nicholas Rand puts it: The concept of the phantom moves the focus of psychoanalytic inquiry beyond the individual being analyzed because it postulates that some people unwittingly inherit the secret psychic substance of their ancestors’ lives. The “phantom” represents a radical reorientation of Freudian and post-Freudian theories of psychopathology, since here symptoms do not spring from the individual’s own life experiences but from someone else’s psychic conflicts, traumas, or secrets . . . Though manifest in one’s individual psyche, the phantom eventually leads to the psychoanalysis in absentia of several generations (parents, grandparents, uncles, et al.) through the symptoms of a descendant.13

The difference between hypothesis 1 and hypothesis 2 is that in the first case the child builds up within himself a fantasy of a feeling mother within—he believes himself to be reproducing a subjectivity he supposes he deeply comprehends. In the second case, the child reproduces an actual, rather than a fantastic, psychosomatic array, but with a blank or a secret at its core. This sense of the blankness at the heart of the inheritance might bring us closer to Fitzgerald’s feeling that he is unable to explain his emotional inheritance, because the idea of the phantom supposes an absent core rather than a ferociously repressed core. The phantom, according to Abraham and Torok, “cannot even be recognized by the subject as evident in an ‘aha’ experience.”14 Rather, one can only hope to recognize the presence of an identifiable intruder, to chart the boundary between the self and an intrinsic accident. Hypothesis 3. Christopher Bollas contends that moods may represent attempts to preserve a feeling of mutuality with a parental presence even after the actual parent departs or dies: Some analysands feel that their moods are the most important authentic memories of their childhood, often because through mood the person feels in contact with a true self experience. A conservative object frequently serves an important function in analysis when it preserves a self state that prevailed in the child’s life just at the moment when the child felt he lost contact with the parents. When this is the case, a conservative object preserves the child’s relation to the parents at the moment of a breakdown in parent-child engagement. Adult analysands may form intense resistances to psychoanalytic knowing of the conservative object, as they feel the analyst is endeavoring to remove their preserved relationship to their parent.15

If aggression, say, is the parents’ mode of being together, then the child’s creation of aggressive moods might be seen as an attempt to reconstitute the parents’ presence, despite the damage done to all participants by aggression. Grief such as that Fitzgerald imputed to his mother is reclu-

Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning   

sive—the sufferer disappears into it frequently, abandons the world—and perhaps the child learns to lure the mother from her caverns by being melancholy with her, thereby mirroring her emotion in a world that other­ wise seems to her only so much broken glass. By consoling her with the equality of their emotions rather than by exciting her anxiety as in hypothesis 1, Fitzgerald might achieve recognition of his being as a person and might revisit that mood even in the absence of the original partner, because the atmosphere of the mood seems to re-create the twilit paradise. In that case, feeling mournful might be a way of avoiding having to mourn, the reconstituted feel of the relation with the mother distracting the boy from the thought of her real absence, a strategy of denial to which the subject tends to turn desperately, hopefully, and pathetically when doubts about his own existence assert themselves over the course of life’s hard journey. Hypothesis 4. Eric Santner and Michael Schneider, in their expansions of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlichs’ analysis of postwar German culture, argue that the disturbed mourning of parents can lead to a tormented self-absorption so complete that the child never experiences a true primordial bond. As Santner puts it: The second [postwar] generation inherited not only the unmourned traumas of the parents but also the psychic structures that impeded mourning in the first place. That is, since so many members of the second generation never really had access to the full attention and care of the parents, who were expending enormous amounts of psychic energy to ward off melancholy (these were parents who were, psychologically speaking, always elsewhere), their own psychological growth has in large measure been disrupted. They have tended, as Schneider notes, to fixate on their parents to a remarkable degree. This fixation is the flip side of a “depressive self-obsession,” a state of melancholy “which can be attributed less to a sense of sorrow that something has been lost than to an existential feeling that something is missing—a sense of disappointment over something which was never received.”16

Rather than a lost thing, a thing never had, and therefore a sense of lacking without the ability to know what it is that is lacked. This hypothesis is probably the closest of the four to my speculations concerning Helen Denis’s depression at the beginning of Deephaven. In all four of my hypothetical scenarios, the son ends up a griever— desolate, anxious, sorrowful, empty, cracked, cursed, and furious—exiled from the possibility of representing either the loss or the lost. If, as Freud suggests, the work of mourning lies in the incremental construction in conscious memory of an adequate representation of the lost thing, a representing that delineates a representer who survives, then the inheritor of mourning is doomed to an inability to mourn—a true ­inability, not a

   Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning deep or insurmountable unwillingness, which is what the Mitscherlichs described—not because the requisite knowledge is too awful but because it is nonexistent. An inability, but not for want of trying, in fact trying all the more intensely, in a series of attempted approximations of the lost object in the imagination, in a writer’s life devoted to the pursuit of what Nick Carraway supposes he hears in Gatsby’s longing: “Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was incommunicable forever.”17 In viewing undone mourning as an incomprehensible personal destiny, Fitzgerald diverges from William Faulkner, who often represents it as an option to be chosen. Quentin Compson, for example, who frequently returns in his thoughts to images of frozen or arrested time, a broken clock or the “apotheosis” of a gull poised in midair, images that, if they are images of his entrapment, are images of his own entrapping desire not to alter. He seems especially distressed by his father’s assurance that he will recover from what he considers to be the loss of his sister—“you cannot bear to think that someday it will not hurt like this”18 —and his suicide may very well be motivated by the fear that he will get over his sorrow rather than that he won’t, that he will become a wholly other person, unoriented by devotion to Caddy. Or for another example, Harry Wilbourne in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, imprisoned after his lover’s death from the botched abortion he performed on her, telling himself, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.”19 Since “nothing” here means mourning, emergence from all-absorbing attachment to the dead, his mental resolve might be rephrased as “between melancholia and mourning, I choose melancholia”—an internal incarceration that makes the jail itself a mere emblem. Both characters are afflicted by the fear that a life that continues, or moves on, is a betrayal, evidence of a corrupt and unfaithful heart, that mourning is no more than attrition, a rotting within that finishes the job started by the rotting without. Such a derogation of self-renewing life is itself a station of mourning, to be transcended or trapped by as the case may be, and the humorous flexibility that Richard C. Moreland sees in Faulkner’s later fiction may signify a sensibility that has learned to keep hands off the tar baby of melancholy.20 The heavy emphasis on emotional inheritances throughout Faulkner’s fiction might make it seem odd for me to assert that his conception of melancholy is more volitional that Fitzgerald’s; but Faulkner’s melancholiacs—Reverend Hightower, in Light in August, is another—do not simply repeat the past automatically; rather,

Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning   

they take up ready-to-hand structures of feeling in order to protect themselves from something else that might otherwise happen, to forestall an imminent possibility. My point here is not that we shouldn’t pity Quentin Compson and Harry Wilbourne but that both of them see mourning as something that’s going to happen unless they do something about it, by contrast with Fitzgerald’s gloomy ones, who somehow can’t seem to get it going. Jack Kerouac is closer to Fitzgerald in these matters. To be sure, the difference between Kerouac’s writing and Fitzgerald’s writing is plain to all readers, Fitzgerald’s deliberate elegance contrasting sharply with Kerouac’s precipitous rush toward prose. But Fitzgerald had a taste for profuse and rough-hewn writers such as Frank Norris and Thomas Wolfe, the latter one of Kerouac’s early enthusiasms, so it is not certain that had he had the chance to comment, Fitzgerald would have rejected Kerouac’s style out of hand. And despite the difference of literary manner, there are many other affinities between the two men’s lives, and some between their aesthetic projects: born into non-WASP Catholic families, they came of age in socially energetic but culturally conservative decades, the twenties and the fifties, absorbing the vigor but refusing the priggishness of public life; they wrote restless, edgy books that affirmed the pursuit of visionary countercultural fulfillments over loyalty to stodgy cautions; on the basis of those books, both of them achieved an exciting and confusing celebrity, the reading public requiring them to exemplify a notorious and avant-garde lifestyle, the lifestyle of a lost generation or of a beat generation; and, of course, in the wake of celebrity and the pursuit of fulfillment, both died in early middle age as a consequence of alcoholism. In the popular imagination, the darkness of the ends of their lives tends to be seen as a bleak sequel to the affirmations of the young men, as if the fireworks that burn twice as brightly burn half as long, or perhaps as confirmation of an especially American insistence that the books have to balance eventually. But this narrative of fulfillment followed by destruction, preserving the separation of light and darkness by casting them as successive phases, obscures a key feature of the two writers’ worldviews, the fact that for them grief is the propulsive force beneath affirmation from the beginning. They were sad young men. When Kerouac was four, his brother Gerard, eight, died from rheumatic fever. In her biography of Kerouac, Ann Charters suggests that Kerouac was too young to comprehend the event, and my own memories of a death and a funeral from that period of my life support her speculation, though I would say that children understand death differently rather than not at all, as a perplexing metamorphosis rather than as a sorrowful ending. At the end of Visions of Gerard, his memoir of this period of his life,

   Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning Kerouac recalls turning to his mother and sister to ask why they are weeping during the brother’s funeral: “Ti Jean you don’t understand, you’re too young to understand!” they wail, seeing my rosy face, my questioning eyes. I look again, the men have stepped a pace aback, expectant, old gravedigger picks up his shovel and closes the book.21

His own lack of grief contrasts sharply with his memory of his mother’s grief, depicted throughout the book, with her attention to the brother during the weeks before his death, her neglect of her own health and wellbeing, her blasphemous explosions of despair the night he dies, and most important, the legend of Gerard the Good that she composes as her means of terminating mourning. Availing herself of a generic template that was a basic element of a French Canadian religious upbringing, memere, Gabrielle Ange Kerouac, spun out a saint’s life, complete with birds coming to the sick boy’s window, even hopping onto his shoulders, prodigiously sweet words whispered to amazed nuns at his deathbed, and so on. The saintly Gerard, too good for the world, had to leave it, his death a melancholy indictment of his actual world—an indictment of the brick-­factory-andtenement world of Lowell and of proletarian and petit bourgeois Quebecois culture: I don’t count Gerard in that seedy lot, that crew of bulls—that particular bleak gray jowled pale eyed sneaky fearful French Canadian quality of man, with his black store, his bags of produce, his bottomless mean and secret cellar, his herrings in a barrel, his hidden gold rings, his wife and daughter jongling in another dumb room, his dirty broom in the corner, his piousness, his cold hands, his hot bowels, his well-used whip, his easy greeting and hard opinion—lay me down in sweet India or old Tahiti, I don’t want to be buried in their cemetery.22

By remembering Gerard as not-yet-canonized saint, memere rationalized and affirmed his death, emanating an unmodulating melancholy idealism and a scornful indictment of the survivors: had you not been such as you are—vulgar, coarse, brutal, licentious—he might have been permitted to remain. The book might therefore have been better entitled Her Visions of ­G erard, since it is primarily about the potent and toxic legacy of memere’s grief and about the part her grief played in his genesis: The whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensible Usable pencil, because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero—“Write in honor of his death” (Ecrivez pour l’amour de son mort) (as one would say, write for the love of God)—for by his pain, the birds were saved, and the cats and mice, and the poor relatives crying, and my mother losing all her teeth in the six terrible weeks prior to his death during

Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning    which she stayed up all night every night and grew such a mess of nerves in her stomach that her teeth began falling one by one, might sight funny to some hunters of conceit, but this wit has had it.23

In its nervous contortions this passage both defends and satirizes the obligation of memory demanded by the legend: notice that he first quotes an introjected instruction from his mother, then analyzes that charge (in honor of his death = for the love of his death = for the love of God; the conversion of grief into fervor), and finally recalls the maternal suffering that cemented his compliance. Notice, too, that, as with Fitzgerald, her grief, not his, made him a writer—his feelings about the dead brother do not appear in this passage, and they are in fact rather infrequently expressed in the book as a whole. Instead, the book chronicles the early effects of his mother’s melancholy idealism, the division of the world into the two categories of the corrupt and the sacred that she adopted in order to avoid mourning: rather than an incremental exercise of memory in which one brings to conscious self-representation a complex and adequate image of the lost, thereby producing an understanding and acceptance of the boundary that death has drawn between the dead and the survivor, enshrinement sets up a ready-made and abstract statuette, prohibits further amendment—further repercussion of loss—freezing life at the instant of loss. In such a frozen universe, the survivor son cannot become and therefore cannot be; he can only epitomize a generic trait, either the saintliness of the dead brother or the abomination of the world the brother was compelled to reject. Much of Visions of Gerard, in fact, is an attempt to rescue his memories of an émigré French Canadian childhood from the disgust his mother directed against that remembered world. Rather than remembering Gerard, he is struggling to free memory from the mandatory forms his mother imposed upon it as her way of escaping from the truth. I have been hovering over Fitzgerald’s and Kerouac’s theories concerning the causes of their writing not to psychoanalyze the two men but rather to elucidate their acts of attempted self-analysis. Such self-attention was, of course, not a rare feature of their writing: perhaps the plainest literary affinity between them is that they both wrote glaringly autobiographical fiction, seeming at times, especially in Kerouac’s case, to avoid autobiography per se only with a sprinkling of name and date changes. But, however slight the distinction between autobiography and autobiographical fiction in actual practice, the two writers chose to maintain it, to be novelists rather than autobiographers, to retain as an option the alterations of fact that the ethics of autobiography prohibit (though rarely really prevent). To understand this preference for the leeway of fiction, we might go back to their boyhood and adolescent years, during which time both Fitzgerald and Kerouac liked to compose and stage little dramas, creating

   Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning worlds that were purely receptive to their design and manipulation, as opposed to the real world, in which they were designed by the fixation of another; worlds with themselves at the center, where they were witnessed, at least in fantasy, by those whose acknowledging eyes they desired to attract. In their young lives they seem seldom to have found what Carraway thinks he finds in Gatsby, the smile that “faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”24 Though such recognition proved to be uncontrollably fitful in their family’s lives, performance within a constructed dramatic space, or, later within the writer-reader space, seemed to offer a more reliably or predictably accessible recognition magnet. If Fitzgerald and Kerouac strike us as uncommonly self-absorbed, we might more precisely say that they are absence-of-self-absorbed, ­absorbed by the attempt to manufacture a self to be witnessed and affirmed, and thereby welcomed into being. Even though Fitzgerald’s and Kerouac’s writings may have begun as juvenile and adolescent fantasy compensations, self-analytical remarks such as those I have discussed are not attempts at wish-fulfillment; they are attempts to understand the predicament of consciousness, not to escape it. Writing, for Fitzgerald and Kerouac, is a mixture of fantasy and analysis, but not simply a mixture, because there is a causal connection between fantasy and analysis: the disappointment that follows and shadows fantasy provokes inquiry into the persistent liability to belief that continually revives fantasy from disappointment only to deliver it back to disappointment again. To understand the development of Fitzgerald’s and Kerouac’s careers, we must attend to the rhythm of their affirmations, an attention that will bring us to what the common reader is apt to remember—not sorrow but energy, velocity, longing, fulfillment, and intense affirmation, the experience of which accounts for the fierce loyalty toward and abiding celebrity of The Great Gatsby and On the Road in the general culture, and perhaps also accounts for the secondary status of both books in academic culture. Noting the vigor of affirmation in these bright books does not, however, preclude noticing as well the atmosphere of loss and decay that is intertwined with affirmation: “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”25 Fitzgerald here asserts that longing and mourning can be confused and therefore substituted for one another,

Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning   

a convertibility Kerouac discussed in a 1949 letter that echoes Fitzgerald’s passage: Lowell, like Winesburg, Ohio or Asheville, North Carolina or Fresno, California or Hawthorne’s Salem, is always the place where the darkness of the trees by the river, on a starry night, gives hint of that inscrutable future Americans are always longing and longing for. And when they find that future, they begin looking back, with sorrows, and an understanding of how man haunts the earth, pacing, prowling, circling in the shades, and the intelligence of the compass, pointing to nothing in sight save starry passion . . . Strange, is strange, how we be-dot infinity with our thoughts and poor rooftops and home-towns, then go away forever. 26

Despite their opposed temporal orientations, mourning and longing are both experiences of an inner lack—I lack what I had but which is now dead / I lack what I do not yet have. Beneath the differing temporal orientations, of course, there is a significant difference in the remediability of the lacking. In the case of mourning, one is irremediably exiled; but longing is based on possibility—it is only a matter of time, of devotion to the cause, or overcoming narrow-minded inhibitions, of having enough money, of getting to the right city, and so on. Both mourning and longing are experiences of being exiled from presence, but there is a significant difference between the two kinds of exile and the two kinds of unhappiness they excite. The substitution of longing for sorrow is therefore rather like myth as Claude Lévi-Strauss described it, something that is not truly equivalent to another thing but that can seem to be—slipping into place, supplying a feeling of resolution and possibility where there had been impasse and futility, but only a feeling of possibility, not the thing itself. (Cool jazz, from Bix Beiderbecke to Chet Baker and Art Pepper, is a kind of flickering, often from moment to moment, between sorrow and longing. This may be why Gerry Mulligan is referred to so frequently in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, a book that prolongs such flickering across its full length.) The prime obstacle to such a conversion of mourning into hope is succinctly stated by Emily Dickinson: “To fill a Gap, / Insert the Thing that caused it.” A dead thing is removed from the field of the possible, and longing can posit a future object as a sufficient resolution of lack only if it can distract memory from the particular features of the lost thing; but if the lost thing is remembered sharply and in its particularity, the substitution of longing for grief is not a compelling option. If, however, mourning is inherited, there is no sharp memory of the lost thing because the heir to the mourning did not suffer the loss, and there is thus no knowledge of the loss to restrain the conversion of grief to longing: the object that longing seizes upon cannot be set next to and compared with the lost object, and the utter incommensurability of the two is therefore not readily apparent;

   Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning the ­success of the conversion of mourning into longing does not depend upon the success of a prior repression of sharp memory because there is no remembered thing to impair the conversion. But if fulfillment in this way seems more credible to one who has inherited mourning, it is not therefore more possible—the object acquired and incorporated, the sense of lack remains; having failed at its mission, the object is abruptly de-­idealized, plummeting into an ontologically opposite state—filth, abomination, decay, ashes. If ordinary grief tends to be skeptical toward new worlds, inherited grief may be prone to an extended chain of uncomprehended disappointments, sensations of absolute possibility followed by plunges into disgust and perhaps into paranoid scenarios of occult, deliberate betrayal. This cycle of elevation and decay governs The Great Gatsby and On the Road, at least until Nick Carraway meets Gatsby and Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty. In both novels, disappointment dogs hope necessarily and absolutely because there is no extant object that can redeem mourning. Disappointment therefore signifies the inescapability of the work of mourning, in which one relinquishes the hope for a simple annulment of disaster; mourning arising from disappointment is a practical critique of the hope for simple compensation and a call to return to the task of accumulating an adequate conscious representation of the lost. But when such memory work is by definition impossible, as I argue concerning inherited mourning, the lesson of disappointment is tremendously harsher because there is no apparent means for exiting the hell to which the subject is remanded other than by way of new acts of self-delusion. To avoid this predicament, Carraway and Paradise posit a flaw in themselves as desirers rather than in desire itself: they imagine themselves to be only fitfully loyal to their own desire, incapable of sustained devotion. If, as Søren Kierkegaard wrote, purity of heart is to will one thing, our narrators add that purity of desire is to desire one thing without variation and diminution. Hence their attraction to two charismatic men who do desire without intermission. Both Gatsby and Moriarty are rather blank, because Fitzgerald and Kerouac cannot imagine a desiring subject immune to disappointment: they can only posit such a person. Such a blank hypothesis marks the strength with which the narrators desire to believe that there is an escape from inherited mourning, a desire so strong that the possibility that Gatsby or Moriarty might waver is the great unthinkable of the two novels—Gatsby is shot in a case of mistaken identity, and Dean Moriarty’s body runs down, but neither is disloyal to his desire. The physical failure of the faithful desirer, in fact, spares the two narrators from having to represent their heroes as credible persons over the course of time, developing, getting old, discovering that Daisy was not so remarkable after all. Their desire intact at the moment of the last glimpse, they are images sealed in place so that the narrators can be loyal to an el-

Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning   

evated and simple memory. (Kerouac’s statements concerning good writing as a kind of “snapshot,” his interest in the imagistic brevity of haikus, and his frequent mention of the way people look as he drives away from them all testify to his attraction to this sort of preservative internalization.) They can be loyal in memory to the other’s loyalty to desire, consistent in their contemplative allegiance to someone else’s consistency, a secondorder consistency that, in fact, allows them to outgrow the excitement the lost friend had stood for, Nick marrying the girl back in the Midwest, Sal taking his date off to a Duke Ellington concert rather than back on the road. (Kerouac probably meant for us to see Ellington as a conservative choice, reflecting Sal’s general decision not to go all the way with Dean. At our historical distance from bebop polemics, such a view of Ellington probably shouldn’t be taken for granted.) The melancholy pseudo-fidelity of the two endings—and I am sure Kerouac modeled his on Fitzgerald’s— represents a sonorous outbreak of bad faith, a failure to confront the issue of longing and its perpetual collapse, an issue both authors raise only to swerve from it. (It’s tempting to think of the pairs ­Carraway/Gatsby and Paradise/­Moriarty as variants on Jewett’s Helen/Kate: Helen is certainly melancholy, and Kate is ready to go when adventure calls; but Kate is never sheer imago, and she’s not disappointing either.) In their subsequent writings Fitzgerald and Kerouac take themselves into increasingly open explorations of the significance of recurring disappointment: each time the object fails, one might suppose he simply chose the wrong object—that Daisy was just too callow for Gatsby, for example; or that all objects are too slight to support a noble but impossible desire. But as the string of disappointments grows long, both writers begin to focus their attention on the demand itself and away from the objects that had failed to satisfy that demand. Once such a meditation is begun, the demand comes to seem anachronistic and irrelevant to the present world, and the world is transformed from a bright promise into the scene of uniform unfulfillment, permanently lacking the originally lost object, whatever it might have been. Expectant desire collapses back into grief, but this exoneration of the actual world from indictment by grievous demand proves to be an odd mercy, not a substitution of a new thing for the lost thing but the replacement of the romance of longing with the possibility of true discovery: released from the demand that it be a factory for manufacturing substitutes for the dead, the actual world manifests itself in the mode of wonder, a capacious and heterogeneous feeling that can include fear and perplexity but that has little connection with the binary claustrophobia of fulfillment and disappointment. At such a point of altered insight, the emptiness of the world becomes the source of its allure and opportunity, an explicit premise in Kerouac’s

   Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Inherited Mourning Zen writings and a fugitive tone in a number of Fitzgerald’s later writings. Emptiness, of course, is an imposed feature—a scene is always empty of some specific thing or trait or tone, expected, hoped for, or dreaded by a particular observer. Emptiness is produced by the encounter of the scene and the observer, and it is the mode in which the scene’s autonomy and consequent mystery present themselves to the observer’s attention: should one insist that the scene respond to demand, its autonomy will be experienced as debasement and betrayal; but should the experience of emptiness—of the world as stranger, rather than as other—be viewed as an announcement rather than as the end of all hope, there is the chance that the observer might come across an unsettling something, streaked with fatality and therefore lonely, but also interesting and mysteriously companionable. I am trying here to communicate the tone I find, often in late Fitzgerald and sometimes in Kerouac, a tone that is for me now quite moving and more beautiful than the familiar uplift of soaring passages from The Great Gatsby. This passage, for example, from Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, now called The Love of the Last Tycoon, demonstrates that tone: They sat on high stools and had tomato broth and hot sandwiches. It was more intimate than anything they had done, and they both felt a dangerous sort of loneliness, and felt it in each other. They shared in varied scents of the drugstore, bitter and sweet and sour, and the mystery of the waitress, with only the outer part of her hair dyed and black beneath, and, when it was over, the still life of their empty plates—a sliver of potato, a sliced pickle and an olive stone.27

But, of course, there is no happy ending here. For Fitzgerald, the ability to experience the world in this exquisitely ordinary way depended upon stopping his drinking. Perhaps this is the final affinity between the two writers, the disastrous attunement of their souls to liquor’s song, to the fluency of its promise of fulfillment, and its putative annulment of the world’s alien features—to the horrible and perfect eloquence of its conversation with grief. I want to end this essay thinking of this attunement and of all that that song drowned out, of all the writing we do not have.

 r 

Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation

8

the memory of strong experiences is usually vivid, and I can recall in detail the evening when I finished my first reading of The Great Gatsby and then went out into the Wisconsin night, searching for the lights of a party that would be the one that would change everything—I remember “the real snow, our snow,” but the lights I was looking for were more exciting than the “dim lights of small Wisconsin stations” that Nick Carraway passed on the train when coming home from Yale for Christmas.1 I was twenty-one then, looking for books that would voice my hope and excitement, and Fitzgerald’s novel struck me as a precise evocation of what he called the promise of life. He had struck a tuning fork on my star. My students these days, hearing for themselves that clarion tone I heard thirty-two years ago, tend to be cool, but affably so, to my middle-aged readings, for instance, my assertions concerning Nick Carraway’s bad faith or Fitzgerald’s growing interest in an emptied world in his later fiction. In the difference between my reading and theirs I see that though Fitzgerald still interests me deeply, he has changed, or rather, the center of his gravity has for me moved not only to the discoveries occurring in his later fiction but also to certain places I had not noticed before in The Great Gatsby, places where he begins to think critically about history, about race, class, region, nationality, and about how the intersections of such powers provoke, shape, and frustrate desire. Fitzgerald’s writing has come to seem less an expression and celebration of American longing than an archaeology of American longings—not the unbroken lineage from Dutch explorers to Jazz Age dreamer that Fitzgerald posited at the end of The Great Gatsby but a sedimentation of desires, like the layers of Troy or the layers of meanings Freud peeled away in the analysis of the symptom—“America”

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation as a condensation, aggregate, or depository of subject residues rather than as a mystical being. This, I would say, is where Fitzgerald parts company from Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway and keeps company with William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston, his archaeological sense leading him away from tacit allusions to transhistorical American essence, and toward inquiry into epochs of desire. This interest in epochs is evident in two of Fitzgerald’s terms, the “Jazz Age” and the “Last Tycoon.” Since the term “Jazz Age” appears in the 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” a postmortem of the 1920s, we have in both phrases an announcement that an American epoch has ended, an implied analysis of the subjective forms that the epoch produced, and speculations concerning the forces that brought about the end. In what follows I will contrast the melancholia that typifies endings in The Great Gatsby and the 1931 essay with some new ways of thinking about social and personal coherence that Fitzgerald was exploring at the time of his death in 1940, midway through composing The Last Tycoon. First, then, the “Jazz Age,” which may have been intended as a humorous successor to the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages—names for periods of archaic humanity that came into use among archaeologists during the second half of the nineteenth century. If humor was intended, the irony is two-sided: first, whereas an “age” formerly spanned centuries, the velocity of change is now such that we run through an age in ten years or so, as long as it takes a trendsetting cadre of young people to follow the arc of its third decade; and second, whereas the universal plastic material that had formerly defined an age, that made it an age, was a material substance—stone, bronze, iron—it is now an intense, ungraspable cultural energy, jazz, “an arrangement of notes that will never be played again,” as Nick Carraway says of Daisy Buchanan’s voice (GG, 11). As fundamental material, jazz saturates the culture of its epoch, supplying people, events, and artifacts with the character by which they are most succinctly grasped. The term “Jazz Age” therefore imputes to 1920s jazz what Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar call “expressive causality,” which “describe[s] the effect of the whole on the parts, but only by making the latter an ‘expression’ of the former, a phenomenon of its essence.”2 Althusser and Balibar’s “but only” indicates their conviction that “expression” is a restrictive way to understand a society, that there are more complex and satisfying ways to think about parts and wholes, an idea, I will eventually argue, that Fitzgerald was approaching as he wrote The Last Tycoon. But for now, I’ll stay with Fitzgerald’s way of understanding expressive causality, as a temporary national whole of which the parts are expressions, which is what makes an epoch an epoch—when the parts break away from their expressivity, become dark

Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation   

and single, then begin to recohere around a new core, the epoch gives way to its successor. Fitzgerald’s attraction to expressive structure is especially clear in his Emersonian linkage between charisma and history, his belief, first, that in their alertness to the spirit of the epoch, remarkable individuals such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and Monroe Stahr are like “those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (GG, 6), and second, in his belief that such harbingers will catalyze a similar spirit among those who enter the remarkable man’s zone of self-display. Expressing the whole, the members of a transcendent avantgarde lead lesser persons to discover their latent character as symbols of the nation. Like his social vision, Fitzgerald’s symbolist aesthetic is undergirded by his passionate theoretical commitment to the transcendent whole, his spiritual and libidinal nationalism appropriating the emotional and theoretical energies of his Roman Catholic upbringing—the essence of the nation bestows the kiss of worth on objects that then partake of its splendor by expressing it symbolically. 3 America is where the Eucharist couples with the commodity fetish, a fervent articulation of American exceptionalism that makes Fitzgerald a prose poet of what Lauren Berlant calls the “­National Symbolic”—“the order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space produces, and refers to, the ‘law’ in which the accident of birth within a geographic/political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively-held history. Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity; through the National Symbolic the historical nation aspires to achieve the inevitability of the status of natural law, a birthright.”4 The symbolicity of the symbol—its character as vessel containing abstract reality, or as portal opening onto wonder—supplies the symbolic thing with its vitality. Lacking that content or contact, a thing is a mere thing, a spiritless nothing or nobody that in The Great Gatsby is figured as “foul dust” or ashes—devitalized remainder (GG, 6). Such symbols of nonsymbolicity are extremely important, because they inhabit the land of exile to which Fitzgerald, or his narrator, at least, sends social life that fails to express the ideal (revulsion marking a place where more complex insight will later grow). Insofar as a person is a living seismograph of the ideal, a pure register of abstract national content, he is truly vital, alive, luminous; insofar as he is particular—a person with projects, worries, tics, pleasures, and sorrows, all of them inflected by ethnicity, region, religion, class, gender, neurochemistry, and so on—he is a failure, merely particular, an outpost in which the rhythms of the capital have long since faded to silence. Determination by real circumstance and the complexity that this yields are markers of inadequacy. This is why Gatsby is great: he is always and only desirer-of-Daisy,

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation and not desiring her as a particular woman but desiring her for the abstract stuff that she is “full of ” (GG, 94). To exemplify the spirit of the nation is therefore to be a knight of desire, as I argued in the previous chapter, for whom purity of heart is to ­desire one thing. But what if the one thing that the symbol incarnates— the essence that makes the epoch an epoch—is not itself at one with itself but fractured, internally complex? As my title suggests, this brings us back to jazz, the primal X of the decade. Jazz is mentioned most often in chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby, Nick’s excited account of the first party he attended over at Gatsby’s: “By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between the numbers people were doing ‘stunts’ all over the garden while happy vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky” (GG, 51). A little later: There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff ’s latest work which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial condescension and added “Some sensation!” whereupon everyone laughed. “The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as Vladimir Tostoff ’s Jazz History of the World.” (GG, 54)

However: “The nature of Mr. Tostoff ’s composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes” (GG, 54). This is a briefly puzzling moment—if Nick were simply distracted by Gatsby’s appearance, why doesn’t he write, “but I didn’t hear the piece, because” rather than “the nature of [the piece] eluded me, because”? Several years ago I found the answer to this question in Fitzgerald’s manuscript, which includes a long description of the “Jazz History” that was cut from the final version: “The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as Les Epstien’s Jazz History of the World.” When he sat down all the members of the orchestra looked at one another and smiled as tho this was after all a little below them after all. Then the conductor raised his wand—and they all launched into one of the most surprising pieces of music I’ve ever heard in my life. It fascinated me. perhaps it was the champagne I’ve never heard it since and perhaps it was the champagne but for about fifteen minutes I don’t think anyone stirred in their chairs—except to laugh now and then in a curious puzzled way when they came to the end of a movement.

Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation    It started out with a weird, spinning sound that seemed to come mostly from the cornets, very regular and measured and inevitable with a bell now and then that seemed to ring somewhere a good distance away. A rhythm became distinguishable after a while in the spinning, a sort of dull beat but as soon as you’d almost made it out it disappeared—until finally something happened, something tremendous, you knew that, and the spinning was all awry and one of the distant bells and come alive, it had a meaning and a personality somehow of its own. That was the first movement and we all laughed and looked at each other rather nervously as the second movement began. [new paragraph mark] The second movement was concerned with the bell only it wasn’t the bell anymore but two intrum wi a muted violin cello and two instruments I had never seen before. At first there was a sort of monotony about it—a little disappointing at first as if it were just a repetition of the spinning sound but pretty soon you were aware that something was trying to establish itself, to get a foothold, something soft and persistent and profound and next you yourself were trying to help it, struggling, praying for it—until suddenly it was there, it was established rather scornfully without you and it stayed there seemed to lurk around as with a complete selfsufficiency as if it had been there all the time. I was curiously moved and the third part of the thing was full of an even stronger emotion. I know so little about music that I can only make a story of it—which proves I’ve been told that it must have been pretty low brow stuff—but it wasn’t really a story. He didn’t have lovely music for the prehistoric ages with tiger-howls from the trap finishing up with a strain from Onward Christian Soldiers in the year two B.C. It wasn’t like that at all. There would be a series of interruptive notes that seemed to fall together accidentally and colored everything that came after them until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were opposed to it outside. But what struck me particularly was that just as you’d get used to the new discord business there’d be one of the old themes rung in this time as a discord until you’d get a ghastly sense that it was all a cycle after all, purposeless and sardonic until you wanted to get up and walk out of the garden. It never stopped—after they had finished playing that movement it went on and on in everybody’s head until the next one started. Whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet. The last was weak I thought though [ ] most of the people seemed to like it best of all. It had recognizable strains of famous jazz in it—Alexander’s Ragtime Band and the Darktown Strutter’s Ball and recurrent hint of The Beale Street Blues. It made me restless and looking casually around my eye was caught by the straight, graceful easy figure of well proportioned well-made figure of Gatsby who stood alone on the his steps looking from one group to another with a strange eagerness in his eyes. It was as though he felt the necessity of supplying, physically at least, a perfect measure of entertainment to his guests. He seemed absolutely alone—I never seen anyone who seemed so alone.5

Startling, fascinating, ultimately dismaying, and even frightening in its manifest but inexplicable logic, the “Jazz History” seems not to express its audience but rather to stand in sardonic or satiric relation to the partygoers,

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation making them drop their hilarity and mutuality and look to one another for a reassurance that none can supply. But the dismay and consequent revulsion Nick feels do not overwhelm his obvious interest: “I was curiously moved.” The nature of the piece eludes him, he says, just when he seems to be about to have it in hand: it seems to have a core, but it veers off just when about to present itself. The performance does not venture into the unexpected in order to return to the consolation of familiar motifs or melodies: on the contrary, even the return of familiar elements is uncanny and threatening, since those elements, when they recur, are embedded in a miasma that distorts them not beyond recognition but in such a way that recognition and disorientation become the same thing. The music seems to amplify rather than to soothe the party’s echolalia. Such a distortion of the familiar world breaks out at several points in the novel, for instance, in Nick’s speculations concerning Gatsby’s last moments: “He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid too high a price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about” (GG, 169). Material, without being real: only the ideal confers real reality on material things, and, lacking it, they become nightmares. “Disruptions in the realm of the National Symbolic,” according to Berlant, “create a collective sensation of almost physical vulnerability: the subject without a nation experiences his/her own mortality and vulnerability because s/he has lost control over physical space as a part of his/her inheritance.”6 Even when the East excited me most . . . it had almost a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lusterless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. (GG, 185)

The wonder, interest, and horror of “The Jazz History of the World” arise from Nick’s realization that its distortion of the world is a deliberate human production rather than a symptom of decay: it is an artifact, not a ruin. Nick and Fitzgerald are baffled by and irresistibly interested in what seems to them to be the enormous perversity of the act of intentionally disconnecting things from their expressivity and turning them into stranded, carefully fashioned monstrosities—terminating expression,

Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation   

d­ issevering the conduit that makes things really real, assiduously producing a residue of unique creations that only a failure of attention could misunderstand as ashes or junk. Though in the excised passage Fitzgerald does not associate such intentional art with African American culture, a 1926 letter thanking Carl Van Vechten for a copy of his novel Nigger Heaven (1926) makes the connection clearly: “[Your novel] seems, outside of its quality as a work of art, to sum up subtly and inclusively, all the direction of the northern nigger, or, rather, the nigger in New York. Our civilization imposed on such virgin soil takes on a new and more vivid and more poignant horror as if it had been dug out of its context and set down against an accidental and unrelated background.” 7 Despite the revulsion and the racism, Fitzgerald realized what jazz is, and perhaps the racism represents an attempt to distance himself from the complicated feeling he has for a vivid horror, a poignant horror: or rather, a more vivid and more poignant horror—those characteristics are already present in “our civilization,” but they are elicited, brought forward when they are transposed into an alien setting. Compare Nick’s account of “The Jazz History of the World” with André Hodeir’s analysis of Louis Armstrong’s “Butter and Egg Man,” written in the 1950s about a recording made while Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby: In this record, Armstrong manages to transfigure completely a theme whose vulgarity might well have overwhelmed him; and yet his chorus is only a paraphrase. The theme is not forgotten for a moment; it can always be found there, just as it was originally conceived by its little-known composer, Venable. Taking off melodically from the principal note of the first phrase, the soloist begins with a triple call that disguises, behind its apparent symmetry, subtle differences in rhythm and expressive intensity. This entry by itself is a masterpiece; it is impossible to imagine anything more sober and balanced. During the next eight bars, the paraphrase spreads out, becoming freer and livelier. Armstrong continues to cling to the essential notes of the theme, but he leaves more of its contour to the imagination. At times he gives it an inner animation by means of intelligent syncopated repetitions, as in the case of the first note of the bridge. From measures 20 to 30, the melody bends in a chromatic descent that converges toward the theme while at the same time giving a felicitous interpretation of the underlying harmonic progression. This brings us to the culminating point of the work. Striding over the traditional pause of measures 24–25, Armstrong connects the bridge to the final section by using a short, admirably inventive phrase. Its rhythmic construction of dotted eighths and sixteenths forms a contrast with the more static context in which it is placed, and in both conception and execution it is a miracle of swing. During this brief moment, Louis seems to have foreseen what modern conceptions of rhythm would be like. In phrasing, accentuation, and the way the short note is increasingly curtailed until finally it is merely suggested (measure 25), how far removed all this is from New Orleans rhythm! 8

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation Fitzgerald’s excised fragment—itself cut loose from the novelistic whole it would have quite significantly failed to express—is one of the first perceptive reactions to jazz performance among European American writers. Contrast Fitzgerald’s and Hodeir’s attempts to paraphrase the puzzling story the music tells with Rudy Vallee’s dismissal of what he can only see as a mess: “Truly I have no conception of what ‘jazz’ is, but I believe the term should be applied . . . to the weird orchestral effects of various colored bands up in Harlem . . . These bands have a style all their own, and at times it seems as though pandemonium had broken loose. Most of the time there is no distinguishable melody . . . [I]t is absolutely impossible for even a musical ear to tell the name of the piece.”9 Though partaking of Vallee’s perplexity, Fitzgerald anticipates Hodeir’s understanding that jazz by design offers no reunion with the already known but rather, by way of improvisation, disconnects the familiar from its familiarity, making it do startling things. To someone as intensely and deeply committed to a sacramental and expressive (in Althusser and Balibar’s sense) conception of art and society as Fitzgerald was at this time in his life, such created tension could only appear as a fracture, a break in the body of the work and in the body politic. Fitzgerald’s perception of jazz performance in the excised passage seems more astute than a remark made several years later in “Echoes of the Jazz Age”: “The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war.”10 But notice that Fitzgerald does not say this is what jazz is but rather this is what jazz has meant and what it has been associated with. He is not in fact retracting the insight of the excised passage but changing the subject from jazz itself to the image of jazz in the middle-class white popular imagination. His feeling for the distinction accords with the subsequent judgment of cultural and social historians: thought of primarily in terms of its conspicuous and propulsive rhythm, jazz came to emblematize for white Americans both an erotic vitality nearly lost in an effete society (but still effective among African Americans) and the pace of postwar technological modernity. This is the image of jazz, jazz understood as energy and velocity, that is implied in the term “Jazz Age” and embodied in Gatsby, the restless, not-quite-really-white roughneck with the world’s most extraordinary car. Leopold Stokowski succinctly articulated this under­standing of jazz: “Jazz has come to stay because it is an expression of the times, of the breathless, energetic, superactive times in which we are living, it is useless to fight against it . . . America’s contribution to the music of the past will have the same revivifying effect as the injection of new, and in the larger sense, vulgar blood into dying aristocracy . . . The

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Negro musicians of America are playing a great part in this change.”11 Jazz could signify both primitivity and hypermodernity because in both cases it is thought of as raw energy preceding or outrunning form—a beat, rather than a conversation, a meditation, a paraphrase, or a discovery. An alternative form so radically disparate from popular performative norms as to be aesthetically unrecognizable to unexperienced listeners, jazz seems not to be form at all, only outburst. When I invoke “jazz itself,” I appeal only to a formal authenticity: we can, for example, say whether a poem is or is not a sonnet without recourse to mystical essentialism. The distinction between real jazz and the image of jazz became more tangled, however, when popularizers began to compose, perform, and record music that satisfied the popular notion of jazz without being jazz. As such simulation came to prominence, the distinction between, say, the performances of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and what those performances were popularly imagined to have amounted to—sex, fun, nervous stimulation—is reified in the distinction between the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and, say, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, which was generally thought to be America’s premier ensemble. According to Burnett James, “Paul Whiteman, though called the ‘King of Jazz,’ fronted an orchestra of semi-symphonic proportions. His jazzmen had their way from time to time, but in essence only as a sideline.”12 ­Marshall Stearns expands this point: The number of prosperous dance bands at the popular level multiplied, while the jazz content remained slight. At the same time, dancing the Charleston, the Black Bottom, and the Lindy was highly popular and the bands tried to oblige by playing a little hot jazz . . . None of these large dance bands, however, could swing as a whole. The formula consisted of importing one or two “hot” soloists, or “get-off ” men, letting them take a chorus once in a while surrounded by acres of uninspired fellow musicians. “Society band leaders like Meyer Davis and Joe Moss always wanted to have at least one good jazzman in these bands,” says clarinetist Tony Parenti. Bix Beiderbecke was doing this for Paul Whiteman in 1927. Beiderbecke was very well paid and his colleagues all looked up to him—the “hot” soloists were always the elite—but the frustration of being allowed to play so little, when he was hired because he could play so much, led to all kinds of personal problems, and indirectly, to the after-hours “jam session,” where a musician could play his heart out.13

(I am surprised that an extended comparison of the careers of Beiderbecke and Fitzgerald has not been attempted. The resonances are many: an upper midwestern origin; the pressures of a sudden celebrity attendant upon embodying the spirit of the age; death by liquor; melancholy—listen for it in “Singin’ the Blues.”)

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation Kathy Ogren agrees with this assessment of the dance bands, especially Whiteman’s: Whiteman, who became the “King of Jazz,” saw his role as that of dignifying and legitimating jazz. He . . . explained away certain characteristics and performance practices original to the music. Whiteman warned musicians against using syncopation, which “gives a sense to the ignorant of participation in the world’s scientific knowledge.” But, Whiteman continued, with a sense of relief, “Syncopation no longer rules American music . . . as we use it in the United States [it] is an African inheritance . . . but to-day it is no longer a necessary thing. It has been retained much as an ornament.” Whiteman’s popular music became so closely identified with jazz that many Americans had no knowledge of its Afro-­American origins. Whiteman himself, who disliked the association with jazz and dance ­music, titled his Aeolian Hall concert an “Experiment in Modern Music.”14

The Aeolian Hall concert is a key cultural locus: commencing with some horsing around on “Livery Stable Blues” (1917) (introduced by Whiteman as “an example of the depraved past from which modern jazz has risen”),15 the orchestra proceeded through Tin Pan Alley numbers, such as “Yes We Have No Bananas,” escalating to the debut of “Rhapsody in Blue,” with George Gershwin on piano, and concluding with Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” (1901–7). The sequence of the performance thus seems like a progression from energy to art, an effect that depends on agreeing with Whiteman’s pronouncement that the structural core of jazz is an African ornament that can be sacrificed without significant loss in order to move to an aesthetic high ground. Where we might see a nonjazz orchestra equipped with a couple of jazz “stunts,” whinnying trumpets, and some boosted drumming, Whiteman claimed that his music was jazz emerged from its cocoon, its inner necessity consummated. Thanks to extensive advance publicity, the Aeolian Hall concert was packed—invitations had been sent to Stokowski, Fritz Kreisler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Van Vechten, and many other prominent white New Yorkers—and the response was tumultuous.16 The concert was performed on February 12, 1924, a couple of months before the Fitzgeralds sailed for France; their celebrity at the time was such that they may have been included on the guest list, though I have been unable to discover whether they were in fact invited or if they attended. In any case, the coverage in the New York papers after the concert was so extensive that Fitzgerald could not have failed at least to have heard about the occasion. I am satisfied that the Aeolian Hall concert was the prototype for “The Jazz History of the World,” a lineage first suggested, as far as I can tell, by Darrell Mansell.17 (Mansell suggests that Fitzgerald may also have been thinking of jazz-­inflected works by Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky.) If Fitzgerald is alluding to Whiteman’s hubristic and ethnically defamatory extrava-

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ganza, the allusion is rather biting: though the excised passage seems at points to describe “Rhapsody in Blue,” it nonetheless alludes to, stays close to, what jazz is at its core, to what Whiteman called unnecessary ornament, a trope not far from Fitzgerald’s “foul dust.” The performance at Gatsby’s party, therefore, were Fitzgerald to have left the excised fragment in, would have put on view a rather fabulous cultural reversal, jazz per se reviving or breaking out at the heart of an event staged to curtail jazz and to appropriate its aura, not only an overturning of Whiteman’s pretension but also an exuberant betrayal of the aesthetic norms governing the book in which it would have been enclosed. Though it is as hard to say for sure what Fitzgerald listened to as it is to prove he was at the Aeolian Hall concert, I am quite sure he would have heard the real thing as well as the smooth simulacrum. It is hard to imagine him not joining in on Van Vechten’s Harlem field trips, and in France Fitzgerald’s friend and fellow émigré Gerald Murphy made a point of having the latest jazz records on hand—his yacht, the Weatherbird, took its name from an Armstrong recording that he had had sealed in the yacht’s keel, a recording made two years after “Butter and Egg Man.”18 But if Fitzgerald heard jazz itself, his narrator nevertheless responds with aversion to what Thelonious Monk would later call jazz’s ugly beauty, and the excised passage shows no awareness of the African American motivations for jazz performance. If the serial paraphrasing that Nick hears seems to him to be a prolonged deformity or brutalization, to the performer improvisation means a kind of circumstance-based freedom, taking an element from the dominant culture, twisting it, turning it around and inside out, seeing if it will serve ends other than the usual and familiar ones. Like experimentation in general, it seeks to discover avenues of possibility through the midst of inevitability, and to do so without special worry about the survival of coherence. It is useful to recall Ralph Ellison’s praise for Armstrong in the preface to Invisible Man: Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own rasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.19

Willfully putting aside fidelity to the original, the performer liberates cultural matter, puts it into motion. Though this sort of individual

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation d­ eparture from script seems to Nick to endanger the coherence and recognizability of the whole—to endanger the sort of expressive structure that Fitzgerald saw in his vision of American sacramentalism—in fact it adumbrates a radically different vision of cohesion, if not of wholeness in its ultimately metaphysical sense. Martin Williams explains this other vision well: In all its styles, jazz involves some degree of collective ensemble improvisation, and in this it differs from Western music even at those times in its history when improvisation was required. The high degree of individuality, together with the mutual respect and co-operation required in a jazz ensemble carry with them philosophical implications that are so exciting and far-reaching that one almost hesitates to contemplate them. It is as if jazz were saying to us that not only is far greater individuality possible to man that he has so far allowed himself, but that such individuality, far from being a threat to a co-operative social structure, can actually enhance society.20

Fitzgerald came to a similar conclusion about jazz’s social vision in The Last Tycoon, the novel on which he was working when he died of heart failure in 1940. Monroe Stahr, loosely based on Irving Thalberg, is Hollywood’s most successful producer, dominating and organizing the ensemble of labor at his studio—drunken writers, extras, peevish celebrities, lighting men, and so on—with a firm, bluff, equable, brilliant, and self-assured demeanor that commands instant respect from all and yields successful collective enterprise. He thus recapitulates the effective charisma of Gatsby and Dick Diver from the preceding novels, but because he has found a young industry in a young place, that potency can exercise itself in legitimate business triumph rather than be confined to crime, parties, or the pursuit of rich girls. Because Hollywood is the last new industry and California is the terminal beach for the series of longings that began with Dutch sailors staring at Long Island, Stahr is the last tycoon. He therefore culminates and closes an epoch somewhat longer than the Jazz Age, the century, more or less, from Andrew Jackson’s election to the time of the novel. The commencement date is established early on in The Last Tycoon, when three characters enduring a long layover during a transcontinental flight take an early-morning cab ride out to Jackson’s mansion, the Hermitage. The first couple of times I read the novel, this interlude seemed rather pointless, until it occurred to me that Fitzgerald meant us to see Jackson as the first tycoon—not a businessman but a charismatic and unorthodox Westerner who marshaled broad-spectrum appeal independently from established elites, creating in the process the economic domain in which the subsequent tycoons down to Stahr would flourish. From Jackson to Stahr, then, we have the Tycoon Age, with Stahr’s life being the epoch’s sunset, the moment when structure crumbles

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and the individuated pieces shed their expressivity, the luster they enjoyed while they stood firm in Stahr’s light. The novel is very unfinished. In what we do have, Fitzgerald launches the plot along two arcs, the thematic relations between which are not at first clear. First, Stahr is suffering the strain of overwork to the point of risking his life. Producing effective charisma is no longer an effortless or fulfilling enterprise, in part because Stahr’s belief in the worth of his work, in the quality of his films, is diminished; and this subterranean slippage is aggravated by widening divisions in the studio, conspiratorial maneuverings by rivals whose crass profiteering is an index of their contempt for the moviegoing public, and advancing unionization among the laborer-writers. Such splitting and fraying suggest to Stahr that despite his titanic labors, he has only a limited number of rabbits left in his hat. In the second plot line, Stahr meets by chance a woman named Kathleen who closely resembles his dead wife Minna, an actress, and the resemblance stirs him from his apathy into a desperate and eerie erotic pursuit that recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” and anticipates Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: “It was Minna’s face—the skin with its peculiar radiance as if phosphorus has touched it, the mouth with its warm line that never counted costs—and over all the haunting jollity that had fascinated a generation.”21 As in those texts, the generative problem is the quandary of second love. If one is destined to love some other one, then the act of doing so expresses the first one’s fundamental inner truth, the profoundest self, the continuity to which all changes can be subordinated. When love is seen this way, there can be no second love—either the first or the second must have only seemed to be love—because a second love would mean that the lover had a fluid or split core and that change can therefore be radical. Recall ­Gatsby’s incredulity when Daisy says she loved Tom, too. The narrative of the second beloved who reincarnates or exactly resembles the first papers over this fracture in desire and in the desiring self by allowing the supposition that the second love is the first beloved redevivus, glowing with the same radiance. But in several quite stirring and uncomfortably beautiful encounters, Stahr seems to discover Kathleen’s mystery, her difference from Minna, and this discovery only deepens the attraction, without provoking any severe crisis in self-image. Relinquishing the obsessive and coercive concern with near-exact repetition that predominates in Poe and Hitchcock, Fitzgerald quickly establishes Kathleen’s not-Minnaness, with wisps of abiding uncanny reminder, as if, perhaps, second love improvises on the first, “to repeat yet not recapitulate the past” (LT, 89). It should be clear what I consider to be the deep link between the two plot lines, the opening of divisions within what had seemed to be secure

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation wholes—between Stahr and his profession, within his professional world, within his ambition, and within his desire—splinterings that Fitzgerald emblematizes as the dispersal of radiance among numerous light sources: “Other lights shone in Hollywood since Minna’s death: in the open markets lemons and grapefruits and green apples slanted a misty glare into the street. Ahead of him the stop-signal of a car winked violet and at another crossing he watched it wink again. Everywhere floodlights raked the sky. On an empty corner two mysterious men moved a gleaming drum in pointless arcs over the heavens.” Frustration, betrayal, and exhaustion in work, combined with deep erotic loss, introduce Stahr, as they did Thomas Jefferson, to a confusing but novel and exciting prospect. Dispersed light recurs later, on a Pacific beach near a half-completed house Stahr is having built. He takes Kathleen there one night for what turns out to be one of the most frank and moving sexual encounters to be found in Fitzgerald, who is usually prudish where the act is concerned. It is both funny and touching when, afterward, taking a barefoot stroll along the ocean, they come into a field of squirming light, dozens of sparkling, spawning grunion, shiny, sexual, fecund, an extraordinary organic improvisation on what transpired just moments before in Stahr’s oceanside hermitage: It was a fine blue night. The tide was at the turn and the little silver fish rocked off shore waiting for 10:16. A few seconds after the time they came swarming in with the tide and Stahr and Kathleen stepped over them barefoot as they flicked slip-slop in the sand. A Negro man came along the shore toward them collecting the grunion quickly like twigs into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful around the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore” (LT, 92–93).22

In Fitzgerald’s novels, African Americans commonly appear at the moment when the main characters’ world is deeply disturbed, as if breaking up is also breaking open. Only in The Last Tycoon, though, is that disturbance refreshing and inexplicably inspiring—a sense of possibility perhaps enhanced by the echo between Drake’s arrival in California and the transfixed gaze of the Dutch sailors at the end of The Great Gatsby. The man on the beach tells Stahr and Kathleen that he doesn’t really come for the fish but rather to read Emerson’s essays, a copy of which he is carrying in his shirt. His pensiveness is confirmed a moment later when, on hearing that Stahr makes movies, he remarks that he and his children don’t go to the movies, “because there’s no profit in it.” He continues down the beach, “unaware that he had rocked an industry” by shining this harsh light on Stahr’s already-uneasy feeling of professional worth (LT, 93). “Now they were different people as they started back” (LT, 94). The

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conversation with the man on the beach and the sexual interlude with Kathleen upset the elementary articles of Stahr’s self-image, his commitment to his work, and his loyalty to his desire for his wife, but these inner fractures turn out not to be premonitions of subjective decay of the kind Fitzgerald described in The Crack-Up and depicted in Tender Is the Night. Instead, they crack Stahr open, rather than up, presenting him with an opportunity, investing him with an intuition of life below the monolithic, frozen unities of the tycoon and romantic love systems. This post­epochal intuition runs underground while he drives Kathleen home, then surfaces. We should recognize by now the passage that comes in from the cold to describe Stahr’s anomalous epiphany: Winding down the hill he listened inside himself as if something by an unknown composer, powerful and strange and strong, was about to be played for the first time. The theme would be stated presently but because the composer was always new, he would not recognize it as the theme right away. It would come in some such guise as the auto-horns from the Technicolor boulevards below or be barely audible, a tattoo on the muffled drum of the moon. He strained to hear it, knowing only that the music was beginning, new music that he liked and did not understand. It was hard to react to what one could entirely compass—this was new and confusing, nothing one could shut off in the middle and supply the rest from an old score. (LT, 96–97)

Lest we be ignorant of the source of this music, Fitzgerald immediately adds: “Also, and persistently, and bound up with the other, there was the Negro on the sand” (LT, 96). Without the disgust—“he liked and did not understand”—Fitzgerald returns to the insight of the excised fragment, acknowledging jazz’s cultural origins and motivations, its allegiance to a future contemplated as something more interesting than the regaining of fulfillment. Fitzgerald’s early death strikes all the more sharply, for me at least, when I think about this new way of thinking that he was laboring so hard to convey, the series of discoveries of the real that The Last Tycoon would have been about—desire that is not an emotional outcome of ­commodityfetishism, labor politics, uninhibited capitalism, the self and the nation as diverse and nonself-identical. He was on the verge of something, like Stahr’s unbuilt house, permanently unbuilt. How did he come to that continental extremity? Perhaps something of an answer lies in the difference between Emerson’s Representative Man, who has something, some mystical X that he bestows, and Gatsby, who has only desire, that is, who lacks rather than has, bestowing only a sharply focused version of others’ more diffuse lacking. Gatsby apprises one that he shares an absence at the core, a vacancy that precedes the phantasms that address themselves to that vacancy—mystic nationhood,

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation voices full of money, and fresh green breasts. If Fitzgerald found himself in the predicament Nick surmises in Gatsby, “[paying] too high a price for living too long with a single dream” (GG, 169), then he may have turned to face the constitutive deficit that the pursuit of the dream had been designed to distract him from. If the common feature of the artifacts in the American archaeological dig is longing, then perhaps the common feature of American experience is not the nation but rather the absence of the nation, temporalized as not-yet. This feeling of the absence of the nation is historically produced by the deep belief that there ought to be—and that there could be—a nation, that is, a political and spiritual object that compensates for the extreme losses that typify the experience of modernity. I derive this conception of the nation as imaginary compensation from Benedict Anderson: The extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering—disease, mutilation, grief, age and death. Why was I born blind? Why is my best friend paralyzed? Why is my daughter retarded? . . . at the same time, in different ways, religious thought also responds to obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming fatality into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.). In this way, it concerns itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child’s conception and birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness, fortuity and fatality, in a language of “continuity”?

Shortly later, Anderson addresses the predicament of modernity: In Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The century of the Enlightenment, or rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than the idea of a nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be “new” and “historical,” the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.23

“The nation,” Homi Bhabha contends, “fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor, as the etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the ‘middle passage,’ or the central European steppes, across those distances, and cultural differences, that span the

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imagined community of the nation-people.”24 The United States is, of course, one of the special cases, since its immemorial pasts are European and Native American: the past of the place entails ethnic difference for European Americans, whose ethnic ties are not local, that is, they connect to other nations. Fitzgerald’s reference to the Dutch sailors seems to say, we do have our own time immemorial now, finally, and seems thereby to transfigure or positivize the peculiarly originary place that lacking has occupied in the imagination of American national self-constitution. What I am proposing is that Fitzgerald may in his last years have begun to shift his focus from phantasmatic reimbursements—the green breast in all its avatars—to constitutive hunger or deficit, and to contemplate such deficit as an opportunity rather than an occasion for stoic resignation. If so, then this development would look back to Jefferson’s way of understanding of democracy (rather than to nation). Claude Lefort writes: Power was embodied in the prince, and it therefore gave society a body. And because of this, a latent but effective knowledge of what one meant to the other existed throughout the social. This model reveals the revolutionary and unprecedented feature of democracy. The locus of power becomes an empty place. There is no need to dwell on the details of the institutional apparatus. The important point is that this apparatus prevents governments from appropriating power for their own ends, from incorporating it into themselves. The exercise of power is subject to the procedures of periodical redistributions. It represents the outcome of a controlled contest with permanent rules. This phenomenon implies an institutionalization of conflict. The locus of power is an empty place, it cannot be occupied—it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it—and it cannot be represented.25

Gazing from a Swiss mountain, Dick Diver observes a scene that recalls, in its transfigured sorrow, the quiet midocean “lake” in which Ishmael witnessed “leviathan amours”: “On the centre of the lake, cooled by the piercing current of the Rhone, lay the true centre of the Western World. Upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty. It was a bright day, with sun glinting on the grass beach below and the white courts of the Kursal. The figures on the courts threw no shadows.” 26 Swans and boats serve as symbols for one another, but no abstraction rises from their coupling: the play of symbolization stays on the horizontal plane of the water’s surface; and the perfectly vertical sun, solitary and unapproached, ensures that there is no slant light, no shadow cast. If the center is nothingness, then loneliness—the historical circumstance to which nationalism so ferociously and unsuccessfully responds—might come to seem mysteriously opportune, people and their things freed from the burden of symbolizing, finding their way through an epoch’s ruin, exemplifying an odd and plain, yet

   Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation luminous, American mysticism, as in an Edward Hopper painting, or in that passage from The Last Tycoon: They sat on high stools and had tomato broth and hot sandwiches. It was more intimate than anything they had done, and they both felt a dangerous sort of loneliness, and felt it in each other. They shared in varied scents of the drug-store, bitter and sweet and sour, and the mystery of the waitress, with only the outer part of her hair dyed and black beneath, and, when it was over, the still life of their empty plates—a sliver of potato, a sliced pickle and an olive stone. (LT, 85)

Notes

Chapter 1

1.  Lawrence Buell, “The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 10 (1985): 410, 419, 413. 2.  I exaggerate the distance in literary history here, because Tristram Shandy is a model for Rushdie. I also feel that Rushdie was influenced by John Barth, and Barth’s interest in eighteenth-century narrative is plain in Letters and The Sot-Weed Factor. If rapid transformation raises a general feeling of social and cultural fabrication or improvisation, then perhaps the eighteenth century was postmodern. 3.  E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11. 4.  Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and ­Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1, 4. 5.  Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1980), 516. Hereafter all quotations from the novel will be cited parenthetically in the text as MC followed by the page number. 6.  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 146. 7.  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1986), 51. 8.  Ibid., 10. 9.  Ibid., 15. 10.  Ibid., 7, 84. 11.  Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), 289. 12.  Herman Melville, Redburn (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 169. 13.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 145.

   Notes to Chapter 1 14.  Elizabeth Dillon, Representing the Subject of Freedom: Liberalism, Hysteria, and Dispossessive Individualism (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995), 50–51. Though this passage concerning temporality has been deleted in revision, Dillon’s larger argument is advanced in The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and American Women Writers, 1630–1870 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). Her quotations from Bercovitch are taken from The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 17, and from The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), 184. 15.  Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 475. 16.  Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 19. 17.  See Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 18.  Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 201. 19.  Elisa Tamarkin, American Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 20.  Salman Rushdie, “Thomas Pynchon,” in Imaginary Homelands (New York: Penguin, 1992), 357. 21.  Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 177. 22.  Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49, 178, 179. 23.  In my view the richest cross-reading of American literature and poststructuralist theory is Gregory Jay, America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). 24.  Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 249. 25.  Philip Kuberski, “Charles Olson and the American Thing: The Ideology of Literary Revolution,” Criticism 27 (Spring 1985): 175–76. 26.  Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1979), 55. 27.  Thomas Pynchon, introduction to Slow Learner: Early Stories (Boston: ­Little, Brown, 1984), 6, 7, 8, 9. 28.  John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom (New York: Everyman’s, 1995; first published as Rabbit, Run, 1960), 23, 24, 25, 26–27, 29, 30–31. 29.  Ibid., xii. 30.  Ibid., 264. 31.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 86–87. 32.  Ibid., 140–1. 33.  Kerouac, On the Road, 309–10. 34.  Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49, 98–99. 35.  Ibid., 183. 36.  Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 141. 37.  Thomas Pynchon, introduction to Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by Richard Farina (New York: Penguin, 1983), x.

Notes to Chapter 1    38.  Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (­Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1972), 31–32. 39.  Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, the Continent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 29–40, 43. 40.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (New York: Scribner’s, 1962), 61. 41.  Ibid., 96. 42.  F. Scott Fitzgerald to Edmund Wilson, Spring 1925, in The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribner’s, 1963), 341–42. 43.  Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 21. 44.  Ibid., 134. 45.  John F. Callahan, The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 76. 46.  Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 42. 47.  Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 141. 48.  Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 42. 49.  Ibid., 154. 50.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits and Representative Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 20. Hereafter all quotations from Emerson’s collection will be cited parenthetically in the text as ET followed by the page number. 51.  E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780; Programme, Myth, ­Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 10, 9, 37–38. 52.  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. ­Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 3. 53.  Ibid., 340. 54.  Ernst Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” in Nationalism, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17. 55.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, 154, 143, 141, 144. 56.  Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, 8, 30. 57.  Douglas R. Angus, introduction to The Man Without a Country and Other Stories, by Edward Everett Hale (Ware, Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth American Classics, 1995), 1–11. Hereafter all quotations from the story will be cited parenthetically in the text as MWC followed by the page number. 58.  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, 1962), 105. Hereafter all quotations from the novel will be cited parenthetically in the text as MD followed by the page number. 59.  Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 25. 60.  Daniel Webster, “Address at the Laying of the Cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument,” in American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War, ed. Ted Widmer (New York: Library of America, 2006), 106. 61.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Riverside, 1957), 21–22. 62.  Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1981), 167, 182. 63.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo ­Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Riverside, 1957), 256.

   Notes to Chapter 1 64.  Sharon Cameron, “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience,’ ” Representations 15 (Summer 1986): 18, 15. 65.  Cameron, “Representing Grief,” 18. 66.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Riverside, 1957), 160, 158. 67.  Charles Olson, “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” in The Maximus ­Poems (New York: Jargon/Corinth Books, 1960), 12. 68.  Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, 25, 86. 69.  Neal Tolchin, Mourning, Gender and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), xiv, xii. 70.  Tolchin, Mourning, Gender and Creativity, 12. 71.  On Melville’s involvement in American political, economic, and military life, see Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 72.  Mary White Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, ed. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 337. 73.  Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 346–47. 74.  Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949; Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1980), 75 (citations are to the 1980 edition); T. Walter Herbert, Moby-Dick and Calvinism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 36. 75.  See, for example, Newton Arvin, Herman Melville: A Critical Biography (New York: Viking, 1950), 176; Marius Bewley, “Melville and the Democratic Experience,” in The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), repr. in Richard Chase, ed., Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 105; John P. McWilliams Jr., Hawthorne, Melville and the American Character: A Looking-Glass Business (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 156, 163; and Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 102–55. 76.  C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (London: Allison and Busby, 1953), 11–40. 77.  Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 240. 78.  Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Federalist, 3. 79.  Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, 5. 80.  Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 34. 81.  Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism: Programme, Myth, Reality, 87–98. 82.  Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 26. 83.  Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 21–36: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 2004), 436. 84.  Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 192.

Notes to Chapter 2   

Chapter 2

1.  Richard F. Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian University Press, 1979); Mary Fulbrook, Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Württemburg and Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Lawrence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 2.  Henry Sussman, The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Sussman is for the most part concerned with the first half of Phenomenology of Spirit, whereas my argument in this essay concentrates on the reading of Antigone that begins the second half. Consequently, he focuses on questions of a less directly social nature and sees “a world whose only principles are indeterminacy and linguistic copulation” as the major source of inner resistance to Hegel’s design, whereas I will emphasize a specifically social form of resistance. Despite this difference, I agree with Sussman’s general judgment that “Hegel may place his forced twists and leanings at the service of a smooth-running machine of logic and abstraction, but the blunt force involved in this application points in the direction of another, less domesticated realm” (2)—though, of course, Antigone’s threat to Creon originates in a more domesticated realm. 3.  G. W. F. Hegel, “The Ethical World. Human and Divine Law: Man and Woman,” in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Sec. C. (BB.) VI. A. a. I will footnote this chapter only when I use specific quotations from it. My argument draws most heavily on paragraphs 449–52, 455, 460, and 462–63. 4.  Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), throughout, but 29–30 specifically, in the left columns. I became aware of the theoretical importance of the topic of exemplification through conversations with, and essays by, Jonathan Elmer and David Lloyd. 5.  Ibid., 143, and throughout the left columns in the book. 6.  Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Freud, Complete Works, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–66), 14:236–58, esp. 236. My reading of Hegel is heavily influenced by Jacques Lacan’s fusion of the Hegelian and Freudian theories of mourning in “The Splendor of Antigone,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1994), 243–91, and by Stuart ­Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). See also Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” trans. James Hulbert, in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 11–52. 7.  In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud argues that melancholia (or depression) results from a derangement of mourning. His argument that this derangement originates in a certain fixated or intransigent incorporation of the dead seems to me to invite supplementation by Hegel’s theory: if mourning ceases prematurely because of an incorporation of an image of the dead advanced by a scheme of social

   Notes to Chapter 2 exemplarity, it becomes melancholia. The missing factor in Freud’s theory is a consideration of the preemptive intrusion of ideology into the course of mourning. In his introduction to the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Derrida claims that for Freud, mourning accomplishes an introjection of the dead, whereas melancholia is stalled by having incorporated the dead: introjection brings the image of the dead into full assimilation with the self, but incorporation assimilates the dead as an alien presence, a crypt in the midst of the self with which the self does not communicate. This distinction is useful but does not seem to me complete. In the case of the sort of prolonged and intimate contact that exists between family members, the dead does not need to be projected into the self because that self is in large measure already determined by the history of the relation—the task is not to bring the dead in but to convert the dead from being an element of life taken for granted to being an object of representation, to being an inner image with which the self can communicate to the limit of all the messages that memory proposes. Derrida’s, Abraham’s, and Torok’s concept of melancholia and incorporation might therefore also be enriched by a consideration of ideological intrusion into mourning: if the mourner takes in an image of the dead that seems adequate but that in fact only simulates the dead, then that image will not communicate adequately with memory but will remain as an encrypted alien body, like the apple embedded in Gregor Samsa’s flesh in Franz Kaf ka’s Metamorphosis, a flesh rendered insectivorid by its unrepresenting alienation from what it surrounds ( Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, trans. Nicholas Rand [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], xiv–xxi). 8.  Most theories of ideology assume the agency of a direct inculcation of fear—fear of criminal punishment, ostracism, guilt, shame, and so on. But an ideology that sublimates mourning puts the fearful thing—death—outside itself and thus can appear in the form of benign desirability, as in Reagan’s speech after the Challenger disaster, which constructed the exemplarity of the victims in such a way as to fortify a national commitment to the renewed militarization of space so that their deaths would not have been in vain. On October 2, 1988, Rick Hauck, commander of the first manned space mission after the disaster, responded to Reagan’s speech in a manner that displayed full comprehension of the technique of sublimating mourning through emulative exemplification: “Today, up here where the blue sky turns to black, we can say at long last, to Dick, Mike, Judy, to Ron and El, and to Christa and Greg: Dear friends, we have resumed the journey that we promised to continue for you; dear friends, your loss has meant that we could confidently begin anew; dear friends, your spirit and your dream are still alive in our hearts” (San Francisco Chronicle, October 3, 1988, Sec. A, 1, 18). Hauck implies that the Challenger mission was Christic (Christa); the debility of the O-rings was a lurking danger or dark necessity that the earlier mission brought forward and thereby purged, enabling a confident new beginning; that this is how we are to remember them, as those who died for us; and the proper form of remembrance is emulation of what are designated as their values, which ensures that they are not really dead—only the vehicle has dropped away. It now

Notes to Chapter 2    appears that NASA suppressed evidence that the Challenger victims may have survived for some minutes after the explosion, a horrifying possibility that would tend to impede an easy passage into symbolicity. Although he does not discuss mournfulness, Stuart Hall quite persuasively engages the question of desirable ideology in “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 58–73 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 9.  Hegel’s theory supplements the explanation of the connection between simulative ideology and intransigent unresponsiveness in Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . . . or the End of the Social, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983): “The mass absorbs all the social energy, but no longer retracts it. It absorbs every sign and every meaning, but no longer reflects them. It absorbs all messages and digests them. For every question put to it, it sends back a tautological and circular response. It never participates. Inundated by flows or tests, it forms a mass or earth” (28). Baudrillard acknowledges the connection between this nonparticipation and Hegel’s description of melancholia, but he shows little interest in the etiology of melancholia when describing what melancholia is a deranged form of: “There would thus be a fantastic irony about ‘matter,’ and every object of science, just as there is a fantastic irony about the masses in their muteness, or in their statistical discourse so conforming to the questions put to them, akin to the eternal irony of femininity of which Hegel speaks—the irony of a false fidelity, or an excessive fidelity to the law, an ultimately impenetrable simulation of passivity and obedience, and which annuls in return the law governing them, in accordance with the immoral example of the Soldier Schweick” (33; the quotation from Hegel to which Baudrillard refers appears in my text shortly after this note). 10.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 288. Brackets are the translator’s. 11.  G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 105–22. 12.  Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 8. 13.  Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975). 14.  See Karen Rowe, Saint and Singer: Edward Taylor’s Typology and the Poetic of Meditation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 15.  Miller’s position is most succinctly stated in “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity,” in Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 48–98. On Miller’s relation to negative theology, see Donald Weber, introduction to Jonathan Edwards, by Perry Miller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), v–xxix. On Miller’s challenge to what was the dominant view of Puritanism, see Russel L. Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986), 53–57. 16.  Puritan writers from Winthrop through Cotton Mather took careful note of reports that Anne Hutchinson and her friend Mary Dyer conceived deformed fetuses, and they suggested points of resemblance between the details of the deformity and the tenets of heresies that these women had entertained before and

   Notes to Chapter 2 during the pregnancies. The fetuses, therefore, were emblems of the two women’s invisible spiritual states; their bodies told an exemplary truth that their mouths were laboring to disguise; but the truth will out. Cf. Thomas Weld, preface to A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines, by John Winthrop, in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638, ed. David D. Hall, 214–15 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968): “For look as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters; and as about 30. Opinions in number, so many monsters; and as those were publike, and not in a corner mentioned, so this is now come to be knowne and famous over all these Churches, and a great part of the world.” This intrusion of divinely composed exemplification, “as clearly as if he had pointed with his finger” (214), must have gratified Weld, Winthrop, and others, in part because the antinomians had denied that the emulation of examples was of any worth to the soul: “Error 6: The example of Christ’s life, is not a patterne according to which men ought to act” (220). 17.  Cf. Michael Wigglesworth’s vindictive delight in binaristic clarification at the bar of final judgment in The Day of Doom. 18.  Cf. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 1–34. 19.  Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 34. 20.  On representations of death, funeral sermons, and funerary practices in American Puritan society, see Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 6; Gordon E. Geddes, Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan New England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); David H. Watters, “With Bodilie Eyes”: Eschatological Themes in Puritan Literature and Gravestone Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Allan I. Ludwig, Graven Image: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650–1815 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966); and Ronald A. Bosco, ed., The Puritan Sermon in America, 1630–1750, vol. 4, New England Funeral Sermons (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978). (Bosco’s introduction is quite shrewd.) In a recent work on Melville and mourning in antebellum America, Neal L. Tolchin identified the centrality of a blocking and channeling of mourning in genteel culture and the consequent production of an underground melancholia (Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988]). Tolchin’s extensive and perspicacious investigation of Melville’s America suggests to me that sentimentalism is a reappearance of the Puritan sublimation of mourning, promoting quite different social values but availing itself of Puritanism’s legacy of social technique. 21.  Cf. Sharon Cameron, “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience,’ ” Representations 15 (Summer 1986): 15–41. 22.  Cf. “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” in Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111–19, and Alexandre Kojève’s revisionary explication in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969). See also Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies

Notes to Chapter 2    in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 83–222. Hegel, Kojève, and Lukács argue not that those consigned to the slave position are better off but that they are more likely loci of insight because they are denied participation in fantasias of mastery as well as basic social and material rights. In the consignment of stereotyped mourning to women, the purpose is presumably to effect a specular localization in one gender so that the other can enjoy a deluded feel of final competence. The slave’s lucidity is, however, not inevitable, because exclusion can prompt an intensely energetic quest to secure mastery, to access to the heavenly heart of whiteness, as in The Great Gatsby or in Native Son before Bigger’s imprisonment. 23.  I am here drawing on Eva Cherniavsky, “Night Pollution and the Floods of Confession in Michael Wigglesworth’s Diary,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 45 (Summer 1989): 15–33. 24.  See Anne Stanford, Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan (New York: B. Franklin, 1974); Wendy Martin, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Anne Stanford and Pattie Cowell, eds., Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983); and Adrienne Rich, foreword to The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), ix–xxi. 25.  Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), esp. 83–92, on the Renaissance aesthetic of the counterfeit. See Michel Beaujour, “Genus Universum,” Glyph: Textual Studies 7 (1980): 15–31, on the theoretical axioms of the Renaissance ­encyclopedia. 26.  See Augustine Jones, The Life and Work of Thomas Dudley, the Second Governor of Massachusetts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900); and Elizabeth Wade White’s thorough and insightful biography, Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). The values expressed by Sidney seemed to Bradstreet to be more respectful of the example of Elizabeth I than did Puritanism. 27.  It might at first seem that the Sidneyan emphasis on personal achievement was even more exclusionary than was Puritanism because it precluded the idea of a collective subject of sovereign representation. However, Bradstreet’s knowledge of the sorts of division that arose within Puritanism after it moved past its early oppositional solidarity—the argument between Winthrop and Dudley, the antinomian debacle, the English Civil War—and American Puritanism’s dependence on acts of exclusion (such as the antifeminism whose force she felt) to rejuvenate a sensation of collective subjectivity would have revealed Puritanism’s equally strong proclivity toward egoistic atomization. 28.  See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977). 29.  We can only speculate about whether Bradstreet’s poem alludes to Fifth Monarchism, a splinter group to the left of Congregationalism, which held that Cromwell’s commonwealth, like the Church of England, was a lingering trace of the Roman monarchy and that Christ’s Fifth Monarchy was still to come. See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English

   Notes to Chapter 3 Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1975); and Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Millenarianism (London: Faber, 1972). 30.  This possibility was suggested to me by Wendy Martin. 31.  Bradstreet, Works of Anne Bradstreet, 215–18. 32.  For an opposed view, see Timothy Sweet, “Gender, Genre, and Subjectivity in Anne Bradstreet’s Early Elegies,” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 152–74. For Sweet, the early poems represent a vigorous attempt to constitute an unprecedented female writing subject, whereas “most of her later poems are written from within a discourse of domesticity and display an acceptance of the ‘woman’s place’ ” (168). Consequently, “while these poems are good of their kind, they are comfortable and unproblematic in terms of their acceptance of the gender system” (169). This vision of Bradstreet’s career as a falling away from, rather than a further refinement of, the vigor of the early challenge seems to me to be wrong. Sweet defends the early verse by accepting a certain early/late either/or and then reversing the commonplace critical valuation of the late. I would prefer to see the late as a dialectical development from the early that maintains the vigor of the early in a more profound register: genuine expression, though a heavily laden term with a checkered ideological career, is not therefore necessarily without worth. 33.  Bradstreet, Works of Anne Bradstreet, 204. 34.  Cf. Wendy Martin, American Triptych, 46: “For [Bradstreet], an attachment to earthly existence is vain only because it does not last.” 35.  Bradstreet, Works of Anne Bradstreet, 292–93. 36.  Mark Twain, Autobiography, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 422. 37.  Bradstreet, Works of Anne Bradstreet, 204. 38.  Ibid., 225. 39.  Ibid., 274.

Chapter 3

1.  Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North-America, in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782 (Dublin: Printed for Colles, Moncrieffe, White, H. Whitestone, Byrne, Cash, Marchbank, Henry, and Moore, 1787), 2:46, quoted in Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, Jefferson and His Time, Vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948). Most of the historical information in this essay is taken from this and subsequent volumes of Malone’s comprehensive Jefferson and His Time. Where a specific opinion or interpretation is involved, I will cite Malone, but for the sake of convenience I have not cited Malone for matters of fact, such as Jefferson’s part in the clearing of the Rivanna and so on. My reader should therefore be aware that my debt to Malone is greater than the notes suggest. All quotations from Notes on the State of Virginia (hereafter referred to as Notes) are from the University of North Carolina Press edition, edited with introduction and notes by William Peden (Chapel Hill: 1955). Hereafter all quotations from Notes will be cited parenthetically in the text as N followed by the page number. 2.  I. T. Frary, Thomas Jefferson: Architect and Builder (Richmond, Va.: Garrett and Massie, 1939), 4.

Notes to Chapter 3    3.  Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 543. 4.  John Dos Passos, The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), 154–55. 5.  Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 275: “To the homely wisdom of Dr. Franklin that honesty is the best policy, Jefferson had added a new element. He had combined in one formula two principles which often seem contradictory and which at any rate are difficult to reconcile. Not a mere idealist, nor simply a practical politician, he was, during the rest of his political life, to make persistent efforts to propagate the gospel of practical idealism which remains to this day one of the fundamental tenets of Americanism.” Adrienne Koch, “Pragmatic Wisdom and the American Enlightenment,” William and Mary Quarterly 8 (1961): 313, 328. In Jefferson’s thought, according to Koch, “the empirical and the rational faculty” are “remarried” after an “unkind and ill-starred divorce” (316). 6.  Robert Ferguson, “ ‘Mysterious Obligation’: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” American Literature 52 (November 1980): 385. 7.  Quoted in Merrill Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 426. 8.  Montgomery Schuyler, American Architecture and Other Writings, ed. William H. Jordy and Ralph Coe (New York: Atheneum, 1964), 32–36, 57–81. 9.  Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1–106. I admire Popper’s writings on induction, which I consider the most formidable challenge to the Lockean tradition to be found in Anglo-American philosophy, though my esteem for his work diminishes as his rancor against the continental tradition rises in The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971). Even with respect to his critique of induction, however, there is a difference between our emphases. Popper is most concerned with the difficulty of predicting phenomena from observation and with the logical difficulty of deriving a universal law from a series of observations—the ­Humean challenge to Locke that instigates Immanuel Kant’s philosophical labor. I, however, am more concerned with the danger of induction becoming excessive reduction than I am with the danger of excessive abstraction from repetition. I will stress the expediency of representation as a deliberate simplification of what I will call the complex object—an object of representation that surpasses the representational schemes brought to bear on it and that is thus capable of exposing the reductiveness of those schemes and of provoking the kind of break in knowledge that T. S. Kuhn has analyzed. I derive this emphasis from a letter Jefferson wrote to John Manners in 1814. Jefferson contends that nature produces only incommensurable “units” or “individuals.” “Classes, orders, genera, species” are therefore not innate to nature and cannot be inductively discovered. Instead, for the sake of heuristic and mnemonic appropriation, men select features that are denominated “predominant and invariable.” Systems of classification are therefore interested reduction of the natural object: they enable men to converse intelligibly and to get on with business, but they should not be mistaken as inductive discoveries of the object’s essence. So far, Jefferson is presenting a rough

   Notes to Chapter 3 corollary to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. There are two differences, however: First, for Jefferson the epistemological schemes being considered are cultural systems rather than universal forming proclivities of consciousness; and second, for Jefferson the actual object has the power to enter thought in itself, as “anomaly,” which “sport(s) with our schemes of classification” (Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Philip S. Foner [New York: Wiley, 1944], 726–30). Jefferson’s critique of induction is thus more historical than Kant’s, since it accounts for the genesis and disruption of paradigms; and it is more radical than Popper’s, since it is concerned with the judgment that a repetition of traits exists rather than with what conclusions can be drawn from such a judgment. 10.  Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928), 40–41. 11.  Thomas Jefferson, Papers, ed. Julian Boyd et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), 9:369–75. 12.  Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (London: T. Payne, 1771), 1, 2, 119, 118, 15–16. 13.  Joseph Heely, quoted in William Bainter O’Neal, Jefferson’s Fine Arts Library: His Selections for the University of Virginia Together with His Own Architectural Books (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 150. 14.  Jefferson, Papers, 10:443–55. 15.  Jefferson, Basic Writings, 240–81; 246 quoted. 16.  Ferguson, “ ‘Mysterious Obligation,’ ” 383, 387, 388–89, 390, 401, 405; Wayne Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 30, 26, 27, 29. 17.  Merrill Peterson, introduction to his anthology, Thomas Jefferson: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), ix. For another statement of the myth of Jefferson, see Horace M. Kallen, “The Arts and Thomas Jefferson,” in the same volume. Kallen notes Jefferson’s interest in contradiction between site and edifice but fails to consider its implications for his own rephrasing of the Jefferson myth. 18.  Peterson, Jefferson and the New Nation, 241, 242, 243, 246. 19.  Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvellous Real,” trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 93. 20.  Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 381. See also Jefferson’s letters to John Taylor, in Writings, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 10:27–31; and to Archibald Stuart, in Writings, 5:408–11. 21.  Thomas Jefferson to John Manners. 22.  William Byrd, Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929), 54–55. 23.  Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 21–33 on Peter Jefferson. 24.  Thomas Breaks, A Complete System of Land Surveying, Both in Theory and Practice (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Printed by T. Saint for W. Charnley and J. Murray, London, 1781), presents a clear summary of the methods and devices common in Jefferson’s period.

Notes to Chapter 3    25.  Thomas Lewis, The Fairfax Line: Thomas Lewis’s Journal of 1726, ed. John W. Wayland (New Market, Va.: Henkel Press, 1925), 20, 29, 35, 85. 26.  Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 117–56. 27.  Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 378. 28.  Thomas Jefferson, “Description of Louisiana,” Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., November 5, 1804 to March 3, 1805 (1852), 1, 498–526. 29.  In addition to Ferguson’s and Franklin’s discussions of these passages, see Clayton W. Lewis, “Style in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” Southern Review 14 (Autumn 1978): 668–76; William J. Scheick, “Chaos and Imaginative Order in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Essays in Early Virginia History Honoring Richard Beale Davis, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay, 221–34 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977); and Floyd Ogburn Jr., “Structure and Meaning in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” Early American Literature 15 (Fall 1981): 141–50. 30.  Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Random House, 1978), 259–72. 31.  A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 242–87; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 166–302. 32.  Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 60–69. 33.  Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: Norton, 1974); on the importance of first memories, see Alfred Adler, Superiority and Social Interest, ed. Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 197–98. 34.  Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson. 35.  John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 46. 36.  Jefferson, Writings, 10:226–32. 37.  John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1:87–91. 38.  Quoted in Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 220–21; Jefferson, Writings, 10:343. 39.  Quoted in Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 66. 40.  Thomas Jefferson, The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Edward Dumbauld (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 99. 41.  I agree with Leo Marx that Jefferson’s agrarianism, like Franklin’s physiocracy, is as much a result of his aversion to economic combination as it is an attraction to farm life. See Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 117–44, and Mitchell Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 221–22. 42.  Jefferson, Political Writings, 138. 43.  John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 397–98, 403–4, 339, 303–20, 386, 425–26.

   Notes to Chapter 4 44.  Jefferson, Writings, 9:305–10. 45.  Jefferson, Political Writings, 56. 46.  Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner Press, 1949), 120. 47.  Jefferson, Writings, 10:27–31. 48.  Ibid., 1:112–13. 49.  Ibid., 7:2–6. 50.  de Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 116. 51.  Jefferson, Papers, 11:92–97, 10:629, 12:355–56. 52.  Jefferson, Writings, 10:294–95. 53.  Jefferson, Political Writings, 126. 54.  Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 186. 55.  Quoted in Edwin M. Betts and Hazelhurst Bolton Perkins, Thomas Jefferson’s Flower Garden at Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971), 1.

Chapter 4

1.  This point is made by Olive W. Parsons in “Whitman the Non-Hegelian,” PMLA 58 (December 1948): 1073–93. Parsons contends that even though Whitman refers to Hegel in Democratic Vistas and elsewhere, he is not really a “Hegelian” because he does not share Hegel’s analytic rigor. I think she is correct, but her point is limited: Whitman could be called a “non-Hegelian” in the same way that Marx, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard might be called “non-Hegelians.” The comparison, in other words, is extremely useful, despite Parsons’s well-argued assertions. 2.  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 337. Hereafter all quotations from Whitman will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as LG followed by the page number. The reader should notice that I have for the most part confined myself to quotations from the first two editions of Leaves of Grass: my sense is that during the 1870s and after, Whitman rid his poetry of some of the complexity I describe in this essay. But that is beyond the present scope. 3.  See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth­Century Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 81–133. 4.  Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 66. 5.  Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 6.  Ibid., 203. 7.  Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1950), 43. 8.  William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Essays on Faith and Morals (New York: Longmans, Green, 1949), 259.

Notes to Chapter 4    9.  Ibid., 272. 10.  Thomas Jefferson, The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Edward Dumbauld (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 126. 11.  G. W. F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 38. 12.  Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), 218, 220. 13.  Ibid., 218. 14.  Ibid., 220. 15.  Ibid., 219. 16.  Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe (New York: Penguin, 1951), 131. 17.  John Keats, The Poems of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 438; italics added. 18.  Bertrand Russell, “Egocentric Particulars,” in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), 90. 19.  Daniel Webster, “Speech in the Senate on Compromise Resolutions,” in American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War, ed. Ted Widmer (New York: Library of America, 2006), 483. 20.  See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). 21.  My affection for this line comes from Leslie Fiedler, who returned to it a number of times in a graduate seminar he taught on Whitman in 1977. 22.  See Gaston Bachelard, “Introduction,” The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), xi–xxxv, 51. 23.  Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), 289.

Chapter 5

1.  Henry David Thoreau, Writings, vol. 4, Cape Cod and Miscellanies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 177. Hereafter, quotations from Cape Cod are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as CC followed by the page number. 2.  Henry David Thoreau, Writings, vol. 2, Walden, 350–51. 3.  F. O. Matthiessen points out that Walden was a favorite of Marcel Proust’s: “In 1904 Proust wrote to the Comtesse de Noailles: “Lisez . . . les pages admirables de Walden. Il me semble que on les lise en soi-meme tant elles sortent du fond de notre experience intime” (American Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1941], 172). One never knows why one writer loves another; yet we may note that the intense presence of the memoire involuntaire is also a function of the divestiture of affection, of longing in particular. Once Swann recovers from his desire for Odette—and Proust is careful to say elsewhere that recovery from love is to be feared as a death—the whole scene of the cafés where they went escapes from the simplicity of jealousy and is recovered in its complexity: the music, for instance, and the aromas; once Marcel has forgotten Albertine, another Venice than the one to which he traveled to forget her rises in memory; even in the “overture,”

   Notes to Chapter 6 the remembrance of Combray in its plenitude occurs after he has gotten over his longing for his mother’s goodnight kiss. Recovery is death. It is also the condition of attentive writing. For Proust, but not for Thoreau, that apocalypse occurs in memory, not in original sight. Is the cork-lined room Proust’s Walden Pond? “If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me” (Walden, 361). 4.  Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry David Thoreau (New York: Delta, 1948), 101–2. 5.  Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York: Dutton, 1936), 296. 6.  Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (New York: Norton, 1951), 74.

Chapter 6

1.  Eliza Cabot Follen, ed. and trans., Selections from the Writings of Fenelon (Boston: Samuel G. Simkins, 1841; original publication, 1826), 294. This is the edition of Fénelon that Jewett owned. On Jewett and Fénelon, see Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 75, 87. 2.  Erich Lindemann, “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief,” in Beyond Grief: Studies in Crisis Intervention (London: Jason Aronson, 1979), 59–78. This influential essay was first published in 1944. 3.  Ibid., 75–76. 4.  Erich Lindemann, “Ethical Aspects of Culture Change,” in Beyond Grief, 203–13. 5.  For an instructive examination of traditional arts and practices in Jewett’s fiction, see Elizabeth Ammons, “Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs,” in New Essays on “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” ed. June Howard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 81–100. 6.  Margaret Miller, Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework (Deerfield, Mass.: Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework, c. 1900), 1. 7.  Sarah Orne Jewett, Novels and Stories, ed. with notes by Michael Davitt Bell (New York: Library of America, 1994), 32. Hereafter quotations from this volume will be cited parenthetically in the text as D followed by the page number. 8.  This passage is from Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), excerpted in Charles O. Jackson, Passing: The Vision of Death in America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 148. 9.  Charles O. Jackson, “ ‘Reaching for the Choir Invisible’: The Nineteenth Century,” in Passing, 61. 10.  James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 4–5. 11.  Ibid., 182–83. 12.  Ibid., 221. 13.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 19–20. 14.  Sarah Orne Jewett, 1874 Diary, MS Am 1743 (341), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Notes to Chapter 6    15.  Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women and American Literary Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 343–84. 16.  Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in Complete Stories, 1898–1910, ed. Dennis Donoghue (New York: Library of America, 1996), 537–40. 17.  Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986), 317–18. 18.  Friedrich Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), 179, 179–80, 182. 19.  Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 116–20. For a critique of Brodhead’s stance and a perceptive critical summary of recent work on Jewett and regionalism, see June Howard, “Unraveling Regions, Unsettling Periods: Sarah Orne Jewett and American Literary History,” American Literature 68 ( June 1996): 365–84. 20.  Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Cathy N. Davidson, Patrick O’Donnell, Valerie Smith, and Christopher P. Wilson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 251. 21.  Sandra A. Zagarell, “Troubling Regionalism: Rural Life and the Cosmopolitan Eye in Deephaven,” American Literary History 10 (Winter 1998): 643. 22.  Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 84–99. 23.  James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths” and “On Ethnographic ­A llegory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 10, 115. 24.  Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” 14. See also, in the same volume, Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” 27–50. 25.  Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 154. 26.  Sarah Orne Jewett, Letters, ed. Richard Cary (Waterville, Maine: Colby College Press, 1956), 33. 27.  Sarah Orne Jewett, The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 248. 28.  Sarah Orne Jewett, “Preface to the 1893 Edition,” in Deephaven and Other Stories, ed. Richard Cary (New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press Publishers, 1966), 34. 29.  Carlos Baker, “Delineation of Life and Character,” in Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 846–47. 30.  Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866). On Jewett and Whitney, see Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 93, 95. 31.  Zagarell, “Troubling Regionalism,” 649. 32.  Ann Romines, “In Deephaven: Skirmishes near the Swamp,” in Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 43–57. 33.  Jewett, 1874 Diary. 34.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 71, 85–86, 52.

   Notes to Chapter 6 35.  Ibid., 59, 368. 36.  Margaret Roman, Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 40–41. 37.  Medical research has at least partially answered the question of the “causelessness” of depression. Many people suffering from depression have an abnormally low level of serotonin in their neural chemistry, not because little serotonin is produced but because it is consumed at an abnormally high rate. The pharmaceutical drugs called serotonin uptake inhibitors can establish an ordinary serotonin level and produce miracles, a word I do not use lightly, without the sorts of distorted consciousness associated with tranquilizers and other drugs previously supplied to those suffering depression. I write this as one who has seen the mercy of these drugs for some who have been dear to me, their relief not only from the primary feelings that the depression causes but from the secondary feelings that arise from the thought of an incompetence they supposed their depression to evidence: in the absence of the sorts of external events that “cause” certain emotions, one who is unaware of the neurological origin of such feelings is prone to conclude that they were causeless, evidence of a moral infirmity, a childish indulgence of minor problems, a matter for shame—emotions about emotions that will be familiar to those who have struggled in the bleak fields of this affliction. I should add, however, that many medical experts feel that pharmacological approaches to the problem work best in tandem with psychotherapy. According to James C. Coyne, “Traditionally, the term ‘endogenous’ has been invoked to differentiate depressions that are purportedly biological in etiology, without environmental precipitants, and that are less amenable to psychotherapy. Also, endogenous depressions are expected to be more responsive to somatically oriented interventions, notably electroconvulsive shock therapy and antidepressant medication. ‘Reactive’ has referred to depressions that are viewed as understandable reactions to some precipitating stress and that are both more suitable for psychotherapy and less responsive to somatic therapies. The distinction was originally based on the supposition that some depressions are related to precipitating events and others seem to appear without them and that this would predict response to treatment and clinical course.” Coyne’s objection to this view is only to the ready separability of the two types that it implies: “After a long history of debate and controversy, there is a growing consensus that the differentiation of endogenous and reactive depression is useful, but that they represent points along a continuum, rather than two distinct forms of disorder” (“Ambiguity and Controversy: An Introduction,” in Essential Papers on Depression, ed. James C. Coyne [New York: New York University Press, 1985], 16, 17). The fact that psychotherapy has a role to play suggests that the curse is not purely a matter of chemistry, a conclusion borne out by the fact that depressive episodes often do have identifiable triggers in external experience, also by the role that disrupted communication between a depressed parent and an infant can play in the infant’s eventual psychological destiny. The incompleteness of pharmacological explanations of depression is also suggested by a fact that is quite pertinent to Jewett’s concerns, that the incidence of depression is markedly higher in industrial and postindustrial societies. I emphasize the conjunction of the chemical with the

Notes to Chapter 6    mental or spiritual because I do not feel that Jewett’s ignorance of serotonin condemns her to be an eloquent chronicler of what depression feels like with nothing of note to say about what it is or what to do about it. At the same time, I do not wish to impugn, by implication or silence, the immense value of antidepressant medications. 38.  Jewett, 1874 Diary. 39.  Ibid. 40.  Judith Fetterley, “Reading Deephaven as a Lesbian Text,” in Sexual ­P ractice / Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), 164–65. 41.  Marjorie Pryse, “Archives of Female Friendship and the ‘Way’ Jewett Wrote,” New England Quarterly 66 (March 1993): 47–66. 42.  Jewett, 1874 Diary, quoted in Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 71. 43.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 72. 44.  Jewett, 1874 Diary. 45.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 44. 46.  Ibid., 72. 47.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 71–72. On Jewett’s life during this period, see also Pryse, “Archives of Female Friendship,” 47–66. 48.  Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Essential Papers on Object-Loss, ed. Rita V. Frankiel (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 38– 52. This is an extraordinarily useful compendium of theoretical work on mourning and melancholia. For the points made in the paragraph to which this note is appended, see Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States,” 95–122; John Bowlby, “Pathological Mourning and Childhood Mourning,” 185–221; Helene Deutsch, “Absence of Grief,” 222–31; Edith Jacobson, “The Return of the Lost Parent,” 233–50; Robert L. Tyson, “Some Narcissistic Consequences of Object Loss: A Developmental View,” 252–70; Martha Wolfenstein, “How Is Mourning Possible?” 334–62; Robert A. Furman, “Additional Remarks on Mourning and the Young Child,” 363–75; Robert A. Furman, “A Child’s Capacity for Mourning,” 376–81; Erna Furman, “Some Effects of the Parent’s Death on the Child’s Personality Development,” 382–402; and Paul M. Lerner, “The Treatment of Early Object Loss: The Need to Search,” 469. See also Alexander Lowen, Depression and the Body (New York: Penguin, 1993); and Peter Shabad, Despair and the Return of Hope: Echoes of Mourning in Psychotherapy (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 2001). 49.  Jacques Hassoun, The Cruelty of Depression: On Melancholy, trans. David Jacobson (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), xxi, 6, 77–78, 53. 50.  Ibid., xxvii. 51.  Ibid., 29. 52.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 81. 53.  Elizabeth Silverthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer’s Life (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1993), 73. 54.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 72, 71–72. 55.  Sarah Orne Jewett, “The Shore House,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1873, 368.

   Notes to Chapter 6 56.  Jewett, “The Shore House,” 358. 57.  Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 141. 58.  Jewett, 1874 Diary. 59.  Roman, Sarah Orne Jewett, 40–53. 60.  See, for example, Sarah Way Sherman, Sarah Orne Jewett: An American Persephone (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989), 124, 328. 61.  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 40–41. 62.  Brown, Sense of Things, p. 90; and Louis A. Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 43–72. 63.  Brown, Sense of Things, 83, 92. 64.  Sarah Orne Jewett, “Deephaven Cronies,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1875, 320. 65.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 62. 66.  Alison Byerly, “Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature,” Criticism 41 (Summer 1999): 349, 350, 351, 352, 357, 357–58. 67.  Brown, Sense of Things, 118. 68.  Zagarell, “Troubling Regionalism,” 649. 69.  Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 133. 70.  Ibid., 140, 141, 138, 136, 135. 71.  Ibid., 162, 151–52. 72.  Francis Otto Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 149. 73.  Jacques Lacan, “Intervention on Transference,” trans. Jacqueline Rose, in In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 99. 74.  Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 183. 75.  Fetterley, “Reading Deephaven as a Lesbian Text,” 177. 76.  Fetterley and Pryse, Writing out of Place, 123–24. 77.  Stewart, On Longing, 48. 78.  Ibid., 109, 132–33. 79.  Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” 251; Zagarell, “Troubling ­Regionalism,” 643. 80.  Stewart, On Longing, 110. 81.  Ibid., 109. 82.  For a deep exploration of the relation between grief and hunger, see Julia Stern, “ ‘I Am Cruel Hungry’: Dramas of Twisted Appetite and Rejected Identification in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons,” in American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard, ed. Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinaur (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 107–27. 83.  Peter Shabad, “The Most Intimate of Creations: Symptoms as Memorials to One’s Lonely Suffering,” in Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and

Notes to Chapter 6    Memory at Century’s End, ed. Peter Homans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 197–212. 84.  Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 192. 85.  Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 152. 86.  Helen’s interest in instances of failed mourning resonates with the narrator’s interest in poor Joanna in The Country of the Pointed Firs and perhaps helps us to a larger understanding of that solitary writer. 87.  Fetterley, “Reading Deephaven as a Lesbian Text,” 180. 88.  Julia Bader, “The Dissolving Vision: Realism in Jewett, Freeman, and Gilman,” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 177. 89.  Bowlby, “Pathological Mourning and Childhood Mourning,” 200, 212, 202. 90.  Lerner, “Treatment of Early Object Loss,” 470. 91.  Alison Easton, “ ‘How Clearly the Gradations of Society Were Defined’: Negotiating Class in Sarah Orne Jewett,” in Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, ed. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 211, 212. See also Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 89–90. 92.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 186, 68–79. 93.  Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, in Autobiographies, ed., Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 23. 94.  George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 32. 95.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Guardian Angel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887; original publication, 1867), 78. 96.  Buell E. Cobb Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), vii, 4. 97.  James S. Stewart, The Wind and the Spirit (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1968), 16, 12, 13. 98.  William Barclay, The Gospel of John, with an Introduction and Interpretation, vol. 2, chaps. 8–21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), 194–95. 99.  Theophilus Parsons, The Infinite and the Finite (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), 79–80. There is a passage in Jewett’s diary that appears to be a transcription from Parsons, though I have not been able to locate the source. The passage concerns “spiritual faculties” and “natural faculties,” the latter being precise and reductive, the former respecting the limits of understanding ( Jewett, 1874 Diary). 100.  Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1993), 142–43. 101.  Follen, Selections from the Writings of Fenelon, 253, 114, 226. Fénelon’s quietism is discussed in the opening “Memoir of Fenelon,” 13. 102.  Ibid., 270. 103.  Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, xvii–xviii. 104.  Jewett, 1874 Diary.

   Notes to Chapter 7

Chapter 7

1.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays, with an introduction and notes by Arthur Mizener (New York: Scribner’s, 1957), 184. 2.  Ibid., 184. 3.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 80–81. 4.  Ibid., 81, 81, 79. 5.  Ibid., 71. 6.  Arthur Mizener, in fact, considers “Author’s House” to be a continuation of the same urgent meditation that produced The Crack-Up essays. Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, 183. 7.  Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, 69. 8.  Ibid., 185. 9.  Ibid., 189. 10.  Quoted in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1981), 15. 11.  Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1:99–165. 12.  Ibid., 165–207. 13.  Nicholas T. Rand, “Secrets and Posterity: The Theory of the Transgenerational Phantom,” in Abraham and Torok, Shell and the Kernel, 166, 168. 14.  Abraham and Torok, Shell and the Kernel, 174. 15.  Christopher Bollas, “Moods and the Conservative Process,” in The Shadows of the Object: Psychoanalysis and the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 133. Thanks to Kathleen Woodward for introducing me to Bollas’s essay. 16.  Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 37–38. Santner is quoting from Michael Schneider, “Fathers and Sons, Retrospectively: The Damaged Relationship Between Two Generations,” New German Critique 59 (Winter 1984): 43. 17.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; repr., New York: Scribner’s, 1980), 112. 18.  William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1984), 177. 19.  William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms] (New York: Vintage, 1990), 273. 20.  Richard C. Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 21.  Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard (1958; repr., New York: Penguin, 1987), 129. 22.  Ibid., 9. 23.  Ibid., 112. 24.  Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 48. 25.  Ibid., 182. 26.  Ann Charters, ed., A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac, 1939–1975 (New York: Phoenix Bookshop, 1975), 16–17. 27.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1941), 85.

Notes to Chapter 8   

Chapter 8

1.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text (New York: Scribner’s, 1991), 137. Hereafter all quotations from the novel will refer to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as GG followed by the page number. 2.  Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970), 316. 3.  My understanding of the connection between nationalism, symbolization, and the simplification of historical reality is heavily indebted to John F. Callahan, The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972): What, in America, have been the relations between complex human personality, history, and those myths summoned to explain the facts of history? What in the national past tempts succeeding generations to evade their history and seek mythologies of fraudulent innocence. Particularly misleading, when applied to history, is the mythic mode’s assumption that ongoing experience endlessly repeats past patterns of action and policy. Nevertheless, history and myth raise the same question for America: how does history rationalized subvert personality? How have dominant myths swayed consciousness away from complexity and freedom? Why have fixity, stereotype and a one-dimensional, denotative perception won out over fluidity, archetype, and personality in the round? (3)

4.  Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20. 5.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Washington, D.C.: Microcard Editions, 1973), 54–56. 6.  Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, 24. 7.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribner’s, 1963), 490. 8.  Quoted in Richard Hadlock, Jazz Masters of the Twenties (New York: Da Capo, 1988), 30. 9.  Quoted in Marshall W. Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 182. 10.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 16. 11.  This quotation originally appeared in Alain Locke, The New Negro (1925), but I found it in Kathy J. Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7. Ogren’s book has been extremely helpful. I am also indebted to Burton Paretti, The Creation of Jazz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Samuel Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (New York: Da Capo, 1962); Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); and Sidney Bechet’s autobiography, Treat It Gentle (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960). I am especially indebted to Richard Hadlock, both for his Jazz Masters of the Twenties and for his weekly Sunday night radio show, “The Annals of Jazz,” from KCSM in San Mateo, California, and also at KCSM.org on the Web. 12.  Burnett James, Bix Beiderbecke (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961), 15.

   Notes to Chapter 8 13.  Stearns, Story of Jazz, 180. 14.  Ogren, Jazz Revolution, 159. 15.  Ibid., 161. 16.  Edward Jablonski, Gershwin: A Biography (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 66–67; and Stearns, Story of Jazz, 165–67. 17.  For a discussion of the relation between jazz and symphonic performance during this period, see Bernard Gendron, “Jamming at Le Boeuf: Jazz and the Paris Avant-Garde,” Discourse 12 (1989–90): 3–27. 18.  Calvin Tompkins, Living Well Is the Best Revenge (New York: Viking, 1962), 32, 116–17. 19.  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1972), 8. 20.  Williams, Jazz Tradition, 252. 21.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 64. Hereafter all quotations from the novel will refer to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as LT followed by the page number. 22.  My feeling that this is Fitzgerald’s breakthrough (rather than a breakdown) moment, and that he felt it to be so, is reinforced by the presence of an item from his personal erotic code, bare feet. In a ledger he composed to help him recall his early years, Fitzgerald remembered that in August 1901, he “went to Atlantic city—where some Freudean complex refused to let him display his feet, so he refused to swim, concealing the real reason” (Fitzgerald, Letters, 9). For July 1903, he writes: “There was also a boy named Arnold who went barefooted in his yard and peeled plums. Scott’s Freudian shame about his feet kept him from joining in” (Fitzgerald, Letters, 11). In This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine is at one point the victim of a fantasmatic tormentor who leers at Blaine as if in full knowledge of Blaine’s worst traits: “Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong . . . with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew. . . . It was like weakness in a good woman, or food on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain. He wore no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them to the end. . . . They were unutterably terrible” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise [New York: Scribner’s, 1986], 113). The “terrible incongruities” anticipate the “Jazz History,” so it is not surprising that race would surface shortly after: “The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep, paled to a livid bronze . . . Axia’s beseeching voice floated down the shaft. Those feet . . . those feet” (114). 23.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 18–19. 24.  Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291. 25.  Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 17. 26.  Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 147–48. See John F. Callahan, Illusions of a Nation, 82, on this passage.

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Index

Abraham, Nicholas, 251–52, 286n7 Adams, Clover, 166 Adams, Henry, 125 Aeolian Hall concert (Paul Whiteman ­Orchestra), 271–73 Alcott, Bronson, 123 Alcott, Louisa May, 176 Althusser, Louis, 264, 270 American history, literary reactions to, 69– 71, 115, 22–33, 71, 93–5, 118–19, 124–25, 138–39, 141–42, 163–66, 171–73, 215, 255, 263–66, 274–75 American literary tradition, 1–2, 11–33 Anderson, Benedict, 9, 27–28, 278 Angus, Douglas R., 28 Ariès, Philippe, 163–64, 215 Armstrong, Louis, 269, 273 Atlantic Monthly, 186, 187, 196, 205, 221, 227 Atwood, Margaret, 18–19 Augustine, 67 Bachelard, Gaston, 142, 191 Bacon, Francis, 88 Bader, Julia, 220 Baker, Carlos, 174–75, 176 Baker, Chet, 259 Balibar, Etienne, 264, 270 Barbe-Marbois, Francois, 96, 97, 98 Barclay, William, 235–36 Barth, John, 281n2 Baudrillard Jean, 74, 287n9 Benveniste, Emile, 132–34, 136–37 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 9, 11, 67, 124–26 Berlant, Lauren, 3, 28, 265, 268 Beverley, Robert, 100

Bhabha, Homi, 278–79 Bible, 35, 105, 150; David, 160; Genesis 11: 4, 186–87; “In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions” (John 14), 231–32, 234–36; Jeremiah 31:15 and Matthew 2:17–18, Rachel’s mourning in, 53–54; Job, 52, 160; John 11:1 and Matthew 6:9, the Lord’s Prayer and, 160; King of Glory Psalm, (Psalm 24), 245–46; Luke 17:32–33, Lot’s wife in, 42; Birckhead, Kate, 177–78, 181, 182 Blanchard, Paula, 164–65, 182, 186, 255 blues, the, 160–61 Bollas, Christopher, 252–53 Bowlby, John, 226 Bradstreet, Anne, 58, 73–83, 94, 130, 239; elegiac poetry, memory and grief, 77–85; poetic ambition, 13–15. Works: “Contemplations,” 82–83; “Epitaph on Her Mother, Mrs. Dorothy Dudley,” 77; “The Flesh and the Spirit,” 76–77, 92; “The Quarternions,” 73–76; “Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666” 78–82; “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” 83 Brodhead, Richard, 171, 172, 173–74, 175, 195 Brodie, Fawn, 109–110 Brontë, Charlotte, 189 Brontë, Emily, 189 Brooks,Van Wyck, 156 Brown, Bill, 172, 195, 196, 197 Brown, Charles Brockden, 28 Browne, Thomas, 199 Buell, Lawrence, 2

   Index Buffon, Comte de, 104–6, 108, 113 Burke, Edmund, 26, 91, 147 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 176 Burton, Robert, 199 Byerly, Alison, 196–97 Byrd, William, 98–99, 100 Calhoun, John C., 141 Callahan, John F., 22, 303n3 Calvin, John, 57, 69 Carlyle, Thomas, 141, 147, 187 Carpentier, Alejo, 95 Channing, William Ellery, 144, 156 Chastellux, Marquis de, 84 Chinard, Gilbert, 85, 88, 291n5 class, 11, 228, 256 Clifford, James, 172–73 Cobb, Buell E., Jr., 233 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 147 Cooper, James Fenimore, 28 Coyne, James C., 298n37 Crane, Hart, 12 Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. Jean de , 124 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, 201 DeLillo, Don: White Noise, 169–70 democracy 26, 46–47, 113–21, 278–79 depression. See mourning, blocked Derleth, August 190 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 59, 60, 61, 286n7 Dickens, Charles, 38, 196 Dickey, Lawrence, 57 Dickinson, Emily, 10, 36, 72, 166, 259 Dillon, Elizabeth, 9 Dos Passos, John, 85–86 Douglass, Frederick, 232 Du Bartas, Guillaume, 74 Dudley, Thomas, 74 Dyer, Mary 287n16 Easton, Alison, 228 Eliot, George, 232 Ellington, Duke, 261 Ellison, Ralph, 273 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 21, 72, 127, 141, 147, 149, 155, 183, 277. Works: English Traits, 23–25; “Experience,” 33–36, 166– 67; “Nature,” 33; “The Poet,” 122–23; “Self-reliance,” 35 Evans, Bill, 176

Farrell, James J., 163–64, 215 Faulkner, William, 51, 196, 254–55, 264 The Federalist: no. 1 (Hamilton), 25–26; no. 49 (Madison), 26 Fénelon, François, 160, 241–42 Ferguson, Robert, 87, 92–96, 97 Fetterley, Judith, 166, 176, 181, 204, 205, 219 Fifth Monarchism, 289–90n29 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 16–23, 25, 32, 94, 169, 175, 247–55, 257–80: archaeology of American longing, 263–64; assimilated symptoms, 251–52; brief epochs, symbolization and social wholeness, 264– 66; desire, disappointment and narrative rhythm, 259–61; echoes between his life and Jack Kerouac’s, 255; emptiness and openness, 261–62; horror of bare feet, 304n22; inheritance of his mother’s mourning, 248–54; inherited mourning as the origin of his career, 247–54; jazz as disturbance, 266–74; lacking a self, 249–50; mood as conservation, 252–53; overidentification with others’ emotions and ensuing crisis, 248–49; parental absenteeism, 253; reformulation of basic assumptions in The Last Tycoon, 274–80; self-injury, 251; writing as mastery, 257–58; writing as self-analysis, 258–59. Works: “Author’s House,” 247– 48, 250–51; “The Crack-Up,” 248–50, 277; “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” 264, 270; The Great Gatsby, 11, 12, 15–18, 20, 21– 22, 25, 250, 254, 248–49, 260–61, 262, 262, 264, 265–69, 275, 277–78; The Last Tycoon, 262, 264, 280, 274–80; Tender is the Night, 19–20, 21–23, 25, 32, 248, 265, 277, 279; This Side of Paradise, 304n22 Fitzgerald, Molly McQuinlan (mother of F. Scott Fitzgerald), 251–54 Foucault, Michel, 107 Franklin, Benjamin, 86–87, 89, 105, 116, 122 Franklin, Wayne, 92–96 Frary, I. T., 85 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 190 Freud, Sigmund, 32, 38, 61, 63–64, 182–83, 202, 253–54, 263, 285–86n7 frontier, American 18–19 Fry, Joshua, 99 Fulbrook, Mary, 57

Index    Gellner, Ernest, 32 gender, 65–66, 288–89n22 gender preference, 11, 125, 180–82, 184–85 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 73, 166, 190–91 Ginsberg, Allen, 12 Hadlock, Richard, 303n11 Hale, Edward Everett: “The Man Without a Country,” 28–32, 42 Hamilton, Alexander, 25–26, 124 Hammett, Dashiell, 14 Hassoun, Jacques, 183–84 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 28, 51 Heely, Joseph, 90–91, 95 Hegel, G. W. F., 57–67, 68, 72, 78, 96, 123, 130, 288–89n22; on Antigone in The ­Phenomenology of Spirit, 58–67; Philosophy of Right, 66 Heidegger, Martin, 7–8, 72–73, 143 Hemings, Sally, 110 Hemingway, Ernest, 264 Henderson, Fletcher, 271 Henry, Patrick, 113 Herbert, T. Walter, 45 Hitchcock, Alfred, 247, 275 Hobsbawm, E. J., 3, 25, 47 Hodeir, Andre, 269–70 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 232–33 Howells, William Dean, 171, 186 Hume, David, 58, 89 Hurston, Zora Neale, 173, 264 Hutcheson, Francis, 58 Hutchinson, Anne, 70, 287–88n16 Irving, Washington, 28, 196 Jackson, Andrew, 274 Jackson, Charles O., 163, 215 Jacobs, Harriet, 12 James, Alice, 166 James, Burnett, 271 James, C. L. R., 45 James, Henry, 28, 183; “The Beast in the Jungle” 167–69 James, William, 63, 127 Jameson, Frederic, 7 jazz. See under music Jefferson, Martha Wayles (wife of Thomas Jefferson), 94

Jefferson, Peter (father of Thomas Jefferson), 99 Jefferson, Thomas, 84–121, 124, 130, 168, 240, 276; aesthetics of garden design, 89–91; American character, 96; American cultural achievement and the American future, 105–7; assessments of Native American and African American physical and cultural life, 106–13; biographical circumstances and the composition of Notes on the State of Virginia, 92–95; cartography and surveying as noninductive activities, 97–103; contradiction as generative experience, 88–121; inductive government, 113–15; inductive reasoning, 87–97; Monticello, 84–85, 86, 87, 89, 12; the natural bridge and the Potomac breach, 103–4; practicality, 85–88; salutary insurrection, 118–19; the separation of powers, 119–20; worries concerning the American future, 115–18. Works: the Declaration of Independence, 109; “Description of Louisiana,” 100, 103; “Dialogue Between the Head and the Heart,” 91–92; Letter to John Manners, 97, 111, 116, 291n9; “Memoranda From a Tour of Rural France,” 92, 103, 113; Notes on the State of Virginia, 92–121 Jehlen, Myra, 18 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 162–66, 170–246, 253, 261, 298–99n37; biographical circumstances and the composition of Deephaven, 164–66, 177–78, 180–82, 185–87; Christian faith and mourning, 230–34; culturally sanctioned expressions of grief, 212–19; Deephaven and The Country of the Pointed Firs, 174–75, 228; Deephaven and regionalism, 170–77; depression, 178–90; the desire to arrest time, 225–27; disturbance of regionalist spectatorship, 203–13; funerals, 236–40; the Gothic, 188–91; lesbian affections, 180–82; the lifting of depression, 244–46; loss and addiction, 208–12, 221–22; narration, 175–76, 194–95; pity for melancholiac characters, 219–29; regionalism as appropriation (sketches, souvenirs, collections), 193–203; time, change and tradition, 241–44. Works: The Country of the Pointed Firs 197, 197, 201; Deephaven, 162–246;

   Index Diary, 165–66, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187, 230 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 209 Jones, Gayl, 51

Lucretius, 135–36 Lukács, Georg, 13, 120, 288–89n22 Luminists, 244–45 Luther, Martin, 58, 71

Kafka, Franz, 286n7 Kane, Dudley C., 158 Kant, Immanuel, 58, 107, 147 Kaplan, Amy, 171, 172, 207 Keats, John, 157; “This Living Hand,” 136 Kerouac, Gabrielle Ange (mother of Jack Kerouac), 255–58 Kerouac, Jack, 12, 15, 17, 169, 255–62: desire, disappointment, and narrative rhythm, 259–61; echoes between his life and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, 255; emptiness and openness, 261–2; inheritance of his mother’s mourning, 255–57; inherited mourning as the origin of his career, 257–58; writing as mastery, 257–58; writing as self-analysis, 258–59. Works: On the Road 12, 15, 17, 258–59, 260–61; The Subterraneans 259; Visions of Gerard 255–58 Kierkegaard, Søren, 50, 260 Koch, Adrienne, 85–87, 88, 291n5 Kojève, Alexandre, 288–89n22 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 156 Kuberski, Philip, 14 Kuhn, T. S., 291n9

Madison, James, 26–28 Malone, Dumas, 97, 99, 100 Mansell, Darrell, 272 Mansfield, Luther S., 44, 48–49 Marx, Karl, 48–49 Marx, Leo, 18, 293n41 Mather, Cotton, 57, 74 Matthiessen, F. O., 145, 201, 295n3 melancholy (melancholia). See mourning, blocked Melville, Herman, 5, 8, 10, 29, 36–56, 145, 154, 183, 196, 199, 201. Works: Redburn, 8; all other references are to Moby-Dick Miller, John Chester, 111–12 Miller, Michael Vincent, 183 Miller, Perry, 18, 69–70, 82 Monk, Thelonious, 273 Montesquieu, Baron de, 117–19 Montgomery, L. M., 176 Moreland, Richard C., 254 Morrison, Toni, 51, 72, 240 mourning, theory of, 37–39, 57–73, 178–88, 247–54, 285–86n7; and addictions, 210– 11, 221–22, 255, 262; blocked (melancholy, depression), 33–73, 166–69, 178– 203, 247–54, 298–99n37; and funerary practices, 39–40, 60–61, 161–63, 232–33, 236–240; inherited, 247–54; and possessions, 162–63, 193–202, 213–15, 225–26; and religion, 40–46, 49, 52–55, 57–58, 67–78, 160–62, 166, 230–46, 256–57, 265; sublimation of (sacrifice and transcendence), 8–73, 146–52; unblocking of, 55–56, 72–83, 93–95, 161–62, 203–46, 261–62, 274–80; and writing, 73–83, 92– 96, 144, 153–59, 185–88, 195–97, 257–62, 263–64; see also literary form Mulligan, Gerry, 259 music, 6–9, 22–64, 124, 160–61, 232–33; jazz, 259, 266–74, 277, 303n11

Lacan, Jacques, 62, 169, 202 Lawrence, D. H., 1, 93 Lefort, Claude, 279 Lerner, Alan J., and Frederick Loewe, Brigadoon, 225–26 Lerner, Paul M., 226–27 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 112, 259 Lewis, Thomas, 99–100 Lewis and Clark expedition, 100 Lincoln, Abraham, 28 Lindemann, Erich, 161–62, 240 literary form, 73–83, 92–96, 122–24, 121–41, 153–59, 195–97, 257–61, 264–74; see also mourning, writing and Locke, John, 88, 89, 91, 102–3, 113–15, 116 Lomax, Alan, 25 Lovecraft, H. P., 190 Lovejoy, A. O., 107 Lovelace, Richard F., 57

nationality and nationalism, 2–33, 57–78, 96–97, 105–6, 122–24, 141–42, 171–73, 263–66, 268, 278–79, 303n3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 73

Index    Ogren, Kathy, 272 Olson, Charles, 37–38, 40 Paine, Thomas, 26, 116 Parsons, Olive W., 294n1 Parsons, Theophilus, 239 Pease, Donald, 45 Pepper, Art, 259 Peterson, Merrill, 93 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 190 Plath, Sylvia, 162 Plato, 68 Poe, Edgar Allan, 275 Popper, Karl, 88–89, 91, 104–5, 291–92n9 Proust, Marcel, 295–96n3 Pryse, Marjorie, 166, 176, 205 Puritan typology and hermeneutics, 67–78 Pynchon, Thomas, 5, 13–18 race and ethnicity, 11–12, 71, 106–13, 266–74, 276–77 Raleigh, Walter, 75 Rand, Nicholas, 252 Raynal, Abbé, 105–9, 113 Reagan, Ronald, 286–87n8 regionalism, 169–77, 193–203, 207–8, 276– 77, 225–28 religion. See mourning and religion Renan, Ernst, 26–27 Renza, Louis A., 195 Rittenhouse, David, 105 Robinson, Marilynne, 54, 72, 166 Roman, Margaret, 176, 177–78, 181, 187 Romines, Ann, 176 Rowlandson, Mary White, 42–43 Rushdie, Salman: Midnight’s Children 2–10, 13, 14, 21, 23, 44, 49, 124, 281n2 Sancho, Ignatius, 109 Sandburg, Carl, 25 Santner, Eric, 253 Schiller, Friedrich, 170, 173, 198, 203, 213, 214, 239 Schneider, Michael, 253 Schuyler, Montgomery, 87 Scott, Walter, 31 Sebald, W. G., 199 Shabad, Peter, 212 Shakespeare, William: Macbeth, 26 Shays’ Rebellion, 118–19

Sidney, Philip, 74 Smith, Henry Nash, 18 Sophocles: Antigone, 58–67 Spenser, Edmund, 74 Staunton Assembly, 115–16 Stearns, Marshall, 271 Stern, Julia, 300n82 Sterne, Laurence, 281n2 Stevens, Wallace, 90, 150, 153 Stewart, James S., 234 Stewart, Susan, 207–8, 198–201 Stokowski, Leopold, 270–71 Superman, 226 Sussman, Henry, 58, 285n2 Swan, Timothy, 233 Sweet, Timothy, 290n32 Tamarkin, Elisa, 12 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 226 Taylor, Edward, 67 Thackeray, William, 196 Thomson, Charles, 89 Thoreau, Henry David, 12, 144–59, 199; beachcombing, 150–51; biographical circumstances and the composition of Cape Cod, 144; Cape Cod and Walden, 144–45; wreckage, fragments and writing, 153–59; wreckage and beauty, 152–53; wrecks and bodies on the shore, 146–50. Works: Cape Cod, 144–59; Walden, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 295–96n3; A Week on the Concord and Merrimac, 155 Tolchin, Neal, 38–39, 40, 288n20 Torok, Maria, 251–52, 286n7 Trilling, Lionel, 125 Turgenev, Ivan, 196 Twain, Mark, 12, 72, 78–79 Updike, John, 12, 15–16 Vallee, Rudy, 270 Van Vechten, Karl, 269, 273 Vincent, Howard P., 44, 45, 46 Ward, Nathaniel, 74 Warner, Michael, 46–47 Washington, George, 105, 122 Watts, Isaac, 233 Webster, Daniel, 28, 32–33, 138, 141, 142 Welles, Orson, 226

   Index Whatley, Thomas, 89–90 Wheatley, Phillis, 109 White, Hayden, 107 Whiteman, Paul, 271–73 Whitman, Walt, 4, 5, 12, 37–38, 40, 46, 72, 122–43, 145; antebellum politics, 124–25, 138, 141–43; contradiction and transcendence, 123–24, 129–31; deictic words, 132–37; depictions of sexuality and death, 125–28; Emerson and the Representative Man, 122–23; “I” and voice in Leaves of Grass, 122, 128–329, 131–37. Works: Calamus, 129; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 134; Democratic Vistas, 123; “Full of Life Now,” 136; “Invocation: To Workmen and Workwomen,” 137; “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” 123–24, 129; Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, 4, 79, 123, 139; “Recorders Ages Hence,” 134; “Respondez!” 139–41; “Salut au Monde!” 4, 137; “The Sleepers,” 125–26,

129, 141; “Song of Myself,” 4, 5, 37–38, 72, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 133, 136, 138; “This Compost,” 144; “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” 123–24, 127, 129; “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,” 137 Whitney, Adeline Dutton Traine, 175–76, 184 Williams, Martin, 274 Williams, William Carlos, 122, 129, 159 Wills, Gary, 104 Winthrop, John, 69 Wolfe, Thomas, 10, 12, 264 Woolf,Virginia, 239–40 Wordsworth, William, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” 169–70, 173 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 87, 89 writing. See mourning and writing Zagarell, Sandra, A., 172, 176, 197, 207 Zweig, Paul, 66