THE EXTRA

I have often wondered why my books on American literary

history, the Cycle and L. H. U. S., have received such wide
acceptance here and abroad, and yet the ideas underlying them and
forming a comprehensive theory of literary history have not.
Nobody speaks of Spiller as the father of a theory of history, such as
those of Turner and Toynbee. My only explanation of this
difference is the realization that Turner and Toynbee base their
ideas on essentially Darwinian and Horizontal yicvvs of the universe whereas my theorx of history is based on a circular \ iew like
that of Kinstein. Maybe some day this difference will be understood, and my theory of history will come into its own as a dynamic
process.
R. E. Spiller

America as Canon and Context: Literary History

in a Time of Dissensus
.s\<:\ A\ hKRcox i r c n
Inncrsiry

1 here's a simple reason for undertaking an American literary

history at this time. A lot has happened, critically and creatively,
since Robert Spiller's Literary History of the United States. And
besides, as Spiller then pointed out, every generation should
produce its own literary history. That revisionist challenge has
special resonance for Americanists. It recalls Jefferson's appeal for
social renewal with each generation. It echoes Emerson's "American Scholar": "Each age must write its own books; or rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period
^11 not fit this." There are new insights, new outlooks, new
thoughts. Why should we grope among the monuments ofthe past?
^menean Literature, Volume 58, Number i, March 1986. Copyright 1986 bv the Duke
"University Press. CCC 0002-9831/86/$!.50

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A simple and unexceptionable demand, in the American grain.

But of course the term American has become increasingly controversial in our time. So has the term literary history, considered
either as a genre or in its constituent parts, literary and history.
This is no mere quibbling over definitions. It is a recognition that
literary history, whatever it is, has always involved a consensus. In
particular, the Spiller History represented a consensus about the
term literary that involved the legitimation ofa certain canon, and a
consensus about the term history that was legitimated by a certain
concept of America. And during the past few decades consensus of
all kinds has broken downleft and right, political and aesthetic
broken down, worn out, or at best opened up, 'The risk we run in
undertaking an American literarv histor\ now is that it will be
perceived, upon its devoutly wished-for publication in 1989, as
being neither history nor literary nor American.
I speak specifically about the project Tve undertaken to edit, the
forthcoming multi-volume literary history, to be published by
Cambridge University Press. And let me say at once that I don't
see any solution to the problem I've posed. Or rather, the only
solution I see lies in making the problem itself the cornerstone of
the project. It was the achievement of the Spiller History to
consolidate three decades of scholarship. It will be our task to make
a virtue of dissensus. In this paper Til tr\ to set out some of the
practical aspects of the task. Mmorx Tllliort has discussed general
principles. Annette Kolodiiv has covered some of the theoretical
issues. My purpose is mainly descriptive. I would like to ofier a
process report; to give you some sense of the questions behind the
paste-board decisions, and to offer speculations about the problems
ahead.
How, then, to make a virtue out of dissensus.^ The first step is to
go with those whose dissensus it is; in effect, with Amerieanists
trained in the 'sixties and early 'seventies. That, in any case, is
what we did. T h e contributors are generally between tenure and
forty-five; they represent no special approach, school, network, or
set of principles, except the principles of excellence and balance.
They were chosen for the quality of their work, for their diversity
of views and interests, and for their openness to other, conflicting
views and interests. None of this necessarily implies a rift between

The Extra

ioi

generations. Some of these young scholars are confessed traditionalists; many are openly building upon the work of their teachers;
and all of them are committed to presenting not just their own
insights but those of peers and predecessors. Still, they will present
these from within a distinctive generational experience; and that
experience (of discontinuity, disruption, dissensus) requires its
distinctive form of expression. Which brings me to the second step
in our process. In considering a format for the History, no obvious
precedent came to mind. The omnium-gatherum seemed as
inappropriate for our purposes as did the alternative model of the
single-author history, and for much the same reasons. The eclectic
mode of the old (Cambridge History assumes comprehensiveness

and objectivity. The cyclical design of the Spiller History expresses

a single-minded attempt at synthesis.
Any contemporary effort, to recall Professor Elliott's apt reference to Bakhtin, should'be history in the dialogic mode. History as
narrative, dialogic narrative as literary history. That concept may
help explain our decision to restrict the number of contributors.
Lacking the authority for synthesis, we felt we should encourage
flexibility and reciprocity. Lacking faith in sheer plenitude, we felt
It necessary to allow fuller scope both for personal vision and for
active collaboration, not only within each volume, but across
volumes. In short, we wanted neither a host of piece-work
specialists to tll out a putative grand design, nor representatives of
host of eclectic constituencies to satisfy some putative statistical
norm. Perhaps the right term for the approach we sought is
integrative, in the sense of narrative integration, and with the
qualifications I just mentioned. Integrative, as distinct from either

eclectic or synthetic: personal voices, responsive to different

voices, but allowed ample development in their own right; continuities and contrasts between eras, emerging neither by chance nor
b editorial fiat, but through substantive interchange between
contributors. Clearly, the success of this precarious combination of
latitude and mutuality would depend on the size of the group. We
needed an Aristotelian mean between the hubris of Parrington's
o and the anonymity of Spiller's fifty-five "et al." We settled on
twenty-two contributors, for five volumes of about six hundred
pages each.

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Twenty-two spokespersons for dissensus! I cannot say that the

prospect filled me with confidence. The third step in our venture
was to bring the group together and see what assurances could be
worked out. Partly the conference centered on pracdcal matters.
But most of it, and by all accounts the most reassuring part, was
devoted to the moot-points. Without compromising on their basic
differences, the contributors found they could agree on what the
central problems were; on the central importance of history in
dealing with those problems; and on a narrative form that would
embody, in texture and substance, the questions they brought to
the literature. When Nina Baym invited me to participate in this
panel, my first thought was to offer a summarv' of their discussions.
No doubt that would have been the more interesting paper. Hut it
would have b e e n theirs, n o t n i i n e . S o I offer instead this o v e r v i e w
o f t h e problems behind the (Conference; a n d n o w (in t h e s p a c e
remaining) some speculations on the sorts of problems I expect
we'll face in the process of writing the History. And in the interests
of controversy, as well as time, I've singled out one issue in

particularone of many, but characterisdc of the others, I believe,

and relevant to quesdons of canon and context alike. Who knows,
this may prove here and now that dissensus can be the basis for
fruitful discussion.
The issue is ideology and it begins with the word "America."
Professor Elliott offers a sensible solution to the choice in title
between America and the I ni ted States^*' American Literary

History," or "A Litcrarv History ot" the Inited States." The

United States, he points out, dates from 1776, and we want to
include the colonial period. But as he also implies, the alternative
involves more than chronology. For the fact is that America, as it
was appropriated by the United Statesas, indeed, it came to
disdnguish the United States, in the view not only of self-styled
Americans, but of other groups of Americans as well from Canada
to BrazilAmerica, as it was thus conceived before and after the
Revolution, from the Magnalia Christi Americana through The
Rising Glory of America and "The American Scholar" to An
American DreamAmerica, in all these various forms and contexts,
from Mather to Mailer, is quintessentially an ideological term. By
comparison, the United States is humbly descriptive. America was

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from the start a demonstration of ideology in actionideas in the

service of p)ower, a system of beliefs imposed upon a so-called New
World and then developed in a long procession of declarations
(political, religious, poetic, intellectual) into a network of meanings
that linked personal and culture identity, prophetic vision and
social action, concepts of aesthetic form and norms of daily
behavior.
That's the best reason, I think, for putting American in the title:
it opens literary history to problems of ideology. To set these in
perspective, I digress for a moment to point out that the history of
our literary histories hitherto has been the conflict over the
meaning of America. One tradition, mainly genteel and Anglophile, contends that since the term is politicalideological, we
might sav, in the narrow sense, and certainly in a sense distinct
trom aestheticsince America is essentially a politieal entity, our
great literature properly belongs to the context of English or world
literature. The other tradition, nativist and often Anglophobic, in
effect joins literature and culture by claiming that conceptually
"America" transcends ideology. The claim is not unlike that made
for religious art. Since the concept of America embodies a set of
universal values, a cluster of ideals that has lent distinctive form
and content to our social institutions as well as to our classic texts, it
follows that the proper context of those texts lies in our national
development. FVedietably, this tradition has been the dominant
one. It runs from Samuel Knapp and the ^Oung America Movement through Tyler, Parrington, and Brooks, and it may be said to
have reached its apotheosis in the Spiller History.
What I've called the ideological view differs from these two
traditions fundamentally. It denies both the disjunction of politics
from art and the transcendent claims ofthe American Way. It sees
the ideal America, as well as the actual America, in relativistic,
historical terms, as expressing a certain way of life. It reminds us
(what some of our best writers sometimes make us forget) that
individualism, self-reliance, and liberal democracy are no more or
less absolute, no more or less true to the laws of nature and the
mmd, than the once-eternal truths of providence, hierarchy, and
the divine right of kings. And in doing so, it calls attention to the
fact that the term America has served not just to reveal, but to

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conceal and exclude: aesthetically, to exclude entire bodies of

literature (and by implication entire "literary communities") from
the canon; historically, to conceal the fact that America is not some
overarching synthesis, e pluribus unum, but a rhetorical battlegrounda symbol that has come to stand, over three centuries of
contradiction and change, for a variety of alternative modes of
identity and belief. Most important, for my present purpose, the
ideological view of America differs from the two traditions I've
outlined in that it problematizes, rather than resolves, the relation
between canon and context.
Let me illustrate this by recalling that the canon we've inherited
was formed, in part at least, through a revaluation of our now classic
writers as subversives. The literarv establishment that substituted
Song of Myself {ox The Song of Hiawatha, and \x\xs\ Moby Dirk into
sudden epic prominence, also tended to emphasize the duplicity in
Hawthorne, the protest in Thoreau, the antinomianism in Emerson. It amounted to a vision of cultural schizophrenia: a radical
literary tradition that was somehow culturally representative; a
canon of American myth-keepers (or keepers of the American
myth) who somehow transcended the foul Americanism drifting in
their wake. This ideal-versus-actual theme has been played out to
so many variations that it has come to seem a category of the
national psyche. But it may be that the dichotomy it asserts, like
that, perhaps, between Gatsby's lyrical smile and his meretricious
life, lies in the eye ofthe beholder. That is to say, it may lie in our
critical method, and specically in the distinction we have inherited between literary and historical analysis, as between the aesthetic and the cognitive faculties, or, more to my point, between myth
and ideology. We can trace that distinction through the entire
genre of American literary history. Myth is the product of imagination, the stuff of which canons are made. Ideology is commensurate
with politics, the stuff of which July Fourth orations are made, and
popular literature, and other elements of context.
This is one of the areas of consensus I referred to earlier, which
has broken down in the past decades. We have come to recognize,
on the one hand, the inescapable fictionality of our contextual
al, scientific, historical. On the other hand, we
know that myth, like ideology, is inescapably bounded by history

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and culturethat both myth and ideology are (among other things)
culturally-prescribed directives for thought and action, and that
both work by translating the historical into the universal: a
particular kind of man into mankind; a particular race or class into a
moral abstraction; a particular set of values into a metaphysics of
the Good. Nonetheless, we have persisted in the old dichotomies.
The sundard technique for doing so might be described as a
hermencutics of inversion. Since ideology pretends to truth, we
make it the task of anaiysis to uncover the sinister effects of its
fictions, or at least to point out the discrepancies between those
fictions and the real America. Since myths are fictions, we use
analysis to discover their "deeper truths," and at best to display the
harmonies which those deeper truths reveal between abiding
values and recurrent plots or metaphors. Hence the emphasis I
noted on cultural schizophrenia in our criticism. To be critical
about the myth of America is to appreciate it from within, to
explicate it "intrinsically," in its own "organic" terms. To be
critical about American ideology is to see through it, to expose its
historical functions, necessarily from an extrinsic, and often from a
hostile, perspective.
It will be a major task of the new American literary history to
bridge these two approaches. This is not to deny the vast distance
in mind and imagination between (say) Waiden and the Loco Foco
critiques of the market-place. No doubt Thoreau's is worth the
whole damn bunch of them put together. My pomt is simply that

the very term America resists the split between myth and ideology,
just as it resists the split between elite and popular culture, or
between national canon and national context. However we define
it, the parallel between myth and ideology is at once central to our
classic texts, and central to our history, and in either respect deeply
problematic. Any full history of our literature must account sympathetically for the symbolic richness of the ideologies that nourished
it. It must also account, extdnsically, contextually, for the way that
the literature is enmeshed in networks of ideology. Certainly a
work of art in some sense transcends; it may be said to be transhistorical, or trans-cultural, or even trans-canonical. But it can no
transcend ideology than an artist's mind can transcend
psychology; and it is worth remarking as a possibility that our great

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writers who transform political into universal normswho portray

American principles, as all ideology yearns to be portrayed, in the
transcendent colors of utopia or millenniummay be just as
implicated in the dominant culture as other, contextual writers,
and in the long run perhaps more useful in perpetrating it.
To repeat: this is not at all to reduce their achievement to
ideology. On the contrary: I believe that ideologically-aware
analysis will show the special capacities of language in some sense
to break free of the pK)wer structures which the language seems to
reflect, and so will help us see more clearly, and to define more
precisely, what we have found to be extraordinarw irreducible, and
uncontained about our major texts. Nor does what I've said m any
way denigrate the much-discussed subversiveness of our literary
tradition. Again, quite the reverse: 1 believe we can enrich the
discussion by subjecting familiar terms (utopia, actual versus ideal,
radicalism itself) to closer scrutiny. More than that, we can thereby
open directions in criticism which have been obscured, ideologically obscured, by the separation of art from politics. Here as
elsewhere, to recognize the limitations of ideology is to open up
interpretation; whereas, conversely, to deny those limitations is to
subject interpretation to ideology.
The distinction here lies at the heart of the "solution" I
ventured at the start of this paper. In its common meaning, 1
suppose, ideology precludes dialogue. It implies a programmatic
narrow-mindedness; a closed and exclusive system of ideas, usually
developed in opposition to alternative explanations, and militantly
committed to partiality, in the double sense of the term, as bias (or
special interest) and as fragmentation. All this, we know, is what
the concepts "America," "literary," and "history" are meant to
transcend. "America" has been presented as a mode of identity
that obviates ideology, not only as vision and ideal but as an
inclusive, pluralistic way of lifewhich is to say, as a culture that

transforms multiplicity into complementarity, reciprocity, and,

ultimately (i.e., teleologically), harmony and union. So, too, with
our "history": it has been presented as the objective account of
national progressan impartial, "factual" (i.e., disinterested)
overview of the country's growth from colony to world power. And
so, too, with our literary heritage: it has been presented as a series
of "classic writers" and "major works" authorized by standards that

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are timeless, universal, and inherent in the process of literary

creation.
The problem, simply stated, is that during the past decade those
very definitions (of America, history, and literary canon) have been
perceived as being themselves ideological. And the result, predictably, has been a fall from transcendence into history, or (in less
mythic terms) from consensus into dissensus, where consensus
involves the dominance of a certain literary establishment, and
where dissensus has all too often issued in a militant commitment
to partialitysectarian, closed, narrowly programmatic.
To make a virtue of dissensus would be to shape this generational experience into something that later decades will view as a
fortunate fall into history. That's what 1 had in mind in emphasizing the problem of ideologythat is, the use of ideological analysis
to specify the questions we share about canon and context, and so
to open up interpretation. Needless to say, this is not necessarily to
answer any of those questions; but it is to venture into the dialogic
mode; it begins the process of narrative integration. Ideology, let
me repeat in closing, is only one of many aspects ofthat process. It
will not concern all our contributors in the same way or to the same
extent. But I think it fairly represents their general attitude. All of
them, even those I termed traditionalists, have a resistance to
solutions, a healthv liminal scepticism about the formulaic, the
natural, and the self-evident. That's the negative side of our
project. T h e other, complementary side lies in the freshness of
perspective which the resistance provokesthe richness of the
problems at issue, the theoretical and practical challenges involved
in our inquiries. In either view, it seems likely that we will not,
thank God, arrive at some sweeping new synthesis. I hope our
History will set directions in American literary scholarship for the
next generations; but I think it's safe to say that it will not lead
them, like the fabled pillar of fire, out of the wilderness of

difference, partiality, and debate into a Canaan of unmediated

truth.
Announcements
Jackson R. Bryer (Dept. of English, Univ. of Maryland, College
Park, MD 20742) is planning a volume of bibliographical essays
surveying research done abroad in American literature. Individual

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