Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction

Writing the Republic

Writing the Republic

LIBERALISM AND MORALITY IN AMERICAN POLITICAL FICTION

Anthony Hutchison

Columbia University Press   New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-51190-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hutchison, Anthony, 1969–

Writing the republic : liberalism and morality in American political fiction /

Anthony Hutchison.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978–0–231–14138–3 (cloth : acid-free paper)

ISBN-13: 978–0–231–51190–2 (e-book)

1. Political fiction, American—History and criticism. 2. Liberalism in literature. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Politics in literature. 5. United States—In literature. 6. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 7. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PS374.P6H87 2007

810.9'358—dc22

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

for Sarah Barrett

(1940–1996)

and Damian Yates

(1969–2006)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Liberalism and the Problem of Tradition in American Literature

PART I

The Nineteenth-Century Context

1

Elusive Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson and the Foundations of American Politics in Gore Vidal’s Burr

2

Our Divine Equality: Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter and the Redemptive Liberalism of the Lincoln Republic

PART II

The Twentieth-Century Context

3

Ideas in Modulation: Marxism and Liberal Revaluation in Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey

4

Liberalism Betrayed: Neoconservatism and the Postwar American Left in Philip Roth’s American Trilogy

CONCLUSION

Writing the Republic: Moby Dick and the Form of American Political Fiction

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book couldn’t have been written without the influence and input of several members—past and present—of the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. To begin at the very beginning, I will always be grateful for having taken Douglas Tallack’s courses in U.S. intellectual history, which played a formative role in this project, igniting my interest in the relationship between ideas and American culture at an early stage. Sharon Monteith has offered helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this work. Dave Murray should also be thanked profusely for his careful supervision of this project in its doctoral incarnation as well as for introducing me to the endless ambiguities of Herman Melville. Paul Giles, now of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford, offered some useful tips at the very end of the process.

My greatest academic debt, however, is to Richard King, a genuine polymath, who has overseen this work’s progress (and arrested its regress) from the start. The continuing relevance of Hannah Arendt’s thought is just one of the many influences of his that this book bears. As a result of our many conversations over the years, I also now know how to successfully stage a one-man protest at the Grand Ole Opry and what a Tennessean might mean when he claims that dog won’t hunt—just about the only knowledge I’ve gathered from Richard that I’ve not managed to incorporate here.

Beyond Nottingham, I would like to thank Professor Ian Bell of the University of Keele for his comments and advice within the context of a viva voce that was much more straightforward than it had a right to be. The readers approached by Columbia University Press also produced extremely thorough and erudite commentaries that identified more than a few vulnerable spots. This work, I feel sure, is significantly sharper for their efforts. I also greatly appreciate the professionalism and conscientiousness of CUP editors Jennifer Crewe and Rob Fellman on my behalf.

I’d also like to thank my father and my brother Andy for always being there for me. If she were still alive, I know my mother would have been proud too—or, more likely, too proud. My children, Madeleine and Harry, quite naturally, have done nothing whatsoever to help bring this book to completion any quicker but have been a whole lot of fun. It is to my wife, Joanne, though, finally, that I owe by far the most in all manner of ways. Without her constant encouragement, support, and preternatural capacity just to put up with me I couldn’t have come close.

Short sections of chapters 3 and 4 have previously been published in Comparative American Studies and Rethinking History, respectively. A truncated version of chapter 2 has also appeared in the Journal of American Studies.

INTRODUCTION

LIBERALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF TRADITION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

I should say more than I mean if I asserted that a nation’s literature is always subordinated to its social state and political constitution. I know that, apart from these, there are other causes that give literature certain characteristics, but those do seem the most important to me.

There are always numerous connections between the social and the political condition of a people and the inspiration of its writers. He who knows the one is never completely ignorant of the other.

—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America

Tocqueville’s early recognition of an intimacy between literary and sociopolitical traditions emerges alongside his view that in a democracy each generation is a new people. This leads him to suggest that the literature produced by democracies such as the United States may well be characterized by a certain immaturity, manifest in facile forms of beauty, self-explanatory and immediately enjoyable. Unhampered by the weight of a literary tradition and its accompanying anxiety of influence, writers in a democracy need merely respond to readers who above all . . . like things unexpected and new. The style cultivated among such authors will thus often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. ¹

This particular sense of American exceptionalism was pursued further by twentieth-century cultural critics of the United States beginning with D. H. Lawrence who, in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), identified and championed a distinctive new voice in a nascent literary heritage hitherto dismissed as a mere accumulation of children’s tales.² Yet the fiction produced by Cooper, Melville, Twain, and others, as Lawrence attests, is far more complex than this characterization permits. Such ostensibly childish themes of generational rebirth, renewal, reinvention, and, most potently and problematically, American innocence are explored in these narratives as a form of democratic and cultural rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe.³ The great cultural progenitor of this in the aesthetic and philosophical realm is, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson—a figure who will be explored in chapter 2.

This antitradition tradition, so to speak, was most powerfully delineated in the works of a group of literary and cultural critics published in the years following World War II. Indeed, seminal studies such as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) played an instrumental role in the institutionalization of American Studies that attended and reinforced the United States’s rise to political, economic, and cultural eminence during this period. The mythopoeic quality of this criticism served to illuminate the influence of Emersonian individualism with reference to a wide range of tropes; these included, most prominently, the frontier or West (Smith), the Adamic figure (Lewis), and the pastoral (Marx). One important shared characteristic of this critical milieu was a concern with the presence of innocence—lost and/or regained—as a recurring theme in the American literary tradition.

Foremost among the consequences of this particular thematic, it was alleged, was a reluctance to engage with society in the fashion familiar from the tradition of the nineteenth-century European novel. Rebelling against this understanding of the novel, American fiction instead associated society with corruption, compromise, and loss of innocence. American authors chose to purify the form by showcasing characters whose central subjectivity-defining relationship was with nature as opposed to culture in the more rarefied sense (or nineteenth-century bourgeois conceptions of society). Adamic figures from Natty Bumppo to Huck Finn are thus portrayed as in retreat from society in some profound way and, as a consequence, still defined and energized by a pristine and frequently pastoral vision of American innocence.

This downgrading of social relations, it has been argued, explains a certain lacuna of the political in American fiction. American commentators on the political novel as a genre have outlined this problem with implicit acknowledgements of the obstacles presented by the U.S. literary tradition. If a 19th century American novelist chose a political theme, Irving Howe noted in Politics and the Novel (1957), he generally did so in order to expose the evils of corruption in government (America’s substitute, as someone has said, for ideology) or to bemoan the vulgarities of public life that were driving sensitive men into retreat.⁴ Robert Boyers, in a preface to his study of the genre a few decades later, Atrocity and Amnesia (1985), extends the charge of such exceptionalism as a hindrance to political fiction to a new postwar generation of American novelists: To discuss the relevant [postwar American] novels . . . would require an extended focus on the peculiar ‘Americanness’ of these works and direct us to matters largely unrelated to the themes of this book.

This idea of a disjunction between politics and literature, or what Boyers more precisely describes in terms of the cultural slippage in the United States between political intelligence and advanced literary thinking, was ostensibly addressed by a group of New Americanist critics in the 1980s and 1990s. Historicist in focus, scholars such as Donald Pease, Myra Jehlen, and Sacvan Bercovitch not only advanced a wide-ranging critique of the literary mythologies produced by critics such as Lewis and Smith but also launched a broader assault on the intellectual culture of the cold war. The central organizing concept in their critical arsenal was that of ideology, that is, in this instance, the prevailing systems of ideas out of which American myth can only ever be generated.

Their position hinged on a rejection of the myth critics’ notion of America as exceptional, as essentially a nation untainted by political ideologies. This was also the conclusion drawn by influential consensus historians of the 1950s, such as Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin, whose promotion of liberalism as the key to understanding such American exceptionalism provides one important context for the discussion to follow in chapter 1. This idea, it was argued, was merely a symptom of rhetorical excess on the part of a liberal culture, society, and polity threatened by the increasingly global reach of Soviet communist ideology. The popular mid-century end of ideology thesis, therefore, articulated by social commentator Daniel Bell (and legitimated in the work of the consensus school), served only to further obscure liberalism’s own status as the predominant ideology in the United States. In other words, it was a liberal end-of-ideology ideology. As we shall also see in the following chapter, a later postconsensus school of American intellectual historians publishing in the late 1960s and 1970s did much of the groundwork for the New Americanists of the 1980s in their exposure of liberalism as ideology or one competing group of ideas among others at various historical points.

Perhaps the pivotal text in the shift from myth to New Americanist understandings of the American literary tradition was the Bercovitch and Jehlen–edited collection Ideology and Classic American Literature (1986). Here, several of the older generation of critics such as Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, in a section entitled Reassessments, addressed those who had come to associate their earlier works with the pervasive ideological distortion that largely determined the intellectual climate of the cold war.⁵ This, it was contended, originated from a similar ideological strategy that prompted a contemporaneous consensus historiography to view the concept of ideology itself as quintessentially un-American.

Elsewhere in the volume, Donald Pease builds on such criticism to critique forty years of cold war readings of Moby Dick, beginning with that put forward by F. O. Matthiesson in American Renaissance (1941). Matthiesson’s reading, Pease argues, largely set the tone for the postwar reception of Melville’s novel that ultimately led to its canonical status. It did so, nonetheless, by reductively equating Ahab with a reckless totalitarian will and Ishmael with the principle of America’s freedom who hands us over to our heritage.⁶ This, however, Pease argues, represents an ideological distortion of a complex text, a text that also crucially reveal[s] the way Ishmael’s obsession depends on Ahab’s compulsion—an obsession, for Pease, analogous to the formidable totalizing logic of cold war liberalism. U.S. liberalism, in yet another cultural context, proves to be the ideology that dare not speak its name. Melville here, then, in Pease’s post–cold war reading, is taking aim not only at totalitarian ideology but also at the type of ideological maneuvering evident in postwar liberalism. In doing so, Pease concludes, he is asking us if we can survive the free world Ishmael has handed down to us.⁷

This and other interventions by the New Americanist critics would appear to have belatedly introduced a political dimension to our understanding of the American literary tradition. However, as John Whalen-Bridge has made clear in a timely response to what has become, by now, a New Americanist orthodoxy, this critical-theoretical development has curiously failed to upgrade the status of the political novel. The ‘political novel’ per se, he writes in Political Fiction and the American Self (1998), is not a factor in contemporary criticism though politics is supposedly more important than ever before. We no longer discuss the political novel though there is a great deal of discussion about politics ‘in’ and the politics ‘of.’⁸ What we have instead is a notion of the literary text as contaminated by ideology, with literary theory or political criticism as the only feasible decontaminant.

This too, of course, is characteristic of the New Historicist school of criticism that has dominated the study of English literature in the United States since the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980). In the context of American studies, Walter Benn Michaels’ The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1982) shared with Greenblatt and the New Historicism a concern with the reinterpretation of texts in the light of Michel Foucault’s post-Marxist reframings of power and subjectivity. Likewise, a decade later, the collection edited by Philip Fisher, The New American Studies: Essays from Representations (1991), indicated how New Historicist currents were now making their presence felt in this new sphere. However, Foucault’s influence aside, it remains difficult to see how New Historicism differs radically from various earlier forms of materialist criticism, Marxist or otherwise. The concept that seems to recur most frequently within New Americanist (and most other New Historicist) scholarship continues to be ideology, albeit ideology in the more sophisticated antireductionist terms first delineated by Western Marxists in the 1960s.

For this reason, no doubt, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) must be regarded as at least of equally significant importance to the New Americanists. An ambitious dialectical reflection on the problem of interpretation, which brought an array of psychoanalytic and Marxist social and cultural criticism to the table, Jameson’s work presented a hermeneutic premised on the return of repressed social and political struggles buried beneath the surface of literary history. In a similar fashion, Donald Pease, in his introduction to an edition of boundary 2 devoted to the New Americanist phenomenon, talks of retrieving questions of class, race and gender from the political unconscious of American studies.⁹ Drawing on the psychoanalytic vocabulary familiar from Jameson’s work, he later adds that the "political unconscious of the primal scene of New Historicist readings embodies both the repressed relationships between the literary and the political and the disenfranchised groups unrepresentable in this relationship."¹⁰

It is perhaps unsurprising then that a work such as Jameson’s—which begins by committing itself without undue self-consciousness to the slogan always historicize!—should later find a receptive audience among literary scholars under the sway of a new historicism. Most crucially, though Jameson goes beyond this in The Political Unconscious by announcing that all interpretation and thus all historicization—if it is to free itself from the reification and privatisation of contemporary life—must begin with the recognition that there is nothing that is not social and historical—indeed that everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.¹¹ If we follow Jameson’s observation, of course, it no longer makes any sense to speak of a political novel, as every novel—indeed every act of interpretation—qualifies in the last analysis as political.

Whalen-Bridge takes issue with Jameson’s thesis and its influence, believing it to have helped to reduce literary criticism and theory to a mode of discourse that offers psychic self-defense in a world of ideological oppression.¹² The therapeutic tendencies of this discourse might even be related to the preoccupation with purity Whalen-Bridge skillfully uncovers in both earlier Adamic mythology critics and their New Americanist antagonists. It is in this respect, he argues persuasively, that the 1990s might be said to have witnessed the emergence of some new American Adams. Here, incidentally, we find an academic disciplinary instantiation—that of American Studies—of a generational conflict over the meaning of the liberal tradition that will feature heavily in other contexts over the remaining chapters. Whalen-Bridge supports his view by noting how Pease, in that same boundary 2 piece, feels an urgent need to reestablish a form of virgin land in order to differentiate—that is, overdifferentiate—New Americanist criticism from the Old Americanist counterrevolutionary criticism of Frederick Crews:

Crews criticizes the younger generation of critics for not respecting the disciplinary boundaries that have given the study of American literature its meaning. According to Pease, Crews has not merely criticized the New Americanists, he has rejected them as followers in the path of American Studies. Pease embraces the claim that American Studies is a bastard discipline (and he exaggerates Crews’s rejection to do this) because the illegitimacy of the newer discipline is, paradoxically, the ground of its legitimacy—as counter-hegemonic formation.

New Americanism—Call it Ishmael! To transcend the mob, to light out for the territory, or to maintain some connection to innocence—these are the marks of the American Adam—as described by Lewis.¹³

This self-dramatizing act of institutional and generational rebellion—what Whalen-Bridge describes in terms of a self purification [that] provides a way to see oneself in opposition to the national sins (slavery, imperialism) [and] a depoliticised academy¹⁴—may or may not make for political criticism. It has, however, by dominating the study of American literature, done little to raise the profile of the political novel or address the question of what it might mean to treat writers of fiction as serious political thinkers. Like Whalen-Bridge, my own view is that the New Americanist criticism is symptomatic of the critical tradition it seeks to displace. Again, like Whalen-Bridge and contra Jameson, my concern here is with explicitly political fiction. Rather than operating on the premise, as Jameson suggests, that all fiction is in the last analysis political, I wish to draw attention to the importance of the Althusserian qualification by asking what might be political in the first instance.¹⁵ As opposed, then, to the perennial focus of contemporary critics on the politics of representation (in which every fictional text inevitably has a stake), my concern here might be said to be with those fictions that explicitly seek to represent politics. There is, of course, no hard and fast distinction that can consistently be drawn between the two—all novels represent politics in the last instance presumably—but the emphasis in this study will track the role of political ideas in shaping culture and identity, rather than vice versa. In the American context, the novel that explicitly seeks to represent politics is ineluctably challenged by the powerful presence of a political tradition that renders the relationship between art and political ideas less abstract or indirect than is commonly assumed. Here, we might do well to recall Richard Hofstadter’s famous dictum that rather than simply having an ideology, America is an ideology.

Thus to write a novel about America, that is, to write a novel in which the idea of America functions as an intermittent refrain, is to write not only a political novel but a novel that engages with a varying set of historically inflected political ideas. This is not the same as, say, writing a novel about the breakup of a marriage that has an American setting. The former will always be political in the first instance; the latter may be in some secondary sense, but for it to be understood as a political novel, its status as a novel about the breakup of a marriage would require downgrading. Such a discrimination between types is sustainable largely as a result of the division between public and private characteristic of both liberal and republican thinking in classical and modern Western societies.¹⁶ Consequently, the only conceivable context in which a novel about the breakup of a marriage might be construed as a political novel in the sense understood here is one in which such a distinction has collapsed. This perhaps explains why the most intimate of political fictions tend to be those set against the backdrop of totalitarian societies in which the private sphere is all but abolished.¹⁷

It must be asserted that the types of distinctions drawn here are not meant to privilege novels that emphasize the public rather than the private and the political rather than the personal. Aesthetic judgment should never be hostage to such narrow generic considerations. A novel depicting marital breakdown is no less likely to succeed as a political novel is to fail. The issue, rather, in the American context, is the reluctance within studies of U.S. literature to develop a taxonomy that insists, among other things, on the political novel as a discrete entity. The effect has been the closure of a number of potentially rewarding avenues of critical inquiry. Several of these will become apparent in the pages that follow, but chief among them—and in some sense underpinning them all—is the idea that the novel has something important to contribute to political thinking. This is not simply in terms of the particular political issues it seeks to explore, but in the formal properties and tools it makes available to the writer interested in political thought and the overlapping discipline of intellectual history. This area is largely unexamined within literary studies itself.

This broader, more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between literature and politics has, however, in recent years been a feature of the work of a few renegade political philosophers. In their introduction to Literature and the Political Imagination (1996), a collection of essays in this grain, John Horton and Andrea Baumeister propose the study of fiction as an antidote to the demand for closure—perhaps equally a demand in response to the need for psychic self-defense—in their own intellectual discipline:

It is in developing a richer, more nuanced and realistic understanding of political deliberation that imaginative literature may have an especially valuable role to play. Novels and plays, for example, seem much better at exhibiting the complexities of political experience and the open-textured and necessarily incomplete character of real political arguments . . . than the linear discourse of philosophy.

Horton and Baumeister go on, furthermore, to stress the capacity of literature to shape and inform the very terms in which [particular political] issues are conceived.¹⁸ This brings us somewhat closer to the design of the present study, which, by focusing on the tension between issues of liberalism and morality in the political thought of several American novelists, hopes to generate a more nuanced and open-textured understanding of the U.S. political tradition.

The type of cross-fertilization between literature and political theory endorsed above has also failed to materialize in the United States despite the interdisciplinary pressure placed on the study of American literature since the 1960s. Yet if this has led American literary critics to bracket awkward questions of the character or form taken by the political novel in a tradition supposedly determined by myth and an antipolitical predilection toward themes of innocence, nature, and the pastoral, then the same cannot be said of critics with a background in political philosophy. Scholars such as Maureen Whitebrook, Catherine Zuckert, and Ethan Canin have all sought to engage with American works of fiction in order to illuminate some of the broader as well as finer details of an overarching liberal political tradition. Indeed, Zuckert’s study Natural Right and the Political Imagination (1990), which examines canonical writers such as Cooper, Twain, and Faulkner, effectively repudiates the notion that a Lockean liberal tradition rooted in natural law disqualifies meaningful artistic exploration of politics and society. The final claim posited in this work is instructive for my purposes here:

Taken as a whole these fictional depictions of a man’s withdrawal from civil society to live in the state of nature have served to reiterate the major elements of the social contract theory underlying the U.S. Constitution, in the face of European philosophical criticism. The novels have not taken the truth of the self-evident propositions of the Declaration for granted, however. On the contrary, by leading their readers to raise questions about the adequacy of the philosophic foundations of the American regime, these novelists have reminded us of the need repeatedly to reconsider the nature of the truths themselves as well as their practical meaning in ever-changing historical circumstances.¹⁹

The implicit point made here is that even those canonical authors championed by the myth critics confronted the American liberal tradition by problematizing as well as affirming its Lockean origins in a theory of nature and self-evident truths. My argument is an extension of this undertaking in so far as I focus on a number of postwar American novels that I believe significantly extend this form of novelistic political-philosophical inquiry. The aim is not solely to continue an effort to bridge the gap between literature and political thought in a particular context, useful as this may be, but also to bring to bear an intellectual-historical approach capable of discerning why some novels might offer us a greater degree of political understanding than others. The liberal political tradition in the United States will thus be examined in various historical circumstances as it finds expression in postwar American political fiction.

In the central chapters, novels by Gore Vidal, Russell Banks, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Roth foreground the critique of liberalism put forward by republicanism, Transcendentalism, Marxism, and neoconservatism at their respective historical moments of ascent. The aim here, primarily, as previously stated, is to treat novelists seriously as political thinkers; much of the analysis is, accordingly, interdisciplinary in approach, drawing from artists, philosophers, and theorists such as Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, Leon Trotsky, and numerous contemporary commentators and historians as well as the novelists listed above. This approach, it must be said, is also an attempt to establish some wider points of intellectual reference than is perhaps customary in the study of American literature as currently practiced. William V. Spanos has recently offered a quite sweeping critique of New Americanist literary and cultural criticism on the basis of such alleged insularity. Much of this simply turns New Americanist accusations toward earlier critics back against them in the manner of Whalen-Bridge, though the charge here relates to both groups’ antitheoretical impulses rather than political quietism. Spanos argues, finally, from a position that would repudiate the influence of homegrown pragmatist and empiricist perspectives within American studies in favor of tools derived from the supposedly more radical tradition