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Developing an iconoclastic methodology
that I call "critical presentism," this book uses close analysis of works
by such classic American realists as Wharton, Twain, James, and Chopin to
"read" contemporary liberal identity in contexts that range from an affirmative
action court case to the liberal arts classroom. The book's aims are two-fold:
to provide new critical insights and pedagogical approaches to specific
realist works, but also to develop fresh interpretative and political leverage
over present-day liberalism. I seek to investigate liberal identity primarily
as it overlaps with currently-lived modes of American exceptionalism and
whiteness.
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American exceptionalism refers most
broadly to the belief that American culture, politics, and selves have always
been qualitatively different from those of European countries, and as such
exceptionalism has been a central theme for analysts of America at least
since Toqueville.1
The phrase American exceptionalism can also refer more narrowly, however,
to a characteristic national sense of "specialness," a specialness taken
to imply both unique privileges and unique responsibilities. The faith in
and desire for American specialness goes back to the Puritans' vision of
founding "a city upon a hill," a community elevated by God with the mission
of modeling Christian charity and virtue to the rest of the world. As many
observers have noted, national assumptions about America's and Americans'
exceptional qualities and status have proven remarkably adaptive over the
centuries, appearing in multiple contexts and in various incarnations.2
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I am especially interested in how American exceptionalism
intersects with a defining facet of white liberal identity today: the desire
to believe that, although there may still be room for significant improvement,
American race relations have made immeasurable progress over the last fifty
years. But why turn, with this sort of contemporary question, to literature
of a hundred years ago? After all, the canonical era of American literary
realism, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an historical
period widely characterized by the open and violent assertion of white supremacy
and of Jim Crow segregation. Today, in contrast, not only has legal segregation
been ended for almost fifty years, but for almost twenty years we have been
living in what Robert Charles Smith has dubbed the "post-Civil Rights era,"
in which racial issues and questions seem both more multi-dimensional and
more subtle than those posed by segregation's stark binaries. Race-related
conflicts of today, moreover, tend to be fought on different terrains than
those of a century ago, and they draw on legal, cultural, and intellectual
tools that were then unavailable (including, for instance, science's undercutting
of "race" itself). How, then, might works from the period of classic American
realism nonetheless give us a better grasp on specific psychological, socio-institutional,
and representational dynamics informing contemporary white liberalism? Why
bring such anachronistic matters to the literature of Wharton, Twain, James
and Chopin?
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One obvious and powerful answer
is that of the cultural historian. No matter the changes involved, America's
cultural past has helped to create America's present. Demonstrating that
whiteness even has a history, for example, works to undo its unceasing
efforts to attain the status of timeless norm. Historicist scholars working
in literary studies and other disciplines (especially in history itself)
have begun to render visible American whiteness's often hidden past. They
have uncovered, for instance, the mechanisms by which various immigrant
groups initially counting as non-white (such as the Irish and Eastern-European
Jews) have achieved white identities and the economic, social, and political
benefits that whiteness brings with it (Ignatiev; Jacobson; Brodkin). Providing
this sort of genealogy for American whiteness crucially resituates our understanding
of and possible approaches to it in the present.
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But when historicist literary study
does contribute to our understanding of present-day versions of American
whiteness or American exceptionalism, it does so through the mediation of
an historical argument. Even when purposefully intending to shift how we
see some aspect of today's cultural or political scene, historicist literary
scholarship proceeds, first and foremost, by locating a work or body of
literature in its "own" cultural moment (the moment of its production and
primary reception) (Chandler). In contrast, I intend in this book to juxtapose
"present" concerns and "past" literature without paying much attention to
the historical specificity of the past literature.
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Within literary studies, the term
"presentism" or "presentist" is widely used to attack scholarship or criticism
that appears not to respect what T.S. Eliot called the "pastness of the
past." Employed as a term of opprobrium, "presentist" refers to criticism
perceived as blithely and un-selfconsciously projecting a critic's own political
or social concerns onto literature of another era. The impulse towards "critical
presentism" that motivates my study, however, seeks new ways of reading
literature of the past not only in but with the social present—and
of doing so self-consciously and also (as I hope to demonstrate) productively.3
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Intellectual historian Dominick
LaCapra defines what he calls presentism—but what I would call blithe
or uncritical presentism—as "the dream of total liberation from
the 'burden' of history" (Lacapra 39). Although LaCapra is not speaking
here either of America or of whiteness, his definition of (uncritical) presentism
identifies what may be the most central, indeed "exceptional," ideological
trait that whiteness and America share. America was imagined from the start
of British colonization as a "new world," where one might escape the crushing,
confining weight both of Europe's and of one's own personal history. As
for whiteness, it can be called an anti-historical mode of identity,
insofar as it strives always to forget its own status as anchored in society
and history—its status as historically and socially constructed, marked,
bounded.
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It is in part because, historically,
white American identity has been so resolutely anti-historical that I believe
critical presentism can make an important contribution. If, as Philip
Fisher has recently argued, what makes the United States most distinctive
is its "culture of creative destruction," in which "the only constant is
change" and the past is continually "discarded" to clear space for the "next-on,"
then, I would maintain, it can only be salutary to find new angles of vision
on how the past can and does unpredictably, even uncannily, stay present.
Each of the literary texts focused on in the following chapters is classically
American in thematizing the desire for a "new world," one which will leave
the past unambiguously behind. For example, Edith Wharton's 1911 short story
"Autre Temps. . ." tells of the divorcée Mrs. Lidcote's wish to find a "new
dispensation" in a "new" New York, one whose elite society has jettisoned
its former horror of divorced women. Twain's Huck Finn is driven
by the desire to escape the entrapment of a pre-determined status and identity—as
a minor child subject to adults' manipulative designs, as a slave—and
it ends with a fantasy of "the territory," a place apart from the constraints
and hypocrisies of fixed "sivilization." Yet, in these and the other texts
my book discusses, the past recalcitrantly persists, and it persists in
potent, wrenching, surprising, and sometimes deadly ways. In none of these
works, despite an overwhelming desire that it be otherwise, is the past
ever smoothly assimilated into, let alone erased by, the present or the
"new." Indeed, in each text the willful imagination that the past be past
renders it more difficult to recognize how and where it remains undigested
and unchanged.
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Drawn from the heyday of America's
literature of manners, the canonical realist works on which I focus are
densely complex. Yet they are also handily compressed, compressed enough
to fit into our very hands. Henry James has commented that "really, universally,
relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally
but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall
happily appear to do so" (James, Roderick Hudson xli). Literary
works by such artists as James and Wharton are famous for how they artistically
encircle, circumscribe, the densely overcrossing lines and cracks of multi-dimensional
social and emotional "relations," while still preserving those relations'
ramifying complexity.
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By practicing a species of what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have
called "wrenching . . . recontextualization," we can heuristically use
the complicated "geometry" of the circles drawn by such literary artists
as James and Wharton to help us reframe and thus re-read aspects of our
own social present that are otherwise hard to bring into focus (including
the often counter-intuitive "geometry" of our social present's relationship
with the past). Indeed we might think of the dense textual circles that
this classic realist literature provides not merely as frames but as refractive
lenses—lenses bulging (like those of the classic bookworm's glasses)
with the thickness both of what James called "the art of fiction" and
"the air of reality." These literarily "thick" lenses can, as it were,
break up the light differently, revealing different angles, surfaces,
and contiguities of our social present than are usually apparent.
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Henry James's 1877 novel The American, for example, portrays
its allegorically named New World protagonist, Christopher Newman,
as "a good fellow wronged"—wronged by ethnic and national others'
humiliating refusal to appreciate his fine qualities and intentions. James's
complex elaboration and critical investigation of Newman's inner feelings
and public posture as "after all and above all . . . a good fellow wronged"
helps to shed light on contemporary white American exceptionalism, and
the "good fellow wronged" is a figure to which several of my chapters
return (303).
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It is not merely coincidental that the thick literary lenses which I
select to help us re-see, and thereby re-articulate, present-day dynamics
of white liberal exceptionalism all derive from the turn of the twentieth
century. For one thing, in addition to the compact yet especially rich
field of social relations and emotions portrayed by authors such as Wharton
and James, certain rough but striking socio-historical parallels between
their time and our own add extra resonance and suggestiveness to juxtapositions
of materials from the two periods. Despite the obvious differences between
the two periods, their rough parallels include, for example, the end of
Reconstruction with its great strides and even greater promises and, almost
exactly a hundred years later, the effective end of the Civil Rights era,
with its great strides and even greater promises. So too, at the turn
of the twentieth century the mass immigration of what were regarded as
racial and ethnic "others" from eastern and southern Europe challenged
and complicated the overlapping identity categories of "white" and of
"American," as is also happening today in America with its unprecedentedly
high levels of Latin American and Asian immigration.
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Even more than for any suggestive historical parallels between "their"
moment and ours, however, I have selected the particular literary works
focused on in this study because they are among the works that I have
found myself most drawn to reading, re-reading, and teaching over the
last ten years. As will become clearer in individual chapters, questions
of pedagogy provide an important motive and background for "critical presentism"
as an approach and for its use in the current project. A critically presentist
approach can, I believe, help empower students and teachers to view the
hard and intricate work of analyzing literature as offering, among its
other rewards, the possibility of a surprisingly proximate social and
political payoff. The same attentive, complex, and creative readings of
literary texts that we develop in our classrooms may, at least in some
cases, be self-consciously turned or "troped" to help shed new light on
even the most resistantly complicated facets of the world surrounding
(and permeating) our classrooms.
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One of the more radical implications of New Critical pedagogy, especially
as such pedagogy evolved during the period of the G.I. Bill, was to democratize
the study of literary aesthetics. New Critical formalism implied that
one could perform valid aesthetic analysis by focusing ever more closely
on a literary work in itself, whether sitting in a classroom with other
students or at the kitchen table. As I conceive it, "critical presentism"
aspires to the same democratizing impulse, although directed not toward
aesthetic evaluation but toward what has become the defining problematic
of literary studies since the 1970s—that is, the relationship between
literature and power. In this book, I wish through demonstration to remind
students and teachers that reading literature closely, even literature
from a different time period, can sometimes refine our understanding of
how representational, socio-institutional, and psychological modalities
of power operate today without our first needing to elaborate historical
genealogies.
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From Chapter One: What Edith Wharton Teaches about Higher Education
and the Defense of Affirmative Action
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In what follows, I will be juxtaposing Edith Wharton's 1911 short story
"Autre Temps. . ." with key documents from Hopwood v. Texas, a
Fifth Circuit case which in 1996 rendered illegal all state-sponsored
affirmative action programs in Texas higher education.4
The Hopwood case constituted the first successful attack on a university's
practice of affirmative action sponsored by the Center for Individual
Rights in Washington, D.C., and it has set many patterns later followed
by similar such cases in Michigan, Georgia, Oregon, and elsewhere. I will
argue here that, despite glaring disjunctions, Wharton's "Autre Temps.
. ." can serve as a penetrating examination, albeit avant le mot,
of some of the Hopwood trial's most central and difficult aspects. Above
all, "Autre Temps. . ." helps us better understand The University of Texas's
failure to mount a sufficiently strong legal argument in favor of continuing
its own affirmative action programs, despite the largely sincere efforts
that The University and its attorneys did indeed make.
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David Simpson has recently complained that "an ethos of presence and
presentism" robs our students of "a sense of the past as past,"
and that it thus can "rob them of the experience of challenge and difference
that the university ought . . . to provide" (14, 7). My contention throughout
will be that, when performed with critical awareness, presentist reading
and teaching of literature can indeed provoke challenging encounters with
difference, both external and internal.
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Political Metaphor
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. . . I would appeal further to the distinguished, if still sometimes
controversial, theatrical tradition in which directors devise purposefully
anachronistic stagings of plays to comment politically on the directors'
own times and places. Defending this presentist practice, Jonathan Miller
(himself responsible for several such productions in theater and opera)
asserts that every dramatic work "must necessarily undergo change with
the passage of time, and that this change is best inflicted upon the work
deliberately rather than, as it were, by default" (27). The plays of Shakespeare,
in particular, have been staged so as to produce what John Elsom calls
"political metaphor." For instance, "at a time when the rigours of Stalinist
censorship could be felt through Eastern Europe, Shakespearean productions
became a way of commenting on political events without running the risk
of banning or imprisonment" (Elsom 2).5
The possibility for political metaphor has motivated directors even in
contexts not heavily burdened by state censorship. Discussing his staging
of Henry IV and Henry V in 1988, British director Michael
Bogdanov observed, "When Prince John of Lancaster meets the Archbishop
on neutral ground, and tricks the rebels into laying down their arms,
I think of Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik" (Elsom 17).
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"Political metaphor" is what I wish to undertake as well, although not
in Bogdanov's sense of locating one-to-one correspondences between given
actors or events. Bogdanov conceives the political metaphors that directing
Shakespeare makes available to him as based on parallels or analogies:
I look for the ways in which the political circumstances were
handled then, and find inspirational parallels in what is happening now.
We governed disgustingly in the fourteenth century, and we are still governing
disgustingly today. (17)
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When "political metaphor" is understood
as Bogdanov seems to have done, that is as a way to underline parallels
between two sets of "political circumstances," the metaphor presumes a certain
transparency, an easy readability, for both sets of circumstances. Even
before juxtaposing them, the director can already see—he already knows—the
underlying essence of each political moment. This prior grasp of each political
moment's central truth "inspir[es]" the parallels or analogies that the
director's staging will subsequently work to emphasize.
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Presuming that we already grasp in full each side of the comparison,
metaphor as analogy can obscure crucial differences. Moreover, finding
analogies between instances of racial and gender discrimination can be
particularly hazardous. In order for them to be rendered parallel, each
side of the race/gender analogy tends to be reductively simplified.6
Wharton's "Autre Temps. . ." explores the effects of discrimination based
on gender, marital status, and sexual behavior, all within an elite upper-class
context, while, by contrast, Hopwood v. Texas's central focus is
racial discrimination at a large state university. Despite the hazards
of reductiveness and oversimplification, my juxtaposition of "Autre Temps.
. ." and Hopwood does rely to some extent on teasing out parallels
between the 1911 short story and the 1996 court case. The possibilities
of metaphor as analogy are not what I primarily seek to emphasize, however.
My overriding aim is to develop a model of political metaphor as catachresis.
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A species of metaphor, catachresis is a "strained," "abused," or "perverted"
use of language that names what otherwise has no name (a table leg,
a head of cabbage, the teeth of a comb) (Murfin 41). I hope
to show that "Autre Temps. . ." and Hopwood v. Texas each
help to give visible figuration to a core of meaning internal to the other
one—or, rather, to a core of non-meaning—that might not be recognizable
without the presentist juxtaposition. For both "Autre Temps. . ." and
Hopwood v. Texas, this core of non-meaning, moreover, turns
out to be what allows for an unspeakable experience of enjoyment—of
jouissance—that each text adumbrates. In both cases, this
secret jouissance shadows socially liberal practices: respectively,
"changes and . . . readjustments" in social attitudes towards divorce
in the early twentieth century and official antiracism at The University
of Texas during the 1990s (Wharton 252).
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