A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction by H. Daniel Peck (review)

Abstract

A World by Itself is eloquent, persuasive evidence that discerning, sophisticated modern reader can find in James Fenimore Cooper's fiction fascinating, deeply stirring experience. Mr. Peck's interesting book bears stamp of responsible scholarship written from heart. Readers may quarrel with much that Mr. Peck says, perhaps even with his method and some of his leading ideas; but few will quarrel with what he is about: rediscovery of major American literary artist not generally supposed to be in need of rediscovery. His enthusiasm and directness should be welcomed by Cooper scholars long embarked on this necessary, difficult quest and by all students of American letters. Mr. Peck intends to suggest, if I read him rightly, that Cooper's greatness as artist, at least in certain works, resides in his quintessential actualization of moment, that when eye takes possession of its rightful holdings. It is still point, fragile equilibrium originating in childhood experience and sustained to adulthood in reverie, state defined by Anna Freud (quoted by Mr. Peck) as one in which inner balance [is] achieved, [and] although characteristic for each individual and precious to him, is preliminary only and precarious. A profoundly personal experience universally shared, it carries, says Mr. Peck, the sense of world doomed to loss. Cooper's unique achievement is that he charges nation's golden age with reverie of his own remembered childhood and thereby accomplishes vital intersection of public and private worlds. It is in this way that he created America's youth and made available to us what Lawrence called 'myth of America.' Extended in time and space, moment is invested with a quality of permanence in such romances as The Deerslayer and Satanstoe, pervading their worlds and generating their aesthetic values. Mr. Peck's argument does not lend itself easily to conventional modes of presentation; and his approach is strongly influenced by Gaston Bachelard, extraordinary French phenomenologist for whom poetic image (or psychic event) is autonomous, that is, in no need of historical, biographical, or intellectual exegesis. Invoking Bachelard's doctrine of the primacy of image, Mr. Peck selects and describes, in spiraling dialectic, images and image clusters from about half of Cooper's fiction, evolving his composite of Cooper's pastoral aesthetic incrementally. Spatial structures equate to structures in Bachelard's phenomenology; and Mr. Peck stresses preeminently visual quality of Cooper's imagination,