Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden Alex Calder edward sugden Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture New York: New York University Press, 2018. v + 238 pp. “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely.” What are we to make of the temporal shrug of Moby-Dick’s second sentence? Ishmael is not adding “once upon a time” to the “never mind who I am” of his more famous first sentence, nor is he offering the teasing redaction of a realist narrator who might begin, “In the town of M. in the year 18__.” Something else is going on. And before being in a position to say quite what is going on, Edward Sugden, our Ishmael-identified guide, throws in a pair of introductory jinks. Firstly, he wants to convey a sense of a time portal opening or closing, and he wants us to know that there is a lot more at stake in the “brief interlude” of Ishmael’s voyage than we might think. Here lie “issues of historical framing, geographical placement, elusive politics, time consciousness, and the roots of a series of alternative internationalist genres” (2). More particularly, Ishmael’s nonchalance as to when all this happened is at once “ultimately . . . the seed” out of which Emergent Worlds grew and a “concentrated, compacted gesture toward the definitional crisis that has engulfed the study of . . . nineteenth-century American literature . . . in the last fifteen years” (2). We have the big build-up—and then swivel number two: “But I am getting ahead of myself” (2). Such swerves are characteristic of writing about worlds that once seemed vibrant with possibility but were then over-mantled by the homogenizing forces of modernity. Compare Sugden’s way of beginning to talk about emergent worlds with the start of a book from Aotearoa written around the same time as Moby-Dick. Ah! those good old times, when first I came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this, now. The very sun does not seem to me to shine as bright as it used. Pigs and potatoes have degenerated; and everything seems “flat, stale, and unprofitable.” But those were the times!—the “good old times”—before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that. . . . I always held a theory that time was of no account in New Zealand [End Page 92] and I do believe I was right up to the time of the first Governor. . . . so I will just say it was in the good old times, long ago, that, from the deck of a small trading schooner in which I had taken my passage from somewhere, I first cast eyes on Maori land. It was Maori land then; but alas! what is it now? Success to you, O King of Waikato. May your mana never be less!—long may you hold at bay the demon of civilization, though fall at last I fear you must. Frederick Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863) is set in the years of early settlement, when Maori exceeded incoming Pakeha in numbers and influence, and was written soon after that situation had begun to reverse. “Maoriland” was being commodified and alienated as Maori land, and “the good old days” of intercultural mixing were giving way to settler monoculture, to “the demon of civilization.” But distinctly odd things happen to time and space in Maning’s narration. Not only does he, like Ishmael, avoid dates, he finds he cannot even tell how he rowed ashore without losing the thread of his story in digression. He feels “the whole affair is fast becoming one great parenthesis” and is forever having to “start fair and try not to get before my story.” But he cannot. He is like a composer whose opera is becoming all overture, or a novelist who seems not to hear the starter’s whistle and presents us with “Extracts” and other dodges. There is something about Maning’s emergent world that thwarts narrative headway and resists accommodation to historiographical norms. Maning’s word for what...