Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the ConstitutionGothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature

Abstract

E pluribus unum, out of many, one. This motto of political unity continues to circulate ubiquitously in the United States today, almost two and a half centuries after it was introduced in the halls of the Continental Congress. As scholars of early US literature and culture know, the rhetoric of unification played a distinctly reparative role in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which were plagued by numerous forms of political and infrastructural disunity. Recent scholarship on early US literature has embraced a different kind of reparative collectivism. Disenchantment with the kind of exceptional and unitary political agency associated with liberal individualism has given new theoretical life to republicanism and a range of other collectivist imaginaries (publics, cosmopolitanism, and so on). The turn away from individualism and toward the commons of politics has inspired critics to grapple anew with the central metonymic problem of politics: the relation between the part and the whole, which determines how we understand “the people.”Matthew Garrett’s Episodic Poetics takes the vexed relationship between part and whole as its central line of inquiry. Episodic Poetics uses the “episode,” a “subgeneric unit or device” that structures the narrative relation between part and whole (145), to excavate the formal features of the political debates that animated “the period between the constitutional consolidation and the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century” (16). Garrett uses his theorization of what he terms episodicity—“the overproduction of noncumulative narrative, lacking the crucial order of prioritization” (20)—to analyze the structural tensions that haunted the collectivist plots of federalism and nation formation. The use of terms like episodicity make for a dense read, but they speak to Garrett’s concerted effort to identify and theorize the logics that are shared across a number of generically diverse literary and political documents. Garrett’s central historical wager is that “the episode is, as a critical narrative poetics would put it, the ideologeme of the early republic” (21). The episode, as Garrett acknowledges, is not specific to any one period in literary history, but it was, he suggests, uniquely “compelling to readers in the early republic” in part because it gave “literary shape to th[e] dialectic of unification and division” (91, 18).Unity, for Garrett, is a “strange illusion,” but individualism is equally fabular (85). This skepticism toward individualism is apparent in Garrett’s introduction to his reading of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: the “social subject itself,” he playfully observes, “is the dubious hero of this chapter” (61). For Garrett, the true situation of early US politics is located somewhere between the individual and the collective—in the dialectical movement between part and whole that Garrett associates with the episode. Each of the four chapters of Episodic Poetics identifies a different episodic logic through sustained work with key texts: “contagion, in The Federalist; error, in Franklin’s Autobiography; hesitation, in the novels of chapter 3; and volubility, in Salmagundi” (146). Throughout, Garrett’s readings are informed by his engagement with a wide-ranging cast of formal and political philosophers. Episodic Poetics opens with a discussion of Homeric epic and Aristotelian poetics, engages with Russian formalism, and grapples with the historicity of form as envisioned by Marxist theorists like Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, and Fredric Jameson. The book’s theoretical commitments bear special mention because they mark its relatively unique relationship to ongoing debates about historicism and literary form. Episodic Poetics is part of the resurgence of new scholarship on aesthetics, but Marxist criticism has not been particularly popular in this work, which has tended to identify Marxism (via Jameson) with the mandates of historical contextualization. And yet, perhaps for this very reason, the book’s engagement with a range of older formalisms moves it toward a newly flexible, structural account of the form of politics.Siân Silyn Roberts’s Gothic Subjects treats the politics of literature—in this case, gothic literature—in relation to the singular unit of the people, the individual subject. Gothic Subjects builds on scholarship on the British gothic, which has examined the role the gothic played in establishing a “realist epistemological order . . . inhabited by characters whose desires and motivations arise solely within themselves” (3). Whereas British gothic literature briefly entertains the possibility of supernatural agency in order to “normaliz[e] and naturaliz[e] a modern subject defined by its autonomy” (3), American gothic literature, Roberts contends, turns away from an exceptionalist model of individual agency to formulate “workable models of social unity” (15). Roberts tempers the nationalistic tenor of this comparative claim by framing Gothic Subjects as a “diasporic” account of the transmutation of the literary conventions of the British gothic and the Lockean model of “the autonomous and self-enclosed individual” with which it has been associated (13).Despite its subtitle, Gothic Subjects is arguably less an account of the transformation of individualism than of its disappearance. Roberts reads the American gothic as “literary evidence” of the cultural development of fluid, changeable selves and collectivist imaginaries, which were “better suited to an early Atlantic world bound by the fluctuations of the market, immigration, accident, chance, circumstance, and opportunity” (4, 7). Gothic Subjects builds its argument through thematic readings of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Wells Brown. Each chapter’s arguments hew closely to the overarching thesis, but Roberts’s textually grounded engagement with Enlightenment philosophy helpfully illuminates the philosophical stakes of the individual texts she examines. Roberts’s reading of Poe’s detective fiction is among the highlights. She situates the “hyperrationality” (97) of Poe’s detective fiction—and what she aptly characterizes as Dupin’s “uncommon sense” (96)—as “continuous” with an “Enlightenment model of identity” (103). In a similar manner, the conclusion briefly outlines some of the continuities between the American and British gothic. Gothic Subjects benefits from these qualifying claims, which unsettle the edges of its quasi-nationalistic thesis because, as Roberts acknowledges in her admirably circumspect introduction, arguments that hinge on comparative characterizations raise special evidential challenges.Roberts’s reexamination of the status of the individual in the US tradition raises a generative question: If, as she suggests in chapter 2, the captivity narrative offers a model of “social and somatic incorporation” that undercuts the Lockean conceit of self-possession and individual determination (70), when and how do models of exuberant collectivity delimit, rather than enable, desirable forms of political change? Geoff Hamilton’s The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature offers helpful information for contextualizing this and other questions. Hamilton’s study examines “autonomy’s evolution” in American literature from the founding era to the present. Hamilton tracks the historical development of autonomy by excavating the “affinities between American and Greek literary characters,” so that “we may see more clearly not merely what American literary history has in common with that of ancient Greece, but what is distinctively its own” (2–3). Hamilton’s focus on ancient Greek theories of autonomy sets his account apart from the more commonly discussed Anglo-American lineage of individualism. For this reason, though, the book’s contribution would have been further clarified by explicit engagement with Locke and the scholarship written in dialogue with liberal individualism.Although autonomy and individualism are often coupled together, Hamilton wants to leave individualism behind. He proffers the “tremendous historical and semantic richness” of autonomy as an alternative to the “blank quality of ‘individualism’” (9, 10). Hamilton’s concluding chapter is particularly engaging. It uses Don DeLillo’s writing to examine “the lingering, postmeridial undeath of personal autonomy.” In contemporary literature, Hamilton argues, the “augmentation of the self” is so great and “absolute” that any meaningful “sense of individuality” is destroyed (112). This image of an omnipresent but moribund individuality resonates with our own critical moment. Lockean individualism, it might be said, is itself in a state of undeath. These three studies attest to both a fatigue with individualism and its continued heuristic and conceptual value. Individualism continues to play a privileged—albeit negative—role in analyzing the historical development of early US literature, as well as its methodological horizons.