Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature Mitchell Breitwieser (bio) David Wyatt , Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 400 pp. David Wyatt argues that twentieth-century American fiction had a predominant itinerary, putting forward imagined versions of what had actually happened in the course of our country's history, the horrific things, those which have been locked out of public narratives, the War in Vietnam, for one, "the iceberg that still cruises through our dreams." "Secret history," a term Wyatt takes from Michael Herr's Dispatches, offsets official histories, the ones the hunters, rather than the lions, write; or rather, since official history silences inconvenient testimony, secret history exposes hidden hiding, bringing the deficiency of the record into view by means of speculative fictions that teach us to feel how it might have felt to have been one of those caught in the grip of what really happened. If secret histories "commensurate with the unresolved and still urgent political and emotional burdens of the event" don't fully compensate for the intentional defects of official history, they nonetheless expose the lethal character of its innocence by raising the question of what hurt, and why, instructing us in the practice of an "attentiveness" to legacies that, left to our own inclinations, we might prefer to let lie, not troubling trouble till trouble troubles us. Secret history is therefore counterentropic and pedagogical, cultivating "the sort of open but suspicious mind that can divine the secret history any text worth reading hides in plain sight." I can think of a number of works worth reading that don't fit Wyatt's bill, but that doesn't really refute his point, because good literary history requires loose, serviceable generalizations, an acceptance of their provisionality, alertness to exceptions, and a disinclination to claim special majesty for the works that best support one's claim. Wyatt lives up to these requirements, and this talent for literary history is coupled with an acute exegetical ability: he is as a reader extremely sensitive to particular texts and to textual particulars when he zooms in for the close view, and that capacity for extended close attention to the writers that matter most to him, especially Hemingway, Faulkner and Morrison, working in tandem with his panoramic view of twentieth-century American fiction (fifty-four writers, by his count, are examined at various lengths), makes for a sweeping critical work that is compelling, always interesting, and often moving. If Wyatt's book is an expression of his "deep belief that American [End Page 598] literature is the secret history of the United States," he doesn't also claim that American literature isn't also something else, or many other things, and this argumentative modesty helped this reader at least to feel that Wyatt is largely right, largely as in for the most part, but also as in large in spirit. "Reading involves a take on something, a submission to the wonder of unexpected supply." Wyatt's book grows from his experience teaching a class on twentieth-century American fiction, more or less continuously, for thirty years now, he informs us, and his writing has the feel of having percolated up from a lot of strong discussion, the vigor of having come across the implications and the importances of novels in the course of passionate and reciprocal talking. It's likely that as a teacher Wyatt does the same thing that he does so well as a writer, getting his reader/student to see literary works as what William James called denkmittel, thinkwiths, mental tools that can be used to access still-current reserves of historical experience with special efficacy: "Absalom and Beloved continue to operate as forces in the American present because they implicate us all in the ongoing cultural and social disaster." We can see his characteristic teacherly quality in Wyatt's book's final words: "In this big and sometimes awkward book of mine, I offer my reader a version of my tradition. The point is not to believe me, but to continue the work. Still I am glad to have written these pages, happy that they now...