Through a Glass Darkly: Countryman's Radical American Revolution

Abstract

I N the last years of Edward Countryman's bad old days of American Revolutionary historiography-sometime in the early i960s-I fell in love with the Alain Resnais movie Last Year at Marienbad. Or perhaps I just fell in love with the way Delphine Seyrig's hair fell across her forehead and the way the narrator's voice intoned les tongues couloirs. I reveled in the riveting images, the seductive voices, and the irresistible intimations of meaning, though I didn't understand a thing. I couldn't piece together a story. I couldn't reassemble the disordered chronology. I had to go back to see it again before I thought I could make it make sense in any conventional way. I read Countryman's paper in much the way I saw Marienbad. I am enthralled by its tantalizing sonorities, its promises of interpretive power, its marvelous mystifications. And even on going back to read it again, I cannot make it make sense in any conventional way. It still seems to me portentous and opaque, full of striking effects and of ideas that finally fail to come together. It still leaves me with the floating sensation of delicious disorientation that Marienbad did. I do not say this disparagingly. I like that floating feeling. I like portentous intimations and suggestive effects, though I grant that these may be personal, even perverse, tastes. Let me lay out the largest outlines of Countryman's enterprise as I see them. And let me begin by comparing it with the work of the historian whom Countryman invokes more often than any other, Gordon S. Wood. Despite their ideological differences, Countryman shares some elemental premises with Wood. He too homogenizes America in the voice of its eminent men, and he too vindicates a transforming radicalism in the American Revolution. But ultimately, Countryman's informing ambition and his praxis alike are far from Wood's. Where Wood seeks a synthesis all his own, oblique if not obtuse to recent research, Countryman aims to find his essential problematic precisely in the preeminent scholarly accomplishments of the last generation. Where Wood proceeds in cavalier unconcern for the truly transformative achievements of recent historians of race and gender, Countryman insists that a credible and coherent account of the Revolutionary era will ultimately have to encompass them consequentially. Where Wood espouses an unabashed American exceptionalism, Countryman essays an ingenious appropriation of some new understandings of early modern Europe and an intriguing application of them to colonial and postcolonial America.