Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 239 Le dernier essai, «Trois Femmes: l'architecture d'une morale» de Wardy Poelstra , aborde le problème de l'utilité des romans. Ont-ils jamais empêché de commettre des erreurs dans la vie? Le thème de l'architecture donne une grande place au «Dictionnaire» intercalé dans le roman et à la définition du mot «bâtir», et celui de la construction littéraire est repris dans cet essai «par des exemples empruntés au domaine de l'architecture» (p. 133) comme la symétrie, les belles proportions. Les nombreuses références à des œuvres littéraires permet d'écrire que «le rôle des livres dans la construction de Trois Femmes et de la vie de ses personnages est donc des plus importants» (p. 135). On ne peut que féliciter l'éditeur Yvette Went-Daoust d'avoir su réunir une collection de sujets aussi variés et de haute tenue. Les lecteurs y trouveront une multiplicité d'idées à méditer. Alix S. Deguise Connecticut College Christopher Looby. Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins ofthe United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. xi + 287pp. US$29.95. ISBN 0-226-49282-6. Christopher Looby's Voicing America joins a relatively civil debate in late eighteenth-century American literary studies between those (following Michael Warner in Letters ofthe Republic) who privilege the operations of print culture in their analysis of the revolution's transformations and those (like Jay Fliegelman in Declaring Independence) who emphasize the revolutionaries' oral and oratorical investments. Voicing America claims to support Fliegelman's emphasis on the voice as a locus of radical intervention, but this study will prove most rewarding to anyone looking for comprehensive and occasionally refreshing discussions of three of this period's canonical texts: Franklin's Autobiography, Brockden Brown's Wieland, and Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry. Whether or not these works support a print culture or oral culture interpretation of the revolution is finally less important (and indeed less discernible) than Looby's account of, among other things, Franklin's predominantly colonial subjectivity , Wieland's relationship to the revolutionary myth of Saxon democracy, and the conflation of republican virtue and millennial striving in Brackenridge's depiction of the aspiring, post-revolutionary American. The strongest aspect of Voicing America is its willingness to grant each of its major texts enough time and attention to demonstrate their internal complexity without subordinating their tensions to an overall claim about the politics of the period. Thus, although Brown's Wieland is finally said to call for "traditional authority as the only bulwark against the uncertainties and distortions that can afflict reasoned discourse" (p. 202), Looby's reading is governed by his sense that the novel was the product of "a moment of confused political transition, 240 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:2 for Brown and for the nation" (p. 194); and while Franklin's Autobiography is similarly summed up as a conservative plea for pre-revolutionary rhetorical diplomacy, Looby's argument is far more suggestive when it claims that Franklin fails to produce "a unitary figure" or a "unitary America" ("What it produced instead ... was an unrevolutionary America, an America in which revolution is constantly deferred," p. 137). The "coda" of Voicing America on the mythologization of Patrick Henry's voice is particularly suggestive and deserves more space than Looby gives it. The discussion of Brackenridge's seven-volume Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), on the other hand, is probably the most generous reading this work will ever receive. Looby draws on Brackenridge's revolutionary sermons (Six Political Discourses Founded on the Scripture, 1798) in order to make me valuable point that a certain strain of populist, egalitarian, democratic politics in America had more in common with Protestant ways of understanding historical transformation than it did with the classical republicanism that had directed the revolution. But while this may help to explain Brackenridge's sympathies (for his "comically" uneducated aspirant, Teague O'Regan, against the "anachronistically" republican Captain Farrago), it does not explain Looby's. The "reactionary discourse of classical republicanism" survives into the nineteenth century, writes Looby, only as an example of "false consciousness" (p. 241). Looby's appeal to...