Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
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Meanwhile, as linguists and lexicographers were trying to puzzle out what it was going to mean to speak English on this side of the Atlantic, authors of imaginative literature were busy working out the analogous literary problem that centrally concerns me here: how their works could exist within the larger body of anglophone writing and yet still claim to lie apart from it as a distinct national tradition. The linguistic solution I have just summarized in fact pre-traced the exact path the literary solution would take, while also suggesting why literature could be a productive medium for working out fundamental problems of cultural identity. Anglo-American literature, like its language, was essentially and inescapably derivative. Yet it too would insist on defining itself not as a repetition of past practices, but by virtue of what it is not: not aboriginally American because it is English in origin, but at the same time not British because it is American in practice. After all, Noah Webster did not propose, as some of his contemporaries are said to have done, that the North American republic adopt a truly American language such as Iroquois or Algonquian in order to provide itself with the necessary “national band”; rather, he began with Johnson’s English and then made certain local modifications to it in order to recast the language in a putatively American form. Just so, Anglo-American literary artists did not, say, begin to write trickster tales as a way of asserting the indigeneity of their tradition; nor did they embrace African American literary forms like the slave narrative as the (arguably far stronger) basis of a culturally distinct tradition. Instead, these authors began with the established forms of English letters and then set out to alter those forms in ways that would render them uniquely “American.”30 By analogy to the Judeo-Christian creation myth, we might say that the creation of U.S. culture was less like that of the first man and more like that of the first woman; “Americanness,” that is, was less a miraculous ex nihilo creation than a generation of radical difference through an act of subdivision and derivation.
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The exception, as the saying goes, is constituted by the rule; just so, “American literature” began to self-generate by first defining a British literary norm from which it might then “except” itself. We can call it a literary version of what Amanda Emerson, drawing on the social theory of Georg Simmel, has termed “negative affiliation.”31 That is, the very idea of the unique singularity of our literature, or of its distinct national character, first originated with the authors’ self-conscious negation of certain characteristics of British literary culture rather than having grown organically from any distinctive features of the American scene. Thus, for example, if British letters were supposed to be hypercultivated and artificial, Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer refashioned their American counterpart as blessedly rude and therefore as manifestly authentic (Chapter 2). If the British culture of the aesthetic was an art of the polished and the beautiful, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly rewrote the gothic romance as an aesthetic of the difficult that mirrored the rough sublimity of America’s geography (Chapter 3). And if British courtship practices and their fictional expressions relied on artifice, disguise, and hypocrisy, seduction novels like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette argued, American expression was artless, sincere, and plainspoken (Chapter 4). In many if not all instances of this kind of national self-definition, the so-called British norm is little more than a stereotype serving the obvious function of enabling Anglo-American differentiation by contrast. More than that, as I have already noted above, this whole logic of negative or subtractive originality, along with some of its characteristic cultural contents, were often themselves direct borrowings from specifically British rhetorics of negation. Even as U.S. writers asserted their distance from British literary culture, they repeated structurally identical gestures of differentiation with which that British culture had set itself against (for example) a French literary culture that it had cast in comparable terms as extravagant and hypercultivated, over-polished and insincere. For all of its claims to novelty, then, this kind of national differentiation did not invent any “new” cultural values. Far from it. In fact, it usually proceeded by grasping onto a cultural opposition already active in British culture, adopting one of its poles as the axis of a supposedly American characteristic, and consigning the other side of the binary to a residual British cultural stance. This was precisely what Noah Webster did, for example, when he embraced certain phonetic spellings that had already been put forward by certain British lexicographers (including color for “colour” or public for “publick”), and then extrapolated from them an “American” mode of spelling.
In spite of its rhetorical tenor, then, the American negation of British literary culture was not really a cultural “disaffiliation”; it would be more accurate to theorize it as an inverted form of affiliation.32 My belief is that this basic reorientation immediately reframes the old question of what makes American literature American. If the set of positive literary features we later came to associate with an American aesthetic (characteristics like naïveté, vernacularity, a demotic