story of the old woman at Athens, who, when Theophrastus, a man of no mean eloquence, used one solitary word in an affected way, immediately said that he was a foreigner, and on being asked how she detected it, replied that his language was too Attic for Athens. Again Asinius Pollio held that Livy, for all his astounding eloquence, showed traces of the idiom of Padua. Therefore, if possible, our voice and all our words should be such as to reveal the native of this city, so that our speech may seem to be of genuine Roman origin, and not merely to have been presented with Roman citizenship.”74 Quintilian’s use of one Greek and one Roman example conceals, in a way, that this problem is far more acute in the latter case, which is to say, to his own audience—members of a culture indelibly marked by linguistic and cultural foreign debt. For the Greeks, who recognized no prior or foreign model to which they need aspire, “correct” speech was simply that which obeyed objective laws of expression. But for Roman rhetoricians, there was an added layer of cultural exertion and aspiration, namely Latinity—being correctly Latin.
I have taken this detour through Latin rhetoric not only for the historical and institutional reason that this rhetorical tradition in general, and Quintilian’s text in particular, would have been intimately familiar to late eighteenth-century authors, readers, and politicians, but more fundamentally because the distinction between these two relationships to language seems to me to be structurally similar to the transatlantic dynamic at work in British-American cultural relations. Beginning at midcentury, standard-bearers of British English like Samuel Johnson had attempted to stabilize the English language and to encode a lexical standard. Later in the century, those British attempts would be countered by American lexicographers like Noah Webster, who set out to address its endemic inconsistencies in spelling and construction and to cultivate an American orthographic system distinct from it and capable of forming a more perfect standard of its own. We might say by analogy that Johnson’s English thus played “Greek” to Webster’s “Latin.” But the linguistic analogy immediately breaks down. For Roman rhetoricians and poets, the problem of imitatio inherently coincided with the fact of translatio. “What the Greeks call φϱασίς we in Latin call elocutio or style.”75 That is to say, at least there were different words for the same concept; at least the idea of style was voiced by different phonemes, visualized by different graphemes. Even under such linguistic circumstances, it was difficult enough to address the problem of speaking a genuinely Roman Latin; imagine how much more difficult had the problem been that of speaking Greek as a Roman. But that, in effect, was the Anglo-American predicament as I have described it: the cultural-nationalist impulse had to be conducted within the same language as the “foreign” culture whose influence must be managed. This sociolinguistic dilemma, and the cultural problem it signals, was a far more intractable one than Quintilian had faced; nonetheless, his theory of idiomatic style cut a path for American cultural nationalism.
And this explains, finally, why style was destined to become even more crucial in the American case. I would go so far as to say that only the order of style—which is to say, the register, not of the language reservoir itself, but of the choice of words and the manner of their combination—could provide American speakers of English with the grounds for claiming a national-linguistic distinction. “American English,” if the phrase itself was not to be an absurd contradiction in terms, would have to be something capable of boasting (to paraphrase Quintilian) genuinely American origin, rather than merely English presented with U.S. citizenship. But with no “new language” in circulation to distinguish colony from metropole, the only available ground on which to claim linguistic distinctness is a new way of inhabiting the metropolitan language. Again, this rests on a conception of novelty not as ex nihilo invention, but as a distinctive selection and recombination of already existing elements. If Noah Webster performed this operation on American language by proposing a modal revision of British English—what we might call American-style English—the authors of imaginative fiction I consider here did the same for American literature by proposing to rewrite British letters as “literature, American style.” Precisely because it was modal in the same way as Webster’s orthographic solution, literary style was the only conceptual register capable of performing this sublimation of foreign language and letters into an original vernacular tradition.
Vernacular Anxiety Without a Vernacular
Literature, American Style will focus, as its title baldly enough indicates, on the nationally and historically specific ways in which these literary concerns played out in early U.S. literature, and obliges itself to describe this process in thick cultural detail. At the same time, however, it would be a problematic distortion to treat it as a singular phenomenon isolated from the long European literary history that lay behind it. At the very least, any account of the problem of national literary distinctiveness ought to begin by registering a long history of various European literatures confronting similar questions of linguistic and cultural identity, and at times generating strikingly similar discursive strategies for addressing them. That longer literary-historical vista is important, not only for the virtues of what we blandly call “context,” but for a more fundamental argumentative reason. It forces us to confront the central paradox of the U.S. insistence on cultural novelty, namely, that it not only repeats but even self-consciously emulates much earlier European arguments and cultural logics. To leave this gear out of the critical machine—to treat the idea of American originality as a self-originating discourse that could be isolated from prior or similar cultural formations—would only result in a pseudohistory of that phenomenon that in reality did little more than amplify its central assumptions and capitulate in advance to its mystifications. This is a serious danger in any scholarly treatment of the topic—the present work included.
The first fence I shall build against the exceptionalist fallacy is simply to recognize this late eighteenth-century desire for American originality as a late moment in a much longer European genealogy. Of course, early U.S. culture had particular political, demographic, and geographical matters to address; the literary nationalism some of its participants embraced was inflected by historically modern conceptions of the nation-state; and the whole question of literary national character thus took on a particular cast in this historical context. To describe that particularity will be my primary critical responsibility in the chapters that follow. Nonetheless, I must begin by acknowledging the fact that nearly all of the “American” cultural problems and solutions I will identify have specific and concrete cultural and historical precursors, far beyond, and long before, the obvious British-American axis of transatlantic comparison.
To begin with, as I have already suggested, the core tension I am identifying in late eighteenth-century U.S. literature had a counterpart in Latin antiquity. Roman authors had similarly to contend with the prestige of foreign models of thought and writing while simultaneously attempting to forge a sense of a distinct cultural identity.76 “If the Greeks were the first in Europe to create and record culture,” Elaine Fantham writes, “the Romans, paradoxically, scored a different first. They were the first cultural community to inherit literary models—those set up for them by the Greeks—before they began to compose their own literature.”77 We might say, in other words, that this represents the moment “foreign debt” first entered European literature as a problem to be overcome. Obviously, to draw comparisons between “Rome’s groping toward cultural maturity and self-definition”78 and the cultural politics of the post-Revolutionary United States is already to indulge in a certain level of transhistorical abstraction. The utility of the analogy has its limits, but that doesn’t make it any less illuminating. It is not simply that “cultural activity and state interest”79 came to be yoked together in both instances. More suggestive is how the problem played itself out as a dialectic between alternatives similarly held in discursive tension. Would cultural achievement result from the emulation of imported models, or would it issue from the “well-springs of native soil”80—allochthony or autochthony? This question would repeat itself over and over throughout European literary history, but the moment of its first articulation has the advantage of laying the logic bare like almost no later iteration. For, framed in those terms, it was an insoluble dilemma: the problem of foreign cultural influence could not be met simply by either the incorporation
