The Rites of Assent

Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America

Sacvan Bercovitch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317796183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The Rites of Assent examines the cultural strategies through which "America" served as a vehicle simultaneously for diversity and cohesion, fusion and fragmentation. Taking an ethnographic, cross-cultural approach, The Rites of Assent traces the meanings and purposes of "America" back to the colonial typology of mission, and specifically (in chapters on Puritan rhetoric, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the movement from Revival to Revolution) to the legacy of early New England.

1 Introduction: The Music of America

DOI: 10.4324/9781315811659-1

When I first came to the United States, I knew virtually nothing about America. This book represents a long and varied effort to come to terms with what I discovered. From the start the terms of discovery were interchangeably personal and professional. What began as a graduate student’s research issued in a series of investigations that express both a developing sense of the culture and a certain process of acculturation. The story they tell begins with the Puritan vision of the New World; it ends, provisionally, with the dissensus within American literary studies; and as it proceeds, the explication of religious types opens into descriptions of national rituals, strategies of symbolic cohesion, and the paradoxes of Emersonian individualism, then and now. It might be read as a scholar’s journey into the American Self. But its strengths, such as they are, lie in the sustained discrepancy between the journey’s subject and object. It is a principle of socialization in the United States that the discovery of America is converted into a process of self-discovery, whereby America is simultaneously internalized, universalized (as a set of self-evident absolutes), and naturalized (as a diversity of representative social, credal, racial, and ethnic selves). In my case, the shock of discovery proved a continuing barrier to Americanization. What I called the reciprocity between the personal and the professional has hinged on my ability to channel my resistance to the culture into a way of interpreting it.

I attribute my immigrant naiveté to the peculiar insularity of my upbringing. I was nurtured in the rhetoric of denial. To begin with, I absorbed Canada’s provincial attitudes toward “The States”—a provinciality deepened by the pressures of geographical proximity and economic dependence. Characteristically, this expressed itself through a mixture of hostility and amnesia, as though we were living next door to an invisible giant, whose invisibility could be interpreted as non-existence. This interpretation was reflected in the virtual absence of America throughout my education, from elementary and high school, where U.S. history ended in 1776, to my fortuitous college training at the adult extension of the Montreal YMCA, where a few unavoidable U.S. authors were taught as part of a course on Commonwealth literature. I learned certain hard facts, of course, mainly pejorative, and I knew the landmarks from Wall Street to Hollywood; but the symbology that connected them—the American dream which elsewhere (I later discovered) was an open secret, a mystery accredited by the world—remained hidden from me, like the spirit in the letter of the uninitiate’s text.

A more important influence was the Yiddishist-left-wing world of my parents. I recall it as an outpost barricaded from the threat of assimilation by radical politics and belles lettres, an immigrant enclave locked into a Romantic-Marxist utopianism long after its disillusionment with Stalin, and fortified by the alleged spiritual values of art in the face of utter cultural estrangement. It was there, far more than at school, that I learned the strategies of denial. Their object in this case was Canada. I cannot recall a single reference to national matters in serious conversation. Literary discussions ranged from Shalom Aleichem to Franz Kafka, with polemical excursions to Yiddish contemporaries published in the local newspaper, Der Keneder Odler (“The Canadian Eagle,” a mixed metaphor, carrying cross-cultural ironies for me even then). Politics consisted in a conflict of imaginary options for world revolution, extending from Trotsky’s lost cause to the visionary boundaries of anarchism. It seems appropriate that I should have graduated from high school not to college, but, for several years, to a socialist kibbutz in what used to be called the Arabian Desert.

The harvest of these experiences was an abiding suspicion of high rhetoric, especially as a blueprint of the future, and an abiding fascination with the redemptive promises of language, especially as a source of personal identity and social cohesion. Still, nothing in my background had prepared me for my encounter with a secular modern nation living in a dream. “I hear America singing,” writes Whitman, and concludes: “The United States are themselves the greatest poem.” So, too, Emerson: “America is a poem in our eyes.” I arrived at a similar conclusion, but from a different perspective and to a different effect. My experience of the music of America (as I came to think of it) was closer to the epiphany of otherness recorded in Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog.” The canine narrator of that story tells us that one day in his youth a group of seven dogs appeared before him, suddenly, “out of some place of darkness,” to the accompaniment of “terrible” and ravishing sounds:

At that time I still knew hardly anything of the creative gift with which the canine race alone is endowed … for though music had [always] surrounded me … my elders had [never] drawn my attention to it. … [A]ll the more astonishing, then … were those seven musical artists to me. They did not speak, they did not sing, they remained generally silent, almost determinedly silent; but from the empty air they conjured music. Everything was music, the lifting and setting of their feet, certain turns of the head, their running and standing still, the positions they took up in relation to one another, the symmetrical patterns which they produced. … [M]y mind could attend to nothing but this blast of music which seemed to come from all sides, from the heights, from the deeps, from everywhere, surrounding the listener, overwhelming him. … I longed to … beg [the musicians] to enlighten me, to ask them what they were doing. … [Their music] was incomprehensible to me, and also quite definitely beyond my capacities. … I rushed about, told my story, made accusations and investigations. … I was resolved to pursue [the problem] indefatigably until I solved it.

The pursuit unfolds as a series of ingenious inferences, deductions, and explications extending to virtually every aspect of “dogdom,” from the higher laws of “universal dog nature” to the specialized issue of “soaring dogs” (how do they “remain for the most part high up in the air, apparently doing nothing but simply resting there?”) and the still-controversial “rules of science” for getting food: should you use “incantation” to “bring it down” or “water the ground as much as you can”? ¹ Nothing, it seems, escapes observation, except the presence of human beings.

Kafka’s story is a great parable of interpretation as mystification—facts marshalled endlessly to build up contexts whose effect, if not intent, is to conceal or explain away. It is also a great parable of the limitations of cultural critique—limitations, not just illusions, for in fact the story conveys a good deal about the dog’s world, in spite of the narrator’s inability to transcend it; or rather, as a function of his non-transcending condition. In this double sense, negative and ambiguous, Kafka’s “investigations” apply directly to my own as an Americanist. The general parallels may be drawn out through a Chinese box of skewed interpretive positions: dog vis-à-vis human, Russian-Jewish immigrant vis-à-vis French Canadian Montreal, Canada vis-à-vis The States, and eventually “America,” as I came to understand it, vis-à-vis the cultural norms and structures it represents.

These are not precise symmetries; but they point to certain common principles of exegesis. I begin with the negative implications. (1) To interpret is not to make sense of a mystery “out there.” It is to discover otherness as mystery (something “overwhelming,” “incomprehensible”), and then to explain the mystery as the wonders of an invisible world, a realm of meaningful “silence,” resonant with universals. (2) To investigate those wonders is not to come to terms with the new or unexpected. It is to domesticate the unknown by transferring the agency of meaning from the mystery “out there” to realities we recognize, and so to invest the familiar—ourselves, or our kind—with the powers of a higher reality: “universal laws,” the view of eternity, the canine principles of music. (3) To establish the laws and rules of that higher reality is not to break through the limitations we experience. It is to deny our conditions of dependency by translating those limitations into meta-structures of culture, history, and the mind. As for motives, we may infer from Kafka’s parable that they are self-defensive or self-aggrandizing, and that in either case interpretation is a strategy for repressing the actual worlds around us which expresses itself through yearnings for a world elsewhere.

We might call this the hermeneutics of transcendence. The possibilities it offers for self-aggrandizement are not far to seek: one need only think of the manifold uses of “he” for God and/or humanity. But this is to interpret from the vantage point of dominance. From the dog’s subordinate point of view, or the scholar’s, to magnify the categories of our containment is to diminish our capacities for understanding. ¹

¹ This is repression in a familiar psycho-cultural sense: interpretation as a strategy for concealing our subjection to a master discourse. Again, the advantages are not far to seek—among these, evading the facts of subordination in ways that allow for compensatory modes of control—but the sense of reassurance this brings comes at the expense of critical awareness.

A negative prospect, as I said, especially since it is Kafka’s donnée that we have no choice but to interpret. However, it is complemented in the parable by the enabling ambiguities of limitation. As the title suggests, “Investigations of a Dog” points not only to the dog’s attempts to describe Kafka’s world, but, at the same time, to Kafka’s attempts to describe dogdom. And the result, as I interpret it, is not a double impasse. It is a model of cross-cultural criticism. Its terms are reciprocity, as against dichotomy: not canine or human, but the contingencies of both, as revealed (in degree) through the re-cognition of limitation. We might call this the hermeneutics of non-transcendence. It may be said to reverse traditional comparativist methods by its emphasis on the historicity of archetypes and essences. Its aim is not to harmonize “apparent” differences (in the manner of pluralist consensus), but on the contrary to highlight conflicting appearances, so as to explore the substantive differences they imply. This entails the recognition of universals as culture-specific barriers to understanding; it is grounded in the faith that barriers, so specified, may become (within limits) avenues of discovery; and although it may take many shapes, as I hope this book demonstrates, its logic may be briefly stated. If dreams of transcendence are indices to the traps of culture, then inquiry into the trapping process may provide insight both into our own and into others’ actual non-transcending condition. Such insight is problematic, provisional, and nourished by a frustrating sense of boundaries. It denies us access to apocalypse, but it helps make our surrounding worlds visible.

I would like to think that the investigations which follow show the benefits of this approach. For purposes of analysis, I review these thematically, not chronologically. My subject is the discovery of an other America, in the double sense of Kafka’s parable: negatively, as cultural otherness, and ambiguously, as a set of cultural secrets, the other America hidden from view by interpretation. Emerson’s American Scholar grows concentrically toward transcendence, in an expanding circle from nature to books to representative selfhood. My own unrepresentative (not to say eccentric) experience may be described as a series of increasingly particularized border-crossings: first, into America proper; then, into the interdisciplinary field of American Studies; and finally, into the special area of American literary scholarship.

I crossed into The States with a Canadian’s commonsense view of the Americas: two continents, North and South, each of them a mosaic of nations—which is to say, a variety of European models of civilization—joined by the semi-tropical bush countries of Central America. How could I not see “America” as a cultural artifact? I knew that that sort of definition applied to all national identities—except Canada, which by consensus was “a country without a mythology.” ² But if Canada was an exception that proved the rule, America was its antithesis, the example par excellence of collective fantasy. Consider the claims of Puritan origins. By comparison, myths of other national beginnings were plausible at least. The mists of antiquity cover the claims of Siegfried and King Arthur and the exiled Trojan heroes who sired Virgil’s Rome. Scripture itself authorizes Joshua’s claims to Canaan. But we know that the Puritans did not found the United States. In fact, we know that by 1690, sixty years after the Great Migration and a century before independence, not even the colony of Massachusetts was Puritan. Nonetheless, the belief in America’s Puritan ur-fathers was evident everywhere three centuries later, at every ritual occasion, from Thanksgiving Day to July Fourth, throughout the literature, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Thomas Pynchon, and in every form of literature, including endless debates about whether or not the Puritan legacy was a good thing.

My chapters on Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards started out as investigations of what appeared to me a cultural secret. I expected to discover the creation of a national past, the invention of a Puritan tradition commensurate with the needs of a modern republic. Instead, as I traced the act of creation back through the nineteenth into the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, I found that its roots lay with the Puritans after all. ² The tradition had been made up, as suspected, but it was built out of historical materials, selected for historical reasons. The fantasy of Puritan origins had worked because these Puritans represented (among other things) the movement toward modernity, because they associated that movement with their prospects in the New World, and because they developed a rhetoric that joined both these aspects of their venture, cultural and territorial, in a vision that was simultaneously distinctive, expansive, spiritual, and secular. Their major legacy was neither religious nor institutional. The Puritans are not particularly responsible for the Calvinist strain in the United States, or for civil religion, or for any particular democratic forms, not even the town meeting. They did not invent guilt, or the Protestant work ethic, or individualism, or contract society. All of these were in varying degrees part of the New England Way, and together they might be said to express its movement into modernity. But the distinctive contribution, it seemed to me, lay in the realm of symbology. The Puritans provided their heirs, in New England first and then the United States, with a useful, flexible, durable, and compelling fantasy of American identity.

² What I found has sometimes given me pause: Puritanism as a venture in utopia; a group of radical idealists whose insulated immigrant enclave was meant to provide a specimen of good things to come; a latter-day Zion at the vanguard of history, fired by a vision that fused nostalgia and progress, prophecy and political action. The analogies to the rhetoric of my own past seem so striking it still surprises me that they did not occur to me at once, and stop me in my tracks. I prefer to think of it in retrospect as a happy coincidence of history and subjectivity—an example of the non-transcendent process of scholarly intuition.

I mean “compelling” in a descriptive, not a celebratory, sense. My discovery pertained to the historicity of myth, and the secret it yielded applied as well to my Canadian geography of the New World: what I had considered to be my neutral, commonsense view of the territory out there as an extension of various European civilizations. To see America as myth was to historicize the Canadian identity—i.e., to see in it the contours of another, complementary myth. I refer to the dominant vision of Canada: a “loose scattering of enclaves or outposts of culture and civilization,” protected from a “hostile bush-country” by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ³ The Mountie is a symbolic figure in this design, of course. But the design itself represents a distinctive national fantasy, which I now saw as a variation of the same myth of conquest that had shaped the growth of the United States.

“Canada” was the colonial version of the myth, a story told by invaders who claimed authority for conquest from abroad—from European royalty and civilizations centered in England and France. “America” was the indigenous imperialist inversion. It relocated the seat of empire from the Old World to the New; it reversed the very meaning of “newness” from its colonial status of dependency to a declaration not just of independence but of superiority; and in this new sense it sanctified the “empty continent” as itself constituting the natural-divine patent for conquest. Gradually, the imperial counterpart to the bush-country police became the frontiersman, living in harmony with nature and yet the harbinger of civilization, a paradox explicable by the fact that the frontier itself had been transformed from its colonial sense of “barrier” into an imperial summons to expand. ³

³ The image of the “bush country” (as formulated by Margaret Atwood and Northrop Frye] links two other widely accepted, quintessentially colonial definitions of Canadian identity: the special conditions of geography and trade which, according to the classic Laurentian Thesis, shaped the course of Canada’s development; and the concept of the “mosaic” which seems to me to show the English Protestant influence, as distinct from the monolithic Catholic versions of other colonial myths, from Mexico through Central and South America to Catholic Quebec.

The issue, then, was not a clash of opposites, Canadian facts versus American fantasies. It was a juxtaposition of myths, colonial vis-à-vis imperial, each of them a border-land of fantasy and fact. The colonial version had issued in “Canada,” a country with a mythology elsewhere, systematically de-centered, and characterized, accordingly, by a rhetoric of absence: non-Indian, non-European, non-American, non-mythological. The other, imperial issue was America. As I followed its changing terms of identity (Puritan errand, national mission, manifest destiny, the dream), the windings of language turned out to be the matter of history. America, an act of symbolic appropriation, came alive to me as the twin dynamics of empire: on the one hand, a process of violence unparalleled (proportionately) by even the Spanish conquistadors, and sustained into the twentieth century by a rhetoric of holy war against everything un-American; on the other hand, an unleashing of creative energies—enterprise, speculation, community-building, personal initiative, industry, confidence, idealism, and hope—unsurpassed by any other modern nation.

It amounted to a demonstration from within of Walter Benjamin’s thesis about barbarism and civilization. Polemicizing against the tradition of empathy in historical studies—which literary critics have inherited as the tradition of aesthet...