Archives of American Time

Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century

Lloyd Pratt

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780812223729
• eBook ISBN: 9780812203530
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

American historians have typically argued that a shared experience of time worked to bind the antebellum nation together. Trains, technology, and expanding market forces catapulted the United States into the future on a straight line of progressive time. The nation's exceedingly diverse population could cluster around this common temporality as one forward-looking people.In a bold revision of this narrative, Archives of American Time examines American literature's figures and forms to disclose the competing temporalities that in fact defined the antebellum period. Through discussions that link literature's essential qualities to social theories of modernity, Lloyd Pratt asserts that the competition between these varied temporalities forestalled the consolidation of national and racial identity. Paying close attention to the relationship between literary genre and theories of nationalism, race, and regionalism, Archives of American Time shows how the fine details of literary genres tell against the notion that they helped to create national, racial, or regional communities. Its chapters focus on images of invasive forms of print culture, the American historical romance, African American life writing, and Southwestern humor. Each in turn revises our sense of how these images and genres work in such a way as to reconnect them to a broad literary and social history of modernity. At precisely the moment when American authors began self-consciously to quest after a future in which national and racial identity would reign triumphant over all, their writing turned out to restructure time in a way that began foreclosing on that particular future.

Chapter 1

Figures of Print, Orders of Time, and the Character of American Modernity

There was, as usual, a crowd of folk about the door [of the village inn], but none that Rip recollected. The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility. He looked in vain for the sage Nicholas Vedder, with his broad face, double chin, and fair long pipe, uttering clouds of tobacco-smoke instead of idle speeches; or Van Bummel, the schoolmaster, doling forth the contents of an ancient newspaper. In place of these, a lean, bilious-looking fellow, with his pockets full of hand-bills, was haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens—elections—members of congress—liberty—Bunker’s Hill—heroes of seventy-six—and other words, which were a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle.

—Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”

The figure of print epitomizes a certain theory of American literature. As in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” nineteenth-century American writing often features images of invasive handbills, newspapers, and other forms of print culture assaulting the integrity of local people and their places. Delivered by strangers who resemble Irving’s “bilious-looking fellow,” these figures of print signify a new way of being in time and a recalibration of the scale of social life.¹ In the epigraph to this chapter, for example, Irving asks his reader to date the Hudson Valley’s nationalization to the intrusion of printed matter into bucolic scenes of local life. The implication is that an emerging national culture of print will use America’s new roads, trains, and waterways to penetrate the nation’s farther reaches. Its periphery and backwoods will be provided with an experience of reading that echoes the heady currents of progress coursing through America’s urban centers. And they will be provided with this experience whether they want it or not. A viral national culture of print is implicated, then, in the temporality of progress’s becoming the nation’s single common denominator. It is also credited with the newly discovered American ability to imagine the nation as what the nineteenth-century railroad magnate Mark Hopkins called “a single body, pervaded by one sympathetic nerve, and capable of being simultaneously moved by the same electric flash of thought.”² If the citizens of the United States are finally coming to know themselves as subjects of a national common time, then the figure of print demands print culture’s fair share of credit for this swift and far-reaching change.

The figure of print’s account of modernity anticipates the great social theories that begin to emerge later in the nineteenth century. As in Tönnies, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, Irving’s modernity initially appears to involve a radical rupture with the past. This rupture’s implications are both wide and deep: a destruction of locality follows the loosening of ties to kith and kin, local folk are reembedded into broader translocal networks (i.e., nations, regions, and races), and a countervailing bourgeois antimodernism becomes the dominant mode of social critique. In classic and more recent theories of modernity, these radical changes follow from a fundamental severing of the traditional relationship between time and space. The increasing sophistication of travel technologies figures large in this narrative because it compresses space and brings geographically distant people closer together. Yet these new travel technologies are just one component of a process that permanently unhinges the measurement of time from the contingencies of space. In this critical narrative of time-space distanciation and supralocal social reaffiliation, there is no more important actor than the rise of mass communication symbolized by industrial technologies of print.

In this chapter, I examine the contribution of the figure of print to an account of American modernity with roots in the nineteenth century. I also propose a reconceived role for literature in modernity’s disarticulated time and space. In the period in question, which is roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, two important theories of literature predominated in the United States. The first is the cultural nationalist model identified with editors such as the Duyckinck brothers, with Emerson, and with Whitman’s uptake of Emerson’s charge. In this first familiar model, literature expresses the feeling of the nation, systematizes its thought, and allows nascent Americans to identify with their distant countrymen. Although the second approach is related to the first, it has not been recognized as a theory of literature as such. This second theory, which is encapsulated in the figure of print, positions literature as just one more instance of a generalized print culture; here the figure of print metonymically substitutes for modernization’s congeries of signature forces: “the formation of capital and the mobilization of resources[;] the development of the forces of production and the increase in productivity of labor[;] the establishment of centralized political power and the formation of national identities[;] the proliferation of rights of political participation, of urban forms of life, and of formal schooling[;] the secularization of values and norms; and so on.”³ By way of implication, the highly abstracted figure of print reduces modern literature to a further example of modernization’s many aggressive instruments. Literature is the “and so on” in this formulation. According to Irving, moreover, in America it has special force: “Over no nation does the press hold a more absolute control than over the people of America; for the universal education of the poorest classes makes every individual a reader.”⁴ The figure of print reveals precious little about the formal qualities of any particular instance of print culture. There is no sense that these qualities matter to the texture of daily life. This is because the figure of print’s main purpose is to confirm that an ever-expanding scale of social affiliation looms on the horizon.

I offer a critique of this capsule theory of literature contained in the figure of print through a reading of “Rip Van Winkle.” This story has several significant things to say about the character of American modernity. For one, Irving will end up criticizing as bankrupt the idea that modernity involves a revolutionary rupture with the premodern past. He has little patience for the proposition that “the modes of life brought into being by modernity have swept us away from all traditional types of social order, in quite unprecedented fashion,”⁵ and he rejects the notion of a “dramatic and unprecedented break between past and present.”⁶ This idea of radical rupture is, for Irving, at the very least incomplete. In the post-Revolutionary world that he would have his reader acknowledge, traditional and modern forms of time overlay each other with disjointing and disaggregating effects. Bruno Latour’s sense of the relationship between the time of progress and that of tradition is germane: “[T]he modern time of progress and the antimodern time of ‘tradition’ are twins who failed to recognize one another: The idea of an identical repetition of the past and that of a radical rupture with any past are two symmetrical results of a single conception of time.”⁷ In the story that Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” tells, modernity superadds to existing modalities of time. It is not a winnowing or a process of replacement; it involves “superimposition” and the “coexistence of heterogeneous times.”⁸ The repetitive temporality of tradition is supplemented here with the linear time of progress. According to “Rip Van Winkle,” in other words, it is perhaps best to think of modernity as a peculiar new arrangement of time orchestrated in a disharmonized minor key. Although Irving’s sleepy Hudson Valley village at first appears to have been transformed by the American Revolution into a place where a “busy, bustling” environment of progress has completely replaced the temporality of tradition, Irving offers a challenge to this view of modernity in his enigmatic description of a portrait-bearing sign hanging outside the village hotel. This figure of ekphrasis belies the more familiar story about modern time, its relationship to nationalism, and the theory of modern literature that the figure of print encapsulates. Before Rip departs for his nap in the mountains this sign features a portrait of King George, but upon his return it is markedly different: it has turned into a kind of palimpsest. Although it aims to represent George Washington, Rip notes an uncanny resemblance to the earlier portrait of King George. In nineteenth-century paintings based on Irving’s story, the suggestive nature of this figure is made clear by virtue of comparison—as is the difficulty of visually paraphrasing Irving’s sign. These canonical paintings often render the portrait in the simplest possible terms, editing out any evidence of the unheimlich qualities described by Irving. They tender instead straightforward internal portraits of the American general that obey recognized conventions.

This painterly tidying up of the portrait obscures a more considered account of American modernity that Irving’s story suggests we would do well to entertain. In the context of his story, Irving’s post-Revolutionary, portrait-bearing sign articulates the character of a modernity in which incommensurable temporalities fail to resolve into a single arrow of time. This moment of ekphrasis suggests, in other words, that what typifies this modernity is not a displacement of the past or the antiquation of former modes of inhabiting time. In this modernity, new temporal modes are coeval with old ones; long-past and present orders of time work together to undo the social ordering of the present. As Rip’s post-Revolutionary role as the village storyteller and Irving’s attention to the Sketch-Book’s form indicate, moreover, literature has a significant role to play in reintroducing certain long-lost chronotypes into the modern present tense. Walter Benjamin speaks for many when he suggests a major difference between the modern novel and premodern forms of the story and when he ties this contrast to “the invention of printing”: “The earliest indication of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing.”⁹ Yet in the Sketch-Book, Irving variously describes his own equally print-dependent writing as fireside gossip, document-based historiography, travel writing, and, importantly, folk legend. In this respect, he describes his contribution to America’s national culture of print—that is, the Sketch-Book—as a palimpsest of antique and modern, foreign and domestic literary forms. By implication, Irving also suggests that the Sketch-Book resurrects antique and modern, foreign and domestic ways of inhabiting time. These are not the observations of an author insensitive to the actual character of his own writing. When Irving reproduces communal folk legend drawn from American and European contexts, he in fact draws the storyteller’s premodern chronotypes into the modern present. In describing his contribution in this way, Irving successfully deflects the narrative of national progress that such reified figures of print as his “pocket full of hand-bills” endorse by way of metonymy. He does this by filling in the abstract figure with a content of various forms. Irving insists that his own work is a formal hybrid, rejecting the notion that the figure of print is a sufficient mode of description for any given instance of print culture; in other words, he refuses to understand literature as a hollow shell. In this respect, Irving’s arguments suggest that actually existing examples of print culture (to which that term does descriptive injustice) often do more to retard the consolidation of identity than they do to secure it. Rather than helping to expand the social scale and facilitate modernity’s dialectic of social dislocation and translocal reembedding, certain specific examples of print culture actually encumber this process. The lack of clarity in Irving’s ekphrastic portrait of the world’s then most recognizable American bears witness to this encumbrance. Irving’s internal portrait self-consciously haunts the figure of print’s tidy account of how modern print culture homogenized time to secure the emergence of American identity. It exemplifies and instances the temporal superaddition that defined this period. And in its resistance to visual paraphrase, it points to the difficulty of fully registering the conflicted nature of modern time.

Where Ian Baucom argues that a conflicted order of time signifies the approach of global capitalism, I suggest that it follows even more directly (and identifiably) from the flow of modern literature.¹⁰ In this sense, nineteenth-century American literature did as much (or more) to disorder American identity as it did to reassemble it on an expanding scale. Indeed, this literature both describes and engenders the radically localized subjectivity signified in Irving’s ekphrastic portrait. A permanent chrysalis of sorts, Irving’s George has no self-evident future, nor is it entirely clear whether he belongs to the present or the past. This quality of irresolution and nonbelonging encourages Irving’s reader to view with a certain skepticism any account of modernity that designates it as a radical break with the past or as the origin of new translocal social forms. George is the caveat emptor at the center of Irving’s story. On the one hand, Irving’s figure of print (i.e., the “pocket full of hand-bills”) reifies print culture: it encourages Irving’s reader to class newspapers, novels, and handbills together in a story of technological determinism. On the other hand, Irving’s portrait of George is emblematic of an unresolved modernity. By filling in the figure of print with attention to the finer details of form in the Sketch-Book’s critical apparatus, moreover, Irving encourages his reader to discern a more vexed role for literature in the making of the modern time that results in this irresolution. And in light of this attention to issues of form, modernity itself begins to take on new characteristics. The political handbill that Irving references is one of the few genres of writing organized around a punctual temporality: the political handbill is necessarily addressed to the national “moment.” When Irving frames his Sketch-Book writings as the product of local folk wisdom, however, he suggests that his and other forms of literary print culture did as much to draw forward antique modes of being in time as they did to introduce the “busy, bustling disputatious tone” and national punctuality that Rip at first witnesses upon his return. In this impossible modernity, Irving seems to argue, no single order of time can be said to rule the day.

Secular Time in America

When Rip Van Winkle returns from his twenty-year nap, which spans the years of the American Revolution, Irving’s narrator observes, “The very character of the people seemed changed.” As it turns out, changeability itself suffuses this people’s new character. Time as change seems to be a rule rather than the exception in Rip’s post-Revolutionary village; Rip’s are a people seemingly steeped in and fashioned by linear progressive time—a new people experiencing time in a novel way. However, the specific events that produced this new experience of constant change have gone missing. In their place stands the somnolent ellipsis at the story’s center. Although the events of the American Revolution are in one sense an absent cause, they are, strictly speaking, just plain absent. Instead, time is “promoted to the rank of a power in its own right.”¹¹ Even Rip never really rises to the position of the story’s protagonist; that role is given over to time. “Rip Van Winkle” in this respect reflects what Jürgen Habermas has called the “time-consciousness of modernity,” to the extent that it abstracts time from contingent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Written to the Future
• 1. Figures of Print, Orders of Time, and the Character of American Modernity
• 2. “A Magnificent Fragment”: Dialects of Time and the American Historical Romance
• 3. Local Time: Southwestern Humor and Nineteenth-Century Literary Regionalism
• 4. The Deprivation of Time in African American Life Writing
• Epilogue: The Spatial Turn and the Scale of Freedom
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments