barbaric yawp: The word as the world in American literature, The

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Leonard, Garry

Leonard is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and the author of Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacaninan Perspective and Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce.

Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $35.00 hc. 586 pp.

Martin, Terence. 1995. Parables of possibility: The American need for beginnings. New York: Columbia University Press. $27.50 hc. xii 263 pp.

Teichgraeber III, Richard F. 1995. Sublime thoughts/Penny wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American market. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.$39.95 hc. xxiii 283 pp.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself

American literature has always attracted and seemed to call for meta-thematic explanations for its many and varied peculiarities. The fact that Chevrolet can describe itself as "the heartbeat of America" is a simple but typical demonstration of this urge to explain, once and for all, what's "American" about America. Other famous commentators such as D.H. Lawrence and Leslie Fiedler have also written books full of sound and fury signifying quite a bit about the curiously coherent yet elusive "heartbeat" that pulses through all American literary projects. We might generalize about why American literature demands this approach so insistently and consistently: from sixteenth century letters written back to Europe, through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it is a country that seems to have written itself into existence, and so the obscured origin of what we take to be the inevitable development of America is in fact textually based.

If the writing of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King amply demonstrates the previously unimagined literary power of the political document, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Ellison equally demonstrate the overtly political power of literature. The result is a fascinating conflation of national and political ideology. In what other country would it make sense to threaten a legislative veto by quoting a line from a Clint Eastwood western (President Reagan: "Go ahead, make my day")? American Presidential candidates must try and persuade the electorate with their storytelling abilities even as they try and impress them with specific political positions. For President Kennedy there is a "new frontier," for President Reagan "it is morning again," and for President Bush, less eloquently, but no less importantly, it is "the vision thing." Indeed, then-President Bush expressed confusion about what this might be, even as he uneasily acknowledged its importance, and Clinton's easy reassurance that he was "from a place called Hope" carried him right past Bush's unsatisfying insistence that "the issue is character." Neither phrase means very much, but Clinton's pronouncement has the sort of epic and mythic resonance that identifies it as a part of the never-ending story of America, and Bush's phrase seems querulous and short-sighted. In line with this, both political parties frequently insist they are fighting for "the soul" of America (Chevrolet, as I've already noted, has first dibs on the heart). America seems to be a pronoun without an antecedent, and thus everyone is free to speculate on what "it" means, from Cotton Mather's tireless typological explanations for all that has happened in America, and all that will, to the frantic angel hipsters of Kerouac's fiction, stopping just long enough to be sure they are not "there" yet, and on to the circular answer of the Coca Cola advertising campaign that, after all has been said and done, "Coke is 'IT'."

Maddened by the apparent yet inscrutable commonality of all American literary projects, we pursue the American literary tradition as though it were Melville's white whale, each of us secretly confident we are the Ahab that can harpoon it. As Ahabs go, Terence Martin, in his book Parables of Possibility, is a particularly impressive one and the thematic harpoon he wields is his central insight about what he calls "the protean importance of a sense of beginning in American literature and culture." "Protean importance" is an instructive phrase because it embodies the way American literature seems to be, at one and the same time, always about the same thing-freedom, liberty, the Promised Land, a new beginning-and yet endlessly protean in terms of the forms used to tell again all the twice told tales-Puritan sermons, Indian captivity narratives, pioneer diaries, political speeches, autobiographical accounts of the experience of slavery.

I've always been struck, whenever rear I teach a survey course in American Literature, at how much of Volume I isn't "literature" in any sense that my students can recognize. By the time we work through even the first 500 pages of the Anthology, they are checking their schedule to see if this is a course on religion, or history, or political science. And even when the "literature" is finally reached (and they act like the crew of the Mayflower sighting land), what is Walden Pond, exactly? And we call Huckleberry Finn a novel because it is close enough, and even append the "Great American" to it, and then we apologize for the last third of it because it is not very novelistic. And what about Moby Dick? If we put John Huston's movie with Gregory Peck next to the novel, we have two neat versions of it: what Melville wrote, and then what Melville wrote with all the philosophy removed-Melville Lite-(the way Melville might have wrote it if he were trying to follow up on the success of Typee). But America is very like a whale in its literary incarnation-huge, sprawling, unencompassable and yet the whole of the story often seems reproduced, in miniature, in any detail we might care to focus upon. And here one thinks of that other protean shape-shifter, Walt Whitman, who, he tells us, can be found both under our feet in a leaf of grass and across the full expanse of the star-spangled heavens.