SOURCE: “F. O. Matthiessen and American Studies: Authorizing a Renaissance,” in Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, Columbia University Press, 1987, pp. 157-75.

[In the following essay, Arac addresses the often contradictory nature of Matthiessen's work and assesses “the possibilities for a new literary history in the practice of American Renaissance.”]

For decades since his suicide in 1950, F. O. Matthiessen has exerted a compelling attraction. The documentation, analysis, and controversy around him bulk larger than for any other American literary scholar born in the twentieth century, and they grow.

There are at least three good reasons for this posthumous attention. First, Matthiessen played a decisive role in making possible the American academic study of American literature (for short, “American studies”). His major book, American Renaissance (1941), has given its name to courses taught at hundreds of institutions. More than any other single factor it enabled hundreds of Ph.D.'s in English to specialize in the American literature of the nineteenth century. Matthiessen himself, however, deplored the “barrenness” of what he termed the “now hopefully obsolescent practice of literary scholars' restricting themselves to the arbitrary confines of a single century in a single country” (Responsibilities 169).

Second, Matthiessen, both as a Harvard professor and as a private citizen, was widely and visibly active in left politics of the 1930s and 1940s. Although as a practicing Christian he was not a Communist and disavowed Marxism, he was considered a leading fellow-traveler. The clearest textual focus for this engagement is From the Heart of Europe (1948), a memoir of his time in Austria and Czechoslovakia in the months before the Czechoslovak coup of 1948.

Third, both as a teacher and friend, Matthiessen made an intense personal impression. A “collective portrait” by many hands was compiled soon after his death, but the most remarkable testimony came in Rat and the Devil (1978), a selection by their friend Louis Hyde from the thousands of letters exchanged by Matthiessen and the painter Russell Cheney during the twenty years they shared their lives.

The interrelations among these three aspects of Matthiessen's career do not, however, offer an occasion for the rhetoric of “wholeness,” even though that rhetoric was extremely important to Matthiessen himself. As a critic, for example, he concluded American Renaissance (henceforth abbreviated AR in references) by writing of Melville that he fulfilled “what Coleridge held to be the major function of the artist: he brought the whole soul of man into activity” (656). As a politically committed man, he began the book by subscribing to the test of “true scholarship,” that it be “for the good and enlightenment of all the people, not for the pampering of a class” (xv). And as early as 1925, he wrote Cheney about their love: “In these last months I am a whole man for the first time: no more dodging or repressing for we gladly accept what we are. And sex now instead of being a nightmare is the most sacred, all embracing gift we have. Now I can see, as this morning, while riding along, a husky labouring feller asleep on a bank, one hand lying heavy across his things, and I can thrill at the deep earthiness and blood of him. For I know that I am of blood and earth too, as well as of brain and of soul, and that my whole self waits—and waits gladly—for you” (Rat 116).

Some problems about Matthiessen's “wholeness” emerge clearly in comparing the letters and American Renaissance. In the long section on Whitman, Matthiessen dispersed over sixty pages references to three topics—homosexuality (AR 585; cf. also 535), the “power of sex” (523), and transient “Good Moments” (541)—which are remarkably condensed in an early letter to Cheney. This letter narrated an encounter with a “workman—husky, broad-shouldered, forty” at Wells cathedral. Matthiessen began with a literary reference: this man was “the perfect Chaucerian yeoman,” and he concluded by explaining that he wrote so much about the event “not because it is the least bit important, but because it was so natural, so like Walt Whitman.” Such cultural awareness did not conflict with but rather enhanced erotic possibilities: “He caught my eye both as a magnificently built feller, and as fitting in so perfectly to the type of fourteenth century work man.” He thus embodied the permanence of the people: “He might just as well have been building the original cathederal, as repairing it centuries later.” For “about a quarter of a minute” they talked, allowing Matthiessen to note the man's “unusually gentle” voice and “dark full brown” eye. Then, as the man went off, Matthiessen “deliberately let my elbow rub against his belly,” for he “wanted to feel the touch of his body as a passing gesture.” He acknowledged that he was sexually excited, yet also that “there was no question of not wanting to keep myself for you.” The “whole self” allows marginal responses to take on their wholeness: “It thrilled me, not only with sex, but with friendliness” (Rat 124).

The problems of temporality here merit further attention: the mythic co-presence of the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, set against its punctual disruption, the “passing gesture,” the “good moment.” What stands out now, however, is the difference between the sense of reading Whitman in Matthiessen's lively letter and in his monumental book. Between these two ways of reading, and ways of writing about reading, stands a long process of transformative discipline, closely related to issues addressed in the chapter on Arnold. The modern critical practice Leavis called the “discipline of letters” required abandoning the modes of “impressionist” reading, the orientation which M. H. Abrams has called “expressive,” and the rhetoric of “flash” and fragment for which the classical antecedent is Longinus on the sublime. To create the centrally authoritative critical identity of American Renaissance, much had to be displaced or scattered or disavowed. Loose elbows had to be tucked in. T. S. Eliot's insistence on “form” and “impersonality” in poetry chastened Matthiessen's early commitment to the “human spirit,” the “man himself,” and the “flash of the spark of life” that reading sets off (Rat 102, 133).

Matthiessen joined his generation in sacrificing to modernist discipline a romantic theorist of the “spark,” the politically and sexually revolutionary poet Shelley. Even a German left-wing modernist like Theodor Adorno (a year younger than Matthiessen) shared his derogation of Shelley, at least by the time he had emigrated to the United States. The first version of Walter Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire (the primary focus of the next chapter) cited a few lines from Shelley's “Peter Bell the Third” to contrast their “directness and harshness” (Härte, which may also be translated “rigor”!) to the obliquity with which Baudelaire represented Paris:

Hell is a city much like London,
A populous and smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity.

(lines 147-51; Charles Baudelaire 59)

In criticizing the essay, Adorno accused Benjamin of being fooled by the “extraordinary” quality of the German translation of Shelley, for “directness and harshness are as a rule not exactly his characteristics” (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:1112). Adorno no doubt felt the odds were on his side, since the translation was by a notoriously harsh and direct German poet—Brecht. In fact the translation is lucidly literal although slightly less lapidary, and without the savage comedy of the rhyme “undone / fun done”:

Die Hölle ist eine Stadt, sehr ähnlich London—
Eine volkreiche und eine rauchige Stadt.
Dort gibt es alle Arten von ruinierten Leuten
Und dort ist wenig oder gar kein Spass
Wenig Gerechtigkeit und noch weniger Mitleid.

(Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2:562)

Brecht and Benjamin had been together in Denmark in 1938. While Benjamin was drafting the essay, Brecht wrote one of his several pieces against Lukács's conception of realism (“Weite”). This one translated much of Shelley's “Mask of Anarchy” (which directly precedes “Peter Bell the Third” in the Oxford Standard Authors edition to which Benjamin referred), to demonstrate that in his very different way Shelley was as important a model for realism as Lukács's Balzac. It seems likely that Brecht did the “Peter Bell” translation for Benjamin, since it is not included in the standard edition of his works, which, however, was completed before Benjamin's essay reached publication.

Matthiessen's hostility to Shelley, then, was representative, but it is especially significant because in the early letters, Matthiessen was reading Shelley with positive engagement. At one point he even archly identified himself with Shelley in their attachment to older men (Rat 33, 78, 84). By American Renaissance, however, T. S. Eliot's denigration of Shelley was in full force. Some half-dozen times Shelley was evoked for predictable dismissals (AR 259, 311, 353, 388). Such gestures contributed to the critical authority of American Renaissance because they certified Matthiessen as emotionally “mature,” and they distanced him from a figure whose philosophic, political, and literary activities can seem terribly unintegrated—in part, we have seen, because of his full commitment to both ends of polarities. Yet in the spread and energy of his own activism, Matthiessen more closely resembled Shelley than any of the antiselves he treated in American Renaissance.

These analyses suggest that the problem of the whole, the indivisible, the individual, requires attention to institutional circumstances. Can we make a whole without exclusion and divisiveness? Matthiessen joined Hawthorne in abjuring the “damned mob of scribbling women” (AR x); students ask me why Frederick Douglass showed insufficient “devotion to the possibilities of democracy” (AR ix) for Matthiessen even to mention him. These are matters of institutional power: in order to be a productive unit, a field must be marked off, delimited, defined—even if your commitment is to “all the people.”

This kind of discrepancy is crucial to understanding the effects of Matthiessen's career. For Matthiessen's power to authorize an American Renaissance came from his mobilizing certain figures that were then appropriated in ways contrary to his intentions. Recall the irony that his work produced specialists of a sort which he himself considered “hopefully obsolescent.” No less striking is the nationalist force achieved by Matthiessen's emphatically international undertaking.

I want to explore in some detail Matthiessen's title: American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. First off, it is significant to my institutional focus that the phrase which later American literary culture most closely identifies with Matthiessen was not originally his own, but provided by a younger colleague (Levin, preface to Power). It was important to Matthiessen that his work be collegial, based more broadly than in the solitary individual. Matthiessen acknowledged the oddity of considering the mid-nineteenth century a cultural “re-birth.” He explained that “America's way of producing a renaissance” lay in “affirming its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture” (AR vii). This still-cryptic clarification is better understood through a quotation from André Malraux cited a few pages later: “Every civilization is like the Renaissance, and creates its own heritage out of everything in the past that helps it to surpass itself” (xv n.). The theory of literary history adumbrated here deserves considerable attention, but for the moment note how obscure this line of intention has become; few can recall this logic for the title.

For “renaissance” has a force of its own. Ever since the historiographic notion was elaborated by Michelet and Burckhardt—in 1845 and 1860, exactly bracketing Matthiessen's period—“Renaissance” has carried a glamorous freight of secularism, progress, and preeminent individuality. All these values were in fact suspect to Matthiessen, but his title's figure translated “the Renaissance” westward to America just when the old, transatlantic Renaissance was being conservatively reevaluated in works like The Allegory of Love (C. S. Lewis, 1936) and The Renaissance and English Humanism (Douglas Bush, 1939). Matthiessen supported their claims for the medieval continuities of the Renaissance, emphasizing Christianity and traditional literary modes (cf. AR 246). But that was not how his figure worked.

What is the particular force of an “American” renaissance? As “American,” it is new; more paradoxically, it is a repetition, a “renaissance of the Renaissance.” It does for the Renaissance what the Renaissance had done for antiquity. Most important, however, it is national. People had long spoken of a Concord or Boston or New England “renaissance,” but this was no longer local, regional, or sectional. It was shared among “all the people.” Contrast Perry Miller's The New England Mind (1939), which not only sectionalized but also split off “mind” from the vigorous physical embodiment suggested by “Renaissance.”

In emphasizing his focus on literature as “works of art” rather than as philosophical or social practice, Matthiessen imagined books that he might have written instead: The Age of Swedenborg, on transcendental thought; or The Age of Fourier on “radical movements” (AR vii-viii). The contrast of Emerson and Whitman with Swedenborg and Fourier strikes home. Emerson and Whitman are major, central, household words; Swedenborg and Fourier are minor, eccentric, obscure—and not even American. The literary and the American unite against the foreign, philosophical, and radical.

Matthiessen's title promoted a euphoria of America that gained power against the grain of his own methodological precepts and critical practice. From a review-essay of 1929 on the need to rewrite American literary history, to the lecture of 1949 on “The Responsibilities of the Critic,” Matthiessen insisted on America's relation to “Europe” (which includes England) (Responsibilities 181, 12). His most important books before and after American Renaissance addressed T. S. Eliot and Henry James, the most notoriously transatlantic of America's great writers. In American Renaissance itself Shakespeare occupied more lines of the index than did Thoreau! Matthiessen conceived of his subject as essentially national and comparative. He taught courses on world drama, Shakespeare, and an introduction to major English poets. American studies has not followed Matthiessen's precept or practice, even while drawing its warrant to exist from him. His radical energies succeeded more in reinvigorating than in remaking culturally established figures.

In speaking of a “euphoria of America,” I do not mean that Matthiessen was blind to social and political problems or that he didn't care about them. American Renaissance immediately proclaimed its solidarity with “those who believe now in the dynamic extension of democracy on economic as well as political levels” (4). But in writing about the social problems of America, Matthiessen failed to achieve specificity comparable to what he achieved in writing about the literary successes. Thus in Ahab he found an “ominous glimpse of what was to result when the Emersonian will to virtue became in less innocent natures the will to power and conquest.” That will gave us the “empire-builders of the post-Civil War world,” the “strong-willed individuals who seized the land and gutted the forests and built the railroads” (459). Matthiessen's rhetoric conflated the will with the deed, while introducing an oversharp chronological boundary. He failed to acknowledge that already in the 1850s, precisely in railroad building, not the tragic individual but the limited-liability corporation was the major agency, drawing capital from many sources, developing the techniques of bureaucratic management to organize the activities of its employees (the “hands” who executed the “will”), and even developing the ideology of free enterprise in order to get rid of existing government activities.

Matthiessen echoed the individualistic focus of Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons (1934) but ignored the contrary perspective of Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means in The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1933), which James Burnham brought to fruit in The Managerial Revolution (1941). Alfred Chandler's painstaking historical work on the “Visible Hand” of the “Managerial Revolution in American Business” postdates Matthiessen, but the classic work of Matthiessen's older contemporary George Rogers Taylor bears out my emphases on the connection of prewar to postwar (Taylor 101), the prevalence of corporate over individual enterprise (240-42), and the role of giant, bureaucratic corporations in fomenting the ideology of private enterprise (383). Instead of this analytic detail, Matthiessen's approach produced an abstract division from a willed unity. That is, his theology provided the human potential for evil (AR 180), and his intellectual history provided the rise of “individualism” in the American 1830s (AR 5-6). The two combined to produce the figure of the evil individuals who obstruct the common good of an otherwise united American People.

Throughout the 1930s, the negative term of “individualism” and the positive terms of the “community” or the “people” figured in the discourse of widely different American intellectuals (Pells 118). Matthiessen's use of such terms in American Renaissance had an important relation to the particular political and rhetorical strategy of the Popular Front (or “People's Front”), which from 1935 was the Communist party line. In contrast to the militantly divisive rhetoric of the “Third Period,” which attacked even socialists as “social fascists,” the Popular Front, in belated response to Hitler's success, emphasized a defensive policy of alliance building. The situation no longer promised imminent apocalypse, requiring radical separation of sheep from goats; now, rather, from liberals to communists all were sheep together, except for that wolf out there. This policy meant a changed stance toward America. In 1933 Granville Hicks published The Great Tradition, on American fiction after the Civil War. In reviewing it, Matthiessen shared its concern with “the class war which is becoming increasingly the central fact of American life” (Responsibilities 197). In 1938, still on the staff of the New Masses, Hicks published his next book, I Like America.

Matthiessen was not a Communist party member, he did not always follow party positions, but the strategy of the Popular Front clearly appealed to him. I have already noted his rhetoric of “all the people” and noted the absence of class analysis in American Renaissance. As opposed to earlier Communist emphasis on independent proletarian culture, the Popular Front emphasized defending the “cultural heritage,” which included the masterpieces produced by the bourgeoisie. This project defined Georg Lukács's major studies of nineteenth-century realism as well as André Malraux's brilliant speech on “The Cultural Heritage” at the second congress of the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture, held in London in 1936 (see further my “Struggle for the Cultural Heritage”). This was the text Matthiessen quoted for its crucial assertion that every civilization is like the Renaissance.

To locate Matthiessen's rhetoric in relation to the Popular Front helps to clarify what I find American Renaissance's most extraordinary idealization: the diminishment of the Civil War. The Civil War was not even indexed, although it was not literally absent from the book. It allowed for tragic poetry by Melville and Whitman, and it was mentioned again and again—as in the passage just cited on “empire builders”—as a marker, dividing the American Renaissance from an age of rampantly destructive individualism. But the war was not integrated into any understanding of the renaissance. Matthiessen demonstrated that his object of study, the literary, functioned for writers as an evasion, though not a complete disengagement, from a political life of which they did not wholeheartedly approve (e.g., AR 67). But his interpretations of this compromise failed to reckon with the affirmative support compromise still gave to dubious policies. It is both more understandable and less commendable than Matthiessen suggested that Hawthorne, despite his skeptical conservatism, supported the party of Jackson. For the Democratic party's commitment to slavery made “the Democracy” include much less than “all the people,” as I detail in “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter.” Rather than facing up to divisions within the renaissance, Matthiessen divided the renaissance from the war and segregated qualities “before” and “after.” His wish for wholeness led to disconnection.

By splitting off the war, Matthiessen forestalled comparisons between the 1850s and 1930s that the Depression had provoked. Edmund Wilson's “An Appeal to Progressives” (1931), for example, defined the time as “one of the turning-points in our history, our first real crisis since the Civil War” (524-25). The comparison between the 1850s and 1930s was exciting for a militant strategy but embarrassing for a strategy of alliance and containment. If, as Charles and Mary Beard argued in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), the Civil War had been “The Second American Revolution,” then the analogy pointed to a class war that would make a third.

Yet to evade the analogy left a problem: what would mobilize change if “democracy” already existed and “class struggle” was forbidden? This impasse structured American Renaissance. Matthiessen was celebrating what he knew must be transformed. Renaissance yielded to Civil War, and the Popular Front too must yield to something else, but there was no acceptable image for that new state except an idealization of the present state. The result was an unhistorical freezing.

This conjunction between Matthiessen's cultural politics and those of the Popular Front has two consequences. First, it grants greater value and dignity to the cultural results of the Popular Front than they have been allowed in the most authoritative representations. Lionel Trilling devoted his career to portraying American “liberal” culture as so Stalinized as to make impossible any live or complex literary response. Such claims depend upon ignoring Matthiessen, as Trilling did, or considering his politics as unrelated to his critical accomplishments, as Irving Howe has done (Margin 156-58).

Lionel Trilling did not literally ignore Matthiessen. He reviewed Matthiessen's study of James, and the two appeared together on a panel (Rat 300, 333), yet the treatment of Matthiessen in Trilling's fundamental position paper, “Reality in America” (1950), is remarkable. The essay asserted that Parrington dominated “the college course in American literature” nationwide whenever it aimed to be “vigorous” rather than “genteel”, an even stronger claim than Trilling had ventured in the essay's first version, “Parrington, Mr. Smith, and Reality” (1940). Yet according to Henry Nash Smith, also writing in 1950, Parrington's dominance in the thirties had yielded to American Renaissance in the forties. Trilling then spotlighted “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet,” that is, the choice between James and Dreiser. Having posed the inevitability of choice, Trilling then quoted Matthiessen's praise of Dreiser while remarking Matthiessen's admiration for James and criticism of Parrington, but he failed to notice the disruptive anomaly this introduced into his schematization (Liberal Imagination 1, 8, 12). Elsewhere in the volume Trilling repeated his claims for the divorce between “our liberal educated class and the best of the literary mind of our time” (94), i.e., Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, and other modern masters. Again, Matthiessen's existence made nonsense of this claim, and he was ignored.

It is worth remarking the contrasted starting points Matthiessen and Trilling specified for their social thought about America. Matthiessen recalled the “comradeship” shared during college with older, foreign-born workers he helped to instruct in English, and he noted the self-awareness as an “American” provoked by his time in England as a Rhodes Scholar (From the Heart 72, 23). For Trilling, “America” only became “available” to his “imagination” through the “Jewish situation” (itself necessarily related to “social class”) that he discovered working with the Menorah Journal in the late twenties (Last Decade 14-15). Matthiessen's national awakening obliterated class and ethnic divisions; Trilling's arose from them.

The second consequence of noting Matthiessen's relation to the Popular Front is to highlight the dangers of such a strategy of reconciliation, a special concern now when a renewed academic Marxism offers to embrace all other intellectual positions, a prospect to which the chapter on Jameson will return. Matthiessen's Popular Front figure of “America” suffered a sobering fate. The war (which, after all, did come) reconstellated American politics, and the figure of “America” that began as a Depression tactic of harmony became a postwar myth of empire. A mobilization intended as oppositional became incorporated hegemonically; American studies gained power by nationalistically appropriating Matthiessen.

“Reconciliation” is not only a political strategy but also a well-known operation in literary theory. Having analyzed the discrepancy between Matthiessen's internationalism and the nationalist authority his work achieved, I want now to address another area of discrepancy: Matthiessen's attempt to use the politically conservative theory of the “symbol” in a critical discourse intended to be politically progressive.

American Renaissance made a major commitment to literary theory, both as views of the 1850s and as a current activity—“our own developing conceptions of literature” (AR vii). Matthiessen was alert to the significance of M. H. Abrams'work, citing the dissertation version of The Mirror and the Lamp (AR 261). Matthiessen related the theory and practice of his chosen writers to his own understanding of “the nature of literature” (xiii) on such topics as mode (myth), genre (tragedy), and figurative language (allegory and symbolism). Over the four decades of American studies, such theoretical engagement has not flourished, and where it has recently begun to emerge, it appears as an imported innovation rather than as reclaiming a founding heritage. The single theoretical topic that has become institutionally part of normal procedure is nationalistic: the question of “American romance”—a topic Matthiessen briefly highlighted but also seriously limited (AR 264ff.). Just as comparative literature became the subfield that kept alive Matthiessen's internationalism, New Criticism after the war became less a movement than a province, the subfield into which his theoretical commitments were segregated and developed.

Matthiessen's major theoretical resource was Coleridge, as elucidated by I. A. Richards in response to T. S. Eliot, but Matthiessen understood and emphasized that Coleridge's position made larger claims than Eliot or Richards or, as we have seen, Robert Penn Warren would accept. Eliot wished to separate poet from poem, and Richards used Coleridge in the service of utilitarian atheism, while Matthiessen proclaimed that “the transcendental theory of art is a theory of knowledge and religion as well” (AR 31).

The crucial passage in Coleridge has already been cited. In the fourteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria, the poet, “described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity” through the “power” of “imagination,” which “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities,” such as general and concrete or individual and representative (Collected Works 7.2:15-16). From this passage, Richards in the chapter on “Imagination” in Principles of Literary Criticism elaborated a theory of tragedy as the most “inclusive” possible “attitude,” which by contemplating the most extreme opposites—fear and pity—achieved a stable poise that he even called “invulnerable.” Matthiessen drew also upon Coleridge's theory of the “symbol,” which “enunciates the whole” yet “abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative” (Collected Works 6:30). Coleridge's image for this condition is “translucence,” above all of “the Eternal through and in the Temporal.” This exposition of the symbol appeared in The Statesman's Manual, a theological guide to conservative politics for post-Napoleonic, early industrial England.

Matthiessen's aesthetics agreed with Coleridge's, as did his theology, but his politics, starting from a similar romantic anticapitalism, differed widely. Matthiessen identified himself with Hazlitt (From the Heart 83), who remained loyal to the revolutionary cause despite its horrors, rather than like Coleridge turning away in fright or revulsion. How could Matthiessen be a trinitarian formalist radical?

He could if radicalism meant reconciliation. The Popular Front enabled Matthiessen's criticism, his politics, and his religion to interact powerfully and positively. The strategy of alliance allowed these different elements to share the same discursive space. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, written just before the Popular Front, is weaker than American Renaissance because Matthiessen's politics found no place in it. This is not to claim Matthiessen “followed” the line; rather, the line “released” him to bring together elements previously separated. But this is not to say either that they make a perfect whole.

Each of these three components had its own particular term for the fantasied unity, the figure of wholeness, that their interaction produced as “American Renaissance.” For Matthiessen the political leftist, that term would be “all the people” in the People's Front. For Matthiessen the critical formalist, the ideal term of wholeness was “literature” itself. For the Christian, in a tradition that reached back into the seventeenth century and through Jonathan Edwards, as Richard Niebuhr and Sacvan Bercovitch have demonstrated, that term would be “America.” Bercovitch has analyzed the “American Jeremiad” as provoking a sense of crisis that finally produces no fundamental change but reaffirms the existing “American” way. This logic I find operates like that of Coleridge's aesthetics or Popular Front politics—in Melville's phrase, “By their very contradictions they are made to coincide.” This formula offers an American translation for the “reconciliation under duress” that Theodor Adorno criticized in Georg Lukács's Stalinist Hegelian realism.

The Jeremiad position is not easy or complacent; it is anguished and sincere, but it stands in a false position. Let me explain this through Matthiessen's reading of “The Try-Works.” In this chapter from Moby-Dick, “Ahab's tyrannic will” is “symbolized,” Matthiessen argued, through the process by which “the act of burning down the blubber on the ship's deck at night becomes, in its lurid flame, ‘the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.’” From the spiritual symbolized in the physical, Matthiessen went on to read the representative from the individual: “It seemed then to Ishmael, in a rare symbol for individualistic recklessness—indeed for a whole era of American development—‘that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern’” (AR 290). Matthiessen's exposition of the “symbol” here interacted with the motifs of America and individualism that I earlier analyzed. His trinitarian aesthetic highlighted the figure of embodiment (“material counterpart”), but in emphasizing the “will,” Matthiessen's reading omitted the loose elbows, the actual bodies, the “Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers,” and the watch with “tawny features … begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth.” In their racist demonization, these bodies did not represent “all the people.”

As earlier “America” was idealized, here the literary was idealized as “symbol.” So vivid was Melville's figure that Matthiessen took it as truth, embodying all that we need to know. Ishmael, however, went on to define his vision of “rushing from all havens astern” as a double error. He mistook his object, for it referred not to the try-works scene but his backward view; and he mistook himself—as his mind wandered, his body turned: “Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern. … In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night.” Not the demonic scene, but the observer's error posed the real threat: Ishmael neglected his responsibility as helmsman. Matthiessen, then, ignored literature's own recognition that it may err: “Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, and the ghastliness of others.” Thus, even at its most passionately intelligent and concerned, the stance of American studies cultural criticism has been misplaced, through a disorienting, self-involved detachment just at the moment it believed itself most perceptively involved with the way things are. This danger threatens also the course of “detachment” Benjamin urged for historical materialism, yet despite the dangers these courses merit attention.

After treating the politics of America and of the theory of literature in Matthiessen's work, I want now to assess the possibilities for a new literary history in the practice of American Renaissance. These possibilities are still “new” after forty years not only because American studies failed to pick them up, but also because Matthiessen's own explicit theory of atemporal wholeness obscured his recurrent perception of transient, fragmentary moments.

I have mentioned the “freezing” of time and denial of history in Matthiessen's reading. Matthiessen used the term “structure” for the wholeness achieved by a successful symbol, a symbolic “form,” when it reconciled the eternal and the temporal. His negative term for the failure of this process was “moments.” Matthiessen most pointedly set these terms in opposition discussing D. H. Lawrence, that bogey of New Criticism (AR 313). Yet despite Lawrence's anti-Coleridgean emphases and his Shelleyan loyalties, he was quite important to Matthiessen, and Matthiessen's evaluation was more ambivalent than his theory. Indeed, when Melville himself reached the imaginative “level where both abstraction and concretion may have full play,” Matthiessen did not emphasize symbolic stability; he observed instead that this was “not a level which … he can sustain for long—but rather, a precarious point of equilibrium between two opposed forces” (464). Melville could not “hold the wave at the crest” (408). Such evanescence resonates less with the New Critics' Coleridge than with the impressionists' Pater, who wrote: “This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later” (Renaissance 187). Such a Paterian “tragic dividing of forces on their ways” rekindles autumnally what Emerson more buoyantly had asserted. Not an enduring “translucence” but the intermittent flare of moments proved in practice what Matthiessen found. Cleanth Brooks observed that Matthiessen's book on Eliot failed to offer a “complete, consecutive examination” of The Waste Land (Modern Poetry 136), and this remained true of American Renaissance. Matthiessen was typically a reader of passages, a judge of moments. The American Renaissance itself from the beginning stood as a moment: “The starting point for this book was my realization of how great a number of our past masterpieces were produced in one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression” (AR vii).

As Aristotle is the exemplary structuralist, the great critic of the moment is Longinus on the sublime. Against structural unity, we have noted that the sublime is a “flash of lightning” that “scatters all before it.” Longinus' discontinuous theory of influence—as the agonistic relation between two literary consciousnesses across a wide span of time, like that of Plato to Homer—offers the nearest precedent to Harold Bloom's “revisionary” theory of poetry. Bloom emphasized, however, the important precedent for his work in Emerson, and I would note that Matthiessen found it there: “Emerson knew that each age turns to particular authors of the past, not because of the authors but because of its own needs and preoccupations that those authors help make articulate” (AR 101-2). Thus, Melville achieved “his own full strength” through the “challenge” of Shakespeare (AR 424). Such a dynamic, recall, was also Malraux's claim in “The Cultural Heritage.” In an italicized formulation that Matthiessen cited, “A heritage is not transmitted, it must be conquered” (xv n.). The energy of struggle, deflected by the Popular Front away from politics, reappears within culture.

Matthiessen understood that such claims violated established ways of conceiving and writing history, and he worried over historiographic method. He knew personally the painful struggle to possess a tradition. He wrote to Cheney in 1925: “This life of ours is entirely new—neither of us know of a parallel case. We stand in the middle of an uncharted, uninhabited country. That there have been other unions like ours is obvious, but we are unable to draw on their experience” (Rat 71). Against such blanking-out, Matthiessen found his own needs and preoccupations articulated in Whitman and in Proust. He accepted Richards'claim that great writing required “availability of experience” (AR 129).

For his own historical project Matthiessen rejected “the descriptive narrative of literary history” (AR vii). He was not alone in rejecting narrative. In 1929 there had appeared in England Namier's The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and in France the first issue of the great journal Annales. Matthiessen, however, also rejected analytic history writing. Against scientific digging “into … the economic, social, and religious causes” (vii), Matthiessen chose Richards'analytic of experience. His project shared this ground with Walter Benjamin's essay on “The Story-teller” (1936) and Sartre's Nausea (1938), both of which lamented the unavailability of “experience” and marked a crisis of narrativity. Frank Kermode's Romantic Image studied Anglo-American modernist alternatives to this failure of narrative discourse.

Matthiessen evaded this crisis by studying the “fusions of form and content” that defined “what these books were as works of art” (vii). This aesthetic ontology projected a Coleridgean, “symbolic” history like that of Joyce's Ulysses. There one day's happenings come into contact with as much of the human cultural past as it could possibly evoke. Likewise, Matthiessen's “moment” focused centuries of American cultural history from the Puritans through James and Eliot. This mythic rhetoric leveled history into what Matthiessen quoted Thomas Mann as calling “recurrence, timelessness, a perpetual present” (AR 629), a relationship of temporality that was “continuous,” as Matthiessen quoted Eliot on Joyce (630).

In American Renaissance there also operated, however, a temporal orientation that aimed not to perpetuate but to innovate, signaled by Matthiessen's sole positive citation of Nietzsche: “Only the supreme power of the present can interpret the past,” and such power required the interpreter to be “architect of the future” (AR 629 n.). The urgency of relationship between this particular present moment and particular past moments contrasts both to the continuous linear sequence of traditional narrative time and to the equally continuous homogeneity of modernist myth. It produces a discontinuous, textured, historical temporality. One model for this could be found in Proust, whose correlation of moments through “involuntary memory” again highlighted Richards'problem of availability, which Matthiessen found as struggle in Malraux. During Matthiessen's work on American Renaissance, the critic most suggestively rethinking literary history—and working on Whitman's contemporary Baudelaire—was Walter Benjamin. (At one sole moment, Whitman occurs disruptively in Benjamin's “Central Park” notebook, 50.) It is worth noting that Malraux's original “Sur l'héritage culturel” referred to Benjamin's study of the artwork and mass reproduction (4), but that in translating and editing Malraux for the New Republic, Malcolm Cowley omitted that reference.

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin characterized the relation between one historical moment and another as a “constellation” (Illuminations 263) and argued that “to articulate the past historically” meant to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255)—as the French revolutionaries did with the Roman republic. This claim illuminates Matthiessen's conjunction of the 1850s and 1930s, his urgent sense that these were exactly the writers “all the people” needed at the moment of solidarity against the danger of fascism, disconnecting them from the Civil War in order to join them to “now.”

Benjamin, however, opposed the Popular Front strategy. He deprecated the preservation of “cultural treasures,” for they are tainted with “barbarism” (Illuminations 256) both in their origin and in their transmission. He urged instead “the fight for the oppressed past” (263), to redeem what was once stigmatized and suppressed as “minor” (254). Perhaps Matthiessen fulfilled this task, in rejecting the cultural treasures of Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell to rescue once-marginal writers as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman had been in their time. Matthiessen, however, disavowed any canon-shifting intervention, deferring to the judgment of “the successive generations of common readers” (AR xi) who selected the five authors. This version of the Popular Front he at once reconciled with the apparently contradictory claim by Ezra Pound that “the history of an art … is the history of masterwork” (xi).

Following Benjamin, I have tried both to specify the “barbarism” at work in Matthiessen's book and to “redeem” certain emphases and practices obscured through the representation of Matthiessen produced in American studies. Benjamin's concern with the cultural apparatus, his care for technical matters that relate the means chosen to the ends desired, leads me to a final question, which bears on Matthiessen's claims about his chosen writers, on his own project in his book, and on work any of us might do: can one espouse and further “all the people” by writing “masterwork”? American Renaissance achieved its masterful unity through the construction of figures that misrepresented Matthiessen's cherished values. Their effect was not a symbolic translucence but an allegorical alienation. He mobilized “America” on behalf of internationalism; he mobilized “renaissance” on behalf of communalism; he mobilized the theory of “structure” but actually elucidated “moments.” The project of “wholeness” involved harmonizing, centralizing, normalizing, and “identifying.” By tucking in elbows, Matthiessen empowered a particular self and work and nation and also rejected particular “other” identities, such as Shelley, and dispersed others, such as Whitman.

Near the end of his decade writing American Renaissance, Matthiessen suffered a psychic breakdown. While he was briefly hospitalized, Matthiessen posed as life-or-death choices the kind of issues that have concerned my analysis—Aristotle versus Longinus, structure versus moment. He asked, was it any reason to kill himself if his failure to accomplish this project proved to him that “I am an enthusiast trying to be a critic … a rhapsode trying to be an Aristotelian” (Rat 246)?

Matthiessen questioned the value for life of this discipline, this struggle of the will to define, formulate, mobilize, and authorize an American Renaissance. His question took its terms from a punning Latin phrase that evoked the extinction of democratic politics in ancient Rome and—as Cesare Borgia's motto—the assertion of identity in Renaissance Italy: “Must it be aut Caesar aut nullus?”—that is, is the only choice that between Caesar and utter nonentity? Only if we can define better alternatives for the intellectual career is there any chance to be of much use to “all the people.”