[In this essay, Laurence suggests that Bradford's seeming anticipations of both the Romantic concept of the sublime and the unique qualities of American literature help to expand scholarly notions of those literary categories.]

Sometime in 1630 William Bradford, perennial governor of Plymouth Plantation in New England, recorded for posterity the inhospitable, wintry scene on which the pursuit of separatist convictions had landed an obscure company of plain English country folk a decade earlier, in November 1620:

But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present condition; and so I think will the reader, too, when he well considers the same. Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembered by that which went before), they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succour. It is recorded in Scripture as a mercy to the Apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the barbarians showed them no small kindness in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they met with them (as after will appear) were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise. And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men—and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world. If it be said they had a ship to succour them, it is true; but what heard they daily from the master and company? But that with speed they should look out a place (with their shallop) where they would be, at some near distance; for the season was such as he would not stir from thence till a safe harbor was discovered by them, where they would be, and he might go without danger; and that victuals consumed apace but he must and would keep sufficient for themselves and their return. Yea, it was muttered by some that if they got not a place in time, they would turn them and their goods ashore and leave them. Let it also be considered what weak hopes of supply and succour they left behind them, that might bear up their minds in this sad condition and trials they were under; and they could not but be very small. It is true, indeed, the affections and love of their brethren at Leyden was cordial and entire towards them, but they had little power to help them or themselves; and how the case stood before them and the merchants at their coming away hath already been declared.

What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: “Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity,” etc. “Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good: and His mercies endure forever.” “Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord His lovingkindness and His wonderful works before the sons of men.”

(61-63)

Every student of American literature can recall, perhaps even recite, these paragraphs from chapter 9 of Of Plymouth Plantation. Yet for all their familiarity as a set piece reprinted religiously at the beginning of every anthology of American literature, Bradford's eloquent sentences present us with a literary anomaly that to my knowledge has never been noticed: We have here, in 1630, a century or more ahead of schedule, a prototype of the sort of romantic sublime Kant called, in The Critique of Judgement, the negative or dynamical sublime.

To be sure, Bradford is no romantic, nor does his text anticipate Romanticism, unless at the extremely general level where Protestantism and Romanticism share broadly similar concerns (see, e.g., Abrams, esp. chs. 1, 2). It seems, rather, that the peculiar quandries Bradford encountered in writing the history of the Pilgrims' journey from Europe to North America mobilized a rhetorical strategy whose energy arranges a structure of transcendence normally associated with Romanticism.

The eminence, force, and impressiveness of Bradford's expression have been duly celebrated in every generation, and this distinction alone would cause us, following Longinus, to call the passage sublime. But Bradford's discourse approaches the sublime in the more special, though not unrelated, sense just mentioned. It rises to the monumental dignity of sublime speech in the way the inhuman, over-mastering might of wild nature becomes an image that directs sensibility to the still more commanding yet hidden power of spirit. Here we have the exact structure of Kant's negative or dynamical sublime.

The passage discomfits us with a double embarrassment to our convictions about proper literary sequence. The sublime is, in the first place, an eighteenth-century phenomenon closely tied to romantic naturalism. Bradford is simply of the wrong epoch and certainly of the wrong ideological persuasion to be producing a literary configuration even remotely resembling that associated with the dynamical sublime. And then there is the unsettling way the passage aligns itself with texts we like to think of as distinctively “American.” It anticipates, entirely too well, any number of classic episodes of nineteenth-century American literature where, released from history, society, and convention, the hero gains a new knowledge of the ultimate nature of things. Consider, for example, Emerson's fiercely gleeful response to the economic collapse of 1837, in Harold Bloom's estimate one of his “two great outbursts of prophetic vocation” (Poetry 236):¹

Behold the boasted world has come to nothing. Prudence herself is at her wits' end. Pride, and Thrift, and Expediency, who jeered and chirped and were so well pleased with themselves, and made merry with the dream, as they termed it, of Philosophy and Love,—behold they are all flat, and here is the Soul erect and unconquered still.

(332)

Or think of Dickinson:

Our journey had advanced—
Our feet were almost come
To that odd Fork in Being's Road—
Eternity—by Term—
Our pace took sudden awe—
Our feet—reluctant—led—
Before—were Cities—but Between—
The Forest of the Dead—
Retreat was out of Hope—
Behind—a Sealed Route—
Eternity's White Flag—Before—
And God—at every Gate—

(2: 473; no. 615)

Announcing what almost seems to merit designation as a topos of American expression, Bradford is for the literary historian very awkwardly too “American” too soon.² If we search the record of American writing between Bradford and Emerson for the like of Bradford's “American-ness,” we search in vain. He seems to accomplish in a sudden and singular leap what American writing in general must wait to achieve after a long period of provincialism. For the brief space of these obtrusive paragraphs, American literature seems to be thrown unaccountably ahead of itself from the standpoint of a historical model built on the premise of gradual cultural evolution.

We might ask, however, whether such a model for American literature is not faulty, or at least confining, in its root assumptions. It may be that we need to experiment with a different approach to the writing of literary history. The anomaly Bradford presents invites renewed reflection on an “ancient riddle” (Jones 353)—the question of what makes American writing American. Bradford's history shows us a scene of writing that, as a representative anecdote in the history of American literature, may help us get beyond the monotonous, homogenizing reductiveness that has been a notable weakness of generalization across the chronology of the field. (On the concept of representative anecdote see Burke 59-61, 323-25.)

In these famous paragraphs Bradford makes a truly surprising use of the wilderness landscape. One must exercise caution in proposing singularity or innovation for anything a writer does, but in my experience the depiction of the Pilgrims' landing at Cape Cod stands out almost freakishly within Bradford's writing and also from the entire seventeenth-century context.³ No mere backdrop to the event, the setting functions as the crucial figure that reveals the Pilgrims' relation to spirit. More a poetic image than a historical reality, the landscape is described not in and for itself but for the sake of the insupportable idea it has been made to represent and over which the passage gains sublime triumph: the dreaded possibility that the Pilgrims have mistaken their call and that, far from being an advance of the community toward its goal, the migration may have been an error, a profane wandering that forebodes the subversion of everything Bradford holds most dear. For artful reasons Bradford recurs to the landscape at the climax of his narrative and insists on it in a rhetorical manner. He permits the North American topography onto his stage in the shape of an agonistic weather-beaten marauder—a trope for everything that jeopardizes the legitimacy of the Pilgrims' action—only because he has learned how to use that image to represent the triumph of spirit over all that threatens and opposes it.

The sublimation of anxiety into exultation is the true subject of the passage. Bradford's chief aim is not to recount what happened when the Pilgrims landed but to satisfy a need for meaning that has become acute in the course of writing his history. The manner in which, rhetorically, the passage takes flight should by itself be a sufficient signal that the balances have shifted: the historian as describer of past events has given way for the moment to the processes of imagination necessary to interpreting those events and envisioning his narrative's total meaning. The sublime emerges as a solution to a literary problem of closure. This text concerns the transit from Europe to North America as an event occurring in and for writing as well as an event writing talks about. Of Plymouth Plantation belongs to our literary history because it shows the peculiar dynamics set in play when North America impinges on the scene of writing—in this instance when Bradford recruits a space at Europe's margin to serve as a theater for the reenactment, the repetition, of European memory.

As is by now familiar enough to require only a brief restatement, Kant develops the sublime as a negative, even irrational, affirmation of the reality of what he calls the supersensible ideas of reason. In one of his several attempts at definition he writes: “Nature considered in an aesthetic judgement as might that has no dominion over us is dynamically sublime” (109). The physical might of nature—the spectacle of “aimless mechanism” (92) with which it assaults the senses—manifestly defies human wish and defeats human will. Ordinarily it inspires fear in the unnerving prospect of misery, danger, even death. In the sublime moment, however, nature's might engenders instead a feeling of the complete superiority of human nature to the terrors with which nature threatens humanity. Here wish paradoxically proves a surer guide than perception. “The sublime,” Kant affirms, “is that, the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense” (98). Considered, that is, as an object of aesthetic judgment, the spectacle of nature's aimless force impels the self to reaffirm its relation to an invisible realm of supersensible, spiritual ideas. The sublime is the feeling of exultation experienced when nature's demonstrations of irresistible might, by exposing the self's weakness and insignificance, remind us that we triumph only as sensibility sacrifices its attachment to nature and identifies itself wholly with the supersensible ideas of reason to which humanity is in any case already secretly directed.

Nature is the scene for this exultation, but not through a capacity to serve as the positive image or symbol of the ideas of reason. These ideas—Kant cites the idea of freedom as an example—are inscrutable; they defy imaging or positive presentation in the sensible (visual) strategies of imagination. Kant reserves a special scorn for the visionary fanaticism “that would will some vision beyond all the bounds of sensibility” (128). Like nature itself in the sublime moment, the ideas of reason are beyond the capacity of the sensible imagination. This analogy forms the basic structuring principle undergirding the romantic sublime.

Nature in its sublime aspect is in fact not symbolic at all. An eclipse of significance, a threatening lapse from a condition of secure assurance in the natural world, moves the self to a kind of emotional whistling in the dark. The sublime occurs as a defensive maneuver. When nature's sheer materiality threatens to give the lie to the supremacy of reason, feeling comes to the rescue. The fearful sight of nature's “aimless mechanism” gives rise to a surprising exultation as the self has involuntary recourse to “a power of resistance of quite another kind” than physical (111). The unveiling of a meaningless nature becomes the occasion for an odd, irrational revelation of a hidden relation of the self to spirit that lurks in ambush along the track of experience and self-knowledge.

The sublime is thus not visionary per se but, rather, a visionary irony or a dramatic irony given a visionary turn. A circumstance of palpable physical subjection becomes, by an ironic logic of the worse the better, the means for the self to register the significance of an unseen world of spirit that nonetheless remains unseen. Its consequence is felt; its contents stay hidden.

The sublime, Kant freely acknowledges, becomes possible only on the basis of a “preparatory culture” (115), a preliminary instruction in traditional morality that renders the mind deeply susceptible to moral ideas—by means, one surmises, of cultural regimes structuring the development of personality along lines that emphasize guilt and self-denial, the classic ascetic collusion of id and superego (as discussed in Freud). And, indeed, a marked ascetic motive makes its presence felt throughout Kant's discussion, which emphasizes sacrifice, deprivation, and the opposition of one aspect of the self to another. In size and power nature exceeds the capacities of imagination, and the delight of the sublime arises when imagination's effort to represent this unattainable extent and might inevitably fails; this failure “determines the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation of [the supersensible] ideas [of reason]” (119). By an ironic gesture whose justification remains obscure, the incomparable realms of nature and spirit suddenly become comparable after all: sensibility's relation to nature determines by a reflexive substitution its relation to the supersensible realm of ideas. This comes down to the claim, philosophically dubious if poetically interesting, that failure, defeat, and inadequacy in the world of experience indirectly and ironically vouch for the reality of a realm of supersensible ideas—invisible, wholly apart from nature, and strictly speaking unimaginable—in relation to which alone humanity discovers the spiritual vocation for which it is born.

It is easy enough to see in Kant's discussion of the sublime the recurrence of displaced versions of familiar themes in Protestant piety. One notes the ascetic downgrading of sense in favor of spirit; the positing of an alienating rift within the self, inaugurating an inner strife between flesh and spirit for the ultimate possession of the self's allegiance; the ethic of exaltation through self-denial; and most of all, perhaps, the intensely inward spirituality that cultivates a capacity for strong emotional responsiveness to moral ideas while vigilantly maintaining a rigorous distinction between the legitimate transports of spiritual consolation and the misbegotten delusions of visionary fanaticism.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the ethic at work in Kant's discussion of the sublime should be largely cognate with the ethic of Bradford's history. The thematic parallel between Kant and Bradford comes out clearly, for example, in Alan Howard's statement of the moral theme that runs through Of Plymouth Plantation: the book's incidents and episodes, Howard remarks, all describe “the continual awakening to the same essential reality, God's power and man's weakness, which underlies the whole range of human experience” (248).

The sustaining hand of God is not manifested in some miraculous suspension of the laws of nature. It is present whenever man is able to withstand privation beyond normal patience and strength, to strive longer than one would have expected—in sum, to endure beyond man's ability to endure.

(244)

But when, as Bradford describes the Pilgrims' situation on making landfall at Cape Cod, his writing turns sublime, it does so for reasons quite apart from this pious and conventional theme of stoic endurance. The idea of endurance does not by itself promote the sublime; no more does piety by itself. The surprising, anomalous aspect of the passage arises in an area other than theme and has to do with the way Bradford verbalizes his theme rather than with the theme itself. It has to do with the way he positively exploits the “hideous and desolate wilderness” with dramatic purpose, advancing a feeling for the natural circumstance as carrying more than natural implication. This dramatic motive engenders a prototype of the sublime, as the “hideous wilderness” becomes a scene where nature is, as in Kant's formulation, “considered in an aesthetic judgement as might that has no dominion over us.” The moment of the Pilgrims' greatest subjection to nature in body becomes the manifestation of their greatest exaltation over nature in spirit. The narrative breaks into true visionary irony or, as Wordsworth termed it, visionary dreariness.

Norman Grabo notes that Bradford deliberately built his description to suggest that “by all rational expectations … the venture should fail” (10). Bradford presents the Pilgrims at the end of their journey as facing the unanticipated horror of an absence of institution so total it threatens to disintegrate the grounds not only of civil existence but of personal identity as well. They are at, if not beyond, the very border of any condition they can call human, where the accustomed sources of supply for human need apparently do not exist, where the praiseworthy sentiments of distant friends are reduced to feeble and irrelevant gestures, and where the obligations and expectations to which morality and civility owe their being evidently wither. Bradford would leave his reader no alternative but to acknowledge that the Pilgrims stood on ground isolated from all human hope or help. He means to show us survival where there existed few means for survival, and little reason to survive.⁴ What began as agitation for a worship “according to the simplicity of the gospel, without the mixture of men's inventions” (6) has ironically carried this tiny band of religious dissidents to a world without the mixture of human inventions at all. Historically, in the arena of what Bradford calls “outward objects,” this deprivation is devastating. Yet for the outward loss there is the compensation of a correspondingly extreme inward gain: a sublime emergence of sustaining spirit.

Here it is necessary to introduce a complication. The sublime exaltation is clearly something that occurs for Bradford in the act of writing and not in the experience he writes about. In this respect, Bradford's sublime differs from the sublime moment as we tend to think of it in eighteenth-century and in romantic literature, where sublimity is more intimately linked with experience and especially with intensely emotional experiences of the wilder aspects of outdoor scenes. As Kant defines the sublime moment, “the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful” (91). The defeat of imagination is but “momentary,” recovery follows “at once,” and throughout the transaction the focus is experiential: the pleasure is a pleasure in the object that indirectly determines a recognition of reason's claim to the self's ultimate allegiance.

One wonders, however, to just what length the interval between check and recovery might be drawn out. Kant remarks that the sublime is impossible where danger is too immediately real and fear prepossesses the soul: “we must see ourselves safe to feel this soul-stirring delight” (112)—a caveat with obvious pertinence to Bradford. The vantage point of safety provided by the ten-year interval between the landing, in November 1620, and the composition of the passage permits the mental “picturing to ourselves” (110) of our susceptibility to fearful objects (in contrast to being in immediate danger)—a picturing that, Kant understands, underlies the aesthetic judgment requisite to the feeling of sublimity.⁵

We may even ask whether Bradford's slowed, drawn-out sublime does not expose formative rhetorical structures that the romantic sublime elides and renders covert. Recent studies of Wordsworth, for example, offer subtle analyses of sublimity as a solution to a linguistic predicament: it arises, typically, when the poet resists the fading out of nature's images that inevitably accompanies the linguistic processes that come into play when the sensation of experience is cast into the verbally mediated understanding and sense of poetry (see, e.g., Hartman; Weiskel; de Man). Visionary dreariness—in Bradford, Wordsworth, and elsewhere—may well turn out to be reducible to a common structure that is best understood not in idealizing terms, as an immediacy of experience, but, rather, as a phase in the conflictual relations between sense as the physical shape and image of the world and sense as non-physical, unvisualizable verbal meaning.

The sublime, then, occurs at a particular position in the transit between, in Wallace Stevens's phrase, “the image without meaning and the image as meaning” (Opus 161). Bradford reaches this position—but from a direction opposite to Wordsworth's. Wordsworth's sublime represents his will to keep hold of the bare image in the face of the rhetorical coercions that displace the beauty of the visible, sensate world with the fell dreariness of overdetermined meaning. Bradford, in contradistinction to Wordsworth, summons the rhetoric of sublimity to recover a proper degree of meaningfulness against the assaults of an impoverished physical world that does not provide the accustomed tokens of spiritual reality that he needs. His sublime is engendered as a recovery from the threat of ruin that he images in the wintry dilapidation of the North American landscape. And the ruin is not just of the plantation as an economic and political entity; it concerns the history as an act of writing perhaps even more directly. The sublime becomes necessary to Bradford when the act of writing the history raises the crucial question of the total meaning of what his community has done.

Two aspects of the problem of historical narration come together here as the problem of closure: the problem of how to plot the movement from Europe to New England converges with the problem of how to reach and convey the proper understanding of that action. Bringing the journey to its proper conclusion requires an act of narration that is also an act of interpretation and persuasion. Bradford's extraordinary description is certainly not set down out of a dutiful commitment to be faithful to the facts, however unpleasant. He aggressively amplifies the scene to take full rhetorical advantage of it—the rhetorical advantage that produces the sublime. This landscape is not described, it is invoked. Or description here functions as invocation: Bradford describes the scene to justify his understanding of the event. For it is understanding, knowledge, and authority that are at stake: what version of events, what understanding of the plantation, will command the future, the “saying” of the children. This spot of time dictates a pious relation to Spirit—with the Christian, uppercase S insisted on—as proper to the future. The moment becomes momentous. The passage, in fact, dictates to the future with a vehemence no other passage in the history approaches. Hence it functions vocatively in several senses: it invokes the image of the wintry wilderness landscape to establish the vocation of the founders and to dictate the vocation of those who come after.

The continual exchange between the descriptive or physical or literal level of the passage and a figurative level of vocative implication comes to a head in the word sustain: “What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace?” It is, of course, a question, descriptively and literally, of physical survival. But mere physical survival signifies here: it implies that a seal is put on their enterprise and their calling to it. Survival means that the Pilgrims are sustained not just in body but in their decision: God has vindicated them and his doing so becomes a support to an argument—that the decision to undertake the plantation was right and proper, was a work they had a divine call to do.⁶

All this is obvious enough. But there is another level of vocative implication that needs pointing out. It follows that insofar as readers fall under the spell of Bradford's sublime speech and accede to the understanding it sets before us, his own act of writing has likewise been sustained. A more than natural force has implicitly been invoked to sustain the history as an act of writing and, in so doing, to compel us to see the past as Bradford presents it to us. The sublimity of the passage can even impose itself on us, at some level, as the mark of insight: something divine and godlike enters the writing in a way that makes the thought cross our minds (it need by no means be our final thought) that this account cannot be less than the very truth.

Physical adversity, one would assume, is overcome by physical measures, by the application of material and technical means. And in book 2 of the history, Bradford does not shrink from telling us about these, and their ironic effects, at length. But here his purpose is to compel his readers to understand that the plantation did not succeed by physical or merely human effort alone. The inevitable question is, how can the description of a physical circumstance—this poor people's present condition—work to convey a cognitive realization, which is by definition purely mental? The answer is: by force of rhetoric. Bradford's description becomes a medium for realizing—in several senses of the word—a certain understanding as, by means of figures of speech, description becomes invocation. A physical circumstance becomes a place where the sublime takes place (I deliberately blur the textual and topographical senses of “place”) as figurative language turns description into invocation.

The figures crucial to the effect of Bradford's description are metonymy and prosopopoeia. Indeed, prosopopoeia, the trope that confers face or voice, seems here an intensification of metonymy in a certain direction. As the sentences pass from one feature of the scene to the next, a chain of resemblances is established by which each feature appears to manifest a single subject that lies behind them all. This is the figure of metonymy: what is presented to us, we see, are not objects merely but effects that reductively represent a cause. The Algonkians' arrows duplicate the sharpness of the season; the Algonkian determination to fill the Pilgrims' sides with them matches the weather's violence, fierceness, and cruelty. Through this integrative tactic (synechdoche), the aboriginal inhabitants and the physical situation serve as figurative equivalents for each other. They are thus prepared to shadow forth metonymically the single, hidden agent at whose behest they operate and of which they are the conformable, consistent agencies.

The ground is systematically cleared of all sheltering structures that might break up this figurative chain and obscure or permit avoidance of the quasi-apocalyptic sense of agency that Bradford creates: hence the famous negatives that situate the Pilgrims frighteningly outside both the civil and the biblical worlds. The ship, its captain, and its crew, mentioned later in the passage, exemplify the material orientation, skeptical reading, and satirical point of view (sauve qui peut) Bradford's voice must overmaster (see White 28-29). (We must feel his is the superior wisdom, not theirs.) The wintry wilderness scene itself even functions, at one level, as a specular image for the reader who threatens to obtrude an inadmissable skeptical and profane understanding. We remember Longinus's warning about what a fearsome character the reader is likely to become should the sublime fail and not sublimity but the devices that were to convey it be what impose themselves: “Accepting the fallacy as a personal insult, he sometimes turns quite savage, and even if he masters his rage, he becomes utterly impervious to the persuasive quality of the speech” (127; ch. 17). For the sublime, Longinus observes, is not a persuasion but a resort to force in lieu of the material reasons for making a persuasive case (100; ch. 1). It is exactly a peculiar form of fallacy.

One begins to discern the depth of the narrative and argumentative crisis Bradford has met with. A physical circumstance that enforces a morally insupportable conclusion must somehow be made the basis for a conclusion that, while morally and poetically gratifying, does not find support in logic, reasons, the material evidence that is the historian's stock in trade. Bradford's tropes turn a physical adversity against which words are useless and irrelevant into an adversary, a vindictive agent—a reader or judge—toward whom a vindicating magic of words can effectively be mobilized. Metonymy intensifies toward prosopopoeia as the face and figure of that agent appear in the description as what description has itself invoked. “For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.”

Later, in the closing biblical citations, this adversary will receive a name: “the oppressor.” One might expect a still more definitive identity, Satan. But Bradford refuses such definitiveness, and this refusal is as important to the sublime as the rhetorical tactics that make the scene imply an agent. It marks the boundary between the sublime and the visionary, the latter with its claim that the invisible world can be seen in as direct and literal a fashion as the visible (see Weiskel 6-7). The oppressor signifies a burden that the passage must lift and that the passage gives us warrant to specify in several ways or at several levels, but all of them human and natural rather than visionary. Not the least important, as I have tried to show, is Bradford's burden as a writer, the burden of reaching a proper closure, a conclusion that brings the Pilgrim community to its New World destination in such a way that a proper understanding of the entire action is conveyed with an irresistible force and mastery. The sublime is engendered as the setting is made to signify danger overcome: both physical danger and the danger of passing out of such relation to the Spirit of God as alone, in Bradford's estimation, can grant the Pilgrims' action worth, value, significance.

Bradford's figures confess his oppressive sense of being too alone in and with nature qua physical environment. Nature itself, not nature as the agency of Satan, is the adversary, and it is nature's oppressiveness, not the malice of Satan, that motivates the passage's tropes and that Bradford answers with sublimity. The tropes of metonymy and prosopopoeia react against a physicality that is oppressive as physicality, an environment that, precisely because it is descriptively and literally an adversity that demands to be met intensely on a material and technical level, must be invoked as a subject, a face, an adversary that spirit can recognize, meet, and master. On one side this adversary is nature. On another it is the reader, who must be made to renounce the credence intelligence naturally gives to material evidence and permitted to join the “fallacious” triumph of spirit over nature.

The being sustained—survival—is, then, a matter of the mind as well as the body, and of Bradford's act of writing as well as the past event he writes about. It signifies a writer's need as well as a physical necessity. It means victory over the threatening possibility of the reader's contempt, indeed, over self-contempt. It means what Kierkegaard termed “repetition,” the “recollection forwards” (33) of European memory in this strange place outside Europe—this place that is without memorials and hence is no proper place. “Recollection forwards” excellently describes the purport of Bradford's concluding gesture: “May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say …,” along with the freely rendered biblical citations that conclude the passage. This image is a second prosopopoeia, inversely symmetrical to the first. Where the first figure apotropaically invokes the reader Bradford fears, this figure invokes and grants voice to the reader he desires, the reader who sustains him. Here the transcendental and the historical converge. For life in this dimension is not simply the motion of a body, or the endowment of body with self-motion, but the performance of an act. It requires a script. There must be a production and reproduction of “that which is written” in a space at once natural and (however covertly or overtly) theological, a paradoxical region of mingled ideality and resistance to ideality that comes into being through the species of theatrics called rhetoric. By turning, troping, his community's region into an area of that stage where the Word too has force and relevance, Bradford re-creates the conceptual space in which life—and writing—takes place. American literature here engenders its context as a volume of theatrical space, a site called wilderness, where the performance of tradition may come to be, proceed, and repeat itself. Its history, we see, has an aspect of histrionics.

We need to appreciate the audacity necessary to willing this repetition. It carries with it the burden of an involuntary solipsism. In this strange place where Bradford stands as if at the uttermost margin of the civil and biblical worlds that govern action and indeed that alone render his life intelligible as action, European memory is perilously close to being reduced to no more than Bradford's personal memory. There is an unlooked-for reversal of power relations: what he has customarily relied on as the authority for his life now relies on him. For it to dictate to him once more, he must dictate it. The surfacing of the term “separate” at this juncture conveys the irony and ambiguity of this circumstance exactly: separation indicates a position vis-à-vis tradition that is at once the complete undoing of the religious project of separatism and its ultimate form. “If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.” In this history of a band of separatists, Bradford applies the word “separate” to the community just this once, when he in his imagination looks from the shores of Algonkia back across the ocean that, like a sudden flooding of awareness, divides “wild” from “civil” and separates them from the social sources of identity.

Bradford, of course, had good political reasons for avoiding the term: it could only antagonize authorities whose goodwill and aid the colony needed. And, indeed, in its occurrence here the word appears stripped of its religopolitical meaning. It seems to mean, and to have been intended to mean, something bad and only something bad. It signifies banishment from the only social existence Bradford can think proper to human beings. A reader alert to the political currents of English life in the earlier part of the seventeenth century might even speculate about whether the apparently inadvertent surfacing of the word “separate” at just this crucial juncture in the narrative can be taken, rather in the manner of a Freudian slip, as an ironic and wholly unintended comment on the separatist project Bradford (without admitting the label) warmly champions elsewhere.

But by the same token, an opposite interpretation presents itself as equally legitimate. The fierce affirmation, closely connected to the sublimity of the passage, that turns defeat by nature into exaltation on the level of spirit may work to perform similar ironic transformations on hidden levels of the term “separate.” The way of separation Bradford has pursued in his search for religious truth perhaps receives here an ironic amplification of which Bradford himself is far from conscious. By slow and carefully modulated steps Bradford's narrative has brought his community of separatists to the place he calls Cape Harbor (60), where, face-to-face with the bleak and wintry reduction that is his image for American space, he finds himself stopped, able to do nothing but come to an astonished pause. The final step, that of imaginative crossing into the land that lies before them, remains beyond the power of narrative to take. Narrative falters, and finding his journey advanced to an “odd Fork in Being's Road” and himself nothing so much as an “empty spirit / In vacant space” (to adopt apt phrases from Dickinson and Stevens [Palm 114]), Bradford requires the sublime if he is to continue moving forward: separation becomes exaltation as it becomes manifest that only an influx of “the Spirit of God and His grace” can have permitted the community to survive its passage to the limit depicted.

The Pilgrims suffered, we understand, an overpowering revelation of discontinuity, a sudden awareness of separation from everything that had come before. Repetition, in this place and in such poverty, must take the form of creation, and unless Bradford can exercise the freedom of creation—that is, open a way for the play of a metaphor to happen—there will be no repetition. The situation exacts more than a humble recollection of the great, the inspired, the prophetic; it requires a joining with them. The sublimity of citation, of the “saying” that reiterates the biblical text, arises exactly from the sensation Longinus identifies as the reader's portion in the sublime. “For by some innate power the true sublime uplifts our souls; we are filled with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaunting joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we had heard” (107; ch. 7). As though we had produced what we had heard: this readerly illusion becomes for Bradford a dramatic imperative. The texts freely rendered from Deuteronomy and Psalms must be, for the moment, as much his as Moses's or David's. It is not enough for the texts to apply to him interpretively or analogically; if Bradford is to reach and convey the understanding he needs, they must be the cry of his occasion.

The texts are confirmed as such by the children, who speak exactly in the pious mode of analogy. Their so speaking is the trope that enables Bradford to envisage piety authoritatively as the vocation proper to the future. But the trope simultaneously obliges him, as narrator, to exceed by implication the orthodox bounds of piety. His voice absorbs and dominates, in a metaleptic reversal, the biblical texts it echoes. In ways that surpass Bradford's intention or control, an unlooked-for sense of falling out of vital contact with tradition promotes defensive rhetorical maneuvers that coercively produce the stance and voice of the prophetic seer.

The journey from Europe to North America becomes, through coercions intrinsic to the linguistic resources Bradford has mobilized, a transit between the roles of children and fathers, a movement from belatedness to origination. At the crisis of his narrative act, Bradford is forced to take up, or submit to, the rhetorical devices of literary revisionism if his work is to find the closure he so fervently desires. Within the dialectic of revisionism as Harold Bloom conceives it, “poetry must leap, it must locate itself in a discontinuous universe, and it must make that universe (as Blake did) if it cannot find one. Discontinuity is freedom” (Anxiety 39). In Bradford's case it might be more accurate to say that discontinuity is fate. It is Bradford's fate to have wandered into separation, into an anxiety of having gone all wrong or too far. He starts from discontinuity and quests back toward continuity—the symmetrical opposite of the revisionist quest for discontinuity typical of so many romantic and modern writers. In his unwished-for sense of falling out of vital contact with tradition he perforce becomes a producer who must give tradition a way to “say” itself anew. He must supply the means for tradition to make itself properly heard, to make a place for itself. For him a central fear is the fear of being so detached from tradition that his claim to belong to it is no longer recognizable. Separation is a condition that makes the fathers fathers in a more than natural sense. To carry, to refer, tradition to this place until now unknown to tradition, Bradford must reoriginate tradition. The sublime is the means he finds for taking up this literary burden.

I have argued thus far that formal motives and rhetorical coercions internal to the act of writing provide the best explanation for the anomaly of the dynamical sublime in Bradford's history. Yet as I have pursued these intrinsic factors, an ineradicable aspect of reference has made itself felt at every turn. The sublime emerges in Bradford as a defense against unsettling implications of the transit from Europe to America. As an act of writing, Bradford's history is uneasily suspended between the sheltering conceptual space of European literature and the alienating physical space of the American continent. The passage, it may be, shows us not the truth of that physical space but only an image useful for defense against the truth. This discussion leaves to one side the question whether the landscape as Bradford represents it is an image engendered by the coercions of his rhetoric or a historical verity commanding the rhetoric that makes the representation.

It is worth recalling, however, that explorers from Verrazano in 1524 to Champlain in 1605 to John Smith in 1614 to the Pilgrim authors (one may have been Bradford himself) of the journal Mourt's Relation, published in London in 1622, uniformly describe the coastal plain from the Saco River to Narragansett Bay as a well-populated region where a great deal of land had been cleared for agriculture (Wroth 127-31, 137-41; Champlain 63-89, 109-39; Smith 15; [Winslow and Bradford] 42-43). We know that Algonkian peoples had flourished there for at least 2,500 years since the ocean level rose and the coastline assumed something of its present outline following the retreat of the Wisconsin glaciation.⁷ Plymouth Plantation occupied the site of fields worked by Wampanoags killed to all but the last man—Tisquantum, the famous Squanto—in the devastating epidemic of 1616 ([Winslow and Bradford] 32-33, 35; Young 183-85n3, 190-91n3; Cronon 85-90). Choosing the word “wilderness,” Bradford names space according to what is, after all, a European category (see Stilgoe 7-10, 21). He reconstructs Algonkian country exactly as Europe's margin, in an aggressive act of definition and perception that effaces what was there and reforms it into a setting adapted to distinctly European acts of will—to an act of writing, for example, that projects the sublime (Laurence).

The willfulness and aggression leave their mark. The emergence of the sublime in Bradford signals a literary transition: the scene of writing implied in Bradford's text is an American scene. His eloquence signals a withdrawal from empirical fact in a search for satisfactions of meaning that derive from literature. The willfulness Bradford finds necessary to this withdrawal in America and the level of aggression required to attain the sought-for satisfaction cross the writing with peculiar force and lend it its distinctive bent. In this, Bradford inaugurates a strain that recurs in American writing, not by way of influence but in the way his history sets forth one logic of the scene of writing as the New World impinges on that scene.

I want to emphasize that one. There may be, hypothetically, any number of other scenes, other logics, though one might expect, practically speaking, that the American scene of writing or the scene of American writing Bradford's history implies should be one of a limited number of such scenes. It would be rash to generalize, however; I eschew any monolithic, single-factor theory of American literature. Literary history need not flatten the unique individuality of writerly acts in its pursuit of general patterns. Nor need it inevitably turn into the history of ideas or moral history of the monolithic national mind that the usual confining methodologies presume literary works reflect. Bradford's desire for meaning, intensified by physical and moral challenges that impinge as the separateness of his American situation, engenders the ironic tactics of the destitute seeker whose world lacks the accustomed tokens of spiritual reality. His singular performance, we surmise, could occur precisely because Bradford was innocent of the general cultural significances we know the sublime would acquire a century after he wrote. Other texts, by writers working in other circumstances and facing the demands of other formal and thematic quandaries, may mark out entirely different, perhaps no less “American,” fields of rhetorical energy. Nonetheless, in the anomalousness of Bradford's history we discover the queer music and peculiar visionary irony of the American sublime.⁸

Notes

1. The point is not original with Bloom. Whicher also notes the depression of 1837 as crucial to what he calls Emerson's “leap into greatness” (60-61). See as well Charvat.

2. Considerations of space prevent me from quoting my favorite example: the passage in chapter 10 of The Awakening (908-09) where Chopin describes Edna Pontellier's exhilarating midnight swim.

3. I am curious to hear from readers in all fields who may want to send examples or counterexamples they know of.

4. An unspoken factor here may be the drowning—Samuel Eliot Morison suspects it was a suicide (Bradford xxiv)—of Bradford's wife, Dorothy, at what is now Provincetown Harbor a few weeks after the landfall, while Bradford with a party of several others was off scouting for a settlement site.

5. Again, a historical-biographical factor seems pertinent: Bradford seems, in part, to have been emboldened to write by the arrival in 1630 of the comparatively large and well-equipped Winthrop expedition and the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For the first time, it seemed there might be a future to write for.

6. It is perhaps not irrelevant to recall Bradford's reference early in the history to the separatist congregation under the leadership of John Smith. Like the Leyden congregation, this group had seceded from the Church of England. Like the Pilgrims, Smith's congregation had been harried out of the land for their civil disobedience and had taken refuge in Holland. But there, Bradford remarks in a tight-lipped comment, they fell into error and “buried themselves and their names” (9)—a possible, even a likely, prospect for his own community that returned to haunt him as he composed his history.

7. The problems of assessing the character and duration of the aboriginal cultural presence are extremely complex. For a discussion, see Moir et al., esp. vol. 1 and 2.

8. This essay is for Leo Marx, committed scholar, skillful teacher, incisive critic, warm friend, and aider of many. “Thanks, Coach.”

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