in the audience observing, watching the performance of Young America, in 1915 say, and reconstruct the play, its director, its plot, and its cast in such a manner that its very point never surfaces? Not why. How? Ten years after Tocqueville’s prediction in 1840 that “ ‘finding no stuff for the ideal in what is real and true, poets’ would flee to imaginary regions,”8 in 1850 at the height of slavery and burgeoning abolitionism, American writers chose romance. Where, I wonder, in these romances is the shadow of the presence from which the text has fled? Where does it heighten, where does it dislocate, where does it necessitate novelistic invention; what does it release; what does it hobble?
The device (or arsenal) that serves the purpose of flight can be Romanticism versus verisimilitude; New Criticism versus shabbily disguised and questionably sanctioned “moral uplift”; the “complex series of evasions” that is sometimes believed to be the essence of modernism; the perception of the “evolution of art”; the cultivation of irony, parody; the nostalgia for “literary language”; the rhetorically unconstrained textuality versus socially anchored textuality, and the undoing of textuality altogether. These critical strategies can (but need not) be put into service to reconstruct the historical world to suit specific cultural and political purposes. Many of these strategies have produced powerfully creative work. Whatever uses to which romanticism is put, however suspicious its origins, it has produced an incontestably wonderful body of work. In other instances these strategies have succeeded in paralyzing both the work and its criticism. In still others they have led to a virtual infantilization of the writer’s intellect, his sensibility, his craft. They have reduced the meditations on theory into a “power struggle among sects” reading unauthored and unauthorable material, rather than reading with the author the text that both construct.
In other words, the critical process has made wonderful work of some wonderful work, and recently the means of access to the old debates have altered. The problem now is putting the question. Is the nineteenth-century flight from blackness, for example, successful in mainstream American literature? Beautiful? Artistically problematic? Is the text sabotaged by its own proclamations of “universality”? Are there ghosts in the machine? Active but unsummoned presences that can distort the workings of the machine and can also make it work? These kinds of questions have been consistently put by critics of colonial literature vis-à-vis Africa and India and other third-world countries. American literature would benefit from similar critiques. I am made melancholy when I consider that the act of defending the Eurocentric Western posture in literature as not only “universal” but also “race-free” may have resulted in lobotomizing that literature, and in diminishing both the art and the artist. Like the surgical removal of legs so that the body can remain enthroned, immobile, static—under house arrest, so to speak. It may be, of course, that contemporary writers deliberately exclude from their conscious writerly world the subjective appraisal of groups perceived as “Other,” and white male writers frequently abjure and deny the excitement of framing or locating their literature in the political world. Nineteenth-century writers, however, would never have given it a thought. Mainstream writers in young America understood their competition to be national, cultural, but only in relationship to the Old World, certainly not vis-à-vis an ancient race (whether Native American or African) that was stripped of articulateness and intellectual thought, rendered, in D. H. Lawrence’s term, “uncreate.” For these early American writers, how could there be competition with nations or peoples who were presumed unable to handle or uninterested in handling the written word? One could write about them, but there was never the danger of their “writing back.” Just as one could speak to them without fear of their “talking back.” One could even observe them, hold them in prolonged gaze, without encountering the risk of being observed, viewed, or judged in return. And if, on occasion, they were themselves viewed and judged, it was out of a political necessity and, for the purposes of art, could not matter. Or so thought young America. It could never have occurred to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848 that I, for example, might read “The Gold-Bug” and watch his efforts to render my grandfather’s speech to something as close to braying as possible, an effort so intense you can see the perspiration—and the stupidity—when Jupiter says, “I knows,” and Mr. Poe spells the verb “nose.”*
Yet in spite or because of this monologism there is a great,