Download American Literature I, Lecture Seventeen

American Literature I Lecture Seventeen: Whitman, Emerson, and Slavery Professor Cyrus R. K. Patell New York University Names and Terms Wilmot Proviso Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore Compromise of 1850 Fugitive Slave Law Lemuel Shaw Provisions of the Compromise of 1850 Related to Slavery: 1) the admission of California as a free state; 2) the organization of the rest of the Mexican cession into two territories, New Mexico and Utah, without a federal restriction on slavery 3) the prohibition of the slave trade but not of slavery in the District of Columbia 4) a stringent fugitive slave law. In addition to requiring that Northern states capture and return fugitive slaves, the law deprived blacks of jury trial and of the right to testify in their own defense. Quotes Whitman, “America” (published in the New York Herald in 1888; exists as a wax cylinder recording) Centre of equal daughters, equal sons All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, The last two lines, not in the recording, are: A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair'd in the adamant of Time. David Hollinger, Post-­Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism Cosmopolitanism shares with all varieties of universalism a profound suspicion of enclosures, but cosmopolitanism is defined by an additional element not essential to universalism itself: recognition, acceptance, and eager exploration of diversity. Cosmopolitanism urges each individual and collective unit to absorb as much varied experience as it can, while retaining its capacity to advance its aims effectively. For Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 17
2
cosmopolitans, the diversity of humankind is a fact; for universalists, it is a potential problem. Emerson, Journal Entry (1845) in this continent, – asylum of all nations, – the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and <the> Cossacks, & all the European tribes, – of the Africans, & of the Polynesians, – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-­‐pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic & Etruscan barbarism. Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Ideal “Often American history – and the meaning of America – has been framed as a political and cultural dialectic between Virginia and Massachusetts, Cavalier and Yankee.” Emerson, “Experience” •
•
•
From “Self-­‐Reliance” to “Experience”: we seem to experience a fall, a loss, a failure of confidence. We seem to move from “self-­‐trust” to “self-­‐doubt.” The opening of the essay embodies a standpoint that is troubled both by a sense of belatedness and a radical skepticism about human epistemology. (Compare the beginning of the essay to one of Poe’s tales.) Critics generally attribute the skepticism and gloom that seem to hang over the essay to the fact that it was written after the death of Emerson’s son Waldo. The essay explores the numbness that Emerson finds himself feeling. Consider the way in which Emerson describes his grief over Waldo’s death (near the bottom of p. 1193): In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, —neither better nor worse. •
“Experience” offers a gloomy and skeptical version of the individualism that animates Nature, “The American Scholar,” and “Self-­‐Reliance”: each of us is an individual, whose identity is formed outside of social bonds and material possessions. In what ways might this be said to follow the Puritan logic of conversion: from faith through combat and doubt to true, imperfect assurance? Does this bear out Melville’s assertion in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” that the “Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin” is a force “from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free”? Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 17
•
•
•
3
Page 1203: “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-­‐lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us.” Emerson here anticipates Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology, and Karl Mannheim’s so-­‐called “paradox,” all of which point to the unreliability of human vision and the untenability of the Cartesian split between subject and object. Compare this account of vision to the “transparent eyeball” passage in Nature. The compensation for the inescapability of this “mediated” subjectivity: the truth that we had hoped to find in “reality” we find instead in ourselves, in our “souls.” “Experience” is a recasting of the Emersonian theme of individualism. In “The American Scholar” and “Self-­‐Reliance” he offers us a ringing exhortation to trust the self. By the end of “Experience,” he discloses that in the aftermath of disillusionment, skepticism, and doubt, there is finally nothing to rely upon but the self. Emerson: “The Fugitive Slave Law” (1854): • Daniel Webster as a "representative man" who fails to fulfill his responsibilities to his culture. Webster also as a kind of anti-­‐Emerson; Emerson faults Webster for • the sterility of thought, the want of generalization in his speeches, and the curious fact, that with a general ability that impresses all the world, there is not a single general remark, not an observation on life and manners, not a single valuable aphorism that can pass into literature from his writings. (Norton 1177) • Note the link, for Emerson, between the ability to think in abstract terms and the ability to think and behave morally. How does Emerson's stance in the address grow out of his philosophy of "self-­‐reliance"? How is it related to the idea of liberation from "fear"? Emerson and Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism: as an approach that values difference. Begins as an alternative to nationalism; among recent theorists like Hollinger and Kwame Anthony Appiah, it is also an alternative to universalism. For universalists like Emerson, difference is a problem to be solved so that he can make generalizations that apply to everyone; for cosmopolitans, difference is an opportunity to be embraced. How does Emerson’s eclectic rhetorical style seem to open the door to cosmopolitanism? In what ways is he unable to realize its potential? Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 17
Today’s Songs “Wake Up,” Arcade Fire “Wake Up,” Arcade Fire and David Bowie (live) “People Have the Power,” Patti Smith 4