{"id":568619,"date":"2010-05-18T12:07:28","date_gmt":"2010-05-18T16:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341d17e553ef0133edd852a2970b"},"modified":"2010-05-18T12:07:28","modified_gmt":"2010-05-18T16:07:28","slug":"greil-marcus-notes-on-the-making-of-a-new-literary-history-of-america-part-3-throwing-the-cards-in-the-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/568619","title":{"rendered":"Greil Marcus – Notes on the making of A New Literary History of America – Part 3 – Throwing the cards in the air"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the third installment of our series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America<\/a>," adapted from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus last month at the International Conference on Narrative, Marcus considers a challenge raised at the symposium Writing Cultural History Today<\/a>, held in 2009 to coincide with the publication of the book, and what that question reveals about the book\u2019s composition and (accidental) structure. At the symposium, a participant said: \u201cThis book covers all sorts of subjects. It ranges all over the place. But what it ignores are the great social movements\u2014the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War\u2014that truly shaped the history of the country.\u201d Part 1 can be found here<\/a>; Part 2 is here<\/a>; and Parts 4 and 5 will appear soon.<\/span><\/span>
\n\"Symposium\"<\/img><\/a> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

Thinking about the book in front of us, it became instantly clear that there was one great social movement that more than any other had shaped the country\u2014and that was slavery. The War, Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, might have to continue \u201cUntil every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword\u201d\u2014and it is small-minded to think that that challenge ended when Lee surrendered to Grant. That is a story that began long before Lincoln spoke, and continues to this day.<\/p>\n

Slavery and its legacies are not only addressed in the book\u2014they turned out to be the spine of the book. And that spine is what holds it together, if anything does\u2014that spine is what allows all of its limbs and appendages and internal organs and even its mind to work.<\/p>\n

We never set out to make that book. This was something the book revealed to us. George Grosz, speaking of his time as a Dadaist in Berlin in 1920, said that \u201cthe point was to work completely in the dark.\u201d We were working in the dark. If there was an engine powering the discussions that led to a choice of what subjects to include and which to leave out, the body of that engine might have been knowledge, but the fuel was ignorance. Again and again, as ideas and arguments flew around the table, we were amazed at the stories we were being told, thrilled by what we didn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

There was no intention to make a point by setting Beverly Lowry\u2019s essay on Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/a><\/em> next to Winfried Fluck\u2019s on Brook Farm and Hawthorne\u2019s Blithedale Romance<\/a><\/em> next to Liam Kennedy\u2019s on Frederick Douglass\u2019s address \u201cWhat to the Slave Is the Fourth of July\u201d\u2014we didn\u2019t think through the connections between the mid-1840s denial of original sin and the depravity of man, the idea of human perfectionism, spiritualism, and abolitionism that thread through the three essays. The writers didn\u2019t work together to draw their themes together. Working on their own\u2014in the scheme of the book, which no one, the individual authors least of all, could see\u2014they were working in the dark. But they were all, it turned out, sitting around the same table, and they all heard the same spirits knocking.<\/p>\n

Lowry begins by talking about the family Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up in, where her father, the great preacher Lyman Beecher, had his ten children sit around the dinner table each night to debate the issues of the day. That table reappears in 1851, when readers waited for each issue of the Era for the next chapter in what began as \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Children\u201d\u2014the title, 87 years later, of a book by Richard Wright<\/a>\u2014the table where, in the words of one letter to the editor, \u201cWhen the Era arrives, our family, consisting of twelve individuals, is called together to listen to the reading of ‘Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin.\u2019\u201d The table reappears in the common dining hall of Brook Farm; it reappears with Margaret Fox\u2019s spiritualist table in Rochester, New York, in 1852, where Frederick Douglass was a visitor\u2014and, partly because of the impact of Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, that table explodes into what in 1852 was the largest auditorium in the nation, Rochester\u2019s new Corinthian Hall<\/a>, where on July 5th\u2014because he refused to speak on July 4th\u2014Douglass gave his great speech<\/a> to an audience of 700 people.<\/p>\n

Lowry\u2019s essay is about the focusing of a national mind, and the search for forms of speech everyone could understand\u2014because in the American republic, in a democracy, that was the task of the American democratic writer.<\/p>\n

Incensed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (the Bloodhound Bill, abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe called it), Stowe slowly began to write, and found her way into a story, Lowry says, \u201cthat would rock the country and then the world.\u201d Stowe was afraid to write the story of slavery, to make it real, to, in Lowry\u2019s words, do \u201cthe unthinkable\u201d\u2014to affirm or even create that national mind, to transfer \u201cher own sensibility, as a privileged, educated white woman into the consciousness of an enslaved black person,\u201d presenting \u201cthe radical notion that slaves were capable of thoughts and feelings similar to hers, and, by extension,\u201d to those of anybody else. \u201cI dreaded to expose even my own mind\u201d to the story she was going to tell, Stowe wrote later\u2014and here again Georges Bataille\u2019s curse against those afraid of the noise of their own words comes into play. And Lowry\u2019s essay becomes a dramatization of how Stowe conquered her fear.<\/p>\n

Sometimes a writer doesn\u2019t know what she\u2019s up to. Sometimes work makes its own demands. In cahoots with the work itself, the mind plays its own tricks. To claim our fears and uncertainties, it creates the notion of an attainable task ahead, easily completed. Under that illusion, we begin. And then the job asserts its demands. A short poem becomes a three-act play. A character sketch insists on stretching itself out to become a short story, a novella, sometimes even a novel. Such is almost certainly the case with Mrs. Stowe, who had already begun writing her sketches but perhaps could not imagine herself\u2014a woman, after all, and the mother of seven\u2014the author of a full-length novel.<\/p>\n

With Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, Stowe searched for the speech that would speak to everyone: in her essay, Lowry emphasizes the way Stowe addresses her readers directly, as \u201cyou\u201d\u2014 <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIf it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader,\u201d Stowe wrote, trying to turn her readers into Eliza, \u201c . . . how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those brief few hours, with the darling at your bosom . . .?\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And so it is both a shock of recognition, planted just pages before, but also not really a surprise, to find Liam Kennedy, with no knowledge of the essay that would precede his, emphasizing the same form of address, the discovery of the same national speech, in Douglass\u2019s overpowering address in Rochester. The Fourth of July, Douglass says, \u201cis the birthday of your National Independence, of your political freedom.\u201d But Douglass distances himself from his audience of white abolitionists only to, finally, perform the same act of communing with the dead\u2014in this case, the dead ideals on which the country was founded and that the fact of slavery has so completely betrayed\u2014only to perform the same act of transference Stowe performed, from the other side. At the same time as he distances himself from his audience, he speaks to its members as his \u201cfellow citizens.\u201d As Stowe did, and as Twain would do in Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, he dramatizes a slave auction, to, Kennedy writes, lead his audience into an \u201cidentification with the plight of the slave\u201d\u2014but that is only half of the equation. \u201cIn doing so,\u201d Kennedy writes, \u201che treats the Fourth of July as a symbolic repository of national memory and retells its narrative significance so as to record his own presence and that of Southern slaves within the origins and present crises of the body politic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slavery and its legacies comprise the great social movement of the nation\u2014what has, socially, moved it\u2014and the book is, in part, and in a certain way as a whole, the literary history of that movement. But the cards were thrown up in the air and as they landed they made patterns, and laid themselves one upon the other, in a way that was implicit in the national narrative\u2014but the narrative that emerged was never anyone\u2019s explicit intention. As the book took shape, it wasn\u2019t even necessarily recognized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the third installment of our series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," adapted from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus last month at the International Conference on Narrative, Marcus considers a challenge raised at the symposium Writing Cultural History Today, held in 2009 to coincide with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6896,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-568619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6896"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}