False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism - Rilegato

Ball, David M.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0810130009 ISBN 13: 9780810130005

Casa editrice: Northwestern Univ Pr, 2014

Riassunto

From Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression. David Ball’s magisterial study addresses the fundamental questions of language, meaning, and authority that run counter to well-rehearsed claims of American innocence and positivity, beginning with the American Renaissance and extending into modernist and contemporary literature. The rhetoric of failure was used at various times to engage artistic ambition, the arrival of advanced capitalism, and a rapidly changing culture, not to mention sheer exhaustion. False Starts locates a lively narrative running through American literature that consequently queries assumptions about the development of modernism in the United States.

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Informazioni sull'autore

David M. Ball is a visiting associate professor of English at Princeton University and an associate professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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False Starts

The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism

By David M. Ball

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3000-5

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction. The Rhetoric of Failure and the Case Study of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 
Chapter One. The Prestige of Failure: Modern Sentiments in Susan Warner and Herman Melville, 
Chapter Two. The Economies of Failure: The Culture of Antisemitism in Henry Adams and Edith Wharton, 
Chapter Three. The Inscription of Failure: Signifying Documents in William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, 
Afterword. The Persistence of Failure: Chris Ware's Graphic Narratives and the Afterlife of Modernism, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Prestige of Failure

Modern Sentiments in Susan Warner and Herman Melville

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.

—Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850)

Jan. 1: It was a pretty thing, the reading of the notices of my work [The Wide, Wide World] that Father had brought home,—from the Evening Post, Boston Chronotype,Commercial, and Literary World. [...] I lay awake, and thought about it after I went to bed. Thank God for every promise of success and encouragement; and oh! for the spirit to thank him, should both fail!

—Susan Warner, journal extract (1851)

The comparison announced in the title of this first chapter deliberately upends many of our received notions about the era known as the American Renaissance. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics have labeled Herman Melville a figure of laudable defiance to the standards of taste and morality in his day. Susan Warner, in her more recent critical recovery, has been understood as a paradigmatic figure in the very formation of those standards of taste and morality. When Melville speaks of failure as the true test of greatness in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," he registers a heroic, almost eschatological struggle of creative artists to represent Truth. When Warner speaks obliquely about failure in her journals, she seems to register primarily the acclaim of her contemporary readers and the mere number of volumes sold. The former appears to insist upon failure as the expression of absolute authorial autonomy, while the latter views failure as nothing more than an insufficient connection with the sympathies of the multitude. These perceived divisions have sprung from and been reproduced by a long-held critical perception of a gendered, Manichean binary between popular and prestigious literature in the mid-nineteenth century, one that has only recently been challenged in contemporary criticism. On one side of this putative binary is the mid-nineteenth-century rise of a mass literary culture dominated by sentimental women authors. On the other side is the first intimation of American modernism, a separate masculine sphere of literary culture in which, largely unrecognized in its day, the first great era of American (men's) literature supposedly emerged in opposition to this mass cultural moment.

However, rather than reading the literature of the 1850s as the ascendency of an oppositional, masculine modernity over a fashionable and feminized sentimentality, this chapter investigates the explicit and implicit connections between two writers as seemingly dissimilar as Melville and Warner, a relationship crucial to a better understanding of the efflorescence and imbrication of popular and prestigious American literature during this decade. Like the American modernist writers after him, Melville expressed great anxiety about what was in many respects the first mass cultural literary moment in American literature—the rise of the sentimental novel—while also directly drawing from these very sources in his own writing. At the same time, the rhetoric of literary failure was not only deployed by Melville and the canonical writers of the American Renaissance alone; it played a crucial role in the negotiation between popular entertainment and religious instruction in sentimental literature. Recognizing these shared complexities allows for a more complete picture of American literature of the 1850s: popular and prestigious literature emerging in tandem, demonstrating the ways that American Renaissance writers depended intimately upon the historical context of the literary marketplace in which sentimental authors wrote and published.

The influence of popular literary genres and topics can in fact be found throughout the American Renaissance's high canon—from the discourse of abolition in Emerson's late political essays to the rhetoric of temperance in Whitman's early fiction and first editions of Leaves of Grass. My focus, however, will be on a network of explicit citations and veiled correspondences between Melville and Warner, who when read together help demonstrate a visible and unresolved dialectic of sentimentality in Pierre's (1852) failed narrative aspirations for a radical break from both literary contemporaries and antecedents. The terms of this comparison also open up possibilities to reread The Wide, Wide World (1850) as a text motivated by many of the implicitly modernist standards Warner's critics and defenders alike have reserved exclusively for the American Renaissance canon—stylistic intricacy, psychological complexity, and epistemological difficulty among them—revealing Warner's stark ambivalence toward the publicity the novel ultimately achieved. Not simply two texts that share a common historical moment, Pierre and The Wide, Wide World inaugurate their literary aspirations by celebrating and transvaluing worldly failure. By reexamining these fault lines of literary taste and production in the 1850s, and the subsequent critical interventions that frequently reified them, we can view the dynamics of popularity and prestige during this period as a dawning expression of modernism in American literary history, one premised on the often equivocal celebration of literary failure.

Sentimental Connections, "Scribbling Women," and Impugned Success

To understand these connections, however, we first have to survey the distance customarily perceived between the work of Melville and Warner specifically, and their discourses of modernist autonomy and sentimental connection more generally. A colorful illustration of these critical commonplaces emerges in "The Monkey-Rope" chapter of Moby-Dick (1851), in which Ishmael first describes the process of "cutting-in" and harvesting whale blubber. As are many of the vivid scenes of such labor in the novel, "The Monkey-Rope" is typically read as a celebration of the democratic bonds forged between men. Ishmael and Queequeg become "inseparable twin brother[s]" through the shared peril of their being tied to each other, Ishmael on deck and Queequeg perilously balancing on the running treadmill of the whale's floating, spinning carcass. Ishmael's expansive and metaphysical conceit spins this analogy outward, eventually encompassing a "Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals," a vision of an intimately bound network of human interrelations.

The work finished, Queequeg is brought on deck and given a cup of "ginger-jub" as a restorative, an offer that prompts the outraged second mate Stubb to cry: "Where lies the virtue of ginger? [...] There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business." "It was not me," the steward protests, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this ginger-jub—so she called it." To which Stubb exclaims:

"Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers, and get something better. [...] It is the captain's orders—grog for the harpooneer on a whale." [...]

When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity's gift, and that was freely given to the waves.

Through the entirety of the novel, Aunt Charity is the only woman to set foot on the Pequod. Sister to the ship's financier, she is shown in the earliest chapters of the novel provisioning the ship with goods as varied as whale lances, writing quills, and copies of the Bible, establishing both the economic viability and the domestic felicity of the departing ship. Her association with instruments of writing and whaling alike should indicate a role for her as something other than merely accessory to the dominant interests of the narrative.

Yet, the felt presence of her hand in this later scene appears as a patent obstruction to the communion of democratic men: an enervating, deleterious agent that taints the pure bonds of masculine physical labor. Aunt Charity's bidding manifests itself in a "gingerly" mien—with all its contingently negative connotations of "daintily," "mincingly," and "effeminately"—while the captain's orders reestablish the exclusively masculine chain of command aboard the ship. The desire for strong drink and the reference to "some sneaking Temperance Society movement" are as much a rejection of a literary model—the booming popular trade in temperance narratives that occurred simultaneously with the American Renaissance—as they are a call for masculine kinship. The concluding act of tossing the teapot overboard restages the revolutionary gesture of the Boston Tea Party at the same moment that it appears to free the novel from the shared influences of women and popular literature alike. Men alone, it would seem, can govern or merit inclusion in this "connexion with a plurality of other mortals."

Avowals of Melville's womanless fiction and his resistance to popular literature have long been the common refrains of a dominant strain of Melville criticism in the twentieth century. Lewis Mumford, in an early and influential account of Melville's value to American literature, avers that the author "left the clothed and carpeted world of convention, and faced the nakedness of life, death, energy, evil, love, eternity: he drew back the cosy hangings of Victorian parlours, and disclosed the black night outside [...] His perplexities, his defiances, his torments, his questions, even his failures, all have a meaning for us." Mumford's Melville is the consummate iconoclast, the exemplary American man in whose "man-of-war's world" woman neither "charms nor nurtures nor threatens: she neither robs man of his strength nor rouses him to heroic frenzy: she is not Circe: she is not Rosalind or Francesca or even the Wife of Bath—she simply does not exist." Even as feminist critics began to question the merits of this heroic forbearance, Ann Douglas recapitulates many of these central tenets, stating that Melville "invented with a radical fierceness unparalleled in American letters," an imaginative bravado putatively anathema to women and their literary productions: "Melville committed himself [...] against the crimes of sentimentality and effeminacy which he was recording and protesting in his society. [...] He conceived masculinity [...] essentially as resistance to sentimentalism, as an effort at a genuinely political and philosophical life." Similarly, Nina Baym identifies what she deems Melville's "quarrel with fiction": "I believe that Melville had no great respect for fiction, that he equated it with popular literature and his own literary infancy, and that in the works that most aspire to truth he expresses a range of attitudes toward fiction that go from impatience with its demands to a clear sense that fiction and truth telling are opposed activities." Even Jane Tompkins, whose Sensational Designs sought to upend the critical disparagement of sentimental literature, portrays Melville as actively suppressing the work of sentimental writers. Tompkins goes so far as to characterize the deprecations of sentimental fiction's later critics as mere "amplified versions of what Hawthorne and Melville said about their sentimental rivals, whom they hated for their popular and critical success." For all of its groundbreaking work in cultural history, Tompkins's view of Susan Warner specifically, and sentimental women writers more generally, as part of a wholly neglected and formally distinct tradition from the now-dominant writers of the mid-nineteenth century participates in this long critical tradition that regards Melville as inviolably distinct from the literary culture of women. One set of readings attests to canonical American Renaissance literature's unassailable distance from the popular books of its day, while the other questions the viability of the standards by which we adjudicate the chasm between putatively prestigious and commercially successful literature. What they agree upon, however, is the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two, and the representative role Melville plays as the gatekeeper of these divisions.

More recently, critics have begun to acknowledge the tacit proximity between the discourses of domesticity and sentimentality on the one hand, and gestures such as Melville's in "The Monkey-Rope" on the other. An instructive document in uncovering this proximity is Melville's May 1850 letter to Richard Henry Dana Jr., a fellow novelist of sea tales and author of the influential Two Years before the Mast (1840). Here Melville employed the same figure of a Siamese connection used in "The Monkey-Rope" to describe his affection for Dana, an identification forged in the experience of reading:

My Dear Dana—I thank you very heartily for your friendly letter; and am more pleased than I can well tell, to think that any thing I have written about the sea has at all responded to your own impressions of it. Were I inclined to undue vanity, this one fact would be far more to me than acres & square miles of the superficial shallow praise of the publishing critics. And I am specially delighted at the thought, that those strange, congenial feelings, with which after my first voyage, I for the first time read "Two Years Before the Mast," and while so engaged was, as it were, tied & welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy—that these feelings should be reciprocated by you, in your turn, and be called out by any White Jackets or Redburns of mine—this is indeed delightful to me.

In this letter—the same one that also includes the first known reference to the composition of Moby-Dick—formal, critical praise is forsaken in lieu of the production of emotional responses between author and reader. The affective bonds described here exceed mere fellowship, instead positing a synthetic unity of bodies and a sympathetic connection achieved through the transformative powers of empathy. Gillian Silverman rightly reads moments such as this as expressions of sentimentalism, both in the terms of Adam Smith's foundational formulation of the sentimental imagination as the leap to "enter as it were into [another's] body, and become in some measure the same person with him," and Melville's own "textual sentimentalism," his "consuming preoccupation with sympathetic, identificatory experience." Melville's more celebrated rhetoric of authorial autonomy here gives way to a discourse of shared experiences, even shared bodies. Returning then to Moby-Dick, the same scene that seeks to repudiate the role of women's culture in the novel also ushers in a sentimental fellowship ("A Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals") that replaces those seemingly severed bonds. What here might be read as mere fraternity comes to represent the motivating structure of sentimentalism that served as the governing ethos of the women writers who published during the American Renaissance.

The Pequod then, in addition to serving as an allegory for the ship of state, remains a domestic economy founded on the bonds of sentiment; Melville conspicuously links the whalers' fraternal labors and the household lamps their whale oil eventually lights. From Ishmael and Queequeg's marriage in the Spouter Inn and the "unfurnished parlor" of the blubber-room, to the insistent language of hearthstones and social obligations, domesticity remains the flip side of Moby-Dick's quest narrative, the receptive, meditative Ishmael to the novel's tyrannical, monomaniacal Ahab. Rather than the materialization of separate and gendered spheres of social life, scenes such as these indicate the permeability of such spheres, even at moments in which the last vestiges of femininity (and their attendant connections to popular literature) seem to have been excised from the Pequod. Just as the hardships of life on the frontier enabled American women to occupy roles outside of those prescribed to them by the dominant ideology, so too did the frontiers of Melville's travel narratives allow men to occupy a domestic sphere seemingly foreclosed as an exclusively feminine domain. What emerges is a continually negotiated dialectic between sentimental connection and authorial autonomy, leading to a correspondingly tenuous distinction between prestige and popularity for the first time in American literature, one premised on the development of a rhetoric of successful failure.

Nowhere was this unsettled doctrine of separate spheres in nineteenth-century American society more apparent than in the profession of authorship. As early as 1830, one of the most popular American women writers of her day, Catharine Sedgwick, satirized the general rush of women to become published authors. Her short story "Cacoethes Scribendi"—the title translates to "The Itch for Scribbling"—imagines a town in the Berkshires comprised exclusively of widows and maidens, "a community of women who lived like nuns," where a "literary fever" to write and publish spreads like a contagion. Indeed women's literacy in America doubled between the years 1780 and 1840, matching the literacy rates of men by the 1850s. This profound historical shift not only produced a dramatic upsurge in the number of published women authors, but also created a new reading public in America unequaled in size and purchasing power up to that point. Gift books and literary annuals with titles such as Affection's Gift, The Literary Souvenir, and The Primrose, in addition to periodicals with titles like The Ladies' National Magazine, Ladies' Garland and Dollar Magazine, and Godey's Lady's Book, marketed themselves almost exclusively to a feminine audience, often showcased the talents of women authors, and explicitly linked moneyed and leisured femininity with literary production and consumption.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from False Starts by David M. Ball. Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Northwestern Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0810130009
• ISBN 13: 9780810130005
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 232
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Paesi Bassi