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Introduction H INTRODUCTION A literary history of America? Leafing through these pages, a reader will find en- tries on Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Mel- ville, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison, but also on Stephen Foster, the invention of the telephone, the Winchester rifle, Steamboat Willie, Al- coholics Anonymous, Porgy and Bess, the first issue ofLife, the atomic bomb, Jack- son Pollock’s drip paintings, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” Alfred Hitch- cock’s Psycho, and Ronald Reagan’s 1964 campaign speech for Barry Goldwater. “All of you know the Doom Story, handed down . How just after this world began, the tall forefathers, white as snow, knew a magic to build all kinds of great things. And how the shadow people came from another place. So black that nobody ever saw their faces. Then the fearsome fight ing when the shadows tried to keep the sun from rising and make it always night. “You know the story as well as I do—how all the forefather things were ruined even though the shadows died. Then the long sickness and starving time when just a few of the forefather children lived in the woods. That’s the old story.” So says a woman in Robie Macauley’s novel A Secret History of Time to Come, published in 1979. The woman is offering an after- the- flood myth of origins, and like most such myths, this one has its core of truth: what she is describing, per- haps two hundred years after the fact, is a full- scale race war that broke out in the United States near the end of the twentieth century. Before all black people were exterminated, the struggle paralyzed the country and disrupted the international balance of power, leading the Soviet Union to launch an attack on China—this being, in Macauley’s telling, history, not myth, entries from the journal of a black revolutionary that Macauley scatters through the first pages of his book. “The white ones left went to sleep,” says another handed- down- tale teller, “and then, waking up the next morning, had forgotten all they had ever known.” Macauley was an editor at the Kenyon Review, Playboy, and Hough ton Mif flin; he died in 1995. This was his only novel. In his secret history, America is again a wilderness: there are scattered settlements, recalling the backward frontier clear- ings of the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries. In some places, people can read and write; in others they have regressed almost beyond speech. Artifacts—ruined buildings, roads, random books treated as the iconic library of the forgotten country (the trea sured shelf of one settlement: Home Radio Repair, Lawrence Welk: xxii INTRODUCTION The Man and His Music, Ben- Hur, Practical Accounting, Learn to Invest Wisely, Short- hand Made Easy: The Gregg System, Caring for Your Parakeet, The Songs of Stephen Foster)—survive, but the connections between them are all gone. “We used to sit around and the old folks would tell us the story of how we came here”—like the story of the Lost White Boy, encountered in the forest by a band of freed slaves journeying north in 1867 to found a town, and how one leader, who only saw the light in others’ eyes, wanted the boy guided back to his people, while another, who only saw the dark, wanted the group to point the boy in the right direction, pick up stakes, and run. As Colson Whitehead, born in 1969, tells the tale in Apex Hides the Hurt, his third novel, published in 2006, the first course was followed: “The Niggers found me,” the boy says when he’s safe at home. His guide flees, the rest of the company as soon as they see him coming, and, as the story has been passed down the generations, always in the voice of a woman who was there, “When we looked back, all the horizon was lit up as if by a giant bon- fire. We knew they had set fire to what remained at our camp, and had we tarried, we would have been ash.” “There was always that kindling problem of being black in America,” Whitehead’s unnamed hero, a young nomenclature consultant, brought in to rename the town, says, “—namely, how to avoid becoming it.” Abraham Goode, a patriarch who was one of the leaders of the original four- teen black families, and William Field, who had lost his own family in slavery, were the Light and the Dark: “My favorite dynamic duo founding fathers,” says the name man. “He recognized them as a common business pair: a marketing, vi- sion guy teamed up with a bottom- line, numbers guy.” In a diary kept by Goode’s daughter, the consultant finds, Goode was “the optimist-prophet type, quick on the draw with a pick- me- up from the Bible and a reminder of their rights as Amer- ican citizens”; Field “turned out to be the downer- realist fig ure, handy with a ‘this stretch of the river is too treacherous to cross’ and ‘it is best we not tarry here past sundown.’ His perspective may have been overcast, but from the diary, it seemed that Field had a knack for being right. The Lost White Boy Incident was a good example.” The town they made was called Freedom—Goode’s choice (That’ll bring ’em in!), winning out over Field’s Struggle (Hey, Bill, why not go all the way and call it Suffering?)—until the white barbed- wire manufacturer Sterling Winthrop showed up, and, with Goode’s vote against Field’s ( Jobs! New schools! And I won’t drive you off your land!), had the settlement renamed for himself, not to mention an- other of America’s founding fathers. Over time, the city divided itself by race; the consultant finds himself “in the Winthrop Suite of the Hotel Winthrop on Win- throp Street in Winthrop Square in the Town of Winthrop in Winthrop County,” and the fact that the town was found, made up, made by black people is a whisper in the night. But the century has turned: Lucky Aberdeen, a software millionaire back in his hometown, wants to remake the place in his own image as New Prospera. The mayor, Regina Goode, descendant of Abraham, wants to go back to Freedom. Al- bie Winthrop, the last of his line, is holding on to Winthrop as if it’s the only proof of his existence. So the pro from New York arrives to settle the matter: INTRODUCTION xxiii “His contract called for his clients to keep the name he gave them for one year. Who knew? They might even come to like it. Recognize it as their own. Grow as comfortable with it as if it were their very skin.” For him, the act of naming is the act of founding, of making, even of discovery. Names are where his mind goes; anything he sees or hears takes him in an instant to a new brand, a different spin, a whole world changed by an adjective. “He’d al- ways had a soft spot for Amerigo Vespucci, who got lost while looking for the In- dies and hit nomenclature’s Big Kahuna instead . He couldn’t argue with Amer- ica. It was one of those balloon names. It kept stretching as it filled up, getting bigger and bigger and thinner and thinner. What kind of gas it was, stretching the thing to its limits, who could say. Whatever we dreamed. And of course one day it would pop. But for now, it served its purpose. For now, it was holding together.” There, then, are two literary histories of America: made- up histories, as Amer- ica was made up, as its historical story has always stood, from its first steps, as a temptation to the imagination. As America is made up out of nothing, it can van- ish in an instant. “The story of Rip Van Winkle has never been finished,” Con- stance Rourke wrote in 1931, but Robie Macauley’s America is Rip Van Winkle in reverse: when they woke up, they had forgotten that the country had ever been. As America is a story of discovery and founding, it can be rediscovered and re- founded at any time: “As he fell asleep,” Whitehead writes of his consultant after he makes his decision, “he heard the conversations they will have. Ones that will get to the heart of this mess. The sick swollen heart of this land. They will say: I was born in Struggle. I live in Struggle and come from Struggle.” And yet, as both fables make as plain as the line that divides day from night—that is, as the one fades into the other—America was made up out of crime, sin, and, as the country found the words to name its mission, violation, a rebuke to its own professed ide- als. As America was made, it can be unmade; with slavery, it was unmade as it was made. Macauley’s and Whitehead’s literary histories share two questions: Does America even exist? Should it? All the names that appear above, fictional and real, Dickinson and Steamboat Willie, Porgy and Bess and Philip Roth, the Light and the Dark, push this drama forward. In 1989 Harvard published A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier, and in 2004 A New History of German Literature, edited by David Well- bery; this book represents an entirely different sort of challenge.
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