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Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction. Phd Thesis, University of Nottingham

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Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction. Phd Thesis, University of Nottingham Hutchison, Anthony (2004) Writing the Republic: liberalism and morality in American political fiction. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11067/1/408643.pdf Copyright and reuse: The Nottingham ePrints service makes this work by researchers of the University of Nottingham available open access under the following conditions. · Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. · To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in Nottingham ePrints has been checked for eligibility before being made available. · Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not- for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. · Quotations or similar reproductions must be sufficiently acknowledged. Please see our full end user licence at: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdf A note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. For more information, please contact [email protected] Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction by Anthony Hutchison Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2004 AA , 1 ABSTRACT This thesis deploys works of literature, political theory and intellectual history to reach an understanding of both the specific form and the content taken by the American political novel. This understanding is informed by an over-arching analysis of liberalism as the dominant ideology within the US pohfical tradition and the pressure-moral and political- exerted on this ideology by successivecounter-ideologies at various historical junctures. The alleged 'anti-political' basis of many post World War 11theories of American literature is initially explored along with the relative absence of American literature in studies of the political novel. Works by the 'New Americanist' literary critics as well as an important recent study of American political fiction by John Whalen-Bridge are also subjected to critical scrutiny. In the central chapters, tiovels by Gore Vidal, Russell Banks, Lionel Trilling and Philip Roth foreground the critique of liberalism put forward by republicanism, Transcendentahsm, Marxism and neo-conservatism at their respective historical moments of ascent. The aim here, primarily, is to treat novelists seriously as political thbikers; much of the analysis is, accordingly, inter-disciplinary in approach drawing from artists, philosophers and theorists such as Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hannah Arendt, John Dewey and numerous contemporary commentators and historians as well as the novelists listed above. Melville's Moby Dick is ultimately invoked as a formal template for the American political novel with a theory of 'republican' fiction then being presented that is compared and contrasted with the 'democratic' mode Mikhail Bakhtin associated with Dostoevsky. The American political novel, finally, it is argued, is always informed by the complexities of the American political tradition itself: a form of immanent liberal critique pre-occupied with the health of the polity and guided by a 'republican' persuasion. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Liberalism and the Problem of Tradition in American Literature 2 Part One: The Nineteenth-Century ontext 1. Elusive Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson and the Foundations of American Politics in Gore Vidal's Burr 12 2. 'Our Divine Equality': Russell Banks's CloudSphtter and the Redemptive Liberalism of the Lincoln Republic 39 Part Two: The Twentieth-Centurv Context 3. 'Ideas in Modulation": Marxism and Liberal Revaluation in Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the journey 71 4. Liberalism Betrayed: Neo-Conservatism and the Post-War American Left in Philip Roth's American Trilogy ill Conclusion Writing the Republic: Moby Dick and the Form of American Political Fiction 193 Works Cited and Consulted 211 INTRODUCTION Liberalism and the Problem of Tradition in American Literature I shouldsay morethan I meanif I assertedthat a nation's literature I.s alwayssubordinated to its;social state and political constitution. I know,that, apartfrom these,there are other causesthat give literature certaincharacteristics, but thosedo seemthe most important to me. Thereare alwaysnumerous connections between the social and the political conditionof a peopleand the inspiration of its writers. He who knowsthe oneis nevercompletely ignorant of the other. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Vol. 1), 1835 Tocqueville's early recognition of an intimacy between literary and socio-political traditions emerges alongside his view that in a democracy'each generation is a new people". This leads him to suggest that the literature produced by democracies such as the United States may well be characterised by a certain immaturity, manifest in 'facile forms of beauty, self- explanatory and immediately enjoyable! Unhampered by the weight of a literary tradition and its accompanying 'anxiety of influence', writers in a democracy need merely respond to 'above like things ' The readers who all ... unexpected and new. style cultivated amongst such authors will thus 'often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. " This particular senseof American 'exceptionalism' was pursued further by twentieth- century cultural critics of the United States beginning with D. H. Lawrence who, in Studiesin ClassicAinerican Literature (1923), identified and championed a distinctive 'new voice' in a nascent literary heritage hitherto dismissed as a mere accumulation of 'children's tales'.2Yet the fiction produced by Cooper, Melville, Twain and others, as Lawrence attests, is far more complex than this characterisation permits. Such ostensibly 'childish' themes of generational re-birth, renewal, re-invention and, most potently and problematicafly, American "innocence' are explored in these narratives as a form of democratic and cultural 'rebelfion against the old parenthood of Europe. '3 The great cultural progenitor of this in the aesthetic and ' Alems de Tocqueville, Democrac in America, 473-74. 2 D. It Lawrence, Snidics in ClassicAmerican'v Literanire, 7. 3 Ibid., 10. -1 be in philosophical realm is, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson-a figure who will explored chapter two. This 'anti-tradition' tradition, so to speak, was most powerfuUy delineated in the works of a group of literary and cultural critics published in the years following World War Il. Indeed, seminal studies such as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950),R. W. B. Lewis's The AmericanAdam (1955)and Leo Marx's TheMachine in the Garden(1964) played a formative role in the institutionalisation of American Studies that attended and reinforced the United States' rise to political, economic and cultural eminence during this time. The mythopoeic quality of this criticism served to illuminate the influence of Emersonian individualism with reference to a wide range of tropes; these included, most prominently, the frontier or 'West' (Smith); the 'Adamic' figure (Lewis); and the pastoral (Marx). One important shared characteristic of this critical milieu was a concern with the presenceof 'innocence'- lost and/ or regained - as a recurring theme in the American literary tradition. Foremost amongst the consequences of this particular thematic, it was alleged, was a reluctance to engage with societyin the fashion familiar from the tradition of the nineteenth- century European novel. Rebelling against this particular understanding of the novel, American fiction instead associated society with corruption, compromise and loss of 'innocence". American authors chose to 'purify' the form by showcasing characters whose central subjectivity-defining relationship was with nature as opposed to 'culture' in the more rarefied sense (or nineteenth-century bourgeois conceptions of 'society). 'Adamic' figures from Natty Bumppo to Huck Finn are thus portrayed as in retreat from society in some profound way and, as a consequence,still defined and energised by a pristine and frequently pastoral vision of American innocence. This downgrading of social relations, it has been argued, explains a certain lacuna of the political in American fiction. American commentators on the political novel as a genre have outlined this problem with implicit acknovviedgementsof the obstacles presented by the US literary tradition. 'If a 19th century American novelist chose a political theme, Irving Howe noted in Politics aml Me Novel (1957),'he generalh, did so in order to expose the evils of has for ideology) corruption in government (America's substitute, as someone said, or to '4 Robert bemoan the vulgarities of public life that were driving sensitive men into retreat. later, Boyers, in a preface to his study of the genre a few decade Atrocihj a?zd Atmiesla (1985), extends the charge of such 'exceptionalism' as a hindrance to political fiction to a new post- war generation of
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