Posts Tagged American

On the Road slid into the American canon like a little boy under a garage door, running on pure energy and speed and getting there without anyone really thinking about it. Like Catcher in the Rye, it’s the sort of book one used to be assigned in high school but now reads on one’s own—a classic of blindly rebellious youth that loses its luster as one gets older and joins the establishment. Unlike Catcher, it’s a remarkably positive book, in that the rebellion enacted by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and the rest of them is not a tearing-down of society but a sort of cosmic yea-saying to life itself:

Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other, “so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy,” and “so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!”—and off we’d rush to eat.

Dean can protest against society merely by living apart from it; there’s no need to throw potato salad at CCNY lecturers, which makes him a far more attractive figure than many counter-culture icons. And yet even Sal Paradise, his hagiographer, notices from time to time that he is a “mindless cad,” remarkably self-centered and unconcerned with the harm he inflicts on those around him—particularly the women who worship him for his animal magnetism. One’s disgust at Dean grows each time the novel is read.

And yet the novel itself, to say nothing of the myth it relives, maintains its Benzedrine edge. You can’t help but be swept up into the flow—the only other option is to be left behind, adrift in Kerouac’s dislocated and disembodied words. The critic finds himself by necessity swept up and left behind. He must examine the novel critically and thus with an outside eye, and yet to see the novel for what it is, he must hop in that ’49 Hudson along with the characters. (This is, of course, true of all novels and all criticism, but it’s much more evident when you’re attempting to say something about On the Road—odds are it’s all going to fall flat like a joke that was only funny after fifteen hours of driving.)

John Updike said of his Rabbit, Run that he wished it to be read as a response of sorts to On the Road:

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, had just come out and made a great stir. As an even younger American writer, I was, of course, jealous of any stir that was being made, and I read the book with some antagonism because it seemed to me to be so very unreal, so very evasive—about these more or less privileged people zipping back and forth across the country with no visible means of support. And I was trying to make the good Protestant point that we’re all involved with our fellow man, and we’re all members of families, and so the basic image of [Rabbit, Run] is of a man running or leaving or going on the road and disrupting his own family.

Rabbit, Run, however, is unnecessary as a response to On the Road—the tension that Updike wrote into his own novel is already present to a lesser degree in Kerouac’s. (Note: There are many other, better reasons to read Rabbit, Run, and to a lesser extent the other three Rabbit novels, which are almost certainly better and more successful books than On the Road.) Indeed, there is a dialectic in On the Road between home and the road, one in which the former gets a larger slice of the pie than you might have anticipated.

The most famous passage in On the Road is probably this one, from the first chapter:

But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

This “insanity as a spiritual virtue” theme is very common among the Beat writers, of course. Kerouac wrote On the Road in 1951, though it wasn’t published until six years later. In between came Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which probably gives you a better idea of what beatnik insanity was really like. “I’m with you in Rockland,” he tells Carl Solomon, “where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void.” Those roman candles aren’t so pretty up close.

But that’s beside the point. You’ll notice that Sal Paradise has put himself outside of the insanity equation—he is more or a less a journalist who follows Dean Moriarty and the other loony saints across the country. That’s why the guiding image of On the Road is not the bursting roman candle at all, but rather something that comes along not too long after it. Sal and Carlo Marx (Ginsberg, if you’re keeping score) are saying good-bye to Dean as he leaves for Chicago:

Carlo and I saw him off at the 34^th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs they had a place where you could make pictures for a quarter. Carlo took off his glasses and looked sinister. Dean made a profile shot and looked coyly around. I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who’d kill anybody who said anything against his mother. This picture Carlo and Dean neatly cut down the middle with a razor and saved a half each in their wallets.

Kerouac doesn’t note specifically that Sal is in the middle of this picture, but that is the obvious implication. As such, the straight razor cuts directly down the center of his face. Half of it goes to Dean, boarding a Greyhound—and half of it stays with Carlo back at home. This is the essence of Sal Paradise and thus the essence of On the Road (which is always his book, Dean’s charisma notwithstanding): Half of him goes on the road, and half of him stays at home.

An example: In the following chapter, Dean wants to go to San Francisco to visit his friend Remi Boncoeur. (It will, of course, take him nearly two weeks to make the three-day trip.) He lives with his aunt, though, and though he is a grown man, he seems to need her permission to do so. She, like all the other women in On the Road, is a grand old obliging gal who understands that boys will be boys and thinks only of his mental health: “[S]he said it would do me good. . . . All she wanted was for me to come back in one piece.” For the road to exist, home—with its self-sacrificing matrons concerned only with the well-being of their traveling men—must exist. For the one leg of the conference to make the circle, the other must stay as John Donne’s “fixed foot.” For Sal Paradise to stay an eternal child on the road, his aunt must be a grown-up at home.

And Sal is a child. Absent his aunt’s watchful eye, he is apparently incapable of taking care of himself. The only thing he eats for the three weeks it takes him to get to California is apple pie, one after another, always topped with ice cream. “I knew it was nutritious,” he tells us, as if we didn’t know that it’s not. This is the sort of diet a nine-year-old boy dreams of having when he grows up. On the road, one either doesn’t eat, or one eats the wrong foods entirely. It’s no coincidence that the first thing Sal does when he arrives back at his aunt’s house is “eat everything in the icebox.” His aunt, as always, is indulgent: “Poor little Salvatore . . . You’re thin, you’re thin. Where have you been all this time?”

Sal’s sexual relationships with women are just as basic and just as dependent on the road-home dichotomy. The most notable of these is with Terry, a chicana mother and migrant farm worker. Sal sees her son, Johnny, as an enemy, someone to get between him and Terry in bed (though Johnny’s presence in the room doesn’t keep him from making love to her). Eventually, it’s time for Sal to hitchhike back to New York:

“See you in New York, Terry,” I said. She was supposed to drive to New York in a month with her brother. But we both knew she wouldn’t make it. At a hundred feet I turned to look at her. She just walked on back to the shack, carrying my breakfast plate in one hand. I bowed my head and watched her. Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again.

Terry has supported Sal emotionally and to some extent financially for several months—he is content to leave her and her baby forever with the childish expression “lackadaddy” and an eye turned back to the freedom of the road. (The nonsense word also reminds the reader that Johnny will now “lack a daddy,” as so many children in this novel do.)

That Sal’s last glimpse of Terry includes his breakfast plate that she must clean is perfect—it only cements the relationship between women, home, and food. So does the girl he “necks” with on the way home from his second trip. He’s blown all his money on the sort of things beatniks blew their money on, and so she buys his food for him. Kerouac doesn’t even bother giving her a name, just a paragraph’s worth of identity wrapped up in sex and food.

However bad Sal is in this regard, however, Dean is a million times worse. Sal needs to be at home from time to time; it is his relationship with Dean that pulls him back out on the frantic and unstable road. Dean only goes home when his friends, tired of traveling, have deserted him. He goes through a series of women in the novel, women who only rarely join him on his escapades—most of the time he leaves them behind to know that he is cheating on them with anyone who will let him. At one point, Dean is sleeping with his first wife and his second wife, along with any number of women Sal doesn’t know about.

On Sal’s left stand his aunt, Terry, the woman on the Greyhound, etc., etc. On his right stands Dean Moriarty, debased but somehow innocent saint of the road. Sal belongs to both sides simultaneously—though it must be said that Dean clearly exerts the stronger pull on him most of the time. If there were no left side, there wouldn’t be four parts to the novel, only one, long, Benzedrine fantasy, no doubt ending in Sal’s and Dean’s deaths; if there were no right side, there would be no novel at all.

The dialectic is thus absolutely necessary for Kerouac’s artistic success. Updike’s innovation in this regard is that he devotes several sections of Rabbit, Run, to the thoughts of the women his Pennsylvanian Sal Paradise leaves behind, thoughts we’re not privy to in On the Road, mostly because Sal needs these women more than he desires them.

I’ve been accused of being “anti-science” on the podcast, a charge against which I’ve done my best to defend myself. My suspicion, as I say in that second post, is not of science qua science but of science’s attempt to either (a) discover metaphysical truth; or, more often these days, (b) discount metaphysical truth as a legitimate thing. (Richard Dawkins, to recap, actually says in an interview with Salon.com that “why” questions aren’t worth asking; Michael Shermer says that the Self is a mere series of chemical reactions.)

So it’ll come as no surprise that I will suspend my normal stance on Edgar Allan Poe (I don’t like him much at all) for his poem “Sonnet—To Science”:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities!
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Obviously, the poem still applies today; you could easily mail it to Dawkins or Shermer and not have to change anything (and you’d probably want to highlight lines six and seven, which seem particularly directed at militant atheists who cloak their baseline fundamentalism under a veil of objectivity).

The truth, though, is that Poe is operating in a very clear tradition—the writers of the American Renaissance (and the period just before it, since Poe is generally not considered part of that movement) are united in their suspicions of science’s ability to create a coherent worldview, morality, and metaphysic. Think of Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” in which naïve scientism leads to the destruction of the human being; or think of Moby-Dick, which gives us hundreds of pages of cetological detail, which leaves us no closer to understanding the white whale. The writers of the American Renaissance are united in their general Romanticism, which—naturally enough—reacts against the dominant worldview of the previous generation, Enlightenment-style “objective” scientism.

Even Ralph Waldo Emerson—despised by Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville alike—gets in on the act. For example, in his essay “Love” (1841), he suggests that art is something beyond the scope of science altogether, a metaphysical truth: “The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.” This goes not just for objects of beauty, but objects of ugliness—because Enlightenment scientism is blindly optimistic (man is perfectible, the universe is comprehensible, and we’re probably going to do both next weekend), Emerson make a turn toward the dark (unexpectedly, for anyone unfamiliar with Emerson’s frequent pessimism):

Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.

Here Emerson has set up two paths to truth: the intellect, identified not just with reason but also with idealization; and the imagination, identified with experience, aesthetic appreciation, and inscrutability. This dichotomy basically persists throughout the writings of the American Renaissance. Thus Emerson can claim, in “Each and All,” that the scientific mindset destroys any ability to see things purely:

The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore.
(ll. 19-27)

Emerson’s actions here are the actions of a clichéd scientist—seeing something beautiful or interesting, he picks the scene apart and takes the components back to the laboratory, only to find that his analysis has destroyed what made the elements special to begin with. Poe gets at the same thing in “Sonnet—To Science” when he says that Science “alterest all things with thy peering eyes”; these are basically early versions of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle!

In the end, Emerson’s solution to the problem of analysis is a more or less religious solution—one must submit oneself to the beauty of the oneness of all things: “I yielded myself to the perfect whole” (l. 51), he says, and in this way maintains the beauty of the scene in his own subjective reaction to it. You can’t pick truth apart, and you can’t discover it in a laboratory—it’s an experience. (If this is sounding a lot like Christian existentialism, remember that Kierkegaard was writing at the same time as Emerson and Poe and that he, too, was reacting to Enlightenment scientism.)

But both Emerson and Poe have an attitude that’s more complicated than a simple rejection of science. Early on his career, Emerson was able to claim that “we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy”—a statement absolutely dripping with scientific optimism. The key to interpretation here, though, is the way those answers come: “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.” So any answers we get are going to come not from the laboratory but from lived experience, from the soul. It is worth noting, too, that the physical truths the scientist can discover are worthless for Emerson unless they lead to higher, spiritual truths.

That brings us back to Poe, who, like Emerson, does not simplistically reject science or its benefits. Indeed, I can think of very few nineteenth-century writers who utilized the sciences and pseudo-sciences of his day as effectively as Poe did—and of course the detective story, which he invented, depends on objective reasoning. Even Poe’s afterlife is couched in scientific terms. As one of the dead people in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” puts it,

Now it was that, in twilight, we discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone should efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe itself anew in the verdure and mountain-slopes and the smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit dwelling-place for man:—for man the Death-purged—for man to whose now exalted intellect there should be poison in knowledge no more—for the redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still for the material, man.

The afterlife is physical for Poe; God Himself is physical, in fact, called in “Mesmeric Revelation” “not spirit, for he exists. Nor is he matter, as you understand it. But there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser.” So Poe is a sort of materialist mystic—there is no such thing as the non-material world, and yet the world we see around us is not the end of the story because there is a hypothetical and non-testable “finer gradation of matter” all around us, in which God and dead people live. This formulation is bound to make both the scientist and the Christian angry.

Poe’s problem with science, then, as expressed in “Sonnet—To Science” is not that it formulates a wholly material universe—Poe himself does that—but that it assumes that it can get its mind around the materialist universe, a mindset he calls, in “Monos and Una,” “the propensity of man to define the indefinable.” Some things just are and cannot be studied—even if other things can be studied.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t use the indefinable for our materialist and scientific purposes, however. The dominant mode of Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” (the detective stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rouget,” and “The Purloined Letter,” along with more fantastic stories like “The Descent Into the Maelstrom”) is what John T. Irwin calls “scientific intuition”; M. Dupin, for example, acts completely logically in the detective stories in which he features, but he can do so only by taking leaps based on intuition. Poe offers a simultaneously scientific and mystical viewpoint, and if he criticizes the scientist in “Sonnet—To Science,” it’s only for leaving out half of the equation, and he would, I am certain, criticize religious believers for leaving out the other half.

I can’t fully agree with either Poe or Emerson here—I am, as the podcast introduction says, “unapologetically confessional,” and so I can’t accept the vague pantheism of Emerson or the mystical materialism of Poe. But I think they’re hinting at the proper relationship between faith and reason. Without the former, the latter can’t answer the ever-important why questions; without the latter, the former cannot survive in the real world.

Crévecoeur and the Two Faces of America

The back of the Penguin edition of J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer says “History” on it, and the Library of Congress has it filed (in my library, anyway, obviously absent a great deal of books) between 1,000 Places to See in the U.S. and Canada Before You Die and the John Steinbeck travelogue Travels with Charley in Search of America. This placement is a lie.

Letters from an American Farmer is full of such lies, beginning with its title. These aren’t letters—at least they’re not letters in the sense that they were never sent to anyone in particular from anyone in particular—and they’re not from an American farmer. Well, kind of. Crévecoeur was a French immigrant to the United States back before they were particularly united, and he owned a farm in Orange County, New York. But he’s not the American farmer, “James,” of the letters.

I’m not interested in figuring out why exactly Letters from an American Farmer is considered a historical text instead of the first American novel. (It was first published in 1782, nearly a decade before Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple came out in England.) My interest in the text—and this is apparently true of nearly everyone who reads it—is historical rather than literary anyway. That’s not to say that Letters from an American Farmer isn’t a delightful little book, because it is far more readable and entertaining than most historical texts from the colonial era—but I’m interested, old-fashioned critic that I am, in what it has to say about that peculiar animal, The American.

Crévecoeur, it must be said, loves America. And he loves it specifically because it has not had time to build up a civilization, as has the debased and polluted Europe from which he comes. Americans are not quite noble savages, but the primitivism of the country does ennoble its citizens: “Here we have in some measure regained the ancient dignity of our species: our laws are simple and just; we are a race of cultivators; our cultivation is unrestrained; and therefore everything is prosperous and flourishing” (Letter I). Crévecoeur manages to mix society with back-to-the-earth ideology—a difficult task, and one that can perhaps be accomplished only in a new culture like seventeenth-century America.

With this rejoicing in the simple, it’s not surprising that we see a wide strain of Enlightenment optimism in Letters from an American Farmer. The minister in the first letter, for example, tells Crévecoeur’s narrator that “your mind is what we called at Yale a tabula rasa, where spontaneous and strong impressions are delineated with facility,” referring, of course, to John Locke’s famously optimistic “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” This optimism allows Crévecoeur to promote a very small and limited government. I see modern libertarianism in statements like the following: “Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?” (Letter III). Crévecoeur sounds almost like Ayn Rand here, glorifying selfishness as though if everyone behaves selfishly, the world will come out okay.

This attitude was enormously popular in the colonial days of this country—you see the same arguments, for example, in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and, though a bit more under the surface, in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. And of course, it persists today, both in Randian conservatism and in the sort of liberalism that suggests that education is the answer to every social ill. (For a good discussion of where that attitude comes from, I recommend Jay Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims.)

But Crévecoeur is of two minds in Letters from an American Farmer. As the letters progress, things get darker. He tells us in the second letter that “Good and evil . . . are to be found in all societies, and it is in vain to seek for any spot where those ingredients are not mixed.” If the first few letters are marked primarily by the good in American society and the blithe Enlightenment optimism that good inspires, evil makes its presence more and more known as Crévecoeur continues writing.

There is a good autobiographical reason for this, incidentally. In 1779, while Crévecoeur was still working on the Letters, he was falsely imprisoned by the British as an American spy. He left the country after three months in jail, leaving his wife and most of his family behind. He would return to the United States in 1783, but he would never see his wife again, as she would die during his absence. It is no doubt difficult to believe in the inherent goodness and perfectibility of man when one is torn from one’s family by the forces of government.

You can feel this in the later letters. Crévecoeur maintains his blitheness while describing Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, but eventually his farmer heads south to Charleston, South Carolina, and all hell breaks loose. “The three principal classes of inhabitants are lawyers, planters, and merchants,” he tells us. “This is the province which has afforded to the first the richest spoils, for nothing can exceed their wealth, their power, and their influence” (Letter IX).

If he doesn’t outright blame the lawyers for slavery, he at least blames them for not stopping it. Slavery, he tells us, is our great national evil because it destroys both slave and master; neither is “permitted to partake of those ineffable sensations with which Nature inspires the hearts of fathers and mothers; they must repel them all and become callous and passive.” It destroys entire generations, “bred in the midst of slaves, [who] learn from the example of their parents to despise them and seldom conceive either from religion or philosophy any ideas that tend to make their fate less calamitous.” Crévecoeur literally sees no hope for the slaveholding South, a 180-degree reversal from his feelings about Massachusetts and Connecticut.

(It should be noted that he engages in some serious bad faith in claiming that slaves in the North “enjoy as much liberty as their masters; they are as well clad and as well fed; in health and sickness, they are tenderly taken care of; they live under the same roof and are, truly speaking, a part of our families.” This sort of statement has been counterindicated by everyone from Alexis de Toqueville to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig. It is simply not true.)

At any rate, near the end of this chapter, Crévecoeur falls to his knees, lifts his hands toward heaven, and screams the following:

The history of the earth! Doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other? We observe avarice, rapine, and murder, equally prevailing in all parts. History perpetually tells us of millions of people abandoned to the caprice of the maddest princes, and of whole nations devoted to the blind fury of tyrants. Countries destroyed, nations alternatively buried in ruins by other nations, some parts of the world beautifully cultivated, returned again into their pristine state, the fruits of the ages of industry, the toil of thousands in a short time destroyed by few!

No Puritan could have said this better. Crévecoeur is, it seems, only as optimistic as his surroundings. When he is in the pleasant and relatively free Northeast, he believes in the perfectibility of mankind; when he is in the South, he wants God to reign down fire from heaven on all the inhabitants of this horrible planet. This attitude is, I think, typical of the American consciousness, which veers from extreme optimism to extreme pessimism every decade and a half or so, spurred in one direction by technological innovation, bull markets, and charismatic leaders and in the other by war, economic downturns, and the Indianapolis Colts making it to the Super Bowl.

We have a few Great National Myths in this country—there’s the myth of the self-made man, which I’ll be talking about next week, and there’s the myth of social mobility. But no myth has more impact on me personally than the myth of the frontier, the myth of movement, the myth of what Frederick R. Karl calls “spatiality.” “Americans,” he tells us, “abhor a vacuum and have, accordingly, structured a literature in which they can pursue the limitless.” This pursuit takes place primarily physically: think of Huck Finn lighting out for the territory, or Rabbit fleeing his infant daughter’s funeral—or, for that matter, think of Bruce Springsteen and Mary heading off down Thunder Road “to case the Promised Land.” (Yes, casual fans—it’s case, not chase.)

My assertion here—and I know it’s taken a long time to get there—is that our national myth of the frontier stems from our national two-facedness, as demonstrated so perfectly in Letters from an American Farmer. We’re as optimistic as our surroundings, and since our optimism comes from an unspoken belief in the noble savage, it makes sense that we would head vaguely West, into open space, in order to diffuse the evil that congregates with large groups of Americans.

In Crévecoeur’s final letter, he bemoans the state of international politics, the conflict between the America he loves and the Britain to which his personal beliefs bind him. (“Must I renounce a name so ancient and so venerable?” he asks.) The only solution he can come up with is to move further into the frontier, where he and his family will become full-blown Native Americans, building a wigwam, receiving new names, and speaking Indian languages. His solution, in other words, is to try to maintain his optimism by cultivating his pessimism—he can believe in the inherent goodness of the woods only by believing in the inherent evil in Charleston. (To put it in Springsteen’s terms, Mary is only desirable in the first place because of the ghosts of her past lovers “haunt[ing] this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets.” I love that song.)

Crévecoeur didn’t create American spatiality; Karl says it stretches straight back to Christopher Columbus. But, subconsciously or not, he gives us the real reason for it—he explicates our incredibly complicated attitude toward civilization and the wilderness, our constant desire to turn the latter into the former and our intense fear that we’ll succeed at it. So we have to keep moving, making new civilizations only to abandon them. As Travels with Charley in Search of America tells us, “Nearly every American hungers to move.”

Maybe the Library of Congress was on to something after all.

If you keep up with the book blogosphere at all, you’ve no doubt already stumbled across this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, a brutal takedown of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The article is worth reading, if only for the blustery vitriol with which William Major and Bryan Sinche attack the Sage of Concord. A typical passage:

The savvy English major comes away delighted with Emerson’s aphorisms and amazed by his ability to thrust together barely related concepts that seem like a viable argument. In that way, Emerson reminds us of the novitiate graduate student who attempts to write theory for the first time. Having read a little, and having been both confused and charmed by it, the student dives in, employing language and concepts barely understood. The result is predictable nonsense. Emerson, too, picks and grabs, looking for a viable path through the forest. The problem, though, is that he has landed himself in a cumbersome thicket. What emerges is a bloated monster that has just gorged itself on nature, God, spirit, reason, understanding, and virtue, to name just a few.

The authors also blame Emerson for the evils of the narcissistic modern world; his famous (and infuriating) essay “Self-Reliance” tells our college sophomores that “They are the center of the world. Their parents and teachers have already told them thus; their iPhone rings with the news; and now here’s Emerson to tell them exactly the same thing.”

The problem, of course, is that “Self-Reliance” is only one part of a very complex and hard-to-define philosophy that Emerson put forth over his entire lifetime—and further, it’s a relatively early piece of the larger whole, and a piece that I doubt Emerson intended to be his sole legacy in the classroom. Major and Sinche recognize this problem and lament the fact that “any reading of his work (absent an agonizing 15-week dive into all his major writings, an undertaking about as inviting as prepping for a colonoscopy) provides students with but a bit of the man.”

As it so happens, I have undertaken just such a 15-week dive, in which my class read not only Nature and the two series of Essays, but pieces from The Conduct of Life and most his abolitionist speeches (an active counterpart to Emerson’s usual political quietism that gets too often neglected). I don’t love Emerson, and I am frustrated and baffled by him as often as I am moved. But I think he is worth listening to—even if one can only listen for one week in a survey course.

Emerson is, as I understand it, largely ignored by philosophy departments and is seen as the province of the English survey course. This is why Major and Sinche have been stuck teaching him, and that’s not really fair. Emerson would probably make more sense stuck between Rousseau and Kierkegaard in an Introduction to Philosophy course than he does stuck between James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne in an American Literature class. But that’s not the way things have shaken down, and Emerson—like Marx and Freud—has been cast aside by his home department and left for the literature folks to pick up.

The problem, one might argue, is that Emerson makes no arguments, not the way David Hume or Aristotle do. He’s content to dance around a topic. The two best things I’ve read on the way Emerson works come from scholars Norman Miller and John T. Irwin. Miller:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, by his own admission, was not a system-builder, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word “system”—a unified and internally consistent set of tenets built upon a basic premise or fact. And it is probably unfair for the twentieth-century American to judge Emerson’s eclectic philosophy—born as it was out of such diverse roots as Platonism, Eastern mysticism, and German romanticism—by strictly logical criteria. For Emerson’s philosophy, if it is informed by a logic at all, is informed by the logic of the spider web rather than that of the skyscraper; it is circular rather than linear, intuitional rather than syllogistic. Given this nature, it resists penetration and probing. Tear it at one point and the whole construct falls.

And Irwin:

In a sense, an Emersonian essay is simply the decipherment of a hieroglyph. The strategy is always the same: he presents the emblem in all its outer complexity and then, through the doctrine of correspondences, he penetrates the emblem to reveal its inner simplicity, to show the hidden relationship between outer shape and inner meaning.

The two guiding metaphors here—the spider’s web and the hieroglyphic—suggest a natural mysticism more than a systematic conglomeration of arguments. If we were to make biblical parallels, Emerson is more John than Paul. But this argument does not adequately explain Emerson’s being kept out of philosophy departments—you could apply the “spider’s web” metaphor to figures as important in philosophy departments as Plato, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and if they can do it, why can’t Emerson?

I don’t know, and to some extent, that’s not my question to answer. The only thing I have to work with is Emerson’s having been ceded to English departments, to a class I will (God willing) eventually teach. And so the question implied by Major and Sinche stands before me: How do you teach Emerson without reducing the complex web of mystery (and yes, contradictions) at his core? I will use the rest of this post to attempt to answer that question, assuming only one class period allotted to Emerson in a sophomore-level survey of early American literature.

I’d begin by chucking both “The American Scholar” and “The Divinity School Address,” both of which I read in college. These two pieces belong to the very early Emerson and are much less tense and interesting than his later work. Most everything they say comes across much better in “Self-Reliance,” which I would keep on the syllabus.

This essay, as I’m sure everyone reading this knows, will drive you crazy. If you have any sort of connection to the real world, you’ll want to backhand the Emerson who tells you, quite earnestly, that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” And if you have any notion of objective right and wrong, you’ll hate him when he says that “Power is in nature the essential measure of right.” (There’s that Nietzsche influence—virtue is often, for Emerson as well as for Machiavelli and Nietzsche, about virility.)  And if you’re lucky, your students will chafe at these assertions, as well.

But just in case they don’t, add to your syllabus the essay “Circles,” also from Essays: First Series (1841). This is Emerson at his finest. Here he explains the method behind all his writings: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” Here we find him circling the truth, unable to settle on a single absolute. When you talk about him with your class, you can discuss how this essay opens up the world of the Over-Soul, the collective that sometimes trumps the individual in Emerson’s work and sometimes is trumped by it.

“Circles” is the dark, moody side of Emerson, the side that doesn’t get much airplay when compared to the blithe “Sage of Concord” vision of him; I’d add to it at least an excerpt from “Experience,” from Essays: Second Series, which is Emerson at his absolute darkest. Here he tries to come to grips with the death of his son and decides the only way to cope with loss is to adopt a Buddhist/stoic enforced alienation in which “Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.” This is the seamy underbelly of self-reliance.

Finally, to give students a taste of the Over-Soul as well as a taste of Emerson’s poetic power, assign the 1867 poem “Brahma,” which is not his best poem but is nice enough and serves as a very effective counterweight to the Jersey Shore narcissism of “Self-Reliance.” All in all, this is between forty and sixty pages of reading, perhaps too much for a single day in a sophomore survey course. If that’s true, you can excerpt from the essays or take out “Experience.” Or you can just assign it over a weekend.

Emerson, as frustrating as he is—and as potentially dangerous as his ideas occasionally are—is to important to the history of American philosophy to ignore. And if philosophers have decided to dispose of him, it falls to English teachers to keep his legacy alive. Let’s try to keep alive more than the Cliff’s Notes “follow your bliss” line-drawing version of him.

As the podcast’s lone Americanist, I suppose it falls to me to say something about J.D. Salinger, who died today at 91.

Salinger is best known, of course, for The Catcher in the Rye, the 1951 novel that launched a million enfants terribles. Nearly everyone reads Catcher in high school, and nearly everyone sees a good bit of Holden Caulfield in himself. One sympathizes with Salinger’s protagonist–and if one is like me, one goes around talking like him for several years.

But something funny happens when you reach adulthood. If you reread The Catcher in the Rye, it makes you a little queasy–you begin to see Caulfield with new eyes, much less sympathetically, and you’re ready for them to throw the hypersensitive little puke into the nuthouse well before the end. Salinger apologists say that this feeling is what the author intended, that the Holden-as-hero reading is fundamentally a misreading. I am not so sure.

I do know, however, that Franny and Zooey, published a decade later, is a much better book and that if there’s any justice in the world Salinger will be remembered for the complex spirituality in its second section rather than for the whiny ur-teenager banned from high schools all over the country. If you haven’t read Franny, use Salinger’s death as your excuse. (I should use it as an excuse to read Nine Stories and Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, neither one of which I’ve read since the first few months of my undergraduate years.)

Salinger famously became a recluse after the publication of Roofbeams in 1963, and hasn’t published anything at all since a very long (and apparently very bad) story in a 1965 issue of the New Yorker. Rumors have persisted for years that Salinger has been bunkered up in New Hampshire these last 45 years writing work that will put his earlier fiction to shame. Some people think he’s got it all in a Prince-style vault, just waiting to be published. Some people think he’s burned it all. I suppose we’ll find out before too long.

In the meantime, so long to one of the twentieth century’s most overrated but effective writers. Here’s hoping his personal life doesn’t overshadow the best of his fiction.