the green tradition in american literature

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

The Green Tradition in American LiteratureThe Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul by H. Daniel Peck;Sherman PaulReview by: Frederick GarberContemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), pp. 558-563Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208330 .

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THE GREEN TRADITION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE*

The green American tradition, as H. Daniel Peck's introduction to The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul tells us, comes down from Emerson, who is not only its founder but still, these essays regularly confirm, its tutelary figure. It was named by Paul Rosenfeld, a nearly forgotten critic of the period around World War I, and finds its most eloquent spokesman in our time in the subject of this festschrift. Sherman Paul is himself the shaper of a tradition profoundly related to that green one, his writings tracking a rich and coherent trace through our indigenous culture. The green tradition has its ironies, of course, Peck's introduction putting several as precisely as any of the essays that follow it. Peck comments how Emerson's seeking to turn out tradition fostered the green American tradition (3); and one could add how Emerson unwittingly cooperated in the tradition of the American Adam from which we have never quite recovered and which has its own part in the continuities of greenness and Americanness. In fact the business of American Adamism makes eminently clear how such undoing becomes, itself, a new mode of doing: the seeking of fractures turns into a continuing tradition of such seeking, so that what the seeking finds is opposite in kind to what it seeks. Such undoing has its later being in being opposite to itself, a self-identity made out of self-difference. The rereadings of modernism by contemporary oral poets like David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg, both contributors to this volume, are only the latest indigenous efforts to spell out the complexities of such a tradition. Putting it in terms of an unmaking that is, at once, itself and not itself is not quite as

*H. Daniel Peck, ed., The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 357 pp. $35.00.

Contemporary Literature XXXI, 4 0010-7484/90/0004-0558 $1.50/0 ?1990 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System



foreign to the organicist green tradition as it might seem: one can imagine Thoreau coming up with just such suggestions about mutual fosterings of identity and difference, contradictions of the principle of noncontradiction. Indeed, it is through those possibilities in figures like Thoreau and, say, Stieglitz that we see in this tradition a subtextual uneasiness with much that the tradition extols, with "organic process, vital expression, cultural and political democracy, and the cultivation of an indigenous art" (as the blurb puts the tradition's elements); and it is precisely that uneasiness, that sotto voce tradition within the tradition, that shows the green American tradition to be extraordinarily vital into postmodernism and beyond it.

The image by Harry Callahan that appears on the jacket will be missed by those taking this volume out of a library, an unfortunate lacuna because the jacket's ironies ought to echo through our reading of this festschrift. Classically modernist/formalist in its depiction of bare trees in pure snow, the trees asserting and resisting the latent forms that describe them, Callahan's image echoes fragmentarily in a green strip just above it, the strip one-fifth the depth of the photograph's spectral black-and-whiteness. What this sardonic encounter suggests of the difficult vitality of the green American tradition ought to have subliminal effects affecting (effecting) our reading of what follows. The book is bound in leaf green, a straightforward play of consonance with the title which emerges as straightforward only when the jacket's embrace is undone. Only such collocations can suggest the complexities of all that Emerson started in his own Concordian Adamism, that tradition made up of an unending sequence of beginnings.

The volume's table of contents mirrors the curve of its dedicatee's work (one of the text's finer ironies, given the beginnings of the green tradition in our main exponent of correspondences). It opens with essays on Emerson, Thoreau, and Cooper, goes through sections on modernism and postmodernism, the final section a selection of poems by contemporaries on whom Sherman Paul has written, its plum an unpublished poem by Robert Duncan. Most of the contributors were doctoral students of Paul, and if the essays are uneven their best are a credit to him as well as to their more immediate makers.

In fact the volume begins auspiciously with three good essays on American Renaissance figures. The studies by Richard Hutson (on Emerson's philosophy of history), by Peck (on time and memory in Thoreau's Journal), and by Thomas Hill Schaub (on The Pioneers and the inscribing of history) come together in their concern with time, memory, and immediacy, on the writings of journals and histories,

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the fixing of flowing civil experience. For Hutson's Emerson, history is "the ceaseless objectification of the human spirit, sublime in its integrity and impassivity," yet it has "a certain vulnerability" in that, as Emerson saw, "it tends to be inaccessible to us except in textual form" (24). Broad reading reveals the soul's sovereignty and uni- versality. Memory is indistinguishable from consciousness, secondary and proximate, a "power of nearness" the understanding of which is profoundly grounded in Emerson's own memories of the New England town (30). Though Emerson obfuscates history and society by referring to them as nature, he turns "communal autonomy into a representative self, freed from its actual historical background" (35). Peck's essay has Thoreau - awed by the inexorable continuity of time yet shocked by the finality of his brother's death - seeking to "kill" time by taking it up within himself (an act which we can find elsewhere throughout the age, American and Anglo-European, functioning in terms of a Wordsworthian absorption of nature into consciousness). Ambivalence is the only appropriate response to such radical ambiguities. They require a compromise through which one learns "to keep time without killing it," containing its fluctuations within consciousness yet honor- ing those independent temporal rhythms in which we do, in fact, live (45). Thoreau turns these quandaries into questions of textuality. Since A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is too much a text of closure, Thoreau needed a text without beginning and end, conclu- sion or conclusiveness (a discussion of the Barthesian theory of "text" would have been particularly helpful here); thus the significance of the Journal. Readings like Peck's help us to see the Journal as a book of memory and more, a book about the homologous shapes of text and temporality, not only the commemorating of experience but the mutually reflecting modes of texts and what they (in the slipperiest of fashionings) seek to contain. Schaub's important essay on The Pioneers plays with questions of text in terms of voicings and inscrip- tions, the play of speech and writing that issues in so much current (largely Derridean-derived) theory and that also appears, in another way, in the poetics of David Antin. Natty, the illiterate voice of the wilderness (unreading and, I would argue, for the lettered who encounter him, largely unreadable), speaks in terms of the quasi- romantic understanding that "voice is everywhere associated with the expression of the truth and spirit that lie within the natural world" (61); yet, as his request for someone to read the words incised on a gravestone shows, that voice "finds no comfortable space . .. except the space of writing." That is the furthest reach of the poignancy which

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readers of Cooper too often turn into sentimentality but which, in fact, makes the study of Cooper's textual ironies one of the great unex- plored areas in American literature.

From so fine a beginning the volume settles down to a somewhat spottier life, with outstanding essays by Jean Fagan Yellin on Hawthorne, Virginia M. Kouidis on early modernist women writers, and Lisa Pater Faranda on the poetics of Charles Olson's Maximus Poems. What makes the essays by Yellin and Kouidis particularly convincing is their sense of intellectual as well as textual intricacies, of the ambiguities built into any green tradition (consider the counterpart in England). Not only do they recognize countervailing arguments, but they also show how the "cultural and political democracy" endemic to American greenness has profound lacunae which we have not only not filled up but, in too many cases, have not even fully recognized. Essays as good as these suggest, without shrillness and therefore with considerable effect, the evasiveness and paternalism implicit in that very "seeing" on which our greenness prides itself, as well as the related, carefully masked nonseeing to which modes of paternalism seem especially prone. Yellin points out how Hawthorne, despite general belief, was fully acquainted with the facts of slavery (he knew about black residents of Salem) yet some of his comments read almost like apologias. At best he suggested that slavery would die out on its-own. Uncertain about the full humanity of black people, disgusted with most reformers (so too was Thoreau, but with very different results), Hawthorne seems to have "deliberately avoided thinking about black slavery in antebellum America" (89). The study by Kouidis locates a more subtle ambivalence in Emerson, whose privileging of the mascu- line finds support in his promulgation of female stereotypes. Still, early modernist figures like Dorothy Richardson, Marianne Moore, and Mina Loy sought their own version of Emersonian seeing (largely under the influence of Experience), with the upshot an occasional visionary illumination framed in the Emersonian mode. Yet consider the cost: Richardson, Loy, and Moore, legatees of George Santayana's genteel tradition, "are victims of Emersonian subjectivity petrified to the transcendental 'system' [which] defended tradition and inherited privi- lege against the pressures of burgeoning democratic culture" (123). If that perverts our ongoing greening, it complicates, in ways we are only now beginning to see, what it means to have no more than the power of an adjunct to realize an urge for greenness. Indeed these two essays suggest what could be the general thrust of a counterpart volume on questions of culture, power, and discourse as they emerge

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in the green American tradition. We need to know a good deal more about what greenness means to those whose places in the hierarchy allowed them little, or inferior kinds of, access to all that the tradition holds. Further (and if I put this point parenthetically that ought not to be taken as discounting its importance) we need to know a good deal more about the relation of greenness to blackness, that other tradition to which Harry Levin gave a title in The Power of Blackness. Poe is no green type, but Hawthorne turns up in accounts of each tradition, in this book and in Levin's, and Peck has written well on Cooper, who links the colorations as intricately, ironically, as anyone at that time. Questions of power, culture, and discourse ought to bring these lines together, for our history makes clear that there are figures and conditions in which they seem inseparable. Indeed, one of the radical factors in American literature at any time is the possibility of bringing together the powers of greenness and blackness, and the dis- courses which attend them, as no other literature can - or art, for that matter, as any reading of Thomas Cole's work will show. And yet to speak of bringing them together is not to suggest their ultimate recon- cilability but quite the reverse, and perhaps to suggest further that it is just such irreconcilability, those factors in those conditions, that characterizes some of the elemental aspects of American culture. Such questions suggest the bridges that could be built, coherently, convinc- ingly, from Paul to Foucault and similar theorists.

All of which is to say that the editor, himself a subtle reader of Thoreau, seems unduly pessimistic when he speaks of "the difficulty of defending the green tradition in a time such as ours, which is in many ways inhospitable to its presence and unreceptive to its lessons" (14). Consider the case of Harold Bloom, who links into the tradition in a variety of ways, who sees so much (perhaps most) of modern American poetry emerging from an Emersonian tradition, Bloom's Emerson. Whatever Bloom's extravagance, his sense of the significance of Emersonian readings of experience (more precisely, perhaps, of our experience of Emersonian readings) opens up a great deal in figures like Stevens and Ashbery. A lot of air has to be released from Bloom's suggestions before we can use them, but they are, after that, suggestive, even practical. And if Bloom's Emersonianism has few points of contact with Paul's, their encounter does much to make an Emerson complex, contradictory enough to be credible for our time. It is clear, though, that Peck's uneasiness has in mind no ultimately sympathetic Bloom but more radical elements in contemporary theory whose non- sympathies can generally be counted on. Yet no line of reading con-

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tinues pure and unchallenged for very long, nor ought any to do so. Some of the elements of the green tradition, especially the "aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may be grounded" that Emerson asserts in Self-Reliance, run into the central tenets of all manner of contemporary approaches: as poststructuralism settles into middle age it is clear that its every variety has little to say for the "aboriginal," the "Self," or anything on which "universal reliance may be grounded." That suspicion is, by and large, not openly represented in these essays, though several show more than traces of the uneasiness the suspicion fosters. Yet an Emersonian sense of the knotty specificity of personal experience comes through in a variety of contemporary readings of the possibilities (and especially the impossibilities) of experience. If poets as different as David Antin, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, and Jerome Rothenberg - all the subjects of studies by Sherman Paul, all represented in this volume-can be seen to make sense in terms of American greenness, then the challenge is not to build a wall around the tradition but to show how the work of one of our finest scholars, much of it part of the permanent literature of our readings, can be shown to respond to very different, even incompatible, suggestions about how to conduct such readings. Whatever the predictable (and frequently healthy) demurrals, no one is likely to deny the outline and major facets of the tradition that Paul has clarified better than anyone before him. It is precisely those clarifications that make possible those other readings of our radical, probably ineradicable, shadings of American green.

Frederick Garber State University of New York at Binghamton

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