Edward Watts and David J. Carlson, eds., John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. Reviewed by Klaus H. Schmidt

EDWARD WATTS and DAVID J. CARLSON, eds., John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2012), xxxiv + 319 pp. Reviewed by Klaus H. Schmidt

Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.2 (2014)

In many a review, claiming the importance of the volume under discussion is little more than a rhetorical strategy. In the case of John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, it simply reflects the facts. As an experimental writer, contentious critic, unconventional editor, and fearless reformist, John Neal (1793-1876) played a central role in the cultural matrix of the early national period and in the transatlantic negotiation of an emerging literary marketplace. Equally influential as a proponent of literary nationalism, pioneer of American historical fiction, advocate of women’s rights, and new type of regionalist, he helped pave the way for a phenomenon later known as the American Renaissance. That an intellectual ranked by Edgar Allan Poe as “among our men of indisputable genius,”[1] remembered by Nathaniel Hawthorne as “that wild fellow,”[2] and praised by Margaret Fuller as “truly a man”[3] could ever be written out of literary history would have been unthinkable in his time. As late as 1962, Hans-Joachim Lang was unable to imagine that Neal’s place in American literature was bound to become insecure: “It would be an exaggeration to say that John Neal […] is a neglected author. He was too forceful a personality […] to be easily forgotten […].”[4] What Lang still labeled an “exaggeration” must now be called an understatement.[5] This is evidenced by the fact that the present volume turns out to be the first collection of critical essays ever published[6] on this key figure of nineteenth-century American culture. Its publication should in particular be of interest to German Americanists, whose scholarly interventions have been instrumental in preventing Neal’s oeuvre from sinking into obscurity.[7]

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As the editors explain in their acknowledgments, the idea for this collection was formed during the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Society of Early Americanists in Hamilton, Bermuda (March 4-7, 2009). While none of the seventy-two panels were dedicated specifically to Neal, “seven papers discussed his work” (ix). Convinced that these papers were striking proof of the author’s relevance to current research, Edward Watts and David J. Carlson decided to offer a textual platform for further investigation. The contributors the editors finally managed to bring together in this collection make for a productive mix of specialists like Carlson, Elmer, Fleischmann, Orestano, Richter, Watts, and Weyler, whose publications account for almost half of what has been written on Neal in the last three decades,[8] and scholars like Hayes, Holt, Insko, Merlob, Pethers, and Sivils, who look at Neal’s writings from the angle of more general approaches to early American history, literature, and culture.

 

The collection comprises thirteen essays and an introductory chapter. The editors’ introduction, “Headlong Enterprise: John Neal and Nineteenth-Century America,” is nothing less than a masterpiece. It affords revealing glimpses at Neal’s uneven career and idiosyncratic character, illustrates why the author gradually disappeared from the radar of American literary historiography, and lists compelling reasons for his current rediscovery. By criticizing his generation of writers for their lack of Americanness and continuing dependence on the aesthetic tastes of the mother country—and thus enabling “Emerson and his associates” to “imagine for themselves a fresh start” (xiii)—Neal ironically contributed to a nationalist narrative that would eventually exclude him from the American Renaissance he had called for all along. By re-interpreting the originality, experimentation, and contrariness of his life and art as emblematic of the tensions and contradictions underlying the social fabric of the early republic and antebellum America, scholars have increasingly begun to see John Neal as “an important touchstone for understanding the culture wars of his age” (xviii).

 

In “‘I Must Resemble Nobody’: John Neal, Genre, and the Making of American Literary Nationalism,” the first essay of the volume and one of its best, Matthew Peters (University of Nottingham) highlights the unconventional use of orality, time, and genre in Neal’s early novels—ironic, self-reflexive, and digressive texts, from Keep Cool (1817) to Rachel Dyer (1828), “whose generic indeterminacy paralleled and complemented an ongoing exploration of the competing forces within American literary nationalism” (3). Taking cues from theoretical constructs such as Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”[9] and Wai Chee Dimock’s “deep time,”[10] Peters demonstrates that Neal considered “the noisy diversity of the nation as requiring representation at the formal level as well as the thematic level” (29) and that in the early decades of the nineteenth century, “the triumph of a linear historical narrative over more accretive methods […] was by no means absolute or uncontested” (31).

 

While Matthew Wynn Sivils (Iowa State University) in “‘The Herbage of Death’: Haunted Environments in John Neal and James Fenimore Cooper” uses heterotopic concepts, e.g. Yi-Fu Tuan’s “middle landscape,”[11] to diagnose a focus on “artifacts of injustice buried within the earth” (40) and “a decidedly gothic environmental imagination” (47) in Logan: A Family History (1822), Brother Jonathan (1825), and The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Jeffrey Insko (Oakland University) suggests that “Neal might be interesting, not despite, but precisely because of his incoherencies” (Chapter three: “Eyewitness to History” 59, emphasis in orig.). A good case in point is Seventy-Six (1823), Neal’s romance of the Revolution, where “[t]he function of a narrator […] is […] not to explain, but simply to present incidents with such vividness of interest that the reader becomes ‘an eye-witness’” (64), reflecting the idea that “narrative is not immanent in our experience, but merely a structure that is imposed upon it retrospectively” (64).

 

In his brilliant reading of Authorship: A Tale. By a New Englander Over-Sea (1830), Jörg Thomas Richter (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin) shows that Neal’s little-understood novel is far from being merely a thinly disguised autobiography, sentimental romance, or fictionalized travelogue but a trailblazing self-reflexive work that stages the problematic relation between author, text, and audience.[12] Replete with allusions to contemporary English intellectual life and the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham,[13] Neal’s novel, through the allegorization of its characters (Holmes = the ‘author;’ Mary = the ‘reader/muse;’ Edwards = the ‘real text’) and the conflation of gambling and professional writing, “explores the collapse rather than the juxtaposition of the fact-fiction divide” and questions “the epistemic validity of authorial self-expression” (83).

 

Maya Merlob’s (Tel Aviv University) “Celebrated Rubbish: John Neal and the Commercialization of Early American Romanticism” foregrounds the ways in which Neal’s oeuvre textualizes the rise of a market society and reflects his program of literary patriotism. Following Harold C. Martin’s argument that Neal’s rambling style and excessive verbosity are “entirely intentional,”[14] Merlob’s analysis allows us to see the interconnections between the author’s satire on the publishing industry and his celebration of “Yankee speech” (105) as an innovative form of authentic writing. By making the “extempore man”[15] “dashing off”[16] texts because he is “paid by the page”[17] the prototype of professional American authorship, Neal turns the ‘flaws’ of his art into a literary trademark and encourages a reappraisal of early American Romanticism as “a commercial enterprise” (110).

 

In “John Neal, the Rise of the Critick, and the Rise of American Art,” Francesca Orestano (Università degli Studi di Milano) emphasizes the author’s “independence of taste and originality” (130), which, in addition to defining “new aesthetic territory” (125), resulted in critical judgments that, according to Harold Edward Dickson, “have stood the trying test of time.”[18] Jonathan Elmer (Indiana University) uses Neal’s 1824 London encounter with the ‘white Indian’ John Dunn Hunter[19] and the former’s preoccupation with the latter’s staging of himself as a true American[20] to offer a psychoanalytic reading of Hunter as Neal’s alter ego, a “double” (152) who has to be demonized in order to suppress parallels in literary adventurism and self-marketing (Chapter seven: “John Neal and John Dunn Hunter”).

 

David J. Carlson’s (California State University, San Bernardino) “‘Another Declaration of Independence’[21]: John Neal’s Rachel Dyer and the Assault on Precedent,” a notable contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and literature studies[22] and arguably the best essay in the volume, reads Neal’s historical novel as “a thinly veiled commentary on the need [for] […] a systematic codification movement” (163). Redirecting our attention to “Neal’s embeddedness in a range of transatlantic legal and aesthetic discourses” (174), including Bentham’s attack on the common law tradition à la William Blackstone, Carlson interprets Neal’s propagation of “a more unruly kind of speech” (170) in the subtexts and paratexts of Rachel Dyer as effectively calling for “a radical rejection of the authority of the past” (172) and the willingness to embrace “an authentically ‘American’ culture” (173).

 

The author’s development as a regionalist and his deconstruction of ‘Indian Hater’ narratives are focalized in the next two essays. “Here, There, and Everywhere: The Elusive Regionalism of John Neal” by Kerin Holt (Utah State University) elucidates how Neal’s weekly magazine The Yankee, by relying on a dialogical structure and presenting northern New England as a contested space, provided “a literary form that encouraged citizens to read the federal nation in diverse, yet cohesive terms” (194). In “He Could Not Believe that Butchering Red Men Was Serving Our Maker: ‘David Whicher’ and the Indian Hater Tradition,” Edward Watts (Michigan State University) comprehends Neal’s 1832 short story as “challeng[ing] the role of popular fiction in the articulation, perpetuation, and celebration of Indian killing,” a story in which the restraint of its protagonist seems to “impl[y] the possibility of an American frontier governed by more civil models of interracial contact and behavior” (213).

 

Two essays are dedicated to the core of Neal’s social philosophy and reformist program, namely his feminism. Putting his works “in conversation” (228) with British and American writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay Graham, and Judith Sargent Murray, Karen A. Weyler (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) in “John Neal and the Early Discourse of American Women’s Rights” traces the author’s emergence as one of the “forefathers” (227) of the American women’s movement, a feminist thinker whose “relentless advocacy was crucial in bringing women’s rights back into the mainstream […] and recuperating it from its scandal-tainted eighteenth-century origins” (241-42). In “‘A Right Manly Man’ in 1843: John Neal on Women’s Rights and the Problem of Male Feminism,” Fritz Fleischmann (Babson College) continues the conversation by extending it to include Neal’s synergetic relationship with Margaret Fuller and exemplifying the former’s lifelong engagement with issues of gender. Displaying an admirable grasp of Neal’s biography and literary oeuvre, Fleischmann selects 1843 as “a banner year” (248) for public manifestations of the author’s ‘male feminist’ agenda. With the aid of incisive readings of “Idiosyncrasies” and “Ruth Elder” as related tales of masculine hubris and patriarchal insanity, Fleischmann points to “Neal’s increasing doubts about the oppressor’s ability to speak for the oppressed” (253) and the necessity of rethinking a personality that is “notoriously multifaceted and a challenge to categorize” (262).

 

In the last essay collected in this volume, Kevin J. Hayes (University of Central Oklahoma) examines “How John Neal Wrote His Autobiography.” Encouraged by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and written almost completely from memory after the great Portland fire of 1866 had destroyed most of Neal’s personal papers, Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life (1869), although warmly reviewed at the time of its publication, “has received virtually no critical discussion” (272). Composed in the same “free-and-easy, rambling style” (272) that characterizes his fiction, Neal’s autobiography is not only an indispensable source on the author’s life and works but, as Hayes argues, a self-reflexive and highly original text exploring “the give-and-take between memory and narrative” (271).

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In terms of content, this collection deserves nothing but praise. It contains essays offering thematically varied, methodically innovative, and intellectually stimulating research that meets the highest academic standards. It also conveys new insights into Neal’s amazing range of interests, multiple talents, and incredible productivity. The image of the author that emerges from these excellent contributions is that of an irrepressible figure radiating vibrant energy and enormous vitality. A man who reviewed more than 130 American authors, only to tell his audience that, with very few exceptions, none of them was worth reading[23]; a man who, under the guise of his pseudonym ‘Carter Holmes,’ shamelessly, if self-ironically, described himself as “the most original writer, that America has produced”[24]; and a man who was not afraid of shocking his readers by opening the preface to Logan: A Family History (1822) with a hilarious antipreface: “I hate Prefaces. I hate Dedications. Enough for the one to say, that here is an American story. […] I do not dedicate my book to anybody; for I know nobody worth dedicating it to.”[25] The audacity of Neal’s outrageous self-praise and forceful iconoclasm foreshadows and anticipates Walt Whitman, who, reviewing himself anonymously after the publication of Leaves of Grass (1855), welcomed the artist enthusiastically as “An American bard at last!”[26] and in poems such as “Song of Myself” uninhibitedly celebrated his ‘expanded’ self. The same is true for Neal’s admiration for the vernacular and experimentation with textualized orality (“talking on paper”[27]) and notorious propensity to contradict himself—personal idiosyncrasies which we find immortalized in Whitman’s much-quoted lines “I permit to speak at every hazard, / Nature without check with original energy”[28] and “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.).”[29]

 

The only misgivings I have about this book relate to formal weaknesses. To be precise, the text is riddled with editorial oversights of all types and categories: for instance, inaccuracies in the table of contents[30]; lack of congruence between titles given in the list of illustrations and titles used in the main text[31]; typos[32]; misspellings of authors’ and publishers’ names[33]; incorrect formatting[34]; extraneous words[35]; extraneous or missing spaces[36]; missing words[37]; incorrect, missing, or inconsistent punctuation[38]; grammatical mistakes, including collocation errors and incorrect word division[39]; mistakes, gaps, and inaccuracies in the volume’s bibliography[40]; incorrect, incomplete, or inaccurate bibliographical information in the endnotes and list of contributors[41]; as well as insufficient streamlining of the different systems of documentation.[42] Watts and Carlson are so consistent in their laissez-faire approach to scholarly publishing—starting the book with an incorrect page number on its first page (v.2) and ending it with an incorrect title on its last (319.21)—that one feels tempted to read their editorial performance as a post-postmodern homage to Neal’s “overhasty” writing style (271) and “lackadaisical attitude toward accuracy” (276). A question that arises in view of the above-mentioned blunders is why Bucknell University Press did not provide the editors with competent proofreaders, instead of suggesting they “improve the project through a series of revisions and restructurings” (ix). Unquestionable is the fact that a groundbreaking volume such as this would have deserved some sort of professional editing.

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Prior to discussing a few research desiderata that follow from the conversations collected in this volume, it is worthwhile recalling the canon-critical debates of the 1980s. In “Masterpiece Theater” (1984), Jane Tompkins pointed out that literary classics “embody the changing interests and beliefs of those people whose place in the cultural hierarchy empowers them to decide which works deserve the name of classic and which do not.”[43] The awareness of the contingent nature of literary value[44] in turn entails the obligation to deal with the vicissitudes of canon formation and search for authors who have fallen through the grid of contemporary tastes:

The recognition that literary texts, like everything else, are humanly created, historically produced objects, whose value has been created and re-created by men and women out of their particular needs, suggests a need to study the interests, institutional practices, and social arrangements that sustain the canon of classic works. It also opens the way for a retrieval of the values and interests embodied in other, noncanonical texts, which the literary establishment […] has—for a variety of reasons—suppressed.[45]

Responding to the seminal work of Tompkins, Annette Kolodny in her article “The Integrity of Memory” (1985) called for a “heroic rereading […] that must proceed from the commitment to take seriously those works with which we are least familiar, and especially so when they challenge current notions of art and artifice.”[46] The willingness to face the risks of “defamiliarization” enables the modern critic “to stand before the vast array of texts—canonical and non-canonical alike—and view them as more or less complex assemblages of rhetorical and stylistic devices whose meanings and value have been variously constituted over time by changing audiences.”[47] Correspondingly, Kolodny demands a rehistoricizing of any early American text to be evaluated from today’s perspective: “To understand how a text works out ‘problems inherent in the culture at the moment of composition’[48] […] allows us to reassess our literary heritage by means and in terms of reembedding texts and authors into encompassing, complicated, and dense historical processes.”[49] At the end of the 1980s, it was David S. Reynolds who, brilliantly if controversially, dared to throw stones at one of the temples of Americanist canon-building by taking on F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford UP, 1941). In Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), a title both paying tribute to and intertextually undermining the magnum opus of his famous predecessor, Reynolds argued for a methodology of “reconstructive criticism,” asking scholars “to reconstruct as completely as possible the socioliterary milieu of literary works through the exploration of a broad array of forgotten social and imaginative texts, paving the way for responsible reinterpretations of canonized works and making possible the rediscovery of lost literature.”[50] Although sticking to an essentialist hierarchy of ‘major’ and ‘minor,’ exemplified by the use of “beneath” as a guiding metaphor, Reynolds was the first literary historian to appreciate Neal’s special achievement:

He put theory into practice in a series of remarkable novels, which are our earliest full examples of the American Subversive Style, characterized by emotions heightened to a fever pitch, extreme sensational action creating a dizzying effect, sudden shifts in perspective, and narrative discontinuities. Subversive fiction, as introduced by Neal […], tried to be deliberately outrageous, inflammatory, disquieting. It spit in the face of conventional literature. […] What may seem the most glaring flaw of many Subversive novels—their formlessness, their wildness—was an extremely important groundbreaker for the major writers.[51]

In his foreword to the 2011 paperback edition of this pioneering text, Sean Wilentz confirms the critical potential of Reynolds’s revisionist methodology and pleads for its fruitful application in an era of digitalization: “The time is propitious for this reconstructive approach to intensify and spread […], since many rare works that once had to be hunted down in archives are now available online.” According to Wilentz, we are now in a unique position “to rescue [‘representative’ geniuses’] lesser known contemporaries from undeserved oblivion, by tapping into the kinds of hidden cultural energies that Reynolds reveals in his landmark book.”[52]

 

Keeping in mind these calls for more holistic readings of American literature and culture, one should not read Neal as someone who contributed to discursive layers “beneath” the American Renaissance but as a personality who was part of a complex literary polysystem in which competing voices were vying for recognition. More specific desiderata concern a recontextualization of Neal’s life and writings within the parameters of current research paradigms; a reinvestigation of his influence as a mentor and literary critic; a reappraisal of his role in the Delphian Club and early nineteenth-century belles lettres culture; a comprehensive survey of his activities as a social reformer and political activist; a new reading of the author as an innovator and epistemological skeptic experimenting with early forms of stream of consciousness, literary self-reflexivity, and the dissolution of genre boundaries; studies of the deeper meaning and intratextual connectedness of Neal’s short fiction; and a reconsideration of Neal’s later life and work (1840s to 1870s).

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At the end of their excellent introduction, Edward Watts and David J. Carlson make a claim that, like Whitman’s poetry, seems to be inspired by the bravado of the younger Neal: “Neal’s erasure from the literary and cultural history of his moment should, by now, be at an end” (xxx). That a renaissance in Neal studies is not only proclaimed but has actually begun manifests itself in both the publication of this long-awaited volume and the positive evaluation of Neal’s oeuvre in recent literary histories. In Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (New York: Farrar, 2013), for instance, Philip F. Gura devotes almost ten pages to Neal and his writings. Unlike Reynolds, however, for whom writers like Neal were primarily pathfinders destined to pave the way for their more important successors, Gura recognizes Neal as an author ahead of his time, a major catalyst whose art is worthy of study on its own: “There were also novelists—the incomparable John Neal most memorably—who questioned the very efficacy of historical knowledge to inform behavior in a time of transformative change” (Gura xv). Hence, Neal was convinced that writers “who truly confronted contemporary challenges had to conceive of new kinds of narratives […],”[53] which explains the radical otherness and originality that distinguish Neal’s handling of the novelistic form:

[…] [Neal’s] own works fit the description he gave [Charles Brockden] Brown’s oeuvre: full of perplexity, incoherence, and contradiction. Frequently criticized for a lack of discipline […], Neal filled his novels of the 1820s with raw and exhilarating energy. In his struggle to contain his large, unruly imagination, he openly broached topics that few other American novelists would touch, and to do so, broached various stylistic conventions and literary genres.[54]

 

If other standard works follow Gura’s example and enough scholars seize the opportunity to explore the fascinating oeuvre of one of the most neglected authors of his age, rewriting Neal into the cultural history of nineteenth-century America will no longer be wishful thinking but a viable and realistic project.

 

Mainz/Germersheim, Klaus H. Schmidt