The Extra 103
From the start a demonstration of ideology in action- ideas in the service of power, a system of beliefs imposed upon a so-called New World and then developed in a long procession of declarations (political, religious, poetic, intellectual) into a network of meanings that linked personal and culture identity, prophetic vision and social action, concepts of aesthetic form and norms of daily behavior.
That’s the best reason, I think, for putting American in the title: it opens literary history to problems of ideology. To set these in perspective, I digress for a moment to point out that the history of our literary histories hitherto has been the conflict over the meaning of America. One tradition, mainly genteel and Anglophile, contends that since the term is political- ideological, we might say, in the narrow sense, and certainly in a sense distinct from aesthetic- since America is essentially a political entity, our great literature properly belongs to the context of English or world literature. The other tradition, nativist and often Anglophobic, in effect joins literature and culture by claiming that conceptually “America” transcends ideology. The claim is not unlike that made for religious art. Since the concept of America embodies a set of universal values, a cluster of ideals that has lent distinctive form and content to our social institutions as well as to our classic texts, it follows that the proper context of those texts lies in our national development. Predictably, this tradition has been the dominant one. It runs from Samuel Knapp and the Young America Movement through Tyler, Parrington, and Brooks, and it may be said to have reached its apotheosis in the Spiller History.
What I’ve called the ideological view differs from these two traditions fundamentally. It denies both the disjunction of politics from art and the transcendent claims of the American Way. It say the ideal America, as well as the actual America, in relativistic, historical terms, as expressing a certain way of life. It reminds us (what some of our best writers sometimes make us forget) that individualism, self-reliance, and liberal democracy are no more or less absolute, no more or less true to the laws of nature and the mind, then the once-eternal truths of providence, hierarchy, and the divine right of kings. And in doing so, it calls attention to the fact that the term America has served not just to reveal, but to