104 American Literature
Conceal and exclude: aesthetically, to exclude entire bodies of literature (and by implication entire “literary communities”) from the canon; historically, to conceal the fact that America is not some overarching synthesis, e pluribus unum, but a rhetorical battleground- a symbol that has come to stand, over three centuries of contradiction and change, for a variety of alternative modes of identity and belief. Most important, for my present purpose, the ideological view of America differs from the two traditions I’ve outlined in that it problematizes, rather than resolves, the relation between canon and context.
Let me illustrate this by recalling that the canon we’ve inherited was formed, in part at least, through a revaluation of our now classic writers as subversives. The literary establishment that substituted Song of Myself for The Song of Hiawatha, and thrust Moby-Dick into sudden epic prominence, also tended to emphasize the duplicity in Hawthorne, the protest in Thoreau, and the antinomianism in Emerson. It amounted to a vision of cultural schizophrenia: a radical literary tradition that was somehow cultural representative; a canon of American myth-keepers (or keepers of the American myth) who somehow transcended the foul Americanism drifting in so many variations that it has come to seem a category of the national psyche. But it may be that the dichotomy it asserts, like that, perhaps, between Gatsby’s lyrical smile and his meretricious life, lies in the eye of the beholder. That is to say, it may lie in our critical method, and specifically in the distinction we have inherited between literary and historical analysis, as between the aesthetic and the cognitive faculties, or, more to my point, between myth and ideology. We can trace that distinction through the entire genre of American literary history. Myth is the product of imagination, the stuff of which canons are made. Ideology is commensurate with politics, the stuff of which July Fourth orations are made, and popular literature, and other elements of context.
This is one of the areas of consensus I referred to earlier, which has broken down in the part decades. We have come to recognize, on the one hand, the inescapable fictionality of our contextual structures- social, scientific, historical. On the other hand, we know that myth, like ideology, is inescapably bounded by history