Book Review: This New Yet Still Approachable America
Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
A New Literary History of America by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Belknap Press (2009).
There is an early, instructive moment in A New Literary History of America—Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s magnificent collection of short essays on American literature and culture—that reflects the tone and scope of the entire work. Norma E. Cantú is describing a visit to the Alamo and her participation in a healing ceremony, an attempt to exorcise a century and a half of “violence, overt and covert, that was done to Mexicans and blacks in Texas” after the thirteen-day siege in 1836: “The rupture, the terrifying rending of the fabric that was life before 1836, has made me who I am, but it has also rendered many of us Texans blind to our own history. The healing circle that October afternoon taught me that the battle is not yet over.” Cantú’s message, at once recuperative and polemical, is emblematic of the volume as a whole, which reads less as a standard literary history than a “healing circle” of its own, a linked set of disparate moments and actors, drawn together in remembrance, solidarity, even defiance, and pledged to the forging of new histories, new readings of the collectively-shared past that is America. Cantú’s essay on Texas-Mexico border writing is at once a reverie for the dead, an attempt at cathartic closure, and a process of communal rebirth, and so is A New Literary History of America The collection is nothing short of a re-visioning of American literary history and identity in light of the concerns of the twenty-first century, a new set of sightings, soundings, and range findings of once-familiar territories from contemporary perspectives.
A book as long and as rich as A New Literary History of America cannot have justice done to its many individual essays in the space of a single review. Nevertheless, highlights from the volume fairly leap out every twenty or thirty pages or so, begging especial mention: Cantú’s luminous essay, mentioned above; or Mary Gaitskill’s take on Norman Mailer, which pastiches the first-person style of the first part of Mailer’s Armies of the Night, and in so doing offers at once a subtle critique of Mailer’s swaggering authorial voice and a celebration of his personal and literary excesses; or screenwriter Michael Tolkin’s deft pairing of hardboiled noir prose with the drinking stories of Alcoholics Anonymous members; or Marcus’s prophetic reading of Moby Dick against a twentieth-century TV Guide and twenty-first-century reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan. In all of these pieces A New Literary History of America delights as well as instructs, the contributors fashioning their own highly stylized narratives in direct response to the critical challenges posed by the texts and authors under study. In so doing these essays usefully collapse the boundary between critic and subject, reviewer and reviewed, so as to quite efface normative divisions between the arts of fiction and criticism. While not all of the pieces in the anthology reach for these heights, the more standard, encyclopedia-style essays—which constitute the bulk of the volume—are nevertheless almost uniformly successful, short, lucid gems of exposition and erudition: the effect of reading these pieces, a few at a time over the course of a month or so, was that of so many windows opening up onto a shadowy past, be it the coasts of the Americas as first glimpsed by European voyagers, or the reception history of James Fenimore Cooper’s wilderness romances in Europe, or even the professional acting career of Junius Brutus Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth and the introducer of Romantic theater to the United States. Even those authors particularly well-embalmed by the twin desiccants of scholarship and popularity, sawdust-stuffed figures like Emerson and Whitman and Henry James, get a thorough airing, and new light thrown into the unexplored crannies of their well-creased hides. All of these pieces, and so many others—especially those treating subjects and periods in which I’m a proud nonspecialist—are consistently informative and exciting.
But like any list or canon, even the inclusiveness and openness of A New Literary History of America cannot fully encapsulate or encircle the entire terrain of American cultural and literary history, even with the inclusion of chapters on Porgy and Bess, Bob Dylan, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, all of which share space with more traditional subjects like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Carl Sandburg, and Philip Roth.
Like groundbreaking books on American literature before it, books such as D. H. Lawrence’s iconoclastic Studies in Classic American Literature or Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, the ultimate inconclusiveness of A New Literary History of America is a happy fault of its rare virtues: its plurality and attempt at an all-encompassing sweep; its commitment to the poetics and politics of literary, cultural, and historical criticism; its self-reflexive inquisitiveness of its own and others’ narratives of origin and identity; and its privileging of diversity and hybridity over sameness and rigidity—qualities that the book will be seen to share with America itself, whose always-elusive “more perfect union” is forever receding, like Gatsby’s green light, beyond its grasp. The omissions and imperfections of A New Literary History of America are many: one looks in vain among the contributors for luminaries like Louis Menand, Rebecca Solnit, and Toni Morrison; a few of the contemporary chapters, like Hua Hsu’s on hip hop, are thin on texture and detail; brand-new modes of communication, like LOLspeak and YouTube,
are absent. But even these gaps succeed as provocations to further exploration, lacunae on our historiographical map to be filled in with further literary and cultural cartography. At its best and quirkiest, A New Literary History of America reads like a vast provocative setlist or syllabus compiled by a team of obsessive collectors and enthusiasts—Benjamin’s author-as-producer refashioned as the twenty-first-century’s geek compiler of alternative histories and tragically overlooked moments. As a great literary mixtape, A New Literary History of America looks beyond itself to other, newer literary histories, ones even less finished or closed, open to newer media and newer discoveries. At times I found myself wishing that the book weren’t immured by copyright laws and the solidity of print production, that an open-source weblog or online supplement were busy recording further contributions to this great project—the genesis of slash fiction, the beauties of Andy Warhol’s a: a novel, learned excurses on the lyrics of Jay-Z or the nomadic aesthetics of iPhone photography: the list, as with this compendious list of lists, is long. A New Literary History of America stands strongly, as both example and challenge to the work—spanning periods, genres, languages, ethnicities, and media—that will follow it.
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