A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government
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A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government
264Hardcover
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Overview
Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer, and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own work.
A Pinnacle of Feeling illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the most innovative literary works of the twentieth century, and shows how these works helped redefine and elevate the role of executive power in American culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691136950 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/26/2008 |
| Series: | 20/21 , #4 |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A PINNACLE OF FEELING
American Literature and Presidential GovernmentBy Sean McCann
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13695-0
Chapter One
Masters of Their Constitution: Gertrude Stein and the Promise of Progressive Leadership Each generation has something different at which they are all looking.... [T]heir influences are the same as that of all of their contemporaries only it must always be remembered that the analogy is not obvious until as I say the composition of a time has become so pronounced that it is past and the artistic composition of it is a classic. -Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation"Napoleon could not write a novel, not he. Washington could. And did. Oh yes I say so. And did.... I say that George Washington was the first president of the United States. I also say that he knew what a novel is. -Gertrude Stein, Four in America
When she landed in the United States in 1935 on the triumphal tour following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein returned to a country that she had not seen for three decades. She had left America in 1903, in the depths of a personal and professional crisis-a medical school dropout, a frustrated lover, a writer who longed for "la gloire" but who was plagued by doubts about her ability. She returned a different woman, to what one would have imagined was a different country. Now a respected arbiter of avant-garde taste and a literary celebrity at the height of her recognition, Stein looked around at the country she had not seen for decades and observed little difference from what she had left. When reporters, alluding to the revolution in industry and communication that had transformed the country, asked, "do you find Americans changed," Stein replied: "no neither America nor Americans after all when you say changed how could they change what after all could they change to?"
It was a typical Stein retort, a philosophical joke designed to confound the expectations of her audience by confronting them with premises inconsistent with their own. Responding to journalists who were preoccupied by the historical evidence of the changing characteristics of life in the United States, Stein proposed instead a formal definition that implied the narrowness of the concerns of the press. Americans were Americans by citizenship; whatever they did they would still be American. Preoccupied with their need "to remember what they are hearing," however, reporters inevitably repeated the clichés of popular discourse. "They would say what it was the habit for newspapers to say" and ignore more significant matters, like "original writing." That was "the trouble with newspapers and teaching," Stein explained, adding that it was a problem they shared "with government and history." As the eminent Stein critic Ulla Dydo points out, "remembering is the demon of the writing world" for Stein, "It leads to dead repetition." With their common interest in thinking historically, the major institutions of popular democracy in the thirties-the press, the schools, the state-all appeared by Stein's characterization to be agents of torpor.
Although her tone in such exchanges was always comic, Stein's point was a serious one and touched on both her most consistent aesthetic concerns and the political attitudes that she would express with increasing emphasis during the later thirties. Beginning with her first major period of creative achievement, which culminated in the publication of Three Lives in 1909 and the completion of The Making of Americans in 1911, Stein had defined her work by an increasingly radical refusal of the historicism and conventional empiricism that characterized ordinary narrative. Now, as she reiterated and extended her philosophical commitment to that program during the thirties, her new public writing often elaborated its political implications. Only recently Franklin Delano Roosevelt had justified the need for a New Deal by referring to just the kinds of socioeconomic change raised by Stein's journalistic audience. Taking up the mantle of his cousin Teddy Roosevelt and, still more earnestly, of Woodrow Wilson, FDR had pointed to the recent history of industrial concentration and demanded "a re-appraisal of values": "Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists. Our industrial plant is built.... Our last frontier has long since been reached.... [W]e are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already." What was needed, Roosevelt concluded, was agreement on a set of "new terms" for "the old social contract."
Stein, who saw little difference between the New Deal and either Stalinism or Fascism, and who accordingly would make her opposition to FDR increasingly direct, declined to accept that diagnosis. As an alternative to Roosevelt's narrative of historical change, she proposed instead a model of cyclic popular confusion and gave it weight by using her own experience as an example. "I began" college in the 1890s, she remarked "when evolution was still ... very exciting" (EA 249). "I was a natural believer in republics a natural believer in science a natural believer in progress ... just as the present generation are natural believers in Soviets and proletarian literature and social laws" (251). Those analogous attitudes were both mistaken, Stein declared. Ideas about historical development were seductive to "the kind of people that believe in progress and understanding," but they did "not really make" anyone "be living" (77, 251). In fact, Stein declared, sounding like a harbinger of Ayn Rand, the premise of the New Deal-that industrial society demanded new political structures to protect the traditional liberal ideal of personal freedom-legitimized "a passion for being enslaved" (65).
Given those beliefs, Stein's joshing dismissal of the press naturally tended to take on a more serious tone. For, in this light, the implication of her question-what, after all, could Americans change to?-shifted meaning. Having first contrasted a formal definition of American identity to an empirical description of American life, Stein went on to suggest that in falling prey to historicist visions of social change, young Americans failed to live up to the demands of their citizenship-implying in effect that if that failure became serious enough the people of the United States might well become something else. They could cease in effect to be good Americans. "Once a nation has lived long enough anywhere to be that nation," Stein remarked, "the character of that nation can naturally never be changing." "If it were not somehow the same," she added still more forcefully, "it would not remain our country" (EA 204).
Those remarks directly contradicted the point of Stein's initial comment to reporters, rendering incoherent her joke on the difference between formal definitions and empirical descriptions. Stein's view of the United States, it turned out, was no less historicist, and no less dependent on "remembering," than that of her listeners. Confusing thought it may have been, that conflation of the formal and the empirical nevertheless cut to the heart of attitudes that ran all through the major part of Stein's career. Beginning with the legendary period of creative ferment that culminated in The Making of Americans, Stein obsessively ruminated over and sometimes sought to undermine, the distinction between empirical and historical understanding, on the one hand, and a kind of abstract or theoretical knowledge that seemed impervious to time and context, on the other. What's more, Stein consistently associated that obsession with her idiosyncratic definitions of "the disembodied abstract quality of the American character," so that her own aesthetic ambitions and philosophical convictions could seem indistinguishable from an ideal vision of national identity. Stein brought that connection to the fore especially during the Depression, where implicitly and sometimes quite explicitly she used it to assail the political developments she opposed. But as she suggested when she compared her own immature inclinations to the progressive youth of the thirties, it was a vision whose roots lay-as did those of the New Deal itself-in the turn-of-the-century movements for political reform with which Stein briefly flirted while a student.
In fact, Stein's investment in American identity would lead her, much as it did the defenders of the New Deal to a fascination with the power of the presidency. She began The Geographical History of America, the book in which she first elaborated on the way her aesthetic principles ran counter to the New Deal, by pointing out that "in the month of February were born Washington Lincoln and I." In Four in America, she returned again to a still more elaborate comparison between herself and Washington, who she reimagined as an experimental novelist like herself. And these two instances of what might be called presidential poetics were merely the culmination of Stein's career-long habit of looking anxiously at the development of politics in the United States and comparing her work as a writer with the work of executive leadership. Like her friend and admirer, Richard Wright, Stein was deeply concerned to imagine her writing as a form of political leadership that might restore an imperiled American sovereignty. Indeed we can clarify Stein's aesthetic and philosophical visions by recognizing that in one significant aspect they amounted to a rival vision of presidential power-one that accepted the priority that recent political developments had given to the chief executive, while also seeking to mobilize that prominence in pursuit of a contradictory agenda. To see the significance of that disagreement, however, we must first recognize the way Stein drew on and departed from the ideas of her reformist contemporaries.
A National Life: Stein and the Language of Progressive Reform Though the connection has only rarely been considered by her critics, Stein drew attention to an important aspect of her intellectual formation when she pointed out her engagement during the 1890s with the emerging forces of the Progressive movement. Her encounter at Radcliffe with William James and her presumed debt to pragmatism have been examined at great length; her several years of postgraduate study in medicine and experimental biology at Woods Hole and Johns Hopkins, and their influence on Stein's professional and theoretical concerns, have been examined to a lesser, but still illuminating degree. Much more rarely noticed, however, has been the extent to which all these experiences, along with her connections to her New York and Baltimore relations and her friendship with recent graduates of Smith and Bryn Mawr, put Stein in contact with newly forming networks of intellectual innovation and political reform. Stein soon rejected the political and intellectual culture of Progressivism. "Everybody knows," she later declared, "there is no progress." But that very comment points to the enduring significance of the ideas Stein encountered in her youth. As an early influence and later a prime antagonist, the ethos of Progressive reform shaped Stein's attitudes in fundamental ways. So much so that the literary ambitions she formulated during the first decade of the twentieth century-as the Progressive movement rose to the height of its influence and Stein herself turned decisively against it-can be understood as nearly a competing, but analogous agenda to the political movement that gave rise to the theory of presidential government.
Stein's intellectual biography overlapped at several points with the paths of the major ideologues of the Progressive movement, and in certain respects both her experience and her youthful attitudes resemble the nearly standard concerns of a whole cohort of reformist thinkers. As a Jew and a Californian, Stein differed from the defining figures of the Progressive movement, who were predominantly from the Northeast and Midwest and strongly influenced by the legacy of evangelical Protestantism. As a rentier whose income depended especially on investments in rail transport, she had reason to be wary of a movement that would place heavy emphasis on the regulation of monopolistic public transport. But, in other ways, her experience was typical of the Progressive intellectuals. As a student in Cambridge and Baltimore, she experienced first hand the rapid rise of the research university and the enthusiasm for expert knowledge it produced. As a researcher in psychology and biology, she worked in the hottest fields of the newly professionalizing sciences. And as a member of several, overlapping groups of friends excited by the new opportunities and advantages that higher education provided, she knew well a number of young people who were involved in both the growing political movements to reshape American institutions and the closely related social-scientific theories that would often be called on to justify those changes. Her closest friends at the turn of the century were aspiring scientists, educators, advocates for women's suffrage, and antiparty activists in the movement for urban reform. In the words of her teacher Hugo Munsterberg, who called Stein an "ideal student," she was one member of an incipient "class of national leaders" whose experience with "higher education" enabled it to rise "above the social life of the masses" and provide the leadership by which "democracy is to be ... perfected."
Indeed her later memories of both the problems that distracted her in her youth and the solutions she imagined for them referred to ideas widely shared among the new university-trained elite at the turn of the century. Stein placed her belief in progress, science, and republics in the context of an anxiety about political and social decline common at the time. "When I was young the most awful moment of my life," she recalled, "was when I really realized that there were civilizations that had completely disappeared from this earth," a discovery, she added, that confronted her with the thought that, if "civilizations always came be dead," then "one was just as good as another one" (EA 12, 250). That intuition of the insignificance of human effort was no doubt a distinctive personal crisis for Stein. But the terms in which she cast it were commonplace among Gilded Age intellectuals, who frequently read in the social upheavals of the late nineteenth century portents of the decline of the American republic and signs of the loss of the nation's exceptional mission. Stein might have encountered an especially stringent version of the warning, for example, in the influential writing of Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty, as she later recalled, had been urged on her by a radical uncle. But at Radcliffe and Hopkins, Stein also would have encountered the topic as a fundamental concern of the era's flourishing social and political thought, where a wide range of academics found, just as Stein would do, a solution to the specter of civic decline in the new vantages encouraged by biological science. "After all," she wrote, answering her own fear of decline, "there was evolution and James' Will to Live" (EA 250). As a "natural believer in republics," Stein suggested, she had grabbed on to the promise of scientific progress as an alternative to the threat of American decline, finding in the new bodies of scientific knowledge a restored sense of both metaphysical confidence and national mission. "Evolution ... justified life and it also justified death." It "was as exciting as the discovery of America by Columbus" (WIHS 61).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
PREFACE ix
INTRODUCTION: "The Executive Disease": Presidential Power and Literary Imagination 1
CHAPTER ONE: Masters of Their Constitution: Gertrude Stein and the Promise of Progressive Leadership 33
CHAPTER TWO: Governable Beasts: Hurston, Roth, and the New Deal 67
CHAPTER THREE: The Myth of the Public Interest: Pluralism and Presidentialism in the Fifties 100
CHAPTER FOUR: Come Home, America: Vietnam and the End of the Progressive Presidency 139
EPILOGUE: Philip Roth and the Waning and Waxing of Political Time 178
Notes 197
Index 243
What People are Saying About This
This is one of the most significant books on the twentieth-century American novel published in recent memory. Exemplifying how literary criticism can illuminate the relationship of politics to literature, A Pinnacle of Feeling examines an impressive array of novels to tell a compelling story of the mutual transformation of the U.S. presidency and the concept of literary authorship over the course of the century.
— Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago
Sean McCann offers incisive ideological and aesthetic analyses of the ways that these authors wrestled with and within narrative forms and paradigms of literary production they understood in terms of the U.S. presidency. His articulation of the link between narrative and executive power is engaging and imaginative. There is no question that this will be an influential book.
— Patricia E. Chu, University at Albany, State University of New York
"This is one of the most significant books on the twentieth-century American novel published in recent memory. Exemplifying how literary criticism can illuminate the relationship of politics to literature, A Pinnacle of Feeling examines an impressive array of novels to tell a compelling story of the mutual transformation of the U.S. presidency and the concept of literary authorship over the course of the century."—Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago"Sean McCann offers incisive ideological and aesthetic analyses of the ways that these authors wrestled with and within narrative forms and paradigms of literary production they understood in terms of the U.S. presidency. His articulation of the link between narrative and executive power is engaging and imaginative. There is no question that this will be an influential book."—Patricia E. Chu, University at Albany, State University of New York