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formation, the crotchety Puritan takes on new interest. Composing his
masterwork in the dying days of the orthodoxy, feeling himself
isolated, deprived by history of the centrality enjoyed by his grand–
father, John Cotton (the analogy with Henry Adams cannot be mi ssed ),
Mather was literally jolted into a new mode of self-perception based on
a " reordering of rhetorical forms ." In his extremity-only more
extreme by degrees from the predicament of his forebears in the first
generation of clergymen-Mather takes America for his sacred text and
reads out a miraculous history. He fuses the self (his own and that of
the heroes of the M
agnalia)
and the nation into an imaginative
construct in which the identification of elf with nation is equivalent
in power to that between self and Chri t in the traditional
imitatio
Christi.
Thus, writes Bercovitch , "To be an American is to assume a
prophetic identity; to have been an American is to offer a completed
action that makes destiny manife t. "
"To be an American" is obviously no ordinary citizenship. It is to
partake in prophecy, in sacred destiny-in effect, after Mather, to be
that destiny in your own historical and natural person, a living
emblem of the "conjunction of sainthood and nationality. " "'Ameri–
canus' was, and has remained, a symbol of their fusion: a federal
identity not merely associated with the work of redemption, but
intrinsic to the unfolding pattern of types and antitypes, itself a
prophecy to be fulfilled. " "Auto-American-biography" (Bercovitch's
term for the rhetorical mode in which this process occurs) is, then , the
Puritan 's great literary invention, one which, the argument continues,
not only "has remained," but ha decisively shaped all subsequent
American culture. "The American Self" of the book's titl e is not an
historical self in the common sense of the word, but an imaginative
construct, a self-creation through language. Selves come to know
themselves as American by plitting themselves apart into text and
reader: reading oneself as text to be interpreted typologically, in light
of prophetic destiny, is the Puritan way of becoming American.
The argument is brilliant, and those old grim fathers suddenly
bristle with new life. But Bercovitch does not stop there. The Puritan
"auto-American-biography" lays the foundation, in his argument, for
everything that follows in America (in the usual historical sense of the
word).
It
is, Bercovitch insists, the most decisive, and to all appear–
ances, the only mediation in American culture. The claims are total:
From a hundred different perspective -shareholding, education,
agrarianism, state or corporation control, free enterprise, various
brands of religion-these writers [in the nineteenth century] see
