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PARTISAN REVIEW
themselves as latter-day Nehemiahs summoning the nation toward
its Jerusalem. ... The hermeneutical method . . . shapes the distinc–
tive American approach to virtually every major area of concern. . . .
Nowhere is the Puritan vision more clearly in evidence than in the
hermeneutics of the Ameri can landscape.
If
Bercovitch is right our national culture wa born in Massachu–
sellS Bay Colony and remains in the possession of COllun Mather and
his imperial imagination.
The broader the argument, however, the less certain I am of
exactly what is being argued. For example, what is the status of the
Puritan " auto-American-biography?"
In
his Preface Bercovitch speaks
of his subject as "a distinctive symbolic mode." Most of his analysis is
finely rhetorical, showing how Mather gets from Protestant hermeneu–
tics to American symbolism. Yet the mode, or what it expresses, is
occasionally referred to as an ideology, "the invention of expatriate
idealists who declared themselves the party of the future and then
proceeded, in an explicit denial of secular history, to impo e prophecy
upon experience." This was no idle act of the imagination.
At one point Bercovitch indicates that the invention was " a means
of social control," which argues for a pretty shrewd sen e of secular
history. But "social control" is dropped into the text like a stone
without ripples. What does it mean? How does it work? Who con–
trolled whom?
In
what ways did political necessities shape the rhetoric?
As Michael Walzer (speaking chiefly of England) has shown, far from
being mere idealists, the Puritans in effect founded the modern
political consciousness of power. What were the particular political
emphases of the New England rhetoric (rhetoric, after all, has to do
with persuasion) at specific hi torical junctures? The Preface promises
an analysis of "the interaction of language, myth, and society." By the
end of the book, apparently in recognition that the third term had
gotten very short shrift, Bercovitch now speaks of "the changing
relations between myth and society in America" as requiring "a
separate study." He speaks here; too, of the "palpable social effects" of
the inherited Puritan habit of subsuming " the facts of social pluralism
(ethnic, economic, religious, even personal) in a comprehensive na–
tional ideal," as arguing for "the importance of ideology (in the
Marxist sense) in the shaping of the United States." But this acknowl–
edgement, in the penultimate sentence of the book, is rather belated.
Ideology is palpably what the book is not about. We never see how the
rhetoric works to enforce orthodoxy (as, for example, Kai Erikson does
in his study of deviance in
Wayward Puritans),
nor do we see the
