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content, the specific social vision, embedded (perhaps disguised) in the
rhetoric.
If
ideologists are, as Clifford Geertz tells us, "maps of
problematic social reality" that "make it possible to act purposefully
within them," then clearly any analysis of an idea or a mode which
functions ideologically must take the social reality into more than
rhetorical account.
Raising the issue of ideology at the conclusion of the book-and
" in the Marxist sense" implying an analysis of classes and class
relations-casts the preceding argument in a much different light from
that shed by the most prominent terms of the ongoing analysis. The
rhetorical terms endow the "auto-American-biography" with the status
of a symbolic mode, which is a matter of the form and structure, rather
than the content, of thought. On this level Bercovitch is able to say that
the mode "continues unabated." Emerson's Romantic language, for
example, represents but " new terms in an old context. The rhetorical
strategy is the same." On the other hand, the references to ideology
imply that language serves nonverbal needs. Unless we are to believe
that history itself has been unvarying in America, we are left to wonder
whether Emerson's ideological needs were substantively the same as
Mather's, and whether "the ugly course ,of actual events" which the
mode was invented as a " compensatory replacement for" is always
the same.
The disjunction in the argument, between "symbolic mode" and
"ideology," confirms a nagging suspicion provoked by the book
throughout, that divided motives are at work. One motive, the most
overt, is to give praise to the Puritans for their hitherto neglected
achievement. The "iluto-American-biography" is credited as the source
of an " extraordinary social achievement" in early New England. The
invention of "a rhetoric adequate to their sense of mission" was a
"daring" act: "Its sustained intensity, its coherence, and the rapidity
with which it grew, amounts to an astonishing, possibly unrivaled
cultural maturation." The argument rings with praise and celebration.
But running alongside is another current, with a barely discernible
skeptical intonation. Offhand allusions to "social control ," "tautol–
ogy," "usurpation of American identity, " suggest one kind of ideologi–
cal undercutting. Another kind is hinted at by terms such as "compen–
sation."
If
Marx is one sleeping-partner, Freud is yet another. Often
enough Bercovitch alludes to anxiety as one of the sources of the
symbolic mode: the "anxieties of seculaI; time," the anxieties of the
"extreme subjectivism"
~o
which the New England clergy was driven
in its quest for justification, "The relationship between psychic
