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uncertainty and rhetorical self-assertion," Bercovitch write, "is trans–
parent in the tone of crisis that characterizes much of the literature.
With every setback, the assertion of American selfhood rose to a higher
pitch." What are we to think of a "cultural maturation" founded on a
process that resembles nothing so much as hysteria, at least in this
particular account? Hysteria and also narcissism, if we are to believe
what Bercovitch says about Emerson, that "the rhetoric he inherited
enab led him to dissolve all differences between hi tory and self- as
well as all differences within the elf (civic, natural, prophetic)-and so
to overcome political disenchantment by revealing himself as the
representative American."
The problem is that Bercovitch's own point of view toward this
supposed disintegration of the boundary between self and reality is
unclear, or at least wavering.
It
is hard to locate a clear and distinct
critical position toward the self-aggrandizing and often tyrannizing
phenomenon. The desire to complete the design, in effect to prove
Mather right by creating a future to his
Magnalia
in which America
does mean prophecy, seems to drive all before it, including in some few
instances, the plain fact of active ocial critici m on behalf of universal
(not "American") values by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Mel–
ville. Yet that desire, manifest in the form of the book, i at odd with
the intriguing minor chord of demystifying allusions to ideology and
compensation. But can we have it both ways?
The book's disjunction are,
I
think, profoundly revealing of a
common state of affairs in a criticism that accepts "Americanness" as
its ultimate subject. Bercovitch concludes that the leading idea of
American literature is the idea of America itself-not a social or
political idea, but an abstract prophetic idea disguised as a "mode."
0
reader of the major writers can deny that America-as mode or theme
or image or symbol-plays a critical role in the literature. But to assign
that role exclusively to an inherited mode of thought eems to foreclose
investigation into the precise ocial and cuI tural tensions that figure in
the making of specific texts. To reveal as powerfully as Bercovitch has,
the solipsistic nature of the Puritan idea of America, and then to claim
that this very self-contained idea constitutes the cardinal ignificance of
the literature, is to risk diminishing the writing to cultural pathology,
or at least draining the writing of its inner subs tan e.
Some implication of this ort has in fact lurked within much of the
criticism in the past decade, and it is to Bercovitch' credit that he has
allowed it to surface as the central issue. By impo ing the Puritan
model upon romantic texts, Bercovitch overstate his ase about the
