Historians' fallacies: Toward a logic of historical thought

We have a deceptively simple way of sorting everything into two heaps, as natural objects or as artefacts, on the principle that artefacts have had purposeful work done on them whereas natural objects have not.

The work of art

Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust.

(1999). Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 201-203.

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

あめりか・コクジン・ジョセイである事-2-Their Eyes Were Watching God

The paper presents a sample historical-literary survey of a specific popular idea of the gist of 'Americanness' in the guise of condensed observations in broad cultural circulation. This is to provoke the question about the degree to which this kind of discourse may reflect the so-called habits of the heart (de Tocqueville [1835-1840] 1966: 264), as against how at a certain point it may explode--to borrow from Paul de Man (1979: 10)--into "vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration". (1) It pays to be clear about the nature of the "No! in thunder". (Fiedler 1972: 7) Founded on the essentialist urge of resistance to something (anything), Americans are reputed to have always found nay-saying the surest and most convenient way of articulating and cultivating identity. May (1983: 53) believes there is enough material to write "an interesting history of American nay-sayers", a project that might bring together "radicals" and "conservatives". Far from being "afraid of no" (Brooks [1949] 2006a: 34), Americans appear to be given to what Wayne C. Booth has dubbed as the "habit" of negative rhetoric. [All the while] long lists of negative terms are invented to describe the protest-culture; they are seen as against, nor for, as attacking ... as destroying ... not trying to build ... as revolutionaries, not as preservers or conservers of values. (Booth 1974: 192-193) As much as to the habituality, the critic draws attention to the rhetoricity as well as the sheer performativity of this discourse when he quotes an anonymous "passionate" manual of 1970 in which there can be found advice on the various ways of fashioning and actually sporting resistance: "passively", "actively", "publicly", "privately", "biologically", "spiritually", "physically"--as well as "beautifully" (Booth 1974: 3). (2) It is widely accepted that Americans have long been convinced that self-fulfilment and individual autonomy depend inherently on the dynamic of contrariness and defiance: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist" (Emerson [1841] 1983a: 261). D. H. Lawrence believes that deep-down in all American hearts there stirs rebellion ([1924] 1965: 4). It is a point transcribed more bluntly by a modern commentator: "The American has always been a rebel" (Karl 1983: 91). Reflecting his ideal of the minimal state, it was none other than a future U.S. president who apropos of a local farmers' revolt proposed confidently that "a little rebellion" be seen as a "good thing" and suggested that the governors be "mild" in the punishment of the rioters, so as not to discourage them too much (Jefferson [1787] 1984a: 882). Addressing the popularity of Jefferson's posthumous works, a nineteenth-century British author and traveller found them to be "a mighty mass of mischief", and decided that such ideas were regrettably but too acceptable to Americans--"each individual of whom would rather derive his importance from believing that none are above him, than from the consciousness that in his station he makes part of a noble whole" (Trollope [1832] 1997: 259-260). (3) One could hardly think of a more expressive personal (fictional) dramatization of the present thesis than the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's sudden impulse --no less than a "revolution" in the sphere of thought and feeling--to recreate himself with a volley of heaven-defying oaths, to teach bad words to little children, and generally to engage in some "strange, wild, wicked thing or other" --all informed by a profounder self than any that might have wanted to oppose some such urge (Hawthorne [1850] 1983a: 306-308). Margaret Fuller, recognized today as an emblematic nineteenth-century intellectual child prodigy who went on to become a prime critical thinker in transgression(s), would admit: "My law is incapable of a charter. I pass all bounds, and cannot do otherwise" (Fuller 1852:180). At about the same time, a popular author of children's books would energetically proclaim: "I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe" (Alcott [1860] 2000: 568). …

Vertiginous Pull of Negative Rhetoric: The American “No! In Thunder”

The symbols, colours and slogans on vehicle registration plates are part and parcel of the United States iconography. While not everybody relates readily to Ohio's license plate motto "Birthplace of Aviation", everybody seems to know North Carolina's motto "First in Flight". (Although the Wright brothers came from Ohio they chose North Carolina as the site for their 1903 groundbreaking experiment.) With the open horizon as the obligatory conceit of the U.S. landscape, North Carolina's license plate projects a homonymic mis-association with the dominant motif of American popular cultural discourse recognized emblematically by Leslie Fiedler (1960:318) as the razzle-dazzle of escape. (1) [S]trange! That she who arm'd the breast for fight, / Was now observed to be the first in flight. ([Anonymous] 1846: 234) ********** Inasmuch as human beings are brought into the world without their consent, are put in circumstances not of their choosing and are unceasingly driven by the desire to improve their lot, all men may be legitimately expected to be dissatisfied with their station in life, current state of affairs and their particular society. Consequently, there has been migration and quest from the beginning of human history. The American tendency, however--both in the exploring (positive, vocal) and the diffusive (negative, mute) guises, motivated respectively by attracting or by repellent forces, both as a heroic and an antiheroic stance--looms so pervasively as to appear endemic, as though constantly energized by the spirit of the so-called New World. A popular contemporary U.S. author (Ford 1996: 154) offers that the single most distinctive aspect about his country is the "innumerable multitudes" of individuals who strive to break away from their "original condition". Bayley (2010: 174) posits that the American imagination "dwell[s] perpetually in the possibility of leaving". Billington (1993:181) argues that if students of the United States of America were to agree about any one thing it would most likely be that the country has created "a nation of restless wanderers unlike any other in the world". This appreciation seems to draw on the germinal definition of the gist of Americanness as constituted by the willful abandoning of all established ways and manners. Begetting the New out of a vigorous defiance to the Old is a thesis borne out for instance by the famous "why should we grope among the dry bones of the past" (Emerson [1836] 1983a: 7) (2); or the nearly equally well-known "forward then and now and forever" (Whitman [1855] 1982a: 218). In the prelude to his narrative poem Western star, Stephen Vincent Benet (1943: 5) sees the story of America commencing at a congenial juncture of the place and the people, even before the mind may have actually become critically aware of itself: "And, if you ask me just what made them go, / ... I think it must be something in the blood. / Perhaps it's only something in the air". While Benet's is an extended poetic meditation, Beard (1879: 722) was in all seriousness prepared to attribute the New World restlessness to the alternations of extreme heat-cold and to the peculiar quality of the air: "Our habits and institutions, so far as they are distinctively American,--rapid eating, eager quest for gold, exciting revivals and elections,--are the product of a dry atmosphere and extremes of temperature combined with the needs of a new country and a pioneer life". In Beyond the horizon ([1920] 1924: 24), Eugene O'Neill offers: "It's more an instinctive longing that won't stand dissection. Either you feel it, or you don't. The cause of it all is in the blood and the bone, I guess, not in the brain". Nelson Algren ([1951] 2001:11) seems to have the last word when he observes with a broad sweep: "Yankee and voyageur, the Irish and the Dutch ... halfbreed and quarterbreed and no breed at all, in the final counting they were all of a single breed". …

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Dubious American license: The first in flight

Although "Wakefield" opens as a leisurely mnemonic act, it turns into an intensely emotional affair. However, the stance of moral indignation and, indeed, condemnation adopted in many readings of this classic tale seems to be a monological trap, an interpretive ride along Einbahnstrasse. The present close re-reading draws on the combined appreciation of perversity as (i) formal figuration in which the bearings of the original are reversed, (ii) attitudinal disposition to proceed against the weight of evidence (the so-called 'being stubborn in error'). Building on this logic, the paper offers a transcriptive anti-type response to Hawthorne's title. It is meant as a detour of understanding and a reclamation of a seemingly obvious relational and denotative proposition. Inasmuch as "Wakefield" is a distinctive rhetorical performance, foundationally a story about story-telling, its title can be naturalized as identifying the story-teller. Even if this does not come across as lucius ordo, it is argued that the order of reappropriative and be-longing signification is that of Mrs. rather than--as is commonly believed--that of Mr. Wakefield. Informed by object permanence and a peculiar looking bias, "Wakefield" proves to be her-tale rather than his-story. As a secret sharer and a would be-speaking gaze, the wife turns out to be a structural and existential pivot of the narrative. More broadly, Mrs. Wakefield can be appreciated as coarticulator of a ventriloquistic logos and choreographer of a telescopic parallactic vision. Unintentional challenge to both the heresy of paraphrase and the aesthetics of astonishment, this is ultimately to proffer a radical Shakespearean/Kantian re-cognition that in certain spheres there obtains nothing absolutely 'moral' or 'immoral', and it is only a particular perspectival discourse that ma make it so. Keywords: narrative framing--phenomenology--female gaze--motivated irrationality--Prodigal Son --Penelope [So] fixed a gaze, that ... the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. (Hawthorne [1850] 1983c: 171-172) For a woman to be called a Jezebel is every bit as bad as for a man to be called Ahab. (Henson 2009: 9) Nobody needs convincing that it makes a world of difference whether one leaves another for a day, a week, a month or presumably/apparently ad aeternum, which is to say 'forever'. "Wakefield" is an exceedingly poignant story about an unwarranted and potentially interminable aorist transaction of marital severance and separation, one that happens overwhelmingly at the expense of the wife. This "sketch of singular power" (Poe [1842] 1984a: 574) may be a disturbing experience to read on account of how the ignoble husband is not really subjected to any sustained pressure and how in the end he is not in any way punished for his transgression. What is more, he is not even really made to feel properly guilty and apologetic (let alone repentant) and the wife's anguish and trauma are not adequately (let alone fully) acknowledged. The wedded couple lived in London. The man, under pretence of going a journey," "took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife" ... dwelt upwards of twenty years.... [A]fter so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity ... he entered the door one evening, quietly, as from a day's absence, and became a loving spouse till death. (Hawthorne [1835] 1982a: 298) (2) As author Daniel Stem (1996: 65) transcribes the story's non-ethical dimension, it is admittedly one of the "cruelest" and "ugliest" narratives on record. As such, it seems to excite conversational indignation across the board. (3) In simplest terms, the self-congratulatory ease with which readers can rectify for themselves the ostensible underempathic shortcomings--finally, the frustrated sense of common justice--goes some way towards explaining the story's hold on popular imagination and its enduring resonance. …

https://www.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/stap-2013-0003

Hawthorne’s Perspectival Perversity: What if “Wakefield” Were (About) a Woman?; or, Credo Quia Absurdum

From the very beginning, all manner of ideas, concepts and conceits have been advanced to explain America and Americans - as much to themselves as to others. The paper presents a historical-literary compilation of popular notions of 'Americanness' in the guise of random de Tocquevillian observations in general circulation. This is to provoke the question about the degree to which this kind of pervasive discourse may reflect the so-called habits of the heart, as against how at a certain point it may lapse into a Nabokovian copulation of cliches. (1) ********** I here mean ... not only moeurs in the strict sense, which might be called the habits of the heart, but also ... different notions possessed by men, the various opinions current among them. (de Tocqueville [1835-1840] 1966: 264) Thus action [becomes] ... limited to the copulation of cliches. (Nabokov [1955] 1997: 313) Even though in more sense than one most of them were 'separatists' and 'independents', it was not exactly the 'self' that the first permanent Caucasian immigrants to the New World celebrated after their arduous, over two-month-long transatlantic voyage. Informed equally by high-flung idealism and sheer practical necessity, the future United States was originally envisaged as an exercise in exemplary social cohesion: as ethos, body politic and territory. The Mayflower passengers famously pledged all submission to the general good of the colony, reinforced soon after by the delivery aboard the Arbella of a communal model in which the care of the public was to over-sway all particular respects. A matter of both conviction and persuasion, a discourse as much sacred as secular, to assert oneself properly in terms of private and public identity was to embody the goals of nonseparating congregationalism. Circumscribed by simultaneous self-righteousness and self-abasement, as well as supervised by communal vigilance, individual sense of freedom and of liberty as such was to be exercised in a way of voluntary obedience and general accountability. On some fundamental level, however, the compact and contract to forge a rigorously controlled commonwealth (gone so far as the taking away of personal property) was soon found to breed so much "confusion and discontent" that the settlers were at length allowed to keep the fruit of their labour "every man for his own particular" and at least in that regard "trust to themselves" (Bradford [ 1646] 1991: 72). (2) With only a background impetus of history, essentially of their own ever-growing numbers, on the surging tide of diversity and pent-up energies, the colonists managed to surmount all kinds of prohibitive ideological proclamations, demarcations, cartographic lines, as well as natural boundaries. It is believed that only people who no longer saw themselves merely as immigrants but specifically as Americans could have so radically reinvented a sense of their spatial and existential orientation. All these processes, hardly a calculated grand strategic design, as is often claimed today, gained momentum at the beginning of the nineteenth-century when "self-fueling" (Newfield 1996: 17) propelled individuals as fast and as far as their impulses would drive them, in what they pseudo-legitimately perceived as terra nullia, or vacant wilderness. Half-way through the nineteenth century, a commentator in The New Englander ([Review] 1850: 429) metaphorized this whole phenomenon as an unstoppable movement of an army of locusts--"the rear ones constantly flying over the front, to find themselves soon again in the rear and so urged to another flight". Just a couple of decades later, to Henry Adams (1918: 237) the American society profiled as a long, loose, stretched and straggling caravan--"trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its tail". (3) As no nation of this size had ever expanded quite so rapidly in a space quite so large, it is small wonder that at the beginning of the twentieth century even Owen Wister, the author of the first full-fledged Western, should have been struck by insufficient social confluence and a lack of condensed common identity: "We're not nearly so closely knit together here" (Wister 1920: 215). …

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Between Habits of the Heart and Copulation of Clichés: Some Popular American Stories, Mores and Shibboleths

https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/17949/1/10Semrau.pdf

Janusz Semrau

Papers

Vertiginous Pull of Negative Rhetoric: The American “No! In Thunder”

Dubious American license: The first in flight

Hawthorne’s Perspectival Perversity: What if “Wakefield” Were (About) a Woman?; or, Credo Quia Absurdum

Between Habits of the Heart and Copulation of Clichés: Some Popular American Stories, Mores and Shibboleths

Magritte, Godard, and Walter Abish’s architectonic fiction