July 23, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: James Fenimore Cooper

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversify our curriculaway beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuableAmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make thatcase for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On historicaland literary reasons to revisit a challenging early bestseller.

Given thefact that myDad’s first book was an extended analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s careerand life, it’s somewhat shameful how little I’ve written about Cooper in mynearly 14 years of blogging (although given that my Dad’s analysis was based ona psychoanalytical interpretation of Cooper’s relationship with his father,maybe the absence is also a telling one!). But I have to admit that when itcomes to Cooper’s style, I tend to agree with Mark Twain (another of my Dad’s subjects—ah whata tangled web we AmericanStudiers weave!) and his thorough takedown in thesatirical essay “FenimoreCooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895). Style is always a matter of taste tosome degree, but Cooper’s is nonetheless unquestionably clunky from a 21stcentury perspective (even more so than it was to Twain’s late 19thcentury one). And at the very least, Cooper’s ponderous prose makes itdifficult for me to recommend him to either my students (I’ve occasionally inmy first-halfAmerican Lit Survey taught the one chapter from Last of the Mohicansthat’s included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but that’sit) or broader audiences.

At thesame time, no early 19th century author reads like one of ourcontemporaries, and of course I’d still make the case for the value of reading literarytexts from that period. A significant part of that value is what these worksand authors can help us see in our histories, and Cooper in particular has agreat deal to tell us about how our national myths developed in the decadesafter the Revolution and how those collective American stories engaged withNative American histories and communities. All of the so-called “LeatherstockingTales” in particular—the five novels that, taken together and read in storyrather than publication order, follow protagonist NattyBumppo from the 1740s through his death in the early 19thcentury—offer a strikingly broad and deep window into those historical themes,as Bumppo is both instrumental in the development of the American frontier (before,during, and after the Revolution) and closely tied to the Native Americancommunities for whom that “frontier” was much more of a slow-moving invasion.While Cooper never fully captures the Native American perspective on thosethemes, as I’ve argued his contemporarynovelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick briefly but importantly managed to, hisbooks unquestionably represent a significant literary and cultural layer tothose fraught histories.

We’ve gota name for works of fiction that represent histories, of course, and for one ofthe preeminent scholars of that genre Cooper was a truly towering figure: theRussian critic Georg Lukács writes about Cooper a great deal (far more than hedoes any other American writer, in fact) in his groundbreaking work TheHistorical Novel (1955). Lukács traces the genre’s origins to theEnglish novelist Sir Walter Scott,and sees Cooper (as Cooperlikewise saw himself) as Scott’s American heir and Natty Bumppo as a closeparallel to Scott’s most famous protagonist EdwardWaverly. And even for folks who aren’t the slightest bit interested ineither Georg Lukács or Walter Scott, I’d argue that we all remain fascinated bythe genre of historical fiction, as illustrated for example by two of the year’smost popular TV shows, Shōgun and Bridgerton. No American author fromany period has been more interested in exploring how fiction can represent historiesthan was James Fenimore Cooper, and so for literary and cultural as well ashistorical reasons I believe it’s well worth wading into that challengingprose.

NextCanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?