The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History

by Quentin Anderson

Very good New Alfred A. Knopf, 1971., 1971.. Very good. - Octavo, 8-3/4 inches high by 5-7/8 inches wide. Hardcover, bound in light blue cloth titled in silver on the spine with a silver device on the front cover, in a printed dust wrapper. The edges of the book's covers are slightly faded. The dust jacket is slightly soiled. xiii, [v], 274, vii & [ii] deckle-edged pages. There is very faint minor foxing to the top edge of the book. Very good. First edition.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[M F · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an always-engaging, sometimes-brilliant book mixing literary criticism and cultural history. Anderson's main goal is to rescue Emerson, Whitman, and Henry James from the new criticism, recontextualizing them within (and against) the currents of 19th-century New England in order to reveal their true significance as writers and cultural figures. His thesis is that each offers a version of a new, asocial and ahistorical form of consciousness that stands in contrast to conventional conceptualizations of identity as being composed of one's social role(s) and relationships. This new form places the "hypertrophied self," the expansive, all-consuming ego, at the forefront of perception, interpretation, and experience; it "incorporates" (that is, consumes and encompasses) the entire world in a unifying impulse that dissolves all distinctions between self and other and removes the self from relationships, history, and culture (which, for Anderson, makes Emerson and co. antecedents of the movement, in post-WWII literature and criticism, away from history and culture into the cult of the self).

It's been a while since I read Emerson, Whitman, and James during my comp exam prep (and I confess I've never read The Golden Bowl), so I can't speak to the accuracy of Anderson's argument, but he does make a compelling case, and at his best (as in the glorious final two chapters on James), he is exhilarating to read. He's also quite catty, such as in his cheerful obliteration of Jonathan Bishop (a man I've never heard of, probably because his career died as a result of the beating he took from Anderson), whose reading of Emerson as a romantic, kin to a line of writers from Wordsworth to Lawrence, Anderson writes off as "so blithely destructive of historical contexts that it surely deserves some sort of prize" (38). He also offers the definitive explanation for Whitman's indifferent critical reception at the time: "The notion of rejoicing at the odor of one's own armpits, had it been widely apprehended, would undoubtedly have provoked mass retching" (sorry, forgot to write down pg).

Given that the essay was published in 1971, there are some enjoyable Freudian overtures in Anderson's readings of the relationship between the writers and their fathers, both literal and metaphorical (as in, guarantors of national authority), and, especially, in his reduction of Henry James to a dialectic between anus and mouth. There is also a delightful moment where he skilfully deploys the techniques of the new criticism which annoys him so much to impose a reading of the word float as a euphemism for Whitman's semen, which, though definitely insane, is also fun (as is his discussion of a peach pit as a euphemism for that "fundamental container," the "vagina" (240)). But perhaps best is the fact that, like me, he articulates his ideas most lucidly through analogies to cats; Whitman's mode of consciousness, for instance, is "at once momentaneous and aware of its commitment to the moment, like a cat with the imagination to comprehend its cathood," and, in their generous infinitude, Whitman's optics allow that "all cats may look at all kings, and every cat becomes equally a king in doing so" (240). Whitman would be thrilled to know he's become the poet laureate of Catlandia, immortalized for his confirmation of the fact that this is a cat's world and we're all just living in it.

I could go on, but eh: for the most part, Anderson is quite brilliant, and he's definitely changed the way I think about his focal authors (James, especially). At the same time, though he's a talented literary analyst, he's not always a methodical or careful one, preferring broad, general interpretations to nuanced close reading (perhaps unsurprisingly, given his antipathy to the new criticism), so his discussion of the writing itself isn't always as satisfying as his insightful argumentation. Further, his chapter on Hawthorne, though offering a wonderful reading of the structure of The Scarlet Letter and providing a strong case for Hawthorne as the opposing force to Emerson and Whitman's radical ego expansion, feels tangential rather than essential as a point of contrast , since Anderson has already situated Emerson and co. in opposition to (or in retreat from) the entire current of American culture and literature to that point.

& yet & yet: this essay is great. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in American literature--especially Emerson, Hawthorne, James, and Whitman--and cultural history. Though I kid, and Anderson does too, he's also deeply serious; his objections to the rage for the new criticism, and the concomitant withdrawal of literature and its critics from culture and history, is, far from pedantic, a deeply moral one. In his concluding pages, he reaffirms the stakes of his argument: "Given the relative thinness and fragmentation which characterize our provincial nineteenth century, it may be intelligible that we succumbed to the impulse to make its literary artifacts support themselves and each other in a historical void, but our present cultural circumstances have exposed the impossibility of continuing to do so" (229). For Anderson, Emerson and company offer a key to understanding how America arrived at a cultural moment where people would rather live in art and in dreams than in the material world itself, would rather see the reciprocity between people and the obligations they have to one another become mere shades in a vast, all-encompassing projection of the self whose expansiveness is matched only by its appetite and its delusionality, a vision of--or upon--the world which, like the ending of The Golden Bowl leaves Anderson--and, he hopes, many of the rest of us--struck dumb with horror.