All participants are MLA members as of 5 May.
In 1978, Henry Nash Smith subtitled his study of canonical 19th-century American literature, Democracy and the Novel (1978), with chapters on Hawthorne and the “politics of romance,” Melville and “the madness of Ahab,” Howells and the “theology of realism,” and Henry James and “the problem of audience.” This successor to Smith’s paradigm-making Virgin Land is a field guide to the need for the tumultuous new pluralist revisionism that soon followed. Smith aimed to address the great challenge of studying these exemplary figures who variously understood their charge as demonstrating how US fiction could mediate crises of democratic thought for a public less responsive than these writers meant to interpellate. Smith probably did not grasp why his study would have been more deeply responsible had he included women or Black authors, but the subsequent explosion of the American literary archive has testified to the urgency and rewards of doing so. For nothing has been more at issue in Americanist criticism since Nash’s time than ascertaining wherein US democratic principles and practices lie, and how literary form has been preoccupied with its shaping? These concerns have proved foundational for contemporary Americanists, although other issues have arisen, in part, as a result. Still, the relation between literature and democracy underlies our continuing struggles to frame a critical practice at once responsive to the necessity of social justice and to the defining powers of form and rhetoric. This special session is associated with other Americanist LLC panels for 2022 dedicated to this general subject. Our idea, at this fraught moment in US political history, is to give these terms’ resonance a new hearing, one that is meant to spread across the Americanist spectrum.
Our session examines the historical trajectory of the relation between democracy and the novel by concentrating on the nineteenth-century investigation of the failure of liberal institutions, which we see first analyzed in Elizabeth Duquette’s “The Tyrannical Backbone of the Democratic Novel.” Taking her cue from Henry James’s deathbed dictation of the emperor Napoleon’s memoir and using Perry Miller’s prompt that “a volume needs to be written on the image of Napoleon in democratic America,” she explores how this weird imperial ghost emerges as the “backbone” of the nineteenth-century novel, bringing tyranny in its wake. For Duquette, such anxieties about tyranny have never been exhausted or fully articulated. Rather than an innovation of the internet age, a cultural politics of tyranny, fused to the actual practice, has always been part of the “intellectual tradition” of “democratic America.”
Russ Castronovo sustains this discussion of the US novel’s effort to meet the burden of democracy’s failures by countering our current tragic mode of narrating history—How Democracies Die (2018), Twilight of Democracy (2020), and How Democracy Ends (2018)—with a “metahistory” aligned with the metafictional techniques anticipated by Henry Adams (1880) and fully embraced by Joan Didion (1984) in their novels titled Democracy. This self-reflective turn in literary narrative discloses an analogue for the missing transparency characterizing US governmental policy since Vietnam. In the incommensurability, however, in which literary strategies remain decidedly unlike governance lies the failed parallels between literary fiction and modes of governance, the gap that remains between aesthetics and politics.
In “Free Without Power or Right”: Improvising Black Lives in Fiction,” Nancy Bentley asks whether we can imagine democratic life without the scaffolding of liberal institutions. Following Saidiya Hartman’s evocation of the lives of young Black women in northeastern cities at the beginning of the twentieth century, subjects determined to “to live as if they were free” without any of civil infrastructure for doing so, Bentley pursues a vision of the novel, with its organizing features such as marriage, property, national belonging, as obscuring a democratic “counter-narrative,” a genre that does not exist but that could indeed narrate lives lived creatively in the interstices of liberal governance. Her paper examines this experimental counternarrative in Albion Tourgée’s Bricks Without Straw (1880). Tourgée (later the defendant’s lawyer in Plessy) assays the novel form to capture the “intimate histories” (Hartman) of people forced to improvise selfhood and sociality without liberal institutions. A white Reconstruction official from the North, in his fiction, Tourgée tries to make legible the absence of any supporting civil infrastructure. Even so, the novel’s Black settlement of Red Wing offers a glimpse of experiments in kinship, labor, and governance generated by a people who are “free without power or right.”
Commentary will be provided by the audience. Papers will be no longer than 15 minutes, so there will be ample time for questions.