As I approach many of these eighteenth century and early nineteenth century texts on my list, I often don't know what to expect. Is this going to be dry? Is it going to be entertaining? Will I wonder why I had to read it, when I'm done, or will its uniqueness and significance jump out at me? With so many of these texts, all I know about them, before going into them, is that they're part of the American "canon" and I have to be familiar with them if I'm specializing in American literature. What I'm trying to say, in a professional and tactful way, is that sometimes I have no idea whether I'll actually like the next book I'm reading. So, reading selections from Washington Irving's The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., published in 1819, was delightful, both because he's a humorous, pleasant writer, and because so many provocative comments about British relations with America (officially only an independent country for about 40 years, when this book was published) jumped out at me.
The Sketch-Book is a collection of literary "sketches," or short stories and anecdotes, narrated by the fictional persona of Geoffrey Crayon, an American character who explains to the reader that he wrote the sketches during his travels throughout America and Europe. From the beginning, Crayon adopts a persona that mediates carefully between extolling the beauty and opportunity of America, while also paying homage to the cultural heritage of Europe: "My native country was full of youthful promise: Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age" (4). Crayon's unique position, as an American traveller describing his journeys in both America and Europe, mirrors Irving's experiences, as he too spent years travelling throughout Europe in his early twenties, and published the Sketch-Book while in the UK, under the encouragement of Sir Walter Scott. Malcolm Bradbury, who edited my edition of the book, suggests that Irving's diplomatic attentions to both American and England were deliberate; tensions between England and America had not been completely erased since the American Revolution, and Bradbury suggests that "in a difficult political situation, Irving was writing in a deliberately healing, apolitical mode" (xxix). As I read selections from this volume (in particular, the famous "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," as well as "English Writers in America" and "The Art of Book-Making"), I found it difficult to consider these sketches completely apolitically, however. While Bradbury may be right to suggest that overall, Irving's humorous, often satirical narrator Geoffrey Crayon diffuses many of the overtly political themes, Irving's alignment of Europe with the "old world" and America with "youth" is subtly fascinating.
I'll skip over "Rip Van Winkle" and "Sleepy Hollow" for the purposes of this discussion, because I think many people are familiar with these famous short stories -- they're the most anthologized of Irving's work, and, of course, "Sleepy Hollow" has been revived in multiple cinematic versions (my favourite is still the 1949 Disney cartoon). What I'd like to focus on is the narrator's backhanded comments about American writers and the English literary tradition. "English Writers in America" is a short little piece, wherein Crayon opens with the statement: "It is with feelings of deep regret that I observe the literary animosity daily growing up between England and America" (42). He goes on to suggest that English writers travelling in America publish "prejudicial accounts of America" (43), possibly because "they may have pictured America to themselves an El Dorado, where gold and silver abounded" (43). These English writers have not only written defamatory accounts of American society and landscape, but of the literature that American writers attempt to produce: "They rebuke the indiscriminating bigotry with which some of our countrymen [Americans] admire and imitate everything English, merely because it is English...We may thus place England before us as a perpetual volume of reference" (49). In other words, English writers mock the efforts of American writers because they try too hard to merely reproduce English literature. While Crayon agrees, here, that American writers often do use England as "a pereptual volume of reference," he agrees that American writers need to stop doing this. His motivation, however, is not to mock the American writers for producing inferior literature; rather, he magnanimously suggests that "there is no country more worthy of our study than England," while at the same time arguing that American writers "forego the advantages of our birth, if we do not shake off the national prejudices, as we would the local superstitions of the old world."
I think it's important to point out here that this book was written for both American and British audiences, and was first published in England. The rhetorical tango Irving is doing here, then, is brilliant. Overflowing with flattery for the quality of English culture, customs, and literary heritage, he nevertheless subtly digs at the relevance of such customs for a new, rapidly growing country like America. By aligning the British literary influence with the "local superstitions of the old world," Crayon suggests that American writers really don't NEED it, as they have enough exciting history of their own, which they should be using to forge ahead with their own literary tradition. He concludes the sketch by suggesting that the English literary tradition may have something to offer American literature "wherewith to strengthen and to embellish our national character," but America need not limit itself to British themes and conventions. What's so fascinating about this sketch is how Crayon has taken such care not to insult or privilege either American or British writing explicitly. Rather, he suggests "you British writers that mock us for imitating you, you're right. We shouldn't do that, because we don't need your old timey ways, as admirable as they are." While I wouldn't call this "apolitical," as Bradbury does, it's a fascinating bit of diplomacy between the two nations.
Keeping that in mind, we move to "The Art of Book-Making," where Crayon describes a lazy afternoon wandering throughout the British Museum. He wanders into "a spacious chamber, surrounded with great cases of venerable books...at which sat many pale, studious personages, poring intently over dusty volumes, rummaging along mouldy manuscripts, and taking copious notes of their contents" (62-63). Crayon learns that this is the reading room of the British Library, and these "studious personages" are authors, reading, researching, and ultimately, writing great works of literature. The walls of this reading room are lined with portraits of famous authors, all of whom these new, contemporary authors are drawing from for imagery and inspiration. Crayon charitably reflects that, though these authors seem to be making liberal use -- "pilfering," he playfully calls it -- of the words and ideas of old authors, "may it not be the way in which Providence has taken care that the seeds of knowledge and wisdom shall be preserved from age to age?" (64). At this point, he somehow manages to fall asleep, and has a dream that the portraits on the walls come to life. The offended authors come to life to defend their works from thievery: "they descended, with fury in their eyes, to claim their rifled property" (67). Crayon finds this dream scene quite humorous, and laughs out loud--which wakes him up. Producing this raucous, disruptive laugh has caused every head in the room to turn and stare accusingly at him:
"The librarian now stepped up to me, and demanded whether I had a card of admission. At first I did not comprehend him, but soon found that the library was a kind of literary 'preserve,' subject to game laws, and that no one must presume to hunt there without special licence and permission. In a word, I stood convicted of being an arrant poacher, and was glad to make a precipitate retreat, lest I should have a whole pack of authors let loose upon me" (67).
So much going on here! In a nutshell, Crayon has stumbled upon the inner sanctum of British literary production, which, according to his dream, seems to be no more than the "hunting" and "pilfering" of British literary inheritance by contemporary authors. When Crayon (an American) acoustically disrupts the setting with his laugh, he learns that he is not allowed to be there -- in other words, British authors may mock American authors for blindly imitating their literary tradition, but they do the exact same thing themselves. Imitation and repetition of the old authors is not prohibited for its own sake then--but no Americans are allowed. Crayon's response to this discovery is one of relief and gladness--this vast, impressive literary tradition may be more of a burden than a resource, after all.
Works Cited
Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. Vermont: J. M. Dent, 1993. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment