The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture by Marjorie Perloff (review)

Abstract

being open to the past Roderick is eager to hand on (177-78); no mention is made of the horror of that past. Dimmesdale's final speech and revelation is heralded as a catalyst for community redemption (106-07); no mention is made of the deep ironies of his speech, and of his abandonment of Hester. And since Pease wants to use Ishmael to underscore "the fundamental problem for a society which has lost sight of a shared covenant" (275), no mention is made of Ishmael's bond with Queequeg. Finally, consider this reading of The Leatherstocking Tales: "By converting those pre-Revolutionary years into a historical period in which Americans were affiliated with the last of a noble Indian line, Cooper enabled Americans to imagine the American nation as the beginning of a new cultural line which included all Americans as its heirs" (21-22). Cooper certainly did not envision a culture in which all races were peacefully compacted together. Pease's "all Americans" apparently does not include Indians, nor members of other races. Pease's new treatment of the American Renaissance is, in fact, unfortunately traditional in its lack of attention to the cultural work of Native Americans, Blacks, and women, all of whom offered more inclusive "visionary compacts" than those of their white male contemporaries. The lack of attention to nineteenth-century women writers is especially surprising, since Pease co-edited The American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), in which appears Jane P. Tompkins' "The Other American Renaissance." Tompkins reinterprets the period's popular "sentimental" novels as literature which spoke to the real needs of its culturally oppressed female audience, an audience in the main not spoken to by the writers Pease assesses. The various sins of commission and omission mentioned above would be more forgivable, were not their author so sure of his righteousness. Like some other new historicists, Pease is quick to attack others for "appropriating" earlier culture-bound literature into their own present ideology (48), but refuses to acknowledge that his own interpretation is also an ideological appropriation, inevitably biased in its interests. I find his attack on F. O. Matthiessen particularly offensive, since Matthiessen at least makes his political agenda plain throughout his brilliantly sustained study. The contemporary critical establishment, however, has not been offended by Visionary Compacts: its back jacket boasts blurbs of praise from Geoffrey Hartman, Richard Poirier, Lawrence Buell, and Joseph Riddle. Perhaps the reader should heed the words of these authorities, rather than of this reviewer.