Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime by Zaller Robert

Author:Zaller, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

6

Democratic Vistas

I

We have thus far considered Jeffers’ construction of the American sublime under two principal aspects: as a privileged mode of access to the divine through the experience of natural grandeur, and as Oedipal praxis. The latter appeared as a condition of the former, since, in Jeffers’ reading of the Western mode of experience, the perception of divinity was bound up with a dialectic in which the earthly father had to be negated to affirm the immanent God within and beyond phenomena. This dialectic was, in turn, the ground of human drama and conflict through which alone tragic, subjective consciousness could be forged, and the divine relation realized.

We must now more closely consider a third aspect of our native sublime, however, the idea of America as a redeemer nation destined to give light to the world. In its Puritan incarnation, it represented a great collective enterprise composed of a myriad of self-enlightened, self-motivated individuals.1 This conception was sublimated into but hardly effaced by the secular republic created by the founding fathers. It manifested itself in the unresolved polarities of the American experience, at once materialist and millennialist. These in turn were reflected in a tension between personal virtue and the national aggrandizement of what the English republican James Harrington felicitously termed “a commonwealth for increase.”2

On a political level, the dilemma of virtue and commerce was played out in the conflict between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian principles, although the doctrines of each were at least partly receptive to those of the other, and Jeffersonianism would prove readily enough adaptable to imperial expansion. In the national literature that emerged in the nineteenth century, the two camps were represented most distinctively by Emerson and Thoreau. At the same time, however, there was a third response, seen first in Hawthorne, and, more profoundly, in Melville. Hawthorne, the Jeffersonian skeptic, saw in the idealized agrarian community the breeding-ground of hypocrisy and vice, while Melville perceived the modern commercial metropolis as a Dantesque inferno in which the individual was crushed and destroyed.

The question of the democratic community becomes particularly acute in Melville, who in Moby Dick offered a paradigmatic representation of the American sublime. Melville’s early novels of romance fantasized a primitive Eden as an implicit refuge from urban anomie. In his later work, the vein of Orientalism exhausted, he posited the enforced despotism of the sailing vessel as the only alternative to the hellish underworld of the great city, New York in Pierre and London in Israel Potter, or the even more infernal anarchy of the steamboat in The Confidence Man. In maritime or naval life, the worst fate was shipwreck and drowning—a deadly, but at the same time a shared and common destiny. In the London of Israel Potter, however, Melville’s “City of Dis,” an ultimate solitude awaited, for here, as Melville wrote, “an ocean rolled between man and man.”3

The mid-nineteenth century thus represented, in Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, the Emerson of “Fate,” the internment fantasies of Poe, and even in James Fennimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the first crisis of American literature.

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