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Teaching Hope to Postmoderns, with Help from CS and Others
by Robert Daly, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Comparative Literature, SUNY/Buffalo
I had taught Hope Leslie many times, but always toward the end of a course on early American literature. In that context, classes focused on such aspects as Indian removal, patriarchy, Puritanism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, palimpsest, and the creation and critique of national myth. Then this spring I blundered into teaching it at the beginning of a graduate course on visions of America and saw, too late as always, trouble on the horizon. Postmodern credibility, when it exists at all, is radically contingent on local knowledge, and time constraints prevented my opening the discussion of this one book with detailed consideration of at least two centuries of American and European precedents. Had I tried that, my students could have sued for false advertising. Since I wanted to contribute to our seminar discussions something rather more and better than "your guess is as good as mine," I turned to some scribbled notes from our symposium (happy memories), put several suggested teaching techniques into practice, and stumbled upon some aspects of Sedgwick's writing that I'd like to share with you.
From Lucinda Damon-Bach I used the focus on paratext, "all the written matter that surrounds the actual narrative, from title and dedication to footnotes." Since this paratext sets up a complex intertextuality with writings from many cultures, I used Dana Nelson's suggested focus on intercultural relations, especially as they relate to national identity, and Brigitte Bailey's focus on those moments when identity is most fluid (disguise, cross-dressing, fictive storytelling by the characters themselves) and ways in which this fluidity relates to construction of readers as national subjects. Finally, from Michelle Bauer I borrowed the technique of having the students engage in the conversation among Sedgwick and some scholarly works, in my case some theoretical works before they read the book and critical works afterward.
Several theorists gave us new ways of reading that seem particularly appropriate for Sedgwick. Marjorie Perloff argues that the "what of literature . . . doesn't matter nearly as much as the how," and she suggests that we replace what she calls "Gotcha!" literary criticism-in which we are informed, with a fair deal of one-upping and gloating, that, in her examples, Dickinson was a classist, Joyce a capitalist, and Conrad an imperialist-with "literary literacy" (B4), a consideration of "what 'reading' is or does" (B5). Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick suggests that we replace "paranoid reading," the use of the hermeneutics of suspicion to resist the supposed seductions of the text, with "reparative reading," an exploration of "the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture-even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (35). Jonathan Culler suggests that we focus less on coverage and more on "literary competence" (62), Robert Scholes that a "canon of methods, unlike a set of texts, must be conceived in terms of 'competence'" (148), and Geoffrey Hartman that the literary "classics . . . are not representative so much as hermeneutic" ("Higher" 731), affording us instruction and practice in the arts of interpretation, that "the capaciousness and excitement of interpretive reading can be taught" ("Fate" 386), indeed have always been taught to the ruling classes, and that "teaching slow reading" to others "can transform the elite mystery . . . into a conscious endowment" ("Fate" 386).
That, we decided, is exactly what, among other things, Sedgwick was up to, disseminating to her readers the hermeneutic competence, interpretive skills, and Foucauldian power-knowledge that had formerly been reserved for her own class. She was cultivating and constructing her audience and the republic. This is not in any sense to argue that she was innocent of class and power. Far from it. In the new democratic republic, such knowledge has to be disseminated. Geoffrey Hartman notes that "without analytic reading and viewing skills, democracy does not long prevail but succumbs to propaganda and demagoguery" ("Fate 386) and Barbara Herrnstein Smith that, even in our current society, "those with cultural power and commonly other forms of power as well" are those with "competence in a large number of cultural codes" (51). Though these contemporary theorists are not all saying the same thing and do not form a school, the resonances among their writings suggest that the relations between literature and other aspects of life may be epistemological rather than ontological or narrowly political. Competence in many cultural codes may enable us, like polymetis Odysseus, to take the measure of the world and then, in our own phrase, to take measures. Our relation to the larger polis and the larger culture may then become more reciprocal. We may then stage our own interventions and help to alter and determine the cultural forces that help to determine us.
Text and paratext offer readers the opportunity to develop such competence in many cultural codes. Pequots, Puritans, Anglicans, Catholics, pirates, pedagogues, Greeks, Romans, and others hold hermeneutic conversations and competitions throughout Hope Leslie, in which race, class, and gender are important but are not the only orderings of power and knowledge.
Despite obvious differences, Cradock is like Chaddock in more than the spelling of their names, though that textual similarity alerts us to the comparison. Both have traveled widely and learned from many cultures. In Padua, Cradock has learned both fideism and Italian and taught them to Hope. Though often comic, Cradock is sometimes "the only one of the groupe (sic), not even excepting Everell, whose sympathy masted his curiosity" (175). His teaching puts her in touch with a cultural multiplicity that has both obvious and subtle advantages. Obviously, she can speak Italian and understand Antonio Batista, that Roman Catholic who offers another point of view and undercuts the easy binarism of both the English and the Indians, who think they divide the world between them. But Batista sees from yet another perspective, one that can view America as "this land of heathen savages and heretic English" (242) and can worship "the blessed lady Petronilla" (241), who became a saint precisely because of her refusal to marry. That her intended was named Flaccus merely adds more comic irony for those who know the codes. Cradock does not know all. Magawisca, whose waistband is ornamented with a text that looks like "hieroglyphics," suggests a cultural range beyond his. In Sedgwick's time, Champollion and others had only recently (1822) deciphered the Rosetta Stone, opening up a new code and a wealth of concomitant new knowledge. In Sedgwick's books, as in postmodernism, one gains wisdom not by learning any single master code but by knowing several. Both Magawisxca and Cradock enable Hope and us to see beyond Madame Winthrop's notion that "the deferential manners of youth, which were the fashion of an age, had their foundation in immutable principles" (206). Cradock puts Hope in conversation with other times and places and enables Hope to recognize fashion and convention for what they are, and she wisely installs "Master Cradock as a life member of her domestic establishment" (349). No one character performs this cultural work, and the limitations of each are made either comically or tragically clear. But together they afford us hermeneutic knowledge and interpretive skill. Even Aunt Grafton has read enough romances to notice that Sir Philip Gardiner "had nothing of the puritan but the outside" (167). As an Anglican, she approves, but the point is that she notices, she reads him better than the others.
Like her characters, Sedgwick's readers are becoming more perceptive, more open to surprise, and better at making sense of the surprises. The older theories tended to be so deterministic that one student could argue that, with them, you did not really need to read any particular text, since you already knew what it was going to say. Th more recent theories mentioned above enable us to learn new things, not just the same things over and over again. Sedgwick works that way.
In her many parabases, she addresses her readers directly, and these passages read so much like her letters to friends that we look in the corner for the CS, the monogram on her stationery. She assures us that by "a single clew an intricate maze may be threaded" (338). Like a good teacher, she even congratulates us prematurely on having done what she hopes we shall learn to do: "OUR READERS' SAGACITY [her capitals] has probably enabled them to penetrate the slight mystery . . ." (247). But she ends with one more surprise, Esther Downing's refusal to marry.
It is likely that no one, on first reading, saw that one coming, but in retrospect it makes sense. Since freedom and power derive not from the absence of convention but from the multiplicity of convention, it makes sense that Esther, that czarina of convention, would make the unconventional choice, that she would, like Sedgwick, choose dissemination over a narrow focus and not "Give to a party what was meant for mankind" (350). The book ends, not with Hope's wedding, but with that splendid aporia. It does not force upon us a single code or interpretation. It increases our interpretive powers and leaves us to emulate Sedgwick's ancestors and do our own thinking. Like Esther and Sedgwick, it shares the wealth.
Works Cited
Many thanks both to those named and to the rest of the colleagues at the symposium, sage Sedgwickians all.
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 1997. See especially the discussion of "poetics" (61-63, 65,70-82, 84-94) and "literary competence" (62).
Delaney, John J. Pocket Dictionary of Saints New York: Image, 1983. 407.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. "The Fate of Reading Once More." PMLA 111 (1996): 383-89.
--. "Higher Education in the 1990's." New Literary History 24 (1993): 729-43.
Perloff, Marjorie. "A Passion for Content: Restoring 'Literary Literacy' to the English Curriculum." Chronicle of Higher Education 9 May 1997: B4-B5.
Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstituting English as a Discipline.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. See especially the discussion of "rhetoric" (8-10, 64-68, 73-76, 84-91, 111-31, 141-49) and "competence" (148).
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. 1827.
Ed. Mary Kelley. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky. "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction IsAbout You." Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1-37.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
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