Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis

289 Pages·2015·2.3 MB·English

by  Joel Pfister

Surveyors of Customs
oxford studies in american literary history
Gordon Hutner, Series Editor
Family Money
Jeffory A. Clymer
America’s England
Christopher Hanlon
Writing the Rebellion
Philip Gould
Antipodean America
Paul Giles
Living Oil
Stephanie LeMenager
Making Noise, Making News
Mary Chapman
Territories of Empire
Andy Doolen
Propaganda 1776
Russ Castronovo
Playing in the White
Stephanie Li
Literature in the Making
Nancy Glazener
Surveyors of Customs
Joel Pfister
The Moral Economies of American Authorship
Susan M. Ryan
After Critique
Mitchum Huehls
Surveyors of Customs
American Literature as Cultural Analysis
Joel Pfister
1
1
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© Joel Pfister 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pfister, Joel.
Surveyors of customs : American literature as cultural analysis / Joel Pfister.
pages cm.—(Oxford studies in American literary history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-027615-7 (cloth)—ISBN 978-0-19-027616-4 (updf) 
1. American literature—Social aspects—History and criticism.
2.  National characteristics, American, in literature. 3. Culture in literature.
4. Literature and society—United States—History. I. Title.
PS169.N35P55 2015
810.9'358—dc23 2015018151
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Minion Pro
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For my darling wife, Lisa Wyant, an inspiring surveyor of customs
Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously.
This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer.
—edwidge danticat, create dangerously: the
immigrant artist at work (2011), 10
Or would you rather write about the moon?
—langston hughes, “to negro writers”
(1935), 140
. . . must be
the devil got you . . .
it caint be capitalism
it caint be national oppression owow! No Way!
Now go back to work and cool
it, go back to work and lay back, just a little
while longer till you pass
its gonna be alright once you gone. . . .
—amiri baraka, “dope” (1979), 266
{ Contents }
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Critical Work and Critical Pleasure of American
Literature 3
Surveyors of Customs, Culture, Hegemony, and Capitalism 5 / Reading
Literature as Usable 6 / A Method of Reading 9/ American Literature
Previews Cultural Analysis 12 / Franklin’s Systemic Reading Lessons: Capitalism
as Cannibalism 16 / Hawthorne’s Systemic Reading Lessons: Imagining the
“Whole System” of Society 26 / Soft Capitalism and the Range of
Reproductive Payoffs 29 / The Chapters 34 / Postscript 36
1. Inner-Self Industries: Soft Capitalism’s Reproductive Logic 39
Inserting the Innate: American Literature Surveys Spiritual Production 48 /
Interpellation, Interiority Incitement, and Soft Power 51 / Interiority
Revolutions: Expanding the Business of Selfhood Reproduction 53 / Soft
Capitalism’s Latency Culture: Industrial-Era Soullessness and Soul Making 56 /
Diversifying Capitalism’s Individuality Repertoire: Franklin plus Emerson 59 /
The Changing Interiority Market: Edwards’s Souls and Franklin’s Stomachs 60 /
Soft Capitalism’s Secular Latency Turn: Poe and Dickinson 61 / Soul Machinery:
Hawthorne on Class-Identity Making as Secular Soul Making 67 / Postscript 76
2. How America Works: Getting Personal to Get Personnel 79
Individualizing and Incorporating Bottom-Up: Franklin and Alger 83 /
Reading the Incentive System: Davis to Wright 84 / Surveyors of
Anti-incentive: Personnel Preference 90 / Personnel Culture: Soft
Incentive Management beyond Franklin and Alger 92 / Redefining
Equality, Individuality, and Incentive: Melville, Bellamy, and Howells 96 /
Domesticating Incentive Making: Sigourney, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and
West 103 / The Family Business: O’Neill as Personnel Culture
Theorist 111 / Postscript 117
3. Dress-Down Conquest: Americanizing Top-Down as Bottom-Up 121
“Democratizing” Inequality: Looking Backward from Bush to Faulkner 124 /
Hegemonizing Dress-Down Power: The Colloquial Turn as a “Littery” Project 126 /
Dress-Up Power: Twain, Melville, Davis, Crane, Fitzgerald 132 / The Equality Racket:
Twain, Tocqueville, Carnegie, Fitzhugh, Du Bois 136 / Play-Acting Equality: King
Arthur in the Connecticut Yankee’s Court 140 / Conquest Handbook:
Americanization Studies as Conquest Studies 150 / Littery Man versus
Oxford Dude: The Americanization of Britain 155 / Postscript 163
viii Contents
Afterword: America Is Worth Saving from . . . 165
Notes 169
Works Consulted 231
Index 263
{ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS }
Frontispiece, “The Library” by Quint Buchholz. i
Figure 1 Mark Twain on the cover of Time magazine, July 14, 2008 issue. 4
Figure 2 An illustration from A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court. 145
{ Acknowledgments }
I should begin by acknowledging two intellectual concerns that have sustained
me when writing Surveyors. Several years ago Amiri Baraka gave a talk (later
followed by a performance) at Wesleyan University and when quizzed about
his most important literary influences offered three names: Herman Melville,
Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Instantly I began to imagine the sort of
conversations that Baraka’s triumvirate might have with one another and with
him. Baraka’s literary symposium intensified my curiosity about what might be
learned—and unlearned—from such cross-period exchanges. Put in the form
of a question, what historical—and cultural-theoretical—insights might be
gained by adventurously moving back and forth in time? Also, from the outset
of this project I found myself motivated by what Michel Foucault so i nspiringly
said motivated him: “It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity . . . that is
worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to
assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get
free of oneself. . . . The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s
own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to
think differently” (Use of Pleasure, 8–9). To be sure, rethinking the history and
the system that have circumscribed what one “silently thinks” (and feels) so
that one might—and others might—“think [and feel] differently” is much
easier said than done. But as the acknowledgments below attest, I have had lots
of help in the effort to make some headway.
So many years after studying with them, I remain indebted to my teachers—
empowerers—who made American cultural analysis irresistible (a critical
pleasure as well as what F. O. Matthiessen called a critical responsibility): at
Columbia, Sacvan Bercovitch and James Shenton; at the University of Sussex,
Alan Sinfield and Peter Stallybrass; at the Institute of U.S. Studies, University of
London, Eric Mottram; and at Yale, Alan Trachtenberg, Bryan Wolf, Richard
Brodhead, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Christophe Agnew, David Montgomery,
Jules Prown, and Vincent Scully. Over the years my Wesleyan colleagues have
made significant contributions to my ongoing education in literary, historical,
and cultural analysis, and they include Richard Ohmann, Richard Slotkin,
Khachig Tölölyan, Henry Abelove, Matthew Garrett, and Marguerite Nguyen.
My brilliant friend Sarah Winter again helped sharpen my ideas in our many
conversations about Surveyors. And another brilliant friend Dale Bauer—who
invited me to lecture on what would become chapter 3 at the Unit for Criticism
and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2005—