Marcus, Sollors’ ‘New Literary History of America’

There aremore than 200 essays in A New LiteraryHistory of America (Belknap Harvard),this part-madcap, part-inventive anthology that tries to redefine Americanliterature. Roaming from the 16th century to the present, from the firstappearance of “America”on a map (1507) to a predominantly visual entry regarding Barack Obama (2008),the content in this Greil Marcus/Werner Sollors-edited book is far-fetched andunexpected. Had it been titled and introduced differently, it might have been agreater accomplishment. However, that this book is not more appropriatelycalled A Cultural Vision with Literatureas Meta-text marks it either asvainglorious or the result of not knowing where the literary aspects ofanything begin or resolve.

Some topicsare handled with unusually inventive analysis. Bob Dylan enters formally onpage 904, but not as expected. “Song to Woody” is the chosen moment of stolenliterary entry in an essay subtitled “The Common Language of anAlmost-Remembered Country” set in 1962, but beginning with a passage fromDylan’s 2004 autobiography, Chronicles:Volume One: “Gutenberg could have been some guy who stepped out of a folksong…” The essayist immediately comments that “actual figures of history, andthe phantasms of culture…[are both] characters in a mythical tableau that isnot a different world at all, but…one in which myth is preserved, as real as thelandlord.”

Each essayin this book takes an area of what either has been or is newly defined asliterature, or, as in this Dylan entry, offers a surprising capture ofredefinition.

The editorsare careful to indicate that the essays are introduced only according tohistorical timeline, but say little else about redefinitions of the literaryaspects of content. We understand the form of the book, but the content is notaltogether much more than the creative writing of its contributors. Perhaps, inthe final analysis, if there can be one, this book presents exceptionallycreative authors.

The editorsgo on: “It is the task of this book to remind the reader of what is mostfamiliar and to raise the specter of what remains out of sightforgotten,suppressed, or biding its time.” Well, agreed. But let us not call it a historyof American literature, or, if we do, there has to be competent theory ormeta-theory with less random content due to the absence of any overalldefinition. Too much is left up to the imagination of even an ideal reader.

As onecloses the book, and either tries to find a spot on the shelf for it or deploysit as a tool for flattening out fall leaves, there is no doubt at all that anew definition of American literature is necessarybut not this unnecessarilyscattered work of bright, rather lost essayists united by editors who shouldhave known better, and most certainly did. They did not find a new literaryhistory of America.They merely lost the old one, and this is not enough.