[To complement
last week’s series on pre-Revolutionary histories, this week I’ll AmericanStudy
some of the many compelling writers and voices from the nation’s exploration
and colonial eras. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a wonderful new
anthology of Native American writing!]
On the problem
with defining a writer by one work, and why and how to get beyond it.
Finding an audience, being read
and remembered, is of course a central if not the central goal of all of us who
write or seek to share our voices with the world in any medium, but it can
without question be a double-edged sword in all sorts of ways. Stephen King, for example,
has written extensively about the experience of being defined so fully as a
horror writer that it becomes hugely difficult to publish (and even to a degree
write) anything else. A heightened sense of audience expectations based on the
success of his first novel, Invisible
Man (1952), seems to have crippled Ralph Ellison’s ability to finish
any of his subsequent novels (which were all published only after he had died).
But those audience-driven problems at least arose during the writers’ lives,
making it possible (if certainly not easy) for them to respond, to write out of
those boxes, to find new audiences or challenge their existing ones, or even,
of course, to ignore audience demands or responses (as much as any writer can).
Infinitely—eternally, even—more
difficult is when a sizeable and multi-generational audience latches onto a
particular, not necessarily representative text and uses it to define the
writer’s whole career and perspective after the writer has passed away. This is
a potential problem for any writer whose works are (or, more exactly for this
problem, one of whose works is) frequently anthologized—and if that writer was
also a preacher, and thus produced literally tens of thousands of
sermons among his many other written works, the danger of one of those
sermons being turned into his anthologized, career-defining work is both
greater and significantly more unfair. And that’s precisely what has happened
with Jonathan Edwards, perhaps
America’s greatest theological philosopher and writer, one of the 18th
century’s leading intellectuals, and a principal influence on the First
Great Awakening, the nation’s most widespread and democratic religious
movement. Yet for generations of American schoolchildren—and since those
schoolchildren tend to grow up to be adults, for generations of Americans
period—Edwards has meant one thing and one thing only: the sermon “Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), a fire-and-brimstone, extremely
dramatic, old-school Puritanical text that Edwards delivered in Enfield,
Connecticut in the midst of the First Great Awakening.
“Sinners” certainly captures a
particular and powerful side of Edwards the preacher, and illustrates without
question why he was able to produce such significant fervor and conversion
rates during the Great Awakening. But it’s likely that any number of fellow
preachers, in that era and in American history more generally, could have and
did deliver very similar sermons, some week in and week out. It is instead in
both the breadth and the quality of his interests and ideas and writings, as well
as his wide range of forward-thinking opinions (on issues such as women’s
rights and roles in the church, Native
Americans, and scientific discoveries), that Edwards outstrips any other
American theologian and would greatly enrich modern audiences’ perspectives on
faith, spirituality, and the church in America’s history and identity. Edwards
at his best (which was most of the time) combined the theological rigor of the
Puritans with many of the Enlightenment’s most important advances, including
those aforementioned opinions but also an abiding interest in aesthetics and a
willingness to recognize the role of personal emotion and perspectives (what Edwards
sometimes called “the affections”) in determining the shape and course of
one’s faith. Even his tragically early death at the age of 54 was the result of
his impressive
openness and desire to lead his fellow citizens into better paths—having
just taken over the Presidency of Princeton College from his son-in-law Aaron
Burr (father to the famous figure of the same name), Edwards decided to
demonstrate the need for a new medical innovation, smallpox inoculations, by
getting one himself, but died from the resulting infection.
Edwards’ literary future and
identity are of course out of his hands, as all of ours will one day be (and if
I had to accept that gaining a multi-century audience would mean that they’d
only be reading one blog post, well, I might take that deal). But on the other
hand, they remain very much in our collective hands, and the more we can try to
reconnect with the much richer and more impressive works and career and man
behind “Sinners,” the closer we can get to inhabiting the kind of America for
which Edwards consistently worked. Next early writing tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Early American writers or works you’d highlight?
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