[Only a couple
New England states celebrate
Patriots’ Day, which officially pays
tribute to the colonial Minutemen who helped begin the American Revolution
at Lexington and Concord. But the holiday offers a chance to think about
patriotism in America more broadly, which I’ll do this week, starting with my
annual Patriots’ Day post, continuing through a series on critically patriotic
texts, and leading up to an update on my new
AmericanStudying book!]
On a fascinating
text that explores, extols, and explodes the rags to riches narrative.
Abraham Cahan’s
1917 novel The Rise of
David Levinsky is a very long book (530 pages in the edition I have at
least), and so I can’t quite argue that all Americans should read it. But there’s
a reason why it’s been on the syllabus for my American
Novel to 1950 class since the first time I taught that course in one of my
earliest semesters at Fitchburg State, and will likely remain on that syllabus
for all future iterations: this is one of those rare works of classic literature
that offers in equal measure reflections of its own time period and profoundly
relevant commentaries for our own moment. It does so through a number of central
threads and themes, including its portrayal of Jewish
American immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century and
its depiction of protagonist David’s socially and psychologically complex
romantic relationships with a number of important female characters (all in one
way or another inspired by his equally complex relationship to his late mother,
whom he literally and figuratively leaves behind in the old country of Russia).
But perhaps no element of Cahan’s novel is more relevant to AmericanStudying,
then and now, than its depiction of the American Dream.
As its title
suggests, Rise presents a story of
success, a portrayal of the rags-to-riches
narrative that had by this time become very well-established
in American mythology. As David narrates in the book’s opening sentences, “Sometimes,
when I think of my past in a superficial, casual way, the metamorphosis I have
gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. I was born and reared in
the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America—in 1885—with four cents
in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as
one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United
States.” The next sentences complicate that narrative, to be sure: “And yet
when I take a lok at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the
same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount
of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.”
But of course David does have all those things, quite precisely can have his
cake while he also reflects thoughtfully on it, and thus the novel presents
from its opening moments a clear and unavoidable tale of stunning success in
many of the ways it has been and continues to be defined.
Abraham
Cahan was a lifelong and dedicated socialist
and labor activist, however; and while Rise
doesn’t delve into those topics in the same overt ways as a short story of his
like “A
Sweatshop Romance” (1909), it nonetheless offers such critiques of the same
society and success it also embodies through its protagonist. It does so in
part through David’s engagements with labor unions and the working class,
conflicts that David views entirely through a purposefully (for the reader)
limited lens of Herbert
Spencer’s Social Darwinism. But it also does so through David’s enduring
unhappiness: the novel’s last book, “Episodes of a Lonely Life,” expands on the
opening paragraph and delves deeply into why David feels so isolated and
incomplete despite his massive success and wealth. Through both of those elements—the
depiction of competing, more or less collective visions of American society;
and the portrayal of the limits of individual accomplishment in a society driven
by the less collective vision—Cahan’s novel both critiques some of the Gilded
Age excesses that continued to dominate America into the 20th century
and imagines alternative possibilities and paths, even if its shallowly
successful protagonist cannot quite connect to those alternate ideals.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other patriotic texts you’d highlight?
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