[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. No really, I’m serious!]
On the humorous
creation that was way, way ahead of its time.
An extensive and entirely
straight-faced viral media campaign, an elaborate hoax which creates a
fictional character (a curmudgeonly historian), passes him off as a real
person, and notifies the public that he has gone missing and is being sought. A
ramping-up of that campaign as the release of said historian’s most extended
(but of course entirely fictionalized) work (a history of his native state of
New York) approaches, including equally fictional newspaper “responses” by
other (fabricated) locals who have known the historian and have information
about his whereabouts. And the deeply meta-textual and multi-level satire that
is the book itself, beginning with a straight-faced account by the (actual)
author of finding said book “in the chamber” of the historian, and publishing
it “in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind”; and continuing
into no less than three different prefaces To The Public, including one by
another fictional character (one of those who had published a newspaper notice)
about his experiences with the fictional historian.
Sounds pretty postmodern, doesn’t
it? Like a 21st-century literary equivalent to The
Blair Witch Project (1999); like, in fact, one of the new century’s
most inventive and postmodern novels, Mark
Danielewski’s House of Leaves
(2000). But the book I’m talking about was published over two centuries ago, in
1809, and was authored (along with the
whole media hoax) by Washington Irving, a figure often associated instead
with some of the Early Republic’s most genteel and Anglophile images and texts.
Irving certainly deserves those associations in many ways, but a return to this
striking first major book of his, A History of
New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, can help us to see just how
satirical and subversive our nation’s first professional author (a somewhat
debated but not inaccurate title) could be and often was. And while the satire
and subversion are most overt in the hoax and the book’s equally fictional
prefatory materials, I would argue that the whole of the book comprises a more
extended and in-depth, and certainly more thematically and methodologically significant,
effort to satirize and subvert many of his period’s conventions of
history-writing and understandings of the world. This effort begins with Book
I’s Chapter I, “Containing Divers Ingenious Theories and Philosophic
Speculations, Concerning the Creation and Population of the World, as Connected
with the History of New York,” and doesn’t let up throughout the text’s seven
Books and many centuries of world and local history.
Those satires and subversions can
feel somewhat directly pointed at other historians and writers, and reading the
whole of the History is thus, while
fun (in an 1809 kind of way), not necessarily crucial for large numbers of 21st-century
Americans. But Irving was not done with Knickerbocker in 1809, and one of the
subsequent stories that he attributes to the character, “Rip Van Winkle” (first published
in an 1819 collection entitled The Sketch Book
of Geoffrey Crayon [another fictional character]), illustrates just how
fully he could turn that satirical and subversive eye to more broadly and
meaningfully American subjects. Much of “Rip” is just funny and silly, from its
opening portrait of Rip’s extreme laziness and extremely hen-pecking wife to
its folkloric, myth-making (literally, as it leads in the story to local myths
about thunderstorms) central encounter with a dour Hendrick Hudson, his
supernatural bowling buddies, and the sleep-inducing potent potable that Rip
imbibes in their company. But Rip’s twenty-year nap coincides directly with the
American Revolution, so that the story’s images of one village and its society
become very overtly (if with no one clear point or argument) symbolic of
American life before and after the Revolution’s shifts and transformations.
I’ll leave it up to you—as I do with my students when I teach this story in my
first-half survey—to decide what you make of the story’s closing pages and
images of post-Revolution America; in any case, Irving’s story represents one
of the earliest literary attempts to grapple seriously with both the
Revolution’s effects and meanings and, most relevantly for our own (and every)
era, the nation that we were and are becoming through and after them.
Irving was one of
post-Revolutionary America’s first, and remains one of our most unique,
literary voices, and was as the viral media hoax illustrates ahead of his time
as a self-promoter and multi-layered meta-textual writer, and there’s a good
deal to be said for reading him for those reasons alone. But underneath the
fictional narrators and fictional commentators and humorous jabs at most
everything and everybody lies, especially in these early works, a commitment to
challenging and satirizing and reimagining some of our deepest beliefs and
ideas—a profoundly American project for sure. Next humorist tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other humorists you’d highlight?
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