[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]
On historical
and literary reasons to revisit a challenging early bestseller.
Given the
fact that my
Dad’s first book was an extended analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s career
and life, it’s somewhat shameful how little I’ve written about Cooper in my
nearly 14 years of blogging (although given that my Dad’s analysis was based on
a psychoanalytical interpretation of Cooper’s relationship with his father,
maybe the absence is also a telling one!). But I have to admit that when it
comes to Cooper’s style, I tend to agree with Mark Twain (another of my Dad’s subjects—ah what
a tangled web we AmericanStudiers weave!) and his thorough takedown in the
satirical essay “Fenimore
Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895). Style is always a matter of taste to
some degree, but Cooper’s is nonetheless unquestionably clunky from a 21st
century perspective (even more so than it was to Twain’s late 19th
century one). And at the very least, Cooper’s ponderous prose makes it
difficult for me to recommend him to either my students (I’ve occasionally in
my first-half
American Lit Survey taught the one chapter from Last of the Mohicans
that’s included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but that’s
it) or broader audiences.
At the
same time, no early 19th century author reads like one of our
contemporaries, and of course I’d still make the case for the value of reading literary
texts from that period. A significant part of that value is what these works
and authors can help us see in our histories, and Cooper in particular has a
great deal to tell us about how our national myths developed in the decades
after the Revolution and how those collective American stories engaged with
Native American histories and communities. All of the so-called “Leatherstocking
Tales” in particular—the five novels that, taken together and read in story
rather than publication order, follow protagonist Natty
Bumppo from the 1740s through his death in the early 19th
century—offer a strikingly broad and deep window into those historical themes,
as Bumppo is both instrumental in the development of the American frontier (before,
during, and after the Revolution) and closely tied to the Native American
communities for whom that “frontier” was much more of a slow-moving invasion.
While Cooper never fully captures the Native American perspective on those
themes, as I’ve argued his contemporary
novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick briefly but importantly managed to, his
books unquestionably represent a significant literary and cultural layer to
those fraught histories.
We’ve got
a name for works of fiction that represent histories, of course, and for one of
the preeminent scholars of that genre Cooper was a truly towering figure: the
Russian critic Georg Lukács writes about Cooper a great deal (far more than he
does any other American writer, in fact) in his groundbreaking work The
Historical Novel (1955). Lukács traces the genre’s origins to the
English novelist Sir Walter Scott,
and sees Cooper (as Cooper
likewise saw himself) as Scott’s American heir and Natty Bumppo as a close
parallel to Scott’s most famous protagonist Edward
Waverly. And even for folks who aren’t the slightest bit interested in
either Georg Lukács or Walter Scott, I’d argue that we all remain fascinated by
the genre of historical fiction, as illustrated for example by two of the year’s
most popular TV shows, Shōgun and Bridgerton. No American author from
any period has been more interested in exploring how fiction can represent histories
than was James Fenimore Cooper, and so for literary and cultural as well as
historical reasons I believe it’s well worth wading into that challenging
prose.
Next
CanonStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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