Quentin Anderson, _The Imperial Self_; Peter Nadas, _Book of Memories_, part two

THE REFERENCE TO Quentin Anderson's 1971 book in Jonathan Sturgeon's article on Franzen et al. inspired me to find it, and it was worth the trouble. Focusing on Emerson, Whitman, and Henry James, Anderson finds in the American literary canon a lack of interest in or attention to what he variously calls association, community, relationship. In analyzing this tendency, he mentions individualism (citing Tocqueville several times) and narcissism (citing Freud numerous times), but his analysis is not theory-driven or programmatic so much as it is based on close reading and (occasionally) biographical particulars.

Anderson respects all three writers and obviously spent a lot of time on them, but he sees their fascination with a kind of self-sufficiency, or willed apartness from others, or refusal to acknowledge even any deep need of others as a limitation and a problem.

Part of his thesis is that this strand in the cable of the canon regrettably disables some of its political potential. This point could get a lot of traction these days, I think, but there may be a hurdle to its wider circulation in the way Anderson frames it. See if you can spot the problem:

These three [Emerson, Whitman, James] have a profound extrasocial commitment: their imaginative work ignores, elides, or transforms history, politics, heterosexuality, the hope for purposive change. (viii)

One does not see "heterosexuality" on the same side of the ledger as "hope for purposive change" these days, but heterosexuality is one of Anderson's images of the genuine engagement with the other that progressive politics require.

That blind spot could put a hitch in the stride of the Anderson revival, but I think he has a point in arguing that classic American tends to sideline the power of community.

The most memorable for me of the many memorable scsnes in Nadas's The Book of Memories takes place in the central square of Budapest at the time of the 1956 uprising. The narrator is caught up in the crowd, in the crowd's growing awareness of its own potential--which had a tragic outcome, in this instance, but was nonetheless real:

In those early evening hours the crowd had not yet swallowed me up, made me disappear within it, trampled me underfoot, or taken away my personality as it did so often afterward, but generously allowed me to experience--in the most elementary condition of my body's life, in the act of movement--my kinship with others, what is common to us all, let me feel that we were part of one another and that, all things considered, everyone is identical with everyone else, and rather than all this making the crowd faceless, as crowds are usually described, I received my own face from the crowd just as I gave it one myself. (487)

Classic American lit, for all our celebration of democracy, has few such moments. Ishmael squeezing spermaceti, maybe?