For our own part we confess that we do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first of all applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true? — true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women? This truth, which necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest artistry — this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot1 be weak. . .
(William Dean Howells, Editor’s Study, April 1887)

1Responding to a grumpy correspondent who demonized fiction and novel-writing in particular as the source of all evil, William Dean Howells, editor of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, struck up his plea for truth as the standard and mainstay of fiction in America. Faithful to the words of Gustave Flaubert, and his famous motto that “something that is true has to be good” (“du moment qu’une chose est vraie, elle est bonne”),2 Howells launched into the promotion of a morally and politically responsible fiction that would neither lie nor “misrepresent” human nature and the social fabric, but stick to the facts, however crude, rough and gray. William Dean Howells was well acquainted with his nation’s far-reaching distrust of the art of fiction and would not ignore the sulphureous fame of an artistry akin to the fictitious, the frivolous, and the false: “It comes to us from wherever men are at work, from wherever they are truly living, and accuses us of unfaithfulness, of triviality, of mere stage-play; and none of us can escape conviction except he prove himself worthy of his time — a time in which the great masters have brought literature back to life, and filled its ebbing veins with the red tides of reality.” (Editor’s Study 75) The true, then, would save fiction from itself, and, who knew, maybe even justify the advent of an American literature cleansed from the sins of deceit and free from the reproach of indifference to the matter-of-fact, down-to-earth, shabby-looking “American” reality.

2Howells’s way out, however, is more puzzling than it is definitive. Writing while traces of idealism were being supplanted by a nascent search for objectivity, Howells looked the other way and argued that the potent Nation-State coupling was not so much the warrant of truth as a challenge to true representation. For Howells, sponsor of local color literature as the only true American literature, the nation was to be represented from a particular angle, or rather, from the angle of the particular: “We for our part,” he states in his March 1912 Harper’s Monthly editorship, “do not believe that the novel of the United States ever will be, or ever can been written, or that it would be worth reading if it were written. In fiction, first the provincial, then the national, then the universal; but the parochial is better and more to be desired than either of the others.”3 So no less than the question of truth itself was being posed: how to represent the true, when truth itself could only be seen from an angle, through a glass, obliquely? “The true does not exist, there are only ways of seeing,” Flaubert had already exclaimed, in a half-jubilant, half-frightening aphorism.4 For Howells, the answer lied in a preposition (or pre-position): truth was not a question of “being true” but being true to.

1 A Native’s Privilege: the Angle of the Local

3Howells’s rethinking of the nature of truth may be best understood as a questioning of both idealism and positivism. His December 1887 Editor’s Study dramatizes the dangers of representation when it turns away from the real and yields to the sirens of the ideal. The hero of the article is a budding young writer learning the tools of the trade as he listens to a dialogue between a scientific observer and the voice of “wretched pedantry.” At the center of their attention lies a grasshopper.

I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Now don’t waste your time and sin against culture in that way. I’ve got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it’s a type. It’s made up of wire and cardboard, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it’s perfectly indestructible. It isn’t very much like a real grasshopper, but it’s a great deal nicer, and it’s served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You may say that it’s artificial. Well, it is artificial; but then it’s ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You’ll find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them.5

4A champion of realism, Howells waged war against the tendency in American letters to “idealize” or “take the life-likeness out of [one’s characters] and put the literary-likeness into them” and — the two go hand in hand — to “stand apart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority.” (ES) For the critic, life and experience were to take over types and imitation as the standards of the artist. The living, not the dead, was the realm of literature: the imperfect, peculiar, ready-to-hop grasshopper, not the “the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventurous, good old romantic card-board grasshopper.” (ES 112) Howells’s rejection here is twofold: on the one hand, he turns down the ideal grasshopper or the idea of a grasshopper — the grasshopper of books, as the pedant rightly advertises — the Grasshopper with a capital G, of which all living grasshoppers are only pale, imperfect replicas; on the other hand, Howells brushes aside the grasshopper “in general”, the typical grasshopper built out of the multitude of grasshoppers which hop alive and well throughout the American land. These are Howells’s true enemies, because they are still understood as truth when they are only its deceptive apparel. For Howells, truth does not dwell in the heavens of the Ideal nor can it be labeled and put into one of the scientist’s taxonomic boxes; truth emerges from experience, a particular experience that is no longer to be pitted against a hypothetical essence nor to be translated into a general law. Howells’s realism, if empirical, dismisses the statistical paradigm that was “the reigning methodology of American science”6 at the time. In an interesting, if daring, conflation, he scorns the ideal and the type. If, as has been proposed, Realism was conceived as the twin of positivism, Howells’s realism was an inflection of the genre. It did not yield to the fascination for a scientific monopoly on truth. Rather truth emerged from an experience at the intersection of the particular and commonplace. He rejected the heavens of the ideal and the abstract constructs of the type in favor of the little patch of earth around any willing observer of nature: “The American, no more than any other man, shall know himself from his environment, but he shall know his environment from himself. In the measure of his self-knowledge only shall he truthfully portray his neighbor, and he shall instinctively keep to his neighborhood, to his experience of it for his chance of knowledge beyond it.” (CF 346-47) Transcendent, scientific or in the service of the nation, the truth was inaccessible from above. It was grounded in the eye/I and thus located or local.

5For Howells, one’s field of vision was the measure of one’s access to truth. A partial view, in both senses of the term, was needed. The reader of local color stories knows only too well how meaningful a narrow window on the world can be, compared with the vast panorama offered by those in search of the “Great American Novel.” How many old women in how many local color stories hold to their own narrow angle of vision as the last bastion of their freedom, as their only grasp on life and truth? A blind spot for them is not so much cause for lament as something to be cherished. De-localizing such characters — what well-meaning members of the village community repeatedly endeavor to do in the hope of offering them a change of scenery, a wider perspective — is no more than a dead-end plot. Taking up these local color characters’ angles, Howells did not hesitate to translate “narrow” into a “thorough” non-panoptical truth of American literature:

But we do not by any means allow that this superficial narrowness is a defect, he responds to a reader reproaching American fiction for its slenderness, it is rather, for the present, a virtue. Indeed, we should call the present American work, North and South, thorough rather than narrow. In one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a “microcosm,” and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any bad sense be called narrow. . . .
(ES 96)

6Aesthetically speaking, the narrowness of the focus guaranteed the truth, the scope and the range of art. Widening the focus (what Howells presents as “a horizontal expansion”) would impair the resolution of the picture or, at least, generate distortion insofar as it would ask for an abstract scale — that of “classes” or “types”; “in a civilization like ours, [. . .] the differences are not of classes but of types, and not of types either so much as of characters.” (ES 97) The true literature of the modern age, and especially the true literature of America, would not be the “great American novel” but an episodic narration juxtaposing a series of particular angles and small perceptions. “Our novelists are each bound by the accident of birth to this locality or that,” Howells sneeringly concluded at the end of his March 1912 study, “and we do not believe we shall ever have a truly United States novel till some genius is born all over the Union.” (CF 349) The “accident of birth” meant the marriage of place and author which guaranteed the power of literature:

If they make it true, it will be large, no matter what its superficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make it big. A big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread of narrative, and there seems to be no reason why this thread must always be supplied. Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one of a connected group; the final effect will be from the truth of each episode, not from the size of the group. (ES 97)

7Just as Howells challenged the necessary homology between the size of America and the size of its literary representation, just as he mocked bird’s-eye renderings of the nation that located its truth in a “whole” constructed from above, he shrunk back from any Ariadne’s thread that would guide the reader through the maze of particular truths. Plot, for Howells and many of the local-colorists he promoted, spelled deceit. Just as it required abstraction from the center of perception, from the various down-to-earth particles of truth, it superimposed guidelines from outside, above.

8Local color stories are famously plotless. Sarah Orne Jewett, one of Howells’s protégées, flaunted her inability to build plots throughout her career, beginning with an oft-quoted 1873 letter to Horace Scudder, then assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly: “But I don’t believe I could write a long story as you and Mr. Howells advise me [. . .]. The story would have no plot. [. . .] I could write you entertaining letters perhaps, from some desirable house where I was in most charming company, but I couldn’t make a story about it [. . .].” (Sarah Orne Jewett Letters 6) Why Howells had asked the budding writer for a longer story has remained unclear, but one may be sure he didn’t ask for more plot. In 1877, he helped her publish her first book — Deephaven — out of a series of sketches without any concern for its plotlessness. As critics have long established, the alleged absence of plot in Jewett’s stories was less a deficiency than a choice — to be correlated with the regionalist distrust of an overall viewpoint.7 Her stories and so-called novels do not so much lack structure as hinge on a non-teleological composition of her own device. Hamlin Garland, Howells’s friend and himself admirer of Jewett, stated the same suspicion about plot, and denounced the collusion between plot and deceit in his 1893 Crumbling Idols: “To have the action spring from the characters is to destroy the traditional plot. It means to have individuals, not situations. It means that this is the farthest present remove from the immitigable doom in Aeschylus and the fixed complications of Shakespearian comedy. It destroys romantic plots and underplots [. . .].” (87) Plot is never far from plotting in Garland, who revives the word’s complicity with dubious entanglements, schemes and intrigues. “No complications, no external intricacies, nothing approaching a plot,” he explains. “The plan springs from the characters, and unrolls mysteriously, with all the unforeseen changes of life itself.” (83) Once acknowledged that truth can only be grasped from the angle of the individual, from the standpoint of the particular, it can no longer be part of a grand scheme contrived by any mastermind or Author; it is no longer predictable. For Garland, the surprise of truth never ends, truth is never “finished, rounded out and smoothed down.” Only Romance is. Truth ebbs and flows, and such cadence can only be, if not caught, at least embraced, from within.

9In the fourth chapter of The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett’s second book-length assemblage of sketches published in 1896, the narrator, a summer resident in the coastal village of Dunnet Landing, and would-be writer, fails to catch the “lovely summer cadences” (18) of the place. “At the School-House Window” (to quote the title of the chapter), overlooking the village from the teacher’s desk, she is unable to record the ebb and flow of life and death and feels estranged from the village community assembled for a funeral below. From her position of superiority — she keeps “call[ing] the bees to order” (18) with the teacher’s stick — she suddenly understands that her retreat, uphill, may well give her a bird’s-eye view of the village but will never help her to catch those appealing cadences and write truly. From the overarching viewpoint of the school-house, the natives look somewhat picturesque: the old Captain Littlepage “had the same ‘cant to leeward’ (16) as the wind-bent trees on the height above;” “he might have belonged with a simple which grew in a certain slug-haunted corner of the garden.” (17) Just as it quotes the native voice, the narration maintains a prophylactic distance through the use of inverted commas and roots the villagers in their soil, plants them in their locality. A would-be botanist or zoologist, she who does not “belong” to the same soil tries to classify them into new categories: the Captain, in her observing eyes, “looked like an aged grasshopper of some strange human variety.” (17) Here comes the grasshopper again ! However, the narrator’s attempt at subsuming the most particular under the category of the known, her translating the idiosyncratic into a type, is nothing but Howellsian and eventually spells failure. Something does not fit and the adjective “strange” reminds the reader of the uneasy concordance between the type and the real. The incomplete scene of writing of chapter 4 will send the narrator back to the village. Only from inside the village will she be able to grasp the truth of its locality, only when she has made herself at home in “some desirable house where [she] was in most charming company” — to quote Jewett’s letter to Scudder once again.

10For Jewett as for Garland or Howells, one cannot apprehend or comprehend the truth of a place from outside. Paradoxically enough, the attempt at a panoptic view only emphasizes what cannot be subsumed under its masterly span — a residuum, a remainder, that may also be understood as a blind spot. The truth of the place is such a remainder, which forbids any smooth translation of the particularity of the place into the concept. It is the untranslatable, the non-transferable — what cannot be extracted, abstracted from the place, de-localized and naturalized into a (universal) taxonomy. In Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, Captain Littlepage stands for such resistance, for the mystery of the local as local. He blows the narrator’s mind and pen because he does not fit into her language — the unmarked, non-dialectal language of the “center,” vehicle and crafter of universals or concepts. Only a glimpse of what the truth of the local could be winks at the reader at the joint between the picturesque cliché of the land-like character and the invention of a type; it beckons us from the markers of discrepancy: the inverted commas inserted in the narration (“cant to leeward”), the modal (“he might have belonged. . .”), the conjunction like. However, such experimenting with viewpoints never brings forth the truth, because the truth of the place, in Jewett and the other local color writers supported by Howells, is not a matter of experiment, but of experience. The telling (and writing) of truth demands the relinquishing of one’s external authoritative position in order to let “the gift of sympathy” — the phrase is from Willa Cather’s preface to her collection of The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (xii) — perform its office. “Trying this method and that” — Cather perceptively notes in her preface — is likely to result in a “brilliant sham”, and it is certainly not by chance that the image of the house crops up in Cather as it does in the work of Jewett: by “using his ‘imagination’” in his subject matter and “twisting it to suit his purpose”, the artist “can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby in a few years.” The so-called artist who builds a narrative as one would a cardboard theater set — with exquisite light effects and stage-managing — would no doubt befriend Howells’s pedant. The “cardboard grasshopper” and the house of sham come down to the same thing: they age badly. In the end, there is no “twisting” of the subject-matter in the hope of making it fit one’s ideal image, no “improvement.” To be true is to fall in love, even to die of love, says Cather.8 Lose grip and purchase on the world and let the story tell itself of its own accord, and, possibly, in its own words.

11Truth, then, is a matter of desire, of “teasing,” says Cather, quoting Jewett.9 Desire, however, is not lust; it does not spell possession, appropriation, but dispossession of oneself to let the thing “get itself put down rightly on paper.” Jewett knew how difficult it was to resist the appeal of appropriation and commodification in a time when things local were put on the market and offered in auctions by unscrupulous local color writers. She herself circulated her own stories of local Maine, and they sold well in the literary market orchestrated by William Dean Howells. But that is not how Willa Cather chose to advertise her prose — nor Howells, nor Jewett herself for that matter. Is it not striking that the narrator of Pointed Firs should introduce herself, in the first chapter, as “a lover of Dunnet Landing” (2)? “When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.” (2) Love is the condition of writing truly, to write “things as they are”.10 But if love is swift, it takes a life-time’s yearning to attain “true friendship,” to experience the sense of belonging that precludes any shameful craving for appropriation. “She once laughingly told me,” Cather reports in her preface, “that her head was full of dear old houses and dear old women, and that when an old house and an old woman came together in her brain with a click, she knew that a story was under way.” (xvi) “To tell things as they are,” it’s the “click” which sets the gears in motion. And then, one needs to have patience, and wait for the story to build itself, without expecting any return on investment. Cather goes on: “If a writer’s attitude toward his characters and his scene is as vulgar as a showman’s, as mercenary as an auctioneer’s, vulgar and meretricious will his product remain forever.” (xviii) The “desirable house” of the writer is a house of desire and “charming company,” a house one does not dress up or stage to sell but inhabits and shares with a loved one. From here the truth of the local may be, if not grasped, at least told, spoken, murmured.

12“You must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world. . .” (Fields, letter 144, 13 December 1908), Jewett once told budding novelist Willa Cather, echoing Henry James’s advice to herself after she had erred outside her “native pastures” into the intricacies of the historical romance.11 Edith Wharton had benefited from the same recommendation following her American exile in the publication of The Valley of Decision (1902), her novel about eighteenth-century Italy: she must “be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduce her to a back-yard in New York,” sharp-tongued Henry James had grumbled to Wharton’s sister-in-law.12 Indeed, turn-of-the century literature, and its keepers, wished to hear the local tale from the locals only. “This is, I believe, the essence of veritism,” Hamlin Garland stated in 1893. “Write of those things of which you know most, and for which you care most. By so doing you will be true to yourself, true to your locality, and true to your time.” (30) To be true is to be true to what you know intimately, what you care for, true to “the palpable present intimate” of Henry James. “The real utterance of a city or a locality can only come when a writer is born out of its intimate heart. To such a one, nothing will be ‘strange’ or ‘picturesque; ’ all will be familiar, and full of significance or beauty [. . .] It cannot be done from above nor from the outside. It must be done out of a full heart and without seeking for effect.” (Garland 59) Only a native, for Garland as for his mentor Howells, could make the text throb with truth, only by dipping one’s pen in his or her locality could the writer tell it truly. In turn-of-the century American literature, truth simultaneously bowed to relativism and essentialism: from the “native pastures” praised by Henry James to Garland’s definition of true literature as “a statement of life as indigenous as the plant-growth” (54) to Cather’s praise of Jewett’s characters as “people who grew out of the soil and the life of the country near her heart,” (xv) truth emanated from an intimate connection with the land; more specifically, it grew from a genealogical link that eschewed the tourist impostor. At the time when nativism was gaining ground in America, rooting truth in the native’s vision conjures up somber perspectives of exclusion as well as the danger of disruption and misunderstanding. Could a nation be built when truth could only be articulated in the native tongues of each of its localities? Was the miracle of a Pentecostal glossolalia the only way out? William Dean Howells took an active part in the rebuilding of the nation from the ashes of the Civil War; but he also defended the local as the only true perspective on America. Facing the practical dilemma of building a national whole out of local, idiosyncratic truths, his answer would hinge on the articulation between the particular and what he called “the common”. On his never-ending investigation of the principle of “acquaintance”, he offered a ceaseless search for a community built from a circulation of particularities.

2 In Search of the “Common: ” the True Particulars of the Nation

13When Federalist Noah Webster endeavored to build the American nation out of a plurality of localities, he unambiguously propounded to “demolish those odious distinctions of provincial dialects, which are the objects of reciprocal ridicule in the United States” (Webster 1783, 9). “Our political harmony is therefore concerned in a uniformity of language” was the motto of his 1789 Dissertations on the English Language. Facing a similar problem, several decades and a civil war later, William Dean Howells paradoxically proposed plurality, difference and particularity as the cement of the new nation to be rebuilt out of the shambles of an internecine conflict.

I should praise rather than blame [in American short stories] their free use of our different local parlances, or ‘dialects’ as people call them [. . .] and I will own that as I turn over novels [. . .] every local flavor of diction gives me courage and pleasure. [. . .] I should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents. (CF 64)

14For Howells, “the American” speaks in tongues, and no national literature in America would ever be true, were it to deny such plurality. The beauty of a decentralized country was not so much in its “uniformity” as in its multi-vocality inseparable from the voicing of local differences. “True American” was not to be found in a standard language devised by the literary center of the United States, “true American” was disseminated in all the different “local parlances” that imparted color and flavor to American literature. However much Howells believed in literature as the best tool to help the nation be born again as a whole, he refused to start from any ideal “nation-ness” nor from a “general utterance”: the truth of the bruised nation would emerge from its variegated voices, from its decentered and plural utterance.

It is true that no one writer, no one book, represents [American life], for that is not possible; our social and political decentralization forbids this, and may forever forbid it. But a great number of very good writers are instinctively striving to make each part of the country and each phase of our civilization known to all the other parts, and their work is not narrow in any feeble or vicious sense.
(Editor’s Study, September 1887, ES 98)

15Only a decentralized literature, a literature without a center, would be true to America, but Howells made it clear that such decentralization did not imply the nation’s collapse. Literature, however devoted to a parcel of the country (it could not be otherwise, and be true), was also devoted “to mak[ing] each part of the country [. . .] known to all the other parts.” Being true to one’s locality not only meant to be true to the whole but also to participate in the making of the whole.

16Howells starts from an a-priori: the basis of democratic America is likeness, not distinction. He states in his September 1887 Editor’s Study: “Men are more like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity.” (ES 96) A common ground will necessarily emerge since difference is but circumstantial in America. The condition, however, is that distinction be eradicated. Distinction, for Howells, who had not forgotten his Ohio rural background, meant difference insofar as it was manufactured by the few to set themselves apart from the vulgar. Distinction was artificial and hierarchical; it cut into common humanity — which was inherently plural, beautifully variegated — in order to secure for itself the largest share of power. Distinction went against the democratic principle; difference was its sine qua non, however challenging it might be. Howells no doubt saw an opening for the “vulgar many”, the “mass of men”, in a post-bellum America now vectorized toward the West, disencumbered of the New England aristocratic preemption on public life and literature. Evoking (somewhat hastily maybe) “the aristocratic spirit which is disappearing from politics and society, and is now seeking shelter in aesthetics,” Howells announced the realm of the common, which — unlike the “distinguished” that necessarily spelled fakeness — was the realm of the true: “The pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but as before, it is averse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise. It seeks to withdraw itself, to stand aloof; to be distinguished, and not to be identified. Democracy in literature is the reverse of all this.” (ES 96) Howells’s discourse failed to theorize, yet heavily relied upon, the articulation between the “common” or the vulgar, understood as the non-extraordinary, and the common ground, which in French may be translated into l’encommun (in common). Starting from the principle that democracy was the truth of America, that (class) distinction was a sham, Howells logically proceeded to state that a true representation of America would give voice to the vulgar, to the common man. Not that class distinctions did not exist in America — Howells, who long flirted with socialism, knew better than that — but he presented them as the product of artifice; they were not native to the American soil, he argued, they were not the truth of America.

Everything in England is appreciable to the literary sense, while the sense of the literary worth of things in America is still faint and weak with most people, with the vast majority who “ask for the great, the remote, the romantic,” who cannot “embrace the common,” cannot “sit at the feet of the familiar and the low,” in the good company of Emerson. We are all, or nearly all, struggling to be distinguished from the mass, and to be set apart in select circles and upper classes like the fine people we have read about. We are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore “the worth of the vulgar,” in believing that the superfine is better. (ES 101)

17Howells did not quote Emerson by chance. He acknowledged his debt to the Concord scholar more than once in his critical essays. Howells’s own attempt to locate the truth of America in the “familiar and the low” partook of the same claim for the artistic independence of America. The novel of manners, the paragon of which, for Howells, was the “English novel,” is presented here as a mere import, a poor fit in the United States for its dishonesty and unfaithfulness. Howells resorted here to a moral critique of such literature which tried to pass for something genuinely American but in fact put the natives in a false position vis-à-vis their own country. It stirred their desire for distinction when a native literature, true to America, should praise the vulgar, that absence of distinction that was distinctive of America. What Howells derided here was not the English novel of manners as such, but its role as a pattern for an American literature. His praise of the familiar and the low forbid the American artist from resorting to imitation. The common, the vulgar was always original.

18Taking up the logics of “The American Scholar,” Howells embraced the common as an alternative to European culture. The passage from Emerson read: “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.” (68) The great, the romantic are here clearly associated with “the remote,” be it in time or in space. No wonder Howells had nothing but the harshest words for the end-of-the century craving for historical romances13 that so often combined the two exoticisms, the double subordination to the foreign and the past. In asking for the common in literature on the contrary, he was asking for the American. Revising Henry James’s famous list of America’s flaws,14 of America’s poverty defined — however ironically — as an absence of history and class distinctions, Howells turned the list on its back, and transformed those flaws and lacks into America’s signature. In a purple-patch essay intended as a response to Matthew Arnold’s very Jamesian lament on America’s vulgarity, Howells turned the vulgar into the truth of America. “We are not picturesque and we are not splendid”, he chanted. “Our towns, when they are tolerably named, are not varied in their characteristics, and our civilization, as a means of pleasure to polite people of limited means and of sympathies narrowed to their own class, with the historic ideals of beauty and grandeur, is very much a failure.” (ES 143) But after acknowledging America’s “beggarly poverty” and “horrible vulgarity,” Howells shifted the gaze to find the truth of America in the very gesture of erasure: “Yet some good things we have done, some great things achieved, and among these is the abolition of that ‘distinction’ which Mr. Arnold found wanting in our life [. . .] it is his only stricture upon our conditions which we should gladly accept as true.” (143) Resorting to a revolutionary rhetoric, Howells overturned the nation’s self-definition and translated “less” into “more.”

19Such reversal of the gaze implied that he should modulate his very definition of truth. Truth became a “conviction,” a “protest.” It was not so much a tangible fact as a horizon — to be pursued:

If we have really got rid of distinction of the sort he seems to prize, we have made a great advance on the lines of our fundamental principles [. . .] Our own civilization, if we have a civilization of our own, is founded upon the conviction that any such distinction is unjust and deleterious, and our whole political being is a protest against it. [. . .]. One of the truths which Americans have always held to be self-evident was that a man, if he was honest, was not only privileged, but was in duty bound, to look other men in the face, with eyes as nearly upon the same level as congenital differences would allow. The fear with most Americans to whom this truth is precious has been that our social structure was not responsive to our political ideal [. . .].
(ES 143-144)

20Howells’s highly hypothetical rhetoric here does not so much spell triumph as a combination of “fear” and hope. In a rewriting of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, he reasserted the fundamental principle of equality — if only qualified by “congenital differences” — but he also voiced his concern that such “truth” was not yet “realized” but should remain a “conviction,” a “protest” and a projection. As the hammering of the present perfect reminds the reader, democracy may well have begun its office, but work still remains to be done. The next movement of the essay sounds like “wishful writing: ” “Somehow, the idea that we call America has realized itself so far that we already have identification rather than distinction as the fact which strikes the foreign critic in our greatness. Our notable men, it seems, are notable for their likeness to their fellow-men, and not for their unlikeness.” (144) What appeared an a-priori was in fact a projection — something to be pursued, however tentatively. Democracy is forever in progress, in the making, just as Art, literature, is the tool for such making. In other words, the truth of America, for Howells, is literature’s making.

Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, [. . .] it seems to us that these conditions invite the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new order of things [. . .] The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art [. . .]. (145)

21“Must: ” the injunction leaves no choice to the American artist and is the condition for the future, for the production of the future (“then we shall have. . .”). For Howells, the true representation of America was not so much a mimetic as a performative process. Once acknowledged that democracy is not prior to a given incarnation but performed in each moment, art keeps the revolutionary democratic process alive in America, reenacting over and again the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States as the democratic land of the common. Post-Civil War literature, in Howells’s agenda, reenacts the performative constitution of “We, the people” — to be translated, in Howells’s voice, into “We, the common, the ordinary people of America.”

22But to resort to the “common man” as the only mouthpiece and performer of truth in America is not so much a solution as a problem. The “common man” is no more ideal or typical than Howells’s grasshopper. His was a particular voice, and all the more so at the time when no center prevailed from which to see and to articulate the nation. “So far as I can see, we get further every day from having such a centre,” wrote Howells in Literature and Life. “The fault, if it is a fault, grows upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life is centrifugal, and just so far as literature is the language of our life, it shares this tendency.” (174) After the Civil War, the idea of a hegemonic center that could define Americanness held no longer. Any attempt to turn the common into a concept was an estrangement from truth. Truth was to be found in “the very material which he [the American youth] could best handle, which he knows most about, and which he really loves most, asserted Garland” (10), who then deplored the tendency of the artist — even the Western artist, blinded by instruction — to neglect “to see the beauty and significance of life near at hand.” Truth dwells in the “near at hand” (or what others would soon refer to as zuhanden). The artist’s abode was what he could best “handle.”

The Western youth, like the average school-bred American, [. . .] feels bound to falsify in regard to his real mind. As a creative mind, he lacks the courage to honestly investigate his surroundings, and then stand by his judgment. [. . .] Art, they think, is something far away, and literary subjects must be something select and very civilized. And yet for forty years an infinite drama has been going on in those wide spaces of the West, — a drama that is thrilling, as full of heart and hope and battle, as any that ever surrounded any man. (Garland 13)

23To be true to America, one has no choice but to be true to one’s immediate surroundings — what is around the focal point, circumscribed by his or her gaze. To find the common — what we all have in common, what we share with the vulgar —, the artist has to stay local and trust the eye/I as far as he or she can see, and trust her hand and her pen as far as she can reach, and no further. Truth therefore is circumscribed, and circumstantial. Its condition of emergence is the circle of the eye, the span of the arm. For Howells too, who shared such conviction with his disciple Garland, “the I is the first circle,”15 but the Howelsian circle had lost the Emersonian eccentricity. Truth lay not so much in an endless expansion from ring to ring, in a ceaseless rushing outwards that allowed the eye/I to encompass the whole, as in the multiplication of centers of perception. “One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a literature of our own, we have no literary centre,” he states at the very beginning of his essay “American Literary Centers.” (Literature and Life) Drawing a parallel with the political organization of the United States, Howells claims that a true American literature, a literature true to America, can only be a literature of many centers, and he enumerates the first two historical centers, Boston and Philadelphia, their successor, New York, their challenger, California, the new-comer, Chicago — only to conclude on a fruitful dissemination that is by far the best that can happen to a democratic nation. “I do not attempt to say how it will be when, in order to spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred at some capital,” Howells sneeringly goes on (174). If the increasingly imperialist America of the 1890s “shall be politically centred at some capital,” democratic America, on the contrary, is centrifugal and cannot be expressed from one locus only. No city-capital, no city with a capital C, can represent it as its generality, nor as an incarnation of American-ness. The America of the common man, true America, must be plural like the common man, and only local fiction could give it true expression. “Local color means national character”, summarized Garland (53). The truth of the nation lies in its different local colors, it emerges from non-concentric circles whose only communality resides in what Howells called “sympathy of point of view,” or what we could call the desire to be true to.

24Embracing as one the aesthetic and the political, Howells took Mary E. Wilkins’s collections of local color stories as an example of a structure that held together without relying on one center. Even if “each sketch is like the sentences of Emerson, ‘an infinitely repellent particle” (ES 97), structural unity is not missing, Howells insists: what provides unity is community, not community of action which is another name for plot, but “unity of point of view.”

It might all have been done otherwise; the lives and fortunes of these villagers might have been interwoven in one texture of narrative; but the work would not necessarily have gained breadth in gaining bulk. [. . .] It has unity of spirit, of point of view, of sympathy; and being what the author intended, we ask no other unity of it; many “broader” views lack this unity which is so valuable. (ES 97)

25If what guides the narrative voice in each sketch is “sympathy” for her material, then each story will be true, and out of these particles of truth — however heterogeneous, non-concentric — a true whole can emerge. Difference, then, is not a problem. Provided that whatever the “I” grasps within the circumscription of the eye be handled with sympathy, difference even qualifies as an asset. “It is the difference that interests us,” says Garland. “the similarities don’t please, do not forever stimulate and feed as do the differences. Literature would die of dry rot if it chronicled the similarities only, or even largely.” (49) The common, then, is not the result of similarities. It arises from the chronicle of differences and emerges from distinct points of view. “The charm of Horace is the side light he throws on the manners and customs of his time,” Garland provocatively goes on. “The vital in Homer lies, after all, in his local color, not in his abstractions.” (49) For once the masters of the past knew better, they did not seek the concept. They never sought more than their partial vision, they rooted their pen in the local. The Romans and the Greeks might well be praised for their invention of universals; Garland turns the theory upside down and cites them as the paragons of the cult of the particular. He makes them the first local color artists ever.16 But Horace’s “side-light” and Homer’s angle are not a fault or a restriction. They do not preclude truth; they are the condition of truth. “The sun of truth strikes each part of the earth at a little different angle; it is this angle which gives life and infinite variety to literature.” says Garland (21) Unlike its Emersonian avatar, circumscription then is not to be feared as would be a circle of stone — immovable, impassable. It is no mortal confinement. Rather, it offers the possibility of an angle and allows each one of us to throw one’s particular side light on the familiar, the common, the low. “There’s a certain slant of light. . .” wrote Emily Dickinson.17 For Garland and Howells, truth lies in that slant, that obliqueness, that angle. To be sure, truth is a liar, for any change of position will have an incidence on one’s vision. The astronomers call it “parallax.” To correct such “internal difference” within truth, Emerson suggested eccentricity — displacing the focus or purchase on the world outside the circle, reaching out. “Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle, through which a new one may be described,” he writes in “Circles.”

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. [. . .] we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star.
(Emerson 408-409)

26Emerson’s solution to the bias born of circumscription is the ceaseless eccentric movement of the eye/I, its constant seeking for another “purchase” outside the first circle. For the New England scholar, the self-reliant man, the American, is he for whom the field itself is expanding with the expansion of the I’s circumscription, he for whom the inmost is the outmost. At the end of the century, however, the bias is no longer to be dispensed with. For Howells as for Garland, the relative purchase is the condition of true vision and the multiplicity of focuses, the circulation of viewpoints, their answer to parallax.

27Unlike Noah Webster or Jedediah Morse, his partner geographer who drew the first maps of the United States as a whole, neither Howells nor Garland searched for the point from which to see the whole or the language in which to tell the whole and truth of the nation. In turn-of-the century America, truth contained a margin of error; it acknowledged its own obliquity; it added a particle, a remainder, to its name — “to” — as in “in relation to” but also as in “towards.” “To” both spells relation and desire, a tension “towards.” Representing true America, or truly representing America (which might be a fair definition of one of the goals of democracy) no longer relies on the transcendent and the objective. In turn-of-the century America, Democracy, as truth, emerges from desire: it is an approach towards and an approximation. Ever in the making, it is, I would argue, a fiction.

3 Relating America: the Democratic Fiction, or the “un-place-able common”

28At the end of the century no voice, however self-reliant,18 could represent/constitute America. The making of America was a “making up”. It demanded a plurality of “common men,” a multiplicity of truths understood as “truths to” — to being the meeting-point of an angle and a circumscription. But while truth was necessarily located for Howells or Garland, what we have “in common” cannot be. The “in common” could only be performed through an American fiction. This American fiction, I would propose, is what William Dean Howells put forward as the horizon of literature: a relation of America that would constitute America as relation. What is at stake in this fiction of America or America as fiction is the building of a democratic basis for representation.

29Howells’s plan to reconstruct the nation after the Civil War was akin to a literary healing process: promoting and circulating local color literature was supposed to help (re)-create connections between the different sections or localities of the nation. As an editor of the influential Atlantic Monthly, he proposed to relate the different parts of the country, to make them acquainted. Sarah Orne Jewett was a young writer searching for a publisher at the time. In her 1893 preface to Deephaven — which Howells had helped her edit and publish in 1877, she recalled: “Twenty years ago, [. . .] crowded towns and the open country were to be brought together in new association and dependence upon each other. It appeared as if a second Harvey had discovered a new and national circulation of vitality along the fast-multiplying railroads that spun their webs to bind together men who had once lived far apart.” (31) As pendular migration from city to country created “a new and national circulation” throughout the nation, the young writer, inspired by her editor, tried to make the most of it and — through her fiction as much as in her fiction — “make the people of [her] state acquainted with one another.” Choosing as narrator a young Bostonian whose aunt owned a house in the coastal village of Deephaven, Jewett explored her encounter — then slow acquaintance with — the “rural Other” through a series of shifts in angles of vision. At the beginning of the tale, Helen, the narrator, saw the truth from her own place and according to a certain angle. Changing places, traveling to Deephaven, allows her — as well as the (urban?) reader — to try another perspective, to enter another epistemological circle. When the tale comes to an end, Helen, back in the city — or the reader, from the desk he or she might not even have left — will have experienced another “angle of truth.” Their own circumscribed vision will be completed or challenged by the natives’ — or at least something approaching the natives’ — point of view.

30What Deephaven and its fiction of a migrant viewpoint allows for is the creation of an “in-common.” The passage from one circle to the other, from one epistemological system to the other, prepares for the making up of the nation as a whole. For Jewett as for Howells, the whole of the nation will not to be grasped from one local angle anymore than from a stable, overtopping, point of view: the whole of the nation, or the nation as a whole, is built up by such circulation or flux, such relation-making which is the privilege of local color fiction. To paraphrase Henri Bergson, himself a contemporary of Howells, Garland and Jewett, the whole (of the nation) resides in the flux of its becoming whole, not in the sum of its constituents.19 Following the Howellsian principle through her deft handling of viewpoints, Jewett implements a pragmatist conception of the nation.

31In Fictions du pragmatisme, David Lapoujade thus encapsulates the pragmatist vision of the whole:

Il n’y a rien dans l’univers qui soit absolument isolé, séparé. Cela ne veut pas dire que les relations forment un Tout achevé et clos sur lui-même dont il serait imposssible de sortir. C’est même le contraire: il est impossible d’enfermer les relations au sein d’un Tout achevé puisque le Tout n’est rien d’autre que la relation elle-même en train de se faire, de tisser ses innombrables fils dans toutes les directions.
(Lapoujade 9)

32Such “relation in the making,” the pragmatist definition of the whole, is made possible by pendular movements, migrations — either literal (the peddler, for example, is a favorite figure of local color stories) or figurative. In that sense, the reader or implied reader’s figurative migrations partake of the same process of relation-building, of the building of the nation. What Cather called “the gift of sympathy” — that which enables the reader to stay where she is, within her own circle, and still commune with another circle — fashions the web of the story, and of the nation. Sympathy, a key agent of pragmatism, is not so much a process of becoming as a process of adjustment — tuning oneself into, without yielding one’s individual voice to the Other. It requires that one remain true to oneself while being true to what or who the Other is. It is a migration, not an alienation — it is “the relation in the making,” allowing for making links and creating the condition for the passage via the fiction of the “in common.”

33“Find your own quiet center of life,” Jewett advised young Willa Cather in one of her last letters, “and write from that to the world.” Unsurprisingly enough, one of the most significant local color writers of her age advised the younger writer to be centered somewhere she knew, in a place she cared for. Yet, Jewett’s piece of advice goes beyond the mere suggestion of “rooting one’s gaze: ” “you don’t see yet [your equipment] quite enough from the outside,” she goes on, “you stand right in the middle of each of them when you write, without having the standpoint of the looker-on who takes them each in their relations to letters, to the world.” Truth may well emerge from the insider’s point of view, but writing will not, insofar as writing — as both Jewett and Howells believed — is the building of an “acquaintance: ” between a reader and a writer, between different worlds and different angles of truth. Deephaven or The Country of the Pointed Firs both dramatize this tension (to) between an insider and an outsider’s points of view, this “pang of sympathy” or ever-thwarted desire to be “one” — to make the two circles, and the two angles, coincide.

34When the narrator leaves Dunnet, in the last chapter of The Country of the Pointed Firs, she has come close to “belonging,” yet her desire remains intact, never quite fulfilled. “At last I had to say good-by to all my Dunnet Landing friends, and my homelike place in the little house, and return to the world in which I feared to find myself a foreigner.” (208) Dunnet is “homelike” — a suffix which simultaneously tells of the desire to belong and the grief of estrangement. I would propose that the truth of the place, and the truth in the writing of the place, lies in that tension and is conveyed in such a particle: like, a copula that nonetheless gestures towards a hiatus. If truth is a matter of desire in Jewett’s texts — the desire to dwell, to belong — such desire is both the drive and the failure of writing. In chapter XI of Pointed Firs, the narrator not only experiences the click between a dear old house and a dear old woman; in sharp contrast to her first attempts at getting to the truth of the place from the schoolhouse window, she also finds within the place the “right” angle from which truth can “get itself put down rightly on paper.” Or at least she thinks she does.

[Mrs. Blackett’s] hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest’s pleasure, — that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one’s own life that can never be forgotten. Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading, and my hostess held the golden gift. Sympathy is of the mind as well as the heart, and Mrs. Blackett’s world and mine were one from the moment we met. (73)

35The product of “sympathy” is a common place — a place to be shared, lived in common. “Mrs. Blackett’s world and mine were one: ” “One” here encapsulates the utopic place of fusion between two worlds — that of the narrator, that of the native —, the perfect coincidence between two concentric circles which makes translation superfluous. Once the narrator is allowed not merely to watch at a distance but to share the most intimate place in Mrs. Blackett’s house, the narration somehow fails to stick to the genre scene typical of local color fiction: “There was a worn red Bible on the light-stand, and Mrs. Blackett’s heavy silver-bowed glasses; her thimble was on the narrow window-ledge, and folded carefully on the table was a thick striped-cotton shirt that she was making for her son.” (84) There no doubt remains something of the ethnographic caption in the depiction of Mrs. Blackett’s bedroom as “a New England period room.” Jewett’s readers might have seen the likeness of it in the brand new regionalist museums where the emphasis was increasingly laid on the intimate relation between body and artifacts away from the traditional taxonomic classification. In Jewett’s depiction of Mrs. Blackett’s bedroom, as in other period rooms, things gain meaning not so much through their belonging to types as through their attachment to a place, a person. They make sense for the narrator insofar as they have been in contact with Mrs. Blackett’s hands and still bear the trace of such contact with “the native”. Substantives do not so much point to a category, they are all inflected, qualified, in order to express attachment. The Bible is “worn” — it has been used, touched again and again; the glasses are “Mrs. Blackett’s” and the thimble itself is qualified by the possessive “her;” even the cotton shirt is marked by a restrictive relative clause (“that she was making for her son”). By contrast, the end of the paragraph can dispense with such markers of attachment. A definite article is now enough: “the rocking-chair,” “the little brown bedroom,” “the quiet outlook.” This shift, I would argue, is what debunks, or at least questions, the genre scene.20 It is the trace of an “in common.” Unlike the prior markers of attachment that unambiguously assigned one thing to one person, “the,” as “one” a few lines earlier, helps build the “place in common: ” its double-reference (both to Mrs Blackett and to the narrator who has now taken place in her host’s rocking-chair) blurs the boundaries between the insider and the outsider. Not only is the narrator invited to share the view, and the viewpoint — “‘Come right in, dear,’ [Mrs. Blackett] said. ‘I want you to set down in my old quilted rockin’-chair there by the window; you’ll say it’s the prettiest view in the house’” (84) — when she sits in the old rocking-chair, she is also initiated in the native’s way of seeing. “Those dear old fingers and their loving stitches, that heart which had made the most of everything that needed love ! Here was the real home, the heart of the old house on Green Island !” Distance gradually diminishes: from “those” and “that” to the triumphant, though subdued, “here.” Sitting in Mrs. Blackett’s seat, the narrator has not so much conquered a place as nestled in a new “home.” “I had been living in the quaint little house with as much comfort and unconsciousness as if it were a larger body, or a double shell, in whose simple convolutions Mrs. Todd and I had secreted ourselves,” the narrator remarks a propos her lodger’s house in the following chapter (86). However much she is ready to defend her shell against strangers, the narrator has not yielded to the temptation of appropriation, rather, she has abandoned herself to the delights of convolution. To tell the truth of the place, to tell things as they are, the narrator has to trade the lofty authorial stance of the schoolhouse window, the exterior stance of the museum or tourist observer, for the secret organic convolutions of a “desirable house” wherefrom she can write to the world. But can she really? Doesn’t she have to leave Dunnet in order to write the book entitled The Country of the Pointed Firs? The narration at least suggests as much: writing is a host’s privilege, more than a native’s. Only he or she who has “come away” and longs to “come back” can find the angle — however unstable, fluctuating or migrating — from which to write. Only a host can, and to be a host — i.e. to be treated like a native but never really as a native — one has to remain a stranger somehow.

36What Pointed Firs describes is the migrant part of the “I”/the narrator without which there is no sympathy, no writing. Without such desire of “being one,” sentences fail to crop up; but, without the unbridgeable distance constitutive of being a host, no tale can be told that tells the truth. Whenever the text verges on fusion, distance has to be reinjected for the sake of writing and for the sake of the relation itself. The truth of a relation, Pointed Firs suggests, can only be in the making. If to be true is “to be true to,” then truth is never achieved, completed. Truth is not so much a matter of “contact” as of proximity and approximation. “Tact is a kind of mind-reading. . .,” realizes the narrator when sitting in Mrs. Blackett’s rocking-chair: close yet at a distance. You cannot write from the solid ground of the coast nor from far off on the ocean, but only from the boat that approaches the harbor, endlessly wavering towards “home”. In Jewett as in Emerson, it is impossible to put your hand on the real, to grasp or “catch” the truth because the truth lies in the movement, the tension to, the desire to grasp that is ever again thwarted by what Emerson calls “the lubricity of objects” (“Experience” 473),21 or what we could call “the lubricity of place” in turn-of-the century regionalist writing. To take up Howells’s challenge of building up America out of the multitude of “angles of truth,” one has to locate oneself at the point of articulation, at the joint which in Jewett is more like a gray zone where the I/eye ebbs and flows within the space of approach or approximation. “An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with,” Emerson writes, somewhat gloomily, in “Experience” (473). It is not by chance if Pointed Firs begins and ends with the ebb and flow of the sea, which separates but also relates the narrator and the place that she aims at and wishes to converse with. The sea is that gray zone or joint between the insider’s and the host’s “angle of truth.” Its pulsation, its cadence, may well be where the truth of the nation lies — as far as it is the truth of a relation in the making, of America as a fiction.

37“The sun of truth strikes each part of the earth at a little different angle; it is this angle which gives life and infinite variety to literature,” said Hamlin Garland. These many angles are also what gives life to a democratic representation of the nation as a whole and from their articulation America arises as a possibility of “true to’s.” The truth of America as a whole, in the world of Howells, is the truth of a relation in the making. It is the miracle of an everongoing acquaintance — to take up a term cherished both by Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett — a way of relating particular truths or loyalties to particular angles of truth. Such a relation or relation-making, Howells reveals to us, can only be a fiction performed from within the gap that lies in between the particular circles of apprehension, or what Emily Dickinson referred to as the “internal difference where the meanings are.” Truth, the truth of the Nation, emerges from the challenging beauty of non-coincidence. As a non-coincidence, it never finds its resolution — nor should find it — but is forever kept alive by the tension called “sympathy.” Fiction, then, such fiction as advocated by Howells in his critical writings, is appointed the never-ending task of unfolding and performing democratic America from the multiplicity of its particular localities. By turning the most particular into the “common ground,” by favoring the angle of the particular as the main focus for building the democratic nation, Howells’s vision defies the logics of parallax, his perspective scoffs at the imperative of correction and locates the “un-place-able common” in the tension and relation to, not the smooth perfection of a central and stable figure.

38Slavoj Zizek has recently suggested in The Parallax View that “truth” is located in the “trou,” the gap which takes place in the interplay between perspectives: there lies the un-place-able “common,” le “peuple introuvable,”22 the only legitimate basis of democracy. Today as in turn-of-the century America, the parallax, then, might not be a way of reestablishing the truth of the whole once the different angles of truth have been taken into account. The parallax, Howells is our witness, is a way of telling the truth, the truth of the whole, nothing “the truth. . . but” of the nation, from that highly unstable and movable point of perspective that is itself a relation: to.