Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

ALH Online Review, Series I 1
Gerald J. Kennedy and Jerome McGann, Eds. Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum
Print Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012). 272 pages.
Reviewed by Stephen Rachman, Michigan State University
If the proliferation of the prefix re- is any indication, then we are evidently living
in an age of reconsideration. The list of topics that scholars are “rethinking”
seemingly grows daily: Marxism, evil, world literature, class, the interior, society,
and representation, just to name a few. There is truly no end to what can be
rethought; we suppose that anything that we can think can be rethought, and
while there is an element of humility in all this critical belatedness, a sense that
we no longer work on tabula rasa over terra incognita, but that, in any
presentation of new work—whatever advancement it may claim—it is not a new
field per se but a new iteration. Remapping, the operative term and organizing
conceit in the rich collection of ten essays under consideration here, typically
occurs in our culture in the wake of changing political and social processes—
Congressionally mandated censuses, wars, revolutions, discoveries, and new
modes of imaging and perhaps imagining. The rationale for remapping literary
America in the 1830s and ‘40s under the pressure of an emergent, volatile print
culture veers toward the political and finds its justification not in our own critical
moment itself but in reappraising Edgar Allan Poe’s involvement with his own
times. By shifting the focus from “a cluster of luminaries in the Northeast” to
“the network of relationships, authorial and institutional, within a decentralized
system of distribution,” editors J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann propose
an altered literary map of antebellum America, flipping the cultural axis of
orientation from vertical to horizontal; and they propose in the figure of Poe an
“avatar of this horizontal culture,” a culture, which Meredith McGill described in
her influential 2003 study, as one of “reprinting” (3).
So US antebellum print culture alights on one of Deleuze and Guattari’s
thousand plateaus, and this horizontality has a rhizomatic feel to it, but just as
McGill’s work, which strenuously argued for the anonymity of reprint culture
but frequently oriented that argument around prominent authors, so that
invocation of the horizontal is immediately put into dialectical tension by the
perennially contradictory figure of Poe, notwithstanding the claims to his
embodiment of horizontal culture. As Leon Jackson demonstrates in his lively
essay “The Rage for Lions”—on Poe and the culture of celebrity—despite Poe’s
recognition of the variety and multiplicity of US literary activity, despite his
canny and churlish opposition to the literary coteries of Boston and other cities,
and despite his itinerant horizontal life in the “magazine prison-house,” he
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2 ALH Online Review, Series I
craved the vertical fame of authorship. In Scott Peeples’s essay “To Reproduce a
City,” one perceives in the literary concentration of Poe’s (and N. P. Willis’s and
L. M. Child’s) Gotham, an incipient and tumultuous verticality 40 years in
advance of its skyscrapers (120). In Kennedy’s essay on “Inventing the Literati”
(in 1846, Poe wrote a series of sketches of New York literary figures entitled “The
Literati of New York), as he charts the trajectory of Poe’s critical career toward
the centralization of literary power (in his own person as the would-be editor of
the never-to-be-published Stylus and in the city of New York), the commitment
to decentered literary landscape emerges almost as a side effect. In an
unpublished manuscript on “The Living Writers of America,” Poe left a note
“[T]here should be no nationality” in a truly National literary culture (27). It is
hard to say how much emphasis should be placed on such remarks, but they are
given provocative weight in this collection.
In a sense, this argument reprises Terence Whalen’s notion of Poe as the “Capital
Reader” from his seminal study Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (1999). Whalen
describes Poe gamely pursuing US mass culture, ready to keep pace with an
ever-expanding literary marketplace. In the face of the increasingly voluminous
and polyvocal quality of the public sphere, Poe insisted upon literary critical
sovereignty. Hence, the “Capital Reader.” Maurice Lee, in “Poe by the
Numbers,” an essay that attempts if not actually to map out Poe’s literary status
then to quantify and plot it by way of a database of the MLA International
Bibliography, remarks that Poe “presents himself as both a maven and a victim of
print culture. On the one hand, he displays an insider’s knowledge . . . of the
secret practices of the literary establishment. On the other hand, he presents
himself as an outsider” (233). One hears in Lee’s characterization an echo of
Whalen’s view of Poe’s career trajectory from “romantic outcast to editorial
entrepreneur.” And one hears it again, when Jackson describes Poe’s condition as
one of “status incongruence,” a condition that produced a literary and social
identity oscillating “between poles of acquiescence and estrangement,
engagement and resistance” (39). The problem of Poe as a figure simultaneously
representative and oppositional runs through many of the other engaging essays
in this collection, informing the other “cartographic” critical operations that it
seeks to deploy. The abiding power of Poe’s work (and his biography, for that
matter) remains in these contradictory fault lines; incongruity is, after all, at the
core of the grotesque. The cartographic horizontals and verticals in the US
literary landscape as viewed through the lens of Poe emerge from the
contradictory aspects of Poe’s authorial/critical persona and concomitant fault
lines that arise in his work.
ALH Online Review, Series I 3
Mapping Poe along cartographic horizontals reconfigures questions of
antebellum literary politics as well. If we are to align Poe with a decentered
culture because he opposed the literary establishments in Boston and to some
extent every other city he inhabited, how do we understand this alignment in
terms of the expansionist ambitions of the antebellum US? How does Poe’s
Whiggish conservatism (the Poe of the American Whig Review, the Poe tipsily
seeking a sinecure from the Tyler administration) square with the decentered
democratically oriented culture for which he is offered as avatar? One answer,
provided in Betsy Erkkila’s slyly titled analysis, “Perverting the American
Renaissance” (as to who is doing the perverting, Poe, F. O. Matthiessen, or
Erkkila herself, I leave it to the reader to judge), comes by way of a figure in Walt
Whitman’s “lurid dream” in Specimen Days (1882) that might stand for Poe: “On
a deck” of a tempest-tossed ship stood “a dim man, apparently enjoying all the
terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the center and the victim”
(68). Similarly, Eliza Richards’s essay on “Poe’s Lyrical Media” shows how
Whitman viewed “The Raven” as “a negative forerunner of Whitman’s positive
poetics” (202). For Erkkila, Whitman saw in Poe what Matthiessen refused to see
or willfully excluded: that Poe’s dissent from democracy (hostility in
Matthiessen’s estimation), like one of Walter Benjamin’s last angels of history,
placed him at the center of a dislocation, that is also part of and crucial to
understanding US democracy. If Erkkila pushes the argument too far (in this
reader’s opinion), implicating his antipathies toward Poe in Matthiessen’s 1950
suicide, she confronts with considerable force a central difficulty in locating the
dislocated political Poe within his writings.
Anna Brickhouse’s contribution, “Robert Greenhow, Poe, and the NineteenthCentury History of Transnational American Studies,” takes up a parallel concern,
providing an intriguing account of this historian for the US State Department in
the 1840s, who temporarily construed Poe’s “Journal of Julius Rodman” as an
actual historical account of western discovery. The motive for Greenhow’s
credulity was, in Brickhouse’s analysis, to test if a fiction could be passed off as
history in order to strengthen the US claims to the “Oregon country” (184).
Brickhouse speculates that Poe knew Greenhow and that in “Rodman” he
effectively “double-crossed” the historian and “the State Department by
producing an account that not only flaunted its own fictionality and lack of
authenticity on every page but also satirized the very context of imperial dispute
in which it had been commissioned to intervene” (184-85). In the RodmanGreenhow case, Poe’s mixture of vertical and horizontal properties makes him
something of a double agent in the project of Manifest Destiny.
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Not all of the essays collected here exhibit a consistent approach to mapping Poe
onto US political life in this way. In “Poe’s 1848,” Jennifer Rae Greeson interprets
Eureka as a projection of Poe’s anti-Transcendentalist literary politics in a time of
national expansion onto the cosmos. Taking her cue from Archimedes’ intuitive
discovery of the principle of specific gravity, Greeson asserts that Eureka “is,
indeed, a study in displacement—a study of the projection of a sectional struggle
for dominance out onto formerly Mexican territory” (137). It is a curious
planetarium in which the speculative cosmology of Poe is doubly displaced and
doubly projected: displacement of mass metaphorizes into projection, a
projection of a projection of Manifest Destiny.
This collection concludes with Jerome McGann’s call for US antebellum print
culture to enter “more comprehensive” digital “textual environments,” ones
that—in consistently paradoxical fashion with the premise of the collection—
move away from “author-centered or thematic approaches” with their limited
“self-centered” rationales (256). It is hard to get a clear picture of what kind of
digital archive McGann has exactly in mind, but he is surely pointing in the right
direction, as some new configuration of literary archives will surely emerge.
Since this reader has always suspected that homologies between the Internet and
print culture of the 1830s were always part of the presentist energies of this
literary critical movement, presentist energies that have yielded a productively
corrective vision of the past, this digital development would be something of an
apotheosis, print at the moment it vanishes into the digital horizon, authorship
disappearing into a sea of text, a website decentered yet localized, containing all.
This vision of course will require rethinking and a new map.