Essay: Donoghue disputes the 'classic' status of five of the United States' most cherished works.
This book, as its subtitle makes clear, is a response to the five American "classics" - Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Leaves of Grass, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - so handsomely depicted on its cover. It is a subjective response unashamedly conditioned by the writer's own history and the historical circumstances in which it is written. Denis Donoghue's latest work is composed in the shadow of what he rightly sees, and forthrightly condemns, as a disastrous turn in American foreign and domestic policy - and it is in part the product of his worry that what has happened is not just an aberration due to the presence in power of George Bush and his associates, but is rather something more deeply engrained in the American psyche, something with which these works may be to some degree complicit.
So the book's purpose is to examine the standing of these five works in the US of today, to see whether their "classic" status (which by definition connotes endurance) can survive the possible uses to which they might be put, or the possible questions that might be asked of them, at the present juncture.
Donoghue begins with two declarations that might seem something of a handicap to his project: firstly, his discovery, on inquiry among his New York graduate students, that by and large they had not read the works in question, though they held them in some kind of distant reverence; and secondly, the disclosure, made again with characteristic and commendable frankness, that he himself does not take any excessive pleasure in these works. He would prefer to reread The Portrait of a Lady or Blood Meridian over The Scarlet Letter, or The Education of Henry Adams over Walden. Nonetheless, these five still seem to him to mark a shared cultural experience, "something in which American society is otherwise impoverished"; moreover, they seem to compel and demand a slow, careful reading, which is a healthy antidote to the dominance of the image and of instant information over American culture at this time. (One might perhaps point to the proliferation of reading groups and to institutions such as the Oprah Winfrey book club as a counter-argument, but Donoghue does not advert to these.)
Oddly enough, the unpropitious conditions under which this inquiry begins do not turn out to be fatal. Donoghue has often been at his best in oppositional mode, engaged in strenuous argument rather than in detached exposition. Here, dealing with writers all of whom, to a greater or lesser degree, make him uncomfortable, he produces a more lively, engaging discourse than in Words Alone, his study of TS Eliot, a writer of whom he thoroughly approved. The book is, however, subject to contradictory impulses, oppositions within oppositions: Donoghue is opposed to current US policy, but he is also opposed to the appropriation of these works for propaganda purposes, even for a cause he endorses. Moby-Dick is the most obvious example, and Donoghue strives valiantly, but ultimately, I think, in vain, to rescue the novel from the allegorical reading that now seems almost too evident, too blatant.
A different kind of oppositional principle is at work in the chapter on The Scarlet Letter. All the romance, all the magic of Hawthorne go out the window in this Lenten sermon of a reading. Donoghue is scandalised that Hawthorne can use such terms, and deploy such concepts, as "guilt", "sin" and "retribution", without being really serious about them in the way that Donoghue understands them. Hester's transgression is merely social; she has no sense, and the text implies no sense, that she has broken God's law, is in a state of sin. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Donoghue is applying to this book values and concepts that are alien to it and to which it is radically opposed. Ironically, of all the works in this wild bunch, The Scarlet Letter is the only perfect work of art; indeed, it is possibly the only perfect work of art in American fiction until Henry James - and yet it is the text that Donoghue finds most irritating.
The other readings - of Walden, Leaves of Grass and Huckleberry Finn - are less contentious, but continue to resist any unqualified sense that these are unquestioned masterpieces. Ultimately, Donoghue does not, if I read him right, hold these books responsible for the pass that the US has come to, but he does believe that they "do not offer any resistance to the determination of American culture to go for power, conquest, the empire of globalization". Other books do, but they are not American classics, and that for Donoghue is exactly the point. The classic status accorded to these works is for a reason, and not a very good one.
This is, then, a rather sad, rueful work, the product of a critic renowned for his devotion to and expertise in American literature, who yet finds some of the acknowledged masterworks of that literature wanting in crucial respects. Ever since his memoir Warrenpoint (1990), Denis Donoghue's work has very often contained an autobiographical element. This book, as its subtitle makes clear, is no exception - it is everywhere in the reading of The Scarlet Letter, for instance. But a more positive, and far more affecting, autobiographical aspect comes through in the writer's continuing devotion to a group of critics - Eliot, Leavis, Empson, Winters, Blackmur, Burke - who animated his early experience of literature and to whom he remains defiantly committed.
Terence Killeen is an Irish Times journalist. He is the author of Ulysses Unbound (2004, reissued 2005)
The American Classics: A Personal Essay By Denis Donoghue Yale University Press, 295pp. £16.95