M&D: Cowart article/ch.35

[Michael Crowley]

A few weeks ago someone mentioned David Cowart's recent article in
American Literature, "The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon."  I just got
around to reading it and found it pretty interesting overall.  However,
his reading of the outer frame discussion of history and novels at the
beginning of chapter 35 has me a bit confused.

Cowart writes (in part):

	...the historian pursues an unltimately chimerical objectivity, a
spurious grail.
	Hence, in chapter 35, the debate regarding distinctions between
history and romance.  Wicks speaks here for the metahistorical
perspective, as his listeners articulate the commonsense objections.  Mr.
LeSpark, for example, quotes the Great Lexicographer: "Dr. Johnson says
that all History unsupported by contemporary Evidence is Romance" (351).
When his brother, the bibulous Ives, delivers himself of a tirade against
novels, the new form that outromances the romance, one recognizes an
inchoate syllogism that seks to disparage the historical novel--Mason &
Dixon for example--as little more than an oxymoron.  Wicks however,
dismisses the earnest pursuit of unitary truth and mischievously suggests
that the greater the element of romance, the better the history.  He
rejects the sober fact mongering of a Gibbon in favor the richer,
paradoxically less deluded homages to Clio that Herodotus wrote--and in
later ages Sir John Mandeville, Captain John Smith, and Baron Munchausen.
Wicks, like Aristotle, values history only insofar as it allies itself to
the insights of poetry or, more broadly, literature.  "Who claims Truth,
Truth abandons" (350), he declares, articulating a kind of parallax view
of history.  By implication, Truth creeps in where the imagination
reigns--especially imagination of multiple perspectives.  At its best,
historical fiction allies itself to that search for the miraculous so
inimical to the logocentric pretensions of the Enlightenment.  If this is
history as carnival, history constantly threatening to "converge to Opera
in the Italian Style" (706), it is also the history that Wicks can
characterize as a record of humanity's "Hunt for Christ" (75).-- [American
Literature, June 1999, p. 358]


I agree in general, though not in all details, with the point Cowart
focuses on: this idea of the impossibility of discovering the
objective Truth or of constructing a "true" history. That's pretty
obvious and nothing new.  But am I missing something, or does he
mistakenly assign all of Ethelmer's lines to Wicks?  Only Ives's lines are
tagged in the text, so perhaps anyone could be speaking them, but when we
get to Ives's response to "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons," we get,
"'Hogwash, Sir,' Uncle Ives about to become peevish with his Son[...]" he
then calls the other speaker "young Pup" and "Ethelmer": 
"'Ethelmer.' Ives raises a monitory Eye-brow. 'Time on Earth is too
precious.  No one has time, for more than one Version of the Truth." (350)

If memory serves, these lines were read as Ethelmer's during MDMD.  The
sentiment expressed is certainly in synch with Wicks's attitude towards
history (as seen in the ch 35 epigraph, "Facts are but the Play-things of
lawyers--[...]).  But even though this is how he feels, Wicks wouldn't
express himself so directly at this point, having early been reminded of
his role as Scheherezade and also having recently encountered Wade's
sarcasm on the topic of killing Indians.  Also, the argument sounds much
more like that of a father and son, the younger and older generations each
thinking they know it all... And Ethelmer has already demonstrated his
lack of restraint with his heretical comments on Our Saviour (ch 7).
	What makes these comments on history even more interesting is that
even as Ethelmer seems to express an attitude towards history very
similar to Wicks's, Wicks is so concerned about and fearful of
where Ethelmer's thoughts are headed (away from Christ).

I've reread the first few pages of ch 35 a few times, and they only make
sense if it's Ethelmer arguing with his father.  Any ideas on how this
scene should be read?
--Mike

Mike Crowley
------------
crowley at arches.uga.edu