Grizzly @ Adams

Early in The American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis wrote that

narrative art inevitably...stains ideas with restless ambiguity. For the experience of the aims and values of an epoch is apt to be more complex and even more painful than the simple statement of them; and narrative deals with experiences, not with propositions. The narrative art, moreover, dramatizes as human conflict what is elsewhere a thoughtful exchange of ideas; and art projects — in a single packed dramatic image — conflicting principles which the discursive mind must contemplate separately and consecutively. (My emphases)

Ideas can be conveyed in the form of a story or in the form of a series of propositions. And as all alert English majors know, form is never completely independent of content. The content is always in some way “stained,” as Lewis puts it, by the form. (Compare this idea to Marshall McLuhan’s contention that “the medium is the message” and Susan Sontag’s argument in “Against Interpretation” that content is actually an aspect of form rather than the opposite of form.)

Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur could have said what he had to say about America in the form of a nonfiction essay. He could have expressed his thoughts in a series of propositions, say, like this:

On the one hand, America holds out tremendous promise of freedom and equality, and for many that promise is coming true. While I was in rural New York I observed people of a sort never seen before, indeed not even possible to imagine, in Europe. On the other hand, even though Americans champion the ideal of freedom, they seem oblivious to the reality that many of them still own slaves….

But Crèvecoeur didn’t use the essay form. He chose instead to express his ideas in a narrative form, in the form of fictional letters written by an ordinary American farmer to a British correspondent. So what we get are passages like this:

[W]here is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of an American farmer, possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little from us? I owe nothing but a pepper corn to my country, a small tribute to my king, with loyalty and due respect; I know no other landlord than the lord of all land, to whom I owe the most sincere gratitude. My father left me three hundred and seventy-one acres of land, forty-seven of which are good timothy meadow, an excellent orchard, a good house, and a substantial barn. It is my duty to think how happy I am that he lived to build and to pay for all these improvements; what are the labours which I have to undergo, what are my fatigues when compared to his, who had every thing to do, from the first tree he felled to the finishing of his house? Every year I kill from 1,500 to 2,000 weight of pork, 1,200 of beef, half a dozen of good wethers in harvest: of fowls my wife has always a great stock: what can I wish more? My negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy; by a long series of industry and honest dealings, my father left behind him the name of a good man; I have but to tread his paths to be happy and a good man like him.…

The general idea seems to be that the freedoms enjoyed by Farmer James and his father permitted them to profit from the fruits of their own labor, gradually amassing wealth to pass on to their posterity. Under such conditions work becomes a joy rather than a burden.

Because he’s writing fiction, and because good fiction demands concrete, lifelike details, Crèvecoeur fleshes out this picture of felicity-and-prosperity-through-freedom with a detailed accounting of Farmer James’s wealth: this many acres, this much beef, that much pork, and so on. This list functions to make Letters from an American Farmer more believable, helping us to willingly suspend our disbelief and also seducing us into its ideology — at least until, near the end of this list, we read that bit, so casually tossed in, about “my Negroes.”

Wait a minute, we find ourselves thinking. How can it possibly make sense to mention one’s slaves in a testimony to the marvels of freedom? And then we might notice the rather dark irony of phrases like “industry and honest dealings”: whose industry? And what’s so “honest” about slavery? Then there’s the idea that all Farmer James has to do to be a “good man” like his father is to do as his father did — including, presumably, to continue to arrogate to himself and his heirs the wealth produced in part by his slaves. Undermining Farmer James’s ideal of freedom is the reality of slavery, not only in the present but projected into the future.

The fictional form of Letters demands the enumeration of concrete details, but among those details are some that “stain” the book’s “ideas with restless ambiguity” — in this case, by suggesting that the freedom under discussion is not freedom for all but only freedom for some.

What are some of the other ways Crèvecoeur’s choice to convey his ideas in narrative form “stain his ideas”? That is, what are some of the ways in which Crèvecoeur seems to be trying to tell us one thing, but is prompted by the Letters’ form to tell us other things as well?