Some time ago we would have called this book a literary history. Samuel Otter positions Philadelphia, along with Boston and New York, as a capital for writers and artists in the 19th century. He argues that in the city we can see the development of the authentic American voice. It pronounces on the uncertain and always hesitant growth of human freedom that will get one prominent expression in the Civil War. The book takes us from the 1790s to the 1850s.
But Philadelphia Stories is literary history on steroids. Otter expands dramatically the scope of “the literary.” This enlargement now figures in a pretty standard way in university departments of English but has noteworthy features nonetheless. In the old days we would have begun with America’s first novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote a novel of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Arthur Merwyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799, 1800). Now Otter looks at memoirs, news reports, and medical documentation, scrutinizing them with the same care he later gives to Arthur Merwyn. As his monograph moves into the 19th century, the author carries on with the examination of the novel as a genre but also considers diaries, advertisements, political pamphlets, scientific reports, and accounts of public meetings. He joins observations about these written works to analyses of other expressive productions such as museum exhibits, cartoons, and pictures to enrich our understanding of the city’s writerly culture. And finally Otter has read extendedly in historical works about Philadelphia.
In part, Otter is interrogating texts in terms of context; he grasps the literature as it arises from the political and economic history of the city. Otter has connections to the American Studies movement, which traditionally combined history and literature. So he explores the junction between facts and symbols, the intersection between 19th-century Philadelphia and 19th-century depictions of it. In the end we get Otter’s appraisal of the artsy visions of Philadelphia—of how novelists and others described issues of public and private lives that were embedded in a particular urban area. But this puts matters in an old-fashioned way that does not get at the sophistication of Otter’s perspective.
Repeated complementary sketches, sometimes cannibalizing one another, and often exhibiting similar structures in the portrayals of Philadelphia, generate a complex signifier. English-department types call the set of shared categories, civic commitments, and collective musings a discursive formation, which Otter names, sensibly enough, “Philadelphia.” “Philadelphia” generalizes from 19th-century writings but also emanates from a social reality, and Otter’s scrutiny of “Philadelphia” tries to uncover this reality in Philadelphia. That is, he wants to tell us, via “Philadelphia,” the principal truths about the city in the period before the Civil War. In unpacking the code at work, the scholar gets at the core but tormented values that shaped Philadelphia.
We have a set of impressions that reflect both the mental world of the authors and the connection of this mental world to the material substrate of the city. But we cannot so easily separate “Philadelphia” from Philadelphia. The collaborative views of the 19th-century authors form an integral part of Philadelphia. “Philadelphia” has a dubious and ambiguous ontological status. The real city manufactures belief about it but blends into it the imaginings of novelists and writers.
We can get a handle on these notions only with difficulty. Otter’s prose style makes me believe he has committed himself to them. His array of usages, not exactly a style, mixes words and things, as I will not so happily put it. For lack of a better terminology, I call it his analogical method, which I can best clarify through examples. So, for Otter, publishers “disseminate the textual city,” and people “encounter networks of imperatives” when they move through the “spaces” of the city. Writers “inhabit the city’s problems” and “articulate a historical surface”; the literature simultaneously insists on geographical “circulation” and rhetorical “implication,” and transforms the city’s grid of streets into a “surface of vulnerability.” The authors whom Otter treats “narrated Philadelphia as an event,” or “fictionally realize/d/” the city. Protagonists in novels moved over “the shared, unstable ground of assumptions.” Otter himself wants to manage “the spatial dilemmas of literary criticism” while pointing to “the dialectic between place and concept.”
So what was essential to Philadelphia, or “Philadelphia”? Otter locates the central theme in the literature, written by both blacks and whites, as an uneasy “regressive advance” in race relations. Although Americans aim at a public order that a conception of white over black does not determine, violence and loathing always accompany our progress, if indeed we have progress. That is, Philadelphia Stories focuses on the major thread of the country’s history in the first part of the 19th century. Because we find the city at the heart of a narrative of freedom-in-the-making that has a culmination from 1862-1865, Philadelphia’s literature has a national scope. The color line makes a romance Philadelphian. And because stories of freedom-in-the-making carry on to the present as a fundamental element in our nation’s literature, we would expect to find similar themes in contemporary literature.
Thus, the penultimate end of Otter’s book gives a reading of Melville’s “Benito Cereno” of 1856, the novella about a Spanish ship overtaken by its slaves. Since the basic Philadelphia story holds a dialogue about race and freedom, Melville counts as “a kind of” Philadelphia writer for Otter. Because “Philadelphia” means the contested nature of race, all stories with a peculiar racial twist are “a kind of” Philadelphia story. Otter welcomes “Benito Cereno” as a tale of the city. Strictly speaking, we have in this line of interpretation the fallacy of affirming the consequent. If Philadelphia stories are racial, we cannot infer that racial stories are Philadelphia stories. But this holds Otter to a standard of linear thinking irrelevant to his book. Even so, if we accept the reasoning, we must also concur that, in a sense, we have Philadelphia stories in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Gettysburg Address. The metaphorical embrace of “Philadelphia” reaches out to many narratives.
John Edgar Wideman, the acclaimed African American novelist of the late 20th and early 21st century, for some time resided in Philadelphia. In ending his volume, Otter leaps to the present: Wideman’s novels hearken back to the Philadelphia fiction from the period from 1790 to 1850. Like authors two hundred years ago in the city, Wideman worries over the dilemmas of race, and over America’s inability to cash out its ideals. For Otter, “a kind of” Philadelphia story designates a narrative of a racial cast, and we can see impressive continuities from the 18th to the 21st century. Philadelphia Stories aspires to teach us about all of American literature.
What should we do with university departments of English? We surely can’t assign them their old job of teaching writing to undergraduates.
I think Otter overplays the dominance of race in the literature of the city. This imbalance mainly comes about because of the attention he pays to black writers. They form a tiny minority of the city’s writers but loom large in Philadelphia Stories. Otter then reinforces the exaggeration by the selection of a racial story of Melville’s to illustrate the genuine dominion of Philadelphia. Finally he selects a contemporary African American author, Wideman, to exemplify the literature of Philadelphia in the present. I find these complaints about the effort, however, minor. Readers will have different judgments about what forms the core of Philadelphia’s writerly history, as they will have different opinions about the analogical method, which structures the thinking in this scholarly study. Students with greater wisdom may find my grumbles unjustified.
I do have a larger grumble. The book is unreadable. I mustered only six to twelve pages a sitting, and at the end of my seventeen-day stint, my wife asked me why I faced my bedtime reading with such a grim face.
Let me explain. The analogical method fails. Otter strives for the arresting phrase, and wants to us to think about the fiction in a certain way. But he left me scratching my head. The same goes for his “a kind of” judgments, which have their outstanding use when he makes Melville “a kind of” Philadelphian. Otter intends to have us reflect on race but instead left me puzzling over the argument. The analogical method and the “kind of” logic obscure his meaning. The man does not have the ability with English to make his enterprise succeed. Indeed, the two devices are components of an overall strategy that results in a systemically gummed-up essay.
Toward the end of the book Otter examines an 1842 lithograph, “A View of the City of Brotherly Love,” that pictures a nightmarish metropolis. Otter says that in one place “an upper-class man and woman enact a crime of passion.” I go for my trusty magnifying class, and see a man shooting a woman. Nothing indicates upper-class status, or a crime of passion. And I have no idea what the ugly verb “enact” conveys—at least the fifth time Otter has used it. For English professors, “enact” connotes something having to do with performance, but how can a victim of a shooting be somehow performing? A vignette that calls for short empirical remarks has been translated into something only problematically intelligible.
In writing this review, I gave some thought to literary history that I have profited from: Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture (1940); George Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens (1946); R. W. B. Lewis’ American Adam (1955); Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957); Nina Baym’s Women’s Fiction (1978); and Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983). These books show their age, and they don’t make for easy reading. But swollen and impenetrable prose rarely defines them.
What should we do with university departments of English? We surely can’t assign them their old job of teaching writing to undergraduates. Their scholarship consists of the higher nonsense. I think we should just stay away from it. Maybe some of this stuff will die off if our attention does not feed it.
Bruce Kuklick, professor emeritus of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, has written two books that deal with race and Philadelphia, To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia (Princeton Univ. Press) and Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontain (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press). With Emmanuel Gerard, he is now working on an international history of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
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