The term “modernity” is often introduced by means of a storyline moving from one to another of opposed terms. One thinks of Sir Henry Maine's status and contract, Ferdinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft, and Henry Adams's Virgin and the dynamo. In such narratives, modernity comes with an increasing awareness of the fluid and apparently random nature of events characterizing modern existence (other terms, such as anomie, alienation, and disenchantment, also come to mind). Darwin's description, in chapter 4 of The Origin of Species, of the process of natural selection offers a defining instance of both change and its haphazard nature. While he doesn't use the phrase “random variation,” Darwin, as he apologetically notes at the beginning of chapter 5, uses the word “chance” repeatedly to name the occasional and sometimes critically important biological changes that he can't explain.
The three books under review here are part of a growing body of scholarship examining what Maurice Lee calls “the rise of chance” and the responses it triggered, such as probabilism, scientific method, social control theory, surrealism, existentialism, and postmodernism. Of these remedies and reactions, probabilism has struck many scholars as particularly noteworthy.Footnote 1 Ian Hacking, for instance, ties “the development of modernity” to “shifting understandings of risk,” “the rise of statistics,” and “the emergence of probability.”Footnote 2 Probabilism, prediction by means of rational analysis of capacious data samples, emerges as a way to “tame” chance, transforming the “modern world” into a place, as Lisi Schoenbach puts it, “in which contingency has been minimized and a managerial, organizational, and thoroughly institutional mind-set has become the dominant mode of engagement with an uncertain future” (88).
One of the more compelling scholarly works addressing the rise of chance in the context of American cultural history is Jackson Lears's Something for Nothing (2003).Footnote 3 In Lears's view, the advent of chance and uncertainty engenders the “rivalrous American cultures of chance and control” (6). Lears's engaging account features a pair of antagonists—the rationalistic, Protestant, prudent, controlling manager and the carefree, profligate, generous, magic-minded, con man and gambler. Both “seek patterns of meaning in the random chaos of human events,” but they differ on the role of chance in formulating such meanings (7). The prudent manager seeks to tame chance, but the carefree gambler reveres “grace, luck, and fortune—powers beyond human mastery whose favor may nonetheless be courted.” “[O]penness to chance,” says Lears, can be fueled by a hope that it may lead to “a deeper awareness of the cosmos or one's place in it” (7). Over time, this battle of ideas is largely won by the culture of control, originating in religious (i.e. Puritan) notions of self-control but eventually taking secular form as an ideal of productivity and organization associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford. The “culture of control,” says Lears, “has shaped our public discourse for more than two hundred years—leading most educated Americans to dismiss the culture of chance as little more than a superstitious muddle” (17). Lears's sympathies, however, clearly lie with the down-but-not-out opponent, the culture of chance, which never fades entirely away and sometimes flourishes in American history. Where the culture of control consumes a disenchanted universe made of brute matter and oppresses disposable classes of people thought to resemble such matter, the culture of chance maintains the possibility of enchantment and deploys a different sort of economy, “conjuring rather than calculating, interpreting rather than accumulating, play[ing] rather than work[ing]” (33–4). Where the culture of control's probabilism emphasizes not “the specific and strange” but “the general and recurring,” not “wonders” but “averages,” the culture of chance continues to insist on the unique, the particular, and the extraordinary (61). Where the culture of control is driven by a desire for mastery, the culture of chance prefers “grace,” something that “could be courted only obliquely and experienced fleetingly,” and the gift, “something for nothing” (9). The culture of chance is willing “to live with unresolved conflicts—to embrace accident while affirming the possibility of transcending it, to acknowledge absurdity while sustaining a vision of cosmic coherence” (9–10). The aesthetics of control emphasize order, regularity, cohesion, and demystification, where the aesthetics of chance highlight spontaneity, surprise, ambiguity, and mystery: “As in William James's pluralistic universe, truth remains enigmatic—a matter of ‘ever not quite!’” (14).
For Lears, James is one of the culture of chance's leading exponents. This seems apt to me. James understood that we inhabit a world with meanings and significances far exceeding our analytic abilities and understanding. “After all that reason can do [has] been done,” says James, “there still remains the opacity of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained.”Footnote 4 This opacity, similar to Emerson's “unanalyzable” “residuum,” creates a considerable degree of uncertainty: “Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where,” James asks, “on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?”Footnote 5 Yet such uncertainty is not bad news for James. On the contrary, “Certainty,” says James, quoting Benjamin Paul Blood, “is the root of despair. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk's wing.”Footnote 6 Uncertainty means there will always be more for us to discover, always the possibility of some new insight or distinctive perspective. For James, by confessing “a dimension of being which escapes our theoretic control,” we keep open the rousing possibility that “our wills are free.” And just as our pets may have an inchoate and incomplete sense of some broader significance or structure underlying existence with us, so we too may have kindred, transcendental intuitions “that higher powers exist and are at work” in the universe.Footnote 7 While all three books reviewed here cite pragmatism and William James, they are decidedly more interested in the literary history of the culture of control than in that of the culture of chance.
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Like Louis Menand, James T. Kloppenberg, and many others, Maurice Lee sees the nineteenth century as moving away from romanticism and idealism toward science, skepticism, fallibilism, experimentalism, and pragmatism. However, rather than adopting the usual characterization of this development as a postbellum response to the disillusioning carnage of the Civil War and the challenge of Darwin, Lee's book relocates the emergence of skepticism and post-metaphysical philosophy in the antebellum era. In contrast to accounts of antebellum America's “ostensibly untroubled faith in a chanceless universe,” Lee's book shows how Poe, Melville, Douglass, Thoreau, and Dickinson were already moving in a skeptical direction away from the version of idealism he attributes to Emerson (11). Lee's subtitle mentions “belief,” but he focuses less on the possibility and shape of belief in an increasingly skeptical era and more on how uncertainty and change made belief difficult, if not impossible.
The rise of chance provoked Lee's antebellum authors to become pragmatists avant la lettre, turning to probabilities and experiment and rejecting the quest for absolute Truth (either metaphysical or scientific) in favor of qualified and plural small-“t” truths. This hedged and more contingent form of truth is, Lee contends, a better payoff than that offered by the “radical skepticism” of post-structuralists “who can dwell on epistemological quandaries of subjectivity and semiotics to a point where indeterminacy threatens to corrode sufficient claims to truth and action” (4). Using contextual materials not common in previous analyses of antebellum literature, such as the probability theories of Thomas Bayes, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, each of Lee's chapters is impressive in its erudition, and, taken together, they suggest the features of a broad interplay between antebellum culture and evolving theories of chance and probability. In sum, Lee makes a strong case for an emergent vein of probabilism in antebellum literature, and his book uncovers a new way of conceiving of the intellectual affinities connecting his primary authors.
Indeed, one of the pleasures of this book lies in the way it uses probabilism to reimagine these canonical authors. For instance, instead of the “anti-rational Poe” associated with “gothic, romantic, sensational, and spiritualist traditions,” Lee focuses our attention on the Poe of “induction and deduction” (21). Instead of Melville the metaphysical adventurer, Lee's Melville prudently warns against the dangers of “eschew[ing] probabilistic reasoning in favor of spontaneous moral judgments” (72). Instead of the impassioned abolitionist objecting to slavery as a gross violation of eternal moral norms, Lee's Douglass is a man of statistics, using “probabilistic logic” to argue that “everyone deserves an equal chance to manage chance” (90). Instead of offering a concrete example of how to achieve contact between, in Emerson's terms, the “me” and the “not me,” Thoreau's naturalism rejects Emersonian transcendentalism in favor of a “modest probabilism” and “the beautiful necessity of estimation” (131, 133). Finally, while not engaged in the probabilistic reasoning Lee attributes to the other writers in his book, Lee's Dickinson shares with them an openness to “the logic of chance, especially as it relates to tensions between science and faith” (163). Instead of a Dickinson “grounded in romantic philosophies of mind,” Lee describes a Dickinson who, like Thoreau, is drawn to “empirical skepticism” (156, 155).
Two pervasive problems weaken the claims of the whole as well as the individual readings of this book. One of these involves Lee's conception of “chance.” Rather than maintaining a distinction between the desire to control chance and the impulse to “take a chance,” Lee makes “chance” stand for both inclinations. “Chance,” for Lee, captures the antebellum era's “paradoxical sense of unprecedented control and unavoidable uncertainty, of empowering knowledge and inescapable risk” (7). But is Lee really describing a paradox here, a simultaneous embrace of chance and control? Serious forms of uncertainty and risk push us to obtain and analyze empirical data so as to minimize, if not eliminate, those hazards, and such efforts do not resemble the courting of risk and are entirely consistent with the culture of prudent rationality. Describing “chance” as “a challenge to be managed but never mastered,” Lee avoids directly addressing the conflict between the divergent cultures of control and chance (4). In Lee's readings, to the extent that he registers it at all, the latter seems to be absorbed into the former.
For instance, in his account of Poe's detective stories, Lee argues that Dupin's hunches do not amount to an alternative, nonrational or not-wholly-rational form of insight but rather are instances of probabilistic reasoning disguised as a divination-like intuitive process (21). What looks like divination or magic is really the rapid, even instant, formulation of a working hypothesis based on previous experience. The more relevant experience one has, the better one's “hunches” are. Consequently, Poe, the “subversive, ironic marplot of rationalism[,] thus becomes a more constructive critic in whose writings intuition looks like calculation, skepticism like science” (45). This is a Poe made safe for the contemporary skeptic who sees the culture of chance as just so much superstitious hogwash. But some Poe fans may wonder, “do we really want the magic of Dupin's problem solving to be explained away?” and other readers may ask, “why turn to Poe for calculation and science?” Also, it seems possible that the analytic and the imaginative aspects of Poe's thought might nurture each other, the nonrational hunch germinating new analytic forays and analysis calling forth imaginative guesswork. Contrary to the pragmatism he cites, particularly that of William James, Lee undersells the thrill of uncertainty and the positive, if sometimes harrowing, excitement of a largely unknown universe and its possibilities. The idea that writers, such as Poe and Melville, exemplify their culture's desire to tame chance (like reasonable people prudently bent on insuring against accident) makes them seem more like the reasonable lawyer in Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” than the metaphysical gamblers that they were.
One can't, I think, finally avoid the fact that the aesthetics of management are not those of courting risk and renouncing mastery. When one takes the high-percentage shot in golf, one does one thing; when one rubs one's lucky rabbit's foot and then takes the go-for-broke-risk-everything shot, one is doing quite another thing—the affective payoff of each is dramatically different. To combine them both under the label “chance” is to create confusion. Or, to put this point in the terms of Lee's study, for the person relying on probabilism, actuarial tables, the law of large numbers, and so on, a Dickinson-like appetite for surprise becomes eccentric, a perverse preference for the anomalous or hard case that defies or shatters prediction instead of the average case that makes life manageable. In her taste for astonishment, Dickinson seems to me more akin to Emerson and William James than to Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor.
The other large problem weakening Lee's book is his paradigmatic approach. Reading his chapters, I found myself wondering, given the diversity of these authors, what are the odds that they would all resemble each other as much as they seem to do in Lee's account? For example, could Douglass, in arguing against slavery, really afford the metaphysical doubts of a Poe or a Melville? Lee seems to assume that to accept some measure of skepticism and doubt is tout court to reject the ideal or the transcendental. Thus to the extent that Thoreau adopts a naturalist's scientific and empirical openness to what is unknown, he must reject Emerson's romantic idealism because the two, in Lee's view, are antithetical. Whether Emerson, Thoreau, and Douglass might be variously working toward an uncertain and open-ended form of idealist belief that could, like Keats's concept of negative capability, coexist with or even thrive on doubt without reaching for the certainties of either absolutist religion or positivist science doesn't appear to interest Lee, whose apparent destination is skepticism without belief, science without metaphysics, and art without the ideal.
For instance, in setting up what he sees as an “empirical abolitionism” shared by Douglass and his ally James McCune Smith, Lee focuses on the abolitionists’ frustration with the inefficacy of religious appeals to moral absolutes (103). Lee assumes that this frustration leads Douglass to cease anchoring his advocacy in ethical ideals. Lee's Douglass eventually comes to advocate antislavery and African American equality “not because of some Kantian or Rawlsian [i.e. idealist] concept of justice but because diverse participants . . . lead to better outcomes” (106–7). One wonders what Lee means by “better outcomes.” “Better” how and for whom? If “better” does not mean more just and fair, letting ethical ideals in the back door, but rather consistently indicates merely more efficiently functional and beneficial in some utilitarian calculus, then, by logical extension, this position would commit Lee's Douglass to accepting an authoritative empirical argument that slavery produces “better outcomes” (e.g., say, for people who are supposedly proven to be less intelligent). Meet Frederick Douglass, the eugenicist. To me, Lee's utilitarian and relativistic version of Douglass doesn't anticipate the pragmatism of James or Dewey, whose acceptance of change and uncertainty does not entail a rejection of ethical norms. Instead, the “probabilistic liberalism” of Lee's Douglass sounds like Richard Rorty's “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism,” a position from which antislavery sentiment must be viewed not as a transhistorical, universal ethical insight but rather as the mere consensus of a particular historical community, a position I think Douglass, himself, would have flatly rejected (107).Footnote 8
In sum, Lee's book makes a very strong case for a previously underappreciated vein of probabilism in antebellum American literature. His argument is more compelling when dealing with authors who are more overtly skeptical (Poe, Melville, and, in her own distinctive way, Dickinson) and weaker when addressing authors such as Douglass and Thoreau who maintained certain idealist commitments throughout their careers. However, a less paradigmatic, more modest and literary perspective might have produced a nuanced account of the various admixtures of skepticism and idealism, empirical calculation and intuition, animating all of these writers in diverse ways, though perhaps at the cost of the clear prominence of Lee's central theme.
Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance by Jason Puskar offers a kind of sequel to Lee's book, tracing the theme of chance from Reconstruction to the New Deal. “Chance,” says Puskar at the outset of his book, does not exist, it is “[n]o mystical force, no scientific property, no real thing.” Rather, “chance is a conceptual category crafted through language and put to use in a wide range of institutional and political contexts.” This fact, if it is a fact, makes chance a perfect topic for cultural history: a figure and theme which is inseparable from the culture producing and consuming it. The idea of chance as a linguistic construction is essential to Puskar's main theme: “American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced chance in new and specifically modern forms through narratives of spontaneous and blameless violence and . . . those narratives in turn supported emergent modes of social organization.” For Puskar, the literature “producing” new and distinctive forms of the accidental played a critical role in shifting the era's sense of risk and how to manage it: “By configuring industrial injuries, gun violence, transportation collisions, falls, financial losses, happy discoveries, fires, social coincidences, and even interpersonal conflicts specifically as matters of chance, novelists helped persuade popular audiences that a wide range of events happen for no reason at all” (1).
Like Lee, Puskar begins by briefly sketching the history of chance, from John Calvin's theological denial of chance to Hume's and Laplace's secular appraisals of “chance” as denoting ignorance of causation (6). But Puskar quickly moves from the question of “what chance is” to looking at what it “does,” which is to “forestall investigation into causes and culprits that would otherwise render some injury amenable to the prevailing order of reason or morality” (7–8). Puskar's novelists use the threat of the accidental to argue for new forms of social affiliation as a protection against risk and accident (10). For instance, pointing out the “spectacular series of carriage wrecks, sleigh collisions, tramplings, dog attacks, mistaken identities, train derailments, misdeliveries, fires, chance encounters, falls, and strokes of luck” that punctuate William Dean Howells's novels, Puskar argues that “Howellsian realism promoted ‘the world of chance’ precisely to facilitate the kind of social interdependence that Howells so desired” (32–3). This is an interesting recalibration of the usual idea of realism as centrally featuring moral responsibility, and one that goes somewhat against the grain of Howell's critique of non-realistic novels that cater to “our gross appetite for the marvellous.”Footnote 9 In Puskar's account, realism becomes real by refusing “to conduct the kinds of inquiries that might lead to any assessment of blame” (35). Puskar's novels of chance push us in the direction of collective risk management, not as a question of ethical duty but as a matter of shared fate—we can all, any of us, be struck by these catastrophes due to the fault of no one in particular. Puskar's book offers something like a literary prehistory of the New Deal and the American welfare state.
While all of Puskar's figures attempt to tame chance, their techniques vary in important ways. Where the rise of insurance constitutes the context for Puskar's reading of Howells, “American gun culture” sets up his analysis of Stephen Crane (67). Puskar interprets Crane's war fiction in relation to “two opposed theories of shooting,” the ideal of perfect marksmanship associated with the newly formed NRA and the antithetical conception of “field firing” (the only reliable way to inflict injury on your military opponent is by massing your shots in frank acknowledgment of the inaccuracies of each individual's shooting) (68). For the proponents of marksmanship, individual agency is supreme, for the “field firers,” it is an illusion. Puskar finds Crane's The Red Badge of Courage to be “a virtual case study in field firers’ conceptions of the demerits of the modern soldier . . . shooting too early, fir[ing] too wildly, wast[ing] ammunition, then run[ning] away, precisely as Fleming [the novel's protagonist] does.” But, says Puskar, Crane “was by no means convinced that a stricter and more vertical hierarchy of command [as recommended by the field firers] was the best solution, or any solution at all” (81). Crane's stories imagine unstable and chaotic conditions working against “the consolidation of power” to achieve predictability and safety (82). Crane rejects “fixed and static social systems in favor of changeable if temporary chance collectives,” and he spurns “the romantic fantasy of rational and responsible individual agency in favor of a conception of the self that was far more accident prone” (85). Turning from guns and warfare to the detective story, Puskar draws a parallel between the “plot of the detective novel” and the teleology of Charles Sanders Peirce's later thought—just as the fictional detective moves inevitably to solving the crime, scientific and philosophical “inquiry will circle in on the truth, biological evolution will make real progress, and the entire universe will move ever onward toward more rational forms” (117).
In his chapter on Edith Wharton and Crystal Eastman, Puskar takes up the issue of industrial or workplace accidents. Puskar's two primary texts here are Wharton's novel The Fruit of the Tree (1907), a tale about a Berkshire factory town featuring an industrial accident, and Eastman's documentary study of industrial fatalities in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Work Accidents and the Law (1910). Puskar finds that both Wharton's novel and Eastman's report make gendered arguments, implicitly or explicitly, for such reforms as workers’ compensation. Where male workers embraced risk, thereby renewing “their commitment to the liberal values of private responsibility and self-determination,” female reformers such as Eastman,” says Puskar, “responded more productively, by using chance to justify the socializing of private losses and the spreading of the costs of industrial injuries as widely as possible” (151). In his last chapter, Puskar reads Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) and James M. Cain's Double Indemnity (1936) as reflecting a change in the era's sense of chance:
at the very moment when avant-garde writers and artists were romanticizing and naturalizing chance more insistently than ever, popular culture [including Dreiser and Cain] was doing just the opposite, ceasing to see accidents as radically indeterminate events and rationalizing them instead as social phenomena that could be tracked and tabulated as predictably as anything else. (207–8)
In Cain's novel, Walter Neff is ironically brought down by the typology of actuarial statistics characterizing the nonstandard or “freak” occurrence as “inauthentic” and singularity as “the clearest marker of deceit” (though the aficionado of noir film and fiction may well wonder to what extent the presence of evil in such texts fits with actuarial reasoning) (209–10).
Puskar's study offers an engaging account of literary responses to the rise of the accident in American culture. However, at times, Puskar's analysis is not as clear as it should be. For instance, “chance” as a marker of any specific era's inability to analyze the etiological nature of certain events does not, as Puskar would have it, necessarily translate into a belief that such events were caused “for no reason at all” (1). Similarly, one doesn't have to believe that an event happened for no reason to decide for pragmatic reasons to truncate the hunt for a particular event's first cause. The fuzziness in Puskar's analysis is on display in his opening example of the Chicago Fire of 1871. Puskar describes the Chicago Fire as “accidental violence,” an oxymoronic phrase which, combining notions of the unintentional (accident) with the intentional (violence), sacrifices clarity for provocative effect (16). Puskar's plausible suggestion that the “confusion surrounding” an accident like the Chicago Fire “could function as . . . a valuable instrument of social solidarity,” pushing Americans to join in insuring against the unforeseen, is undercut by his supporting analysis of a lithograph depicting the legend of Mrs O'Leary's cow (11). As depicted in the print, the cow's left hind leg has just kicked over a lantern which presumably Mrs O'Leary had placed directly behind the cow before milking her. Puskar asserts that “the cause represented offers very little of moral and rational consolation that causal explanations might typically provide” (14). This contention strikes me as decidedly odd, even naive. If an experienced adult farmer, male or female, put the lantern behind the cow, knowing that cows occasionally kick out in response to some discomfort with the milking process, then that farmer is responsible for the cause of the fire, and it is immaterial to the clarity of responsibility and causation that the farmer did not precisely foresee the extent of the damage caused thereby. The theme of the image's caption—be careful, don't put your kerosene lamp where the cow can kick it over—doesn't mean, as Puskar says, “No amount of care can protect everyone from statistically inevitable, but individually unpredictable, fires that kerosene lamps will ignite” (14). Rather, to put it in Puskar's terms, the moral and rational consolation that the image and its caption provides is precisely that of the standard of reasonable care that is being developed and elaborated in American tort law during the very period that Puskar is studying (a subject that Puskar's study, given its topic, should have engaged in greater detail).
Puskar similarly misreads the causal implications of Eastman's narratives of individual injuries. Puskar suggests that Eastman “avoid[s] moralizing the action,” using the brevity of her accounts to hinder the reader's “ability to discern causes or culprits” (154). In the first of these narratives a worker is “caught in a shaft around which there was no railing” (153). The absence of the railing is at least a contributing cause of the death. In the next narrative, a worker is killed when “lifting something under the direction of a foreman”; “his foot slipped and got caught in the uncovered cogwheels of a roll table” (154). The uncovered cogwheels are plainly part of the cause of injury. In the third example, a boy must squeeze into a space of thirteen inches “between a heavy sliding door and a revolving flywheel” in order to oil some machinery. When the door is suddenly opened, he “instinctively leaned back . . . and was instantly caught in the wheel” (154). Clearly, the accident is caused in part by the fact that the uncovered and moving flywheel is too close to the door. The idea that these accounts suggest that “workers endure injuries that seem to erupt entirely on their own or issue obscurely from the world of things” seems not only preposterous but oddly deaf to Eastman's hope that her flatly factual descriptions will provoke the reader to see that certain easily undertaken measures can help to avoid such injuries and to hold factory owners responsible as the parties who can put railings around shafts, covers on cogwheels, and adequate space around moving machinery (155).
The other main problem with Puskar's study has to do with the occasional disjunction between his recitations of history and his readings of literary texts. For instance, Puskar doesn't show that Crane even knew about the disagreement between the “field firers” and the “rifle individualists” (89). But even if he had evidence that Crane was aware of this disagreement, the materiality of such evidence to his interpretive point would still be doubtful. That chance in Crane disrupts and resists narratives of group management or individual self-control is plain without this bit of extrinsic evidence. In the Wharton–Eastman chapter, the disjunction between the literary and the nonliterary cuts in the reverse direction: we don't need the literature to understand the nonliterary historical document. Here the main event is the nonliterary figure of Eastman and her reform efforts to improve safety in the workplace. Wharton's novel, which does feature a workplace accident, but also centrally involves other sorts of risk (e.g. the riding of a dangerous horse by a wealthy and impetuous woman) does not add materially to Puskar's account of Eastman or the handling of risk in the workplace.
The experience of reading Puskar and, to a lesser extent, Lee has provoked me to wonder more generally about the continuing direction and force of historicist literary scholarship. As I move from these scholars’ close analyses of literary texts to mini-dissertations on historical topics, I find myself questioning the necessity either of the literature to the history or of the history to the literature. I doubt I need much of the literature to understand the historical issues, and I doubt I need quite so much of the historical context to understand the literary issues. Do I really need James M. Cain to understand the evolution and increasing prominence of the insurance industry and its way of thinking about risk? And do I need the history of American gun culture to understand Crane's conception of chance? I think the answer in both cases is “no.”
Lisi Schoenbach's book, Pragmatic Modernism, strikes me as more purely philosophical in its orientation than either Lee's or Puskar's books, focusing on habit as a pragmatist and modernist way of ameliorating or handling the “shocks” of modernity. The critical perspective that Schoenbach seeks to dispute makes the term “modernism” synonymous with “disruption,” “conflict,” “opposition,” “revolution,” and “antagonism” to the exclusion of any form of continuity (3). Instead of parroting this “ideology of rupture and opposition,” she argues that the pragmatist version of modernism, “pragmatic modernism,” “suggests an approach to change that is entirely distinct from the standard idea of modernism-as-break” (3). “[R]igorously gradualist,” pragmatic modernism is interested “not only in moments of shock, but also in the moments that precede and follow them” (68, 7). Schoenbach's pragmatic modernists, such as Gertrude Stein and Henry James, embrace a version of habit identical to that described in pragmatism.Footnote 10 In most areas of life, we proceed habitually until surprising or unusual experiences force us to rearrange or modify our expectations. The prior continuity is important to our recognition of the discordant experience as distinctive, and the subsequent modification of our routines constitutes the adaptability upon which our survival depends. This dynamic of routine expectation and revision happens both at the individual and societal levels, and these levels are interdependent. For Schoenbach, William James is strong on the individual manifestation of this dynamic, but John Dewey and Henry James are strong on both the individual and societal varieties.
Highlights of this book include Schoenbach's readings of Gertrude Stein and Henry James. Stein believes, says Schoenbach, that repetitions of habit have a particular power, “She insists that habits can accrue a historical and a national weight even as they remain flexible to future needs” (55). For Stein as for Dewey, habit is not static but always under revision as we seek to form new patterns of behavior that are “more intelligent . . . more flexibly responsive than those now current” (59–60). “[A]wakening from habit,” for Stein, “is an ongoing process involving a sometimes painful fluctuation between habit itself (which is ‘peaceful’) and shocks to habit (which are ‘exciting’)” (62). Schoenbach connects Stein's signature stylistic move of repetition to her conceptual appreciation of habit. Reading Stein's prose, one “experiences the ‘peaceful’ lull of repetition and the ‘exciting’ or invigorating work of avant-garde literary experiment” (62). Schoenbach offers a novel reading of Henry James's The American Scene focusing on its “theory of state” (115). Where William James has a “blind and furious hatred of all institutions,” Henry maintains, says Schoenbach, a “balance between respect for the state and wariness about its potential dangers” (115). The noncommercial “democratic institutions” favored by Henry “must balance stability and order with what Tocqueville called ‘the spirit of liberty.’ The energy of democracy—of free, unfettered critical thought on the part of each citizen—must be encouraged but not crushed, by the structures (often hierarchical and bureaucratic) charged with maintaining it” (118). This is the core idea animating Schoenbach's entire study, the oscillation between stability and change, rest and movement.
Perhaps the biggest question hovering over this study has to do with the two concepts Schoenbach merges in her title: pragmatism and modernism. Habit is a distinctive part of pragmatism, the prior certainties and expectations guiding our behavior until something disrupts them causing uncertainty and subsequent revision, but the habitual is not immediately recognizable as a characteristic part of modernism. It is easy to see how the more common emphasis on rupture captures identifiable aspects of art and literature we label as modernist (e.g. the fragmented and multiple perspectives of cubism or the rejection of the figurative in abstract expressionism). “The key figures of Pragmatic Modernism,” says Schoenbach, “understood themselves to be embedded within institutions, and they emphasized education over conversion, recontextualization over defamiliarization, continuity over rupture” (5). How would we use this statement to distinguish these “modernists” from their Victorian forebears? At the outset Schoenbach uses a conflict between one group of artists and Gertrude Stein to set up the idea that there may be different kinds of modernism, the modernism of Stein and that of her critics, but the pattern of habit and revision defining Schoenbach's pragmatic modernism applies not only to many non-modernist examples of art and literature but, if the pragmatists are correct, to all human experience.
Like the studies of Lee and Puskar, Schoenbach's Pragmatic Modernism ostensibly centers on the safer part of experience—the routine, not the disruption; the taming of chance, not the courting of risk. However, like Lee's account of “chance,” Schoenbach also makes her central term, “habit,” paradoxically contain both what is conventionally thought of as habit and its opposite. She moves from discussing habit as routine to conceiving of habit as containing both repetition and change. This bit of rhetorical exaggeration feels particularly overt when Schoenbach says that “[Henry] James is careful to show that, even for his pragmatist heroes and heroines, this relative freedom from habit is itself a habit cultivated through education” (70). By including freedom from habit within habit, Schoenbach leaves us to wonder how any nonunique human action or behavior would not qualify as habitual.
The other major problem in Schoenbach's study might be termed a failure to pay due respect to disciplinary and generic differences. For instance, by repressing the disciplinary contrast between William James's philosophical and psychological analysis of individual experience and Henry James's novelistic interest in exploring the relationship of the individual with a specific social setting, Schoenbach can claim that William James is not interested in social institutions in the same way that his brother is, as though this observation reflected a divergence of thinking rather than a mere difference of professional orientation and project. Similarly, by ignoring the difference in context between Oliver Wendell Holmes's essay “The Path of the Law” and James's The Wings of the Dove, Schoenbach can claim for James a superior, more humane approach to prediction. The student of law recognizes that Holmes is describing a system of state power which commands individuals and groups of people to do or not to do all sorts of things. Holmes's prediction theory simply defines the American legal system by looking to its effects and remedies. If the result of a breach-of-contract case is to make the erring party pay damages, then the law of contract may be defined by the result that it makes people pay damages for breaching their contractual promises. Henry James's Wings of the Dove, by contrast, says Schoenbach, is “against prediction on ethical and aesthetic grounds” (85). Of course, as a novelist, James can afford to be “against prediction” in a way and to an extent that Holmes, as a jurist, cannot. Imagine a judge espousing, as Schoenbach says Henry James does, “risk as a means of achieving vulnerability and embracing radical contingency” (103).
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In closing, it seems worth pausing to note one curious and potentially revealing aspect of the contrast between Lears's study and the three books reviewed here. Lears, the historian, is plainly drawn to and engaged by the more literary strand of American culture—the culture of chance. By contrast, the three literary scholars reviewed here seem to be attracted to the less conventionally literary business of managing risk—actuarial tables, the insurance industry, the law of large numbers, and habit rather than the fortuitous disruption or inspiration. They focus on the perchings, not the flights (to appropriate William James's well-known phrase). On the one hand, it's potentially refreshing to consider the literary and aesthetic dimensions of the hedge move, the strategy of playing it safe. On the other hand, this scholarly orientation runs the risk of neutralizing what makes these texts literary in the first place, their courting of risk and acknowledgment of mystery in an era of increasing rationalism. Like Flannery O'Connor, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers have felt that it is literature's business to embody mystery despite (or rather because of) the fact that “mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.”Footnote 11 Reading all four of these books together, one is tempted to opine that—unlike Lears—Lee, Puskar, and Schoenbach are embarrassed by the continuing force of the romantic elements in American literature and simultaneously seek to prove their own analytic and historicist bona fides by eschewing such soft and fuzzy affirmations as “grace,” “mystery,” or “something higher.” Or, perhaps, the positive side of the aesthetic is itself embarrassing to literary scholars steeped in a professional culture predisposed to reject any form of affirmation as naive or belletristic. Thus, ironically, we have to go to the historian to get the “literary” perspective.
