BOOK REVIEW

     Covici, Pascal, Jr.  _Humor and Revelation in American
     Literature: The Puritan Connection_.  Columbia and London:
     University of Missouri Press, 1997.  Pp. 226.  Cloth,
     6-1/2" x 9-1/2".  Bibliography, index.  $39.95.
     ISBN 0-8262-1095-3.

     Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

          Glen M. Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
          The Catholic University of America
          Washington, DC

     Copyright (c) Mark Twain Forum, 1997.  This review may not be
     published or redistributed in any medium without permission.


Pascal Covici began his career in 1962 with _Mark Twain's Humor:
The Image of a World_.  Thirty-five years later it comes full
circle with _Humor and Revelation in American Literature_.  The
circle is now much wider, as evidenced by the intellectual scope
and historical reach of this new book.  But it's sadly also a
closed circle due to Covici's death earlier this year.

Grand-sounding titles like _Humor and Revelation in American
Literature_ are common in academic publishing today: you learn to
check the subtitle for the actual, usually quite limited, topic.
Covici's subtitle, _The Puritan Connection_, pins down one starting
point for his investigations; but his main title more accurately
reflects the ambitious project.  His goal is nothing less than to
bring together two of the master topics of American studies, the
Puritan world view and vernacular humor.  This is to bridge a
chasm, for as Covici notes Americanists are not used to thinking
about religion and humor at the same time.  Or if we do, we
construct a narrative where the good guys, with the American
language as their sword and Mark Twain as General Grant, finally
drive the bad guys, bowed under the weight of their Calvinist
tomes, from the City on the Hill.  Covici focuses his account of
this master critical narrative on George Santanaya, who named the
Genteel Tradition.  He could also have noted it in founders of
American literature and culture studies like V. L. Parrington and
Alice Felt Tyler--to say nothing of virtually every biographical
critic of Mark Twain from Brooks and DeVoto, through Kaplan, to
Andrew Hoffman.

Covici doesn't attempt a systematic study, either chronological or
topical, of how Puritan thinking underlies our vernacular
tradition. He provides an excellent introduction that discusses his
central insights in terms of how he arrived at them, then outlines
how he will present the insights to us readers.  Beyond that point,
Covici's method is to hopscotch among key texts looking for
suggestive connections.  So the first chapter deals with Mark
Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville (in that order).  We then move back
to Anglican and Puritan preachers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.  The literary texts that Covici analyzes range from
Nathaniel Ward's _Simple Cobbler of Aggawam_ (1647) and two books
by John Wise (1713, 1717), through Franklin, Southwestern Humorists
G. W. Harris, Johnson J. Hooper, and T. B. Thorpe, and of course
Mark Twain, as far forward as Fitzgerald's _The Great Gatsby_.
Covici's final chapter, "The Puritan Roots of American Humor,"
draws in Poe, Emerson, and especially Thoreau, with the last in
particular anticipating Twain's break from genteel tradition.

To approach such huge topics in Covici's way requires extraordinary
attentiveness, particularly to nuances obscured by critical
formulations we take for granted.  Covici excels at close reading.
He calls his book "a meditation on some of our literature's
revelation," but I would change the metaphor and call it a set of
riffs on where "American literature" came from and what makes it
unique.  He has also found an effective conversational tone and
style: Covici gets away with some chatty rhetoric of the type that
your reviewer generally finds insufferable: "As is painfully clear-
-I do enjoy piling up the illustrations."  "I wrack my brain in an
effort to recall Emerson's humorous passages; I do not succeed."

Simply in terms of space allotted, Mark Twain is less prominent in
this book than you would expect.  The only Twain works treated at
much length are the 1877 Whittier Birthday Dinner speech and _Tom
Sawyer Abroad_ (1894), though there are brief engagements with
several others.  Nevertheless, Covici's introduction makes clear
how essential Twain's work was in the process that led to the
book's thesis.  In developing the thesis, Covici's fundamental move
is to revise the standard view that Twain took the vernacular
tradition from the Southwestern Humorists and raised it to the
level of "literature."  That particular formulation originated with
William Dean Howells, and as Covici notes, it always had within it
a note of ambivalence, as if the vernacular had somehow to be
redeemed before it became a worthy concern for serious people.  By
contrast, Covici argues that Twain did not simply elevate a
sub-literary tradition, but transformed it intellectually by
reviving a parallel tradition that goes back to the Puritans.  He
makes his formulation explicitly religious: Southwestern humor,
Covici says, was derived from models that were British, Anglican,
and Arminian.  Mark Twain, on the other hand, revivified a
tradition that was [more] American, Puritan, and antinomian--and
because of that more serious about language, and more democratic.

Examining Covici's argument concerning the Southwestern humorists
reveals some of the strengths, but also weaknesses, of _Humor and
Revelation in American Literature_.  In Hooper's and Harris's
stories, Covici suggests, laughter is generated through the
exposure of affectation, which was Henry Fielding's rationalist
definition of comedy.  The vehicle for ridiculing affectation is
the educated narrator characteristic of Southwestern stories;
however, the affected target is not the narrator, but rather the
curious vernacular characters he reports on.  (This is, of course,
a major difference from Twain, who "sold" his educated narrators as
early as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.")  The next step in
Covici's argument holds that the Southwestern humorists share key
attitudes of both eighteenth-century rationalism and the
nineteenth-century genteel tradition: the "sense of certainty" that
allowed them to treat truth and social values as firm and knowable.
That kind of certainty is implicit in the disapproving attitudes of
Hooper's and Harris's narrators toward what they report--attitudes
which, Covici insists, the norms of the stories unambiguously
support.  Even more, the antics of Harris's vernacular character
Sut Lovingood, which can disgust even a late twentieth-century
reader, are so appalling that they implicitly support propriety of
the most repressive sort.  Thus the humor of the Old Southwest,
despite or even because of its subject matter, starts looking as
rational and proper as the genteel tradition could wish.  Then Mark
Twain arrived (anticipated by T. B. Thorpe) and changed everything
by undercutting and eventually eliminating his genteel narrators,
thus revealing a world where certainty on moral and psychological
issues is no longer available.  And that alternate conception, of
a world marked by complexity, mystery, and pain, is America's
Puritan heritage.

Covici's alternate genealogy for Southwestern humor, which among
other things makes Ben Franklin an immediate ancestor, is of
considerable interest.  But the rather simplistic sorting out of
two humorous strains creates some problems.  For one thing, arguing
that the narrators in Southwestern humor represent unambiguous
norms of certainty disallows any possibility of irony.  Thus Covici
on Hooper: "No subversion that I can see lurks below the surface of
the text."  This is a peculiar claim--all the more so because two
pages earlier Covici has alluded to Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of
"the pleasure of carnival."  It's just as well that Covici doesn't
mention Bakhtin by name, since he goes on to say that carnival "has
nothing to do with any suggestion that respectable society fails in
a serious way to nurture adequately the totality of the human
spirit."  This is not at all what Bakhtin found in Rabelais (who
also wrote in a time of cultural "certainty").  And you don't have
to be a deconstructive historicist to find Covici's presentation
naive about what lies below the surface of this humor.

When we come to the contrasting "Puritan" strain of humor, there's
a different sort of problem.  Examining his chosen texts, Covici
builds up a set of characteristics for the Puritan connection that
are rather general and occasionally shifty.  His main point is that
American Puritans bequeathed us a sense of mystery, a concern with
inner states, and antinomian tendencies that nourished a desire for
independence and, ultimately, democracy.  Not much is new in that
claim.  Covici does, however, use close readings to show how often
writers like Ward and Wise employed vernacular characters to
develop, or at least to give a vernacular social cast to, these
"American" tendencies.  When it came to vernacular language,
however, these writers condescended nearly as much as their British
cousins.  This is an important observation, and Covici finds the
same contrast of vernacular value vs. genteel language in
Franklin's presentation of "Speech of Polly Baker."  Moving forward
historically, it shows up in Emerson, in Melville's "Paradise of
Bachelors" and "Tartarus of Maids," and as late as Nick Carraway's
narration of _The Great Gatsby_.  While it seems to me that Covici
oversells the originality of his insight into this ambivalence in
our literature, he nevertheless employs it to tease insightful
readings out of some familiar works.

When Covici places Mark Twain into his model of intellectual
history, the initial focus is again on "ambivalence."   This is
hardly a new idea, and Covici starts with the Whittier birthday
dinner, which Richard Lowry recently has called the primal scene of
Twain criticism.  Covici's main interest at the dinner, however, is
William Dean Howells's introduction of Twain, assuring the audience
that his friend met the evening's standards of high seriousness.
Covici puts a slightly different spin on the dinner by casting the
genteel audience as representatives of a British, Anglican
tradition of reason and propriety.  This enables him then to
showcase some important original research in colonial period
Anglican sermons preached in England.  Looking at sermons preached
on special occasions such as the anniversaries of the execution of
Charles I and the restoration of Charles II, Covici discovers a
rhetoric of divine special mission that seems virtually
indistinguishable from the City on the Hill pronouncements we have
long assumed to be distinctive to American Puritans.  This is a
surprise, and it sets a new context for the close readings of
American Puritan writers in the chapter that follows.  Beyond that,
however, Covici doesn't really know what to make of his discovery:
he lacks (as do I) the sophistication in Reformation theology that
could unpack what is obviously a very complicated system of belief
and rhetoric.  Close readings of Covici's kind will hack us only so
far into this thicket.  Nevertheless, he has noticed something
important, which has the potential significantly to alter our
understanding of the American sense of specialness.

Pascal Covici entered the academic profession at a time when
thinking about Puritan origins of the American self was dominated
by Perry Miller (rather than by Sacvan Bercovich, whose very
important work is barely mentioned in this book and not listed in
the bibliography).  Covici's model of parallel traditions moving
through American intellectual history from the seventeenth to
nineteenth centuries--with one strain seeming to be weaker and even
apparently disappearing from time to time, only to burst forth in
a glorious efflorescence--is similar to Perry Miller's classic
formulation "From Edwards to Emerson."  Covici wants to get from
Nathaniel Ward to Mark Twain.  Since his method of reading provides
only a thin grounding of theological and intellectual history, I
can't say that the grand design of _Humor and Revelation in
American Literature_ succeeds.  The conclusion is flat: "To laugh
. . . suggests a distancing, a sudden change of perspective.  What
should be of supreme importance shrinks for a moment."  What a
reader will remember is not this sort of formulation, humane as it
is, but Covici's frequent, more modest insights about specific
works.  The extraordinary attentiveness of Covici's readings
provides many rewards.  Looking at two ends of his historical span,
for example, we discover Twain-like vernacular impulses in
Nathaniel Ward's _Simple Cobbler of Aggawam_, and Ward-like
confusions over propriety in _Tom Sawyer Abroad_, written well
after the assumed triumph of the vernacular in Twain's work.  Both
Americanists and Twain scholars will profit from this book.
Well-written and reader-friendly (though skimpy on references,
especially to recent criticism) it is also a good recommendation
for serious undergraduates.  _Humor and Revelation in American
Literature_ brings a distinguished academic career to a fitting,
though too early, conclusion.