Mitchell Meltzer, Secular Revelations: The Constitution of the United States & Classic American Literature (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, $39.95, 204 pages, ISBN 0-674-01912-1)—Alice Béja, Université Paris 3

Mitchell Meltzer’s book offers an interesting insight into a seldom-studied aspect of American cultural history. In its pages, the author analyzes the impact of the American Constitution on three of the main American Renaissance writers, Emerson, Whitman and Melville; the originality of his approach however, is that it does not deal with the thematic influence of the founding text on major literary works, but in what the author calls “constitutional poetics.” To define this concept, Meltzer, in the first few chapters of his book, retraces the genesis of the Constitution, and what he sees as one of its main characteristics, namely that this text is a “secular revelation.” Other authors have emphasized the almost mythical importance of the Constitution in the construction of the United States as a nation; Denis Lacorne, for instance, spoke of a “constitutional theology” to refer to the sacralization of the Constitution, and its lasting status as the reference text for American law and policy making.

Far from considering the constitutional text as a monument, Meltzer stresses the fundamental paradox which lies at the heart of the foundation of the United States, a self-originated country, endlessly referring back to the Constitution as its raison d’être. But the Constitution itself is fraught with contradictions and ambiguities. Its history is one both of evolution and adoration: “the belief in original meaning, the idea that the meaning of the text was somehow fixed by the Founders, or the ratifiers, coexists with what could be described as a tension, or a contradiction, namely, the idea of an organic constitution whose meaning changes with the changing times.” [54] The author retraces the material conditions of its elaboration to enhance its status as a secular revelation. The secrecy shrouding the Philadelphia Convention gives to the final text a sacred aura: “one effect of this secrecy was that when the Convention finished its work, the Constitution was presented not as a mere political document, one that had been hammered out, phrase by phrase, through four long and contentious months of compromise, but as if it were suddenly all at once revealed” [30]. This revelational dimension makes up for the lack of reference to religion in the text itself, and establishes a new authority, the “supreme law of the land.” Nevertheless, the legitimacy of the Constitution is not obvious, as the author shows through his description of the debates surrounding its ratification; what right had the Framers to start the document by “We, the People”? The question of legitimacy, which in retrospect might seem superfluous, is shown to be essential. The Constitution, like the United States itself, presents itself as a causa sui, referring to no superior authority except its own: “the Constitution of the United States befits a nation conceived in paradox, in which independence brought mutual dependence, and sovereign states remained intact within a sovereign Union” [54].

The transition from politics to literature, from the Revolutionary period to the American Renaissance, is effective and well managed. Meltzer gives a brief account of the function of literature at the end of the eighteenth century, when the purpose of authors was mainly to support and celebrate the newly founded nation, also explaining the link between law and letters, abundantly developed by Robert Ferguson in Law and Letters in American Culture, to which Meltzer refers us. However, it is not through one of those early authors, such as Washington Irving or Brockden Brown, that the author leads us toward the American Renaissance; on the contrary, he explains that the Constitution’s influence on literature can only be truly achieved once the law and the literary profession go their separate ways, thus framing his own reflection along the same paradoxical lines he uses to describe the Constitution.

Ironically, only after literary expression began to lose interest in what could be called an explicit republican ideology of the legally constituted Union is it possible to trace the effect of the Constitution’s paradoxical form on the aspiration for an independent American literature. It is almost fair to say that the less the Constitution served as a manifest theme for the nation’s literature, the more profoundly it developed as a latent, formative influence. [64]

We can see once again in this extract the motif of paradox and ambiguity throughout Meltzer’s argument. The influence of the Constitution on literature is not literal, but indirect. This is why Meltzer coins the concept of “constitutional poetics.” He aims to show that there are certain patterns in the texts of Emerson, Whitman and Melville, which can be traced back to the paradoxical status of the Constitution as a secular revelation, and to its uncertain source of authority. As he says, the Constitution does not build; it frames, and therefore accounts for a number of characteristics of the American mind, best visible in the works of great authors.

The link between the first part, more historical, and the second, is therefore well established, and the demonstration of the Constitution’s influence on classic American literature is achieved through a number of interesting and accurate close-readings. What is, however, most remarkable in Meltzer’s work, is that he never systematizes any of his claims. His conclusions are always drawn from the texts, and never imposed upon them. We could say that sometimes he takes too much for granted, as far as the reader’s knowledge of Emerson or Melville is concerned, but on the whole his ideas are clearly expressed and always bear a strong relation to the quoted text, therefore being understandable even for those who have not read the whole of Emerson’s Journal!

The main point in Meltzer’s analysis of constitutional poetics is its decentralizing power. The founding conflict between the secular and the religious, the one and the many, is reflected in the works of Emerson, Whitman and Melville. The status of the author, or the narrator, in these works is always problematic, be it because he is not clearly defined, as is the case in Whitman, or because he deliberately wanders about, from digression to digression, as in Emerson’s essays. The decentralization however, is not necessarily a source of conflict, and can be seen as an asset, the power to be “both in the game and out of the game,” like Whitman. The three authors chosen by Meltzer all represent what has been called the American Renaissance, and marks the true birth of American literature. It is therefore easy to make a parallel between them and the Framers, a parallel which is valid in more than one sense: “For the writers of the American Renaissance, as for the Founders before them, the impulse to prophesy reflected their response to the predicament they shared: they all came at the beginning of a tradition—an oxymoronic condition, given that ‘tradition’ means nothing other than a handing over of something already received.” [136] The paradoxical denomination of “Renaissance,” for something which was, in fact, never born in the first place, sums up the predicament of these authors, who must establish their own authority, just as the Framers established theirs in the Constitution. Whitman’s “I celebrate myself” answers “We, the people,” in a supreme act of self-constitution.

Secular Revelations: The Constitution of the United States & Classic American Literature enables us to look into the Constitution of the United States, not merely as a legal text, but as a cultural frame; Meltzer gives the reader numerous examples, and his study of the three writers he chooses is accurate and inspiring. The endnotes are extremely helpful; the only thing one might regret is the absence of a bibliography. Given the wide range of sources on which the author relies, it would be quite useful.

The founding paradox of the Constitution as a secular revelation, brilliantly developed in the first part of the book, gives birth to a series of fascinating analyses of classic American literature. The tendency of the foremost American authors towards prophecy is illustrated and explained, as is the paradoxical status of the author or narrator. The conflict of representation which is at the heart of the Constitution is materialized in the invisible face of the white whale, always present yet always elusive. In the end, we realize that what matters is not whether we are dealing with fiction or not, but the authority of the founding narrative: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” [Wallace Stevens, quoted p. 161]