Between them and the sky: The constitutionality of classic American literature (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman)

The argument of this thesis is that the Constitution of the United States has had a determinative effect on the group of writers responsible for what has since became known as the American Renaissance. The peculiar process of self-constituting engaged in by the American states after the Revolution created what this thesis refers to as a “secular revelation,” that is a paradoxical legal instrument that on the one hand insists on its thorough-going secular character, yet on the other assumes an almost-miraculous, revelational authority. Such a joining of antinomies is by its nature not resolvable, resulting in neither a secularized revelation, nor a revelation-fired secularity, but a consciousness of incommensurate realities—as though an awareness of a coin's two sides, notwithstanding that neither side can be seen in the presence of the other. Thus the settlers could initiate a quasi-mythic origin, a kind of foundation without a foundation, a foundation in mid-air, upon which to build their new polity and new national identity.; With the founding generation passing, Lincoln faces the paradox of their secular revelation and commands an absolute dependence upon obedience to the law as a way of limiting the danger of new, innovative revelation. Lincoln can be said to save the revelation of the Constitution by trying to limit the force of revelation, while Emerson at roughly the same time argued for saving the paradox at the risk of new, unsettling revelation. If Lincoln could be said to fix the political heritage of the Constitution, Emerson opened up the full cultural significance of that founding paradox. Thus in Emerson, as in those who followed him, there is a procedure of paradoxy, a fondness for self-contradiction, and with it a tendency toward the essayistic. The response to this procedure varies—from a matter of grateful acceptance, as in Whitman, to a half-horrified perplexity, as in Melville—but in either case gives birth to what the Americans had been long searching, a new, distinctive note of literary presence.