LITMIR.BIZ

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“illustrious” possible medium for poetry.⁸⁶ Dante asserts more globally that a spoken language is always more immediate, vital, and natural than that “secondary kind of language” which sits “at one remove from us”—namely, the dead and artificial language of the ancients—and that vernacular language is thus, in principle, “the more noble” kind.⁸⁷ Steven Botterill refers to this “revolutionary” assertion as “the Declaration of Independence of the ‘modern languages.’ ”⁸⁸ Americanists should not only take note of the invocation, but also consider what light Dante’s “declaration” might shed on our familiar objects of study and our perennial cultural-historical problematics. The first thing to note is that, as “revolutionary” as the content of Dante’s linguistic argument may be, its style and structure betray the tension between opposed impulses upon which I have already remarked above: to elevate the new national language, on the one hand, and to lay claim to traditional forms of discursive authority, on the other. The most obvious sign of this is the simple fact that Dante must compose his celebration of the vulgar tongue not in Italian but in Latin—and as Botterill observes, a particularly “graceful” and “mellifluous” Latin, at that.⁸⁹ These are the same paradoxes that abound in Revolutionary rhetoric; when Thomas Jefferson declared independence from England, he did so in English.⁹⁰ In Dante’s case, the use of Latin spoke not only to the complex negotiation between emulation and disaffiliation, but even more fundamentally to the central problem of his treatise: after sorting through the “cacophony of the many varieties of Italian speech,” Dante must conclude that the “illustrious, cardinal, aulic, and curial vernacular”⁹¹ he promises does not yet exist in Italy—except as a potential. It must still be brought into being. To an Americanist, this too calls to mind the complex problem faced by such “linguistic pioneers” of the Revolutionary period as Noah Webster, who loudly sang the praises of an “American tongue” even as he acknowledged that such a language was still but “a prospect” rather than “an entity already in existence.”⁹² Within the realm of poetry more particularly, we might look ahead to Walt Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, a politico-poetic manifesto in a very real sense descended from De Vulgari Eloquentia. Whitman, too, weighs the power of “the English language” against “the grand American expression”—not quite as the relationship between a dead language and a living vernacular, but certainly as that between a morbid inherited language system (like the “corpse” that is “slowly borne” from the house in the first paragraph of the preface) and the vital speech of a new language community (“the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches”).⁹³

      Dante’s argument on behalf of the Italian language would be succeeded by many more on behalf of different “illustrious” vernaculars. “If our language is not as copious and rich as Greek or Latin,” wrote Joachim Du Bellay in the Pléiade manifesto, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoise (1549), “that should not be imputed to any defect in it.”⁹⁴ The French vulgaire has simply been insufficiently cultivated and “illustrated” (that is, made illustrious, given luster). “I cannot better … persuade you to write in [the vulgar tongue] than by showing you how to enrich it and render it illustrious [l’enrichir et illustrer].”⁹⁵ For Du Bellay, the means to “illustration” is strategic imitation: French poets must begin to imitate the poetry of the ancient Greeks and Romans,⁹⁶ as well as the best poets among the Italians and Spanish⁹⁷—yet to do so in their own vernacular. After all, this was precisely what the Romans had done to cultivate their own vernacular when it lay in the shadow of Greece: “By what means were [the Romans] able so to enrich their language, indeed to make it almost the equal of Greek? By imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them, and, after having thoroughly digested them, converting them into blood and nourishment, selecting, each according to his own nature and the topic he wished to choose, the best author, all of whose rarest and most exquisite strengths they diligently observed and, like shoots, grafted them … and adapted them to their own language.”⁹⁸ Du Bellay draws here on a long tradition of theorizing imitation; in fact, the digestive metaphor with which he begins is itself an imitation of an analogy first used by Seneca.⁹⁹ The most important thing to note about digestion as a figure for emulation—one that was utilized by a range of Renaissance authors—is that it suggests not just the copying of a model, but its transformation.¹⁰⁰ Du Bellay’s prescription is to begin by selecting the “best author” from the past to suit present purposes; yet once that model is “devoured,” “digested,” and “converted” in this way, he is no longer the same author who had been plucked from tradition. Having been remetabolized and combined with one’s organic material, he now belongs to the vernacular culture.¹⁰¹ The result of that process is thus—and here Du Bellay shifts from a metaphor of animal digestion to one of botanical growth—a graft, a new hybrid. If the French poets learn this double lesson well, he argues, the “time will perhaps come—and with the help of the good fortune of France, I have high hopes for it—when this noble and powerful kingdom will in its turn seize the reins of universal dominion and when our language … which is just beginning to put down roots, will spring from the ground and grow to such height and girth that it will equal the Greeks and Romans themselves, producing, like them, Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils, and Ciceros.”¹⁰² Here, Du Bellay isolates the arboreal variant of the organic metaphor which would serve Anglo-American culture so well: a transplanted culture had been bedded out to unaccustomed soil, shot down roots, and somehow become sui generis after the fact. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Crèvecoeur in particular would make maximum use of this arboreal trope in his bid to argue for the ex post facto originality of a borrowed or derivative cultural form. Yet the most general lesson for Americanists in this literary prehistory is the manner in which imitation and innovation, in some sense opposed impulses, are never represented as mutually exclusive. They are inextricable aspects of the same cultural gesture, no more separable than the two sides of a coin. The assumption common to these cultural scenarios is that literary and cultural production will necessarily be constituted out of a dialectic between deference to borrowed traditions and the independence of vernacular expression. If emulation is performed properly, adoption is really adaptation; imitation is really supplementation; and the “copy” is capable of becoming a new and distinctive origin.¹⁰³ This cultural fantasy of the copy that displaces the original was perhaps the single most important idea animating later Anglo-American literary arguments on behalf of national originality.

      The earliest literature in the English vernacular displayed a very similar dynamic in the interplay between deferential emulation and the self-assertion of originality. Yet this dynamic took on a peculiar hue in English writing, which may have had a uniquely “uneasy” cultural status for specific historical and linguistic reasons. As outlined in a recent treatment of the subject, The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, early literature in the English vernacular effectively incorporated into itself a “theoretical” argument about the distinctive features of the English language, and the sorts of literary style it was capable of voicing, as part of a “broader literary reflection on the complex position occupied by English literature (a newcomer in fifteenth-century European terms) in relation to other European vernacular literatures and to their great precursors.”¹⁰⁴ The historical origins of this argument lie in the late fourteenth century, when English emerged as a literary language that could claim legitimacy alongside languages with far greater cultural prestige.¹⁰⁵ Prior to that point, as Paul Strohm notes, “English had been almost entirely sidelined by Latin (as the language of record keeping and theological disputation), Anglo-Norman (as the language of courts and the law), and Continental French (as the literary language of the cosmopolitan English court).”¹⁰⁶ What English writing there was between 1200 and 1330, as Nicholas Watson argues, was “relatively rare” and “seems on the whole to have been more the product of local efforts to create an English literary style from the ground up than the expression of a continuous … tradition.”¹⁰⁷ In the late fourteenth century, though, the use of English “surged”; helped by the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Usk, it “began to win respect as a literary language” in its own right.¹⁰⁸ English writers drew

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