E Pluribus Unum: Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Constitutional Paradox

E Pluribus Unum: NineteenthCentury Literature and the Constitutional Paradox W. C. Harris. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2005. This book is an extended comment on our national motto, E Pluribus Unum ("out of many, one"), which appears on the Great Shield adopted by the Continental Congress in 1782. It continues to be our daily companion on the backside of the one-dollar bill. The secretary, Charles Thomson, explained that the shield and its motto "represent the several states all joined in one solid compact entire, supporting a Chief, which unites the whole & represents Congress." In a valuable "Afterword" that I recommend reading first, Harris traces the elusive origin of the phrase E Pluribus. He rigorously and convincingly argues that the slogan derived not from a classical source such as Virgil or Horace, but was New World Latin invented to express both an ideal and the tension of a dilemma. Harris believes the slogan's appearance was an important moment in a conceptual search, "a problem of writing, of finding words that are right and effective" (198). He sees a back and forth dialectic in the founding period, with the Declaration and Articles of Confederation expressing pluralism and quest for equality that was countered by the unification of power represented in the Constitution. The distinctiveness of this book lies in seeing these well-known polarities as a continuing engagement with the ancient metaphysical problem of "the one-and-the-many," addressed in detail by Plato in Sophist (360 BCE) and by the neoPlatonist Plotinus (205-270 CE) in collected writings called Enneads. Harris's machinery for treating this congeries combines extremely close textual readings with intensive reviews of political, social, and religious history. But above all, E Pluribus Unum illustrates the assimilation of Continental metaphysics and discourse theory into American studies. Without even a bibliographical reference to Derrida's Writing and Difference (1967) Harris discusses American literature's nineteenth-century engagement with the "work of difference," the impulses of resistance against hierarchy in the spirit of articulation, separation, and equality. Absent the formal acknowledgment of French deconstructive inspiration, the framework language is yet catechetical: issues are found at "sites"; positions are "privileged"; texts are "decentered" or "imbricated"; exhausted stances find textual expressions that "recuperate" them; hegemonic hierarchies are enforced through "a quota of difference-work" that can be "disrupted," or "fragmented"; doctrines are textually "inscribed" or "reinscribed." In significant footnotes regarding the focus for this work, Harris rejects "stringing our best writers in traditions" (Daniel Rogers's phrase) but chooses instead "neglected texts of major American Renaissance authors or texts by the same authors which have not been read in light of the one-and-the-many problem" (210 fn5). The tendency to deal with textas-metaphysical puzzle results in some sentences of at least 100 words in length that show their syntactical pedigrees from the Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre that inspired the deconstructionists. Here is a shorter sample: "What makes the problem of the many and the one so thorny is the constitution of social and compositional wholes on some version of the problematic of unity which is less problematic, that is, which reassigns on a less particularized basis the inevitable quota of difference-work" (33, author emphasis). Placed within such a metaphysical framework, American literature, particularly Poe's Eureka, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and assorted works of Melville and William James can be seen as instances of attempted "mediation" between unity and plurality. Harris contends that in these authors we witness the formation of a kind of secondary American "documentary culture," a set of new literary charters meant to compensate for the unresolved problems attached to the originating Constitution of the United States and Lincoln's assertive efforts to preserve the Union. …