>> Well, Jerry, thank you so much for joining our class, Plagues, Witches, and War. >> Mm-hm. Glad to be here. >> So, you're one of the only people, and in fact, you're the only person I know, who's read all of James Fenimore Cooper. And I wonder if you could tell our students what, what was that experience like, reading that, the totality of this man's work? >> Well, first of all, I have to say that it's an astonishment to me that I did that. >> [LAUGH] >> Because when I left graduate school, I remember telling my wife as, as long as I live, if I never read another word, James Fenimore Cooper, it will be too soon. >> [LAUGH] >> the but more recently I've gotten into American Literature and American History. And in particular American memory. and I was talking with a graduate student friend of mine and was complaining about how I disliked Cooper. and he said to me well, have you ever read The Crater? And I said to him I've never even heard of The Crater. and, and he said well it's probably a book that you might find interesting. It's a very very late Cooper novel, almost nobody has ever heard of it. It's a masterpiece, actually. and so I read it, and I was completely blown away. >> Mm. >> and then we talked some more about it. And he said, you know, you might try reading Cooper backwards. Starting at the end, and go back to the earliest books. Which is what I did. I have read all of Cooper, but I have read him in reverse. and it has made an enormous difference in my sense of Cooper. I'm now, I can't believe I'm saying this, an enormous enthusiast of Cooper. >> It's okay. [LAUGH] >> but I feel very easy about it. especially because I am very aware that, through all of the 19th century, up until about Mark Twain, when he started to make fun of Cooper. Cooper and Scott were the major influences on the European novel. I mean, everybody. I mean, Tolstoy, I mean Dickens, I mean everybody. and so if you're interested as I am primarily interested now, in American memory, Cooper is unevadeable. not least because of these wonderful books that he wrote. But the whole corpus which is a highly coherent and very deliberate effort, to write American history in relation to the world. because it isn't just the, Cooperstown, or that little place in western central New York that his father set up a famous village in. but, that's really a kind of axis mundi. and so his books travel all over, as far as the Middle East down to Micronesia, all along the west coast of Africa. The entire world, really, pivots around Cooperstown. From from Cooper's point of view. And, and so he's wanting, actually, to write American history into the history of the western world. >> Wow, Now you, you talked about reading Cooper backwards. And it was D.H. Lawrence and studies in classic American literature, you talked about now Natty Bumpo aging backwards. >> Right >> Is there something, and he linked it up to mythic story of America, right? >> Yes. >> Is there something about that, going backwards that I think as a medievalist I think of Merlin, right? Is there, is there something about that backwards regression that you think gives you a different kind of perspective? >> Well, it was important for me because Cooper has solidified into a certain kind of caricature myth. and so, sort of like Emily Dickinson, you know, she says about reading poetry. I often read it backwards. Something overtakes the mind. and when you read in reverse or backwards or in some skewed way, you tilt really your preconceived notions of things. and that was my purpose actually. I just, I didn't want to approach Cooper through various kinds of preconceived ideas that I had about him. And it made all the difference in the world. I did not know, for example, that in the last sort of 10, 15 years of life, Cooper's idea, he was an enormous enthusiast of American democratic institutions. But as time passed he grew more and more skeptical about them until actually toward the last 4 or 5 years of his life he's extremely dark in his sense of where the United States is at mid-century. and it's not even the coming of the, of the, Civil War that he's worried about. and, and at the end of his life the darkness really is quite pronounced. and the last book, that Cooper that Crater crater book, is actually a prophecy of the future of the United States, and it's not nice. >> Oof. Now you've also thought about Cooper in relationship to the history of the book. >> Yeah. >> And I know that you've, you focused quite a bit on the Pioneers. >> Yes. >> And so in, on the screen right now, we're projecting an image of the title page from a first edition, I guess of The Pioneers. >> It was the first edition. >> This is from the University of Virginia's special collection? >> Yes, it is. >> Tell us what we're seeing here and what we should, what we should take from this image. >> The the title page is actually in three parts. the, the, the bottom set of information is the bibliographical information, about the place and date and publisher and the date of publication. It turns out that that date is really important. as, as are the other pieces of information here. Where it's published. New York, as a scene of publication is not Boston in 1923. And Boston is the principle scene. >> 1823 >> I mean 1823. And if it were Philadelphia it would be an entirely different thing. It was Baltimore. If it was Cincinnati. Totally different thing. So you have to sort of excavate as it were, the significance of having a title page in which the imprint is New York. And, I could go into the the printer here. I could go into the publisher here. The date is extremely important because all this, this is an historical novel. The the narrative the story is set in 1793, 94. so that's one as it were face base of the history. But it's written in 1823. and the, that's the other face base. This is a historical novel. It pivots around two very different moments in history. So that you could read this novel, both as a novel about 1823, or a novel about 1793, 1794. And in fact it, it is about both of those things. So now you, you go up the, the page and you, you excavate, really, is what I'm, I'm trying to do here. the implication of what this title page is after. Any title page is a kind of algorithm forecasting what's coming later on. It's kind of a compressed file. and, and so the the, poem in quotation here is from a very famous long, epic tedious poem to a degree. that was written but well-known at the time called The Backwoodsmen. And it's a completely different kind of pioneer story from the one that will unfold through this book. so you have to excavate that. the, and so I could go up through here, the author of Persuasion. Why is his name not on this title page? In 1823. >> Of the Author, you could say that again. >> And the author of persuasion, of Precaution. and that was his first novel. and it's a kind of Jane Austin, rip-off. >> >> It was pretty well received. But after that he wrote a book that was very well received. it was called The Spy. and I won't go into it, it's an extremely interesting book set during the the Revolutionary War. But if he, if if you were trying to advertise him as a popular author and a successful author, you would say, by the author of The Spy. Because that really was quite a success. Not only would you do that, but the publisher down at the bottom, Wiley, was the publisher of The Spy. Wiley did not publish Precaution. it was published by a small, insignificant publisher. So you, you say to yourself, what is going on here? >> Mm. >> and if you start to excavate, you can find out that really what he's trying to present himself here as not James Fenimore Cooper, but an American author. An American author. And you don't actually need a name for the American author that he's trying to present us. Especially because the story is the first of a whole series of very famous stories about the history of America. I mean I can go up into the, the main part of the title page. The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna. Let me just stay with The Pioneers, stay with that for a minute. the word pioneers appears three times in this book, that's it. >> Huh. >> it appears on the title page. It appears in the last sentence. And it appears once more in a remark that the narrator makes, when he distinguishes two different kinds of pioneers. do you mean the pioneers like James Fenimore Cooper's father, who founded Cooperstown in the late 1780s? Or do you mean the [FOREIGN] the, the, the Daniel Boones or even the people who preceded Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone was practically civilized compared to some of the other people who were out there on the frontiers. I mean the real frontiers. The the pioneers here is a loaded term, and you won't know what it means until you read the book. The, or the sources of the Susquehanna. That's a really interesting sub-title. the the work, actually has three words in the title. Pioneers, sources and Susquehanna, are in three languages. French, the pioneers and sources have a french root. Susquehanna is a, an a, a Lenape word, it's a native American word. and then, of course, it's all been translated into English. the word sources, let me just say something about that for a minute. The right at this time, and through the late part of 7 18th Century, was an enormous controversy about the source of the Susquehanna River. The, I don't know whether the Susquehanna is in your mind, but if you have it in your mind as an image, you know that it actually has two main branches. The West Branch, which strikes out across Pennsylvania and rises in Western Pennsylvania. And then the Northern branch, which goes up to Otsego lake which is where Cooperstown is. and so there's a big, big controversy about what, what is the source of the Susquehanna. And in Cooper's time the the scientists who were concerned about this had decided that the west branch is actually a tributary. The source of the Susquehanna is Otsego lake. So then you say to yourself, well what the hell is going on here? Why is he knowing that there is one, as he would say himself in his preface he says, there's only one true source to the Susquehanna. Why is he putting sources of the Susquehanna? Well, I mean I can go on about this, but in order to go on about it, you actually have to plunge into the book and see that sources is a loaded word. The way pioneers is a loaded word. The way Susquehanna for that matter, is a loaded word. And you don't actually know what they mean, until you move into the book. the so that's like an interpretative reading of the thing. But my, I have to tell you in truth, my real interest in reading this is, is to read the way graphical space conveys information, and very important information. And nothing, really, shows that more dramatically than title pages. >> So even something as deceptively simple as a title page, which we usually tend to just skip right past. >> Exactly. >> Is telling us something profound about a book's meaning. >> Exactly. >> And it's, and it's, and it's implications. >> And I mean, I could go into you, even more pedantic detail about this. >> [LAUGH] >> I mean, if you look really closely, at, at this title page, you'll see there are a hell of a lot of points. They, each line ends in a dot. if you, if you go down a little further there are volume dot 1 dot. Why? If you go 50 years from now, that is not the way a title page will look. they will air out the title page. But what happens on this title page is that, that punctuation, which is extremely pedantic, tends to modularize the spaces of the page. it's really important that there be a lot of white space, or in this case, a little, beige space. so that the different sections, and the, and therefore, the meaning clusters that are in this kind of collage are separated out. So that you pay attention to them, on their own. And then later, sort of, weave them together. The problem with a a principle text for example, Is that it's designed not to let you pay attention to the typefaces and the, the page design. But there's no way to avoid the page design here and everything that it means. But in, in a narrative, what you really want to do is forget about the typefaces. >> Mm-hm. >> just sort of plunge through to the story. until of course we get to 20th century literature where the whole page space, or if you think of Lauren Stern, the page space is very important. You're, you're supposed to pay attention to the typefaces, the fonts, the page design and so forth. >> Any, any last thoughts on, on Cooper and his significance for the historical novel for historical fiction? >> The Leatherstocking Tales are a famous mythological presentation of America. the, but in a certain sense I have grown more interested in the later books, the books of the 40s when he's turning very dark. And, indeed, he begins to write what a scholar from California calls hysterical novels. >> Hysterical fiction. >> Hysterical Fiction. Becaue he is hysterical about the state of America. and he has a trilogy which is I think the first connected series, as its three novels. And it tracks a family from the mid 18th century to the mid 19th century, over a 100 year period. three, and three plus generations, basically three generations, in three books. and I don't think before, it's called the Littlepage trilogy. I actually don't think. I think that's the first connected novel about a family ever written. So that it, it has a pretty significant historical position. but the, all the novels of the, of the 40s are hardly read anymore, but they are extremely interesting in the history of of fiction, and also in American memory. >> Right. Well thank you so much for, for joining our class. >> It's been a pleasure.
