“American” Characters

A set of exploratory and critical discussions about the politics of “narrative character” in the American literary tradition — especially focused on the individual, interior personhood of American capitalist Christian culture. Topics below include the “psychlit” of Hebrew narrative, America’s testimonial genre, an Institute of Character Research in the 1930s, and the CIA’s interest in the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

I want to understand various forces that produced what most commentators agree is the primary ethos of the “American” literary character — its psychological individualism that is attuned to the “mundane specifics of life” rather than big ideas, symbols, or ideologies — effectively delivering a so-called apolitical narratology that cannot overcome the self-help, identity-culture it helped craft. The Bible seems to have been somewhere up in the mix.

University of Iowa Libraries - Character research seminar, College of Education, 1930s. Frederick W. Kent Collection of Photographs. University Archives via the Iowa Digital Library.

Character Research Seminar

I vividly remember reading Eric Bennett’s “How Iowa Flattened Literature” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2014). Later published in a longer monograph, Workshops of Empire (2015), he argues that “with CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing lingers.”

This claim really stuck with me. Apparently, it stuck with thousands of Twitter commentators too, and solicited at least one thoughtful rebuttal, Lincoln Michael’s “No the CIA Did Not Invent ‘Show and Tell.’” American fiction is not my area of expertise, but as an avid reader, and as a lover of ethnographic research and creative nonfiction, and as someone who has taken a couple of creative writing workshops (Left Margin Lit in Berkeley, Calif.), I try to listen, learn, and work towards comprehension of outside fields. From what I can tell, there is a broad sense among commentators that America’s distinctive literary tradition has valued a particular kind of fiction. I’ve heard it called, “show, don’t tell” or “granular domestic fiction.” I quite like the moniker, “psychlit” to describe the motivational and moral terrain of interiority that is explored by American realist fiction. Shoshana Felman describes American literature as a “testimonial” genre, engaged with overwhelming events that erase, silence, or obscure its witnesses.

The claim that the CIA somehow wants Americans on a strict diet of psychlit stuck with me because it felt highly relevant to my actual area of expertise, the Hebrew Bible.

Scholarship on Characterization in Hebrew Biblical Narrative

Over the last 70 years, several prominent scholars have made Hebrew narrative their focus. Below, I select primarily those were are/were situated in traditional structures of privilege and influence in academia. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis singled Hebrew narrative/epic out in the Western canon for being psychologically mysterious, achieving a narratology that is incredibly sparse and ambiguous. According to Auerbach, these features of Hebrew narratology succeed in figuring complex characters who are “fraught with background” (1957). Paul Ricoeur’s three volume, Time and Narrative (1984–1988) is shot through with Ricoeur’s thoughts about biblical narrative, as the collected volume of essays, Figuring the Sacred underscores. Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy and A Literary Guide to the Bible (1978/1987) took on New Testament narrative, but is worth mentioning among the above, especially because it exerted influence on biblical studies more broadly. To name a few more literary critics who influenced American biblical scholars:

• Harold Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (2012), The Book of J (2014), Ruin the Sacred Truths (1991), and edited the Modern Critical Interpretations for Genesis, Exodus, and the Book of Job.

• Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible as Literature (2002) — (Frye was Canadian) — Drawing on Vico’s theory of language in “Scienza Nuova,” Frye proposes that the language of the Bible is of an entirely different civilizational epoch. This takes a second to digest, but I think it is deeply important and insightful. If we take human language not as something universal and transcendent that serves a singular function across cultures and periods, but rather as an historically contingent technology that humans use for various purposes — we must face the possibility that our language culture today estranges us entirely from what words used to do. Frye also imagines that the Hebrew Bible is almost like an archive — not of ideas or theologies, but of metaphor, rhetorical device, and tropes. These “words that do things” are not literary flourishes to beautify biblical language as if the Hebrew Bible were a content-delivery system, but rather are the primary content itself. If this is true, boy have most Americans been misreading the Hebrew Bible.

Robert Alter’s Theological Biblical Character

But to get back to this story about the “American character” in literature, I think most biblical scholars would agree, no other study of Hebrew narrative exerted more influence than Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981). This single book gave a broad American literati a rich guide to reading biblical narrative’s unique and fascinating devices. But Alter also proffered an often overlooked historical argument about “the beginning of prose fiction” which warrants discussion in light of my interest in American individual, interior characterization.

Non-specialists may be surprised to hear this, but narratives about individual lives did not exist in the earliest stages of human writing. Early literary genres included hymns, myth/rituals, incantations, omens, curse texts, collections of prayers or laws or pharmaceutical plants, king-lists, and royal annals about war-booty. The Hebrew Bible contains some of the oldest narratology about individual characters in ancient West Asia, so scholars ask the historical question — how and why did this type of writing emerge? According to Robert Alter, the beginning of prose fiction loosed itself from the polytheism and repetitive tropes of ancient mythology.

The prevailing emphasis of the [Hebrew] narratives, in any case, does move away from mythology. What is crucial for the literary understanding of the Bible is that this impulse to shape a different kind of narrative in prose had powerfully constructive consequences in the new medium that the ancient Hebrew writers fashioned for their monotheistic purposes. Prose narration, affording writers a remarkable range and flexibility in the means of presentation, could be utilized to liberate fictional personages from the fixed choreography of timeless events and thus could transform storytelling from ritual rehearsal to the delineation of the wayward paths of human freedom, the quirks and contradictions of men and women seen as moral agents and complex centers of motive and feeling… Because it is a literature that breaks away from the old cosmic hierarchies, the Bible switches from a reliance on metaphor … toward the indeterminacy, the shifting causal concatenations, the ambiguities of fiction made to resemble the uncertainties of life in history. — Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative.

The idea that the moral agents of Hebrew narrative emerged from myth is pretty problematic, from an historical perspective. Frank Moore Cross (1997) provided a much better historical literary framework for the move from myth to prose. But the prose was historical epic, where narrative centers a collective people and not a psychological individual.

Characteristic of the religion of Israel is a perennial and un-relaxed tension between the mythic and the historical....Israel’s religion emerged from a mythopoeic past under the impact of certain historical experiences which stimulated the creation of an epic cycle and its associated covenant rites of the early time. Thus epic, rather than the Canaanite cosmogonic myth, was featured in the ritual drama of the old Israelite cultus. At the same time the epic events and their interpretation were shaped strongly by inherited mythic patterns and language, so that they gained a vertical dimension in addition to their horizontal, historical stance. In this tension between mythic and historical elements the meaning of Israel’s history became transparent. — Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic.

What we have in the development of ancient Hebrew prose between Alter and Cross is the difference between a “main character” who is a psychological, moral agent and a “main character” who is an historical community crafting mythopoetic rituals that start transforming into survival epics. From the vantage of this distinction, Alter’s overdetermining, psychlit theology becomes more clear:

• “The Hebrew narrator does not openly meddle with the personages he presents, just as God creates in each human personality a fierce tangle of intentions, emotions, and calculations caught in a translucent net of language, which is left for the individual himself to sort out in evanescence of a single lifetime.”

• “Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others; and a literary perspective on the operations of narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination.”

Eric Bennett’s “Workshop of Empire” and the American Character

I am really struck by the similarity of the character in Alter’s biblical narrative and what Bennet discussed as the American literary ethos. Hebrew lit partially overlaps with American lit’s focus on “sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.” American narratology springs from an infinite universe of detail. Indeed, American fiction is attached to the mundane, intersectional specifics of diverse lives, calling to mind the fundamental cultural category of “identity” in American experience and thought. It is ironic — this will come full circle. A commentator I cannot now credit noted that an earlier phase of U.S. literature (perhaps it was poetry) envisioned literature as the “efflux of a noble soul,” implying that more recent American narratology had broken with that older phase and turned toward a motivational complexity that can be laid bare through stories about diverse human circumstances, scenes, sensations, and memories. But in many ways, each diverse psyche in American narratology now bears the burden of opening up new universes to its readers. According to Bennet, American literary narratology sought to “venerate and fortify the particular, the individual, the situated, the embedded, the irreducible.” We might not have abandoned the soul after all. We Americans just placed the soul into a multiverse and requested that every person from differently specific worlds testify. Indeed, as Shoshanah Felman described, the American “testimonial genre” enhances not contradicts the psychlit ethos of American fiction. And don’t even get me started on American memoir.

But there is something very important at stake — and I feel a little funny writing about this, but here we go — what to do with the suspicion of political machination? Bennet’s argument that the CIA used narratology to effect culture work could start me down the road of the “tinfoil hat” or it could lead in the opposite direction, towards the ideal of a rigorous, investigative probe of one’s own society. In the spirit of autoethnography, I would like to critically understand my own society, history, and culture. And if we Americans are all somehow trapped in a warm bath of pyschlit that locks our imaginations into individually isolated, internally focused, self-interested and protective, consumptive models of the self, I would like to interrogate that norm.

So, I note that a few other titles emerged after Bennet’s book: Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2013) and Joel Whitney, Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers (2018). These two books both examined the emergence of famous literary journals, The Kenyon Review and The Paris Review, amassing evidence that the CIA funded literary magazines world-wide through an international agency, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another book recently pointed out to me, Juliana Spahr, DeBois’ Telegram (Harvard, 2018) discusses the founding of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Again, this is not my area of expertise, and I cannot evaluate the claims in these monographs. But it’s hard to dismiss these kinds of claims when you know even a few more dots (like that the FBI had investigative files on everyone from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to leaders in the Black Panthers, like Fred Hampton, as Judas and the Black Messiah brings to light.) But still, yes — I am not enough of an expert to evaluate the claims of these three monographs. Instead, I will highlight an essay that draws heavily on three of the above-mentioned books (Bennet, Saunders, and Whitney), Annie Levin’s “How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction.” Levin observed, “when I was first studying literature in college, I started putting a dividing line between literary novels written before and after World War II. It seemed like the books from the before times were good at doing lots of things. They could world build and philosophize. They could be love story, adventure novel, and satire all in one. Books written after the war, however, could only do one thing at a time. Mostly that one thing was soul-searching or introspection. Serious postwar fiction, whether it was what I was being fed in school or read in the pages of The New Yorker, was about sad white people with relationship problems.”

So, it would seem that a major turning point for the “American” literary character is WWII. Indeed, Bennet’s book is mostly based on his archival research on Paul Engle, the second director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (1941–1965). According to Bennet, a huge influx of money came in during Engle’s leadership that funded the Iowa Writer’s Workshop after the war, from government, private, and corporate sources: the Rockefeller Foundation, the State Department, and CIA front organizations like the Farfield Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Asia Foundation. as well as numerous conservative businessmen: “No other program would receive an initial burst of underwriting from Maytag and U.S. Steel and Quaker Oats and Reader’s Digest” (Bennet, “How Iowa Flattened Literature”).

Bennet dishes a lot of memorable quotes:

• “Creative writing’s small-is-beautiful approach — today’s creative-writing department specializes in sensory and biographical memory. The safest material is that which the philosophers and economists and sociologists have no claim on, such as how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt.”

• “In our workshops, we simply accept it as true that larger structures of common interest have been destroyed by the atomizing forces of economy and ideology, and what’s left to do is be faithful to the needs of the sentence.”

A Few Data Points about the American “Character” Before WWII

The reading I did for the above got me intrigued about the earliest stages of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I was especially curious if biblical literature had any influence on this history of the American character in literature. Without trying very hard, I immediately found several references to an Institute, seminars, and publications about “character research” all connected to the University of Iowa in the 1930s, the same decade the Iowa Writer’s Project began. So, I decided to plop down several paragraphs of writing — seeking to understand a set of possibly related, possibly unrelated data points.

1) In 1927, Edwin D. Starbuck published a short essay, “Studies in Character at the University of Iowa” (The Phi Delta Kappan 9, pp. 135-136), He begins his essay announcing, “Studies in the psychology and pedagogy of character and religion have occupied an important place in the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at the State University of Iowa during the last twenty years.” Starbuck was the director of a well-funded “Research Station in Character Education and Religious Education” which began to operate out of Iowa’s Graduate College and of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology in 1922. One of its projects, “A Guide to Character Training Literatures,” employed eight literary critics, full time.

2) In an edition of Psychological Bulletin dated to May 1, 1932, four titles were reviewed from the University of Iowa’s Studies in Character publications (1928 and 1930): T. H. Howells, A Comparative Study of Those Who Accept as Against Those Who Reject Religious Authority (#167), R. D. Sinclair, A Comparative Study of Those Who Report the Experience of the Divine Presence and Those Who Do Not” (#168), P. R. Hightower, Biblical Information in Relation to Character and Conduct (#186), and G. W. Beiswanger, The Character Value of Old Testament Stories (#187).

The reviewer, Abraham Cronbach from Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati, Ohio), began by highlighting the “arithmetical exactness” of the titles: If arithmetical exactness be a scientific ideal these studies are, in a most rigid and exacting sense of the term, scientific.” (366). Cronbach goes on to comment on each:

• #167 (university students): A study of correlations between, on the one hand, “sympathy with the doctrines of the church, belief in the infallibility of the Bible, belief that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Lazarus was raised from the dead, enjoyment of sermons,, belief that preachers are sincere…” and, on the other, “sensori-motor characteristics as visual, weight and auditory discriminations, threshold of sensation and of electric shock, simple reaction time, rate of tapping, fatigue,, muscular steadiness, muscular coordination, etc.; also such volitional characteristics as suggestibility to positive instructions, to negative instructions, to pain, to electric shock sensation or increase of electric shock sensation, perseverance in tapping and in muscular coordination, perseverance in spite of pain or in order to escape pain” with factors “sex, racial type, emotional stability, optimism-pessimism, introversion-extroversion as well as social attitudes like conscientiousness, kindliness, fastidiousness, pugnacity, aggressiveness, radicalism, inferiority complex, …town or country nurture, father's occupation, nationality of parents, number of children in the family, respondent's position among these children, sympathy with parents, home discipline, religious background, training and activity, religious attitude of parents, mystical experience, conversion experience, age at conversion and church membership.” (366-367)

• #168 (university students): The same as #167, focusing specifically on experiences of divine presence. Appendices to both included the lengthy questionnaires and “photographs of the apparatus used for the sensori-motor and perceptive computations.”

• #186 (school children): “In study No. 186 on the relation of Biblical information to character and conduct, one of the correlates comprises propensities for cheating and for lying as well as for loyalty and altruism. Delinquent as well as normal children are among the subjects of the tests. Fully one-half of the publication is devoted to appendices displaying the ingenious devices for measuring character ingredients on the one hand and Biblical information on the other” (367). Conclusion: “there appears to be no relation of any consequence between Biblical information and the different phases of conduct studied" (original quote) although Hightower notes that biblical material could be used to influence conduct.

• #187 (7 experts): The seven experts at the center of this study read “63 Old Testament stories taken from a collection of 76 found in various Sunday School curricula” (367) and additionally reviewed 74 children’s Bibles. “Study No. 187 on the character value of Old Testament stories gave low ratings to these stories and still lower ratings to the books of story adaptations. Juvenile material outside of the Biblical sphere was accorded much higher ranking” (368).

Afterword: Done not Finished … [Notes]

…I may add to the above if I can make some time in the future. I also wish I could cogently add paragraphs on more recent data-points: Capital Ministries’s Bible Studies, the recent APA/WHO determination that spirituality is a fundamental category of human psychological health, and the psychological “cyber warfare” experiments of social media giants from Facebook to Cambridge Analytica.

But I personally have enough here to chew on.

I continue to be intrigued by the connections between biblical narrative, the American character (individual, interior, and mundane), and the politics hidden within this seemingly apolitical, literary tradition in the U.S.

It remains important to track the activities of Christian lobbying groups (PEW study on religious lobbying groups, 2012). Of note, the eight groups that spend the most money (2008/9) include (in order): American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Family Research Council, National Right to Life Committee, Home School Legal Defense Association, CitizenLink (affiliate of Focus on the Family).

Also, it has been important to educate myself about the blurred lines between digital marketing and evangelical communication (spreading their “good news”) — in an era of psychographic digital marketing, and all of the political advertising perhaps most famously known from the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. —>

• Psychological targeting — see Matz, Sandra; Appel, Ruth; Kosinski, Michal (February 2020). John, Leslie; Slepian, Michael; Tamir, Diana (eds.). "Privacy in the age of psychological targeting". Current Opinion in Psychology. 31: 116–121.

• Facebook’s status as the “greatest marketing platform ever” — and the saavy of evangelicals using its tactics (churches and targeted ads on Slate, 2019).

• The Super Bowl ad that Hobby Lobby made to convert people to (politicized) Christianity. I would like to dig into more research — like this 2022 special (Brill) issue on religion and marketing.

• It does not surprise me that Liberty University (a high profile, politicized Christian institution) offers undergraduates a bachelors in marketing analytics. This is intensely specialized. Undergraduate as data-analyzing bots. As a college professor, I can say that such a specialized degree is rare — reflecting a diminished view of what education could be for a 22 year old:

Market analysts evaluate the success of marketing initiatives. They look at data from many different platforms — including websites, social media, mobile apps, and emails — to determine whether a company is meeting its advertising goals. If you want to help businesses improve their marketing tactics, Liberty’s online Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) and Data Analysis – Marketing Analytics degree can help! [Liberty University website]

Underneath all of the above lies a philosophy of “formation” based in marketing — made political through psychological testing and data-driven communication strategies that emerge from harvested social media/user-data. THIS is a territory of power that needs to be less opaque — these are the economic and political designs that govern the contours of our lived worlds — and yet they are invisible to us — and we have lost the liberal value of educating ourselves on the forces that hold sway over our desires, emotions, and psyches.

[Random fact about researching the above: I got a message from my browser “Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access oaoa.com.” But the rich snippet that I saw on the search page said:

After decades of lobbying by Christian conservative donors, school voucher legislation may finally have the votes Odessa American|20 days ago

The primary challenges drew millions in contributions from national groups and billionaire donors ... Dunn and West Texas billionaire evangelical donors Dan and Farris Wilks later contributed ...

Are Christian conservative political campaigns using psychographic, algorithmic data to shape the fears, desires, angers, and aesthetics of pliable donor-subjects? Isn’t it more improbable to answer, no?