In One Person

 

Me citan en este artículo sobre John Irving:

 

Aladylah, Majed (Mutah University, Jordan). "Time and Identity in In One Person, by John Irving." International Journal of Literary Humanities 14.2 (June 2016): 39-43. Online at ResearchGate.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304883147

         2020

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving (Ruland & Bradbury)

On Washington Irving, in From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature, by Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury (1991):

The quest for a native American novel progressed slowly. It moved from Philadelphia to other Eastern seaboard cities as Boston, Charleston and New York developed mercantile classes with intellectual and artistic as well as economic and political aspirations. The Knickerbocker scene which had nourished the essay and poetry turned as well to the fictional forms, and found its voice in Washington Irving. The Goldsmithian essays Irving wrote with Paulding as the Salmagundi papers established him as a New York wit, but his reputation was made with his "comic history of the city," A History of New York . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), a work of mock-learning and literary parody much admired for its technical skill and wit by Scott, Byron and Coleridge. Irving's prose was neoclassical, but his sensibility half-Romantic. He was drawn by Scott and Campbell, excelled in inventing comic personae and yet had an appreciative sense of the melancholic and picturesque. His style was a search for a balanced voice that would let him be both American and European, let him comically report his own age yet reach for the "legends" of the past. A youthful Grand Tour through Europe educated him in Romantic sensations; and it was to Europe he returned, after the War of 1812, in an attempt to heal the widening political and literary breach, establish himself in the literary profession and resolve the manifest problems of the American writer.

In 1815 he sailed for Liverpool, settling in Britain first in an attempt to rescue the family business, then to try to live by writing in the world of the English Romantics. Scott received him generously, and at Abbotsford he read the German Romantic folktale writers. The British too were looking back to the Romantic past, as industrialism thrived during the peace that followed Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. As the Battle of the Quarterlies raged, British magazines mocked American aspirations for an independent literature: "in the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" demanded Sydney Smith. But almost single-handedly, Irving seized the moment and reversed the condescension with the essays, sketches and stories of The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824), which appealed enormously to British and American audiences alike. Irving cast himself as a romantic traveler who makes his sketches, essays and vignettes, or collects his fables, as he passes from place to place, observing the picturesque and the historical, the ivy-covered ruin, the falling tower, the "mouldering pile." In Romantic fashion, he polarized the activities of the imagination, dividing them between Europe and America. Europe was the past, the poetic, the timeless, the mythical; indeed in a sense it was living Romanticism, a depository of the antique, the exotic, the traditional, "storied association." America was the present, rushing, potential, time-bound, political, it was in a state of literary promise, with its prodigious but still unwritten and unfelt grandeur of prairie, river, mountain and forest. In the center is Geoffrey Crayon, the traveler-painter hunting each nook and cranny that calls forth a sensation and a sketch, turning Europe's romanticism back on itself by giving European and American readers alike the history they were beginning to crave in an age of rising industrialism and entrepreneurship.

Irving was the American writer as ambassadorial expatriate. In May 1815, he began a seventeen-year Europan residence that would take him over the landscape of the new Romanticism in Britain, France, Germany and Spain and establish fresh links between American writing and European tradition. His response to this romanticism was half accepting, half ironic, but it led him toward a historical mythology of American life. In Volney's Ruins, translated by Thomas Jefferson and Joel Barlow in 1802 as a radical text, the French writer had associated moldering civilization with political decline. Irving associated it with art itself; the Europe he paints is a timeless human past, stable and engaging, a picturesque paradise rooted in custom and peasant ways and scarcely tourched by modern industrialism or expansion. His essays recognize political antagonism and social change but emphasize the need for the imagination as an aid to reconciliation, "looking at things poetically rather than politically." We can sense an element of evasion in this, and he himself admitted this was a "light" Romanticism, not much more than "magic moonshine." But America needed a legendary past, and he went on to collect it from many European sources, working deliberately to construct a new sense of world landscape for the American imagination. He gathered folktales from the Germany of Tieck and Jean Paul (J. P. F. Richter); in Spain, in addition to writing Legends of the Alhambra (1832), he rewrote the Columbus legend, thereby providing another triangulation for American experience. The influential American historians of the time—Prescott, Ticknor, Everett—were cosmopolitanizing themselves in the same way, turning to Europe to give the United States a significant history. Irving likewise defined a set of references that would relate the European Romantic past to a fresh American present, providing an imaginative geography that would shape much later American  writing, as well as much American tourism.

Most of Irving's writing was about Europe—as if this had become the required material for the American artist seeking to recover the Romantic past from whence art sprang—but he did set a few tales, now his most famous, in the United States. "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," both in the Sketch-Book, have become classics of American folklore. They were in fact conscious endeavors to transport elements of the European folk tradition to American soil and are adaptations of German folktales, transposed to a "timeless" European part of America, the Dutch-American villages of the Hudson River Valley, the heart of the American picturesque. He sets them there, as he says in his own voice in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," because

population, manners and customs remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current.

 It is this ahistorical and apolitical sleepiness that, to Irving,  offers the possibility of legend, a view he shared with the German Romantics he imitated. Even so, the "passing current" does enter the stories. Rip Van Winkle steps out of society into twenty years of timelessness when, in the Catskill Mountains, he meets the ghostly drunken revelers from Henry Hudson's crew who lull him into a long slumber with a flagon of magic wine. His sleep takes him through the greatest American change of all, the Revolution; and when he returns to his village its old sleepiness has gone, replaced by disputation, politics and historical motion. But Irving's theme is not political; what the Revolution frees Rip from is "petticoat government," for his shrewish wife has died. Like Irving himself, Rip can now become a legend-maker, telling tales of the world before the war, transmuting history into myth. Rip makes legends; Ichabod Crane, in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," becomes their victim. This classic Yankee entrepreneur chases a rich heiress and her prosperous farm but is, ironically, cheated into seeing a ghost and losing his fortune through the belief in magic he has drawn from "Cotton Mather's history of New England witchcraft."

For an America without a written folk tradition, Irving provided essential material, the stuff of much future tall tale; here were stout Dutch burghers, backwoodsmen, Yankee peddlers, henpecked males and their garrulous wives, male dreams of freedom and space. His tales—he planned one novel but never wrote it—were his main contribution, a durable invigoration of the Romantic and the popular tradition of American fictional writing. But it was European distance that had added glow to his materials, as he found when, in 1832, he came back to America, a fêted author with a great European reputation, to face contemporary American history in the changed world of Jacksonian, westward expansion and commercial specualtion. In this world the eastward Grand Tour was being replaced by a Western one which led not to civilized but to natural wonders, an American scene being written in many literary languages. William Bartram's influential Travels (1791) had explored American landscape as romantic grandeur. Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New York, 1769-1815 (1821-22) had seen nature as the field of improvement and subjected the regrettable prevalence of forest to the standards of clearing and cultivation. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had, in their record of an adventurous continental exploration, Journals (1814), added new language of description and scientific report. John James Audubon was giving an extraordinary narrative and visual record of the birds and animals of the continent. And so this America was now available to Irving's touring, his sentimental associationism, his sense of the sublime.

This native landscape became the theme of his later books, his "Westerns": A Tour of the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837). The first is his Geoffrey Crayon tour to the "untrodden" frontier where the Indians were being driven from their homelands, but the book simply reveals how hard it was to render the West and the prairies—"For shich the speech of England has no name," Bryant had written—in the language of the European Grand Tour. Indians romantically became Arabs and gypsies, the unwritten mountains European Gothic cathedrals, and though the North American Review parised Irving for "turning these poor barbarous steppes into classical land," they remain, for Irving, in a state of curious vacancy. Something of the reason for this is apparent in the other two books, which were commissioned works. This nature is not innocent, but space for entrepreneurship, and Irving was never interested in the paradoxes and contradictions, the present troubles of history. Astoria really celebrates New York commercial intervention and the development of the West in its account of John Jacob Astor's monopolizing of the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, and Captain Bonneville is the similar story of the famous soldier-explorer staking claims to American lands. These are minor works, and Irving seemed to know it, returning to Europe again as minister and ambassador in high government posts and doubting the durability of his talent. What these late works show is the difficulty faced by those seeking the tone and shape of American narrative in the opening world of American nature, exploration and mercantilism. They reveal the West not only as a social and political but as a linguistic and literary frontier.

It was a quite different writer who was to take on those social and narrative implications most directly and thereby point the direction of American fictional maturity. (...)

James Fenimore Cooper

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Washington Irving

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th ed., ed. Hart and Leininger:

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was born in New York City, the youngest of 11 children of a wealthy merchant who had sided with the rebels in the Revolution. Precocious and impressionable, the boy was early influenced by the literary interests of his brothers William and Peter, but in 1798 concluded his education at private schools and entered a law office. His legal studies soon lost their appeal, although he continued in various offices until 1804, varying his occupation by a frontier journey (1803) through upper New York state and into Canada, and by writing for the Morning Chronicle and The Corrector, newspapers edited by his brother Peter. For the Chronicle (1802-3) he wrote the "Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.," a series of youthful satires on New York society, which won him recognition. To restore his failing health and to further his education, he traveled in Europe (1804-6) where he collected material later used in stories and essays.

Although he was admitted to the bar upon his return,  he lost interest in the law and turned seriously to literature. Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807-8) is a series of satirical miscellanies concerned with New York society. The leading essays were written by Irving, his brothers, and William Irving's brother-in-law., J. K. Paulding, all members of the group known as the 'Nine Worthies' or 'Lads of Kilkenny' of 'Cockloft Hall'. Federalist in politics, conservative in social attitude, and humorous in intention, these early essays represent the position and manner to which Irving was to cling throughout his career. He was now famous as author, wit, and man of society, and, to further his reputation, turned to the creation of the comic Dutch-American scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker, on whose burlesque History of New York he was occupied until 1809. This work, called 'the first great book of comic literature written by an American', although ostensibly concerned with the history of the Dutch occupation was also a Federalist critique of Jeffersonian democracy and a whimsical satire on pedantry and literary classics.

Before its completion, Irving suffered a tragic loss in the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman. According to sentimental biographers, who disregarded later love affairs, he remained a bachelor to be faithful to her memory. Certainly he was profoundly affected at the time. In spite of the success of the History, he deserted creative literature during the next six years, when he was occupied in business with his brothers, in collecting the poems of Thomas Campbell (1810), in editing the Analetic Magazine (1813-14), a popular miscellany of reprints from foreign periodicals, and in social and political activities in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Toward the end of the War of 1812, he served as an aide-de-camp to the governor, and in 1815 he planned a cruise to the Mediterranean with Decatur; but, when this became impossible, he sailed alone for Liverpool, to take charge of the family business there.

During the next two years he tried desperately to maintain the failing business, but in 1818 it went into bankruptcy, and he was forced to write for a living. He had already been impressed by the beauties of the English countryside as interpreted by the romantic poets, and, encouraged by Scott, now returned to writing his most successful work, The Sketch Book (1819-20), containing familiar essays on English life, and Americanized versions of European folk tales in "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." As Geoffrey Crayon, the pseudonym by which the book was signed, Irving was now a celebrity, lionized in English and French society, and the intimate of such men as Scott, Byron, and Moore. In Paris (1820) he wrote plays with J. H. Payne, a collaboration to which he occasionally returned for several years. Bracebridge Hall (1822) is another book of romantic sketches, less important than The Sketch Book, but equally well received.

Continuing in his search for fictional materials, Irving now traveled in Germany (1822-23), spending the winter at Dresden, where he fell in love with an English girl, Emily Foster, who seems to have refused his proposal of marriage. After a year in Paris, he returned to England and published Tales of a Traveller (1824), so adversely criticised that Irving was nearly discouraged  from further literary activity. After two unproductive years in France, during which he is supposed to have vied with Payne for the affections of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, he became a diplomatic attaché in Spain (1826-29), living for a time in Madrid at the home of the biographer Obadiah Rich, and engaged in research for his scholarly but popular History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), based principally on the work of the Spanish scholar Navarrete. This was followed by A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and a 'Spanish Sketch Book', The Alhambra (1832), recounting Spanish legends and describing the famous monument.

Irving was secretary of the U.S. legation in London (1829-32), and then returned to New York, after an absence of 17 years, to be welcomed enthusiastically as the first American author to achieve international fame. Again seeking picturesque literary  backgrounds, he made an adventurous trip to the Western frontier. This was described in A Tour on the Prairies, published as a part of The Crayon Miscellany (3 vols., 1835). The tour also resulted in Astoria (1836), an account of the fur-trading empire of John Jacob Astor, written with Pierre Irving; and the Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837). Irving's Western Journals were published in 1944.

After a few years at his home, Sunnyside, during which he declined the nomination for mayor of New York City and the secretaryship of the navy offered him by Van Buren, as well as giving up a plan to write a Conquest of Mexico in favor of Prescott, Irving returned to his favorite place of exile, becoming minister to Spain (1842-45). His position was made difficult by the Spanish insurrection (1843), and after his resignation two years later he spent a year in London on a diplomatic mission concerning the Oregon Question. Again at Sunnyside, he passed the remaining 13 years of his life in company of his beloved nieces and innumerable friends, acknowledged as the leading American author, in spite of his waning powers, as evidenced in Oliver Goldsmith (1840), a biography of one of his literary masters; A Book of the Hudson (1849) and Wolfert's Roost (1855) collection of sketches; Mahomet and his Successors (2 vols., 1849-50), conventional biographies; and the monumental Life of Washington (5 vols., 1855-59), planned as early as 1825, but completed in the last year of his life, just before his health finally failed. Bare of the graces of his early writing, this triumph of scholarship crowned an erratic career that seldom retained its literary focus for more than a few years at a time, but which served in many ways to consolidate the culture of the U.S. and Europe. Unlike his contemporary, Cooper, Irving saw the European past in an aura of romance, and, except for the gentle satire of his early works, consistently avoided coming to grips with modern democratic life. His graceful, humorous, stylistically careful writing is in the tradition of Addison, Steele, and Goldmith. In subject and method he sought the traditional and the picturesque. A scholarly edition of his Complete Works began publication in 1969.



Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others, satirical essays and poems, published in 20 periodical pamphlets (Jan. 24, 1807-Jan. 25, 1808) by Washington and William Irving and J. K. Paulding, who used such pseudonyms as Anthony Evergreen, Jeremy Cockloft the Younger, Will Wizard, and Pindar Cockloft, Esq. The work was collected in book form (1808).

Modeled on the Spectator, these whimsical pieces travesty contemporary New York tastes, society, and politics, showing the authors' aristocratic Federalism. The 'letters' of the visiting Mustapha-Ru-a Dub Keli Kahn to Asem Haac-hem satirically describe the 'mobocratic' and 'logocratic' Jeffersonian democracy, while other essays and poems deal in a humorous, pseudo-learned style with such various topics as fashions in women's clothing, the vulgarity of parvenus, theatrical and musical criticism, style in literature, and caricatures of celebrities. A second series of Salmagundi papers was written by Paulding alone (May 1819-Sept. 1820).

A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, burlesque history by Irving, published in 1809 annnd revised in 1812, 1819, and 1848. It satirized the methods of contemporary historians, the heroic style of epic poetry, and men and events during the Dutch administration as well as during its own period. Although Irving follows the history of New Netherland as then known, his satirical intention causes him to alter or disregard facts, as when, in the figure of William the Testy (William Kieft) he draws a Federalist caricature of Jefferson. According to the preface, the fictitious chronicler was "a small brisk looking old gentleman . . . a very inquisitive body . . . although a little queer in his ways."

Book I contains a cosmogony and description of the world, parodying contemporary histories, and a burlesque account of the discovery and peopling of America. Book II chronicles the voyage of Hudson, early Dutch colonization, and the founding of New Amsterdam, and gives traditional portraits of Dutch colonial types. Book III describes the "golden reign of the stolid governor Wouter Van Twiller, who was "exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference," and whose head was "a perfect sphere"; the profound deliberation of his burgomasters over their pipes; conditions in early New Amsterdam; the hostility of the neighboring Yankees of Connecticut; and the establishment of Fort Goed Hoop. Book IV tells of the governorship of William the Testy, so learned that he was "good for nothing"; his pugnacity; his war "by proclamation" with the Yankees; his many laws, partisan quarrels, and border disputes. Books V, VI, and VII chronicle the reign of Peter Stuyvesant (Peter the Headstrong): his political reforms and military adventures in Delaware; and his unsuccessful defense of New Amsterdam against the conquering British force.

The Sketch Book, familiar essays and tales by Irving, written under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., published serially in the U.S. (1819-20) and in book form in England (1820). Its genial humor and graceful style made it successful both in the U.S. and abroad, where American authors were not yet recognized. Most of the sketches concern his observations as an American visitor in England (e.g. 'Westminster Abbey,' 'The Christmas Dinner,' 'Stratford-on-Avon,' 'John Bull,' and 'The Stage-Coach') but six chapters deal with American scenes. Of these 'Rip van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' are adaptations of German folk tales to the New York backgrounds of Diedrich Knickerbocker. 'English Writers of America' opposes the criticisms of the U.S. by British tourists; 'Traits of Indian Character' is a romantic defense of the American tribes; 'Philip of Pokanoket' is an account of King Philip; and 'The Angler' is a whimsical self-exposure of the author as preferring to read Izaak Walton rather than pursue the art of angling in person.

Rip van Winkle, tale by Irving, published in The Sketch Book (1819-20). Joseph Jefferson is famous for his acting of the title role in a dramatic version, which he made with Boucicault in 1865. Rip, an indolent, good-natured Dutch-American, lives with his shrewish wife in a village on the Hudson during the years before the Revolution. One day, while hunting in the Catskills with his dog Wolf, he meets a dwarf-like stranger dressed in the ancient Dutch fashion. He helps him to carry a keg, and with him joins a party silently engaged in a game of ninepins. After drinking of the liquor they furnish, he falls into a sleep which lasts 20 years, during which the Revolutionary War takes place. He awakes as an old man, returns to his altered village, is greeted by his old dog, who dies of the excitement, and finds that his wife has long been dead. Rip and his associates are almost forgotten, but he goes on to live with his daughter, now grown and the mother of a family, and soon wins new friends by his generosity and cheerfulness.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, short story by Irving, possibly based on a German source. It was published in The Sketch Book (1820). An operetta, The Headless Horseman (1936), with music by Douglas Moore and libretto by Stephen Vincent Benét, is based on it.

Ichabod Crane, an assertive, ingenuous Yankee schoolmaster, lanky and angular in appearance, lives among the Dutch folk in Sleepy Hollow on the Hudson, in post-Revolutionary days. He loves Katrina Van Tassel, daughter of a rich farmer, and is the victim of many pranks by the friends of his chief rival for her affections, Brom Van Brunt or Brom Bones, a reckless horseman and neighbourhood hero. At an autumn quilting party at Van Tassel's the guests entertain themselves with stories of ghosts and witches, and Brom tells of the headless horseman said to haunt the region. Ichabod is discouraged in his suit for Katrina, and on his way home, late at night, riding a borrowed plow horse, is frightened by a headless apparition that rides after him and throws a round object at his head. Ichabod is never again seen in Sleepy Hollow, although the next morning the round object is discovered to be a pumpkin. Brom marries Katrina, and Ichabod's tale becomes a legend of the countryside.

Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists: A Medley,  49 tales and sketches by Irving, published in 1822 under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Resembling its predecessor, The Sketch Book, the collection includes stories with English, French, and Spanish settingss, but is chiefly remembered for "Dolph Heyliger" and its sequel, "The Storm-Ship," which recount the adventures of a New York lad who undertakes to discredit the legend of a haunted house, but encounters its ghost and recovers a fabulous buried treasure, as well as marrying an heiress. Americanized versions of the Flying Dutchman theme are presented in "The Storm-Ship," and other stories in the volume are also based on European folklore.

Tales of a Traveller, 32 stories and sketches by Irving, published in 1824. The volume, resembling its predecessors The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall, was the product of notes and anecdotes gathered mainly during a tour of Germany (1822-23). The first three sections deal with European backgrounds: "Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman," "Buckthorne and His Friends," and "The Italian Banditti'; while the fourth section, "The Money-Diggers," contains five tales "found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker," set in New York, and dealing with buried-treasure legends about Captain Kidd and other pirates.

The Alhambra, 41 sketches by Irving, published in 1832 and revised and enlarged 1852, the result of the author's residence (1829) in the ancient Moorish palace at Granada in Spain. His purpose was "to depict its half-Spanish, half Oriental character; .  . . to revive the traces of grace and beauty fas fading from its walls; to record the regal and chivalrous traditions . . . and the whimsical and supertitious legends of the motley race now burrowing among its ruins." Tales of medieval Moorish Spain are interspersed with architectural and other descriptions, and anecdotes of the author's experiences among the native residents.

The Crayon Miscellany is a series of three volumes published under this pseudonym [Geoffrey Crayon, pseudonym of Irving].  The books are A Tour of the Prairies, Legends of the Conquest of Spain, and Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey.

A Tour on the Prairies, autobiographical narrative by Irving, published as the first volume of The Crayon Miscellany (1832), in which he was accompanied by Charles J. Latrobe, a British traveler; Count de Pourtalès, a Swiss youth, Henry L. Ellsworth, a Government commissioner; and a little swarthy, meagre, wiry French creole, amed Antoine, but familiarly dubbed Tonish, a kind of Gil Blas of the frontier'. From Fort Gibson, in the present Oklahoma, Irving and his companions traveled westward, living among the frontiersmen and in camps and buffalo-hunting grounds of the Pawnee, Osage, and Creek tribes. Irving was particularly interested in gathering examples of folklore, and the Tour recounts such legends as that of the Pacing Mustang. The descriptions of Western life are presented in Irving's characteristically softened and picturesque manner, and when compared with Ellsworth's manuscript account show many omissions and alterations of fact.

Astoria, now a town near the mouth of the Columbia river in northwest Oregon, was founded as Fort Clatsop (1805) by the Lewis and Clark expedition. In 1811 John Jacob Astor founded a fur trading post at the site, but during the war of 1812 the Astor interests were sold to the British. Astoria was restored to the U.S. in accordance with the Treaty of Ghent (1818). Irving's Astoria (1836, revised 1849) is a history of Astor's fur trade in the northwest. The region also appears in fiction, e.g. Archie Binn's You Rolling River.

The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), narrative by Washington Irving from the papers of Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville (1796-1878). Bonneville, a West Pointer, led expeditions through the western slopes of the Rockies in 1832-35. Irving, at work on his novel Astoria, met Bonneville at the home of John Jacob Astor, bought the explorer's papers and maps, and shaped his story as a kind of sequel to Astoria.

Mary Shelley

 

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