Trachtenberg Covers His Tracts

The most immediately noticeable aspect of “Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas” is a giant photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s craggy face staring out from the cover. But in spite of the photograph’s prominence, the key word in the title of Alan Trachtenberg’s new book is not “Lincoln,” but “enigmas.”

Honest Abe figures only slightly in one of the book’s essays, and even then it is not so much Abraham Lincoln as the photographs of him that interest the author. This fascination is typical for Trachtenberg, who is a professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University. “Lincoln’s Smile” largely ignores the giant figures of America’s past in order to give an insightful analysis of the minute details of culture that are more frequently overlooked.

This weighty but rewarding collection of nineteen essays written over the last forty years is divided into three parts, each dealing with a different historical period. The first focuses on the antebellum years, the second on the Gilded Age, and the third on the 20th century. Trachtenberg covers a wide range of topics, with an emphasis on photography, urban studies, and literature.

Trachtenberg views himself as the descendant of the historical critics of the 1920s who first used cultural criticism to examine photography and, in the process, created the field of American studies as we know it.

Unfortunately, he is much more in dialogue with these historians than with the reader. At times the book seems to be infused with ghosts from the past, obscure critics that have been forgotten by everyone except Trachtenberg.

Trachtenberg draws upon his immense knowledge of history, culture and art not to answer questions about 19th- and 20th-century American culture, but to raise them. Not only does he address existing puzzles—he creates enigmas out of events that seem commonplace. Only Trachtenberg’s obvious delight in wordplay and vivid language rescue what could have easily become an impenetrable maze of historical references and theories.

Again and again, Trachtenberg returns to analyzing how people perceive one another and their world. Trachtenberg is at his best when drawing the reader’s attention to the significance of some otherwise-overlooked fact. Trachtenberg first presents Henry James’ more conventional analysis of Whitman’s poetry, only to undercut it by showing Whitman’s grittier side. For Trachtenberg, the poet is not merely a man of nature, but also a man of the urban environment who wrote about dead prostitutes in the street. Trachtenberg’s Whitman is a complex figure, less important as a poet than as a witness to his flawed culture.

Trachtenberg’s work is difficult for even the most advanced college reader. He doesn’t always ground the critics and artists he references—names and ideas float in and out of essays. This refusal to contextualize the critics he engages with could be a conscious choice—the names are not as important to Trachtenberg as the ideas being expressed—but it leaves the reader feeling out of the loop and overwhelmed.

In Trachtenberg’s hands, a bridge ceases to be a work of architecture and becomes a “cultural text,” a symbol that reveals aspects of the society that created it. Trachtenberg opens his essay on the Brooklyn Bridge by considering the bridge as viewed by little-known contemporaneous architectural critic Montgomery Schuler. Trachtenberg uses him as a launching point from which he examines the various artistic representations of the bridge throughout the first half of the 20th century and addresses the question of why the bridge recurs so often in American art and literature. Hart Crane’s 1930 epic poem “The Bridge” is beautifully interwoven with thoughts on the bridge’s multiplicity in perception and representation.

Trachtenberg’s array of facts, names, and tidbits is what makes his writing simultaneously insightful and difficult to read. Each of Trachtenberg’s essays is a dense, layered piece that is as much of an enigma as the subjects explored therein. This book is not meant to be read in a day, a week, or even a month. Each of these essays needs substantial time for digesting Trachtenberg’s complex prose and even more complex ideas.

In a literary era when so much non-fiction writing focuses on issues that polarize readers—global warming, decaying moral values, political corruption, and the like—Trachtenberg uncovers the small and forgotten parts of our past that have helped forge a common American culture. Trachtenberg’s work is not an easy pleasure, but it’s refreshing to read the thoughts of such a thoughtful cultural critic—if you can persevere.

—Reviewer Madeline K. B. Ross can be reached at mross@fas.harvard.edu.