Hybridizations in John P. Kennedy’s Swallow Barn
4.3 Generic Hybridity as Political Strategy
Kennedy’s integrationist design is clearly manifest also in his ostentatious strategy of generic hybridity. In "A Word in Advance, from the Author to the Reader," written for the revised edition of 1851, Kennedy warned that Swallow Barn "is not a novel" (10) and then commented: "Our old friend Polonius had nearly hit it in his rigmarole of 'pastoral-comical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral'––which, saving 'the tragical,' may well make up my schedule" (11). Later in the text, the narrator tells his correspondent to be prepared for the "little romance of domestic life" which he is "about to weave out of . . . everyday occurrences" (80). The oxymoronic categorization of Swallow Barn as a
"romance of domestic life" indicates that the narrative mixes elements from the
"romance" and the domestic novel, producing a crossbreed that can be harnessed to both progressivism and conservatism. Kennedy's "romance" is open for assimilation because it has been domesticated. The hero is relegated to the household, where his culture-preserving activities turn into self-conscious antics that do not have any political significance.
In fact, it is tempting to view Ned (i.e. Edward) Hazard in Swallow Barn not only as a distant relative of Scott's Edward Waverley but also as a mock-heroic substitution for George Tucker's Edward Grayson in The Valley of Shenandoah. Mark Littleton writes to his correspondent: "A few years ago [Ned] was seized with a romantic fever which manifested itself chiefly in a conceit to visit South America, and play knight-errant in the quarrel of the Patriots. . . . [H]e came home the most disquixotted cavalier that ever hung up his shield at the end of a scurvy crusade" (52–53). The characterization is closely reminiscent of James Gildon's attempt to compromise Edward Grayson's heroism as "knight errantry"26––yet, in Swallow Barn the cynic's perspective, represented as benevolent irony, is that of the narrator.
As has been argued above, the precarious balance established by the narrative between the pragmatic ratification of change and the conservative opposition to change rests on its being a still life. In consequence, Ned Hazard's wooing of Bel Tracy is a series of non-events ironically distorted to mock-heroic dimensions. The labels provided for Ned's feats by the respective chapter titles evoke a heroic plot with which the real occurrences are comically at odds. Thus, the chapter entitled "Knight Errantry"
(351–358) recounts his attempt to regain Bel's good will by catching "Fairbourne," her escaped falcon (which, of course, is really a hawk). The following chapter, "A Joust at Utterance" (359–368), shows Ned engaging in a pointless and decidedly un-genteel fistfight with a notorious troublemaker. At the end of this chapter, the narrator comments sardonically: "we regained Swallow Barn : returning like knights to a
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bannered castle from a successful inroad,––flushed with heat and victory,––covered with dust and glory ; our enemies subdued and our lady's pledge redeemed" (368). And Harvey Riggs, who serves as an extension of the narrator's ironic voice, comments on Ned's embarrassing attempt at chivalry: "Fancy that you have heard of a tilting match between a bull and a cavalier, and that the bull was beaten. Romance and chivalry are souvereign varnishes for cracked crowns and bloody noses" (385).
When she learns of the fistfight, Bel is greatly disconcerted. Ned responds to her displeasure by symptoms of love-sickness, which are described in a short chapter entitled: "Signs of a Hero" (386–392). Here, the willfulness with which the "romance"
plot pattern is imposed onto the scene is once again brought home. According to the narrator, Bel's learning of the quarrel was "one of those unlucky strokes of fortune to which the principal actors in romance have been subject from time immemorial. This therefore, gives me strong hopes that [Ned] is really destined to be a hero of some note before I am done with him" (386). The passage announces that the "picturesque tourist" will eventually withdraw from the scene and return from the periphery to the center, from provisional and ironic "romance" to everyday reality. Before he does so, Ned has successfully confessed his love to Bel––a somewhat embarrassing drawing-room occurrence that is recounted under the disproportionate heading "The Fate of a Hero" (420–434).
After its two uneventful strands of action (the swampland lawsuit and Ned's wooing of Bel) have been brought to a conclusion, the narrative disintegrates. First, it veers into the chapter about the slave quarter, which, in its turn, leads to an inserted story that recounts the tragic fate of the slave Abe. Here again, the particular significance attributed to the slave population as embodiment of the conventions and abstractions at the heart of the southern symbolic order becomes apparent. Too proud to serve on the plantation, Abe was put under the service of a pilot on the Chesapeake and died in the attempt of saving the crew of a shipwrecked boat during a furious storm. In volunteering for this kind of hopeless service, it is pointed out, the slave was
"impelled by that love of daring which the romancers call chivalry" (482). If the old slave Carey is the nearest approximation to a medieval "minstrel," Abe is the most authentic translation of a "romance" hero into the present of the nineteenth-century. Indeed, his fate spurs the narrator to real pathos: "I say, it was a gallant sight to see such heroism shining out in an humble slave of the Old Dominion !" (483).
Such pathos, however, is possible only in connection with the vague tale about a dead slave. Otherwise, the text takes pains to show that the "Old Dominion" is not so much a (political) reality as an image that is consciously conjured up by the visitor from
26 Cf. G. Tucker, The Valley of Shenandoah 1: 183.
the North. By a twofold strategy, Kennedy finally provides a closure which contains the political implications of Littleton's "sojourn" in the South. As Walter Scott's wavering heroes have to be conducted from the "romantic" realm of the Highlands back into the British Empire, Kennedy's traveler also has to be piloted out of the "Old Dominion,"
recrossing the boundary that separates the realm of ambiguity from the real world.
Littleton is made to do so by the sluice of the plantation library, where he withdraws during a prolonged spell of rain. Reading in the library, the narrator ceases to be a participant in the life of his Virginian relatives and undergoes a process of unlearning.
Accordingly, the narrative shifts from the description of plantation life to an account of Littleton's reading experiences. He spends his time perusing an old account of the life of Captain John Smith, one of the first colonists of Virginia. Having read the story Smith's life when he was still a child, Littleton now finds a new relationship to the text:
The narrative was no longer the mere fable that delighted my childhood ; but there I had it in its most authentic form, with the identical print, paper and binding in which the story was first given to the world by its narrator––for aught that I knew, the Captain himself––perhaps the Captain's good friend, old Sam Purchas, who had such a laudable thirst for the wonderful. This was published, too, when thousands were living to confute the author if he falsified in any point. (496)
Describing his intellectual adventures in the library, Littleton employs the tone of the professed antiquarian, mixing ironic fabulation and scholarly pedantry in the manner of Scott's narrators. The implicit theme of these passages is what Scott discussed as the conflicting claims of "romance" and "real history," i.e. the twin dichotomy of fiction versus fact and text versus history. Paradoxically, as a grown-up the narrator seems to be charmed even more thoroughly by Smith's account than when he was a child. Now, the distinction between fact and fiction come to be totally obliterated. Smith's story ceases to be a "mere fable" because Littleton is actually holding the volume in his hands. Evidently, the error––or the trick––is in the confusion of medium and message, since the material authenticity of the book is purposefully mistaken for the historicity of its content. Littleton underscores the implicit irony by stressing the uncertainty of authorship. Even the year of publication is obscure because the last number of the date given on the title-page is illegible (495).
It becomes apparent that the secularization of "romance" goes along with the mythification of history. History is mixed up with myth, in the same manner in which
"romance" is mixed up with domestic fiction and the still life. While George Tucker had insisted that "romance" once had been real but was irrevocably gone, Kennedy follows Scott in suggesting that "romance" has never been quite real. If “romance” has always been a construction, however, it can apparently be continued into the "real history" of the present. Accordingly, Mark Littleton's confusion of medium and message in reading
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the account of Smith's life points to a strategy of displacing politics into the literary, where it would pose a formal problem amenable to stylistic solutions. Kennedy's narrative achieves a hybridization of genres and modes that is purposefully confused with a mediation of the glaring oppositions of permanence and change, regionalism and nationalism, plantation and industrial manufacture, slavery and freedom, "South"
and "North." In Swallow Barn, the "Old Dominion" is represented as an imaginative realm, a fictitious text, where politics might be transcended by style.