“Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas” by Alan Trachtenberg

 

400 pages, Hill and Wang, ISBN-13: 978-0809042975

Author Alan Trachtenberg was an American historian and the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English and professor emeritus of American Studies at Yale University and was, by all accounts that I have seen, a respected scholar in American cultural studies for more than forty years before his death in 2020. In his book, Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas, he examines a famous American symbol or icon from over the 250 years and how it impacted the people of the time and up to the present day. In the 19^th Century, many believed that the new method of photography was a way in which a person’s personality could be captured in more honest detail than a painting; in his essay on Lincoln, Trachtenberg undertook to explore this concept and the sociological implications this entails for later societies. A related essay examines the extent to which Walker Evans’ Depression-era photographs created, rather than revealed, images of the South that to this day shape national discourse about the region, for good and ill (mostly ill).

I must admit I was surprised by this book, picked up for cheap from a little out-of-the-way place called Avalon Books in Shelby Township, Michigan (now, sadly, defunct). I wasn’t at all familiar with Trachtenberg and I certainly wasn’t prepared for some of the concepts he threw at me, and while these essays are always enlightening and thought-provoking, they are also often maddening and rage-inducing, like, for instance, this one: “Newspapers respond…to the increasing mystification, the deepening estrangement of urban space from interpenetration, from exchange of subjectivities”. Hmmmmm…yeahhhhh…this is esoteric verbiage of the first order, and I found myself reading this book with a dictionary at hand on my right and a thesaurus at hand on my left. There are moments of pleasure, to be sure, like his analysis of the political meanings of daguerreotypes in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a discussion of deadpan in the work of Mark Twain. Not for the faint of heart or the short of attention.