Peter Conrad’s Flight from Precision

Richard Poirier

  • Imagining America by Peter Conrad
    Routledge, 319 pp, £7.50, May 1980, ISBN 0 7100 0370 6

When the Redcoats first encountered the Colonial revolutionaries they were quite unexpectedly beaten, and according to an anecdote in Harold Rosenberg’s The Tradition of the New, they were beaten because they were the best-trained infantry in Europe. They had been so well trained that when they looked at the rough American terrain on which their opponents had chosen to meet them, they could not see it. Instead, what they saw was a European battlefield on which they expected to march in formation to meet and overwhelm a similar formation of the enemy, rather than uncouth renegades shooting from behind trees. A gridiron of style, a trained mode of perception, preceded them into battle, creating the illusion that in front of them was only what they intended to find.

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