Walter Göbel

Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle”,

A Postcolonial Reading or: In Search of a Usable Past

Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle” is undoubtedly one of the most famous, but also one of
the most enigmatic short stories of the nineteenth century. Part of the enigma is due to the multi-
ple search for a usable past in the story and in the Sketch Book itself. The glorification of tradi-
tional and even medieval English culture in the spirit of Edmund Burke, the idealisation of an
idyllic Dutch past in New York state and the fascination of Native American myths seem equally
to have inspired the romantic poet’s mind. While decoding this plethora of cultural intertexts,
most critics have, however, not paid any attention to the postscript which Irving added in 1848.
Approached from a postcolonial point of view, the postscript calls the entire tale in question and
deconstructs the Dutch and German legendary intertexts by adding an older layer of myth and
fable. Native American culture takes over, most obviously in the symbolic remapping of places,
and dislocates white mythologies as much as European romanticism, conceding – possibly
against the author’s intentions – a cultural precedence to the expropriated Native Americans,
while the centre of poetic inspiration moves from the old to the new world.

Introduction
There have been so many excellent interpretations of Irving’s “Rip van Win-
kle”, whether mainly biographical, intertextual, mythic, psychological, politi-
cal or feminist, that a new approach seems to demand some explanation.1 Or
does it? Isn’t it a commonplace that complex and paradoxical texts, espe-
cially those with an enigma at their centre, require periodical reinterpretation
according to the shifting horizon of the present and its mediation with the

1
Some of these approaches can be found in 1860-1974. A Centenary Commentary on the
Works of Washington Irving, ed. Andrew B. Meyers, which includes Philip Young’s famous
psychological approach, and in Critical Essays on Washington Irving, ed. Ralph M. Alder-
man. Among more recent interpretations I would like to mention Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky,
“The Value of Storytelling: ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ in the
Context of The Sketch Book” – especially for Irving’s search of a mythic England; Richard
J. Zlogar, “‘Accessories That Covertly Explain’: Irving’s Use of Dutch Genre Painting in
‘Rip van Winkle’”; Peter Kuczynski, “Intertextuality in Rip van Winkle: Irving’s Use of
Büsching’s Folk-Tale Peter Klaus in an Age of Transition”; Deanna C. Turner, “Shattering
the Fountain: Irving’s Re-Vision of ‘Kubla Khan’ in ‘Rip van Winkle’ (one of the few con-
tributions to mention the postscript, which perhaps addresses “criticisms that he had clung
too closely to European models”, 14); Colin D. Pearce, “Changing Regimes: The Case of
Rip van Winkle” for a philosophical-theological approach; and Jutta Zimmermann, “Exem-
plarisches Erzählen in Washington Irvings ‘Rip van Winkle’”. Zimmermann emphasises the
importance of the, albeit playful, creation of national myths for the story, anticipating some
of my postcolonial argument.
104 Walter Göbel

horizon of the past? The criticism of the “Rip Van Winkle”-story is exem-
plary for this hermeneutic truism: questions about the many possible pre-
texts2 influencing Irving – Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith, German legends,
Dutch genre painting have been among the main intertextual sources –, about
moral messages, about hidden psychological or psychoanalytical agendas,
about symbolism, myth and politics have in their turn illustrated the history
of literary fashions and theories and allowed for the discovery of ever new
keys for the central enigmas of the text and its many intertexts. And the pre-
sent age offers a new set of questions within the framework of postcolonial
studies, which I will reduce to two: how did the postcolonial American situa-
tion affect the question of cultural identity and how is the colonial situation
of the Native American nations inscribed into the story? There is, however,
an additional, more simple reason why a new reading of “Rip van Winkle” is
offered here: a dissatisfaction with the way in which the postscript from the
year 1848 – a ‘peritext’ according to Gerard Genette – has commonly been
interpreted or rather, more often than not, been completely disregarded. A
typical example of this is Helmbrecht Breinig’s remark that the postscript
should not be taken into account, because it was added much later (Breinig
1971, 151).3 In the second part of the interpretation offered here, however,
the postscript will move to the centre of attention, as it deconstructs or re-
writes the entire story.

Framing Rip with Irving’s own Paratexts and Intertexts:

The Sketch Book and Knickerbocker’s History
The openness of the “Rip van Winkle”-story may to some extent be due to
Irving’s concept of the Sketch Book, which presents itself as a somewhat
haphazard collection of various kinds of texts. Side by side we find essays on
aspects of English culture (“Rural Funerals”, “London Antiques”) and de-
tailed quasi-ethnological descriptions of rituals and festivities (e.g. Christ-
mas), parts of a travelogue presenting famous locations (Stratford-Upon-
Avon, Westminster Abbey), sentimental tales reminiscent of Sterne’s A Sen-
timental Journey (“The Widow and her Son”, “The Pride of the Village”),
sketches of celebrities met or imagined (William Roscoe, James I of Scot-
land), essays on poetry and criticism (“English Writers on America”, “The
Art of Book Making”) and two depictions of Native American life and his-
tory (“Traits of Indian Character” and “Philip of Pokanoket”), which were
written earlier (in 1814) and added to the collection. Irving presents himself

2
The term is throughout used in the sense of ‘antecedent text’.
3
Especially for a German critic such a positioning is unusual, because critical editions are
traditionally based upon the author’s final version of a given text.