First published as “Containment or Emergence? A Theory of American Literature.” Making America: The Cultural Work of Literature. Ed. Susanne Rohr, Peter Schneck, and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. 67-82. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 I use the word containment here as a shorthand for a whole range of radical claims in which, in a first stage of the argument, concepts like systemic cooptation, unwitting complicity or invisible forms of constraint were seen as power effects of American literature that should be unmasked. In contrast, concepts like surveillance, disciplinary regimes or subjection have dominated a second, more radical stage. In each case, revisionists have argued that it has been the main function of American literature to serve as an invisible form of ideological and political control, if not subjection. Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature Winfried Fluck I. In the revisionist criticism that has dominated the study of American literature over the last fifteen years, we have become used to a mode of reading which focuses on literary and fictional texts as discursive and disciplinary practices. The interpretative emphasis lies on what is cleverly and cunningly contained by the text, not on what is made possible by literature. In contrast, I want to provide the sketch of a theory of American literature in which literature does not only figure as a site of systemic containment but also of imaginary self-extension. 1 In fact, as I will argue, the two are interdependent and regularly reinforce each other in ever new constellations. The stronger the containment, the greater the wish for an imaginary self-extension that can go beyond existing constraints; the more radical the wish for self-extension, the greater the systemic need to find new ways of containment. The inherently provisional and exploratory dimension of fictional texts as “as-if-statements” offers an experimental space to try out new responses to these challenges. In the following essay I will trace the changing constellations of this ongoing interplay. My theory is based on the following assumptions: 2 Iser’s use of the concept of the imaginary is taken from a phenomenological tradition. His two major sources of inspiration on the imaginary are Sartre and Castoriadis. For a detailed discussion of the concept of the imaginary see Iser’s books Prospecting (1989) and The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993). 3 For Iser, the preferred term to describe the function of fiction is that of a self-extension. The term comprises two aspects. On the one hand, a fictional text will not be of any interest to a reader if it cannot evoke any personal resonance. We have to be able to relate to the text. On the other hand, readers will not be interested either if the fictional text does not go beyond a mere reproduction of what already exists. Thus, as Iser puts it, for the duration of the reading process, “we are both ourselves and someone else” at the same time (244). 1. The gradual liberation of the “fictional” from religious and moral contexts and its institutionalization in literary texts, especially in the form of the novel, is one of the major events in modern Western cultural history. 2. This emergence and institutionalization of literary fictions establishes a mode of communication with conditions and possibilities of its own and draws its major force from a particular potential, namely to provide the imaginary, whether radically individual or cultural, with new possibilities for articulation. 3. The imaginary is defined here, following Wolfgang Iser, in a phenomeno‐ logical sense as that realm of diffuse, discontinuous and decontextualized associations, images, feelings, affects, and moods which constantly feed our perceptions and flood our consciousness but which need to be translated into a recognizable form or Gestalt in order to find expression. 2 One advantage of such a broad definition of the imaginary is that it is not equated with any of its manifestations. In fact, to trace the changing words and concepts that have been used to grasp this imaginary dimension - such as fancy and imagination, prophetic vision, phantasm, the uncanny, the unconscious, or desire, to name but a few - would in itself provide a fasci‐ nating cultural history of changing conceptualizations and manifestations of the imaginary. 4. This “articulation effect” has made fictional texts, and especially the novel, one of the primary cultural instruments of imaginary self-extension and individual self-fashioning in Western societies. 3 By giving the imaginary a Gestalt, fiction can give expression to thoughts, feelings, and affects that may remain elusive otherwise. For Iser, “the act of representation brings about something that hitherto did not exist as a given object” (Prospecting 236). However, the imaginary is not identical with its representation because fiction can only give expression to the imaginary by linking it with cultural codes of the real. In the history of literature (and other 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 96 Winfried Fluck 4 The term individual is not used here in any emphatic philosophical sense, as a subject, but in the Tocquevillian sense of a new type of social character who wants to extend his or her own possibilities of self-realization. The special potential of democracies for liberating the imaginary is already perceived by Tocqueville, although with concern: “I have no fear that the poetry of democratic peoples will be found timid or that it will stick too close to the earth. I am much more afraid that it will spend its whole time getting lost in the clouds and may finish up by describing an entirely fictitious country. I am alarmed at the thought of too many immense, incoherent images, overdrawn descriptions, bizarre effects, and a whole fantastic breed of brainchildren who will make one long for the real world” (489). Since this essay was first published, sociologists have introduced the concepts singularity and singularization in order to avoid suggestions of individual autonomy and self-determination that have often been associated with concepts like individualization and individualism. But as used here, individualization simply refers to an increasing dissociation from the authority of social and cultural claims. It can be a story of loss but also of gains. 5 Actually, I think, one should speak of an act of suppression, because to acknowledge this dimension of cultural history would also mean that one would no longer be able to define those considered oppressed as dupes or victims of the system. fictions), we encounter this interplay of the imaginary and the real in ever new combinations. In this process, no side remains unaffected: While the imaginary aims to redefine reality, the codes of the real transform the imaginary into something that can be understood and experienced by others, thereby socializing subjective experience. 5. The paradoxical interaction of the imaginary and the real can be seen as a motor of an ongoing process of cultural rehierarchization and individual‐ ization in Western societies. 4 II. Such assumptions do not necessarily stand in opposition to revisionist insights into the cooptive and disciplinary powers of fictional texts. However, they provide a necessary addition to these insights by drawing attention to the interdependence between a growing refinement in disciplinary regimes and yet, at the same time, a growth in individual self-expression, between ever more subtle forms of ideological containment and, at the same time, a steady increase in the possibilities of imaginary self-extension. This interdependence escapes the new revisionism. 5 Its paradoxical logic works both ways: It is one of the major promises of fiction to give expression to not yet fully articulated, diffusely imagined desires, feelings and associations, but this articulation also leads to the discursive configuration of the imaginary element by which it was generated and, thus, to its socialization. This configuration, in turn, provides a basis for 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 97 6 This alone I think can explain a strange paradox that pervades the current critical argument in literary studies and which I have described on another occasion: the fact that, contrary to revisionist analyses about the all-pervasive cooptive and disciplinary power effects of discursive regimes, a culture of opposition and dissent has emerged in contemporary intellectual and cultural life that is unique in its scope and critical intensity. new forms of social and cultural control; however, in doing so, it also provokes new wishes for self-expression and imaginary self-extension. In following the heated debates between the various revisionist camps about whether American literature has any oppositional potential, it may seem that we have to decide between either containment or opposition. But the real challenge is to grasp their interdependence, that is, the way in which they depend on one another and constantly reinforce each other in that extremely unstable semiotic system called literature. 6 This is not to say that the new revisionism, which has given us intriguing and powerful readings of classic American literature, should be dismissed. It means, however, that the role and function of literature seems to me to be more complicated than it is presented in many revisionist readings at present. Literature can be a site of cultural containment and ideological formation, but it is also a struggle for expression and, in consequence, a major medium of self-definition and imaginary self-extension. III. In order to illustrate a view of literature as a realm of negotiation between seemingly contradictory functions of fiction, let me focus on two types of novels which can be considered as breakthrough genres in the development of a specific American tradition and which are nowadays often described as supreme examples of ideological containment, the historical novel of the frontier and the domestic novel. The frontier already plays an important part in a novel such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799). But since Brown’s Indians are only beastly manifestations of an imaginary fear and nothing else, belonging together with a ferocious panther to a paradigm of life-threatening forces, the threat to the self remains ultimately uncontrollable and the imaginary functions as an uncanny double of the self. In contrast, in James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novels of the frontier, this Indian threat is dramatized as challenge of a prior, savage state of civilization that must be conquered and contained. This encounter is described from the perspective of an eighteenth-century ideal of civilizatory progress which insists on the superiority of modern stages of historical development over the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 98 Winfried Fluck savagery of prior stages of civilization but also fears the “modern age” as a threat to communal values and established social hierarchies. James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms write on the basis of a stable, unquestioned historical and social hierarchy, both use their novels to dramatize a threat to this hierarchy in order to provide it with a new legitimation and to reconsolidate it successfully, and both present their narratives in an unambiguous mode of representation which reflects their strong belief in the legitimacy and transparency of the social organization they favor. Both authors, finally, write historical novels in order to give their struggle for social recognition the heroic dimension of an epic battle. However, in their efforts to elevate the novel to the level of a national epic, they also introduce fictional elements designed to make their stories of a rightful historical genealogy interesting and “powerful.” As a result, the historical novel emerges as a highly paradoxical genre. On the one hand, it can be seen as an attempt by gentry-authors to put fiction in the service of their own “civilized” values and political claims, while, on the other hand, the historical novel heats up the imagination with wild adventures and daring deeds in order to engage the reader in support of these goals. It stimulates and constantly refuels the imagination - but it does so in order to increase the legitimacy of its own social and cultural claims. Thus, it is in constant movement between two constitutive elements: its nourishing promise of adventure and the “socialization” of these elements of adventure, so that emerging threats to authority can be successfully contained. The license of fiction to reconfigure social hierarchies, if only temporarily, may provide a crucial explanation for the initially unexpected success of Cooper’s version of the historical novel, as, for example, in the case of The Pioneers (1823). By elevating Leatherstocking to the level of a vicarious father figure who saves the heroine where the actual father and patriarch, Judge Temple, fails, a process of rehierarchization is set in motion which becomes a major source of attraction and gratification for the reader. However, this also creates a major problem of representation. For clearly, in view of the ultimate goal of the historical novel to legitimize an established social hierarchy, “wild,” heroic adventurers that have the potential to overturn this hierarchy must be prevented from becoming too seductive. In The Pioneers, Cooper solves the problem by removing Natty from the new social order after he proves unwilling and incapable to adjust to the legal code of civilization. When Cooper resurrects Natty as a younger self in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Natty has already internalized an idea of the “natural” order of things for which he now becomes a willing pathfinder and for which he needs no social legitimation. Simms, on the other hand, solves the challenge of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 99 7 On the problem of how to relate history to fiction (and how to invert the hierarchy of the two), cf. Dekker: “In most of his romances, Cooper solved this problem by virtually dispensing with the kind of famous historical personages and events that figure so prominently in most of the Waverley novels. As a result, Cooper’s casts of characters could be smaller, his plots simpler, and his natural settings could bulk larger than was usual in Scott’s romances. For Simms, the potential gains of concentration which Cooper’s practice offered did not outweigh the losses of panoramic effects and ‘real’ historical interest; and so he crowded the plots of his romances with the notable figures and incidents that also appeared in his History of South Carolina” (63). 8 I think it is the successful balance Cooper achieved between the two contradictory pulls of the historical romance which provides the answer to the question Green poses: “But granted that driving interest in America - which I called the cultural reason for Cooper’s popularity - why should Cooper’s treatment of these themes have been its beneficiary, when for instance Robert Montgomery Bird’s was not, though his Nick of the Woods (1837) treats the same themes with what seems to me much more literary power and skill? ” (“Cooper, Nationalism” 166-67). 9 The unstable semantics of the genre designation thus reflects an inner conflict or tension at the heart of the genre, a tension between historical specificity and a fictionalization of history in the interest of excitement and adventure, a conflict between an imaginary attraction to the “wild” and its exemplary reintegration into a “natural” social order. In fact, it may be argued that one major attraction of the romance consists in its considerable freedom in combining generic forms and modes of representation. “Pure” examples are temporary rehierarchization even more cleverly (but also more conventionally): In The Yemassee (1835), his rough outdoor hero is really a disguised aristocrat who returns to his true identity and rightful social status after the attack of the “savage” forces is successfully repelled. In both cases, the historical novels draws its appeal from a carefully controlled interaction between “historical” and “fictional” elements, the realm of the reality principle and the wild desires of the imaginary which are temporarily rearranged in hierarchy in order to “tempt” and engage the reader, but which are, in the end, reintegrated into the reaffirmation of a social hierarchy legitimized by history. 7 Seen in this way, the historical novel presents a highly instructive case for the gradual liberation of elements of the imaginary in the history of the American novel. It dramatizes a state of tension and strikes a precarious balance: It has to draw on elements of the romance in order to make itself dramatically interesting and to provide a space for scenarios of heroic selfenhancement. But it also has to discipline and ultimately control these elements of the romance in order to meet their potential challenge to a social hierarchy which the historical novel set out to defend and to exempt from the suspicion of undue privileges of power and possession. 8 Hence, it moves between novel and romance; accordingly, it has been called both historical novel and historical romance almost interchangeably. 9 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 100 Winfried Fluck rarely found. The American romance usually appears as a hybrid form, constantly and promiscuously establishing new discursive links and generic combinations. In terms of its theory of effect, the main point about the historical romance is thus not simply the liberation of an imaginary core of “wild,” savage selfassertion but its connection with a countermove of control, resulting in a constant tension between wish-fulfillment and restraint, the articulation of a desire for imaginary self-extension and its socialization. The reader is lured by the excitement of heroic deeds; at the same time, he or she is also reminded of the need for self-discipline and the legitimacy of social hierarchy. In its recurring sequences of victory and defeat, pursuit and escape, anxiety and relief, the narrative produces something like an emotional see-saw effect, in which the imagination and the emotions of the reader are constantly refuelled, but also never quite released from the need for self-restraint and self-regulation. The heroic self-discipline which the hero demonstrates therefore also be‐ comes a model for the reader. While the hero has to fight enemies, the reader has to grapple with his or her own projections of triumph and fear and bear the continuing challenges to a fantasy of self-empowerment “manfully.” Thus, the “work” of readers consists in learning to control their own “wild” impulses and to thus to contain a conflict that is carried out on the level of plot in a passionate, openly violent way which is still “savage” and pre-civilizatory. Indeed, in terms of cultural history, this exemplary reenactment of a conflict between the articulation of imaginary temptations and the reassertion of a need for self-regulation is the major achievement of the most popular early forms of the novel, the sentimental, the historical, and the domestic novel. All can be seen as emotional training grounds that use dangerous encounters to dramatize the need for self-regulation. The historical novel can thus be seen as a form instilling a disciplinary regime. However, this function is only part of a trade-off in which imaginary self-extension and temporary rehierarchization also play a crucial role. IV. The adventure story in the style of Cooper’s historical novels and the female domestic novel are usually set in contrast as irreconcileable and antagonistic genres while, in fact, they resemble each other in striking ways in their strategies of internalization and their implied theories of aesthetic effect (so that, in fact, this genre, too, has been called both “domestic novel” and “domestic romance” interchangeably). As critics such as Nina Baym, Jane Tompkins and others 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 101 10 See Brodhead’s chapter, “Sparing the Rod. Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” in his book Cultures of Letters (1993). 11 Cf. my essay “Cultures of Criticism” (1995). 12 These categories are taken from Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985), although I do not use them here for a critique of individualism, as Bellah does. have shown, the domestic novel - at first blush the story of an unappreciated, orphaned, underprivileged girl or young woman - holds a well-calculated theory of power designed to turn weakness into strength and make submission and self-sacrifice the basis for an assertion of the self. At the beginning of Susan Warner’s domestic novel The Wide, Wide World (1850), the young heroine has to learn to overcome a cruel experience of sepa‐ ration which turns her, not legally, but surely symbolically, into an orphan. This, clearly, is another version of the Cinderella-motif whose striking dominance in nineteenth-century women’s literature must have something to do with the fact that it provides an exemplary drama of recognition. Inevitably, one consequence of Ellen’s loss of social relation is a loss of self-esteem. Hence, it must be the project (and promise) of the novel to find new sources of self-esteem. This search draws on images of trimphant self-enhancement in the presence of a father figure, and emotional symbiosis with a mother figure. But as Richard Brodhead has shown in exemplary fashion, both of these forms of imaginary self-empowerment have to be earned, by the heroine as well as the reader, in a painful process of psychic self-regulation. 10 In the historical novel, the “savage” stage of human development has to be overcome, in the domestic novel, it is the “childish” stage, but in both cases it is precisely this realm of yet uncivilized or “immature” forces that becomes the nourishing ground for fiction. V. I have shown in a different context how in Herman Melville’s hands, the novel, no longer following the predictable plot pattern of the historical novel of adventure, metamorphoses into a book that defies any generic formula in its exuberant celebration of fiction’s potential for imaginary role-play and selfextension. 11 In this process, the novel of social apprenticeship, which dominates the first part of the nineteenth-century, is replaced by the early manifestation of an expressive individualism that begins to challenge and replace the selfregulative ethos of fictions of so-called utilitarian individualism. This shift from utalitarian individualism to expressive individualism provides the imaginary with entirely new possibilities. 12 In Moby-Dick (1851), in screening virtually the whole archive of human knowledge for the purpose of imaginary self-extension, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 102 Winfried Fluck 13 For especially helpful discussions of this aspect, see McIntosh, Schulz, and Porter. 14 This, in fact, explains Hawthorne’s characteristic choice of genre. In classifying his novels as romances, it is often forgotten that they take their point of departure from the historical novel and its particular interest in Puritanism. Bell, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (1971), Brumm, Geschichte und Wildnis in der amerikanischen Literatur (1980), and Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986) have discussed Hawthorne’s work in the context of a literary tradition dealing with early New England history, and, especially, with the legacy of Puritanism. The American Revolution, the encounter between white settlers and Native Americans, and the Puritan past of New England were the three dominant themes of the American historical romance until the Civil War. Ishmael as well as Ahab discover ever new roles and forms of self-fashioning. 13 But they are also in constant danger of being overwhelmed by this semiotic abundance - a danger that gives Melville’s rewriting of the Bildungsroman in Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852) its characteristic self-destructive trajectory. Consequently, Melville’s heroes do not fail, as heroes often do in utilitarian individualism, by disregarding the reality-principle. They either exhaust or ruin themselves in the chase and struggle for ever new possibilities of self-expression, so that the novel’s quest for the ungraspable phantom of life turns into “the chartless voyage of an ardent, self-dramatizing ‘I’” (Milder 438). The subsequent history of American literature can be seen as that of a continuous unfolding and increasing radicalization of expressive individualism, although there are moments and movements, like the work of Hawthorne and that of American realism, that try to integrate claims of individual self-assertion into visions of a transformed community. 14 However, where this is done with radical insistence, the imaginary can reassert itself in entirely unforeseen ways. An example is provided by Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which starts out as a democratic critique of feudalism, only to discover unexpected possibilities for self-aggrandizement nourished by the very “fictions” which the book sets out to discipline. But the most intriguing case is provided by Henry James, who first bases his negotiation between individual and society on the possibility of common experiences, then realizes the need for an interpretation of these experiences through consciousness, and finally reveals the uncanny presence of imaginary elements of desire, voyeurism, even vampirism, and, above all, a will to power and self-assertion in this consciousness. In this process, the realist project is transformed from within and a new conceptualization of the imaginary is opened up, as, for example, in James’ stories “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) and “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), in which the imaginary becomes an ungraspable bait. As in the case of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 103 15 See Ickstadt on Howells: “Throughout his writings therefore the romance is associated with everything destructive to the balanced vision: with selfishness, the passions, the morbidness of dreams and the unconscious; with class society, aristocratic conceit and idleness, and with imperialist expansion” (98-99). 16 See Peper’s pioneering study, Bewußtseinslagen des Erzählens und Erzählte Wirklich‐ keiten (1966). Twain, a realistic containment is subverted by fiction’s potential to exceed the “real.” VI. It is fascinating to consider, for a moment, the transformations which the imaginary undergoes in the development of American literature: In Hawthorne, the imaginary is the source of “dark” suggestions of guilt and sin that create all kinds of ambiguities. But this imaginary is still morally contained. In realism, we find a determined attempt to redefine the imaginary as a literary illusion and to subdue it by contrasting it with “experience.” 15 However, as realists, including Howells, find out, this “romance” of real life is much more powerful than they were initially willing to acknowledge. In James’s enigmatic stories of the 1890s and his late novels, a new stage is reached. The imaginary becomes a source of unnameable suggestions which no longer trigger moral reflection but horror. With the works of Kate Chopin, which occupy a major role in the transition from nineteenthto twentieth-century fiction, a long tradition of regarding the imaginary with both fascination and fear comes to an end. In The Awakening (1899), the imaginary is now reconceptualized as an authentic life-giving force, which can no longer be represented, not even by enigmatic, ambiguous signs. It can only be experienced through sensuous suggestion, acknowledging the force of an intangible desire (as does Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie at about the same time). As Jürgen Peper pointed out in the context of a different, but related argument, 16 the subsequent development of modern literature in the twentieth century can be seen as an attempt to penetrate ever new layers of cultural convention, including those of language, in order to get access to an underlying, but inaccessible authentic life force that cannot be represented in language. It can only be represented indirectly by evoking feelings, moods, and associ‐ ations that are tied to signs used for representation. When the idea of an “authentic,” unrepresentable existential dimension is finally undermined by postmodernism’s redefinition of reality as a semiotic universe, this must, in turn, also affect the conceptualization of the imaginary. Instead of acting as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 104 Winfried Fluck placeholder for an existential truth that cannot be expressed, the imaginary now becomes the generator of an endless chain of signifiers and plots that only faintly retain the possibility of an underlying meaning. VII. Again, this story of the changing conceptualizations and literary manifestations of the imaginary has two sides to it. On the one hand, it is a story of liberation: While most conceptualizations of the nineteenth century still emphasize an uncanny, potentially self-destructive dimension of the imaginary, it emerges as a liberating force in most twentieth-century versions. But at the same time, the story of the changing literary manifestations of the imaginary is also one of constant retreat, ranging from the still overpowering presence of the double and the savage in Brown’s work to the narrative function of a mere blank or empty signifier. Hawthorne’s characteristic modes of ambiguity, even James’s “unspeakable suggestions,” though they may only function as hermeneutical baits, still hold a promise of meaning. In contrast, Chopin’s evocation of sensuous experience (or, to give another example, Scott Fitzgerald’s green light on the other side of the bay) assumes a central role in the text because it is, by definition, “untranslatable” in its primarily sensuous suggestiveness. Finally, the postmodern romance of a Donald Barthelme retains meaning only as a faint linguistic echo of mythic patterns and narrative conventions. This story of retreat is closely bound up with the rejection of those (real or imagined) authorities which seem to impede individual self-assertion. Here, too, a fascinating story of changing concepts of the “antagonist” to individual selfrealization is opening up, in which the initially universal claim (and restraints) of rationalism that still govern the world of Charles Brockden Brown are first taken back to a historical dimension, the concept of civilization, and the idea of gentry-guardianship, and are then reduced to a social dimension, the authority of moral and social traditions which become “manners” in the work of James. In James, manners can be both deceptive and an element of self-definition; in Chopin, they have become oppressive only and threaten to suffocate the self. In the worlds of Dreiser and Fitzgerald, on the other hand, manners are displaced by a new materialism that is much harder to grasp and to battle because it already resembles the unstable plasticity of the consumer market and the stock exchanges; moreover, it is so all-pervasive that the individual can no longer be sure whether and to what degree it is infected itself by these forces and desires. This, in turn, triggers the modernist search for non-materialistic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 105 residues of existence such as art (or the aesthetic realm) or an existential reality that explodes all social conventions. However, it is one of the paradoxical consequences of this retreat to a seem‐ ingly authentic, uncorrupted sphere of life that the relentless and continually radicalized search for an authentic dimension that is not yet compromised by social forces reveals ever new layers of linguistic and cultural convention, until the idea of authenticity is undermined itself. Not only are the concepts of art and self now considered as discursive constructs that imprison and “discipline” the individual, but also such seemingly private dimensions as sexuality, the emotions, and the body, so that it has become a major project of contemporary art to overcome the separation between life and art and to dissolve the authority of these concepts by parodistic, self-reflexive, or deconstructive forms of signification. This, in turn, must again affect the conceptualization of the antagonist. Already in modernism - and then especially in the culture of the fifties - the threat of materialism is complemented and, in part, replaced by the concept of conformity, which, in contrast to materialism, can no longer be tied to specific acts. But as long as materialism or “conformity” are the antagonists, there is still a possibility of escape. This flight from conformity lies at the center of many, if not most, cultural texts of the fifties. In the following decades, the question whether a writer managed to escape from the lure of materialism became the central question of revisionist marketplace criticism. However, if the separation of life and art is torn down and the belief in an “authentic” self or existence is rejected by insisting that the self is generated by linguistic or discursive conventions, then threats to the individual can arise from literally everywhere. Society becomes a linguistic system or discursive regime, social criticism is replaced by the search for “plots,” and cultural criticism becomes a search for invisible power effects. In postmodern literature, it is the ubiquitous presence of narrative or linguistic patterns in all processes of sense-making that threatens to engulf the individual and make it subject to invisible power effects. Thus, what is still a source of potential insight in James - the hope that single impressions cohere - becomes a sign of possible paranoia or of a potentially totalitarian dimension of the social or cultural system. In this cultural history of forces that stand in the way of the self - this is the important point here - there is an unmistakable tendency to gradually broaden the perception and definition of the antagonist. In most nineteenthcentury texts, claims of order are still tied to social groups with a special status such as the gentry; or to philosophical concepts or positions such as the enlightenment, Calvinism, idealism, transcendentalism etc. If threats to the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 106 Winfried Fluck individual are dramatized, they are attributed to clearly identifiable historical forces, such as Puritanism, the Southern system of slavery, or the city. These are already rather broad categories, so that a good deal of scholarly debate is generated by the counter-attempt to dispel or problematize such generalizations - by claiming, for example, that not all Southerners are cruel slave owners etc. But the source of power is still attributed to a social or cultural realm that is separated from others. One can therefore flee or fight this opponent, for example, by leaving the city, fighting a civil war, or breaking with religion. In such struggles, society is still conceptualized as an entity with a distinct historical and regional identity, which can be described by spatial, temporal, and social distinctions: past and present, upper class and lower class, North and South. In the reconceptualization of social threats as materialism, society is redefined as an all-pervasive consumer culture, in the criticism of social conformity as a faceless mass society. In both cases, the them/ me dichotomy loses its clear-cut spatial or temporal contours. Materialists and conformists can be found everywhere, you never know where and when you will encounter them. Nevertheless, materialists and conformists are still visible opponents one can identify and avoid. In a world of invisible linguistic and discursive power effects, on the other hand, one can never be sure whether their identification is an act of paranoid projection or shrewd insight into the hidden mechanisms of the system. VIII. These varying conceptualizations of the antagonist must in turn shape the conceptualization of the counter-force on which the individual can draw in his or her own search for a scenario of liberation. The two conceptualizations are interdependent. Where eighteenth-century rationalism and the idea of civilization still anchor social authority, a challenge will most likely emerge from the irrational and the savage. Where this semantic opposition is replaced, in the Jacksonian period, by the conflict between individual and society, this newly discovered individual must begin to explore the options it has for realizing his or her own potential. While, at first, the painful search for individual identity seems to provide a chance of self-assertion, the coercive dimension of all social identities, and, ultimately, of language and other discursive regimes is gradually foregrounded and radically criticized. In this process, the significance of an “unnameable” imaginary must increase because it holds out the promise of a force that remains inaccessible to social control. At the same time, however, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 107 17 A key author here is Leslie Fiedler, precisely because of his methodological indifference and his unrepentant reappropriation of literary studies for the purpose of self-expres‐ sion. See his books, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) and No! In Thunder (1960), but also his provocative defense of a wild, unruly imaginary even in novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) and The Clansman (1905) in What Was Literature (1982), published separately as The Inadvertent Epic (1979). this imaginary must also constantly retreat in order to maintain its status as an inaccessible and uncontrollable force. An interplay is thus set in motion: • The stronger the promise of self-extension by means of fiction, the greater the sensitivity to possible sources of coercion; • the greater the sensitivity, the broader and more comprehensive the defini‐ tion of what constitutes coercion; • the broader the definition, the greater the pressure on the imaginary to retreat to that which still promises an escape from the coercive potential of the social or linguistic system. Such forms of interdependence (and interplay) can hardly be grasped by traditional liberal theories of American literature because these theories have been locked in a basic, restricted, and ultimately ahistorical opposition between conformism and rebellion and, hence, have argued along the reductive semantic lines of society/ conformism/ realism on the one side versus individual/ noncon‐ formity/ romance on the other. Critics like Richard Chase articulate a certain moment in the history of cultural self-extension I have traced, but they are incapable of developing any self-awareness about the projective dimension and historicity of their own theory. For this post-war liberalism, the romance posed the challenge of coming to terms with two possible narratives about individu‐ alism in American life: While the individual who evades social responsibilities by lighting out for the territory exemplifies a type of individualism that lies at the bottom of what is wrong with American society, the individual who says “no! in thunder” to middle-class expectations exemplifies the individual who rescues American life from the iron grip of conformity and whose right for unfettered artistic self-expression must therefore be protected at all cost. 17 The one type of individualism is to blame for the fact that American society appears superficial, maybe even for the fact that it has not developed a socialist tradition or a tradition of social or political engagement, while the other type of individualism remains the only hope against a bourgeois regime of moral censorship and the tyranny of cultural conventions. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 108 Winfried Fluck 18 Thus Michaels writes in “Romance and Real Estate”: “Looking for the Seven Gables in Salem, Hawthorne says, is a mistake because it ‘exposes the Romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing (its) fancy pictures into positive contact with the realities of the moment.’ The implication seems to be that the romance (unlike the novel) is too fragile to stand comparison with reality, but Hawthorne immediately goes on to suggest that the difference between the romance and the novel is perhaps less a matter of their relation to reality than of their relation to real estate. (…) The romance, then, is to be imagined as a kind of property, or rather as a relation to property. Where the novel may be said to touch the real by expropriating it and so violating someone’s ‘private rights,’ the romance asserts a property right that does not threaten and so should not be threatened by the property rights of others. The romance, to put it another way, is the text of clear and unobstructed title” (157). IX. The radical revisionism of American literary history emerging in the late 1970s focused on this promise of individual self-assertion as the core of liberal selfdeception. The debate has continued to focus on the genre of the “American Romance,” which the liberal tradition had identified as the major novelistic expression of American identity. The romance has thus remained a central topic in the ongoing debates about the true nature of American literature. However, recent discussions have not focused on the tenability and representativeness of the romance-thesis but on its political implications. Walter Benn Michaels’ essay on “Romance and Real Estate” provides an exemplary case. In rejecting a liberal view of Hawthorne’s romance as “revolutionary alternative to the social conservatism of the novel” (156-57), Michaels rereads it as a form of displacement and subtle containment: But in my reading, the point of the romance is neither to renew the past nor to break with it, it is instead to domesticate the social dislocation of the 1840s and 1850s in a literary form that imagines the past and present as utterly continuous, even identical, and in so doing, attempts to repress the possibility of any change at all. (179) For such a radical revision, Michaels has to reconceptualize the imaginary dimension that nourishes the romance. What distinguishes his and other examples of the new revisionism in American literary history is a radical political allegorization of the imaginary. If the literary symbol is ambiguous or “unknowable,” then only because it represents something that is hidden by the system and not supposed to be known. In Michaels’s case, this “absent cause” is the market - a market, however, that is no longer a metaphor for the instability and corrupting forces of social life, but for the invisible hand of the system. 18 From being the site of the not-yet-domesticated, the imaginary thus turns into 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 109 a model case of how even the seemingly most private and inaccessible sphere of the human makeup is thoroughly pervaded by the logic of the market or other systemic effects. However, such an analysis of the systemic containment of all acts of indi‐ vidual resistance can only be made, as I have tried to show in tracing the changing relations between imaginary self-extension and changing conception‐ alizations of social constraint, from the perspective of a radical norm of selfrealization. The more radical the claim for individual self-assertion, the more “totalitarian” will the social system that stands in the way of this claim appear. In this sense, the new cultural radicalism, although ostensibly unmasking and criticizing an ideology of individualism, voices this critique from an even more radical vision of that same individualism. Inevitably, such a vision of the unobstructed freedom of radical self-assertion must draw on the imaginary in order to even think the possibility of an “other,” fully liberated self. It constitutes, in other words, a romance of its own - and clearly one that is not pervaded by the market but is the result of a process of ongoing rehierarchization propelled by the discovery and increasing use of literature as a means of self-definition. Where it “unmasks” the romance as complicitous, it does so in the name of its own political romance of a society without coercion and restraints, in which individual self-extension is no longer constrained. X. To sum up: In contrast to recent revisionist accounts, I see the social and cultural role of American literature not primarily in the systemic containment of individual liberation, but, quite to the contrary, in its constantly renewed stimulation - a stimulation for which discursive regimes that socialize and contain the imaginary (and other seemingly non-discursive elements) regularly provide new motivations for imaginary self-extension. The individual that has been strengthened by an internalization of discipline or by establishing an identity (even of an illusionary nature), will pursue its own interests and claims, including those for the articulation of his or her desires, more insistently, setting in motion ever more radicalized struggles for self-expression and self-extension. Such a claim, I am afraid, is not a message revisionist critics want to hear, however. My theory, to make a last point, can explain why. For in order to justify their own ongoing struggles for self-empowerment, they need a force that stands in the way of the self. And the more pervasive this force is, the more radical and categorical can the claim for self-expression and self-empowerment be articulated. 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