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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 30 (2014) Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies Edited by Winfried Fluck and Donald E. Pease Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 30 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Winfried Fluck Herbert Grabes · Donald E. Pease 30 Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies Edited by Winfried Fluck and Donald E. Pease Notice to Contributors The editors invite submissions of manuscripts appropriate to the topics of the forthcoming volumes of REAL. The 2015 volume, edited by Winfried Fluck and Günter Leypoldt, will be on „Reading Practices“. The 2016 volume, edited by Ingo Berensmeyer, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning, will be on „Literature and Cultural Change.“ Each author will receive one copy of the yearbook and a pdf file of the article. Articles submitted for consideration may be sent directly to the volume editors or via an advisor. They should reach the volume editors by December 1 of the year prior to publication, and should not exceed 10,000 words (including endnotes and references). To facilitate processing, they should be sent in duplicate and on cd or disc; they must be typed in English, doublespaced, and should observe the conventions laid down in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003 sqq.). Editors Tobias Döring, LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, Germany Winfried Fluck, Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstraße 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Herbert Grabes, Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, D-35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease, English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) Text-editing and final layout: Dominik Fungipani, Berlin. © 2014 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. http: / / www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Printed by: Hubert & Co., Göttingen Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-8233-4185-7 ISSN 0723-0338 Contents Contributors � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � VII W infried f luck & d onald e. P ease Preface � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � IX d onald e. P ease Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1 W illiam s Panos “The Center Will Not Hold”: The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 13 W infried f luck Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings: American Studies and the Realities of America� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 41 l aura B ieger The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 67 J ohn c. h avard Ironizing Identity: Cosmopolitanism and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” as Critique of Hispanic Exceptionalism� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 105 B radley r ay k ing Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 127 g ünter l eyPoldt What Carrie Wants: Romantic Longing and Balzac’s Upward Mobility Novel in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 149 m ary v ermillion The Uses of Tragedy: A Thousand Acres and American Exceptionalism � � � � 179 s usan s trehle “Prey to Unknown Dreams”: Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves, and the Exceptionalist Disavowal of History� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 201 c hristine m. P effer City upon the Convexity: The Satire of American Exceptionalism in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 221 B imBisar i rom Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel: Transnational Disjunctures in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 237 J ohannes v oelz Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 255 i da J ahr Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies � � � � � � � � � 283 s imon s chleusener Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 307 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier Object Lesson By Déjà Vu: Rodney King, Representativeness, and Anna Julia Cooper’s Rhetoric of Law in a Post-Exceptional American Study � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 327 s ieglinde l emke American Exceptionalism in the Age of Inequality� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 359 a hu t anrisever Subprime Heroism: Revisiting the Trope of the Male Breadwinner in the New Millennium� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 375 h eike P aul Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies � � � � � � � � � � � � � 397 t heodora t simPouki Once Upon a Time in Central Park: Public Space and the American (Exceptionalist) Ideology of Space � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 425 c hristina m aria k och Occupying Popular Culture: Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, and the Guy Fawkes Mask as a Political Icon � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 445 a aron d e r osa The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror � � � � � � � � � � � � 483 Contributors B ieger , l aura . Englisches Seminar - Nordamerikastudien, Albert-Ludwigs- Universität Freiburg, Rempartstraße 15, 79085 Freiburg, Germany d e r osa , a aron . California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, English and Foreign Languages Department, 3801 W Temple Ave, Pomona, CA 91768, USA f luck , W infried . John-F�-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Abteilung Kultur, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstraße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany h avard , J ohn . Department of English and Philosophy, Auburn University at Montgomery, P�O� Box 244023, Montgomery, AL 36124-4023, USA i rom , B imBisar . 1215 SW Hannah Street, Pullman, WA 99163, USA J ahr , i da . Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo, P�O� Box 1003 Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway J ohnson -r oullier , c yraina . University of Notre Dame, Department of English, 356 O’Shaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA k ing , B rad . 4511 Speedway, Unit B, Austin, TX 78751, USA k och , c hristina m aria . Philipps-Universität Marburg, FB 10: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Wilhelm-Röpke-Straße 6F, 35032 Marburg, Germany l emke , s ieglinde . Englisches Seminar - Nordamerikastudien, Albert-Ludwigs- Universität Freiburg, Rempartstraße 15, 79085 Freiburg, Germany l eyPoldt , g ünter . Anglistisches Seminar, Heidelberg Center of American Studies, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Kettengasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany P aul , h eike . Department Anglistik/ Amerikanistik und Romanistik, Friedrich- Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Bismarckstr� 1, 91054 Erlangen, Germany P ease , d onald . 14 Woban Road, Canaan, NH 03741, USA P effer , c hristine . 9650 Brook Road, Olmsted Falls, OH 44138, USA VIII C ontributors s chleusener , s imon . John-F�-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Abteilung Kultur, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstraße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany s trehle , s usan . 326 Riverside Drive, Binghamton, NY 13905, USA t anrisever , a hu . John-F�-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Abteilung Kultur, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstraße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany t simPouki , t heodora . University of Athens, Department of English Studies, School of Philosophy, University Campus Zografou, 15784 Athens, Greece v ermillion , m ary . Mount Mercy University, 1330 Elmhurst Drive NE, Cedar Rapids, IA 52402, USA v oelz , J ohannes . Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Goethe- Universität Frankfurt, Grüneburgplatz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany W infried f luck & d onald e. P ease Preface The field of American studies, as it was envisioned in the 1930s and institutionalized academically after World War II, was from its very beginning tied to the idea of American exceptionalism, best defined as the belief that the United States are politically and morally superior to other nations because of their unique political visions and moral virtues� The narrative of American exceptionalism, told in various identity-shaping versions that range from the Puritan errand to the frontier mythology, from a pastoral agrarianism to the myth of the melting pot, long determined the field’s characteristic choices of interpretive objects and methods. It shaped the field’s processes of canon-formation, and provided the narrative frames for the writing of history, including American literary and cultural histories� This exceptionalist consensus was first put into question by critical scholarship emerging in the wake of the 1960s and the new social movements and was then submitted to an increasingly trenchant criticism by ideological critiques of myth and symbol school studies, the new historicism, race and gender studies, the new Americanists, and transnationalism� In consequence, although the idea of American exceptionalism is still very much alive in the American public sphere today and is evoked regularly by American politicians, it no longer enjoys the status of an unquestioned interpretive assumption and now co-exists with competing interpretive narratives and structures of belief in the field of American studies. This disciplinary constellation provides the starting point for this volume of REAL� Can there be an American studies after American exceptionalism? Can American studies be practiced without recourse to exceptionalist premises? What would be the contours of such a post-exceptionalist reconfiguration? What should be its analytical agenda, what its objects of analysis and interpretive frames, what its themes and methods? Do we have new narratives about “America” that are emerging in this post-exceptionalist moment? To provide answers, we have asked well-established, as well as promising younger scholars in the field to offer contributions that could help to clarify these questions� Attempts to go beyond the idea of American exceptionalism in the field of American studies have gone in three directions so far� One is the continuing critique of the “tenacious grasp of American exceptionalism” (A� Kaplan), as it still manifests itself in the field’s preferred topics and interpretive practices. An alternative approach is opened up by transnational perspectives� Scholars across the burgeoning field of transnational American Studies have demonstrated how seemingly “unique” traits - geographical placement, revolutionary origins, millennial religious culture, prosperous resources, historical trajectory - once taken as foundational to the United States’ exceptional standing, X W infried f luck & d onald e. P ease are in fact connected to encompassing economic, political, geographical, and religious processes throughout the world system� However, not everything in the United States can be explained by transnational perspectives, so that American studies scholars will also have to continue to focus on specifically American phenomena; in doing so, they will have to find ways to do this on the basis of non-exceptionalist premises� There is a continuing need - as contributions to this volume demonstrate, often formulated most strongly by American studies scholars from outside the U�S� - to further clarify the way in which the American system and its culture work� What have we got when we take exceptionalist assumptions away in such analyses? Do the critical alternatives developed by revisionist American studies already provide satisfactory answers? Or are they failing to register important aspects and developments? We are pleased that examples of all three of these postexceptionalist perspectives are represented in this volume� By complementing one another, they can hopefully provide a glimpse of the outlines and the explanatory potential of a post-exeptionalist American studies� d onald e. P ease Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 1 American Exceptionalism. General Editors Timothy Roberts and Lindsay Dicuirci� London: Pickering & Chatto Limited, 2013� 1552 pages� $625�00 (cloth) Volume I: American Exceptionalism: Land and Prosperity� Edited by Timothy Roberts� 388 pages� Volume 2: American Exceptionalism: The American Revolution. Edited by Timothy Roberts� 353 pages� Volume 3: American Exceptionalism: Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism. Edited by Lindsay Dicuirci� 404 pages� Volume 4: American Exceptionalism: Anti-Exceptionalism. Edited by Lindsay Dicuirci� 280 pages� In 2013, Timothy Roberts and Lindsay DiCuirci served as general editors of a four volume collection of thematically organized primary source materials on American Exceptionalism that the London-based company, Pickering & Chatto published, complete with an editorial apparatus that including a general introduction, introductions to each volume, biographical sketches, headnotes and endnotes as well as a consolidated index� Readers of this remarkable four-volume treasury of American Exceptionalist tracts might wonder why the editors undertook this project when the prevailing historiographical mood has decisively shifted to transnational inquiries into United States culture and experience� Over the past two decades American Studies scholars have impugned American exceptionalism as an ethnocentric relic of the Cold War chiefly responsible for the denial of the long history of U.S. Imperialism. The British American Studies scholar, Paul Giles, recently gave representative expression to this mood when, after listing foundational tropes of the exceptionalist paradigm - Puritanism, the frontier, Manifest Destiny - as examples of what American studies scholars should no longer take as objects of study, he admonished that only by replacing these remnants of an ahistorical fantasy will “transnational” and “transhemispheric American studies” plant a “stake through the heart of the unquiet corpse of American exceptionalism” (Giles, 2006, 648 )� But American Studies scholars’ demand for its expulsion from respectable scholarly discourse has coincided with a spectacular upturn in the usage of the term within the public domain� Print media references to American exceptionalism increased from two in 1980 to a stunning 2,580 in 2012� 1 A slightly revised version of this essay appeared in American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 1, March 2014, pp� 197-209� 2 d onald e. P ease Republican candidates for the presidency supplied one rationale for this disconnect when they characterized anti-exceptionalist, left-leaning academics and the democratic political candidates they supported as anti-American� The term that had formerly been restricted in its usage to political scientists and American Studies scholars took over conceptual center stage when the Homeland Security Apparatus presented difficulties for distinguishing the United States as a nation from the activities of a global empire� American exceptionalism became the default category politicians and policy-makers took up to manage citizens’ understanding of the contradictory relationship between U�S� nationalism and U�S� imperialism in a transnational epoch� Rather than disagreeing with scholars who set the transnational and the exceptional in a relationship of irremediable antagonism, the editors of this project concede “that scholarship with a national focus misses America’s historical connections with the world�” (ix, volume 1) But they turn this concession into rationale for the pertinence of the question that has animated their project: “Why has the myth of American exceptionalism, characterized by a belief in America’s highly distinctive features or unusual trajectory based in the abundance of its natural resources, its revolutionary origins, and its protestant religious culture that anticipated God’s blessing of the nation - held such tremendous staying power, from its influence in popular culture to its critical role in foreign policy? ” (ix, volume 1) In response, the editors turn “America’s highly distinctive features” into thematic rubrics - Land and Prosperity, the American Revolution, Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism - organizing the first three volumes of the set of four� The editors then proceed to sort various “source documents” under each of these rubrics� Traversing three centuries, these works range from academic essays, congressional addresses, and sermons, to juridical briefs, orations, and funeral sermons� Individually and collectively these entries cross cultural, economic and political terrains and promise to transform the received understanding of American exceptionalism� Although this compilation “focuses on the discourse’s changing contours, rather than elements shared with other nation’s exceptionalist claims,” the editors insist that it “nonetheless…offers a rich opportunity to study exceptionalism from a comparative perspective, a topic that has received little attention, that the time is ripe to undertake a comparative history of various national ‘exceptionalisms�’” (xviii, Volume 1) Following this account of its significance to the field of transnational scholarship, the editors go on to claim that this collection “illustrates the ways in which American exceptionalism became an unquestionable and entrenched ethos that dominated economics, politics, religion, and culture from the colonial period through the early twentieth century�” (xviii, Volume 1) Since scholars in the field of transnational American Studies have demonstrated how each of the traits - America’s prosperous lands, the American Revolution, America’s religious millennialism - that the editors describe as foundational to the United States’ exceptional standing are in fact connected to encompassing patterns of economic, political, geographical and cultural Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 3 behavior in the Atlantic world system, it is difficult to understand how the editors’ intention to study them “in isolation from other nation’s exceptionalist claims” would contribute to comparative perspectives� How can a discourse which claims to be an exception to the norms of intelligibility organizing other national histories “nonetheless”, offer a “rich opportunity to study exceptionalism from a transnational comparative perspective”? Doesn’t its “uniqueness” presuppose the non-comparability of American exceptionalism and quite literally disconnect it from other national formations? Moreover, how can the editors achieve the intention to trace the contours of American exceptionalism “evolving discourse” when the collection purports to illustrate the ways in which “American exceptionalism” became an “unquestionable and entrenched ethos”? Rather than addressing these questions the editors’ introductions to each volume and to the individual contributions provoke additional ones� Three generations of American Studies scholars have scoured the historical archive to locate writers to authorize belief in American exceptionalism� Their intensive scholarly labors resulted in the ordination a pantheon of hyper-canonized figures - John Winthrop, Alexis deTocqueville, John L. O’Sullivan, Hugo St. John de Crèvecoeur, Frederick Jackson Turner, Werner Sombart - all of whom make cameo appearances in the introductions to the individual volumes� With the exception of John L� O’Sullivan, however, the editors have included none of their writings in the more than 1552 pages of their scrupulously annotated digest. The fact that none of the fifty-seven figures the editors selected as representative American exceptionalists previously received this attribution, raises vexing questions concerning what criteria might possibly have guided the editors’ decisions as to which authors and texts to include (or exclude)? I confess that I did not find my skepticism concerning the rationale of the editors’ enterprise or my dubiety as to the applicability of this plethora of documents to American exceptionalism assuaged by what I considered the bizarre interpretive frame through which they tracked its history� Indeed, on first reading the introductions to the individual volumes and individual entries, I found myself in near total disagreement with what I deemed arbitrary, inconsistently assigned criteria, and wrong-headed explanations� But my critical attitude toward the project altered considerably after it belatedly dawned on me that the editors did not select these texts to corroborate a United States readership’s pre-existing consensus about American exceptionalism� Neither the texts the editors selected as representative specimens nor the rubrics under which they organized them can be comprehended without recognizing that the editors viewed American history from a perspective that re-imagined the “exceptionalist” aspects of United States history as a continuation of Anglo-American imperialism� As a consequence of this realization, I have decided to begin this review with a series of observations about what renders this perspective different from United States American Studies scholars accounts of American exceptionalism� After thus demonstrating the literal truth of the editors’ claim that 4 d onald e. P ease their project would foster future comparativist study of “national exceptionalisms”, I shall turn to what I continue to find troubling about the editors’ method of representing, interpreting, and opposing American exceptionalism� British-American Exceptionalism American Studies scholars in the United States usually position American exceptionalism in a relation of insuperable opposition to British imperialism� In establishing what renders the United States different from Great Britain, citizens and scholars steeped in exceptionalist norms routinely list a series of absences - of feudal lords, of a landed aristocracy, of a monarchical tradition, of a colonial empire - as the outstanding traits that set American liberal democratic and egalitarian values apart from British institutions� (Pease, 2007, 109) Depending on the context, what’s thought exceptional about the features that distinguish American political and social institutions from Britain’s can mean “distinctive” (meaning merely different), or “unique” (meaning anomalous), or “exemplary” (meaning a model for other nations to follow), or that the United States is “exempt” from the rules and treaties regulating the international community (meaning that unlike Great Britain, it embodies the power to enforce them internationally), or that it is an “exception” to historical laws (meaning that it is able unilaterally to establish the terms and provenance of international law)� (Pease, 2009, 21) Rather than taking on such representations, the editors describe the United States origins as a British settler colony as the prerequisite to understanding what renders it exceptional� According to the editors, American exceptionalism originated within a culture of British colonial imperialism as the response of white British settlers to the lands and populations they colonized� Observing that British settler-colonists participated in a colonialimperialist project that set the British presence in the New World against the Catholic powers of Spain and France, the editors explain how British exceptionalism endowed white colonial settlers in the Americas with the sense of moral superiority belonging to a people specially chosen to carry out a mission� In the following passage, the editors attribute to British colonial imperial formations each of the qualities - moral superiority, uniqueness of purpose, exemplary polity, exemption from the historical laws regulating the trajectory of other empires - conventionally ascribed to Americans exceptionalism: “Similar exceptionalist discourse would serve many functions in populating the British North American colonies…America was an exemplary place for all free people to occupy the same social status under the law and to enjoy equal opportunity…Despite the geographic dispersion of disparate communities with unique national roots, ethnicities and religious creeds settling in the New World, they shared in common a sense of the lands exceptionality and the unique purposes to which it might be put� In the British colonies of North Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 5 America, this unique purpose assumed the form of radically new political arrangement…colonists in New France, New Spain and New Amsterdam… often understood themselves to be emissaries of European Empire…Once in America, Spain, Portugal and France have planted despotisms, only Britain liberty�” (x, xiii, volume one) In this passage, British imperial exceptionalism tacitly supplies the editors the norms and rules guiding the editors’ account of American exceptionalism� They give explicit expression to this re-orientation, however, only after they cite the following passage from Godfrey Hodgson’s, The Myth of American Exceptionalism to explain how exponents of the Americanness of exceptionalism performed a categorical mistake when they located its origin in Winthrop’s 1635 sermon “Model of Christian Charity”: “(Winthrop) could not possibly have imagined a United States� He was preaching to Englishmen, and expressing his determination that the colony … [which] he and his friends were setting out to found would be ‘an example to other English colonies, in North America and elsewhere,’” but not that “the colony was ‘unique or exceptional’ in any way�” (vii, volume 3) Hodgson proposed that the exceptionalist belief undergirding Winthrop’s covenant with God was invested in the British imperial venture in which Winthrop participated. Rather then advancing Hodgson’s demystification of the Americanness of exceptionalism, however, the editors point out the ecology of belief sustaining the disposition that persuaded United States citizens to perpetuate this mistake: “Despite a contemporary impulse to expose American exceptionalism as a myth, religious writers from the colonial period through the turn of the nineteenth century still frequently drew upon religious rhetoric to insist upon America’s absolute uniqueness�” (viii, volume 3) As they trace the history of this disposition from the Puritan times to the present, the editors organize their narration of this chronology from a perspective that designates the United States the special legatee of the exceptionalism at work in British imperial formations� This viewpoint is evidenced in the editors’ selection of texts, and the conceptual schema with which they offer accounts of their historical significance. In the course of four centuries, the geographical territory of the United States underwent a change in status from the product of processes of conquest, colonization, and cultural transformation, to its initiator and from a subaltern colony in the British empire to the most powerful hegemon in the imperial world system� The editors restrict their discussion of American exceptionalism to a chronological period ranging from colonial era to the prelude to World War I - just before the United States replaced Great Britain as the global hegemon� The four rubrics they have selected to organize their vast array of exempla - Land and Prosperity, The American Revolution, “Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism” and Anti-Exceptionalism - supply the editors with the warrant to strip territorial mappings, political institutions, and religious predilections of what once were considered their incomparably unique American traits and render them expressive of quintessentially British institutions� In 6 d onald e. P ease volume one, they describe the descendants of the British colonial settlers in New England and Virginia as the legitimate heirs of America’s prosperity� The sources the editors cite in volume two characterize American Revolutionaries as struggling to preserve “traditional British rights to life, liberty, and property - not to seize new ones�” (xi, volume one) In volume three they describe Anglo-Saxon Protestantism as the chief agency responsible for national transformation� In volume four they assign an arbiter of British imperialism the proto-typical anti-exceptionalist posture� Spectres of British Exceptionalism British spectres of comparison guide the editors’ representations of U�S� history� In passages scattered throughout their Introductions, the editors repurpose tropes from the discourse of British imperialism to forge a vantage point from which to re-envision and explain formative historical events within U�S� history� I felt the spectral presence of this alternative perspective most strongly in the editors’ account of the American revolution� In the editors’ view, the revolutionary era Americans who clamored to throw off the yoke of British imperial rule, could only achieve this aim by enacting ideals already laid down by their British imperial master� It was the British roots of the American revolutionary cause that disclosed the “unique nature of American revolutionaries�” It followed that preserving the uniqueness of British traditions of liberty - “became equal to or more important” than the emancipatory “rhetoric of the revolutionary era�” (xi, volume One) It also followed that America’s revolution against British Imperial rule could only be realized through the continuation of the British Empire by American means� Their effort to sustain this perspective leads the editors to distinguish the British imperial exceptionalism of the American Revolution from the alien exceptionalism they assign the French Revolution� The editors secure the line separating the “conservative” American from the “radical” French Revolution by consigning advocacy of French revolutionary ideas to Morgan John Rhees, a “Welsh radical” the editors fault for believing America “was less exceptional than it was a New World location for dangerous ideas of equality, he had first encountered in France” (95, volume Two) The editors’ belief in the distinction between the two revolutions also in part explains their selection of Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau’s 1784 Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution” over Alexis deTocqueville’s Democracy in America as the lead text in their second volume� Unlike Tocqueville, Mirabeau considered the aspirations of the emergent American republic so similar to British governmental principles that he felt impelled to advise United States leaders not to “adhere too closely to British precepts”� (1, volume Two) From the opening volume, the editors describe American exceptionalism as an inherently divided disposition that regulates the disparity between construals of United States as an empire and a democratic republic� According to the editors, the Civil War realized the imperial aspirations of the American Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 7 Revolution by “consolidating a state formation powerful enough to extend its liberal ideology across time and space� “ (vii, volume Two)� The editors elaborate this claim in their remarkable account of United States continental expansion� United States historians have conventionally drawn a contrast between U�S� territorial expansion and British settler colonialism by explaining how the territories were destined to became equal polities in a nation rather than colonial protectorates within an imperial formation� Frederick Jackson Turner established the precedent for this understanding when he famously described self-reliant settlers, rather than an imperial state, as the agents chiefly responsible for westward expansion. The editors differ from Turner and most U�S� historians in that they are keen to explain how the nation’s expansionist policies “collectively exposed…practices of 19th century statebuilding’’ focused primarily on “expanding the rights of white men�” (xii, Volume Two) The editors concede that the western territories were indeed incorporated into the union as equal states, but they call attention to the fact that the populations of Native Americans, free blacks, women, creoles, Hispanics and Mexicans who resided within the territories were treated as if imperial subjects� Although they never quite call the territories settler colonies, the editors do assert that the federal government’s “continuance and expansion of black slavery, removal of Indian populations and subordination of women and workers” installed the rule of colonial difference throughout the territories� (xii, Volume Two)� The United States is a democratic republic; it is also an imperial state with multi-jurisdictions comprised of gender and racial hierarchies, excepted spaces (slave plantations), excepted peoples (slaves, women, people of color); and excepted polities (colonies, foreign domestic nations, western territories) that the editors describe as comparable to Great Britain’s� (Pease, 2010, 65) Most of the documents the editors have selected for inclusion are situated at the dynamic interface of disputes over understandings of the United States as a democratic republic and as an imperial state� But the criteria that the editors deploy for the selection of American exceptionalist texts reflect the rules of colonial difference instituted under British settler colonialism to justify the unequal treatment of women, slaves, Native Americans, slaves, and racialized minorities� Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Phyllis Wheatley are mentioned in the introductions, but no women are included among the 57 entries� Three of the four African-Americans the editors cite hail from British colonies and exemplify the impossibility of becoming fully assimilated to U�S� citizenship� The sole Native-American, the Choctaw Chief Moshulatubbee, makes his appearance in the third volume to attest to the sweeping impact of American exceptionalism on “U�S� Policy-making�” (248, Volume Two) Few United States American Studies scholars would select figures from the American Colonization society and the Free Soil Party as the chief representatives of the anti-slavery movement� None would characterize the 8 d onald e. P ease American Colonization society, the anti-slavery movement, and the Free Soil Party as comparable efforts to sustain the United Status identity as “a benevolent empire�” (116, volume One) But the editors of American Exceptionalism assert that the United States decided to resolve the racial tensions internal to United States national society by devising a policy of “racial exceptionalism” that was implemented by white leaders of the American Colonization Society and the Free Soil Party� To explain the role slavery played in forging this doctrine of “racial exceptionalism,” they cite William Murdock’s 1848 “Address on the Free Soil Question” that describes slavery as a constitutionally protected conservative force inherited from the “revolutionary ancestors” to protect Americans from the social revolutions besetting Europe during the period� (263-264 Volume One) Although most black abolitionists shared Frederick Douglass’s repugnance for the American Colonization Society, the three authors - Robert Finley, Ralph Randolph Gurley and Leonard Bacon - that the editors have selected to represent the anti-slavery movement were authored by white members of this fellowship� And although they take care to acknowledge that “the relationship between African colonization schemes and American exceptionalism is complicated” the authors nonetheless maintain that colonization fulfilled the “Christian mission…representative of exceptionalism” by instituting “outposts of a benevolent empire that were utterly different from the trading colonies of European powers�” (116, volume One) To corroborate this claim, the editors include “The Negro at Home and Abroad,” a text written by the Sierra Leonean “African exceptionalist”, J� Augustus Cole, who traveled to the United States to Christianize Americans�” (344, Volume Three) Perhaps the most anomalous of the editors’ entries is George Washington Williams’ 1876 Independence Day oration, “The American Negro”� A “free black”, Williams fought with Union forces during the Civil War and with U�S� troops in the military campaign in Indian territory before traveling to King Leopold’s Congo in 1886 where he championed the official recognition of Congo Free States� The editors distill the miscellany of critical statements Williams directs against the Unites States as well as King Leopold into what they describe as an exemplification of “the evolution of exceptionalist discourse after the era of American slavery” that calls attention to “the brutality of European not American colonialism�” (266, Volume Two)� Lest the unwary reader sort British colonial structures with other exemplars of the “the brutality of European not American colonialism”, the editors include an essay entitled “The Oregon Question” that Charles Hazewell published in 1876 that described the United States and Great Britain as separate but equal partners in a global enterprise of benevolent “Anglo-American” imperialism that authorized the United States to exercise power in the western hemisphere after the example of British dominion in the East� (202, Volume One) Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 9 The editors’ account of Anglo-America’s “benevolent empire” reflects an encompassing outlook emphasizing, on the one hand, the United States establishment of national institutions unique to the American experience, and, on the other hand, its validation of popular rebellions against traditions of authority elsewhere in the world�” (xvi, Volume Two) Alpheus H� Snow, a lecturer in colonial government at George Washington University and a member of the executive council of the American Society of International Law, Snow supplied the editors’ perspective with quasi-juridical warrant in a 1907 legal brief bearing the unwieldy title: “’Colony’, -or ‘Free State’? ‘Dependence’, or ‘Just Connection’? ‘Empire’,or ‘Union’? An Essay Based of the Political philosophy of the American Revolution, as Summarized in the Declaration of Independence, towards the Ascertainment of the Political Relationship Between the American Union and Annexed Insular Regions”� Unlike many of his contemporaries, Snow forthrightly described imperialism as a primary determinant of U�S� history and based this proposition on the contention that the founders of the American republic intended the United States to be “an imperial state in its possession of territories and in its influence over farflung areas.“ (289, Volume Two) In Snow’s opinion, this meant that the United States’ newly acquired territorial possessions had a right to just government under the law of nations established by the Declaration of Independence and adjudicated by the United States in its role as “Justiciar�” (290, Volume Two) Providential Exceptionalism as Myth and Method As should be evident from these observations, the editors’ notion of American exceptionalism manages to serve as a governing disposition across disparate iterations of American political, economic and religious culture because the incompatible elements out of which it is composed lack any fixed relationship to a binding state of affairs� Each of the overarching schema - Land And Prosperity, The American Revolution, Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism, and Anti-Exceptionalism - the editors have selected, elevates a particular trait into a grand conceptual narrative capable of subsuming and subordinating other concerns� None of these conceptual metaphors supplies the editors an all-embracing definition of American exceptionalism. In changing the foundational trope to which American exceptionalism is rendered applicable as well as the significance of the context in which it accomplishes its effects, the editors dismantle the various ideological and cultural elements organizing its previous disposition and recombine them in shifting permutations that give expression to quite different, even contradictory cultural values� Each volume unfolds in seeming disregard of the ways in which these changes in the term’s meaning affect the texts selected for the previous volume� The editors’ inventive lexicon of ever-multiplying qualifying terms - national, racial, conservative, sectional, theological, radical, economic, imperial - reveals the varied and changing criteria organizing the multi-layered 10 d onald e. P ease terrain of American exceptionalism as well as the quixotic beliefs it fostered� I tend to lose track of the provenance of each of these qualifying terms as the editors change the domain to which the term applies� But there is quite literally a world of difference between national and imperial exceptionalism� The editors describe the conceptual metaphors organizing each volume as more or less equivalent manifestations of the phenomenon� Nevertheless, within this four volume set, the topic of the third volume, Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism, performs a privileged function in the valorization, circulation, and expansion of the ethos of American exceptionalism� Rather than characterizing it as historical mystification, the editors explain how Providentialism elevated American Exceptionalism into an ontological disposition that aligns contradictory versions of American exceptionalism to a network of interdependent symbolic structures, institutional formations and material practices� Truth be told, however, it is the editors’ discourse that produces the historic outcomes that they describe as an effect of Divine Providence� The editors repeatedly assert that the growing evangelical impulse encouraged participation in both church and civic life� However the link of these two ideologies is tenuous and made by the editors rather than drawn from the text� The editors simply assert that during the revolutionary crisis, a pre-existing millennial tradition initiated a reciprocal dynamic that brought about the merger of otherwise incompatible forms of knowledge-production - enlightenment rationalism and faith-based belief - in what the editors call providential design� But it is the editors’ assertion of the dominance of the system of belief over the order of knowledge that is the true agent of the historical causation that they assign providential exceptionalism� Each discourse the editors have designated as a representative instance of American exceptionalism is the historically specific result of an analytically separable historical interaction and negotiation� But their usage of American exceptionalism as an encompassing ontological disposition flattens out specific issues and elides materially specific political and economic antagonisms - between pre-millennialists and post-millennialists, between Whigs and Federalists, between advocates of the Confederacy and supporters of the Union, between Marxian socialists and laissez-faire republicans - as if exceptionalism rather than slavery or state’s rights or self-determination or salvation was the issue under contestation� Instead of propounding a series of potentially falsifiable historical claims, the editors turn historically specific facts into evidence of American exceptionalism’s transhistorical reach as the ruling norm� But when it becomes sufficiently elastic to accommodate seemingly every moment in United States history, the term American exceptionalism loses any semblance of analytic rigor. The self-confirming circularity of the editors’ discourse overdetermines their every representation and allows them imperially to define, reflect upon and decide the meaning of nearly every event under their provenance� In passages like the following, the editors conflate the historical controversies over specific issues as if they are indistinguishable from the doctrinal Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 11 exceptionalist rhetoric through which the editors assign them significance: “These shifts in emphasis on what aspects of the creed of national exceptionalism were actually still within reach, and what aspects of the creed were merely instrumental or expedient, mark an important evolution in exceptionalist discourse� (xxxv-xxxvi, Volume One) By the time its readers arrive at the conclusion of the four volumes, they discover that the editors have installed Anglo-American imperial exceptionalism in a providential relationship to the entirety of the United States historical past and future� According to the editors, American exceptionalism is, was, and what Americans will have made British imperial processes� Anglo-American Imperial Exceptionalism In my remarks thus far, I have shown how Anglo-American imperialism has supplied the editors with the perspective from which they interpreted the providential role American Exceptionalism played throughout the history of the United States� In the 4th volume, entitled Anti-Exceptionalism, the editors proceed to demonstrate how Anglo-American imperialism also provides the standpoint from which to criticize the Americanness of American exceptionalism� All the contributors to Anti-exceptionalism require some version of Anglo- American imperialism to articulate their opposition to American exceptionalism� The British journalist Henry Bragg expresses this critique most cogently in his 1869 “Challenge…to American Progress and American Democracy” when he casts American exceptionalism as a mystification of the United States continuation of British imperialism by other means: “it fights, it gets into debt much like a monarchy, labor there as here gets into contests with capital… bribery in elections there as here there the original owners of the soil - the Mohawks, Seminole or Cheyenne is dealt with just as we have treated the Hindoos�” (xvi, Volume 4) In my 2009 book, I described American exceptionalism as a fantasy through which United States citizens misrecognized the nation’s transposition from a democratic republic to a global imperial power� The editors of American Exceptionalism have proposed an alternative understanding� In their view, American exceptionalism facilitates a misrecognition of the Britishness of (Anglo)American imperialism� But if the editors’ descriptions as well as their criticisms of American exceptionalism presuppose the hegemony of Anglo-American imperialism, their project makes all the more urgent the need for a truly transnational, and critically comparativist analysis of national imperial exceptionalisms so as to expose the limitations of that hegemony� 12 d onald e. P ease Works Cited Giles, Paul, “Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality�” American Literary History 18, no� 3 (2006): 648� Pease, Donald E�, “Exceptionalism�” In Key Words for American Cultural Studies, ed� Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, 108-12� New York: New York University Press, 2007� -----, The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 -----, “American Studies after American Exceptionalism? Toward a Comparative Analysis of Imperial State Exceptionalisms�” In Globalizing American Studies, ed� Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 47-83� Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010� W illiam s Panos “The Center Will Not Hold”: The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. Edward W� Said, Culture and Imperialism So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex� When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool� Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve� Till, gaining that vital center, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over. And floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main� The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks� On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last� It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan� Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 1. In the summer of 2000, shortly before the epochal bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al Qaeda on 9/ 11/ 01 and President George W� Bush’s spectacular annunciation of the U� S�’s “War on Terror,” I delivered a paper entitled “American Studies in ‘the Age of the World Picture’: Thinking the Question of Language,” at the Humanities Institute at Dartmouth College (published after 9/ 11 in 2002) in Donald E� Pease and Robin Wiegman’s inaugural volume, The Futures of American Studies� 1 In that contribution to the New Americanist project, I criticized the promising counter-mnemonic initiative of the “New Americanists” for remaining too local in an age that had irreversibly become global� It was my view then that these New Americanists remained vestigially bound to the American exceptionalist ethos in a global 1 Donald E� Pease and Robin Wiegman, The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)� 14 W illiam s Panos age, dominated by the United States, that has brought the spatializing logic of Western metaphysical thinking (thinking meta ta physika: from after or above things-as-they-are) to its fulfillment (and theoretical demise) by way of the final reduction of temporality to a “World Picture” (and the disclosure of the nothing [das Nichts] it cannot finally contain). More specifically, I argued that, for all their interrogation of the celebratory discourse of American exceptionalism (the American Adam of the Myth and Symbol School that inaugurated American studies in the World War II period), these New Americanists, with a few exceptions, were not global enough� By this I meant that they had not yet achieved the inside-outside (de-centered or exilic) perspective that would have 1) enabled them to perceive exceptionalist America from the eyes of its victimized “others”; and 2) that, in thus remaining vestigially inside the metaphysical ontology of “American exceptionalism,” they were unwittingly compelled to fulfill the prophetic dictates of Francis Fukuyama’s (de Tocquevillean/ Hegelian) annunciation of the “End of History” in the wake of the ”triumph” of American democracy over Soviet communism - and the absolute vindication of the “Truth” of the American exceptionalist ethos: What is emerging victorious is not so much liberal practice, as the liberal idea� That is to say for a very large part of the world, there is now no ideology with pretension to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy, and no universal principle of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people� Even non-democrats will have to speak the language of democracy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard� 2 Commenting on this prophetic American exceptionalist annunciation of the End of History, I wrote: The universalist-instrumentalist discourse that frames the triumphalist American vision of the brave new post-Cold War world rings hollow in the wake of its selfdestruction during the Vietnam War and of the postmodern thinking that has tacitly theorized the violence inherent in its saying� Nevertheless, New Americanists continue unthinkingly to use this language even when it opposes the violence of its practices, thus becoming unwitting accomplices of the very regime of truth it would delegitimate� This complicity, for example, is manifest, as Paul Bové has decisively shown, in [Sacvan] Bercovitch’s “reformist” mode of dealing with problems confronting the Americanist seeking for alternatives to the consensusproducing imperatives of the American jeremiadic discourse, specifically, his disabling delimitation of critical options to those made available by that discourse: “the option [for American critics] is not multiplicity or consensus� It is whether to make use of the categories of the culture or to be used by them�” 3 2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), p� 45; my emphasis� 3 William V� Spanos, “ American Studies in the ‘Age of the World Picture,’” p� 390� The quotation from Bercovitch is from the afterword to Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed� Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p� 438� The quote from Paul Bové is from “Notes toward a Politics of ‘American’ Criticism,” in In the Wake of Theory (Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1992) pp� 52-60� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 15 My frame of reference at that time was not simply the Vietnam War - the selfdestruction, at this liminal point, of the long forwarding historical itinerary of the America’s “errand in [the world’s] wilderness,” of the American exceptionalist ethos by way of the American war machine’s unerring destruction of Vietnam in the name of “saving” it for democracy� As this obscene paradox suggests, it was also the disclosure of the banality of the evil that the American exceptionalist language wrought on that “new frontier” with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsworth� Michael Herr, it will be recalled, put this dreadful reality in an unforgettable synecdochical way in his account of the Tet Offensive: Our worst dread of yellow peril became realized; we now saw them dying by the thousands all over the country, yet they didn’t seem depleted, let alone exhausted, as the Mission was claiming by the fourth day� We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality� Our machine was devastating� And versatile� It could do everything but stop� As one Americana major said, in a successful attempt of attaining history, “We has to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it�” That’s how most of the country came back under what we called control, and how it remained essentially occupied by the Viet Cong and the North until the day years later when there were none of us left there� 4 The national forgetting of the apocalyptic violence inherent in the redemptive logic of American exceptionalism disclosed by the United States’ brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam became the paranoid purpose of the American political class (Republican and Democrat) and the culture industry in the aftermath of that catastrophic war� It took the form of representing the protest movement in the United States against the war as a national paranoia - “the Vietnam Syndrome�” And this sustained, massive ideological initiative of forgetting, aided and abetted by Saddam Hussein, a former client of the U�S� in the Middle East, was successfully accomplished during the first George Bush’s administration with what was then represented by the American government and the media as the spectacular “surgical” victory of the American army in the first Gulf War (August 2, 1990-February 28, 1991), an accomplishment epitomized by the president’s exclamation to a reporter, “Thank God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome at last�” 5 What the finality of this exclamation of relief meant ideologically was that the “healing” of the Vietnam syndrome was the healing of the wounded American exceptionalist ethos - and, as the euphoria of the political class and the media made spectacularly clear, the redemption of America’s exceptionalist) errand in the world’s wilderness. It established, before 9/ 11, the ideological justification for the second Bush administration’s “War on Terror” in the name of America’s redemptive global mission� It is this recuperative initiative - this rejuvenation of the 4 Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage 1991), p 71; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. For an amplified account of the self-destruction of the American exceptionalist ethos during the Vietnam War (and its recuperation in the aftermath), see William V� Spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007)� 5 George Bush, to a group of state legislators, reported in Newsweek 117, March 11, 1991� 16 W illiam s Panos American exceptionalist ethos and the realization of the myth - that, I will suggest, the new, post- 9/ 11 generation of New Americanist have not adequately registered in their effort to transcend the limitations of their predecessors by way of the “transnationalization” of American studies� 2. Since the Al Qaeda attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001 and the United States’ annunciation, under the aegis of the George W� Bush administration, of the United States’ interminable global “War on Terror,” the blindnesses of the New Americanist studies to the global context I pointed to in the summer of 2000 have been overcome� In the decade or so following 9/ 11, a remarkably large archive of New Americanist scholarship and criticism addressing American studies according to the urgent imperatives of the waning of the nation-state system and the globalization of the planet has been produced� Edited volumes such as Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell’s Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007); Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen’s American Studies: An Anthology (2009); Russ Castronovo and Susan s Gilman’s States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009); Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar’s Globalizing American Studies (2010); and Donald Pease, Winfried Fluck, and John Carlos Rowe’s Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (2011), among others, which include the essays of a wide range of prestigious and neophyte New Americanist scholars, and books such a Paul Giles’ Virtual America: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002) and The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011); Donald Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism (2009); and Paul Jay’s Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (2010), among others, bear witness to this radical transformation of the American studies� 6 Despite the great diversity of perspectives, most leave behind the founding Puritan school of Americanist studies associated with Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch and the nation-oriented Myth and Symbol field imaginary associated with Henry Nash Smith (The Virgin Land), Leo Marx (The Machine in the Garden); R�W�B� Lewis (The American Adam), among others� Instead, as a number of the subtitles attest, this new generation of New Americanists take their point of departure in the transnational turn compelled by the rapid globalization of the planet in the wake of World War II, which is to say, the self-destruction of the Western imperial project, the rise of the postcolonial consciousness - and the neo-liberal globalization of the “free market�” The consequence of this transnational turn, as virtually all these post-9/ 11 New American texts testify, has been the supersession 6 Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010� Of the critical studies, I single out Donald Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism as in some degree an exception to the rule� See footnote 7� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 17 of the emphasis of study on the national by the “post-national” or “transnational,” or, to anticipate, the overdetermination of the global over the local� 7 I am, of course, in some significant degree in solidarity with this turn in New Americanist studies, not least, because 1) it has enabled the silenced peoples of the world - the multitudes who have hitherto been spoken for by the West - to speak for themselves or, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s resonant terms, to “provincialize Europe,” that is, to avow the violence against them that the hegemonic (exceptionalist) Western interpretation of history has always disavowed, 8 and 2), in so doing, this perspectival turn reveals the unexceptionalist essence of American exceptionalism� But, I submit, in overdetermining the “transnational”- in collapsing borders and boundaries, the trinity of “state, nation, territory” that underlies the modern nation-state system 9 in favor of the “global” or the postnational, this promising “new” Americanist initiative has gone too far in the direction I was calling for in 2000 in “American Studies in the ‘Age of the World Picture�’” That is, as richly diverse as the transnationalizing of American studies seems to be, the one aspect that this diversity has surprisingly - unfortunately - in common is its marginalization of the hegemonic American exceptionalist ethos in the name of its “anti-exceptionalism�” Despite its remarkable resurrection after 9/ 11 (now overtly, as the prolific use of the literal term by the American political class testifies) and the government of the United States’ declaration of its exceptionalist “War on Terror” and on the “rogue states” that harbor them, the new, New Americanist transnational initiative views the manifestations of post-9/ 11 American exceptionalism, when it addresses them at all, as merely one of many, often unrelated, global projects - weather, gender, race, education, information, migration, the Americas, domestic politics, ecology, neo-liberal capitalism, etc� - rather than, as global history from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror patently bears witness, the locus that determines the structural feature of all these others� 7 The work of Donald E. Pease constitutes a significant exception to this tendency to overdetermine the global, as his magisterial The New American Exceptionalism testifies. See also “Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn,” his introduction to Re-Framing American Studies� Though ostensibly a summary of the various itineraries of this transnational turn, it is evident from his insistence on the fundamental centrality of the George W� Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the exceptionalism of which has normalized the state of exception, that Pease discriminates qualitatively between those post-9/ 11 New Americanists who focus on the critique of American exceptionalism and those who do not”: “In calling for a wholesale dismantling of American exceptionalism, transnational Americanists have failed to see that transnational American studies produced the version of American exceptionalism without exceptionalists that the transnational state of exception required� Transnational Americanists’ generalized disavowal of the state of exception became especially discernible in their anti-exceptionalist explanations of the transition from Cold War American studies to transnational American studies�” (p� 23)� 8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000� 9 This trinity defining the essence of the nation-state system was first posited by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitianaism, vol� 2 , and later appropriated by Giorgio Agamben in Means Without End. 18 W illiam s Panos Let me amplify on what I mean by this paradigm shift from the local to the global enacted by these new New Americanists in the last decade by way of invoking the spatial metaphor that has informed not only the history of the West’s representation of being (metaphysics), as Jacques Derrida has shown, 10 but also its political logic of belonging (the concept of the nationstate), and its comportment toward its Others (imperialism)� I am referring to the centered circle, or, more precisely, the exceptionalist Center/ Origin and the ever-expanding circumference or periphery that is intrinsic to the imperial logic (the ”will to power’ over difference) of thinking meta ta physika (from after or above or beyond things-as-theyare�) The Achilles heel of the sovereign logic of this exceptionaist/ imperial metaphor lies in its inexorable imperative to expand its circumference, to incorporate and tether everything in space and every event in time to its commanding center� This is because the farther away from the center the circumference recedes, the weaker the tether that binds it to the sovereign center becomes� At a certain point in the centrifugal process the periphery eventually disintegrates, which is to say, annuls the (power) of the exceptionalist center� To quote W� B� Yeats’s “Second Coming” (without adhering to his conservative nostalgic judgment): Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity� 11 Taking my directives from this centrifugal temporal dynamics of the center/ periphery, I am suggesting that the new New Americanists to whom I am referring all too prematurely assume that the globalization of the planet and the demise of the nation-state (the emergence of the global and the annulment of the local) has been historically accomplished� Though they take their theoretical point of departure from the de-centering of the metaphysicai center, it 10 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and difference, trans Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978): “[I] t has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted the very thing within structure while governing structure, escapes structurality� This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it� The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere� The center is not the center� The concept of centered structure - although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science - is contradictorily coherent� And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire� The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of free play� And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered�” p� 279� 11 W� B� Yeats, “The Second Coming,” The Collected Poems of W. B Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p� 183� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 19 is, paradoxically, the panoptic perspective enabled by the “center elsewhere” that, like that of the traditional Americanists they oppose, determines their representation of the contemporary historical occasion� In thus positioning themselves outside of - and in opposition to - the local, not incidentally, they, tacitly circumscribe the “exilic consciousness” - the in-between, the outside-inside condition that Edward Said posited as the most efficacious agency of resistance to contemporary power relations� For all their insistence on attending to history, they seem blinded by the oversight of their global problematic 12 to its local historical actualities� Indeed, this New Americanist oversight for all practical purpose annuls the local of the local-global dyad, or, more specifically, the role that the nation-state, particularly the United States, continues to play in the world at large� Despite the continuing identification of their scholarly discipline with America, they, like the exponents of “World Literature” (Weltliteratur) - Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Franco Morretti, and John Pizer, among many others, 13 and the exponents of cosmopolitanism (Martha Nussbaum and Bruce Robins, among others), who have clearly influenced their global vision, their historical perspective is so broad that it effaces the culturally and politically fraught post- 9/ 11 occasion and the urgent need to resist the form of globalism it is taking by way of the harnessing the American state to the dynamics of the global free market� 14 To put it generally, what this panoptic global perspective overlooks in its all too easy, sometimes euphoric, representation of the contemporary historical occasion as “deterritorialized” (Giles) 15 is that global humanity, in fact, lives in an interregnum, in between the local (or national) and the global, a world-system (the nation-state) that is dying (but is not in fact dead) and a de-centered world struggling to be born� It is true that, on the one hand, the American exceptionalist myth self-destructed theoretically during the course of the Vietnam War (“We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it�”) and then again, even more decisively, with George W� Bush’s declaration of the United States’ unending global “War on Terror” and the “rogue states,” like Iraq and Afghanistan, that harbored terrorists in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and, on the other, the proliferation of contrapuntal postcolonial voices that have challenged the American 12 Althusser explains the operations of the problematic in “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy” in Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979), pp� 24-30� For my analysis of the problematic, see “Althusser’s ‘Problematic’: Vision and the Vietnam War,” in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Gobalization: The Specter of Vietnam (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), pp� 35-57� 13 Titles, respectively: The World Republic of Letters; What Is World Literature? ; Modern Epic; The Idea of World Literature� 14 For a persuasive early critique of the general tendency of recent transnationalist scholars to overdetermine the global, see Timothy Brennan, “Cosmo-Theory,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 100: 3 (Summer 2001), pp� 659-691� 15 Paul Giles, “The Deterritorialization of American Literature,” in Dimock and Buell, ed� Shades of the Planet, pp� 39-61� This essay is reprinted with some revisions from Giles’ The Global Re-Mapping of American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)� Further citations of the latter will be abbreviated to GR, and incorporated in the text in parentheses� 20 W illiam s Panos version of the exceptionalist Western narrative of modern global history� But this theoretical self-de-struction has not manifested itself in the destruction of American exceptionalist praxis� Despite its theoretical disintegration, the American exceptionalist ethos continues, after the fall of the Bush administration to remain intact as a hegemonic “truth�” The tentative speech-bereaving spectacle of American high tech war-making, the “domino theory,” the creation of puppet regimes, and the establishment of torture camps inaugurated by the United States in the name of in the America’s exceptionalist errand on the “New [Southeast Asian] Frontier” were brought to their liminal (and revelatory) point of development by the George W� Bush administration after 9/ 11 when it identified the United States as a Homeland Security State: The security environment confronting the United States today is radically different from what we have faced before. Yet the first duty of the United States Government remains what it always has been: to protect the Americana people and American interests� It is an enduring American principle that this duty obligates the government to anticipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage� The greater the threat, the greater the risk of inaction - and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack� There are few greater threats than a terrorist attack with WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction]� To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, If necessary, act preemptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense� The United States will not resort to force in all cases to preempt emerging threats� Our preference is that nonmilitary actions succeed� And no country should ever use preemption as a pretext for aggression� 16 I am referring specifically to the Bush administration’s illegal doctrine of “preemptive war” (the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq); the “shock and awe” military tactics that were intended to strike these Third World peoples dumb; the systematic institutionalization of concentration camps (Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo); the practice of detention and torture without legal recourse obscenely called “extraordinary rendition” by its apologists; the tethering (however contradictorily) of the American state to the neoliberal global free market, indeed, as Robert Marzec has forcefully shown, the militarization of the global ecos in the name of national security; 17 and, not least, the declaration of a global state of emergency in the name of “homeland security” (The Homeland Security Act), all enacted in the name of the redemptive American 16 “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” [see Google]� Though the second paragraph of this quotation disclaims the Bush administration’s willful resort to military force to achieve its preemptive “defense,” the truth is that the Bush administration justified its preemptive war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by falsely representing it as manufacturing weapons of mass destruction� 17 Robert Marzec, “Introduction to Environmentality: MEDEA, the SAGE’s of the Earth and the Environmental Politics of Adaptation,” in Environmentality, forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 21 exceptionalist ethos and the Pax Americana� 18 In short, what was tentatively inaugurated in the period of the Vietnam War in the name of the “exceptionalist American state” became under the aegis of the sovereign Bush administration the global normalization of the state of exception: the biopoliticization of human life, which is to say, with Giorgio Agamben’s identification of modern democratic (particularly American) political practice and Nazi biopolitics in mind, the reduction of bios to zoé, bare life (nuda vida), life that can be killed without the killing being called homicide: The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of Jews by means of the term “Holocaust” was … an irresponsible historiographical blindness� The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes … neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere “capacity to be killed inherent in the condition of the Jew as such� The truth - which is difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils - is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, “as lice”� Which is to say, as bare life� The dimension in which these extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics� If it is true that the figure proposed by our age is that of unsacrificeable life that has nevertheless become capable of being killed to an unprecedented degree, then the bare life of homo sacer concerns us in a special way� Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics. A line that is as such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri. 19 3. Nothing substantial has changed since the fall of the Bush administration and the election of Barack Obama� To be sure, the cultural rhetoric of this Democratic administration, playing as it does to both political constituencies, has become less strident and aggressively exceptionalist than that of the Bush administration� But it continues to represent itself and the Americana people fundamentally in terms of the American exceptionalist ethos and its redemptive global mission� More important, its domestic and global practice remains basically the same as that of the Bush administration� The Bush doctrines of preemptive war and regime change; its tactics of staging the spectacle; and its harnessing of the power of the state to the global free market have not been explicitly renounced; the war on terror continues; Guantánamo and 18 See “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century,” the white paper of the influential neoconservative group called “Project for New American Century” (PNAC) that became the ideological blue print for the George W� Bush administration’s foreign policy� 19 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans� Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp� 114-115� 22 W illiam s Panos the lawless detention camps in political indeterminate zones remain open and operative; the torture of Arabs suspected of terrorism (euphemistically called “enhanced form of interrogation”) and the targeting of terrorist suspects by CIA hits squads (now drones) goes on� In sum, the Bush administration’s establishment of the Homeland Security State in the wake of the Al Qaeda bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and enacted by Congress as The Homeland Security Act of 2002) 20 - the sovereign executive decision that rendered the state of exception the global rule - remains the determining “law” of the American domestic and global practice� 21 Equally important, it is the American exceptionalist ethos - the perennial belief that History has ordained America as the redeemer nation - that continues to informs this law� That this national condition remains the case in the wake of the election of a Democratic president is borne witness to by the sudden adoption and massive take off of the celebratory use of the term “American exceptionalism” by the American political class (Republican and Democrat) and the culture industry in the aftermath of 9/ 11 as a jeremiadic strategy for covenantal rejuvenation� As the sociologist Jerome Karabel has observed about the remarkable popularization of the term since its emergence during the Reagan administration’s Cold War against the Soviet Union: “According to a Gallup poll from December 2010, 80 percent of Americans agree that ‘because of the United States’ history and the Constitution - the United States has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world�’ Support for this proposition varied somewhat along party lines, but not by much: 91 percent of Republicans agreed, but so, too, did 73 percent of Democrats�” 22 Indeed, these telling statistics were dramatically corroborated during the national presidential election conventions of 2012, during which the Democratic Party speakers in behalf of Obama (including Obama himself) vied with the Republican speakers in behalf of Mitt Romney over which candidate (and party) was more faithful in its practice to the redemptive Imperatives of the American exceptionalist ethos� Elsewhere, I have analyzed in some detail a number of these speeches by the American political class to show the continuing hegemonic power of the term. Here, for the specific purpose of this essay, I will restrict my commentary to a brief rehearsal of the spectacular use (in the Debordian sense) to which Senator John Kerry (now Secretary of State in the Obama administration) put the term in behalf of persuading the American public, against earlier and persistent jeremiadic accusations of betrayal by Republican spokespersons, that President Obama’s administration 20 Enacted by the Congress following the directives of the Bush administration’s post- 9/ 11 declaration of policy entitled “The National Security Strategy of the United State of America�” 21 The recent exposures by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden of the disturbing degree to which the state operates according to the imperatives of the state of exception bear witness to this� 22 Jerome Karabel, “‘American Exceptionalism’ and the Battle for the Presidency�” Huffington Post. http: / / www.huffingtonpost.com/ jerome-karabel/ american-exceptionalism-obama-gingrich_b_1161800�html The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 23 was continuing America’s perennial exceptionalist errand in the world’s wilderness� 23 I am referring to his staging (for effect) of his encomium to the president’s American exceptionalism by way of his triumphant (but equivocal) climactic assertion that Obama’s “promise” to fulfill the redemptive (symbolic) goal of America’s global mission in the wake of 9/ 11 culminated in what the previous Republican administration had not achieved: the spectacular - “surgically executed” - assassination of Osama bin Laden, the living symbol of the threat posed by Jihadist Islam to the security of the American people: And President Obama kept his promise� He promised to end the war in Iraq - and he has - and our heroes have come home� He promised to end the war in Afghanistan responsibly - and he is - and our heroes there are coming home� He promised to focus like a laser on al-Qaeda - and he has - our forces have eliminated more of its leadership in the last three years than in all the eight years that came before� And after more than ten years without justice for thousand of Americans murdered on 9/ 11, after Mitt Romney said it would be “naïve” to go into Pakistan to pursue the terrorist, it took President Obama, against the advice of many to give that order to finally rid this earth of Osama bin Laden. Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago� [inordinate applause] 24 In thus identifying American exceptionalism as the determining agent of the spectacular assassination of Osama bin Laden, Senator Kerry not only brought to fulfillment the conservative Republican George W. Bush’s Texan inflected Ahabism: his exceptionaiist and monomaniac promise to hunt down Osama bin Laden� In so doing, he also brought to its liminal point the essential - massively destructive (and finally self-defeating) - exceptional (onto)logic, or, rather, the (onto)logic of exceptionalism - of the American exceptional ethos: the objectification of the complexities of history (produced in large part by Western and American colonialism) to render them, as Melville proleptically observed of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal exceptionalism, “practically assailable�” 25 Despite the growing counter-mnemonic scholarship of the New Americanists pointing to a quite different evaluation of American exceptionaiism, what seems to be astonishing about this discourse of the contemporary post-9/ 11 American political class is its obliviousness to its findings. 23 Senator John Kerry used the term “exceptionalism” nine times in his speech� 24 John Kerry, Speech to the 2012 DNC� Charlotte, North Carolina� September 6, 2012� http: / / goo�gl/ Ooj33h 25 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whole, ed� Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G� Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago” Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), p� 184; my emphasis� The unintended ironic parallel between the spectacular high tech (“shock and awe”) metaphor Senator Kerry uses to characterize Obama’s assault on Osama bin Laden (“like a laser”) and the spectacular high tech metaphor Melville uses to characterize Ahab’s assault on the white whale (“and then , as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it�”) should not be overlooked� 24 W illiam s Panos My purpose in thus retrieving this recent American history is, in sum, to underscore two affiliated urgent points, which, despite their patent visibility, have been strangely marginalized if not entirely overlooked by the new, New Americanist globalized discourses. The first is that the American exceptionalist ethos continues at the present historical conjuncture to determine America’s mission in the world� Despite its theoretical self-destruction (the disclosure of the violence it always disavows during the Vietnam War and again during the global “War on Terror”), it has not, as yet, become, in the Gramscian sense of the word, a (conscious and articulate) ideology; it remains, that is, a hegemonic discourse (what I have been calling, after Jacques Rancière, an “ethos”): a polyvalent ideology that is taken by the American political class and the vast majority of the interpellated (“called”) American public to be reality: “common sense,” “the way things are�” At the risk of rehearsing the obvious, I quote at length Raymond Williams’ precise and resonant rendition of Antonio Gramsci’s enabling and indispensable, yet curiously marginalized, distinction between “ideology” and “hegemony,” which, in determining the difference between - and the sameness of - modern totalitarian and democratic/ capitalist societies, remarkably epitomizes the American exceptionalsit ethos: The concept of hegemony often, in practice, resembles the definitions [of “ideology” as a consciously held world view of both the dominant and subordinate classes], but it is distinct in its refusal to equate consciousness with the articulate formal system which can be and ordinarily is abstracted as “ideology”� It of course does not exclude the articulate and formal meanings, values and beliefs which a dominant class develops and propagates� But it does not equate these with consciousness, or rather it does not reduce consciousness to them� Instead it sees the relations of domination and subordination, in the forms as practical consciousness, as in effect as a saturation of the whole process of living - not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense� Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of ‘ideology’, nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as ‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination’� It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world� It is a lived system of meanings and values - constitutive and constituting - which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a ‘culture’, but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes� 26 26 Raymond Williams� Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp� 109-110� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 25 4. The second point I want to underscore in thus recalling the dominant role that American exceptionalism continues to play in the contemporary world, despite the volatile dynamic of globalization, is that our contemporary occasion is not the end of an era, whether of History or the “American Century�” It is rather the occasion of the interregnum� By this term I not only mean the “now time” between a centered world (the nation-state and its intrinsic exceptionalism) that is dying but, in the form of the U.S., is willfully, desperately, and dangerously trying to remain alive, and a de-centered world struggling to be born� I also mean “the now time” of the exilic consciousness, that damaged but thus estranging and illuminating local/ global perspective of, in Edward Said’s still compelling words, “the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages,” who is the consciousness of the ubiquitous deracinated “migrant,” that incarnation of the “unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies” that, “today, ” in the wake of the implosion of the Western Imperial project and the replacement of “the settled, established and domesticated dynamics of culture,” has become the new agent of liberation from Western colonial oppression� (CI, 332) 27 That is to say, to return to the metaphor of the centered circle (the local and the global), the interregnum compels the authentic intellectual to be both inside and outside the “world,” at home and not at home, at once (apart)� From this estranged and estranging perspective - this profane alienating time of the now - as Said empoweringly observes, “all things are indeed counter, original, spare , strange”: potential as such� 28 To put this imperative of the profane time of the now of the interregnum in Giorgio Agamben’s alternative terms, in the interregnum the exilic intellectual’s vocation becomes the “revocation of all vocations” 29 - the rendering inoperative of the interpellating ethos - in this case, American exceptionaism - that renders the individual human being a subjected subject, the willing servant of a Higher (transcendental) Cause, which is to say, the liberation of humanity from the bondage of a logic of belonging that serves the mystified few to a logic that returns the commons to the common� From the exilic perspective of this in-between time, too, one is enabled to envision a coming polis of the 27 See also Hannah Arendt “We Refugees” in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed� Ron H� Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978); and Giorgio Agamben “ Beyond Human Rights,” in Means without End, trans� Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp� 15-28� I amplify on the liberating potential of the figure of the contemporary figure of the refugee in Exile in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013) , pp� 165-174� 28 This, not incidentally is, consciously or not, an echo of Martin Heidegger‘s phenomenological analysis of the de-structive by which the “ordinary” becomes “extraordinary�” 29 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary of the Letter to the Romans, trans� Patricia Daily (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p� 23� 26 W illiam s Panos commons untethered to the sovereign and totalitarian center elsewhere, or, in Said’s paradoxical and resonantly heuristic phrase, “’the complete consort dancing together’ contrapuntally�” Given the continuing, if contested, authority of the polyvalent American exceptionalist ethos in the discourse and practice of the American political class throughout the post-9/ 11 era, it comes as a surprise to find that, in “remapping” American studies, the great majority of New Americanist texts published in the last decade either marginalize “America” (interrogate the validity of the term “American studies”), minimize America’s exceptionalism, or virtually erase it in the process of overdetermining the site of the global or, rather, the plural aspects of the global� Of course, the tacit purpose of this overdetermination of the global (when it is not simply a matter of academic fashion) is, more or less, in keeping with the dictates of the global perspective, to diminish the imperial authority of the United States, and, more generally, the concept of the nation-state� But the result of this outside Archimedean perspective, as I have been arguing, has been to distort the historical reality of the post-9/ 11 occasion. This distortion is evident in some significant degree in all the New American texts I have referred to above� A remarkable example of this effacement of the visible local can be found in Wei Chee Dimock’s “Planet America: Set and Subset,” the introduction surveying the influential volume of New Americanist essays she edited with Lawrence Buell entitled Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007), which makes no significant reference to the primary role the perennial American exceptionalist ethos has played on a global scale since the Bush administration’s declaration of America’s “War on Terror�” It is true that Dimock refers in passing to 9/ 11 as a turning point in the history of Americana studies: After the World Trade Center, and after Katrina, few of us are under the illusion that the Unites States is sovereign in any absolute sense� The nation seems to have come literally “unbundled” before our eyes, its fabric of life torn apart by extremist militant groups, and, by physical forces of even greater scope, wrought by climate change and the intensification of hurricane cycles. Territorial sovereignty, we suddenly realize, is no more than a legal fiction, a man-made fiction.” 30 But, it is not, in fact, America’s unending exceptionalist war on terror and the massive “collateral damage” it is inflicting that she overdetermines in introducing the topic of the globalizing of American literary studies and the essays that follow� 31 Indeed, the war on terror and the “redemptive” exceptionalism of its origins are marginalized in the sequel (and in the following essays)� It is, rather, as the emphasis in the above passage anticipates, 30 Wei Chee Dimock, “Introduction: “Planet and America, Set and Subset,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature and World Literature, ed� Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), “Plant and America,” p� 1; further references will be abbreviated to PA and incorporated in the text in parentheses� 31 The dearth of reference to American exceptionalism in this volume of thirteen is evidenced in the Index� Under the heading “American studies, and exceptionalism,” the Index lists, 6 single page entries; under the heading “exceptionalism: American,” it lists 5 single page entries� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 27 “Katrina,” the ecological disaster that befell New Orleans as a result of the United States’ indifference to global warming that, she claims, has precipitated the planetization of American studies: What Katrina dramatizes … is a form of “globalization” different from either scenarios [the emergence of a “global civil society” in the wake of the decline of the nation-state envisioned by such theorists as Jürgen Habermas and Michael Walzer, on the one hand; and the global free market under the aegis of the United States warned against by theorists such as Fredric Jameson]� Not benign, it is at the same time not predicated on the primacy of any nation� Long accustomed to seeing itself as the de facto center of the world - a military superpower, the largest economy, and the moral arbiter to boot - the United States suddenly finds itself downgraded to something considerably less� “It’s like being in a Third World country,” Mitch Handler, a manager in Louisiana’s biggest public hospital, said to the Associated Press about the plight of hurricane victims� The Third-Worlding of a superpower came with a shock not only to Louisiana and Mississippi but to unbelieving eyes everywhere� Not the actor but the acted upon, the United States is simply the spot where catastrophe hits, the place on the map where largescale forces, unleashed elsewhere, come home to roost� What does it mean for the United States to be on the receiving end of things? … Scale enlargement has stripped from this nation any dream of unchallenged primacy� If Europe has already been “provincialized” - has been revealed to be a smaller player in world history than previously imagined, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues - the United States seems poised to follow� … In this context, it seems important to rethink the adequacy of a nation-based paradigm [of American literary studies]� Is “American” an adjective that can stand on its own, uninflected, unentangled, and unconstrained? Can an autonomous field be built on its chronology and geography, equal to the task of phenomenal description and causal explanation? Janice Radway, in her presidential address to the American Studies Association of 1998, answers with a resounding “no,” and proposes a name change for the association for just that reasons� (PA, 2) Dimock is, of course, justified in calling into question the sovereignty of the nation-state, “America,” and the exceptionalism it implies. But her identification of the ground of this identification with Katrina as such - without pointing to the negative effects on the domestic site (in this case the ecologically vulnerable city New Orleans and its black population) of the United States’ “War on Terror” - not only flies in the face of contemporary history. In deflecting attention from the unending, massively destructive global War on Terror being perpetrated by the United States in the name of its assumed redemptive global errand, it defuses the urgency of naming this unerring exceptionalist justification as the normalization of the state of exception on both the local and global scale - a normalization, not incidentally, that includes the United States’ right to militarize the ecos in the name of national security 32 - and, thus, of resisting not only its drive to reduce human life to life that can be killed with impunity, but also, in the end, to destroy the planet� 32 See Robert Marzec, “Environmenality : The War Machine and the Struggle for Inhabitancy in the Age of Climate Change,“ in Environmentality, forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press, 2015� 28 W illiam s Panos The deflection of critical attention from exceptionalist America endemic to this overdetermined global perspective of Wei Chee Dimock (and the majority of essays in the volume) is also plainly evident in various degrees in the other recent anthologies of New Americanist Studies� But its disabling effect is most visible in the introduction to (and contents of) the volume entitled The Globalization of American Studies edited by Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, a compilation of the best essays presented at the ongoing conferences of the “Global American Studies” project (GLAS) at Northwestern University� And this is because, unlike the editors of the other anthologies, who overdetermine the global at the expense of the local, these take the point of departure of their global perspective (and their summary of the essays In the volume) by invoking the myth of American exceptionalism (which, following Henry Luce, they refer to as “the American Century”) only to dismiss it, along with the United State’s exceptionalist post-9/ 11 “War on Terror” and it rendering of the state of exception the rule, as having run it historical course� That is to say, they begin from the vantage point of the “historical” coming-to-itsend of the myth of American exceptionalism, the dissolution, as it were, of the center intrinsic to the widening gyre� Thus, their introduction begins with an extended (and rather labored) commentary on the essay inaugurating the volume, Donald Pease’s “American Studies after American Exceptionalism? : Toward a Comparative Analysis of Imperial State Exceptionalism,” the purpose of which is to challenge its thesis concerning the viability of American exceptionalism in the era of globalization: The question is whether American exceptionalism has always already been implicated in some sort of imperial formation, as Pease argues, with the American century serving as the most recent incarnation of that imperial strand� This historical question, which Pease argues with considerable precision and force, need not, however, be the starting point for this introduction� If American exceptionalism was always implicated in American imperialism, so long as American imperialism does not come to an end, neither will some versions of American exceptionalism invoked to sustain that imperialism come to an end� In this we agree with Pease, but the question we ask is the following: What happens to American studies when the American Century - which can be variously described, including as an imperial formation, but which always refers to a particular logic of the circulation of capital, signs, texts, and (cultural) goods - comes to an end or enters its longue durée? If the American Century in the Lucean sense is coming or has come to an end, then we expect that the particular link between American exeptionalism and American studies is bound to change, if it has not already changed� 33 Edwards and Gaonkar thus modify, if they do not entirely reject Pease’s thesis about the continuing existence of American exceptionalism by way of assuming, against historical reality, that the American century has for all practical purposes come to its end� Admittedly they express ambiguousness about this end: 33 Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Introduction: Globalizing American Studies,” in Edwards and Gaonkar, ed� Globalzing American Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp� 4-5� Further references will be abbreviated to GAS and incorporated in the text in parentheses� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 29 The American Century cannot be critiqued out of existence, even if it renews itself In the guise of a decentered empire, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri would have us believe� Instead, it can only come to an end� We need to come to that time when American exceptionalism has to stand alone, in the multilateral world of the global� indeed, we believe that we have come to that time, or nearly so� Therefore we suggest that the closing of the so-called American Century, less as unit of time than a decided shift in global conditions, signals the weakening of the long-and-enduring myth of American exceptionalism� American studies, as a result, must yield to a context within which such a formation - of America’s special place and role in the world - requires the bracketing of fictions that can no longer be sustained� (GAS, 50; my emphasis) This qualification is a telling one, but, as the content of the essay testifies, it has no importance to the editors’ argument (and to those of most of the essays in the volume) about the ”closing of the American Century�” 34 Indeed, the ambiguity strikes one as a specter of the historical reality of the interregnum - the exceptionalism that continues to inform America’s global practice - that haunts Edwards’ and Gaonkar’s overdetermined global thesis� Like the other texts to which I have referred thus far, Edwards’ and Goankar’s bears unintended spectral witness to the new New Americanist betrayal of the critical imperatives of the interregnum� 5. The small anthology edited by Russ Castronovo and Susan Gilman entitled States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies is, in this respect, more adequate than the Dimock and Buell volume, because, as the title suggests, it identifies the issue at stake for New Americanists as the rendering of the state of exception (emergency) the global rule� In their ”Introduction: The Study of the American Problems,” however, the editors’ global (as opposed to local) orientation renders their analysis finally inadequate to the critical imperatives of the Interregnum, in which local and global belong together� Symptomatic of this inadequacy is the labored way the editors attempt to relate the global issues referred to in the essays - weather, slavery, neo-liberal capital, homosexuality, torture, etc� Their overdeterminaton of the global perspective, that is, blinds them to the fact that it is the (local) American exceptionalist state, understood at its liminal point, as in the case of the Vietnam War and, especially the post-9/ 11 War on Terror, that has precipitated the ominous normalization of the state of exception and thus constitutes the hidden paradigm that informs all the global topics to which the essay refers� 34 The editors refer twice more to “the closing of the American Century as if it were a fait accompli. A page later, for example, they write, “We briefly defer the question of what sort of American studies emerges after the American Century by asking what sort of disciplinary anxiety our time - the end of the ‘American Century’ - present�” p� 6� See also pp� 30 and 39� 30 W illiam s Panos Two essays in this volume constitute exceptions to this general marginalization of the destructive role the United States continues to play on the global scene: Anne McClintock’s “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib” and Ian Baucom’s “Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, and the Laws of War. ” The first distinguishes itself by way of its brilliantly corrosive analysis of the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs depicting American soldiers torturing Arabs suspected of being terrorists, which, against the official representation that identifies the agents as exceptions to America’s redemptive global mission (“bad apples”), demonstrates decisively that they were manifestations of an official paranoia which was the result of an imperial society’s coherence around “contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence and phantasms of threat and engulfment�” 35 The second essay distinguishes itself, by way of its illuminating genealogy of the West’s concept of the “unjust enemy” which has enabled the its perennial colonizing project� McClintock’s focus on the “superior” (exceptionalist) imperial society’s need for a perpetual enemy constitutes a major contribution to the understanding of both the strength and weakness of the Western imperial project� But in universalizing the paranoia informing the practice of torture at Abu Ghraib, it diverts attention from the specifically American version of this paranoia and its long history� Thus, for example, in introducing the theme of what she calls “the enemy deficit” that is intrinsic to imperial power, McClintock invokes the famous last lines of the modern Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians: ” “And now what shall become of us [the Romans] without any barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution�” Commenting on these lines, she writes: C� P� Cavafy wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1927� But the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/ 11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient déjà vu� To what dilemma are the “barbarians a kind of solution”? Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power� Cavafy’s insight is that an imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians� It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empire’s borders in the first place� On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of impending attack� The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part� And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom� These people were a kind of solution� (PE, 92) McClintock then goes on to illustrate Cavafy’s thesis by recalling, first, the dominant American culture’s deep anxiety - she quotes General Peter Schoonmaker, head of the U�S Army; Dick Cheney; Colin Powell; George W� 35 Anne McClintock, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo an Abu Ghraib,” in Castronovo and Gilman, ed� Strategies of Emergency: : The Object of American Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) p� 91; further references will be abbreviated to PE and incorporated in the text in parentheses� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 31 Bush; and the neocons of the Project for New Americana Century - over the loss of such an enemy with the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and, then, in Cavafy’s language, their relief, if not euphoria, in the wake of al Qaeda’s bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: The 9/ 11 attacks came as a dazzling solution to both the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy� General Schoonmaker saw the attacks as an immense boon: “There is a huge silver lining in this cloud� … War is a tremendous focus� Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph�” After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Powell noted, “America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before�” Charles Krauthammer called for a declaration of total war� “We no long have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era,” he declared, “It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism�” (PE, 93) McClintocks’s Cavafian focus on the anxiety-provoking “enemy deficit” constitutes a significant contribution to our understanding of the paranoid dynamics of the imperial imagination� But her overdetermined universalizing global perspective blinds her to the more immediate origins of the American version of the paranoid imperial syndrome� That is to say, her recurrent reference to the American political class’s vacillation between “delirium of grandeur” and “nightmare of perpetual threat” and thus of the paranoid need for a perpetual rejuvenating enemy can be more accurately - and, from the point of view of resistance, productively - understood as having its genealogical origins in the American jeremiad� I mean that long and abiding ritualized (hegemonized) American cultural tradition, coeval with the origins of American exceptionalism, that, as I have shown elsewhere, had its origins, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, in the American Puritans’ effort to combat recidivism - the very cultural backsliding that its errand in the New World wilderness was intended to transcend - by way of the instigation of anxiety - the threat of a perpetual enemy on the other side of a perpetual frontier� I quote at length from Bercovitch’s American Jeremiad not only to suggest the remarkable parallel with McClintoch’s Cavafy but also to underscore the difference of this same between the process-oriented New World and the static Old World vocations and the hegemonic nature of the American jeremiad: the perennial national ritual that has ensured the rejuvenation (through violence) of the American covenantal people 36 : The American Puritan jeremiad was the ritual of culture on an errand - which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process� Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old World ideals of stasis for a New World vision of the future� Its function was to create a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless “progressive” energies required for the success of the venture� The European jeremiads also thrived on anxiety, of course� Like all traditional forms of ritual, it used fear and trembling to teach acceptance of fixed social norms. But the American Puritan jeremiad went much further. It made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis 36 See Richard Slotkin, Rejuvenation Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973)� 32 W illiam s Panos was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand, after all, implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England’s Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome. Denouncing or affirming , their vision fed on the distance between promise and fact� 37 Similarly, Ian Baucom, in “Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, the Laws of War,” locates the genealogical origins of the Bush administration’s representation of the terrorist suspects incarcerated and tortured in indeterminate juridical zones such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo as “unlawful combatants” back to European origins: the discourse and practice of modern Western nation-states, which identified the “unjust [nomadic] enemy” as one that was not organized into a national polity, thus violating “the law of nature” and justifying its destruction by sovereign (sedentary and civilized) 38 states with impunity� The difference between the two is a matter of degree of historical specificity. Whereas McClintock, via Cavafy’s poem, locates the origins of contemporary America’s “unjust enemy” - the barbarian Arab that can be tortured without the torture being subject to punishment - in the general imperial Roman distinction between civilization and barbarism, Baucom locates it in the early modern tradition of European jurisprudential discourse on war and the commonwealth instigated by the question of Black Atlantic slavery and going back from Immanuel Kant (The Metaphysics of Morals) to Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), Hugo Grotius (The Rights of War and Peace), and Alberto Gentili (De Jure Belli Libri), who, in turn, find their source in Cicero’s Philippics (against “’the bandit,’” Mark Antony, and his “’villainous band of brigands�’” 39 Taking his point of departure from the commen- 37 Sacvan Bercovicth, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p� 23; my emphasis� For an extended account of the relationship between the Puritan understanding of the enemy and the later American understanding of the frontier, see William V� Spanos “American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier before and after 9/ 11: From the Puritans to the Neo-Con Men,” in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (Albany: SUNT Press, 2008), pp� 187-242� 38 I put “nomadic” and “sedentary” in parentheses to suggest that Baucom could have extended his genealogy beyond Cicero’s argument against Mark Antony to include the fundamental distinction, extending throughout the history of Western colonialism to the present day, that justified Rome’s conquest and occupation of the terra incognita beyond the terra orbis: that between a sedentary (agricultural and thus “civilized”) people and a nomadic people (and thus “barbarian”) people� Had Baucom included this aspect of Rome’s justification of war against an “unjust enemy,” it would have enabled him to be more historically accurate about the genealogy of post-9/ 11 America’s version of the unjust” or “inimical” enemy� For this distinction was absolutely central in the establishment of the American exceptionalism ethos, which in the period of westward expansion was expressed in the vernacular as the opposition between the Americans’ “betterment” or “settlement” of the land the natives’ merely “roaming on” the land� 39 Ian Baucom, “Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, and the Laws of War,” in Russ Castranovo and Susan Gilman, ed�, States of Emergency: The Object of Americana Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p� 131; further references will be abbreviated to CG and incorporated in the text in parentheses� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 33 tary justifying America’s war against Iraq (“The Pentagon’s New Map”) of American of policy expert Thomas P�M� Barnett, former director of “the New Rules Set Project, a collaborative project sponsored by the Naval War College and the investment consulting firm Cantor Fitzgerald,” Baucom succinctly summarizes his globalized version of this genealogical history of America’s version of the unjust enemy as follows: The key argument central to the mid-seventeenth-century law of war (and central again, in overtly Hobbesian terms, to Kant’s own theory of international and cosmopolitan right) thus returns as key to Barnett’s new map of capital law, and war� In response to the appearance of a “predatory” people living in a putatively real state of nature on the boundaries and beyond the outposts of stable nation states and the circulating flow of capital-people living in that “lawless condition in which man is a wolf to man (homo homini lupus” [Hobbes]), the condition of human life one of a perpetual war of all against all, and the pursuit of commerce impossible in the absence of an overawing law-and-contract-securing power-sovereign power can again extend itself as a law-constituting power of violence and, in so extending law and violence extend the flow of capital. And it is not at all an accident that at precisely the moment in which this Hobbesian-Kantian map of war should re-emerge, or that at the very frontier of its Gulf War testing ground, so too should the figure of the inimicus return to the law-suspending center of the law of war: now in the form of the “unlawful enemy combatant” identified in President Bush’s October 2001 order of War and subsequently written into U�S� law by the Military Commissions Act of 20006 - a figure, once again, distinguishable from the “lawful enemies” of the imperial state by the failure to “belong to a State party”: a figure, once again. Inimical, rightless, legally exceptional, and languishing indefinitely, but by law, within yet another of the Atlantic’s legally free and empty zones; a melancholy successor figure in the long line of “Capman,” “Hottentots,” “brigands,” “inimici,”and “unjust enemies,” against whom the imperial state has held its own “rights” to be ”unlimited�” (CG, 138) As in the case of McClintock genealogical focus on America’s perennial “enemy deficit,” Baucom’s remarkably similar, but more historically specific, genealogical focus on its perennial reliance on “the unjust enemy” sheds new and welcomed light not only on the United States’ justification of its “war on terror” and its use of torture against “terrorist suspects” at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and other indefinite zone of detention, but also on the United States’ post-9/ 11 American imaginary� This is especially true of Baucom’s resonant implication, by way of his identification of America’s understanding of the “unlawful combatant” with that of the Western tradition at large - the “unjust enemy,” the inimicus,” “the homo homini lupus” - that the pervasive American discourse and practice pertaining to an always threatening enemy (or frontier) is ultimately, no different, in reality, from “the unjust enemy” of all the other Old World imperial nations-states from which it distinguishes itself� (Tellingly, however, Baucom, like McClintock, does not overtly articulate this parallel�) As in the case of McClintock’s genealogy, however, Baucom overdetermines the global perspective at the expense of the local� And, in thus violating the imperatives of the historical interregnum, he marginalizes, if he does not entirely efface, the particular - and, crucially, the historically differentiating - origins of America’s perennial representation of “the unjust 34 W illiam s Panos enemy” and the violence it has inflicted on their minds and bodies. In short, his distance from the center, like McClintock’s, blinds him to the the fundamental role that the American jeremiad has played in the formation of the American national identity as an exceptionalist and redemptive identity from America’s Puritan origins, through the era of the removal of the native Americans to reservations (camps) and their eventual extermination (including the reduction of Africans to slaves, which is Baucom’s primary example of the continuity between President Bush’s “unlawful combatant” and the Old World’s “unjust enemy”) to the present 9/ 11 occasion� I mean, to repeat, the instigation of anxiety in the covenantal people by way of identifying the alien Other beyond the frontier between civilization and wilderness as a threatening enemy in behalf of always already rejuvenating (by violence) its communal energies in the face of the backsliding that is endemic to the very civilizing process of its errand� Had McClintock and Baucom been more attentive to American history in tracing the genealogy of official America’s post- 9/ 11 representation of its global itinerary, epitomized by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, they, no doubt, would have been directed by their focus on “the unjust enemy” to the prestigious neoconservative Samuel P. Huntington’s very visible justificatory defense of George W� Bush’s War on Terror in the face of what he refers to as “the deconstruction of America�” I am referring to Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s NationaI Identity (2004), 40 which traces the American national identity (the “Protestant core culture”) that the Bush administration would secure against “militant Islam” back to the Puritan “errand in the wilderness” - The settling of America was, of course, a result of economic and other motives, as well as religious ones� Yet religion still was central� … Religious intensity was undoubtedly greatest among the Puritans, especially in Massachusetts� They took the lead in defining their settlement based on “a Covenant with God” to create “a city on a hill” as a model for all the world, and people of the Protestant faiths soon also came to see themselves and America in a similar way� In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans defined their mission in the New World in biblical terms� They were a “chosen people,” on an ”errand in the wilderness,” creating a ”the new Israel,” or the “new Jerusalem” in what was clearly “the promised land�” America was the site of a “new Heaven and a new earth, the home of justice,” God’s country� The settlement of American was vested, as Sacvan Bercovitch put it, “with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest�” This sense of holy mission was easily expanded into millenarian themes of America as ”the redeemer nation” and “the visionary republic�” (WAW, 64) and, as the title itself and Huntington’s (misleading) appropriation of Sacvan Bercovitch make patently clear, is consciously written in American jeremiadic vein� 40 Samuel P� Huntington, Who Are We? : The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); further citations will be abbreviated to WAW and incorporated in the text in parentheses� Baucom refers to Huntington in his essay (p� 137), but it is the Huntington who is identified with the ”clash of civilizations” thesis of his earlier book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 35 Huntington’s jeremiadic ideological itinerary, in fact, culminates in a disquisition on America’s perennial need for an enemy that is remarkably similar, though ideologically antithetical to Anne McClintock’s characterization of what she calls the Bush administration’s’ paranoid “enemy deficit.” Unlike his neoconservative predecessor, Francis Fukuyama, who represented the end of America’s Cold War against Soviet communism euphorically as the triumph of American democracy and “End of History,” 41 Huntington, in this culminating chapter tellingly entitled “In Search of an Enemy,” dwells, paradoxically it would seem to most, on the negative consequence of this triumphant “end�” Like the previous American Jeremiahs - John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, Francis Parkman, Daniel Webster, Frederick Jackson Turner, Mark Twain, and William Lederer and Eugene Burdick , among many others - he overdetermines America’s loss of the anxiety-provoking enemy: At the end of the century, Democracy was left without a significant secular ideological rival, and the United States was left without a peer competitor� Among American foreign policy elites, the result were euphoric, pride, arrogance - and uncertainty� The absence of an ideological threat produced an absence of purpose� “Nations need enemies,” Charles Krauthammer commented as the Cold War ends. “Take away one, and they find another.” The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militantly strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security� The foreign policy debates of the 1990s were already over who Might be such an enemy� (WAW, 262) It is at this point in Huntington’s jeremiad, as I have observed elsewhere, that “the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/ 11 come from the margins, where they have been lying in wait from the beginning, to center stage�” 42 In a rhetoric worthy of Mark Twain’s signature American exceptionalist technique of staging for effect - or more to the point, of Guy Debord’s corrosive analysis of Western modernity’s use of the spectacle to bereave its human objects of speech, i�e� a polity), Huntington goes on calculatively to orchestrate a spectacular end of his narrative of exceptionalist America’s anxious ”search for an enemy�” Beginning with a rapid but suspense-inducing survey of the possible candidates for the status of America’s post-Cold war enemy - Serbia, China, Iran Iraq , Pakistan - he concludes with a resonant - and, to invoke McClintock language, paranoid finality: The cultural gap between Islam and America’s Christianity and Anglo- Protestantism reinforces Islam’s enemy qualifications. And on September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden ended America’s search� The attacks on New York and Washington followed by the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq and the more diffuse “war on terrorism” make militant Islam America’s first enemy of the twentyfirst century. (WAW, 264-265) 41 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992)� 42 William V� Spanos, “American Exceptionalism and the State of Exception after 9/ 11: Melville’s Proleptic Witness,” in The State of Exception and the Exceptionalist State: Herman Melvile’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p� 157� 36 W illiam s Panos 6. I conclude this essay with a brief critical commentary on Paul Giles’s influential The Re-Mapping of Americana Literature (2011), 43 which, it seems to me, epitomizes what is most problematic, if not entirely disabling, about this New Americanist tendency to overdetermine the global at the expense of the local, the American exceptionalism that has informed America’s national identity and its practice from the Puritans’ genocidal war against the Pequots to the George W� Bush administration’s post-9/ 11 “War on [Islamic] Terror�” Giles’s revisionary “re-mapping” of American literature brings numerous “subversive” texts hitherto marginalized by the exceptionalist tradition to visibility� Furthermore, in reading canonical American texts against the nationalist grain, it sheds productive counter-light on the American literary tradition� That is, his intervention complicates the narrative of American literature canonized by the celebratory Myth and Symbol school of Americanist studies and is thus welcomed� But the spectacle of his erudite invocation of forgotten American texts and his disorienting globalized readings of canonical national texts should not awe us into acquiescing to his questionable revisionary thesis� In fact, they distract attention from its otherwise patent vulnerability� In what follows I will identify this hidden vulnerability by way of making four brief but indissolubly related points pertaining to Giles’s global “remapping” model to suggest what is troubling - and perhaps even disabling - about his revisionary thesis on American literature� My first point has to do with the presiding metaphor of mapping (or remapping) itself, since it has become increasingly prominent in New Americanist studies� Giles’s inaugural and determining invocation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “de-territorializing” to characterize the history of American literature “hidden” by the thesis that posits American exceptionalism as the founding and abiding origin of the Americana national identity is confusing if not contradictory� The concept of cartography he uses to articulate this deterritorialization derives from Mercator’s map-making , which is to say, the very spatializing concept that, in replacing the ancient existential and temporal-oriented “periplus” by the projection of parallel and longitude coordinates, enabled a panoptic view of the “unknown” from within� I mean, more specifically, that version of the spatialized “tableaux vivant,” born in the period of the Enlightenment, as Foucault has shown, that, in privileging the distanced panoptic eye, enables the observer to spatialize and domesticate the mysterious terra incognita, thus becoming the primary apparatus of the of the exploration and colonization of the “New World,” the “territorialization of its ”wilderness�” Giles, of course, uses the metaphor of cartography against itself� But in thus privileging the panoptic eye and its distancing/ spatializing perspective, his project becomes an apparatus of capture complicitous with the mapping intrinsic to the territorializing imperatives of imperialism� Ironically, critique of this panoptic modern cartography in the name of experiencing the phenomena of being immediately, i�e� existentially, was made by 43 Further citations will be abbreviated to GR and incorporated in the text in parentheses� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 37 two recent American poets, Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, who were critical of the imperialism inherent in the cartographic mentality of American modernity� Thus Pound’s recurrent appeal to the Phoenician sailor Hanno’s periplus: “not as land seen on a map / but sea bord seen by men sailing�” 44 Thus also Charles Olson’s similar appeal to Juan de la Cosa, Columbus’s shipboard mapmaker: Behaim - and nothing Insular Azores to Cipangu (Candyn) Somewhere also there where spices And yes, in the Atlantic, one floating island: de Sant Brand an�… But before La Cosa, nobody could have a mappemunde 45 My second point is that Giles’s overdetermined (panoptic) global perspective compels him to minimize, if not entirely erase, the Puritan thesis, inaugurated by Perry Miller and especially Sacvan Bercovitch about the origins of the American national identity� This is especially evident in his misrepresentation of Bercovitch’s scholarship, particularly by way of not directly addressing American Jeremiad, most evident in his “heretical” reading of Cotton Mather’s Magnaiia Christi Americana: There is a certain heretical quality to such an approach [reconsidering Cotton Mather’s major work “along a geographic axis” and reading “it within a transatlantic context, as an example of Restoration style being creatively reconfigured within an American context] not only because it goes against the Bercovitch line of New England as a protected space bound into an apocalyptic rhetoric of “New England promise” but also because it cuts across the premise that the organizing principle of the Magnalia is ”generational [Puritan Origins,75, 130) with Mather seeking to bind New England in a diachronic continuum across time� There is clearly a filiopietist strand to the Magnalia, with Mather paying homage to his father Increase, to John Winthrop , and many others as he seeks to canonize New England history and to institutionalize its legacy� But if the content of the text is filiopietistic, the form, I would argue, is primarily Augustan, owing less to Increase Mather than to John Dryden, the arch enemy of the Puritans� (GR, 46 ) 44 Ezra Pound, “Canto LIX in The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1970, p� 324� 45 Charles Olson, “On ‘first Looking Out through Juan de la Cosa Eyes,” in The Maximus Poems , ed� George Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp� 81- 84� For Pound and Olson the periplus is an immediate expression of being-there, in the midst� As such they are more true to the reality of the world than the earlier maps of sedentary academics such as the map of the world of Martin Behaim (1492), which shows no land between Europe and Cipangu (Japan), but also earlier maps of the world based on Mercator’s projections� For an expanded commentary on this issue of cartography see, William V� Spanos, “The Ontological Origins of Occidental Imperialism: Thinking the Meta of Metaphysics,” in America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp� 39-52� 38 W illiam s Panos In representing the “Bercovitch line” as identifying Puritan “New England as a protected space,” Giles travesties both the concepts of history and language that inform American Jeremiad. In focusing on the Puritans’ figural (or typological) mode of interpreting historical events and their related need for a perpetual rejuvenating enemy, Bercovitch demonstrates that the Puritan errand in the New World was not only intrinsically “global” and trans-temporal in its perspective but also imperial in practice� Thus, contrary to the implications of Giles’s representation, he can be seen as a precursor of the New Americanist counter-memory� All this is borne witness to by Bercovitch’s brief but decisive commentary on Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, which, as he decisively notes earlier in his text, epitomizes the historical itinerary of America “from visible saint to American patriot, sacred errand to “manifest destiny,” colony to republic to imperial power (AJ, 92): Mather’s millenarianism at this time is worth special emphasis because the Magnalia has often been read as cry of despair. … The significance of those deliverances are [sic] indicated by the title of the last section of the last book, “Arma Virosque Cano,” a title that recalls the Virgilian invocation with which Mather opens the History (as well as the numerous echoes of Virgil thereafter), and so suggest the epic proportions of his narrative� For Mather, of course, New England’s story not only parallels but supersedes that of the founding of Rome [by a saving remnant], as his literary “assistance” from Christ excels the inspiration of Virgil’s muse, as the “exemplary heroes” he celebrates resemble but outshine the men of Aeneas’ band - not only as Christians but as seafarers and conquerors of hostile pagan tribes� Undoubtedly the proper title for Mather’s work is the exultant one he gave it: Magnalia Christi Americana, The Great Acts of Christ in America� (AJ ,87) My third point, related to the second, is that, Giles’s marginalization of the Puritan thesis about the origins of the American national identity in favor of his overdetermined global thesis also tacitly marginalizes the patent continuity between the American jeremiad - the Puritan need for a perpetual rejuvenating enemy - and the frontier thesis inaugurated by Frederick Jackson Turner at the time of the official closing of the American frontier and incorporated by the Myth and Symbol school of Americanists in behalf of America’s Cold War against the Soviet communism� 46 My fourth point focuses on the linguistic aspect of the Puritan providential concept of history� In identifying Mather’s literary style (in the above passage) with the “Augustan” style of the Old World English poet, John Dryden, Giles, in keeping with his minimization of the Puritan/ frontier thesis, obscures the difference between Mather’s Puritan figural poesis and Dryden’s “allegorical” style: One of the dominant strains in the Magnalia is the tension between history and allegory, the stress involved in the struggle to bring temporal events into alignment with a providential pattern� This precisely links Mather again with Dryden, whose historical satires, “Absalom and Achitophel,” and other works play both the analogies and the disjunctions between contemporary monarchs and and mythological 46 See William V� Spanos, “American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad ,and the Frontier, before and after 9/ 11 : From the Puritans to the Neo-Con Mend,” in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, pp� 167-242� The Widening Gyre of the New, New Americanist Studies 39 or biblical archetypes. The whole Idea of parallelism is highly significant tropologically for Mather in the Magnalia, something evident at both a microcosmic level … and also a macrocosmic level� … Throughout the Magnalia, indeed, the search for parallels becomes self-conscious, even compulsive� … (GR, 48) In thus identifying Mather’s with Dryden’s style, Giles collapses the very essential distinction, implicit in Bercovitch but explicit in Eric Auerbach, between the figural interpretation of the Puritans, which understands the “parallels” it draws between disparate particular images as fundamentally historical, and the allegorical interpretation of those “Augustans,” like Dryden, who view the parallel images as imaginative and ahistorical abstractions: Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separated in time, but both being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events whether past, present, or future and not with concepts or abstractions; these are not secondary, since promise and fulfillment are real historical events, which have either happened in the incarnation of the Word, or will happen with the second coming. … Since in figural interpretation one thing stands for another, since one thing represents and signifies the other, figural interpretation is “allegorical” in the widest sense� But it differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the historicity both of the sign and what it signifies. 47 Of course, as Giles points out, Mather “is always pondering self-critically the question of how far parallels of any kind might be legitimately be pursued�” (GR, 48) But this self-critical pondering is not the result of questioning Puritan providential history and the figural method of historical exegesis. It is rather the natural consequence of the human problem of trying to incorporate every detail in space and every moment in historical time (the “fall of a sparrow” or Virgil’s Aeneid, for example) into a total design� In the conclusion of his commentary on the Magnalia, Giles, defining Mather’s literary accomplishment as the making of “an American Augustan style,” writes, “Drawing deliberately upon classical myth and Virgil’s conception of epic, Mather crosses [the “baroque” elements that other revisionary commentators on the text have identified with writers like Melville, Borges, and Faulkner] with Christian piety and scientific rationalism to create a work whose tortuous energy derives from its manifold rhetoric of self-contradiction�” (GR, 54) If, however, the structure and rhetorical style of the Magnalia is seen in the light of this crucial distinction between Puritan figural exegesis and allegory, it then can also be seen that its “tortuous energy” - and, I would add, its engaging power in behalf the Puritan redemptive mission - resides, not in its Drydenesque “Augustan” (Old World) style, but in it Puritan’s New World vocation� My last, but not least, point is that, in thus effacing the Puritan thesis about the origins of the Americana national identity, which, as I have observed, tacitly effaces the frontier thesis extending from Turner and the Myth 47 Eric Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian Books 1959), p� 53-54� 40 W illiam s Panos and Symbol school of Americanists, through the intellectual deputies of the presidencies of the Vietnam War era to George W� Bush administration’s post-9/ 11 “War on Terror,” Giles’s overdetermined “deterritorialing” global perspective minimizes the historical reality of American exceptionalism and the violence it has always disavowed, not least, of its perpetual exceptionalist appeal to the state of emergency that justifies the establishment of the state of exception (the homeland security state) as the norm� In so doing, he suggests, if he does not literally state, like so many of the new New Americanists, that America, in keeping with its self-representation as a “New World,” has always been plural, multicultural, hybrid, transnational, global� It is, of course, true that American exceptionaiism is a myth� But, to recall Gramsci, it is also true that this myth has produced reality, as the history of Indian removal in the nineteenth century, the Vietnam War, and, most recently, the unending “War on Terror” bear stark witness� It should not be forgotten - it is the decisive lesson bequeathed to us by post-structuralist theory from Nietzsche to Althusser - that when a fiction (ideology) becomes hegemonic, “a representation of the imagined relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” it also becomes history� In short, we might say, adapting a vernacular commonplace to Yeats’s lines about the widening gyre from “The Second Coming” quoted in my title, that Giles’s “heretical” readings of American literature, particularly those early texts such Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana and Timothy Dwight’s “The Conquest of Cäanan” that were hitherto Identified as founding works of the American exceptionalist tradition, are “far out�” What I have said in this essay about the new New Americanist studies is not intended to disparage its globalizing or transnationalizing initiative� As I have observed, globalizing the national contributes to the disclosure of the dark side of the nation-state, and, in so doing, facilitates thinking an alternative - de-centered and non-identitarian - communal polis� As such, it is a welcomed initiative� Furthermore, as I have noted, its implied collapsing of the distinction between American exceptionalism and the exceptionalism of the Old War nation-states - the disclosure that there is no ultimate difference between the exceptionalism that defines their national identities - contributes significantly to the task of resisting America’s errand in the global “wilderness�” My intention, undertaken in the spirit of dialogue, is, rather, to show that this new New Americanist countermnemonic initiative’s overdetermination of the global perspective - its perception of the world from the vantage point of the expanding gyre, where the center no longer holds - obliterates the actual history of our contemporary post-9/ 11 occasion, which is bearing witness to an uneven struggle between a reactionary United States, armed by its exceptionalist ethos and the most powerful-and spectacular-weapons of mass destruction in the world, and a multitude of deracinated people, unhomed by the depredations of exceptionalist nation-state imperialism, who are symptomatically clamoring for a new, alternative global polity� As “New Americanists,” therefore, it is from this interregnumthis in-between, estranged world, that we must take our critical-counter-mnemonic-directives in addressing our globalizing occasion� W infried f luck Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings: American Studies and the Realities of America I. My subtitle refers to a by now classical essay in the history of American Studies, written by Robert Sklar in 1970 and published in American Quarterly at a time when the dominance of the so-called Myth and Symbol School was waning and criticism of the approach was growing� The Myth and Symbol School, which was a combination of intellectual history with the formalist New Criticism practiced in literary studies, 1 had defined the field of American Studies as the study of myths and symbols that had dominated American society and culture from its beginning� They were the ideas and ideals, American Studies scholars argued, which provided American society with a unique national identity� Myths and symbols thus played a key role in defining America and their study, whether in documents of cultural history or the so-called masterpieces of American literature, stood at the center of the field. Myths and symbols provided access to what made America exceptional. The founding fathers of the field of American Studies, although most of them were left liberals, thus bequeathed a consciously nationalist agenda to the field. This has been the starting point for transnational studies, as it has emerged in the last decade: if we want to discuss the state of American Studies - and other fields in the humanities more generally - we have to address the concept of the national and find ways to go beyond it. However, as the term “Transnational American Studies” indicates, such a perspective is not the antidote to a focus on American society and culture� It is designed to reinterpret America by gaining a better understanding of the role of the United States in the world� Transnationalism is thus an important part of a post-exceptionalist American Studies agenda, but it cannot be the whole 1 In his essay “American Studies and the Realities of America” Sklar speaks of a “fusion of literary and intellectual history“ (598), but, in order to be precise, one should add: a particular literary history shaped by formalism and a particular type of intellectual history shaped by consensus historians� The result is called “high cultural history“ by Sklar: “High cultural history - and that considerable part of the American Studies movement with which it overlapped - asserted the primacy of mind as the central factor in culture, and the autonomy of the individual work of art� It did not necessarily turn its back on society� Rather high cultural history argued that American society could most perceptively be studied through works of intellect and imagination� America’s culture was peculiarly shaped by systems of myths and symbols that were most precisely expressed and deeply explored in the writings of novelists, poets and intellectuals” (599)� 42 W infried f luck story, because not everything in the U�S� can be most meaningfully explained as the result of transnational flow and exchange. It is not enough, then, to deconstruct the national and replace it with the idea of the transnational� We have to continue to look at the U�S� itself and we have to continue to discuss the ways in which this can be done best� II. Let us enter this discussion by briefly going back to the essay by Robert Sklar. His essay was well received at the time of its publication as a long-overdue critique of the history of ideas-approach of the Myth and Symbol School� What Sklar had in mind as an alternative was a comprehensive cultural history that would no longer be restricted to the analysis of high culture� Instead, its object of analysis should be “the whole American culture” (602), including its popular culture and the variety of cultures that exist in America, “each one creating its separate institutions and forms, its alternative vision of reality” (601)� In other words, for Sklar the realities of America lay in plain sight� One merely had to overcome the limited perspective of high cultural history, replace it by a more comprehensive “whole cultural history” and bolster it by “an intensified study of society and social structure” (600). An extension of the interpretive range of American Studies was needed to make the objects on which the field focused more representative, and the consideration of social structure was needed to explain why these new objects of study were relevant� However, the question of how to describe this social structure - for example, from the point of view of a conservative, liberal, or Marxist perspective - appears to have been of no concern for Sklar� He seems to have had no awareness of the fact that one and the same object can be interpreted differently, depending on the interpretive frame that one uses, and that the problem is therefore not primarily one of the range of subject-matter but of the interpretive frame that one uses for its analysis� 2 2 For a brief period in the early 1970s it looked as if the approach of a “whole cultural history” could establish itself as a theoretically advanced alternative to the Myth and Symbol School� See, for example, the 8-volume American Culture Series (1970- 73) in which renowned and at the time leading scholars like Gordon Wood, Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Harris, Robert Sklar, and Warren Susman edited single volumes that aimed at an interdisciplinary reconstruction of specific periods of American social and cultural history “as a whole�” In theory, the approach wanted to focus on those aspects of American culture that had been ignored by an emphasis on “high cultural history,” in practice this often led to a focus on popular and material culture without, however, providing a convincing explanation what we can learn from this material� Or, to put it differently: these and other examples of the approach (of which the best known and most influential was Warren Susman’s revisionist essay on “The Thirties”) remained very much on the surface of American culture� For a more detailed discussion of the approach and some of its different versions see my essay on “’A Whole Cultural History’: Zu einigen neueren Versuchen kulturwissenschaftlicher Synthese�” Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 43 The idea of a “whole cultural history” did not gain much traction in American Studies, because the assumption that the realities of America lie on the surface and can thus be grasped relatively easily ran against the views of other approaches in the field, including that of the Myth and Symbol School� We encounter at this point a central methodological problem, not only of American Studies, but of literary and cultural studies more generally, that of surface vs� symptomatic readings� Traditionally, for American Studies scholars the question from which they have taken their point of departure has been: how can we grasp the meaning of America when, as we claim, this meaning finds expression in and through American culture? Does the meaning lie on the surface, so that we only have to have the good will or courage to name it explicitly, 3 or does the surface only hide what really constitutes America, so that we have to go to a deeper level to retrieve the realities of America? The question of the relation between surface and deeper level of meaning has been a key question in the field of American Studies since its beginnings. In fact, the history of the field could be rewritten on the basis of how this question has been answered by different approaches at different times� For example, the programmatically most consistent theoretical statement of the Myth and Symbol School, an essay called “Literature and Covert Culture” by Leo Marx and two of his colleagues at the University of Minnesota, Bernard Bowron and Arnold Rose, begins with the statement: “By covert culture we refer to traits of culture rarely acknowledged by those who possess them� In any society men tend to ignore or repress certain commonly learned attitudes and behavior patterns, much as an individual may ignore or repress certain personal experiences or motives” (84)� Americans may have hostile feelings toward machine technology but these feelings are hidden even from themselves, because America is considered the land of progress� It almost seems superfluous to mention that what we have here is the theoretical blueprint for Marx’s classical study The Machine in the Garden, probably the one book in American Studies to which critics have referred most often in discussions of the theory and method of the field. How do we know that Americans held hostile feelings toward technology and how do we learn to recognize the textual manifestations of this hostility? The answer is: by learning to read the symptoms of this repression, that is, by a symptomatic reading: “How then is covert culture recognized? We may assume we are in the presence of covert culture when we note a recurrent pattern of inconsistent or seemingly illogical behavior” (84)� Inconsistencies or lack of logic or excessive emotionality can be seen as symptoms of a deepseated problem that cannot be openly admitted� America was supposed to be the land of progress and thus one could not possibly be against technology on a public level� 3 Thus, Sklar encourages us not to be too timid: “There is no shame, no diminution of intellectual rigor or professional standards, in asking of American Studies scholarship that it be intellectually liberating, freeing our minds and those of our students to seek new worlds of knowledge and of being“ (601)� 44 W infried f luck On the other hand, since the hostility cannot be repressed completely, because strong emotions do not simply go away, this hostility finds expression in indirect forms like imagery or metaphor� This is where popular and great writing differ for the Myth and Symbol School� Popular writers can only reproduce the cultural symptoms more or less helplessly, whereas great writers are sensitive observers and therefore have deep insight into what is going on� That is why great literature can reveal “the presence of a ‘reality’ hidden beneath appearances” (88)� In other words, popular literature can only indicate that there is another reality, but high literature can tell us what it is� Only great literature can thus reveal to us what the real realities of America are, because only art has access to a deep knowledge that goes beyond surface phenomena� Beneath the optimistic surface of American life lies an adversarial spirit, expressed in books like Moby-Dick, that undermines any naïve belief in progress and draws our attention to the existence of a culture of negation in American life� 4 Like many myth and symbol critics, Leo Marx was a politically committed left liberal who believed in America but criticized the betrayal of its ideals� 5 There is a famous anecdote told by Marx about the attempt of an American Studies scholar to explain to Richard Hoggart what distinguished American Studies from British Cultural Studies in which, after several unsuccessful attempts, the American Studies scholar finally cried out in despair: “But you don’t understand! I believe in America! ” But the America he and scholars like Marx believed in was not always visible and not always easily accessible on the surface� This exceptional America had to be retrieved from the depths of texts like Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn. Thus, Marx needed symptomatic readings to get at a better America that seemed hidden� Once retrieved, this other America could provide a powerful antidote to an “official” optimism in American life that prevented Americans from acknowledging social problems created by industrialization� 6 4 As Leo Marx puts it in the afterword to a recent re-edition of The Machine in the Garden: “Nevertheless, The Machine in the Garden emphasizes a fundamental divide in American culture and society. It separates the popular affirmation of industrial progress disseminated by spokesmen for the dominant economic and political elites, and the disaffected, often adversarial viewpoint of a minority of political radicals, writers, artists, clergymen, and independent intellectuals” (“Afterword,” 383)� 5 The same holds true for other major scholars in the beginning of American Studies, as Sklar points out: “On the other hand, the American Studies movement also attracted many liberal and radical scholars - Miller and Matthiessen were good examples of one and the other - who found in high cultural history and literary criticism opportunities to explore the shortcomings of American culture, the conflict of ideals and actions, of rhetoric and reality“ (600)� Just as there exist two types of literature for the Myth and Symbol School - formulaic and artistic, affirmative and adversarial -, the U.S. consists of two Americas in the view of these critics, and American literary history, by emphasizing America’s adversarial tradition, is supposed to strengthen a better, “covert” America that is in danger of being pushed aside by a shallow Americanism� 6 Elaine Tyler May provides a useful reminder: “And although most of the myth and symbol scholars accepted the existence of a national consensus, they remained profoundly critical of it� (���) Contrary to the common view, most of the myth and symbol Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 45 D�H� Lawrence had paved the way for this type of argument when, in his book Studies in Classic American Literature, he had argued that American literature of the nineteenth-century, with its many Leatherstocking-type heroes and sea adventures, looked like juvenile literature on the surface but that this surface only hid a deeper truth about America: “Where is this new bird called the true American? (…) Well, we still don’t get him� So the only thing to do is to have a look for him under the American bushes” (vii)� This may be a somewhat unorthodox description of a hermeneutics of depth, but an unmistakable one nevertheless� Lawrence saw two national literatures that struck him as particularly modern, Russian and American literature� However, there was a crucial difference between the two: “The great difference between the extreme Russians and the extreme Americans lies in the fact that the Russians are explicit and hate eloquence and symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, whereas the Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning� They revel in subterfuge� They prefer their truth safely swaddled away in an arc of bulrushes, and deposited among the reeds until some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe” (viii)� For Lawrence, American literature is grounded in duplicity� What others had considered a weakness turns out to be a unique strength: the cunning construction of a double meaning that allows writers to smuggle in the truth about what really constitutes America� How can we gain access to this subtext? As I have argued in a different context, in Lawrence’s argument “a psychoanalytical model of doubleness as a configuration of repression is replaced by an expressionist image of skinning, conceptualizing the subtext as a level of meaning which breaks through and reveals itself in the reader’s encounter with the text�” This provides the double structure of the text with a different function: while a double-decker model of above and below is useful in supporting the idea of repression, “the skinning metaphor can serve as welcome analogy for a myth of cultural or individual self-renewal and self-regeneration” (“Double Structures,” 119-20)� In other words: the classic American writers were modernists avant la lettre. Structures of doubleness can thus have different functions� 7 But in both cases, practitioners were not writing a celebratory scholarship� In fact, in the work of scholars of the frontier like Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, the agrarian myth is cast in an extremely negative light“ (May 187)� It is cast in an extremely negative light because it prevents Americans from having a hard look at the realities of industrialization (and, by implication, capitalism)� 7 Another influential critic in the early stages of American Studies who was a strong admirer of Lawrence was Leslie Fiedler: “Of all the literary critics who have written about American books, the one who has seemed to me closest to the truth, even at those points where I finally disagree with him, and who has brought to his subject an appropriate passion and style, is, of course, D�H� Lawrence� His Studies in Classic American Literature attempted for the first time the kind of explication which does not betray the complexity or perilousness of its theme; and in the pages of that little book I found confirmation of my own suspicions that it is duplicity and outrageousness which determine the quality of those American books ordinarily consigned to the children’s shelf in the library“ (Fiedler 14-15)� But in his study Love and Death in the American Novel Fiedler uses 46 W infried f luck Leo Marx as well as Lawrence, the idea of a double structure is needed to turn the literary text into a work of art that can help us to gain “deeper” insights into American culture� 8 III. Myth and symbol critics like Leo Marx still believed in America, but the next generation in American Studies had its formative experiences in the Sixties, had gone through the experience of Vietnam and had become skeptical about America� What was wrong about America was no longer conformity or a shallow optimism� The real realities of America are now racism, sexism and capitalism, that is, aspects of American life that had been ignored or repressed by liberalism and had therefore remained hidden from official American self-definitions. These were realities that had had no place in the narrative of American exceptionalism� Sacvan Bercovitch, successor to Perry Miller on the chair of American civilization at Harvard University and for twenty years the leading American Studies scholar after the Myth and Symbol School, provides an interesting case study of transition� Perry Miller had put the Puritan errand at the center of American self-perceptions� But for Bercovitch, this Puritan errand is not what it seems to be� At a closer look, there is an unmistakable ideological dimension to it: “It is that ideological function of the errand I want to stress� Considered as myth, the errand was a radical skewing of Christian tradition to fit the fantasies of a particular sect. Considered as ideology, it was a mode of consensus designed to fill the needs of a certain social order. Perhaps the most obvious of these needs was expansion� By errand, the Puritans meant migration - not simply from one place to another, but from a depraved Old World to a New Canaan� In other words, they used the biblical myth of exodus and conquest to justify imperialism before the fact” (3)� Why had that not been realized before? Not because it was hidden� To be sure, myths and symbols can mask social realities but more often they are based on “a very real system of values, symbols, and beliefs” and “persist through their capacity to help people act in history” (1)� Thus, their effectiveness is not based on their power to deceive� They are, on the contrary, part of a national consensus that is widely shared and constantly reaffirmed through exceptionalist rhetoric. Americans participate in this rhetoric of consensus, because it allows them to disavow the darker realities of American life� the argument of a double structure to provide yet another “deeper” meaning: the suppressed truth classic American fiction reveals once one looks deeper is how immature American society still is� As Fiedler argues, Americans try to hide their adolescent immaturity even from themselves, so that duplicity also functions as self-deception� 8 Doubleness has been a key issue in many discussions of American literature, not always from a political perspective, however� In my essay “Double Structures and Sources of Instability in American Literature,” I discuss different approaches that focus on doubleness as a source of aesthetic experience, from the Myth and Symbol School to Deconstruction� Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 47 One reason why the terms myth and symbol had gained such prominence in the post-War years was because critics wanted to avoid the term ideology� For thirty years the term had been tabooed in analyses of American society� It was part of the rhetoric of consensus to claim that America had reached the end of ideology. In defiance of this liberal consensus, Bercovitch introduces the term ideology again but reconceptualizes it: it is no longer a class-based (false) consciousness but a commonly held world view, such as, for example, American exceptionalism and the idea of the American errand� Even in dissent, the idea of a unique nation that has a special historical mission still remains the tacit premise for defining America. For Bercovitch, this explains why, in contrast to other Western societies, there is no socialist movement or strong oppositional counter-tradition in America� 9 The major writers of the American Renaissance have made especially effective contributions to a national rhetoric of consensus by creating an illusion of resistance through art� However, to reveal the ideological function of the rhetoric of consensus, no symptomatic reading is needed, only a non-exceptionalist perspective that provides the necessary distance for having another look at the role the rhetoric of consensus has played historically� In a way, Bercovitch is the last of the myth and symbol critics because his objects of analysis are still American myths� But in contrast to the Myth and Symbol School, he is a critic of the idea of American exceptionalism and his critical work is very much concerned with the question of how to overcome an exceptionalist view of America� To be sure, the American founding myths serve psychic needs - otherwise they would not be so resistant to critique - but in contrast to the views of the New Americanists, they do not yet constitute subjectivity for Bercovitch. In principle, they can be demystified and overcome, and after Hiroshima, Vietnam, and Watergate they have already become increasingly hollow� Thus, Bercovitch can conclude: “Who knows, the errand may yet come to rest, where it always belonged, in the realm of the imagination, and the United States recognized for what it is, one more profane nation in the wilderness of the world” (20)� For Bercovitch, American exceptionalism tries to hide the “profane” reality that the U�S� is not unique but merely one nation among many others� But whereas Bercovitch still wants to undermine exceptionalist claims by an emphasis on the unexceptional non-distinctiveness of the American nation, scholars in the following generation saw this “normality” as a mere cover-up� In consequence, the realities of America are redefined, in fact, inverted. To be sure, as in the case of Leo Marx the covert level remains the site of the real America, but this real America has now changed its character� While in the 9 It is interesting to compare Bercovitch with Leo Marx on this point� One may argue that, deep down, The Machine in the Garden is also trying to explain why there is no socialism in the U�S� For Marx, the reason lies in the continuing imaginary attraction of American pastoralism� In Bercovitch’s broadened view of ideology, pastoralism is merely one element in a rhetoric of consensus� It can easily be exchanged by the idea of the errand or the frontier or the American dream of success� Thus, it is no longer a single myth that can explain America but its exceptionalist mythology as a whole� 48 W infried f luck Myth and Symbol School the double meaning of the text signals the possibility of negation, it now reveals exactly the opposite, namely the illusionary nature of any hope for negation� There is no normal or better America, not even a hidden one� In fact, the real horror lurks on the covert level, the former site of opposition, where things are worse than on the surface� Even the great writers are now affected by these ugly realities of America, as, for example, when Toni Morrison uses Moby-Dick to draw attention to the pervasiveness of whiteness as a hidden racial marker in America� The “normality” of American life turns out to be an especially insidious form of oppression� It is interesting to see that Moby-Dick can still tell us something important about America but the “something important” is now an ugly truth, no longer a manifestation of a better America� And because this reality has been suppressed, a symptomatic reading is needed in order to reveal its true nature� Morrison’s case is of special interest methodologically because of the changing nature of symptomatic readings� If we ask what the relation between literature and society is in readings like hers, so that literature can tell us what America is “really” all about, the assumption now is that the relation is metonymic� There is no “organic,” metaphoric relation between the whiteness of the whale and the race problem; their “relation” simply consists of the fact that they are both manifestations of a problem that pervades all of American society� For Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, the scene in Huckleberry Finn where a steamboat destroys the raft is a key metaphor through which Mark Twain, the great writer, provides insights into the ambivalent views Americans held about progress� But racism is everywhere and thus every aspect of the text can, in principle, stand for the whole, as, to give another example from revisionist American Studies, when Amy Kaplan calls empire the “submerged foundation” of all of American culture� If empire is a submerged, “covert” foundation, then it is foundational and that means that it constitutes and shapes all of that culture’s manifestations in one way or another� 10 IV. Thus, from focusing on single, privileged moments of insight, symptomatic readings have moved on to larger generalizations - to something that, in the words of Fredric Jameson, can be called the political unconscious� Jameson’s book The Political Unconscious had little direct influence on American Studies 10 On the significance of Morrison’s book see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus: “The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American literature� Both showed that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages” (Best 6). To this list of influential, agenda-shaping texts Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1994) should be added� Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 49 but it played a crucial role in giving the idea of a political unconscious a theoretically sophisticated basis� This idea, in turn, stands at the center of the theoretical reorientation that the 1960s brought about in literary and cultural studies in the wake of the Paris May and the new social movements� Both called for the development of a new form of political criticism and regarded formalism and aesthetics as merely an escape from politics� One of the radical alternatives to formalism seemed to be Marxism� But orthodox Marxism was widely discredited by that time, both politically and as a political hermeneutics� It was Louis Althusser who showed a way out by drawing on ideas from structuralism and reconceptualizing Marxism as “structural Marxism�” One of his students was Pierre Macherey who applied Althusser’s revised Marxism to literary studies� Macherey’s study A Theory of Literary Production paved the way for a major reorientation in political criticism in which the work’s ideology (and hence its politics) no longer manifests itself on the level of content but in what Macherey calls “the structures of the ideological” (43, m�t�): “The hold of ideology can be undermined by radical criticism, however not by a superficial denunciation of its message; instead, a conventional ideological criticism (critique de l’idéologie) has to be replaced by a critique of the structures of the ideological (critique de l’idéologique)” (43, m�t�) 11 One may also call this the opening shot in the transition from political radicalism to cultural radicalism� 12 In contrast to the interpretive practice of critics still working in the tradition of political radicalism, a political interpretation of a literary text now cannot simply focus on its politically or ideologically relevant passages but must consider its mode of expression, called, from today’s perspective somewhat surprisingly, “the specifically literary dimension” by Macherey (27, m.t.). Because of its specifically literary dimension, a literary text cannot be reduced to ideological messages� One consequence is a reconceptualization of ideology� In traditional political criticism ideology is identified with a particular political position or class based-view. Now, 11 Macherey’s book was first published in 1966, one year after his cooperation with Althusser on Lire le Capital� A German translation appeared in 1974, an English translation in 1975� Jameson’s study The Political Unconscious in which he refers to Macherey several times, was published in 1981. Macherey also had a major influence on Terry Eagleton; in fact, one may argue that the approach called “cultural materialism“ was developed on the basis of an application of Althusser’s theories to literary studies� For quotations from Macherey’s book, I could only use the German translation from which I have translated into English� 12 In the interpretive framework of political radicalism, including orthodox Marxism, there are progressive and reactionary forces in society, and the challenge is to provide support for the one and resist the other� For this political struggle, there are still institutions like progressive political parties, or the labor unions, or the student protest movements, or simply the institution of art, that hold a promise of resistance� In cultural radicalism, such hopes are rejected as liberal self-delusions, because for this newer type of radicalism the actual source of power does no longer lie in particular institutions but in culture and its processes of subject formation� I have described the difference between the two and its consequences for literary interpretation in more detail in my essay on “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism�” 50 W infried f luck ideology also manifests itself through the form it takes; in fact, the literary form becomes its primary site of manifestation and the ideology of form the main focus of analysis� Macherey’s revision of ideological criticism can be understood as response to an impasse that Marxist literary criticism had reached in the post- War years� As long as the politics of a literary text was sought on the overt level, only critical realism qualified as a potentially progressive, politically acceptable literary form, whereas movements like modernism were rejected wholesale as decadent� By the mid-Sixties, this schematic approach became increasingly untenable� If Marxist literary criticism was to be taken seriously as an approach in literary studies, it had to be able to deal with the question of literary form� By making form the actual site of ideology, Macherey turned weakness into strength� Ideology is seen as a representation of reality that manages to successfully paper over certain “unspeakable” realities: “…ideology consists of that which must remain unmentioned� Ideology exists, because there are things that cannot be openly expressed” (44, m�t�)� In a programmatic reconceptualization of the base-superstructure model (Widerspiegelungstheorie) Macherey writes: “It is thus wrong to see contradictions in the literary work as a truthful reflection of historical contradictions; they are on the contrary the result of a lack of truthful reflection” (40, m.t.). 13 Or, to put it differently: they are symptoms of something that could not be openly articulated and had to be repressed� In order to successfully realize its political function, ideology must leave out or repress certain facts without, however, giving any indication that it has done so� Ideology is thus most successful when it manages to create the illusion of a coherent and internally consistent representation of reality� The literary form that is most effective in achieving this reality effect is realism and thus, in an astounding reverse that reflects the transition from political to cultural radicalism, the form that was formerly considered the potentially most critical of ideology - namely realism - is now the potentially most ideological of all� 14 This raises the question of how the ideological nature of realism can be revealed, although it manages to present the illusion of a truthful representation of reality to us� The only way to undermine this reality effect is to restore “to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history” (Jameson 20)� Because realistic texts can only achieve their reality effect by suppressing aspects of reality that do not fit, they must produce inconsistencies and textual symptoms that point to hidden 13 One may claim, however, that Macherey is not yet quite clear on the sources of the work’s inconsistencies and contradictions� Are they produced by the need to leave out important aspects of reality and therefore undermine the (authority of the) work’s representation of reality, or because the literary form “doubles” the ideology and thereby does not leave it intact in its original form� At times, Macherey sounds like Roland Barthes, at others like Jacques Lacan� One of the major differences between Macherey and Jameson is that Jameson, who harshly criticizes Barthes on several occasions, ties the argument firmly to Lacan’s concept of the Real as a word for an inaccessible reality. 14 The analysis of 19th century realism thus stands at the center of Macherey’s and Jameson’s studies� Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 51 tensions, conflicts and contradictions: “In Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading, the symptoms represent contradictions that have been driven into unconsciousness by repression” (Crane 81)� What pushes Jameson towards symptomatic readings is thus not necessarily a “suspicious mind,” as Rita Felski would later describe the motivation for symptomatic readings, but the logic of a “literary” redefinition of ideology in which ideology does no longer manifest itself in terms of ideological content but in the literary form of expression� Jameson’s The Political Unconscious was instrumental in establishing symptomatic readings in literary studies as part of what Paul Ricoeur has called a “hermeneutics of suspicion�” This hermeneutics proceeds on the assumption that we cannot trust the surface of the text, including that of a realist text, and that the actual meaning of the text may therefore be repressed or hidden underneath� 15 As Rita Felski has pointed out in her essay on “Suspicious Minds,” in the hermeneutics of suspicion the interpreter takes on the heroic role of a detective or of an archeologist who explores dark secrets or dark caves in search of hidden facts or a hidden truth� In fact, at a closer look, it is even better than that, because it is the scholar who now takes the place formerly occupied by the great writer� In revisionist criticism even the great writers are reproducing the dominant ideology in their works, and it is only the scholar who still seems able to penetrate the deceptive ideological surface� Thus, Crane can speak of the heroic agency of the reader “who is able to bring to light meaning that has been hidden from everyone else” (Crane 83)� 16 However, the funny thing is that the hidden truth has always been in plain sight� Because Macherey and Jameson are Althusserians, we know from the start what the underlying cause of the symptoms is that they will identify, just as we already know the narratives that psychoanalysts will weave around the symptoms they find, or the underlying realities of America that the black activist Toni Morrison or the New Americanist critic of imperialism Amy Kaplan will find. Seen from that perspective, symptomatic readings perform a magician’s trick, because they already know what the symptom stands for� “Hermeneutics of suspicion” is thus actually a wrong designation, since critics do not merely suspect that something must be hidden but they already know what they will find. One may even go one step further and claim that certain textual aspects are declared to be symptoms, because of their apparent usefulness for a critical analysis of capitalist and/ or American society� By presenting one’s view as the result of scrupulous detective work, one can endow it with the authority provided by a heroic narrative of discovery� But the game is rigged from the start, because the detective already 15 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. See, for example, chapt� 2 and the passages on “Interpretation as Exercise of Suspicion,“ 32-36 in which Ricoeur discusses Marx, Nietzsche and Freud� 16 See also Rita Felski: “The pervasiveness of this mindset also testifies to the increasing pressures of professionalization and the scramble to shore up academic authority: the hermeneutics of suspicion, after all, assigns a unique depth of understanding to the trained reader or theorist, equipped to see through the illusions in which others are immersed” (“Suspicious Minds,” 218)� 52 W infried f luck knows who the murderer is and the daring archeologist already knows what she will discover in the dark recesses of the cave� Symptomatic readings often function tautologically: they look at symptoms as expressions of an underlying truth and take the underlying truth to explain the symptoms they have selected to stand for the underlying truth� V. The problem of symptomatic readings has at present become a key methodological issue in literary and cultural studies and thus goes beyond the field of American Studies. Recent publications like the important essay “Suspicious Minds” by Rita Felski in Poetics Today or a special issue of the journal Representations, collecting essays that were first delivered to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Political Unconscious, indicate that the question of a hermeneutics of suspicion is currently getting special attention in literary and cultural studies� In both publications, the phenomenon is attributed to the rise of critical theory in literary and cultural studies� In their introductory essay to the Representations-issue on “Surface Reading,” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus attribute the search for hidden meanings to the special theoretical authority Marxism and psychoanalysis had gained since the 1970s� 17 Rita Felski’s essay poses the interesting question why the search for hidden or repressed meanings seems to be so dominant among contemporary scholars and finds the answer in a particular state of mind, a distinct sensibility she calls suspiciousness: “Suspicious reading inscribes itself in the psyche as a particular mode of thought and feeling, a mind-set” (222)� Here, too, the implication is that the rise of critical theory has led to unhealthy attitudes that have had a negative impact on literary and cultural studies, leading to “the critic’s entrapment within a suspicious sensibility” (218)� What may at times have served a useful purpose has now become a bad habit� But such an explanation does not fit the American Studies examples I have given, because neither the left liberal Leo Marx, nor the modernist D�H� Lawrence are motivated by a particularly suspicious sensibility� The problem of symptomatic readings may still be seen in another context, then� I see the phenomenon not simply as the result of a particular critical climate and mind-set, contaminated by Marxism, psychoanalysis or cultural radicalism more generally� Rather, it is a problem of a much more fundamental nature 17 Best and Marcus start their discussion of surface and symptomatic readings with a section on “The Way We Read Now”: “One factor enabling exchanges between disciplines in the 1970s and 1980s was the acceptance of psychoanalysis and Marxism as metalanguages� It was not just any idea of interpretation that circulated among the disciplines, but a specific type that took meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter� This ‘way’ of interpreting went by the name of ‘symptomatic reading�’ We were trained in symptomatic reading, became attached to the power it gave to the act of interpreting, and find it hard to let go of the belief that texts and their readers have an unconscious” (1)� Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 53 that is constitutive of many fields in the humanities, above all literary and historical studies, but also art history, film studies and other forms of cultural studies. American literary history belongs to the field of national histories that, in their modern form, have been decisively shaped by Hegelianism� 18 With his concept of a history of the universal spirit (Weltgeist), Hegel found a way to tie together single objects in a story of progressive evolution and to assign national cultures a significant role in different stages of historical development� A number of claims derived from Hegel’s starting premise have been eminently influential and still have a lingering presence in many literary and cultural histories� By regarding art as supreme expression of the universal spirit in an age, the study of art was moved from the leisure interest of an upper class to the center of society’s self-definition. Art could become a privileged form of national self-recognition and gain central relevance for the analysis of society and culture� 19 The assumption that its history is organized by a unifying principle that connects various stages and single objects in meaningful fashion made it possible to provide an ostensibly random collection of cultural forms with a sense of direction and purpose and created a basis for the writing of national histories� For literary histories, however, the most important legacy of Hegelianism may be the search for a unifying principle as the basis for the identification of a national identity� Ever since Hegel, intellectual, literary and art historians have been in search of such unifying principles� Intellectual historians solved the problem by transforming Hegel’s manifestation of the spirit in an age to a manifestation of the spirit of an age, and made that regionor period-specific spirit - e.g. in the form of the New England Mind or one of the American founding myths - their starting assumption for the analysis of a particular area or era� 20 But although the assumption of a mind that can be seen as expression of something like the essence of a nation or region may be helpful to provide interpretive objects with larger meanings and significance, such a mind is also by definition an elusive phenomenon that is hard to pin down� We therefore have to learn to interpret its manifestations in order to be able to understand what they tell us about the true nature of that national 18 For a more detailed analysis of this aspect see my essay on “American Literary History and the Romance with America” from which I have taken parts of the following passage� The same phenomenon can be observed in histories of American art, as I show in “Transatlantic Narratives About American Art: A Chapter in the Story of Art History‘s Hegelian Unconscious�“ 19 See, for example, the following statement by Leslie Fiedler that can be seen as representative of the early phase of American Studies� As Fiedler puts it, the subject of his study Love and Death in the American Novel “is the American experience as recorded in our classic fiction“ (Fiedler 8). 20 One of the first major books in American Studies was Perry Miller’s The New England Mind, an exemplary study in the history-of-ideas tradition� In the following generation, the word ‘mind’ disappeared from book titles in American Studies but not from approaches in the field. For example, in his spirited defense of American Studies, “American Studies - A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” Leo Marx defines American Studies as “the effort to describe and understand the state of mind of a group (or groups) of people at some moment in the past” (76)� 54 W infried f luck or regional mind� In other words, an explanatory model in which the textual surface expresses something that is lying behind or underneath the surface is built into the starting premise of the humanities, namely that culture is a privileged expression of a national mind or of the mind (or the character, as it is also sometimes called) of smaller cultural or social units� Even where a national ideology is rejected, the starting assumption - that a single text represents a larger totality - can still be at work� It is certainly true that new revisionist histories of American literature are no longer nationalistic but they retain the Hegelian premise that literary texts and cultural objects can be a key for understanding a social body or historical period� If literary texts and other cultural objects are of interest because they stand for a larger totality and therefore can tell us something significant about that totality (called America in American Studies), then the question of the representativeness of the interpretive object arises� Are all texts equally expressive of their culture? Or are certain texts especially helpful? Sklar’s appeal to replace a - in his view unrepresentative - high cultural history by a “whole cultural history” is obviously an attempt to put the question of representativeness on new grounds by recommending a method of interpretation that would try to include the full plurality of American culture� But in the final analysis, a “whole cultural history” must also at one point draw a conclusion from its comprehensive study of a historical period or a region and tell us by what they are characterized or distinguished� Plurality can thus become the new totality� 21 In contrast, symptomatic readings go exactly into the other direction: they offer a strong claim that a single phenomenon can provide a key for understanding a whole culture� As we have seen, they do so by offering a different answer to the question of representativeness, namely that of metonymization: if all texts are part of a totality that is characterized by capitalism, racism or homophobia, then all texts are shaped by these features and can represent them equally well� 22 Symptomatic readings, then, do not only provide a new and promising approach for political criticism; in doing so, they also provide a new and ingenious answer to the key problem of the humanities, that of representativeness� In this sense, surface readings and symptomatic readings are not fundamentally different; both have found ways, albeit very different ones, to claim 21 It would therefore also be hermeneutically naive to try to solve the problem by replacing the study of nation by a (critical) regionalism, or by replacing macro-level studies that aim at the “big picture“ by micro-level studies that are more open to contingent and multiple forces and do not apply single factor models of explanation� However, although for multi-factor models it may be the interrelationship of elements that shapes the whole, and not any single factor, the heuristic assumption must still be a “whole“ in the sense of some form of integration, that is, an interpretive unit in which multiple factors come together and produce a result that goes beyond the single phenomenon� 22 See the astute characterization of New Americanist assumptions by Johannes Voelz: “As the title Cultures of United States Imperialism indicates, the critical point of the volume lay not only in replacing the ideology of American Exceptionalism with an account of U�S� imperialism but also in extending the critique of empire from foreign policy and economics to culture itself” (175)� Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 55 that their objects of analysis represent a larger totality, no matter whether it is called nation, region, class, or social group, and that they can provide a key for understanding this larger unit� In American Studies, this larger unit is “America” and thus we find three different Americas in the three approaches we have sketched: in the Myth and Symbol School an exceptional America that has not yet reached its unique potential; in Sklar’s “whole cultural history” a plural America that has not yet fully acknowledged its plurality; and in symptomatic readings of a political unconscious, an America that is living in a state of mis-recognition and self-deception, either by joining a rhetoric of consensus or by disavowing the realities of America altogether� Although it cannot be done here for lack of space, it would not be difficult to demonstrate how these underlying views of America shape the characteristic interpretive procedures of these approaches� Symptomatic readings provide merely one version of what literary and cultural studies do all the time, and a suspicious disposition is not an inherent aspect of the method itself but of the particular politics on which it is based� For such a politics, symptomatic readings can be eminently useful� If you say that racism is still pervasive in the U�S� that will hardly cause more than a polite nod in intellectual circles� But if you claim that even Moby-Dick is racist, that will still capture people’s attention and put you in the position of someone who has realized something about America that others have not� The scholar becomes a scout and a pioneer and he or she can be in that position because others have not yet dared to acknowledge the full extent of America’s racism, namely that even America’s masterpieces are affected by it� 23 When Jameson wrote The Political Unconscious, or when Kaplan wrote her book on The Making of Empire, concepts like capitalism or imperialism were still somewhat suspect and often dismissed as polemical terms� That is one of the reasons why the Marxist Jameson prefers to use the word history to refer to a truth about capitalism that he sees as repressed� Symptomatic readings made it possible to smuggle in “truths” about America that were tabooed as long as the official American self-definition was based on the idea of American exceptionalism� 23 Cf. Crane: “Despite these theoretical difficulties, symptomatic readings remain appealing because they are generally strong readings; the interpretation they offer is different from what appears obvious on the surface of the text� The symptomatic reader claims access to meanings that others do not notice, and of which the author (or text) is unaware or seeks to repress” (Crane 83)� Fittingly, Felski speaks of “the bravura of such claims that helps ensure their impact” (228)� In an academic culture, in which strong statements, even if they are seen as overstatements, can help the scholar to stand out and can thus become a golden opportunity for individual distinction, symptomatic readings and their dramatic revelation-effects can obviously be helpful� (On this point, see my essay on “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism�”) However, in the present essay, symptomatic readings are not discussed as a professional strategy but as a theoretical position� 56 W infried f luck VI. But now they are no longer tabooed� Political and social developments have moved certain phenomena from the deep level to the surface� There is now not only a liberal consensus about American society but also a critical one� One may even claim: what used to lurk underneath the surface is now in plain sight� Post-exceptionalist American Studies thus do no longer have to define themselves as a discipline in search of political truths that have been repressed and have to be retrieved� Does this mean that we should move from symptomatic readings to surface readings or, to use Josselson’s more fitting, less loaded terms: should we replace a hermeneutics of demystification by a hermeneutics of faith whose goal is a faithful restoration of meaning? As Josselson shows, such an approach could draw on phenomenology as its philosophical basis and methodological inspiration in order to do full justice to the subjective world of a speaker or author� Indeed, in her criticism of the suspicious mind-set of symptomatic readings, Rita Felski characterizes her own counter-position as a turn to “neophenomenology” (“After Suspicion,” 31)� Similarly, in their critique of Jameson’s method of symptomatic readings, Best and Marcus propose a “new formalism” as an alternative, “literal readings that take texts at face value” (12), because, as they argue, “texts can reveal their own truths” (11)� A common assumption in new formalist work “is that we do not need to criticize art-works, because they contain their own ‘critical (and self-critical) agency’” (13)� 24 Like phenomenology, formalism is based on the assumption that it is possible for subjects to know their own world� The subject “is the expert on his or her own experience” (Josselson 5)� This claim also applies to literary texts� Our task as interpreters is thus a faithful reconstruction of a meaning that is already in place� For this purpose, we have to take a literary text at its word� The high prestige that works of art possess(ed) can be attributed to the fact that they are seen as fully achieved manifestations of human consciousness� In contrast, readings searching for hidden meanings see consciousness as potentially a site of illusion and self-deception� Even where these readings do not subscribe to the concept of false consciousness, they claim that there are “aspects of self-understanding or meaning-making that operate outside of the participant’s awareness” (Josselson 15)� What links different approaches in critical theory, including those of cultural radicalism, is the assumption that subjective experience is not necessarily transparent to itself. For confirmation, they may even refer to Hans-Georg Gadamer, a student of Heidegger, who, in his classical study on hermeneutics, Wahrheit und Methode, sees prejudice as the necessary, unavoidable basis and starting point for understanding� 25 24 Felski’s version is more ambitious: “Phenomenology seeks to make the familiar newly surprising through the scrupulousness of its attention, exposing the strangeness of the self-evident” (“After Suspicion,” 32)� 25 In Gadamer’s use, “prejudice” means “horizons of understanding constituted by language and culture” (Josselson 10)� Thus, a “prejudiced” perception of the world is not necessarily the consequence of ideological blinders, but reflects the fact that we simply Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 57 Gadamer’s position is often associated with a hermeneutics of faith, because he believes that the prejudice of the interpreter can be overcome, if interpreters are willing to reflect on their own premises. Nevertheless, it is Gadamer’s starting point that underlying premises (or “prejudices”) - often tacitly held - provide an interpretive frame that shapes the interpreters’ perception decisively and determines their interpretive focus� One logical consequence is that one and the same object can be interpreted differently, depending on different interpretive frames� 26 From that point of view, the assumption that close readings can avoid interpretive distortions and reveal faithfully “what the text says about itself” (11) is a stunning hermeneutical naiveté� 27 To criticize the - largely unquestioned - dominance of symptomatic readings in American Studies thus does not mean that we have to stay with - and, worse, be stuck with - mere “surface” readings or a literalist formalism� We must still be interested in “meanings that are not immediately apparent on the surface of the text” (Crane 83)� In effect, we must continue to proceed from the assumption that, for a number of reasons, meanings will not always be apparent on the surface: “It is a property of all texts to have manifest and latent content (…)” (Josselson 5)� Sometimes meanings are implied but not explicitly expressed: “Interpretation is not limited to direct, expressed, explicit meanings but may consider implicit meanings that lie beneath or within the structure of the language used to depict experience” (Josselson 8)� Sometimes views are tacitly held without the subject’s self-awareness� 28 Language and cannot focus on everything at the same time and in equal measure and that we therefore use filters through which we view reality. 26 Josselson mentions this aspect almost in passing, without drawing any conclusions from it: “In anthropology, researchers have studied the same culture with an aim to present their informants as they see themselves and have nevertheless created very dissimilar portraits” (10)� 27 This naiveté in Best’s and Marcus’ plea for surface readings becomes apparent, for example, in the following reference to the New Criticism: “This valorization of surface reading as willed, sustained proximity to the text recalls the aims of New Criticism, which insisted that the key to understanding a text’s meaning lay within the text itself, particularly in its formal properties” (10)� In spite of sixty years of scholarship on the New Criticism, the authors seem to be entirely unaware of the fact that the close reading practiced by the New Criticism stood in the service of a particular aesthetic theory which made New Critics register and value certain formal properties and dismiss or ignore others, irrespective of their calls for close readings� The problem of interpretation is that of selection (which even a “mere” description has to make) and the principles (in Gadamer’s term “prejudices”) on which these selections are made� Literary theory is not the opposite to description; it is the attempt to clarify what the principles of selection are, no matter whether the interpretive focus lies on the surface or on other levels� 28 Thus Felski concludes: “Suspicion remains an indispensable sensibility and reading strategy in the classroom; students need to learn to read against the grain, to question received wisdoms, to learn the fundamentals of critical interpretation” (“After Suspicion,” 33)� As it turns out, Felski’s criticism is not one of suspicious readings per se but their doctrinaire application: “Elevated to the governing principle of literary studies, however, suspicion solidifies into a sensibility and set of disciplinary norms no less doctrinaire than the fastidious aestheticism and canon worship it sought to replace” (33)� Hence, she adds: “Critique needs to be supplemented by generosity” (33)� 58 W infried f luck narrative can structure the representation of our experiences in unforeseen ways� Sometimes certain aspects of experience are taken for granted because of habit and are thus not explicitly stated� But they may be of special interest for the cultural historian nevertheless, precisely for that reason� A good example is provided by Clifford Geertz’s interpretation of Balinese cockfighting. No interpretive harm would be done, if descriptions of this event would remain on the surface, but through Geertz’s reading, we gain a valuable perspective that goes beyond the transparent physicality of the phenomenon itself� The purpose of interpretation is not only to recover what we already know but, much more importantly, the discovery of that which we do not yet know� The absent, the latent, the hidden continue to be important dimensions of meaning� However, symptomatic readings should not be our method of discovery� Symptomatic readings can be criticized for a number of reasons, including their notion of the unconscious, but the major problem is that they must provide single-cause explanations because of their starting assumptions: if I start from the assumption that a literary text or cultural object represents a larger unit, my interpretation has to identify those elements that are, in one way or another, pointing toward that larger unit, so that my interpretation has to be metaphorical (as in the Myth and Symbol School) or metonymical (as in cultural radicalism)� And if I identify this larger unit as a structural totality that does not have any representative expressive core, then the meaning of the larger unit is, by definition, an “absent cause” and can only manifest itself in the form of a symptom� This set of assumptions also works the other way round, however: if what I am looking for as an interpreter of literary texts is a symptom, then this symptom can only have one cause, not several, and must therefore represent a single cause, even though this single cause may be an absent one� Again, the example of Jameson is instructive here� VII. The long and carefully argued first chapter of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, entitled “On Interpretation,” is one of the theoretically most ambitious recent discussions of how to constitute and define one’s interpretive object without falling into the Hegelian trap� In drawing on Althusser’s terminology, Jameson’s search for an alternative starts with a rejection of the Hegelian model of an expressive totality, because this model “presupposes in principle that the whole in question be reducible to an inner essence, of which the elements of the whole are then no more than the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner principle of the essence being present at each point in the whole (…)” (24)� However, the problem is that such an “essentially allegorical operation” (33) cannot only be found in approaches within an idealist tradition of intellectual history� It has also been a mainstay of traditional Marxist approaches: “Here Lukács’ essays on realism may serve as a central example of the way in which the cultural text is taken as an essentially allegorical model of society as a whole (…)” (33)� Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 59 Jameson insists that only Marxism can restore to the surface of the text “the repressed and buried reality” of history (20)� But he faces the problem of how this can be done without falling back into an allegorical mode of explanation� The challenge consists in no less than the outline of a new hermeneutics, and this new hermeneutics is based on Althusser’s concept of a “structural causality�” Texts are determined, not by any single element, not even by the economical base, but by a “structural totality�” Again, the move is from content to form, from a mind that expresses the whole to a structure that constitutes the whole� And in contrast to Hegel’s universal spirit that can be expressed best in its essence by works of art, “this ‘structure’ is an absent cause, since it is nowhere empirically present as an element, it is not a part of the whole or one of the levels, but rather the entire system of relationships among those levels” (36)� Seen as “absent cause,” this “totality is not available for representation” (55)� It is only visible in its effects - through which it is present in its very absence� How can we identify these effects, “of which linguistic practice is one,” (46) as “representations” of the absent cause? As in the case of Macherey, we have to look out for discontinuity, disunity, dissonance and discrepancy: “The aim of a properly structural interpretation or exegesis thus becomes the explosion of the seemingly unified text into a host of clashing and contradictory elements” (56)� This sounds like Barthes and not Lacan, and thus Jameson hastens to add that the heterogeneous impulses of the text have “to be once again related, but in the mode of structural difference and determinate contradiction” (56)� The contradiction must have a deeper cause and stand for something, it cannot just be a result of the play of the text� And what it stands for is also clear: it is the absent cause that cannot be explicitly represented and thus has to be traced through its effects� Moreover, although the cause is absent, we also know what it stands for, namely no longer Hegel’s expressive spirit but Althusser’s theory of structural totality of which the interpretation provides an allegorical reproduction� Jameson’s attempt to escape a Hegelian totality (and hence an allegorical reading) thus has a paradoxical result: allegorization is not avoided but merely moved to a theory that promises to avoid allegorization� Interpretations in this mode are therefore entirely predictable: contradictions are symptoms; symptoms are the effects of an absent cause; the absent cause is a structure that determines the whole; hence symptoms stand for the whole and can become the basis for a sweeping generalization about the whole� Jameson’s struggle with the issues of representation and representativeness provides an exemplary case study for literary theory in times of cultural radicalism� As such it had a strong impact on literary studies, including American literary studies� Again and again, cultural radicalism has re-enacted the Althusserian move from overt ideological content to the “ideology of form” as the actual site of the text’s politics� And again and again, the textual presence of this politics can only be conceptualized as absence� Jameson’s paradigmatic move from expressive totality to structural totality has two important consequences for the interpretation of literary texts� One is that the 60 W infried f luck unrepresentable absent cause will inevitably be conceptualized as a single cause� Secondly, such an approach will eventually have to give us an idea about what this structural totality is determined by, because such a revelation is, after all, the rationale for symptomatic readings that want to retrieve hidden and repressed meanings� For Jameson, in following Althusser and Macherey, it is the mode of production that provides the organizing unity for the structural totality� But, as subsequent work in American Studies has shown, the absent cause that determines the structural totality can also be race, queerness, empire, or the nation-state� The major problem with symptomatic readings, then, is not a bad mind-set or some form of radical posturing but a philosophically problematic starting point: beginning with Macherey and then reaching a more sophisticated formulation in Jameson, the literary and cultural approaches of cultural radicalism are still based on the assumption of a totality that gives meaning to all of its parts� In the case of cultural radicalism, this totality will be a single cause because of the need of political criticism to claim that the political shapes all aspects of reality, even where this does not seem to be the case at first sight. Thus, the determining political cause can be absent on the surface� The starting premise of cultural radicalism that everything is political points toward an absent structural cause and thus creates the necessity for a symptomatic reading that is able to lead us to this absent cause, that is, to a unifying principle that metonymically explains it all� Symptomatic readings thus make larger generalizations about America possible� By looking at Moby-Dick, the scholar can analyze American society as a whole� The idea of the national, our starting point, is thus still present even in the act of revision and redefinition, because this revision continues to be based on the assumption that there is one key principle that explains all of the rest� Or, to put it differently: even where the idea of the nation is put into question marks, the method keeps it alive� VIII. Our starting point has been the founding idea of American Studies, the idea of American exceptionalism which stands at the center of American national identity� Two approaches have emerged in American Studies in the critique of this idea, transnational studies and symptomatic readings� While I have discussed transnational American Studies in a different context, 29 this essay has focused on symptomatic readings� Despite their revisionist claims, we found that a national paradigm is still in place� Even where the intention is to criticize American exceptionalism, this is still being done in search of the true meaning of America, of what the realities of America really are� I thus think that one of the major challenges for a post-exceptionalist American Studies is how to deal with the idea of the national. Let me suggest a first step by introducing a conceptual differentiation� 29 See “A New Beginning? Transnationalisms” and Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, edited with Donald E� Pease and John Carlos Rowe� Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 61 As is well known, the term “American” as it is used in American Studies can refer to two different interpretive objects which explains why we are using two different words in the field, often interchangeably it seems, to refer to American society: we often speak of America but then we sometimes correct ourselves and speak of the United States� This parallel use is not necessarily a result of confusion or intellectual imprecision� On the contrary, most users, especially in American Studies, are quite aware of the difference� We still use the term “America,” although we know it is incorrect and perhaps even improper, when we want to refer to the idea of America, that is, in a Hegelian sense, to the meaning of America� And we use the term “United States” or U�S�-America when we want to refer to the political system, and other political, social, and cultural arrangements that characterize American society� Another way of describing the same difference would be to use the terms nation and state� Nation refers to the imagined community based on the idea of America, state refers to the often pesky and irritating realities of that nation, what Robert Sklar may also have had in mind when he spoke of the realities of America� (But Sklar also illustrates the problem: he should have referred to U�S�-America�) To distinguish between the nation and the state can explain the paradoxical fact that American society may be in crisis but that Americans nevertheless strongly support the ideal of American exceptionalism, the imaginary construct of the greatest nation on earth� When conditions in the U�S� are deplored, no matter from what side of the political spectrum, criticism is leveled against the government, not against the nation� The government is criticized for not living up to the ideals of the nation - which leaves the idea of the nation intact� Even in the act of criticizing American society, the idea of America as a nation distinguished by superior values can thus be reaffirmed. The separation between nation and state can explain an aspect of the contemporary United States that strikes the outside observer as profoundly contradictory� On the one hand, there is an increasing suspicion and rejection of the government, both on the national as well as on the state level - a mood that can be found not only on the political right but in a growing segment of the population� On the other hand, the military-industrial complex and the national security apparatus have become manifestations of a state power that has no equal in Western societies� However, in American political discourse these strong, government-run institutions are not associated with the state but with the American nation, and as long as they are seen to stand in the service of the nation, they are not viewed as part of the government and its waste� On the contrary, they are indispensible for protecting the superiority of “America�” In military spending, American politicians can thus be remarkably generous� At the same time, these politicians can be pretty meanspirited about so-called welfare “entitlements�” The reason is simple: welfare is framed as a government program and not as a national project� It does nothing to support the idea of the strength of the American nation� President 62 W infried f luck Obama therefore tried to define health care reform as a long overdue national project, while critics do everything in their power to characterize it as yet another wasteful government program� IX. As an interpretive unit, the state is different from the nation - not a totality shaped by a unifying principle, but a field of power struggles between different institutional and social forces� It includes a variety of actors, among them government, business, classes, ethnic groups, media, civil society, culture which in itself consists of a variety of different elements, ranging from religion to art. These different actors have different influences at different times and in different contexts� That is why generalizations about nations rarely work, because there are always important aspects of reality that do not fit the generalization. Thus, when we think about the state as a political or social context, it does no longer make sense to speak of a totality, expressive or structural� Instead, what we have is a unit marked by complex relations, often antagonistic and conflicting, so that matters cannot be reduced to one common national denominator� We have gotten used to speak of a national identity, but it does not make sense to speak of a state identity, since the state is an organizing framework for a society but not a meaning-giving entity� Even where it exerts power or draws its legitimacy from a dominant ideology, there are always counter-forces and there is always resistance� American Studies and British Cultural Studies have drawn our attention to this fact by making the possibility of resistance one of their major concerns� 30 If the nation is a totality that is conceptualized as being shaped by a unifying principle, and if literature and art are the forms in which this unifying principle can find expression and thereby become visible, then it makes sense to interpret literature on the basis of a unifying principle that can serve as a metaphor or metonymie of the larger - expressive or structural - whole� But if we think of the United States in terms of a state that is a battle-ground of conflicting interests that constantly undermine unity, then we do no longer have to interpret texts in terms of a unifying principle� 31 In fact, we shouldn’t� What would be the alternative, however? At this point, it may make sense to go back to that moment in the history of American literary studies - and literary studies more generally - when the formalist idea of an organic unity, which had still influenced literary interpretations of the Myth and Symbol School, began to be put under pressure from various sides and was finally given up� This opened the way for discussing literary texts, even those that were canonized as masterpieces, in terms of a non-organicist aesthetics that 30 On this point, see my essay “Theories of American Culture,” in which I trace the changing visions of resistance through various stages in the history of cultural theory and American Studies� 31 In “American Literary History and the Romance with America,” I have shown that, contrary to the associations of multitude and heterogeneity which the term evokes, “diversity” has also been used as such a unifying principle in American literary studies� Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings 63 was able to include elements that seemed to be not fully integrated, or discrepant, or even contradictory� A whole new vocabulary emerged: where concepts like organic unity, aesthetic coherence, rhythm, repetition and variation, symmetry, structural patterns, ambiguity, paradox and irony had been dominant before, we now encounter silences, gaps, ruptures, discontinuities, conflicts, discrepancies, contradictions and multiple codes. In one way or another, texts are no longer seen as unified but as heterogeneous. Can we still gain any insight into American society and culture from such a text? An emphasis on the heterogeneity of literary texts, including their tensions and contradictions, can be taken in at least three different directions� One is the direction we have already encountered in our discussion of Jameson: to see contradictions, or heterogeneous elements more generally, as symptoms of an absent cause and, hence, a structural totality� The second possibility is rejected by Jameson when he sets Althusser in contrast to Roland Barthes: “The aim of a properly structural interpretation or exegesis thus becomes the explosion of the seemingly unified text into a host of clashing and contradictory elements� Unlike canonical post-structuralism, however, whose emblematic gesture is that by which Barthes, in S/ Z, shatters a Balzac novella into a random operation of multiple codes, the Althusserian/ Marxist conception of culture requires this multiplicity to be reunified, if not at the level of the work itself, then at the level of its process of production, which is not random but can be described as a coherent functional operation in its own right” (56)� For the post-structuralist Barthes, heterogeneity is the pre-condition for a “play of the text” that undermines any reality effect and carries its own rewards in the jouissance of aesthetic experience� From this perspective, interpretation can only lead to a constantly renewed celebration of a postmodern aesthetic� 32 For Barthes, the source of the heterogeneity of the text lies in an uncontrollable semantic surplus produced by different linguistic and generic codes� But textual heterogeneity can also result from the need to mediate between conflicting interests and impulses or simply from the challenge to coordinate historical, representational, imaginary, and affective dimensions of the text� Thus, multiple modes of signification, including conflicts and contradictions, can also become important sources of cultural insights, for example, when a text pulls in conflicting ideological directions or when political ideals and fantasies of individual self-empowerment clash or when social values and imaginary transgressions are at odds and create an emotional dilemma� 33 All of these conflicts make culture and literature fields of contestation in which different groups, classes and individuals struggle for recognition and dominance� Such 32 At another point in The Political Unconscious, Jameson characterizes S/ Z as a project “to rewrite Balzac as Philippe Sollers, as sheer text and écriture” (18)� 33 I cannot dwell here on the fact that such a reorientation also requires a view of the reading process and the reading subject that is different from theories of interpellation, the theory of reading adopted, often tacitly, by the New Americanists� For a different conceptualization of the reading process see my essay “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer�“ 64 W infried f luck a reconceptualization of the literary text as a field of contestation would allow us to maintain American Studies’ focus on conflict and contradiction as socially and culturally instructive dimensions of a literary text, however, not in the sense of a metaphor or metonymie of national totality� American Studies should continue to focus on the relation between literary texts, cultural objects and the realities of American society and culture� But they should move out of the blind alley into which the idea of structural totality has pushed these analyses� Works Cited Bercovitch, Sacvan� “The Ideological Context of the American Renaissance,” in: Forms and Functions of History in American Literature. 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Rev� ed� New York: Dell, 1967� Fluck, Winfried� “’A whole cultural history’: Zu einigen neueren Versuchen kulturwissenschaftlicher Synthese,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 20 (1975), 337-353� -----� “Theories of American Literature: Double Structures and Sources of Instability in American Literature,” Actas Y Congreso Nacional A.E.D.E.A.N. Zaragoza 1988, 115- 136; online http: / / www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/ en/ v/ publications_fluck/ index.html. -----� “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism,” in: The Future of American Studies, eds� Donald E� Pease and Robyn Wiegman� Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, 211-230; reprinted in an extended version in W� Fluck, Romance with America? , 49-68. -----� “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies),” Romance with America? , 69-85� -----. Romance with America? 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Hanover, N�H�: Dartmouth College Press, 2010� l aura B ieger The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly Rethinking Narrativity What I want to bring to this volume’s collaborative effort of charting new trajectories for a post-exceptionalist American studies is a plea for rethinking our current notions of narrative from the perspective of belonging: not just be-ing, but also longing, the yearning for a place in the world without which it would crumble� In order to feel and direct this longing we need a mediating structure; narrative is that structure� Just think of the many people who write diaries in times of trouble and stop once things have smoothened out; or think of the inner monologue that immediately sets in when realizing that one is lost� My interest is thus not so much in narrative as a form of language use that is predominantly coercive in its drive toward the fixation of meaning in storied form� Rather, I am interested in narrative as a cultural resource of orientation and emplacement; a practice that sustains our being through its capacities to articulate unsettling experiences, conduct the semantic, psychic, and geographic movements unleashed by them within the shifting parameters of space and time, and in due process give meaning and mooring to life by giving narrative form� Understood in these terms, narrative becomes an indispensible component of dwelling in the world - a proposition with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of narrativity� Most narrative theories are formalist or structuralist, and broader approaches, scarce as they are (Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative and Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot come to mind) tend to conceive of narrative as primarily invested in matters of human temporality - the problem of time-boundedness and the impossibility to understand the meaning of one’s death� Building on and yet departing from these latter theories, an understanding of narrativity based on the human need to belong brings out its distinct involvement with our existential boundedness in both time and space, our wrestling with “the unutterable contingency of time-place” (Massey 5), with sustaining life and facing death within our ever-shifting life-worlds by narrative means� Much of our storytelling vocabulary is indeed strikingly spatial: we speak of situations, expositions, plots, arrivals; storytelling presupposes emplacement, unfolds specific spatial imaginaries (without which it would be incomprehensible), takes place in particular settings and can have transformative effects on them� Neither 68 l aura B ieger scholarship on space nor scholarship on narrative has explored these correlations so far, and yet they are absolutely instrumental for the task of understanding the production of both space/ place and narrative� Rethinking narrativity along these lines contests notions of narrative as a representational backdrop to the messiness of life that still prevails in literary and cultural scholarship� Approached in this traditional way, narrative’s capacities to mend a troubled sense of belonging are strictly retrospective: categorically removed from life, narrative elucidates what already has been lived� In fact, it can function as a basic form of human understanding precisely because it re-creates - and thus recovers - life from a safe distance not unlike that sheltered room of therapeutic treatment� Yet rather than limiting narrative to operations that are strictly representational, this approach embraces what Margaret Somers has recently called an ontological understanding of narrativity: It assumes that life itself is storied in fundamental ways, “that stories guide action; that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; that ‘experience’ is [mediated] through narratives; […] and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available […] narratives” (613-14)� Which brings me back to the spatial dimension of narravitiy addressed above� Unrelated as my research on the recent revaluations of space and those of narrative initially was, I have come to think that there is an epistemic correlation between the untying of space from its former conception as a stable backdrop to the dynamic operations of time and the untying of narrative from its former conception as a representational backdrop to the messiness of life� Both ‘turns,’ it seems to me, are stirred by what Michel Foucault has famously described as a shift from the epoch of time to that of space, concluding that we are at a moment “when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (22)� Tied back to the narrative productivity of belonging, the historical discourse and imagination consolidating in the nineteenth century would then be responding to a world that had become uncertain through the loss of feudalistic orders and providential plots by investing into narrative’s representational capacities� Yet the spatial discourse and imagination taking shape in the late twentieth century demands new frames for the task of narrative recovery - and finds them in an ontologically enhanced relation of life and narrative� In fact, the new epoch (or episteme) ascribes proactive ‘building’ capacities to a cultural practice that has previously been thought of as merely restorative� This recent reconception of narrativity is part of a larger turn toward ontology that, in responding to the recent crisis of late or post modernity, has profoundly challenged the typical ways of seeing and doing in the modern world, particularly the conception of the autonomous, self-aware, selfreliant, etc� human subject (see White)� Questions of its dependency on the natural, social and cultural environment have thus increased in relevance� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 69 Conceiving this subject through its existentially imposed and narratively sustained need to belong is precisely such an ontological commitment, one that is quintessentially driven by the questions “how to articulate the meaning of our lives, both individually and collectively” (White 4), and how these articulations matter� Which brings me to the question of literary narratives� Although removed from the messiness of life and committed to representing rather than living it, they are deeply invested in the narrative productivity engendered by the yearning to belong: they exploit the depragmatized realm of fiction to stage and explore the narrative productivity of belonging as a life-sustaining practice that springs from an insurmountable need to interpret one’s surroundings and express one’s being in relation to them� One striking and important way in which the narrative productivity of belonging operates in literary texts is by generating and testing different kinds of ‘narrative agency’ - which I tentatively define as the capacity to make choices about the telling of one’s story and impose them on the world� These narrative agencies take shape against the backdrop of strikingly distinctive (with Bakhtin one may say ‘chonotopic’) conjunctions of spatial and psychic imaginaries, the inner and the outer worlds in which belonging is sought� Literary texts tend to stage and explore narrative agency to the end of cohering disrupted, troubled life-worlds� In doing so, they not only test narration’s capacities to produce and maintain a sense of belonging within the fictional world of the text, but they also make these suturing capacities available for narrative operation - and thus for the existential task of dwelling - beyond their fictional worlds. This ‘articulation effect’ of fiction is framed and limited by given sets of narrative conventions, and thus condemned to reiterating the norms and values inscribed into them� 1 But giving an account of uncertain states of belonging also and just as inevitably entails a wrestling with is the sayable at a certain place and time� In fact, it tends to push narrative production toward and across the limits of what can be said within given norms and conventions with the effect of exposing and transgressing the narrative frames and formulas by which be live; and with the effect of engendering ever-new ‘life-forms’ for the narrative pursuit of belonging� In fact, one way of writing a history of American literature in all its cultural and regional meanderings and cross-fertilizations would be to write it from the perspective of the relentless narrative productivity of belonging that I am about to exemplify in my reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s frontier gothic Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker� 1 The concept of the ‘articulation effect’ is a core element of reception aesthetics� Not unlike Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘structure of feelings’ that cultural forms of expression can make tangible, yet with a more elaborate theorization of the process of transfer at stake, the basic idea is that fiction - as fictionalizing acts that perform a constant border crossing between the world of the text and the world of the reader - propels the articulation of that which has not yet a social correlative� See especially Iser, “Fictionalizing Acts,” and Fluck, “The Role of the Reader�” 70 l aura B ieger But before going in medias res, I want to spell out the intervention into the current field of American studies that I seek to make with this reading� Rethinking current notions of narrativity along the lines mapped out above is an attempt to go beyond the critical paradigm of ‘resistance’ that has gained a hegemonic stance in our field in the wake of the historical turn. Literary texts are now predominantly studied to determine how they are situated in larger discursive fields, and how they participate in regulating the subject positions contained in them� Yet this interpretive framework comes at a cost as it presupposes a relation between a literary text and its recipient that is located first and foremost on a conceptual or cognitive level: a resistant reception penetrates the text intellectually while affective mobilization tends to be seen as merely manipulative� Aesthetic experience thus becomes a mere function of interpellation, and art produces ‘aesthetic regimes’ that need to be scrutinized in order to understand how to resist them� 2 Concerns with belonging question this paradigm in assuming a narrative drive (Peter Brooks would say a ‘narrative desire’) for meaning and form that bears a thoroughly ambiguous relation to ideologies of place and self� No matter how idiosyncratic, incoherent and ‘non-closural’ it may be, any account of losing or regaining one’s sense of belonging is conducted within ideological constraints� And yet out of psychic and social need, account-giving cannot be dismissed� 3 There is, in other words, no radical state of non-belonging that does not construe and make sense of that state by narrative means� The prescriptive side of narrative is a familiar target of critique in the resistance paradigm - as a subject-forming power to be exposed and disseminated at almost all cost� Yet while narrative is certainly inclined to bring disparate elements into a socially intelligible, coercive form, the narrative activity propelled by the need to belong tends to challenge and transgress established forms, simply because these forms are often unsuited to aptly express what seeks expression� This double-bind of coercion and transgression is indeed a primary motor of literary creativity - which means, in turn, that we can trace, in and through narrative’s inclination to express and give form, both concerns with and limits of belonging at particular conjunctions of time, space, and social being� In approaching the resistance paradigm - usually conceived of as opposing the subject-forming power of the symbolic structures - with an interest in the need to belong that operates in and through these structures, the experiential dimension inherent to any regimic mode of ‘distributing the sensible,’ its relentless involvement with making and unmaking these structuring forces gains critical weight� 4 In fact, the mutually constitutive relation of belonging and narrative posited here insists upon an ecstatic dimension of being-in-the-world, a ‘need to tell’ that drives it� In doing so, it sets out to rethink the troubled relation of narrative and agency� And it asks what ramifications this rethinking has for the study of literary narratives. 2 The term ‘aesthetic regime’ is drawn from Rancière� 3 Judith Butler has recently taken up this issue in her essay “Giving an Account of Oneself�” See also Ricoeur, Ezzy, and Somers� 4 The idea of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ is also drawn from Rancière� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 71 Caught Between Frontier Paternalism and Liberal Capitalism Published in 1799 and set in the mid-1780s, Edgar Huntly speaks from a period of unprecedented disruption and reorganization of American life� There is consensus among historians of the time that it was a “revolution of massive proportions” (Watts, Romance 3)� 5 Among the most profound effects was the breakup of a social order that had rested on ‘republican’ values (the common good, civil responsibility, the public sphere) and its replacement by a ‘liberal’ order inclined to individualism and mobility, self-made success and the private sphere� 6 For a short while - coinciding with Brown’s most creative years of literary production between 1797 and 1800 - these two orders existed side by side, constituting what William Hedges has termed a “culture of contradictions” (107)� Edgar Huntly responds to this situation by imagining a protagonist who falls out of his familiar world� After going to bed one night, he awakes in a pitch-dark cavern, barely dressed and miles away from his uncle’s house, the place where he has been living since his parents were killed in an Indian raid� In one terrible instant the world around him has grown strange� The shock of this realization haunts the tale thoroughly� In fact, it constitutes the story’s implicit threshold of uncertainty, the moment when action - both physical and narrative - becomes imperative� The protagonist’s rehabilitation is bound to his warding off the maddening threat of utter incoherence and unfamiliarity, of restoring a sense of belonging after his ‘fall�’ The narrative that springs from this need traces Edgar’s herculean efforts to meet this task, about which he writes to his fiancée Mary in a letter that takes up the largest portion of the tale; a letter that not only gives an account of its writer’s struggle to return home, but that also, and for my interest in the narrative productivity of belonging even more pertinently, gives voice and form to his desire of recohering his troubled life-world by narrative means� 5 During Brown’s short life time (he was born 1771 and died of tuberculosis in 1810) the world order was swept up by the American, the French and the Haitian Revolutions as well as Spain’s loss of imperial hegemony to Great Britain� Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Alexander Hamilton’s, James Madison’s and John Jay’s Federalist Papers were published� The Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance became the legal blueprints of colonizing the North American continent� The federal Constitution was signed, and soon thereafter Federalists and Republicans waged a fierce battle over the nature of the democratic order that had been ratified. Outside of established circles of political elites, dissatisfaction with this newly installed order erupted in Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion; the Fugitive Slave Law and the Alien and Sedition Acts were ratified to regulate undesired movements of non-citizens. The Napoleonic Wars broke out and produced a vast power-vacuum on the Atlantic that was in turn seized by US oversea tradesmen� The Louisiana Purchase multiplied US territory several times, yet expanded it into parts of the continent’s interior still completely unknown to its non-indigenous population� Under the impact of increasing immigration, expeditions into the new territory were soon followed by settlement� 6 For historiographic work on this shift see Wood and Appleby� The republicanism-literalism debate has also become a major trajectory of scholarship on early American literature� Warner, Ziff, and Gilmore stress the active role that the rise of the novel played in bringing about the gradual fading of the Early Republic’s republican ideology and its publically oriented literary culture� 72 l aura B ieger Brown’s novel bundles and personifies this yearning for narrative in the figure of the letter-writing protagonist who needs to tell his story to resume a place where he can dwell� But he is a sleepwalker, which means that his yearning to belong is in a quintessentially deviant, erring state, and his capacity to give account of what has happened to him is seriously impaired� The result is a letter of epic proportions� Over the course of two-hundredand-eighty pages, Edgar tells his fiancée about his adventures of trailing a sleepwalking Irishman whom he suspects of having murdered Mary’s brother and his beloved friend� He tells her about killing and eating a ferocious panther, slaughtering numerous Indians, and rescuing a girl who was their captive� About sleeping in an impressive number of strangers’ beds, escaping an ambush by jumping into a river from impossible heights, and fainting several times out of sheer exhaustion along the way� He also tells her about his encounter with a stranger named Weymouth who made credulous claims about the money that Mary had unexpectedly inherited upon her brother’s death, urging her to return it. And eventually, he tells her about finding out that he, too, is a sleepwalker, and that it was indeed his sleepwalking that brought him into the wilderness and made him a stranger to himself� Loosely framed by the epistolary form, the narrative is restless and inconclusive� It contains stories within stories, changing narrators, characters that emerge out of nowhere and disappear again, plotlines that are elaborately built up and just as unexpectedly dropped. In Leslie Fiedler’s fitting words, “[i]t is a charmingly, a maddeningly disorganized book, not so much written as dreamed” (157). For a long time, the lacking coherence of Brown’s fiction was regarded as a major weakness of his work� The situation could hardly be more different today� 7 Brown is now widely celebrated for the “complexity of his response and exploration of key concerns and issues in early national culture” - among them the intersecting debates on republicanism, nationalism, and expansionism, the rise of bourgeois liberalism and its impact on gender dynamics - and praised as an author whose “achievement … lay in his ability to radically challenge both form and content of contemporary writing” (Barnard, Kamrath, and Shapiro x)� In assuming that “Brown’s work adequately, deliberately, and often intelligibly engages or represents a coherent early national culture,” the revisionist scholarship inverts assumptions of earlier criticism, which tended “to see Brown as a prototypical Romantic 7 Conjointly fixed by New Criticism’s normative aesthetics and the predominantly ‘exceptionalist’ concerns of Cold War American studies, Brown’s reputation as an artistically flawed writer remained firmly in place until the early 1980s. It was not until the transnational reconfiguration of early American studies that his reception underwent a profound revision� Three major shifts undergird this development: the break-up of the consensus view of early American ideological history and its underlying assumptions about the relation of individual and society through the republicanism-liberalism debate; the programmatic reevaluation of formerly disregarded genres such as the sentimental and the gothic; and the general expansion of the literary field in the wake of the canon debates� Ironically, by 2009 the tide had turned to such an extent that Waterman, introducing an Early American Studies Special Issue on Brown, wonders if ‘Brown studies’ have taken over the field of early American studies. The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 73 author and framed him as writing against his culture rather than typifying it” (Waterman, “Introduction” 236)� Which also means that features such as the maddening incoherence and excessive sentimentality of Brown’s novels are now - and will be here - read as historical symptoms whose ‘problematic’ forms are artistically sound and innovative means of expressing a sense of disorientation that was deeply engrained into its contemporaneity� 8 Building on and yet departing from these revisionist concerns, my own engagement with Brown’s work does not aim at producing historical ‘evidence’ about the larger discursive field in which it is situated and the subject positions that it contains; nor does it seek to determine whether the novel is acting out or striving against the premises of its ideological context� Approaching it with an interest in the need for narrative that uncertain states of belonging bring forth, I seek to trace a struggle of articulation and formgiving that touches upon the shifting foundations of social being at this time� Brown’s fiction is so interesting in this regard, because it seeks to expose and explore these foundations and their limitations� It questions traditional authorities (enlightenment ideas of reason, traditional gender roles and the paternalistic order) and voices latent anxieties about material insecurity and moral corruption in a world mobilized by self-made success� These themes run through Brown’s fiction like a red thread. What Edgar Huntly adds to them is a concern with the frontier, which it imagines as haunted by a colonial past of violence and dispossession that deeply troubles the narrated present and future. In fact, the frontier enters American fiction with this novel. It features prominently, not as the mere allegory of a disturbed psyche that a former generation of scholars has detected in it, but as a “recognizable landscape” imagined as a site of recurring violence and dispossession (Jehlen 162)� 9 More than a mere background, Edgar Huntly’s frontier setting “provides the literal premises for the possibilities and trajectory of narrative action - inscribing, describing and circumscribing an extrapolative or speculative […] world and giving that fantasized world a significant and visibly signifying shape and temporal dimension” (Sobchack 123)� The brutal killings of Edgar’s parents and his infant sibling, the resulting move of the remaining Huntly children 8 Garbo’s Coincidental Art was most instrumental in bringing about this revaluation� His structuralist readings of Brown’s major novels contended that, whatever one might think of Brown’s prose style, his plots were intricately crafted rather than hastily improvised� Later critics extended this revision with the use of narrative discourse and performance theory� See especially Wall Hinds, Barnard, Bellis, Downes, Hagenbüchle, Hamelman, and Keitel� 9 For Jehlen, the novel is “at once seminal and terminal, the first to envision a specifically American psyche and also more or less the last to represent taking possession of the continent not as destined fulfillment but […] as conquest” (161). Earlier readings had valued it primarily for its psychological dimension. Ringe was the first to praise Brown for adding a psychic dimension to the gothic genre� In fact, for him the ‘Americanness’ of Brown’s fiction was not primarily a matter of its setting but of psychologizing narrative techniques. The most influential psychological reading of the novel stems from Fiedler, for whom the protagonist’s destructive desires are forces of the id, which he, in turn, interprets as a token of the conservative underpinnings genuine to American gothic fiction in general. 74 l aura B ieger to their uncle’s house (a farm built at a site that was formerly occupied by a Delaware village), the killings of Edgar’s uncle and his closest friend spring immediately from the settlers’ violent struggles to take possession of their non-native land� The troubled state of belonging that resonates through this setting gains voice in the first-person account of a figure that becomes the narrator of this story out of a profound experience of loss and insecurity� To come to terms with this uncomfortable state is the narrative’s primary theme and motivation� Yet imagining the novel’s setting in these particular terms and no other inscribes the dwelling places envisioned by the novel with historical remnants of betrayal, loss, and guilt that deeply trouble the ways in which these places can be ‘used’ and ‘lived’ (in the Lefebvrian sense)� It has often been pointed out how intensely Edgar Huntly’s fictional assessment of frontier violence draws from historical record, most notably the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737, a fraudulent land deal between European/ Quaker settlers and a Delaware tribe that took place precisely at the site Brown chose as the setting of his story, and that is known to have stirred a series of particularly violent revenge raids� 10 But while the historical references made by the novel are doubtlessly striking in their accuracy and complexity (and it is likely that the novel’s contemporary readers were familiar with them), they are implied rather than explicated� In stressing this point I do not want to dismiss the importance of tracing and contextualizing these historical markers� However, in terms of the narrative operations performed by the novel, the silent and suggestive nature of these references is significant: they are situated outside of the plotted story, rendered to spaces in-between the lines, and are, in this important sense, not part of what the narratable of this time� This point is further underscored by the fact that the mise-en-scène of this historical struggle is one of gradual domestication� Whenever the frontier setting is described, it is done by drawing on the picturesque, an aesthetic regime that correlates and binds seemingly random and irrelevant parts together with the effect of containing the ‘unruly’ features of its object of 10 Initiated by William Penn’s sons John and Thomas, the Walking Purchase resurveyed a tract of land measured on the basis of what could be walked by a man along a windy river in a day and a half� Penn’s sons manipulated these conditions by previously clearing straight paths into the wilderness, hiring several walkers in particularly good shape and equipping them with support teams� What would under regular conditions have added up to a walk of about twenty-five miles was thus extended to sixty-four miles and a resulting territory of 1,200 square miles of tribal land that the Delawares then lost to the Pennsylvanian settlers. Scholars have identified “the Elm” (consistently capitalized throughout the novel), which ironically marks the site of Waldegrave’s murder, as a reference to the tree at which the founding of the state was sealed in a peace treaty between Quakers, led by William Penn, and Lenni Lenape/ Delaware Indians in 1782� For in-depth accounts of Brown’s use of this event see Krause, Luck, and Sivilis� Rowe discusses the Walking Purchase as a key event of the rise of U�S� imperialism, in which Brown’s novels participate by providing a respective imaginary� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 75 depiction� 11 The houses that Edgar passes on his way from the cavern back to civilization underscore this spatial logic of domestication� Many scholars have written insightfully about these houses, reading them as mirroring a progression in Edgar’s behavior which is most violent at the site closest to the wilderness (Garbo 65; Slotkin 384-93), as visual markers in the frontier landscape that enhance the productive use of the picturesque (Berthold 79- 83) and “symbolically reiterate the social order that they host” (Wall Hinds, “Brown’s Revenge” 56), or as manifesting the process of remodeling the period’s notions of national identity (Faherty 56-66)� What I want to add to these observations is that these dwellings - all allegories of attempted, yet either precarious or failed belonging - turn the western frontier into a thoroughly social space; a space that becomes visible as an effect of the “interlocking and articulating nets of social relations” (Massey 168) among those who imagine to live in them and those who contest their presence� In fact, the houses depicted by the novel turn the western frontier into a “‘place’ […] formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location” (168, my emphasis) and deformed by the corrosive forces inscribed into the process of civilization, symbolized by the degeneration of the most lavish house, and by using them as primary sites for the staging of revenge violence� Interacting with these dark and ambiguous depictions of the (western) frontier, is another, rarely acknowledged but no less foundational fiction of modern America: the eastern frontier of the Atlantic, embodied by the figure of the immigrant or ‘alien other’ and imagined as an unstable contact zone of possible contagion� 12 As Luke Gibbons has pointed out, “in terms of historical grievances and political trajectories, both frontiers represent very different presences on the political landscape: the Native American [inhabiting the western frontier] is territorially defined and seeks to retain - or regain - tribal land; the immigrant [inhabiting the eastern frontier], by contrast, has forsaken the homeland and has chosen to reinvent himself or herself in the New World” (25)� Along the same lines of difference, the two frontiers also provide opposing frames for imagining potential dwelling places. In the first 11 For a longer discussion on the importance of the picturesque in the visual appropriation of the North American continent, see my essay “Transatlantic Landscapes�” In “Narrative Frontiers” Wall Hinds also stresses the imaginative conquest of space thus performed, supporting Mitchell’s claim that landscape can be understood as enacting the “‘dreamwork’ of imperialism, unfolding its own movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding back on itself to disclose both fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance” (10)� For discussions of the picturesque in Edgar Huntly, see Bertold and Lueck� 12 The terms are drawn from Gibbons� For further discussions of this topic, see for example Slotkin, Rowe, and Garner. Garner specifically elaborates on how the racializations of these multiple ‘others’ (including the millions of involuntary immigrants brought from Africa as slaves) and their legal regulation through the Alien and Sedition Acts played a distinctive role in forging an ‘American’ identity� Irish immigrants, whom the Alien and Sedition Act particularly targeted and who play a key role in providing mysterious, potentially evil ‘others’ in Brown’s novels, are employed as instrumental figures not only in forging that identity but also in threatening to destabilize it. 76 l aura B ieger scenario, these places are gained in a territorial conflict with roots in the past that haunts all possible forms of belonging with the question: where do we come from? In the second scenario, they are gained in a conflict about social mobility spinning into the future that haunts the prospect of belonging with the question: where do we go? In Edgar Huntly, these two frontier imaginaries are not juxtaposed, but they overlap and seep into each another with the effect of complicating the possibilities of dwelling imagined by the novel� The fact that three of the above dwellers at the western frontier - the nameless builder of the hut on its outer edge, the suspected murderer who later becomes an inhabitant of this hut, and the owner of the degenerated ‘mansion’ - are Irishmen clearly points in this direction; that ‘Old Deb’/ ’Queen Mab’ temporarily lives in the same dwelling as two of them shows how intricately the two frontiers are intertwined� Clithero, the quiet and withdrawn man without a past and the main suspect in the plot that Edgar constructs around his friend’s murder, is the most potent embodiment of the eastern frontier� When “conn[ing] over the catalogue” of his populous neighborhood, Edgar easily singles him out as “the only foreigner among us” (14)� 13 In the patriarchal scheme of his community, “this was an exception to the rule� Clithero was a stranger, whose adventures and character, previously to his coming hither, were unknown to us” (14)� In this mode of spatial production, the ‘alien other’ without a past must assume the role of the unpredictable, potentially dangerous intruder� Yet what Edgar does not acknowledge, neither in this passage nor elsewhere in his letter, is the uncanny resemblance of Clithero’s position with his own, orphaned and without any viable prospect of land inheritance as they both are� And yet the paternalistic order that promises to domesticate the frontier is vanishing� Its New World variant, embodied by Edgar’s home community, is doomed to fail because it refuses to integrate those who (like its ‘native son’ Edgar and the ‘alien other’ Clithero) fall outside of the scheme of land inheritance and thus become threats to its cohesion� This is the spatial predicament of the eastern frontier envisioned by the novel� It falters again because it is haunted by the collective guilt of conquest and dispossession that culminates in Waldegrave’s random death and the course of destruction that follows� This is the predicament of the novel’s western frontier� And as if the protagonist is drawn to this guilt, it is a deliberate move toward the latter frontier that sets the narrative in motion: Edgar leaves the road that would take him home to revisit the site of his friend’s murder where he stumbles across the mysterious Irishman and embarks on the kind of “détour, an intention which is an irritation” that constitutes the very material of narrative production (Brooks, “Masterplot” 292)� Yet the failings of New World paternalism that it exposes along the way do not create any nostalgic longings for its Old World predecessors� Even its modernized version, embodied by the Irish 13 Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, ed� by Krause and Reid� All further references are based on this edition and given in brackets in the main text� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 77 noble lady who marries the proto-enlightenment man of reason and multiple skills (ranging from surgeon via intellectual and teacher to businessman), is bound to vanish, simply because it fails to socially reproduce itself� Cast against the two faces of this “old-fashioned, even feudal” (Wood, Radicalism 40) economy of landownership and inheritance is the order of liberal capitalism� 14 This emerging order is depicted as a vertically and horizontally mobile “economics of paper currency and speculation” that is run by an equally emerging entrepreneurial class (Wall Hinds, “Brown’s Revenge” 52)� Even more distinctly than the space of the frontier, the space unfolding from this order is imagined through the figures that embody it; and as these figures are imagined to be strikingly mobile, the space unfolding from them is constituted by their relentless movements and shifts through abrupt changes in individual itineraries and social relations. Weymouth is the figure that most clearly embodies this order� He appears out of nowhere at the Huntly farm to ask for Edgar’s help in retrieving a substantial sum of money� According to his story, he had asked Waldegrave to keep it for him while going on a trade adventure that took him to the eastern shores of the Atlantic (an itinerary that also associates him with the eastern frontier)� In fact, he had put everything he owned into this adventure to maximize his possible gain except for the money (a fortune substantial enough to secure his existence) that he allegedly left with Edgar’s friend� Hoping to return with abundant means to provide for his old father, the wife taken during his travels, and himself, he suffers shipwreck, imprisonment, and a life-threatening disease, and ends up losing everything but his life� Edgar elaborately recounts this story in a passage that stretches over several chapters, portraying the other not as a cruel capitalist but as a farsighted, responsible, and trustworthy victim of a reckless system� Weymouth’s misfortune and the insecure place into which it has brought him (his loss includes the legal documentation of him transferring the money to Waldegrave so that he can do nothing but plea for its return) is construed as a product of the emerging liberal order rather than a product of false ambition or flawed character� This judgment is underscored by Edgar’s passionate comment about the other’s misfortune: What a mournful tale! Is such the lot of those who wander from their rustic homes in search of fortune? Our countrymen are prone to enterprise, and are scattered all over the sea and every land in pursuit of wealth which will not screen them from disease and infirmity, which is missed much oftener than found, and which, when gained, by no means compensates them for the hardships and vicissitudes endured in the pursuit� (154) But Weymouth’s fate is not only tragic for his own sake: the money that Waldegrave had been asked to keep and that Edgar, after listening to the other’s “mournful tale,” promises to help restore is that same money 14 According to historical record, the unprecedented wealth sweeping the country as a result of these transformations raised the average level of prosperity with the effect of fostering a wide acceptance of the newly emerging entrepreneurial spirit� See for example Appleby, Capitalism; Watts, Republic and Romance� 78 l aura B ieger miraculously inherited by Mary upon her brother’s death� The material security thus promised to her - and to Edgar himself, were they to be married - dissolves through the sudden appearance of its “rightful owner” (154) just as unexpectedly as it had materialized through her brother’s untimely death� In this ironic twist of fate, the place envisioned by Edgar and Mary on the basis of Mary’s inheritance turns out to be a chimera, arising from the unlikely conjunction of two impossible spatial orders: the blood-trenched grounds of the frontier and the unpredictably shifting grounds of the emerging liberal order� Entangling Edgar’s and Mary’s prospect of material security not only with Waldegrave’s untimely death but also with Weymouth’s economic risk-taking makes this second order equally hazardous: it ‘infects’ the old, presumably stable prospect of securing one’s place by means of inheritance with the radical instabilities of entrepreneurial capitalism� Epistolary Transgressions If the world in which belonging is sought in this novel emerges from two conflicting orders and their respective modes of spatial production, both are rejected in the figure of the protagonist. Excluded from the patriarchal scheme (first by orphanage, then by the carelessness or choice with which he forecloses the opportunity of becoming Sarsefield’s and Mrs. Lorimer’s heir), Edgar does not show the slightest professional aspiration that might create a place for him in the emerging world of liberal capitalism� His two outstanding talents - storytelling and box-making - are used for non-commercial ends only, his actions are completely devoted to leisure, and there is no discernible motivation of changing his bohemian way of life� Edgar’s distinctive (self-) positioning outside of the two available orders constitutes the space from which the narrative evolves� In fact, the yearning to belong that drives his narrative is not geared toward emplacing him in either one of those orders; both of them are imagined as uninhabitable� Rather, the narrative is geared toward asserting a sense of belonging through the act of narration itself� The novel opening is programmatic in this regard� It stages an enunciative act of self-assertion that generates its narrative momentum directly from an ailing state of incoherence; a state in which telling one’s story offers itself as “the only viable form of ‘explanation’” (Brooks, Reading 54): I sit down, my friend, to comply with thy request� At length does the impetuosity of my fears, the transports of my wonder permit me to recollect my promise and perform it� At length I am somewhat delivered from suspense and from tremors� At length the drama is brought to an imperfect close, and the series of events that absorbed my faculties, that hurried away my attention, has termined in repose� (5) If these opening lines unmistakably communicate that the following narrative is brought to us in the form of a letter it needs to be stressed that Edgar Huntly is certainly not an epistolary novel in the traditional sense (like, for example, Brown’s two later novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot)� And yet the The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 79 novel’s toying with the epistolary form is highly significant for its narrative pursuit of belonging� In fact, is bending and transgressing this form brings forth the most important and innovative narrative strategies in this regard� To better grasp these dynamics I want to consider the evolution of the epistolary genre for a moment. Emerging as the novel’s first popular subgenre in the mid-eighteenth century, the success of early epistolary novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) (both widely read in North America), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) or Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1784) is so closely tied to the novel becoming the most influential literary institution of the modern age that one can think of it as substantially evolving from this particular form� Approaching this genealogy with an interest in the narrative productivity engendered by the need to belong makes tangible some rarely acknowledged, yet central aspects about the creative adaption from which the novel’s rise departs� Fictionalizing a pragmatic form of writing whose sole raison-d’ être was to maintain a sense of belonging in increasingly mobile social formations, the epistolary novel untangles the dialogic structure inherent to this form from the need to both await and respond to an actual letter� In fact, it exploits this artistic self-sufficiency as a main resource of gratification. The reader of these stories gets to participate in an epistolary exchange without having to create an own narrative account; instead she can fully immerse herself in the reception - the ‘consummation’ - of the narrative� In other words, the lure of this new kind of literature lies precisely in exchanging a real, intersubjective form of dialogue for the imaginary self-sufficiency of fictional narration. Edgar Huntly is a particularly interesting case in this regard since its adaptation of the epistolary form reenacts this process of artistic emancipation� As early as in the first paragraph, a simultaneous borrowing and bending of the epistolary conventions becomes tangible: a reader is directly addressed but the formal line of address and the indication of place and time that are usually part of this genre are omitted with the effect that the reader has to wait, as in a novel, for further clues about the letter’s addressee� And once the epistolary form has been ‘out-used’ for the task of initiating the narrative and establishing its basic frame (the narrator has experienced something so disturbing that he can only now begin to tell about it and needs a ‘real’ interlocutor to be able to tell his tale), the narrative quickly grows into epic proportions, geared toward assuming a totalizing completeness without the addressee’s response� The letter departs from the addressee’s request to stay informed about its writer’s life and ends with the promise that he will visit her “as soon as [he has] seen Sarsefield” and “discuss with [her] in conversation […] [his] schemes for the future” (282)� 15 But despite its epic proportions and the novelistic pose of self-sufficiency (for example through its division into chapters), the story that is told is far from complete without the three letters exchanged 15 This silencing has a clear gender bias: none of the female characters - Mary, Mrs� Lorimer, Clarice, Shelby’s wife, ‘Old Deb’/ ’Queen Mab’ - are allowed to speak for themselves, and ‘Old Deb’/ ’Queen Mab’ is even said to speak in unintelligible tongues� For an in-depth discussion of the silenced women in Brown’s fiction see Persons� 80 l aura B ieger between Edgar and Sarsefield that follow the main narrative. In fact, the final correspondence is absolutely crucial for the narrative design� Not only does it introduce a new addressee, but it also grants him a voice of his own� In fact, it leaves the novel’s final pages to a voice that explicitly and substantially challenges the narrative authority that exclusively ruled thus far� Making up a total of just ten pages, this final correspondence challenges some of the most vital conclusions reached in the epic ‘Mary-letter’: we learn that Clithero is not on his way to recovery but has indeed turned out to be the dangerous maniac about whom Sarsefield had warned Edgar all along; that Edgar, in his obsessive desire to relieve the madman from his equally obsessive conviction of being the murderer of his former patroness (now Sarsefield’s wife), had become entangled in the other’s evil schemes - fulfilling his destiny as Mrs� Lorimer’s murderer - by telling him her whereabouts, and that he nonetheless pleads for Sarsefield’s compassion. The other’s response brutally shatters this hope� In a tone that - especially when read back to back with Edgar’s highly sentimentalized writing mode - comes across as strikingly matter of fact, he rapports only the most basic information: that he left his home immediately upon receiving Edgar’s first letter (which consisted of nothing but a short warning that Clithero is on his way with “mysterious intentions” (283) to see his former patroness) in the urgent pursuit of the madman’s arrest; that while supervising the latter’s deportation to a psychiatric asylum, he witnessed him drowning after going overboard in a final attempt to get away and that in Sarsefield’s absence, Edgar’s second letter arrived and was read by Mrs. Lorimer who was so terrified by what she had read that she lost the child that she was pregnant with� The harsh and definite “Farewell” concluding Sarsefield’s letter leaves no doubt that their relationship will not be resumed in the future. Yet as definite as this endpoint may be, the unexpected twists preceding it - enforced by the exclamation-mark-like death of the unborn child - produces radical non-closure rather than ‘the sense of an ending’ with vast consequences for the main narrator’s struggle to belong� 16 In fact, the novel’s hybrid structure of epistolary and ‘conventional’ novelistic storytelling - one crafting a series of present moments and projecting an open future, the other retrospectively working toward a meaningful ending - is generated by two conflicting yearnings to belong� The retrospective parts are driven by the longing to resume a place at and through which meaning and familiarity are at least provisionally restored, while the sections breaking with this retrospective mode are driven by the longing to keep all questions of belonging wide open� The narrative thus simultaneously stages a longing for recovery and its rejection� And while the latter, retrospective mode makes up the by far largest part of the narrative, its epistolary initiation and framing, albeit rudimentary, provides a way of binding and coercing the novel’s antagonistic yearnings by construing a narrator who speaks with maximal immediacy and passion from a severely troubled psychic state� 16 The expression is drawn from Kermode� See McArthur for an in-depth discussion of the non-closural dynamics of the epistolary novel� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 81 This also means that narrative agency is most powerfully assumed through the epistolary form� And yet the opening paragraphs unmistakably warn their readers that this agency is seriously impaired� While Edgar’s initial remarks claim that he is finally calm enough to give account of what has happened, he is quick to admit that his account-giving capacity has not been fully recovered, to which he adds that a full recovery might even eclipse the events and experiences that he longs to report� The intricate way in which narrative agency is at once assumed and deferred at the novel’s beginning deserves a lengthy citation: Till now, to hold a steadfast pen was impossible; to disengage my senses from the scene that was passing or approaching; to forbear to grasp at futurity; to suffer so much thought to wander from the purpose that engrossed my fears and my hopes, could not be� Yet am I sure that even now my perturbations are sufficiently stilled for an employment like this? That the incidents I am going to relate can be recalled and arranged without indistinctness and confusion? Time may take away these headlong energies, and give me back my ancient sobriety� But this change will only be effected by weakening my remembrance of these events� In proportion as I gain power over my words, shall I lose dominion over my sentiments; in proportion as my tale is deliberate and slow, the incidents and motives which it is designed to exhibit will be imperfectly revived and obscurely pourtrayed� (5-6) The double movement of claiming narrative agency while conceding to its insurmountable limitations that is performed here installs the narrative with a tension that pervades it on all formal and structural levels� Yet realizing that his capacity to tell his story is impaired does not diminish the narrator’s intent to tell� To the contrary, he knows that he must tell this story - not only because he has made a promise to his fiancée, but also and maybe even primarily because he needs to separate himself from the experience that haunts him if he wants to resume a place in the world� At a closer look, the narrator is caught between two equally unattractive evils: the fear that revisiting these experiences may thrust him back into confusion and the concern that he might distance himself so far from what has happened that he can no longer truthfully remember it� In explicating this troubling state, the impaired sense of narrative agency is used to stage and explore a gap inherent to all remembering� As the narrator sets out to tell his story, he discovers within his contradictory feelings - the urge to tell and the delay of telling - a discrepancy between the object of remembrance as it was ‘then’ and his own mental image of it� More than a mere source of irritation, this gap or discrepancy between object and subject of remembrance is a constant site of hermeneutical inspection and thus a constant generator of narrative� In narratological terms, this tension may best be described as a split between ‘experiencing self’ and ‘narrating self,’ the first mobilizing the narrative and driving it into the future, the second contemplating this 82 l aura B ieger process and making sense of it by means of narrative emplotment� 17 If narrative agency succeeds in generating a sense of belonging, it succeeds because it manages to soothe this gap: an unsettling experience generates a narrative impulse, creates a drive to register its impact, and is then, somewhat belatedly (and thus retrospectively), transformed into a familiar mental object by means of narrative emplotment� This basic narrative ‘situation’ is indeed implicit to any pursuit of belonging� 18 This also explains why a novel that toys with epistolary narration provides a particularly interesting case for studying a narrative productivity that stems from the need to belong� Through its highly conventionalized art of crafting a narrative exchange about unsettling events, it is generically inclined to staging and exploring the negotiating process between the experiencing and the narrating self as the very site at which belonging can be gained or lost� Edgar Huntly’s opening passage stages nothing less than a war between the two� The narrator longs to tell his story but has the greatest difficulties to separate himself from his experience; to let the narrating self take over� He achieves a truce between the two by drawing the letter’s recipient into his conflict. In fact, the narrative is initiated by the narrator’s articulated wish to reconnect with his fiancée and meet her request to stay informed about his life during their separation� Brooks has compellingly argued that the desire to tell is ultimately “the desire for an interlocutor, a listener, who enters into the narrative exchange” (Reading 216) and expects something in return� And yet this novel does not discover the ‘contractual’ nature of storytelling as its narrative draws to a close� Rather, it begins with claim idea that both teller and listener will be transformed by the story and creates a narrator who does everything in his power to subvert the terms of the contract that his listener expects to have entered� The opening words “I sit down, my friend, to comply with thy request” draw the letter’s recipient - and with her, the reader of the novel - into a binding commitment� What she is asked to give in return for the story is made perfectly clear just a few paragraphs later: let the narrative take possession of her� “Thou wilt catch from my story every horror and every sympathy which it paints� Thou wilt shudder with my forboding and dissolve with my tears� As the sister of my friend, and one who honors me with her affection, thou wilt share in all my tasks and all my dangers” (6)� An yet no matter how boldly the longing to possess his addressee it is expressed here, moving her with his story to the point of dissolving their separate identities is only half of the desire driving the narrative� The narrator longs for her to assure himself that 17 The terms are drawn from Stanzel� Although not seamlessly translatable, the terms correspond to Roland Barthes’s differentiation between a ‘proairetic code’ (also called the ‘code of action’ or ‘Voice of the Empirical’) and the hermeneutic code (also called the ‘code of enigmas and answers’ or ‘Voice of Truth’)� See Barthes, SZ� In his discussion of these terms, Brooks writes: “Plot might then be best thought of as an ‘overcoding’ of the proairetic by the hermeneutic code, the latter structuring the discrete elements of the former into lager interpretative wholes, working out their play of meaning and significance” (Reading 18)� 18 The term is also Stanzel’s� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 83 his struggle to extrapolate his story from an experience so disturbing that it shuns narration will be heard and sympathetically received� The longing to be received is indeed crucial to the need to tell that drives this narrative: born from the discovery of the contractual nature undergirding any such need, it is geared toward a listener who, in desiring the narrative, designates the desired locus of belonging. And yet as the novel’s long first letter progresses it becomes increasingly clear that Edgar needs Mary as a listener to bequithe a past disturbance, but he does not want to belong to her in the future� In fact, he longs to separate himself from her once she has desired and received his story� It is hard to disagree that the story he tells her to this end is inconclusive and confusing: the mystery around Waldegrave’s murderer is lost out of sight and then abruptly resumed at he end by turning him into the victim of a random act of revenge violence; the story of ‘Old Deb’/ ’Queen Mab,’ first elaborately built up, is halfheartedly resolved by having her arrested without resistance for inflammatory activity; the narrator’s own sleepwalking is never compellingly reflected. Yet despite all this maze, the further course of Edgar and Mary’s relationship is clearly projected� In a long passage of direct address, situated almost exactly in the middle of the book, Edgar uses the narrative agency of the letter-writer to the fullest and boldest extent when he practically cancels their engagement� In fact, the narrative reaches its greatest conclusiveness in this middle passage� Interrupting the letter’s retrospective narrative for four entire pages, it is by far the longest of its kind,� The circumstances, rhetoric and effects of this passage of direct address deserve closer scrutiny� The passage grows out of recounting Weymouth’s story whose quintessential role for narrating and rejecting the liberal spatial order has already been addressed� After listening to the other’s misfortune, Edgar is convinced that the money that Mary inherited belongs to the stranger and that she must return it� The situation is delicate, however, since neither legal proof nor private documentation exists to substantiate the stranger’s claim� Mary has to solely base her decision on Edgar’s account of the other’s story� But despite the lack of ‘hard evidence’ and in full awareness of the gravity of the consequences - returning the money would thrust her back into poverty, dissolve the financial basis of their marriage, and leave Edgar and his sisters homeless in the near future - Edgar urges her that returning the money is the right thing to do. As if to authorize his bold advice with personal sacrifice, he stresses his own share of the burden and then progresses to announcing his retreat from their engagement: I know the precariousness of my condition and that of my sisters, that our subsistence hinges on the life of an old man� My uncle’s death will transfer the property to his son, who is a stranger and an enemy to us, and the first act of whose authority will unquestionably be to turn us forth from these doors� Marriage with thee was anticipated with joyous emotions, not merely on my own account or on thine, but likewise for the sake of those beloved girls, to whom that event would enable me to furnish an asylum� 84 l aura B ieger But wedlock is now more distant than ever� My heart bleeds to think of the sufferings which my beloved Mary is again fated to endure, but regrets are only aggravations of calamity� They are pernicious, and it is our duty to shake them off� (156-57) The use of the substantive form - “precariousness” - stresses the gravity of Edgar’s concern� Bringing in his sisters and the longing to provide for them amplifies it semantically. And although the first paragraph speaks about the future, the verbs are determined rather than speculative; adding “unquestionably” further enforces the closural force of this passage � Edgar’s breakup line is cast against the rhetorical substance of this sacrifice. The legal term “wedlock” turns the prospected marriage into a mere technicality that does not seem to have anything to do with his loving feelings for her� Pitted against this impersonal legal entity, the shared sense of duty and sacrifice offers a vision of unity beyond their disengagement� In the light of the decisiveness of his announcement that “wedlock is now more distant than ever,” the chapter’s final concession - “[t]hese considerations […] will be weighed when we meet” (156) - sounds like an empty promise� Which is another way of saying that the ‘narrative action’ undertaken in this carefully construed piece of rhetoric is at once direct and veiled� Edgar wants Mary to return the money even though this means the end of their future union and he is quite outspoken about his willingness to manipulate her to this end� “I will exert all my influence, it is not small, to induce her to restore [the money]” (144), he assures Weymouth - and thus also tells her since the recapitulated encounter with the stranger is part of his letter� In changing the contractual terms of their relationship, this announcement also changes the terms of narrative transfer: Edgar does not tell this story in order to arrive at a point where they belong together; he tells it to dissolve the prospect of belonging to her� The motive he gives to her is strictly moral (they cannot built their future on money that does not rightfully belong to them), but the epistolary form creates a narrative surface that is too opaque to gain any ‘genuine’ insight into the narrator’s psychic life� Had he only considered marrying her as long as she had money? Or had he begun to have doubts about marrying her prior to finding out that the money was most likely not rightfully hers, so that Weymouth’s visit came as a handy excuse for dismissing their wedding plans? In rendering these questions indeterminable, this passage makes tangible the limits of asserting stable meanings and predicable conduct inscribed into the narrative by its toying with the epistolary form� No matter how disturbed the letter-writing narrator may be, what he says and how he says it is carefully weighed with regard to the effects he hopes to evoke in his correspondent� In fact, the epistolary form of the narrative veils the narrator’s psychic state by exposing what is said to the anticipated judgment of the correspondent� And while conventional letter writing is subject to a similar kind of distortion, its embeddedness in lived rather than fictional relations relativizes its effects. The literary adaptation amplifies them by putting the recipient in a position in which both sides - and psyches - of the correspondence have to be imagined� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 85 Yet while the epistolary renderings of the novel make it impossible to gain any definite insight into Edgar’s ‘true’ or ‘private’ state of mind, the timing of his turn to a kind of narrative action that the epistolary form enables is striking: it happens right after his account of Weymouth’s story - from which we not only learn that Mary will most likely be poor again, but also that she must be pregnant - and right before Edgar’s mysterious awaking in the pitch-dark cave� His letter to Mary is plotted in a way that strongly suggests that Weymouth’s visit is the cause of Edgar sleepwalking into the wilderness� In fact, this plotting operation connects Weymouth’s visit immediately to Edgar’s transformation into a fearless Indian fighter and the odyssey back to his “natal township” (221, emphasis in the original) that has been swept up by violent revenge attacks of the Delaware Indians during his absence� Placing the prospective passage of direct address and the dissolution of Edgar and Mary’s engagement that it performs right in between these two events assigns the passage with a crucial function in the narrative design of the novel� It both separates the first part (dedicated to the search for Waldegrave’s murderer) from the second part (dedicated to Edgar’s horrifying experience of awaking in the cave and its disconcerting aftermath) but also binds them together� In fact, it seems that narration changes its course so radically because it seeks to interrupt a no-longer-desired trajectory of belonging� But there is more to this self-serving assertion of narrative agency: It is the ultimate act of dismissing any pursuit of belonging through material means� And if this break-up passage exposes the degree to which belonging depends on narrative it also suggests that it has to be sought in the retrospective parts that take over from here on again. How perfectly fitting that this consequential passage culminates in the narrator’s announcement that he will “[m]eanwhile […] return to [his] narrative” (157)� Prolonging the act of storytelling is indeed the narrator’s most vital desire� Belonging as Unterhaltung If narration is so clearly geared toward prolonging its own activity in this novel it comes as no surprise that one of its most striking features is the internal drive toward ‘narrative mobilization�’ 19 In fact, and at first thought somewhat paradoxically, it is through this feature that belonging is most rigorously pursued� To the extent that the possibility (or desire) of restoring the protagonist’s unsettled senses of place and self by way of actual moments of arrival or return are dismissed as narrative trajectories of belonging, the promise of recovery is shifted to the realm of imaginative self-assertion� Here, it is most effectively realized by means of staging and exploring the act of storytelling itself� Assuming narrative agency and testing its capacity to craft a compelling narrative thus becomes the rite de passage for the unsettled sense of belonging from which the novel speaks� But since this agency is impaired, the pursuit of belonging as creative consolidation cannot 19 The term is drawn from Brooks, Reading� 86 l aura B ieger aspire formal mastery in any conventional sense� Rather, exposing and exploring the limits of the narratable becomes the primary end of narrative form-giving� And if belonging as imaginative self-assertion is sought at these limits, in that semantic grey-zone where the imagination fades and falters, mobilizing rather than stabilizing the narrative offers itself as a viable course of action� Diegetically, the most powerful mobilizing force is physical movement� Sentimental mobilization is often described in physical terms (recollections “plunge” the narrator “into anguish and perplexity” and he is “hurried” into “the insanity of vengeance and grief” [8]), and intellectual quest is habitually performed across space� In fact, all main characters are constantly on the move, with the effect of delivering, spreading and merging their stories whenever they meet� The story of Edgar’s adventures begins programmatically in this regard: the protagonist is on the road, walking home from a rendezvous with his correspondent� And since his nocturnal journey makes him melancholic, he abandons his route to revisit the site of his friend’s murder, not minding that “[his] journey would, by these means, be considerably prolonged” (9)� In the account that follows, Edgar barely rests� Driven by his quest to find his friend’s murderer, he walks back and forth between his uncle’s house and the site of the crime, pursues his sleepwalking suspect all over the countryside for several nights in a row, and takes more long walks as he waits for the much desired interview� Even in those rare moments in which his movements are arrested, Edgar paces� But with this narrator, physical movement is a narrative motor that is frequently dissociated from consciousness, either through falling into states of ‘reverie’ or when sleepwalking� At once propelling and impairing the agency assumed by the narrator, these dissociated physical movements turn out to be the most effective vehicle to delineate and push against contemporary confines of belonging. I will return to them in the concluding section� The novel’s use of sentimental mobilization has been widely discussed in the scholarship on Brown� Announced by the author himself in the preliminary note “To the Public,” this strategy plays out in the frequent remarks about the narrator’s present state of turmoil and disorientation and in his highly emotionalized way of storytelling� Unlike in sentimental novels narrated by an external narrator, however, sentiment is not retrospectively projected into the events recounted by an uninvolved, morally unsuspicious observer to legitimize the telling of the tale� Rather, it propels the diegesis from within the fictional world. Only to the extent that the narrating self feels can it begin to connect with the experiencing self again; only if this connection holds can the protagonist tell his story and narrate himself back into having a place in the world� His feelings thus function as the throbbing pulse of the narrative� They determine the direction and intensity of every action performed or accounted for and the coercive force that holds the dispersed elements of the narrative together� Edgar reports, for example, to have left the road home to revisit the site of the murder when his “recollections once more plunged [him] into anguish and perplexity” (7); when arriving there, The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 87 the “mighty anguish” and “heart-bursting grief” of the half-naked stranger whom he finds suspiciously digging at this site moves him so profoundly that “[e]very sentiment, at length, yielded into sympathy” (11)� Sympathy is indeed the feeling that guides Edgar’s actions in the first half of the novel (i�e� his nocturnal trailing of this stranger through the province’s western wilderness, his quest for an interview, his explorations of the cave into which the other has disappeared and the provision of food for him)� In amplifying the mediating capacities of feelings as the narrator’s primary form of attachment to the world, the narrative taps (not without warning of the ‘dangers’ involved) into contemporary beliefs about the pedagogical merits of sentimental fiction. 20 In doing so, it acts out and stages Hume’s idea that ‘passions’ are an indispensible ingredient of any mental activity: they stimulate the imagination and thus make it possible to integrate new thoughts and impressions into the realm of the already familiar� Just as in Hume’s model, sense is made - or rather, in this novel, attempted to be made - when feelings intermingle with the ideas that the narrator relentlessly generates in his intellectual search for meaning� 21 Lists of questions, adding up to entire paragraphs, can be found throughout the text� When contemplating whether or not to revisit the site of Waldegrave’s murder, for example, Edgar asks himself: “What could I expect to find? Had it [the site] not been a hundred 20 Based on their reception of sensationalist models of the human mind, specifically those of Locke and Hume, progressive writers such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft, Robert Bage, Helen Maria Williams, Thomas Paine, and Brown had come to believe that emotions can encourage moral behavior and that imaginative literature could be used to the end of fostering a more democratic society� For further discussion see Clemit and Kelly� 21 For Hume, the imagination conditions all mental activity, be it directed toward external objects or toward introspection, just as it is impossible to know with certainty whether impressions or memories derive from a supposedly external object or are produced by the creative power of the mind (84-85)� In one of the many passages in the Treatise of Human Nature (1734) dedicated to this matter, he writes: “Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chace [sic] our imagination to the heavens, or the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear’d in that narrow compass� This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produc’d� The farthest we can go towards a conception of external objects, when supposed specifically different from our perceptions, is to form a relative idea of them, without pretending to comprehend the related objects� Generally speaking we do not suppose them specifically different; but only attribute them different relations, connections and durations” (67-68)� In this at once enabling and veiling conception, the imagination could become a counterforce to Hume’s skepticism: if all relations made by the imagination are incomprehensible, the laws of causality and principles of cognition (especially those still taken for granted by Locke) turned out to be “fictions of the mind.” Hume uses the expression frequently, cf. Treatise 216, 220ff�, 254, 259, 493� As Iser points out, Hume didn’t mean this in any derogative kind of way. As an incomprehensible premise of cognition, “fictions of the mind” became an essential concept in what Hume critiqued as misguided epistemological postulates (The Fictive 175)� For concise discussions of Hume’s model of the human mind and his notion of the imagination see Engell; Iser, The Fictive� 88 l aura B ieger times examined? Had I not extended my search to the neighboring groves and precipices? Had I not pored upon the brooks, and pryed into the pits and hollows, that were adjacent to the scene of blood? ” (8) These accumulative questions create a sense of constant speculation, and since they address their object of reasoning from various angles and perspectives they have the effect of enlarging it in the perception of its beholder� Just as in the narrator’s ‘emotional economy’ one sentiment leads to and enforces another, in his ‘intellectual economy’ a question does not lead to an answer but to another question, gradually building up to a crescendo of uncertainty� In one of these passages, Edgar explicitly ponders over the nature of his quest, realizing that he is not interested in revenge or any other direct action to be based on the knowledge gained, but in knowing itself� 22 Armin Paul Frank has interpreted these lists as an echo of Hume’s skeptical epistemology: since there is no way for the narrator to gain certainty about the external world, he’s in constant need to make hypotheses about it� 23 This also means, however, that curiosity is not at all an end in itself, as Edgar proposes� Rather, it is a vital strategy of bridging the virulent gap between inner and outer world by way of constant speculation - which, in turn, becomes Edgar’s only means of restoring his impaired sense of belonging� While the directedness of this intellectual quest in the service of ‘therapeutic’ restoration is mainly retrospective, its larger objective clearly lies in the future: Edgar seeks to restore his senses of place and self so that his life can continue� Yet the (erotic) desire of self-extension driving this intellectual quest is destined to continuously transgress what has already become familiar� It is precisely in this vein that Edgar cultivates his habit of venturing ever deeper into the province’s western wilderness (those parts into which his pursuit of Clithero and later on his own sleepwalking will lead him)� In fact, his excursions connect the epistemological and geographical uncertainties of his state of being - and respectively, intellectual and physical dynamics of narrative mobilization - in consequential ways� Earlier trips into the wilderness, undertaken with Sarsefield, “chiefly consisted in moralizing narratives and synthetical reasoning” and had “familiarized [him] with [the 22 “For what purpose shall I prosecute this search? What benefit am I to reap from this discovery? […] Curiosity, like virtue, is its own reward� Knowledge is of value for its own sake, and pleasure is annexed to the acquisition, without regard to anything beyond” (15-16)� 23 For Frank, the open-ended, reality-testing mode of narration results from this epistemological uncertainty that qualifies Edgar Huntly as a prototypical romance� He locates the emergence of the genre in Hume’s speculative epistemology and argues that it can be directly related to basic patterns of sense making that are paradigmatic to the ‘American’ experience: “Die aus Europa in die Neue Welt gekommenen mehr oder weniger intelligenten Wesen mussten erkennen, dass sich viele der mitgebrachten Erfahrungssätze (verites) hart mit amerikanischen Fakten stießen� Auf die alten Automatisierungen konnte man sich nicht verlassen� Neue Deutungsmuster mussten erst aufgebaut werden� Einstweilen war der Kolonist von Fall zu Fall auf eigene interpretierenden Anstrengungen angewiesen” (63)� From here it is only a small step to the means and ends oriented epistemology of pragmatism that is often regarded as the only genuinely ‘American’ philosophy� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 89 province’s] outlines and the more accessible parts” (92)� But after his mentor had left, Edgar kept exploring for the sole reason of expanding the realm of the known and the familiar: “Every new excursion indeed added somewhat to my knowledge� New tracks were pursued, new prospects detected, new summits were gained� My rambles were productive of incessant novelty, though they always terminated in the prospect of limits that could not be overleaped” (93)� The last sentence is especially telling with regard to the true nature of his quest: more than any certainty of knowledge about the region gained by his excursions, Edgar’s explorations incessantly assure him of - and thus familiarize him with - the very limits of the known and familiar world� Novalis’s saying that “[a]ll philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home anywhere” addresses precisely this impossible double bind of ‘post-enlightened’ modes of belonging� 24 Edgar’s quest to recover his sense of place and self can be read as an early American version of this quintessentially modern sense of homelessness, not just in the transcendental sense of falling out of the security of religious but also in the pragmatic, geographical sense of exposure to radical unfamiliarity of the North American ‘frontier�’ In fact, Edgar’s account of his awaking in the cave dramatically maps both senses of existential uncertainty onto one another� The despair that he feels in this situation is all the more dramatic since there is no God for him to reason with� His atheism already played out in his first reported instance of sleepwalking: he hides the letters that Waldegrave wrote to him during his short phase as an atheist, from which the latter soon reconverted, but Edgar never did� In this second incident of rude awakening, Edgar’s atheism prevents him from making sense of his incomprehensible ‘captivity’ and the life-threatening dangers caused by it (to die of hunger, thirst, in an attack by a wild beast or hostile Indians) in terms of a transitory stage in a longer journey home: “I had none but capricious and unseen fate to condemn� The author of my distress and the means he had taken to decoy my hither, were incomprehensible� Surely my senses were fettered or deprived by some spell� I was still asleep, and this was merely a tormenting vision, or madness had seized me, and the darkness that environed me and the hunger that afflicted me, existed only in my own imagination” (164). 25 Edgar’s response to this threat was to kill with one strike and then eat a ferocious panther that suddenly emerged from the darkness of the cave, a deed that redirects his self-devouring urge “to bite the flesh of [his] arm” (164) to an object of his environment� It has often been noted that this moment marks 24 “Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein” (Novalis 179)� 25 Many critics have pointed out the resemblances between this novel and the colonial accounts of Indian captivity that were still popular at Brown’s time� See for example Slotkin, Hamelman, Smith-Rosenberg, and Rowe� Luciano takes the argument even further when suggesting that “Edgar Huntly is itself a captivity narrative, though of a different sort: although Edgar is at no point in the novel imprisoned by Indians, he is captivated by the carnal body, as much as he hopes the reader will be by his narrative” (11)� For reasons that will become clear as I further unfold my own reading of the text I would modify this argument by stressing that Edgar is captivated by his “sorely wounded” (13) mind as much as by his carnal desires� 90 l aura B ieger a fundamental transformation in the novel’s protagonist: his rebirth as a savage-killing American performed, in Turner-like fashion, by the wilderness setting of the western frontier� 26 However, just as striking as this transformation of his character is the shift in talking about his fate: in his efforts to make sense of what has happened, the “tyrant” who mysteriously took him captive becomes an incomprehensible “author” of distress - a position that Edgar, in assuming narrative agency to mediate this experience, then seizes for himself just as instinctively as he kills and eats the panther to sustain his threatened life� Calling the novel Edgar’s “memoirs” is a testimony to this second rebirth: that as an author who needs to narrate himself back into having a place in the world� In fact, what the author of this memoir yearns for more than anything else is to be sustained by his capacity of storytelling� The German term unterhalten (entertain) has two meanings that converge in this longing: to be ‘pleasantly diverted’ and ‘comfortably supported�’ In Brown’s novel, the desire to retreat into a self-absorbed and self-sustaining state of Unterhaltung - the narrator’s longing to inhabit his story - turns out to be stronger than any longing for a place in the world. The final lines of his epic letter to Mary read like a concession in this matter: “I am surprised at the length to which my story has run. I thought that a few days would suffice to complete it, but one page has insensibly been added to another till I have consumed weeks and filled volumes. Here I will draw to a close” (282), he announces in an abortive verbal gesture before ending with the promise to visit her, a destination that has long been dismissed for matters of belonging� The Power of Narrative and the Limits of the Narratable Read along these lines, Edgar Huntly is a story about narrative’s restless drive to recover a lost or impaired sense of belonging� It is a story about a young man who sets out to narrate himself back into having a place in the world, emotionally exploits his listeners, and ends up inhabiting the word of his story rather than the world beyond it� In due process, he integrates, in minute detail and sympathetic elaboration, narratives of others into his own with the effect of expanding the boundaries of his textual and imaginary ‘habitation�’ And while these other narratives enlarge and pluralize the body of the written text and produce idiosyncrasies that can be read as early experimentations with modernist techniques (such as multiple focalization and heteroglossia), they also give significant impulses for the evolution of the story and the pursuit of belonging thus performed� In fact, throughout the 26 To quote one of the most famous passages of Turner’s seminal essay: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization� The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe� It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin” (2)� For discussions of Edgar’s transformation/ rebirth upon awaking in the cave see especially Luciano 13-15, and Garner 444-46� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 91 novel, narrative is portrayed as an immensely powerful agent in regulating social relations and the highly mobile space that evolves from them� Time and again, it immediately and substantially affects states of belonging: by moving characters to unforeseeable places, transforming them, and thrusting them out of seemingly stable social relations� More often than not, the effects of such narrative actions are disruptive, working against the pursuit of a viable sense of belonging in the world, and in the service of shifting the existential task of dwelling to imaginary places� Clithero is the most extreme figure in this regard. That he serves as Edgar’s doppelgänger heightens his symbolic importance, because as Edgar takes on more and more of the other’s behavior one cannot help but wonder if he could eventually become an equally dangerous psychopath� But back to Clithero� After his crime has exiled him from the comfortable home provided by Mrs� Lorimer on her estate in Ireland, his sense of belonging hinges on his possession of her memoir� He takes it with him - steals it - not only for its value as a life-enhancing souvenir (when he thought it lost he was determined to take his life; when it reappeared he was willing to live on), but also because, once abroad, this manuscript bears the only proof that he ever had a place where he belonged� The document - through its material presence, the tactile imprint of its author, and the power of the story it contains - oscillates between being a (mobile) agent of (provisional) emplacement and the fetish of a home forever lost� 27 Cast against its owner’s fleeting state of belonging, his final outbreak of madness must be read as the outcome of the unbearable interference with an already precarious condition. When he finally establishes a somewhat bearable mode of dwelling as an outcast on the verge of a frontier community, and apparently even stops wallowing in the tragedy of his murderous act of self-expulsion, Edgar retells it to him - only to remind him how exclusively his sense of self and place anchors in what he calls his “evil destiny” (289)� In fact, Clithero’s stubborn belief in the metaphysical burden imposed on him (and the tale that he crafted around it) gives him a sense of identity, purpose, and place in his tragic state of belonging as non-belonging: he is the one with this extraordinary fate of having killed his beloved patroness, and will have to endure it until God relieves him� Meanwhile, he lives in an abandoned hut whose location is close enough to other people so that he will always be reminded of his lonesome destiny� His interlocking senses of place and self are defined precisely through the ways in which he does not belong anywhere, to anyone or anything except his story� Crafting his life-narrative in this tragic form grants him a sense of agency - of affirmation and of choice - that is essential for his survival� For the life of him he cannot give it away; if it turns out that Mrs� Lorimer is alive he is “reserved for the performance of a new crime� [His] evil destiny will have it so” (289), if just to set the fateful 27 Clithero’s obsession with this object highlights a fundamental contradiction in the relation between property and belonging� The most treasured and forcefully claimed piece of his few possessions (and thus the kind of object that one would expect to give emotional stability), it is not so much an object of ownership but an object to which he belongs in the sense of ‘being possessed’ by it� 92 l aura B ieger story straight again� Edgar’s - not unsimilar - inclination to pursue belonging solely though narrative self-assertion is severely questioned by the other’s manic precedence� If he loses touch with the external world and slips into “the universe of the imagination” (Hume 67), his story could become an equally hazardous dwelling place� But Edgar Huntly is as much a novel about the power of narrative as it is a novel about the limits of the narratable - and about the ways in which these limits regulate the possibilities and modalities of belonging that its narrative operations map out� Installing a sleepwalking narrator with a tortured psyche is a consequential choice in this regard� “The incapacity of sleep denotes a mind sorely wounded” (13), Edgar sympathetically comments after finding out that the main suspect in the murder of his friend is a sleepwalker who displays a great deal of anguish when being in that state� And while Edgar waits almost until the end of the ‘Mary-letter’ until he addresses his own sleepwalking, he must have known about it all along, and thus also refers to himself when writing about the other� The formulation used here strongly resonates with Erasmus Darwin’s then contemporary notion of sleepwalking as a mental disease: a state in which “general sensation” is disconnected from a person’s bodily actions that can, in turn, engage freely in an “exertion to relieve pain” (202); and it resonates with sensational psychology’s core idea that perceptions can forever form - and possibly harm and distort - a person’s mind� 28 In the absence of psychoanalytical models of the unconscious, sleepwalking - conceived as a mode of action both purposedriven and separated from rational conduct - offers itself as a potent imaginary to explore the limits of the narratable� 28 Darwin’s ideas about sleepwalking were widely circulating as part of his influential study Zoonomia, to which Brown was exposed at the Friendly Club, the literary club he was a member of. Darwin himself was heavily influenced by Lockean notions of sensational psychology, particularly their challenging of Cartesian notions of enlightened rationality by proposing that the human mind does not process innate ideas but begins its life as a tabula rasa on which sensory perceptions leave immediate and lasting imprints� Thus conceived, the psyche emerges from an initial incident of wounding; “from its first experience after birth, [it] becomes marked, scored, impressed, and indented” (Engell 18)� The shift in thinking about the human mind in terms of a safely enclosed, self-contained entity imagined by Descartes to a genuinely vulnerable target of random impressions corresponds with an uncertain, irritated sense of belonging� It is important to add, however, that Locke pairs this vulnerability with a strong instinct of survival: Not only can the mind ‘repeat’ the simple ideas derived from sense perception, but it has the capacity “to rearrange, to alter, and to fuse the separate elements it receives in ‘an almost infinite variety’” (18). Among the most immediate effects of this rethinking was a declining belief in the virtues of authoritarian childrearing and its replacement by the pedagogical ideal of fostering an “affective individualism” (Fliegelman 12-29)� Locke writes: “If the mind was not formed at birth and from this moment on safely installed with rationality, the little, and almost insensible Impressions on our tender Infancies have very important and lasting Consequences” (Axtell, Educational Writings 12)� It might be added that Descartes’s self-contained model of human rationality can be read as a prior reaction to an irritated sense of belonging, sheltering human rationality in a quasi-hermetic capsule to keep the world in order after the coercive epistemologies of the pre-enlightenment era had lost their power� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 93 There are at least two incidents from which we can assume that Edgar’s mind has indeed been sorely wounded: His closest friend died of violent murder in his arms not long before the narrative sets in, and as a child he found half of his family killed by Indians upon returning home with his two younger sisters� These events have been used as touchstones for reading the novel as a tale of traumatization, thus giving occasion to trace the narrative mechanisms of a compulsive desire to repeat striving against an unconscious need to forget and repress (see Bellis), or as trauma-typical inscriptions of a guilt-tortured psyche from which this imaginary effort of storytelling springs (see Cassuto)� Yet while traumatic experience and unconscious repression constitute very real limits of the narratable, and readings which are sensitive to psychic operations stirred by them perform important work in delineating the resulting silences, strategies of narrative deferral and delayed re-semantization, their a-historical assumptions about the human psyche are of limited use for the task at hand� The project of making audible contemporary concerns about belonging articulated by the novel demands to approach its struggle with the limits of the narratable from within the enunciative structure of the text� Sleepwalking offers itself as the most promising venue in this regard, not least because it functions as a powerful device of producing and intensifying all those gaps and uncertainties in the narrative that the narrator’s efforts of emplotment relentlessly seek to smoothen out� Not unlike the walk home in a state of ‘reverie,’ in which the protagonist moves through his environment with his perceptions so completely absorbed by his mental activities that he suddenly ‘discovers’ his uncle’s house in front of him, sleepwalking provides a way of staging a striking perceptual disjunction of his inner and his outer world� But different from the earlier incident, it imagines a state of disjunction that amplifies his split consciousness by casting his awareness of the inner world into the (semi)darkness of sleep� As a narrative device, sleepwalking thus pulls the psychic world inside out and maps it onto the external world, which then unwillingly becomes a stage for experiences that are painfully entrapped in a person’s troubled mind and have no other outlet than this physical, absent-minded and ultimately ‘mad’ kind of ‘exertion�’ 29 29 The narrative can only be so obsessively entangled with physical and affective mobility because the narrator’s efforts to remember are not only split along the ‘usual’ lines of object/ subject, past/ present, experiencing/ narrating self but are, within that split, further punctured by movements and feelings from which - despite performing them - he will remain forever separated� The novel’s excessive investment in the body has frequently been noted� See for example Luciano, Burgett, and Dillon� From a perspective of belonging this investment dramatizes the fact that the body naturally emplaces each individual� In Edgar Huntly somatic emplacement is particularly charged and uneasy because the narrator’s body is forced to inhabit the irreconcilable, ostensibly ‘pathologic’ gap between the narrator’s inner and outer world that the novel idiosyncratically stages� In the tortured psyche of the novel’s narrator this gap is dramatically widened under the impact of his sleepwalking� In the process of gaining awareness of this habit that his letter seeks to put into words, Edgar’s body not only functions as the primary site and mobile vessel of his ‘pain-exerting’ activities but is also assigned with the role of the mute and secret witness of all those movements performed 94 l aura B ieger More than a mere backdrop for a psychological drama, however, Edgar’s actions in this eclipsed state of consciousness have real effects on the external world - a world imagined as a haunted frontier space trenched with violence and dispossession� As this self-disclosing force of mobilization, Edgar’s troubled psychic state simultaneously propels, dislocates, and punctures the narrative desire to belong� The erring, deviant movement thus generated enables the telling of the story by thrusting life into a state of crisis, conditioning the very grounds of imaginative recovery and, like all retrospective narrative, by demanding a repeated traversing of already covered grounds� But a retrospective narrative under the spell of sleepwalking demands repetition of an unusual kind� While it technically sets out to cover the same, disturbed ground again with the desire of making it meaningful, familiar, and ideally inhabitable, it actually covers (some of) this ground for the first time (since it was initially traversed with the narrator performing his actions in other spheres)� One passage gives insight into the narrator’s dreaming psyche: the account of Edgar’s first incident of sleepwalking, in which he tells Mary how “the image of Waldegrave was flitting before [him]” during his sleep, and how the appearance was in a state of “inquietude and anger�” It reminds him of having neglected to perform “[s]ome service or duty” (130) which Edgar, upon awaking, remembers to be the destruction of a correspondence between the two that he had promised to send his friend� But as we learn from his further account, not only had he not destroyed the letters, he also promised Mary to copy them for her as a souvenir of the deceased, knowing that she would be the last person Waldegrave would have wanted to read them� When wanting to get the letters out of their theft-proof hiding place to see if he could solve at least part of his problem by omitting certain passages from the transcript, he finds the entire correspondence missing, and he learns from his uncle that someone was just walking around in the attic� The plotline is lost out of sight when Weymouth visits the Huntly farm the next day and delivers his story, triggering Edgar’s much more spectacular incident of sleepwalking that takes him to the pitch-dark cave in the remotest part of the province, the challenging starting point of his adventurous journey home. One-hundred-and-twenty pages later, the first sleepwalking incident is revisited: Sarsefield tells Edgar about having seen him heading in disjunction with the supposedly ‘sane’ facets of his consciousness� By far the most dramatic scene in this regard is Edgar’s awaking in the cave after his sleepwalking into the wilderness� His reported consciousness of “nothing but existence” (159) is a state in which his sense of embodiment has been radically detached from any further sense of place� Yet even in this crude state, it provides the only grounds from which he can reconnect himself with the external world: by stretching out his sore limbs, feeling that he is lying on his back, noticing the rugged texture of the ground underneath him and the striking freshness of the air in his lungs� This tactile mode of reconnection then gradually expands, first into assessing the immediate space around him (walking along the wall of the cave, yelling out at the top of his lungs to estimate its size), then by providing food and drink and protecting himself against threats from the wilderness, and finally by desperately, almost mindlessly, trying to get home. The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 95 out into the wilderness barely dressed, with no shoes on his feet, and not responding to being called by his name. He also tells him about finding the missing letters hidden in the roof of the uncle’s house, thus ‘proving’ the earlier incident of sleepwalking� The dream, the erring narrator can gather now, not only reminded him of his duty to destroy the letters, it must also have triggered his guilty conscience� The following deeds thus acted out the ‘pain’ this caused him by ‘saving’ the letters from his duty of copying them for Mary, and hiding them at a place where their gradual destruction would have eventually resulted in the fulfillment of his promise to Waldegrave. Yet how he felt when performing these actions (was he swift or reluctant? was he grieving? ), or how he chose his hiding place is non-recoverable since no one was consciously present when these grounds were traversed for the first time. This fragmented itinerary of narrative recovery demonstrates that meaningful, familiar, potentially inhabitable grounds cannot be ‘achieved’ by the narrator’s hermeneutical detective work alone� The narrator’s longing for other stories responds to the structural limitations of the narrative agency imagined by the novel. It gravitates toward other narratives to fill the blanks in the narrator’s impaired consciousness and compensate for the instability immanent to his performance. Sarsefield’s account of witnessing Edgar sleepwalking is the most interesting example in this regard� For a hopeful moment, the longing for an interlocutor turns into the longing for, and performance of a conjoint form of storytelling. Both Edgar’s story and Sarsefield’s story would have remained incomplete without the account of the other� Yet as it turns out, such complementing narratives may be just as erring as one’s own. Sarsefield, the figure with the greatest credentials for exact observation and rational meditation, was certain to have seen Edgar drown after his fall into the river, just as he wants to have seen Clithero drown after jumping off the ship that was supposed to take him to detention. In the first case, his flawed narrative is corrected through Edgar’s account; in the second case, there might not even be an error: maybe Clithero did die after going overbroad� But the previous misinterpretation lingers and destabilizes - in not securely concluding Clithero’s dangerously erring state - any viable grounds for future dwelling� The longing to create such grounds is severely constrained by this eclipsed mode of repetition, which is put to nothing less than the task of reconciling a narrating consciousness with the hazardous fact that it has been oblivious of its external world and absorbed in interior pains and obsessions that stem from its past, not from its present� And if the only incident of sleepwalking that allows for a rather complete reconstruction of its performer’s inner and outer world clearly connects it to an unacknowledged feeling of guilt, the sleepwalking that Edgar witnesses before performing his own underscores this connection. When he first sees Clithero in this state he is powerfully moved by the other’s grief and despair; his story, delivered in response to Edgar’s suspicions, leaves no doubt that he, too, sleepwalks out of guilt� The obsessive burial of the stolen manuscript is his ‘pain-exerting’ action: he breaks into his own secret hiding place, hides and nearly destroys 96 l aura B ieger his most valued treasure just like Edgar breaks into his treasure chest, hides, and nearly destroys Waldegrave’s letters� In both cases, sleepwalking generates actions that are potentially harmful to the one performing them with the effect of turning the perpetrator into a prospective victim and blurring the distinction between the two� This effect of leveling is of great importance for the narrative design of the novel and its implied vision of belonging� In crafting a story in which sleepwalking springs from an ailing, inarticulable sense of guilt that is potentially hazardous for its bearer, the novel does not exploit the topic of guilt for the task of moralizing� To the contrary, it exploits guilt for the sake of suspending moral judgment� Trapped between a rejected future and a haunted past, dwelling in this narratively created state of suspension is the yearning to belong that drives the telling of this story� Sleepwalking, which is not exploited as a stabilizing metaphor but as a metonymic trajectory, “the figure of contiguity and combination, the figure of syntagmatic relations” (Brooks, “Masterplot” 281), is the most effective enabler of this task� Through its conjoint forces of driving, deferring, and punctuating the projected story, the narrator’s longing to dwell in his narrative coincides with and is continually reinforced by the longing to dwell in a state of narratively suspended guilt� While this logic of suspension is most powerfully enforced through sleepwalking, it pervades the narrator’s actions throughout his storytelling� The initiative impulse to reconnect with his fiancée is entangled with feelings of guilt. Edgar knows that he has kept her waiting, maybe for an irresponsibly long time, and is most likely already convinced that he has to cancel their engagement when he starts writing� Because he feels guilty about these matters, he longs to create a favorable frame for her inevitable judgment. It also plays out in Edgar’s final letter to Sarsefield, which he closes with the words: “I shall not escape your censure, but I shall likewise, gain your compassion� I have erred, not through sinister or malignant intentions, but from the impulse of misguided, indeed, but powerful benevolence” (290)� This desire for a suspension of guilt brackets and undergirds the entire narrative� 30 Upon learning that Clithero has impulsively killed Mrs� Lorimer’s evil brother and, out of manic regret, nearly killed her, Edgar reasons that 30 Another example would be the break-up passage: Edgar urges Mary to return the money, confronts her with the resulting consequence while doing everything to make the end of their engagement seem inevitable, portraying himself as a victim� And although this passage achieves the most conclusive density and thus creates the strongest sense of an ending in the middle of the book, the final sentences counter the conclusiveness that has just been reached with the resurging longing for suspension: “These considerations, however, will be weighted when we meet” (157), he announces before steering straight into that part of his adventure that will turn him into the greatest victim of his sleepwalking: the moment of awaking in the cave� In the same passage it also plays out on a very different register of speech - omission - in Edgar’s massive silence when Weymouth mentions the rumors about Mary’s pregnancy (Is she really pregnant? Is it Edgar’s child? Is this silence based on a mutual agreement or is it imposed by him? Is he about to abandon his responsibility? )� As if responding to this massive silence, the opening paragraph of the following chapter features the word “pregnant” that has been so thoroughly avoided when recounting Weymouth’s story The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 97 he has “acted in obedience to an impulse which he could not control, nor resist� Shall we impute guilt where there is no evil design? ” (91)� This early judgment is crucial, for it turns the other from being the bearer of Edgar’s unbound sympathy into a personification of suspended guilt - and into a powerful figure of imaginary kinship. As a result of identifying with (and thus internalizing) this imaginary placeholder of suspension, Edgar moves away from his efforts to save the other which constitutes the narrative thrust of the novel’s first part, and toward the repetitive reenactment or doubling of his behavior that constitutes the narrative thrust of the second part (with his own transformation into a sleepwalker as its most evocative token)� For the reader anticipating this event, Edgar’s earlier instance of crude reasoning turns him into a major suspect in the case of his best friend’s murder with the effect of mobilizing an immense longing for suspension� 31 This suspicion is ‘officially’ proven wrong at the end of the ‘Mary-letter.’ On its final pages, Edgar reports that Waldegrave has been the random victim of a revenge-seeking Indian who was determined to kill “the first human being whom he should meet” (281), and credits himself for most likely being the killer of that Indian� And yet, Edgar stays closely associated with his friend’s violent death� Does the desire to destroy Waldegrave’s letters acted out in his first instance of sleepwalking not hint at an even deeper desire to destroy the person who wrote them? Could this have to do with the latter’s return to faith while Edgar stayed an atheist, a topic that is passionately discussed in the letters? Had Edgar secretly wished for his friend’s death because he previously knew about the latter’s safekeeping of Weymouth’s money, started his relation with Mary out of sheer calculation to participate in the inheritance, and now feels so guilty about both that he sleepwalks into the wilderness? Does his strange friendship with the old Delaware woman known to the region’s settlers as “Old Deb” or “Queen Mab” who turns out to be the mastermind behind the outburst of revenge violence that killed both Waldegrave and Edgar’s uncle, not strongly suggest a secret complicacy with destruction? Again, sleepwalking offers itself as the most productive figure of contiguity and combination to make sense of this looming suspicion� In this case, it connects with the second name of the old Delaware woman, Queen Mab, a famous fairy character in English folklore, in highly suggestive ways� The name stems from a Celtic legend in which Queen Mab is the warrior queen� Frequently evoked by poets such as Herrick, Spencer and Shelly, the in what can be read as a metonymic slippage of the term� “The following incidents are of a kind to which the most ardent invention has ever conceived a parallel� […] The scene [awaking in the cave] was pregnant with astonishment and horror” (158)� This proximate metonymic use of the term can be read as a hint towards an act of deferred, probably unwillful acknowledgement� 31 Having the sleepwalker turn out as the murderer was presumably the idea of an earlier work, “Somnambulism,” that Brown never finished. Edgar Huntly toys with this suspicion, for example in the final chapter, shortly before the murderer is revealed, when Edgar ponders over his and Clithero’s sleepwalking and concludes: “How little cognizance men have over the actions and motives of each other! ” (278)� 98 l aura B ieger best-known version of the character goes back to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where Mab brings the dreams to sleepers and presides over childbirth� 32 Edgar is indeed closely connected to this name: inspired by her “pretentions to royalty” (209) and the strangeness of her appearance in which he saw a resemblance with this folklore fairy queen, he gave it to her� Within the evolution of the narrative, this act of name-giving provides the impulse to tell her story, thus integrating an uncanny reminder of the native population’s fate of dispossession into the imaginative texture of the novel that might even be read as the token of an emerging sense of discomfort (or possibly even guilt) on the side of the European settlers from which Edgar speaks� Her tribe, he reports, once inhabited a village on the grounds now owned by his uncle� When repeated harassments drove her people from their village she refused to accompany them, burnt the wigwams, and, companied by her three wild dogs, moved into a hut deep in the woods where she “conceived that by remaining behind her countrymen she succeeded in government, and retained the possession of all this region” (208)� In the other’s narrative pursuit of belonging that becomes tangible here, “[t]he English were aliens and sojourners, who occupied the land only by her connivance and permission, and who she allows to remain on no other terms but those of supplying her wants” (208-9)� When re-telling her story Edgar spends an entire paragraph describing how she is in constant conversation with her dogs, granting her (as only woman and the only indigenous character of the novel) a voice of her own; however, she does not speak directly, for she refuses the language of the colonizer, and her long isolation has rendered her unintelligible even in her native language� Only Edgar has studied a little of her jargon, and, as a result, she is favorably inclined to him� For Myra Jehlen, her incessant, unintelligible speech addressing wild beasts, her control over these beasts and their strange loyalty to her “parody the rituals of domestication” make her “a creature of romance and of Romanticism, conceivably a heroine, if a perverse one” (165)� Edgar directly participates in creating this possible heroine: by associating her with the power of fomenting weird dreams that turns her - at least in Edgar’s fancy - into a possible midwife in the dream material of his own (and by extension also his community’s) worst nightmares, some of which he might have already acted out while sleepwalking� But “midway through the paragraph in which this possibility suggests itself, Brown pulls back” (165), having his protagonist concede that he has gone too far in seeing “some rude analogy between this personage and her whom the poets of old-time have delighted to celebrate: thou wilt perhaps discover nothing but incongruities between them, but, be that is it may, Old Deb and Queen Mab soon came indiscriminate to general use” (Edgar Huntly 209)� Edgar’s lack of insistence in the rightness of this name strips it of the magic powers it had barely seized� Does this mean, as Jehlen argues, that the novel’s only potentially transgressive character falters, that history wins over 32 In Romeo and Juliet the character is evoked in Mercutio’s speech, Act I, scene 4� A comprehensive genealogy of this reference is given in Barnard and Shapiro’s annotated edition of Brown’s novel (138-39)� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 99 romance? That it was doomed to falter since its subversive potential was too weak to be fully realized by the narrative? Not necessarily� Following Paul Witherington, one can also read romance and history as two different voices, both speaking from the text in poetically sound ways� Oscillating between these two voices, the narrative would then not be an expression of the narrator’s personal guilt (and no product of a tension between conscious and unconscious levels of his storytelling)� Rather, it would express a tension between romantic aspiration and realistic qualification that the text articulates in idiosyncratic, yet exemplary ways (Witherington 166-69)� I am rehearsing these arguments here, because the double-voicedness of the narrative that they address exposes yet another limit of the narratable - and with it, another trajectory of suspending guilt� For since the romantic imagination that is emerging at this time is not yet fully hatched, it cannot assume the role of a transformative force in its own right� Historical guilt can thus only be expressed when narrative agency and narrating consciousness are formally separated� In the absence of an artistic vision that would allow for the suturing of the gap between the experiencing and narrating self that ails this consciousness, guilt is exploited to the end of not only creating in a state of suspension but dwelling in it� And as the novel clearly shows, this mode of dwelling corrodes the foundations of the community that is imagined here� Its story of ‘attempted homecoming’ is thus indeed a perverted one� Insisting on an imperative need to tell as its driving force, it impairs the narrative agency that is construed to pursue this need in ways that entangle the yearning to belong with a hazardous desire for suspension - of past guilt and future anxiety� Dwelling in Narrative In Edgar Huntly, belonging is sought at the post-revolutionary frontier, imagined as a hazardous amalgam of a western frontier of indigenous violence and an eastern frontier of immigrant contagion that is thoroughly interlocked with an emerging, yet equally uninhabitable space of liberal capitalism� The novel pairs this troubled space with an inner world of anxiety and distortion, which is then turned back onto the outer world by the narrator’s habit of sleepwalking� This mode of action, conceived as both purposeful and separated from rational conduct, is employed to stage a narrative act of recovering a troubled ground previously traversed without a proper sense of it while uncovering a state of impossible belonging along the way� In the intricate situation thus produced, the incoherent and excessively sprawling narrative that the protagonist tells to his fiancée in the form of a letter offers itself as the only viable dwelling place� And if the result is a novel that is equally concerned with the power of narrative and the limits of the narratable, one of its most striking features is testing narrative’s displacing and emplacing capacities. In fact, the novel stages its characters (trouble at) fitting into the larger scheme of their respective time-space in ways that expose 100 l aura B ieger the contemporary limitations of belonging as limits of the narratable� In the world of this novel, dwelling thus always and inevitably entails an active dwelling in narrative� Which also means that narrativity is explored as a lifesustaining practice that springs from an insurmountable need to interpret one’s surroundings and express one’s being in relation to them� In the formgiving act thus performed, the need for narrative assumes a particular kind of agency: The letter-writing protagonist ruthlessly exploits his capacities to make choices about the telling of his story and impose them on the world to the self-serving end of dwelling in a state of suspension� He manages to draw his interlocutors into this state, and thus artfully prolong it, by tapping into an inarticulable guilt about past conquest and dispossession on the one hand, and an equally inarticulable anxiety about the rise of liberal capitalism on the other� Looking back on the reading performed here, it is remarkable how utterly troubled Edgar Huntly’s spatial and psychic imaginaries are, both in themselves and in their relation to one another� As the narrative unfolds, it engenders and explores its abusive narrative agency - all of the interlocutors experience serious harm - to the end of suturing and cohering the haunted world of its own making� In is indeed striking how unstable and ambiguous the novel’s articulations of these worlds are� Instead of offering closure, they tend to involve their reader in a process of recovery whose outcome is quintessentially provisional and uncertain� It is to this end that the novel foregrounds the psychological dimension of narrative production (i�e� by creating a narrator who excessively puts his troubled psyche on display) and employs forceful, engaging modes of narration� I read this instability as a poetic response to the moment of uneasy transition from which the novel speaks, a response to the faltering faith in the adequacy of reason or religion to settle the fundamental uncertainties of human existence� But while the novel turns, in tune with the emerging romantic spirit, to the imagination and the senses in its attempts to cope with these doubts, it remains skeptical about their ‘healing’ capacities and embraces moral ambiguity and a plot design of narrative suspension instead. In doing so, it exploits fictional instability to the end of exposing the existing limits of the narratable, pushing beyond them with the effect of engending the ‘frontier gothic’ as a new ‘lifeform’ for the narrative pursuit of belonging� But is this new ‘life-from’ suited for the task at hand? Is Edgar Huntly not rather a novel of disastrous, or possibly joyful failure, of belonging rejected rather than restored? And if narrative is indeed explored as a quintessential component of dwelling in the world, does this novel not show exactly the problems and dangers involved with making a home in it? It certainly does� In fact, I think that it is a seminal in precisely this regard� It expresses and explores, for the first time in American literature, a quintessentially modern sense of belonging - the sense that to the tenuous degree that one can be at home at all, it is in and through narrative; that there is no other way� How comfortable such a home is depends on its narrative construction, much of which is ruthlessly imposed on us through external forces and conventions� The Need for Narrative and the Limits of Narratability 101 And yet dwelling is a practical task with an inherent need to be enacted and performed that draws us, like the sleepwalking protagonist in Brown’s novel, out into the world where it leaves us with at least some agency of how this task is to be met, how it engages us with the world and those inhabiting it� Limited and possibly hazardous as this agency may be, it can only be assumed and acted out through narrative, which may, in turn, be changed in its conventions� Expressing one’s discomfort about this task and its limited means along with the need for a place in the world may be the only way to build a home� Boldly acquiescing such feelings in narrative neither solves the problem of belonging nor does it create interesting literature� Works Cited Appleby, Joyce� Capitalism and a New Social Order. 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New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1991� Print� J ohn c. h avard Ironizing Identity: Cosmopolitanism and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” as Critique of Hispanic Exceptionalism 1 Readers of Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855) who are sensitive to questions of identity and race have tended to focus on Amasa Delano’s view - funneled through free-indirect discourse - of black slaves (e�g�, Karcher 109- 59; Tawil 191-208)� However, such studies are now supplemented by acknowledgement that Delano’s response to Benito Cereno reflects Anglo-American prejudices against Catholic Spain (Emery; DeGuzmán 47-67; Nelson, Word 112-14; Sundquist 143, 148)� Such views emerged in the colonial period as the “Black Legend,” the common Northern European belief that Spanish colonizers were bloodthirsty conquerors whose stated aim of spreading Catholicism in the Americas was a pretext for exploiting indigenous peoples� These views toward Spain were replayed in the racialist atmosphere of the antebellum United States, when US Americans construed Spain as a quaint but despotic nation whose (by now waning) power in the New World had to be curtailed by US expansion and influence. 2 My essay makes two points that shed light on these issues� First of all, as Allan Moore Emery and Eric Sundquist indicate, the stereotypes upon which Delano relies do not simply construe Spaniards as the Black Legend’s violent despots� In Delano’s view, the Spanish are also languorous and inefficient (Emery 50-53; Sundquist 148). These characteristics were not as pronounced in the colonial typologies� I contend that Delano’s perspective thus reflects a nineteenth-century US evolution of Anglophone attitudes toward the Spanish� In what I describe as an exceptionalist discourse of Hispanicism, 1 I presented earlier versions of this essay at the University of Rochester Graduate Colloquium in 2010 and the 2012 meeting of the American Studies Association� I would like to acknowledge those in attendance for their thought-provoking feedback, with particular thanks to Melanie Hernandez, Donald Pease, and Russell Sbriglia� The essay is a product of my dissertation, and I would also like to thank my dissertation advisors, John Michael and Ezra Tawil, whose guidance shaped the project� Lastly, I would like to thank the editors of LIT and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, which were invaluable in helping me finalize the essay. 2 The term “Black Legend” was coined by Spanish journalist Juderías in 1914, but it refers to a much older tradition� It was originally only vaguely tied to race, but with the rise of more systematized racialist views in the antebellum period, it took on specifically racialist overtones that emphasized the Iberian peninsula’s history of racial intermixture and pervasive intermixture in the colonies (50)� On the Black Legend, see further DeGuzmán; Gibson; Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan; and Retamar� On the evolution of racial understandings of difference in the nineteenth century, see Horsman; and Jordan� 106 J ohn c. h avard Delano self-reflexively imagines himself against Cereno as a US American who is particularly well-fitted for a managerial role in an emergently capitalist, liberal-democratic world� Delano thus voices antebellum imperialist beliefs that Hispanophone peoples - whether “off-white” Spaniards (DeGuzmán xxiv, xxvii) or Spanish Americans of mixed Hispanic, African, and/ or indigenous ancestry - were racially incapacitated for the duties of sovereignty� My use of the term “Hispanicism” is extrapolated from Ed White’s discussion of “[t]he growing [antebellum] literary fascination with Latin America - an Hispanicism analogous in ways to European Orientalism” (77-78)� White describes a fascinated exoticization of Hispanophone peoples through which US Americans self-reflexively constructed US identity. Although Delano’s views might seem to lean toward Hispanophobia more so than the patronizing part-aversion, part-romanticization suggested by “Hispanicism,” Hispanicist romanticization is indeed evident in Delano’s attitudes� Moreover, as a conceptual legacy of Orientalism and as comparable to Toni Morrison’s “Africanism” (the latter to which I will often refer in this essay), “Hispanicism” evokes the exceptionalist, self-reflexive quality of Delano’s views� Delano’s attitudes toward Spaniards and Africans are distinct but interrelated. In both cases, the views are self-reflexive: contemplating Spanish and African difference, Delano imagines himself to be racially superior as an Anglo-American� Delano’s understanding of blacks as subhuman, though, specifically bolsters his sense of himself as possessing basic human capacities of free will, reason, and aesthetic sensibility� Such views, refracted through romantic-racialist tropes regarding blacks, reflect what Morrison terms “Africanism,” the pervasive US discourse through which US Americans imagine cherished self-perceptions against a mysterious, demonized black presence (5, 17)� On the other hand, in perceiving Spaniards as despotic and inefficient, Delano views himself as a member of a benevolent racial and national community that is exceptionally endowed to forge liberal-democratic social, economic, and political institutions� He thus believes himself entitled to usurp management of Cereno’s ship and slaves� 3 My second point regards how Melville interrogates such discourses by writing literature� Some have described Melville’s approach, while good-intentioned, as overdetermined by the racialism pervading Melville’s white US American culture� Dana D� Nelson claims that while “Benito Cereno” subverts how Delano views blacks and Spaniards according to static types, the tale fails to imagine alternatives to these typologies (Word 109-30)� More intent on examining the tale’s depiction of Spain, María DeGuzmán, too, contends that while Melville denaturalizes how Delano confirms his whiteness through reflection on the “off-white” Spaniard Cereno, this critique is undermined by what DeGuzmán reads as the tale’s damnation of Cereno and Babo (47-67)� 3 Compare Emery, who argues that “Benito Cereno” is more concerned with expansion and its relationship to slavery than with slavery per se; and Sundquist, for whom historicizing Melville requires recognizing that “slavery was hemispheric” and that it must be interpreted in terms of “several cultures, several nations” (136)� Ironizing Identity 107 These claims inform my view that by ventriloquizing Hispanicism through Delano, Melville emphasizes how Hispanicism informs US exceptionalism� In doing so, Melville ironizes Delano’s sense of himself as the benevolent representative of an exceptional nation� Melville reveals how Delano’s perspective occludes the in fact rapacious Delano’s ability to realize that he and Cereno share much in common� However, I also part ways with Nelson and DeGuzmán; inspired by neo-formalist arguments for literature’s socio-civic power, 4 I champion Melville’s efficacy in thinking beyond exceptionalism. Proposing grounded alternatives to racist and imperialist policies was not Melville’s aim, but his tale suggests formal alternatives to racialist exceptionalism by calling attention to the qualitative differences between manners of telling stories about relationships and identity� These opposed manners can be described as forms of cosmopolitanism� On the one hand, in contrast to the self-absorbed Spaniard Cereno, Delano self-reflexively identifies as a gregarious cosmopolitan who good-naturedly navigates the differences between cultures. Delano’s cosmopolitanism thus reflects his Hispanicism. However, Melville implies another, non-exceptionalist form of cosmopolitanism, one premised on skepticism toward identity categories; the ability to revise preconceptions about identity; and sensitivity to context� The evocation of this more rigorous cosmopolitanism is a major achievement of the tale� Putnam’s Monthly, “Benito Cereno”, and Hispanicism The Hispanicist contexts Melville commented upon through his depiction of Delano are exhibited in articles about Spain and Spanish America appearing in Putnam’s Monthly around the time of the journal’s 1855 publication of “Benito Cereno�” Such articles exhibited fascination with and prejudice against Hispanophone peoples� Melville’s engagement with Putnam’s is well-documented, particularly regarding the journal’s slavery politics (Post- Lauria; Robbins)� Melville’s engagement with the material on Spain and Spanish America has also been noted (Emery 50; Post-Lauria 5)� While such scholarship attests to the articles’ broadly imperialist dimensions, I here emphasize their reflection of nineteenth-century US views about Spanish-ness. Anglophone prejudices toward Hispanophone peoples had always posited the moral superiority of British over Spanish colonialism, traditionally emphasizing Catholic Spain’s cruel, duplicitous exploitation of indigenous peoples� Latter-day Hispanicism - referring both to Spain and Spanish America - had additional focuses� In the Putnam’s pieces (typically ethnographies or travelogues reporting on the landscape, customs, politics, and wealth of Hispanophone locales), Hispanophone peoples are not only vicious and despotic but also lazy and lacking in economic individualism� This characterization contrasts with the author’s identification with what he construes 4 For an overview, see Levinson on “activist formalism” (559). For specific approaches, see, e�g�, Castiglia and Castronovo; and Levine Dislocating; Otter� 108 J ohn c. h avard as modern US values of entrepreneurship in a liberal-democratic, capitalist world� Such texts comprised a stock Hispanicist narrative that informed the general nationalism of Putnam’s� 5 Articles such as “Annexation,” which favorably compares US expansionism to prior forms of empire-building, attest to the demonization of Spanish colonialism� Attention to two other texts, though, will illustrate especially nineteenth-century US views of Hispanophone peoples� The second issue of Putnam’s includes “A Glance at Havana�” In this unsigned travelogue, the author narrates his trip into the exotic Cuban port city, reporting on his entrance into the harbor on board a steamer and his experiences after landfall� He writes in the first-person plural, evoking identification with his readers. As such, the article reflects how these texts construe consensus between author and US reading public regarding a Hispanophone world whose difference confirms the author’s sense of US superiority. The article focuses on the inefficient management of human and natural resources in Cuba, a flaw construed as a product of the Spanish economic and political aversion to liberalism and the concomitant backwardness of its people� Upon arriving in the harbor, the author is immediately approached by a lethargic pilot, even though “[t]he entrance to the harbor of Havana is the plainest possible sailing�” “Were it an American or an English port,” he continues, “the offer to pilot a vessel into it would be regarded as a patent swindle�” In Havana, though, things work differently, as “a corps of pilots has been established by the Spanish government, and a neglect to employ one is sure to be resented as a slight offered to the authorities” (186)� Indeed, “The Captain of the Port …has absolute power over every vessel that enters it� … The vessel, therefore, which should enter the harbor unpiloted would be pretty sure to find herself ordered into the most inconvenient position which his ingenuity could possibly discover” (186)� The situation affronts the author’s free-market sensibilities� He views the Captain’s arbitrary power as indicative of the invisible operation of power in Cuba in contrast to the transparency favored by US liberal democracy� This piece continues in the following issue under the title “How They Live in Havana�” Picking up where he left off, the (presumably same) author walks the reader through Havana� As the title suggests, this article describes Havanese social and domestic customs - what the hotels and food are like, what the inhabitants do at their leisure, what social etiquette is expected, etc� Although not explicitly focused on economic and political matters, the discussion again self-reflexively represents Cubans as less fitted for life in a liberal democracy than US Americans� Nineteenth-century US liberal discourse assumed a separate-spheres model in which the wife, hearth, and home provided the moral suasion necessary to cultivate men’s virtuous behavior in a market-driven public sphere that encouraged cut-throat behavior� The article is at pains to show that this is not happening in Cuba� The hotels are “nothing more or less than … boardinghouse[s]”; the author puns that in them “bed 5 See Robbins 548-51 on the magazine’s (literary) nationalism� Ironizing Identity 109 and board” become one, “the bed being in fact a board” (288)� More to the point, he comments that in Havana, “The man whose volante and harness have a thousand dollars’ worth of silver worked into their decorations, and whose calesero (coachman) carries enough of bullion about him to purchase his freedom, will not have so much, or so expensive furniture in his house as the New-Yorker who considers himself in very moderate circumstances” (289)� The passages ridicule the contrast between exterior and interior, construing a telling inversion between the customs of Havana and the United States: in the States, the home space welcomes and refreshes, while the exterior is rugged, enterprising, and productive; in Havana, the exterior is foppish and wasteful, the interior inhospitable and enervating� A similar equation is implied in passages noting the lack of privacy in Havana (290)� While privacy might seem a simple matter of etiquette, separate-spheres ideology accorded it great importance, positing that a safe haven from the outside world was necessary for the moral suasion offered by the private sphere� The author’s perception of Cuba’s failure to maintain this necessary division further suggests his view of Cuba’s illiberality� “Benity Cereno” as Metafictional Commentary on Hispaniscist Inconsistency These and similar Putnam’s articles offer warrant for a discourse of US imperial management that “Benito Cereno” examines� As Nelson explains, the tale stages a drama of managerial identity in which Delano seeks recognition of his prerogative as a white, managerial man through identification with fellow captain Cereno� When Cereno does not provide that recognition (National Manhood 2), Delano becomes suspicious that Cereno is some form of imposter to his captaincy and decides to appropriate Cereno’s ship (National Manhood 16)� Delano fails to recognize the true state of affairs - black revolt - because he blindly believes that white men of the managerial class monopolize power� However, as Nelson briefly acknowledges elsewhere, Delano’s perception is complicated by his sense that Cereno is not exactly white (Word 112)� Cereno is Spanish, an important distinction given that Melville added to the real-life Delano’s account a number of details playing up Delano’s attitudes regarding Spaniards (Emery 51-52, 53, 57-59, 61, 66)� 6 As DeGuzmán elaborates, Delano’s ambivalence toward Cereno reflects the equivocal place of Spanish-ness in Delano’s Anglo-American perspective� White and not white, modern and medieval, representing a nation that tried to build an empire in the New World but failed, the Spaniard limits exceptionalist Anglo-American selfconception� 7 As such, Cereno’s behavior triggers Delano’s wariness about Spaniards (Nelson, Word 112)� Indeed, Delano has as much riding on believing that Cereno is not of his caste as he does on believing that Cereno is - if, 6 The real-life Delano’s account reveals little regarding Anglophone attitudes toward Spain (318-53)� See Newman 98-100 for a breakdown of Melville’s alterations to the original� 7 See Norton 4 on the function of the liminal figure in national identity construction. 110 J ohn c. h avard per Nelson, Delano confirms his managerial aptitude when he condescends toward blacks, he also does so through interactions with Cereno� The following section recounts the self-reflexive, obfuscating roles played by Delano’s Hispanicism and Africanism, emphasizing how they exhibit complementary but particular functions� Melville begins to reveal Delano’s Hispanicist perspective from the moment Delano sees the ship, a sight that reminds him of “the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas” (47). The stories inflecting Delano’s perspective here may be romances of Spanish pirates, narratives commonly associated in the Anglo- American imagination with the seas off South America even though pirates were typically Northern Europeans plundering Spanish gold� These associations trigger apprehension in Delano, although he characteristically sheds his fears by power of his “good nature�” As he gets a closer look at the boat, he continues to view it in light of his attitude toward Spain� Emery describes the boat as “symboliz[ing] … a ‘tottering’ Spain” and “stand[ing] … for Spain’s Western empire” (52)� In this sense, the boat’s decrepit appearance reminds Delano of what he imagines to be its romantic, illustrious past� Delano sees in it what was “in its time, a very fine vessel” that “under a decline of masters, preserved signs of former state” (48). He fixates on an exotic “stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked” (49). Here, Spanish and gothic figures articulate in Delano’s eyes: “the arms of Castile and Leon” are juxtaposed with a frightening mythological image� These impressions color Delano’s engagement with the San Dominick. What thus emerges is a metafictional demonstration of how such stories shape experience� As should already be clear, in addition to Spanish piracy, tropes regarding Spanish aristocratic languor also underpin Delano’s perspective� (Although these tropes are conjoined, an analytic distinction will prove useful�) As Delano offers assistance to Cereno, he notes Cereno’s “grave and ceremonious … national formality [which is] dusked by the saturnine mood of ill health” (51)� Delano further perceives a “sour and gloomy disdain … not unlike … his imperial countryman’s, Charles V” (52-53)� Delano’s attitude toward Cereno here hearkens back to the traveler’s appraisal of the inefficiency of Havanese aristocratic trappings in Putnam’s� To Delano, Cereno’s “ill-health” marks Cereno’s incapability to command, which Delano generally associates with Cereno’s Spanish identity� Viewing Cereno as “at once a genteel courtier … and an impotent master” (Sundquist 148), Delano, while contemplating “Don Benito’s small, yellow hands” (note the perception of racial difference), “easily inferred that the young captain had not got into command at the hawsehole, but the cabin-window; and if so, why wonder at incompetence, in youth, sickness, and gentility united” (58)� This ready inference reflects Hispanicist perceptions of Spanish aristocratic languor. Delano eventually becomes pre-occupied with the notion that Cereno is a poor Ironizing Identity 111 manager� Delano’s particular concern is the apparent disorder of the blacks, which he ascribes to Cereno’s “strengthless style of command” (Emery 52) but which, of course, reflects successful mutiny. Although Delano acknowledges that “long-continued suffering seemed to have brought out the less good-natured qualities of the Negroes” (51), he believes the central problem is that the “San Dominick wanted … stern superior officers,” as “not so much as a fourth mate was to be seen” (54)� Delano thus frequently patronizes Cereno with advice regarding proper command, for instance suggesting that Cereno “keep all [his] blacks employed, especially the younger ones, no matter at what useless task” (59) after witnessing a black boy attack a white one� Melville uses Hispanicism as an aesthetic mechanism to produce the suspense experienced both by Delano and by the first-time reader who sees through Delano’s eyes without knowing the tale’s conclusion� (Accounts of this suspense, such as that of Edward S� Grejda [136], typically neglect the pertinence of Hispanicism�) Delano eventually becomes uncertain regarding what is happening on the San Dominick, sensing that something is amiss but unable to discern what� As he regards a seemingly stereotypical Spanish ship, Delano perceives himself to be embroiled in a gothic romance with an ambiguous captain and crew� Rather than recognizing black rebellion, Delano, as Sundquist explains, “vacillates between dark suspicion and paternalistic disdain for the Spaniard” (148)� Is Cereno a piratical Spaniard who will betray Delano, or a languorous, inefficient Spaniard who needs direction? It must here be mentioned that Delano is blind to black rebellion partly because he sees blacks as inevitable servants� As Nelson observes, Delano persistently “denies the slaves Subjectivity” (Word 112) - he is unable to recognize their desire for freedom� Delano, after all, takes “to negroes … genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs” (84); this human-animal analogy betrays Delano’s belief in innate African childishness and fawning sub-humanity� This view’s impact on his perception is frequently apparent� For instance, in one passage, Delano contemplates a Spanish sailor’s attempt to give Delano a hint about the mutiny, an attempt which Delano mistakes as a possible sign about Cereno’s treachery� Delano speculates that Cereno and the blacks are working together, but he quickly concludes, “But they were too stupid� Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes? ” (75)� Here, Delano’s racist view of black intelligence (note the polygeneticist reference to “species”) makes it impossible for him correctly to read the sailor’s attempted signal� The state of affairs on the boat - a brilliantly orchestrated slave mutiny - is, indeed, unfathomable to him� Compounding his inability to recognize black rebellion, Delano finds the interpretations suggested by Hispanicist tropes preferable to what he views as the impossibility of black humanity� As Sundquist puts it, when Delano confronts black revolution, that reality is “conceal[ed] … behind the shadow play of the contest between the American and the European” (151)� 8 For 8 Compare Fiedler on how Delano’s stereotypes of Spaniards and blacks work hand in hand (400)� 112 J ohn c. h avard instance, in the well-known Gordian knot scene, when the sailor gives Delano the knot, one of the blacks comes to them, tells Delano the sailor is a fool, and takes the knot and inspects it, clearly suspicious (76)� Despite witnessing this evidence of black rebellion, Delano ponders Hispanicist alternatives� Upon seeing his whale boat returning to the San Dominick, he complacently says to himself, “I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard? - Too nonsensical to think of! ” (77)� Shortly afterward, Babo returns and bids Delano go to speak with Cereno, who has recovered from a coughing fit. Delano decides he has been mistaken in his suspicions, laughingly thinking to himself, “What a donkey I was� This kind gentleman who here sends me his compliments, he, but ten minutes ago, dark-lantern in hand, was dodging round some old grind-stone in the hold, sharpening a hatchet for me” (77)� In rejecting the signs of black rebellion because of his Africanism, Delano first decides that Cereno is not the piratical, vicious Spaniard� Then, given evidence by Babo that Cereno was simply ill, Delano comforts himself in the belief that Cereno is a “kind gentleman” who is physically incapacitated to manage a ship� Robert S� Levine claims that Delano ascribes the ship’s disorder to how Cereno is “deficient as a leader because he is not ‘Spanish’ enough” (Conspiracy 204)� Delano is certainly preoccupied with Cereno’s managerial capacity, but the despotic Spaniard is not the only Hispanicist trope available to Delano� That of the languorous, inefficient Spaniard is just as, if not more, appealing to him. He prefers both options, in any event, to the San Dominick’s reality� In the deposition, it becomes clear that Babo orchestrated affairs on the San Dominick in order to deceive Delano (109)� Babo does so, in part, by playing upon Delano’s Hispanicism� Babo relies on Delano’s Africanism, too, of course, by acting the part of the faithful, submissive servant that Delano finds appealing, as well as by correctly gambling on Delano’s inability to see black capability (Nelson, Word 111). Babo also, though, stages the inefficient Spanish ship to Delano� Babo has instructed the Spanish sailors to occupy themselves with odd, useless tasks, oftentimes undertaken by more men than necessary� He has also apparently instructed Cereno to fake sick anytime there is a need for Cereno and Babo to conference in private, playing to Delano’s proclivity to believe that Cereno is not fit for the hardships that have supposedly occurred. (Certainly, Cereno’s actual fear and debility figure here, too.) Particularly telling is how Babo has Cereno dress in a gaudy outfit that Delano perceives as typical of South American aristocratic, despotic trappings (57)� In the conclusion, it is revealed that Cereno finds it particularly distressing that this “dress …had not willingly been put on� And that silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic command, was not, indeed, a sword, but the ghost of one� The scabbard, artificially stiffened, was empty” (116). Cereno is horrified at the memory partly because Babo has made a “travesty of Don Benito’s former Subject-status by forcing him to assume the role he once commanded” (Nelson, Word 120). However, Cereno’s feelings likely also reflect his recognition of having been forced to lower himself in Delano’s sight by performing a stereotypical form of Spanish mastery� Delano views the scabbard as a sign of Ironizing Identity 113 lawless Spanish despotism, but Babo has made Cereno simulate this form of virility while symbolically castrating him� In any event, Babo presents Delano with a state of affairs conforming to Hispanicist tropes, tropes Babo correctly hopes Delano will prefer to the truth� That Delano holds tightly to his views until the truth is forced upon him during the tale’s climax reflects those perceptions’ centrality to his sense of self� Crucial to that self-perception is the difference between how Delano understands blacks and Spaniards. When observing blacks, Delano confirms what he perceives as the humanity that undergirds his “singularly undistrustful good nature” (47)� In one illustrative example, Delano, during one of Cereno’s absences, comes upon “a slumbering negress … lying … like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock”; upon waking, the woman “delightedly …caught [her] child up, with maternal transports, covering it with kisses�” The “sunny sight” pleases Delano, and he thinks to himself, “There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love” (73)� This passage does not appear in the real-life Delano’s narrative; Melville invented it to exhibit Delano’s racial views� Coming shortly after Delano has had an equivocal encounter with a sailor that has aroused his suspicions, the sight helps Delano conjure up his “undistrustful good nature” and to become confident in his safety. As Andrew Delbanco explains, “Melville knew that in America the dignity of whites depended on the degradation of the blacks” (156)� In this light, Delano perceives the woman through an animalistic simile to a “doe�” Melville here associates Delano with antebellum romantic racialism� While construing blacks as embodying positive natural forces in contrast to more virulent racisms that emphasized black savagery, romantic racialism viewed blacks as less human than whites� 9 In finding something beautiful and “pure” in her “naked nature,” Delano exercises an intellectual, aesthetic capacity through which he elevates himself above the woman, who is figured as part of nature (Nelson, Word 124). Once satisfied in this capacity, he complacently dismisses the notion that anything untoward might happen to him� Delano’s Hispanicism informs his self-conception differently� A commonality must first be noted, though: Delano is comforted whenever the blacks and Cereno conform to his preconceptions� For instance, in an early passage in which Delano and Cereno pace the deck, “Don Benito, with Castilian bows, solemnly insisted upon his guest’s preceding him up the ladder leading to the elevation�” Delano experiences a twinge of fear as he ascends the ladder after seeing that “two of the ominous file [of blacks] … one on each side of the last step, sat for armorial supporters and sentries�” However, “when, facing about, he saw the whole file, like so many organ-grinders, still stupidly intent on their work, unmindful of everything beside, he could not but smile at his late fidgety panic” (59). Delano’s fear of a potentially treacherous Cereno and crew, which he figures as medieval “armorial supporters” and “sentries,” is assuaged as he comes to believe that the two blacks are “stupidly intent on their work�” Delano is calmed by what he perceives as characteristic black 9 On Melville and romantic racialism, see Robbins as well as Tawil (191-208), both of whom view “Benito Cereno” as responding to Stowe� 114 J ohn c. h avard intellectual inferiority combined with the typical inefficiency of Hispanic management; the “stupidity” in the work he thinks the blacks have been instructed to perform points him to both stereotypes� Such moments that adhere to his prejudices bolster his sense of security as a man who controls his situation� The difference between the roles Hispanicism and Africanism play for Delano is that whereas he confirms his humanity through Africanism, he confirms his aptitude for liberal management through Hispanicism. In viewing Cereno as nationally incapacitated to lead his ship and slaves, Delano projects his own capacity to do so� A particularly illustrative passage occurs shortly after Cereno asks Delano how well-armed Delano’s ship is� Babo has put Cereno to this task in consideration of possibly overtaking The Bachelor’s Delight, and it puts Delano on guard� Delano, though, decides the questions are just further evidence of Cereno’s weakened mind, “good-naturedly explain[ing] away [his fears with] the thought that, for the most part, the poor invalid scarcely knew what he was about�” This realization convinces Delano that “for the present, the man was not fit to be entrusted with the ship. On some benevolent plea withdrawing the command from him, Captain Delano would yet have to send her to Conception�” Delano believes that “the sick man, under the good nursing of his servant, would probably, by the end of the passage, be in a measure restored to health and with that he should also be restored to authority�” Musing upon the wisdom of this “tranquillizing” plan, Delano self-congratulates himself with the thought that “[t]here was a difference between the idea of Don Benito’s darkly preordaining Captain Delano’s fate, and Captain Delano’s lightly arranging Don Benito’s” (69-70)� Delano’s decision that Cereno’s odd behavior is a product of Cereno’s incapacitation coheres with the general tenor of Delano’s Hispanicism� Delano believes that Cereno’s ostensibly aristocratic, Spanish initiation into his captaincy has not prepared Cereno for the hardships of his voyage� This decision prompts Delano’s feelings of prerogative as a man upholding liberal, capitalist values, feelings through which he presumes the duty to commandeer the San Dominick until Cereno can do so himself� Just as Delano considers undertaking this duty, “‘With pleasure’ would Melville’s confident countrymen have similarly taken upon themselves the responsibility for a ‘spellbound’ Spanish America” (Emery 53)� Delano’s Hispanicist feelings of prerogative embody the nationalist imperialism of Putnam’s, which construed self-interested imperialism as beneficence. As Louis A� Pérez, Jr�, explains, the United States “was singular in the degree to which it so thoroughly obscured the distinction between selfless purpose and self-interest” (174)� 10 In this vein, Putnam’s articles such as “Annexation” suggested that due to political and economic illiberality, Spanish America was incapable of achieving on its own the modernization the United States could bring� As such, the United States should feel not shame but pride in its 10 Compare Pérez’s claim that “the efficacy of metaphor” in the context of US-Cuban affairs “resided precisely in its capacity to obscure its function” (37)� Ironizing Identity 115 imperial ambitions� US imperial discourse thus provided cover for the territorial and pecuniary benefits produced by US expansion and the concomitant terror experienced by Spanish America� Melville scrutinizes the Hispanicism of Putnam’s by revealing Delano’s motivations to be complicated and equivocal, despite his sense of innocence and entitlement� 11 Although Delano thinks of himself as “lightly arranging” the affairs of the San Dominick out of altruism, his offer of assistance is after all a “business transaction” (Melville 91), and the final counter-revolt “is prompted not by any wish to ‘redeem’ the oppressed but by a simple desire for material gain” (Emery 54)� After deciding in light of the advice of his officers that he should not personally participate in the attack, Delano appoints his chief mate to lead the charge, and “[t]he more to encourage the sailors, they were told, that the Spanish captain considered his ship as good as lost; that she and her cargo, including some gold and silver, were worth more than a thousand doubloons� Take her, and no small part should be theirs” (100-01)� Far from being disinterested, Delano and crew are willing to make capital of their deeds, significantly on pretext of a self-interested interpretation of Cereno’s plea that they leave the ship to its fate� 12 These passages suggest another inconsistency: Hispanicism construes the United States as exceptional to Hispanophone nations when that exceptionality is equivocal� Delano understands his managerial aptitude against that of Cereno, but Melville not only shows that Delano is not exactly what he thinks he is but also that Delano is much like what he views Cereno to be� As Delano commands his men to retake the San Dominick, he “appoint[s] his chief mate - an athletic and resolute man, who had been a privateer’sman, and, as his enemies whispered, a pirate - to head the party” (101)� The mention of piracy recalls that Delano’s perspective on Spain is conditioned by tales of the Spanish Main. Confirming this point, at the narrative’s climax when Cereno desperately leaps into Delano’s whale boat, a frenzied Delano, still unaware of what is actually happening, yells to his men to “give way for your lives … this plotting pirate means murder! ” (98)� Through his Hispanicist lens, Delano misinterprets Cereno’s actions as piracy in contrast to his own self-conception as a benevolent captain� Yet Delano’s chief mate is a reputed pirate, which undermines Delano’s self-differentiation from Cereno� Delano’s failure to disarticulate himself from Cereno suggests their 11 Robbins views Melville’s engagement with Putnam’s as tacit acquiescence to its slavery politics (547, 548-51, 551-52, 555)� Putnam’s, Robbins points out, distanced itself from the romantic-racialist antislavery espoused by The National Era and Stowe, instead preferring a more hard-nosed, ironic mode of engagement� Melville published in Putnam’s partly because “Benito Cereno” fit Putnam’s vision, with the depiction of Delano serving as an ironic denunciation of sentimental antislavery� However, while racially progressive, Putnam’s often took nationalist stances, including on the issue of US imperial prerogative in the Hispanophone world� Here, I argue, Melville parted with the magazine� I would also disagree with Post-Lauria, who argues that Melville joined forces with Putnam’s on both its critique of slavery and imperialism (5)� Putnam’s regularly published pro-imperialist work, as seen with “Annexation�” 12 See further Nelson on Delano’s pecuniary motivations (Word 116-17)� 116 J ohn c. h avard shared guilt as exploitative, violent, racist captains� More broadly, as Emery explains, Melville “was … conscious of America’s mimicry of Spain” as a nation that sought through appeals to religious and racial hierarchy to impose a moral order on the Western hemisphere (56)� What Delano and the US Americans Delano represents take to be different and particular to Spain is, in fact, common to both the United States and Spain� Irony, Cosmopolitanism and “Benity Cereno” Melville’s depiction of Delano serves to comment not only on how imperialists constructed US national identity as liberal and managerial but also cosmopolitan� What did “cosmopolitanism” mean in Melville’s world? The Oxford English Dictionary defines “cosmopolitan” in its adjective form as follows: “1� Belonging to all parts of the world; not restricted to any one country or its inhabitants� 2� Having the characteristics which arise from, or are suited to, a range over many different countries; free from national limitations or attachments.” These definitions were established by the antebellum period� As John Bryant explains, in Melville’s day, the cosmopolitan was “an easily recognizable cultural type� For eighteenth-century European philosophes, the cosmopolitan ideal had expressed the liberal longing for a political, economic, and spiritual communion of all races and nations� Thus, the true cosmopolite was ‘at home’ wherever he traveled - London, Paris, Rome, Leipzig, even Philadelphia” (“Citizens” 21)� The cosmopolitan, Bryant writes elsewhere, “is a ‘man of feeling,’ a humorist, a gentleman traveler and a ‘citizen of the world’” (“Nowhere” 276). As Bryant elaborates, this figure was at times viewed suspiciously in the antebellum United States� The line between a genial cosmopolitan and a rootless confidence man appeared narrow; a cosmopolitan might seem more a “chameleon than a gentleman, more a satirist than a humorist” (“Nowhere” 279)� For the moment, I will work with the first sense in which Bryant discusses the concept, but I will later touch on the latter� Although cosmopolitanism ostensibly promoted questioning national traditions and identities, some US nationalists paradoxically figured the United States as an exceptionally cosmopolitan nation� The second Oxford definition listed above gives as an example a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson that attests to this view� In “The Young American,” Emerson stated that, considering the influx of immigrants into the United States and their dispersal over the nation’s expanses, “it cannot be doubted that the legislation of this country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any other� It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race” (217)� Emerson, elsewhere, expressed qualms about cosmopolitanism, for instance in his contrast between traveling and self-culture in “Self-Reliance” (277-79)� In “The Young American,” though, he calls for his Ironizing Identity 117 listeners to build a cosmopolitan nation with the most “generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens [are] willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity” (226). Emerson’s exhortation reflects a broader nationalistic view of a progressive, inclusive United States� In Hispanicist texts, this cosmopolitan national identity was celebrated against what was perceived to be a provincial, exclusive Spanish identity� For instance, the Putnam’s articles “Cuba” and “Annexation” posit that the United States, in contrast to Spain and Spanish America, offers benevolence to all, regardless of identity and history� “Cuba,” indeed, states that US “nationality” is “the practical realization of cosmopolitanism” (16)� As such, US empire-building projects such as the annexation of Cuba promise a time when “all the nations of the earth shall be as one people” (16), a utopia in which petty prejudices will no longer impede the individual’s pursuit of happiness� Several aspects of Melville’s characterization of Delano signal Delano’s self-understanding as a cosmopolitan� Delano exhibits bourgeois sympathy and racialist benevolence in his reaction to the scene aboard the San Dominick, expressing paternalistic concern for those he perceives to be his racial and social inferiors� These attitudes intersect with cosmopolitanism as forms of cross-difference sentiment� What particularly distinguishes Delano as a selfimagined cosmopolitan, though, is his sense of himself as a congenial man of the world who is at home anywhere he goes� He takes heart in his “singularly undistrustful good-nature” (47) and sees himself as “benevolent” (47) and “humane” (52)� He is “genial,” with a “good, blithe heart” (84)� Delano views himself as well-traveled, as revealed by the confidence he feels at being able to “converse with some freedom” in Spanish, and more generally by his assumption of familiarity with African and Spanish natures� He is a man of ready “sympathies” (51) and “charity” (53) toward members of cultures other than his own� To an extent, he even makes an effort to see himself in Cereno; while pondering how “the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it,” he concludes that “Spaniards in the main are as good folks as any in Duxbury, Massachusetts” (79)� As his associations with the term “Spaniard” suggest, though, Delano construes his cosmopolitanism not only through fellow feeling for but also through self-differentiation against Cereno� A man who enjoys making “gay and humorous expression[s]” (67), Delano frequently takes offense to what he views as Cereno’s unfriendly affronts to Delano’s own gregariousness� Delano’s resentment is most evident after Cereno refuses to join Delano for a pleasant visit aboard the Bachelor’s Delight shortly before the tale’s climax (94)� Earlier, Delano perceives in Cereno an “unhealthy climax” of the need for captains to at times manage their ships with a cold lack of “sociality” toward their crews (53)� Delano, in turn, thinks of himself as having balanced sociability and authority� Delano’s assumption of a sympathetic outlook also reflects this tendency to construe his cosmopolitanism against Cereno. He frequently expresses pity for Babo, whom he believes Cereno does not properly appreciate� Delano, here, takes pride in extending his sympathy to the downtrodden slave (Tawil 200)� What becomes apparent is that Delano’s 118 J ohn c. h avard cosmopolitanism takes shape within the Anglo-Hispanic-African triangle that informs Delano’s perspective� The power relationships he perceives in that triangle limit his cosmopolitanism; identities are not truly level in his view� Delano’s benevolence toward Babo only persists while Delano believes Babo is a willing slave� Once that belief has been exploded, Delano loses all good will toward Babo, leading a brutal counter-revolt� Delano’s cosmopolitanism does not go so far as including a willingness to recognize the legitimacy of Babo’s desire for freedom, to see the world through Babo’s eyes� Delano’s cosmopolitanism is hierarchical, too, in that Delano defines himself as a cosmopolitan in contrast to Cereno� His sociable regard for Cereno is counterbalanced by his sense of superiority� As we have seen, though, Delano’s sense of difference is mistaken� Here again, Delano’s disavowal of Spanish identity blinds Delano to his failure to measure up to the standards he sets for himself� Delano, thus, exemplifies what Donald E. Pease terms the “structures of disavowal” of US exceptionalism� As Pease writes, “the relations between US citizens’ belief in US exceptionalism and the state’s production of exceptions to its core tenets might be best described in psychosocial terms as structures of disavowal�” These structures, Pease argues, “enabl[ed] US citizens to disavow … measures … which violated the anti-imperialist norms that were embedded within the discourse of American exceptionalism” (19)� The United States, in exceptionalists’ view, is on the one hand exceptionally benevolent, on the other the bearer of exceptional duties that make its violations of its norms somehow different than similar actions performed by other nations� To extend Pease’s claim to “Benito Cereno,” through Hispanicistand Africanistfunded exceptionalism, Delano disavows the rapacity of his actions and confirms his identity as a benevolent American. Delano represents a US type whose chief characteristic is his reflexive ability to employ exceptionalism to refashion questionable actions as innocent, his opportunism as disinterestedly volunteering his managerial expertise� As Melville depicts Delano as representative of pernicious tendencies in US politics and life, Melville’s position reflects that of Pease in that Melville suggests that exceptionalism makes it difficult for US citizens to face up to the nation’s guilt. However, DeGuzmán and Nelson express dissatisfaction with the tale as a critique� While Nelson acknowledges the work’s subversive insight into racism’s “dehumanizing force” (Word 110), she points out that it offers “neither explicit criticism nor alternative action” (Word 128)� She further argues that “the narrator participates in the sentence and the gaze of the Lima Court at the same time he makes it possible for his readers to do the same” (Word 128) - as DeGuzmán summarizes Nelson’s point, “the narrator dehumanizingly turns Babo into an art object” (50)� Despite seemingly good intentions, the tale’s irony is an end in itself rather than a means of change, a phenomenon Nelson finds typical of socially engaged writing by authors from privileged backgrounds (Word 127-28)� DeGuzmán echoes Nelson� Melville has a “keen sense of the inhumanity of monomaniacal whiteness,” she explains, but “[t]he fact that all the characters are typed (and most definitely in a racializing, Ironizing Identity 119 if not overtly racist, manner) and that the typing is configured in … a way … that … leads to not only re-cognizable but pre-cognizable doom for certain characters [Babo and Cereno] and, if not salvation, then survival for others [Delano] constitutes the real … dead end of the story” (52)� As such, the tale presents no “serious critique” of racism or imperialism (52)� There is a basis for such arguments� Melville was not particularly concerned with advocating specific policy proposals such as anti-imperial foreign relations (Delbanco 155)� His concerns are intertwiningly epistemological and literary as opposed to political per se� Hispanicism and Africanism interest Melville, in part, as fertile aesthetic grounds, as the blinding quality of such discourses offers an engine for suspense� To the extent that his work has an ideological import, I would describe that import as pre-political� Melville is interested in what happens before political proposals are made� He focuses on the frame as much as on the content, on how stories told about political issues are structured by assumptions about identity as opposed to what such stories tell regarding how to judge specific political programs. 13 He asks readers to engage political questions with an attitude between reflection and activity� Instead of answering political questions related to liberalism and imperialism, Melville’s ironic, perspectival commentary on how imperial socio-political forms structure (and obscure) Delano’s perception is an injunction to slow down and linger on how such questions are approached� To say that the tale engages the pre-political, though, is not to say that it is not politically valuable� Indeed, in subverting Delano’s perceived certainties, the tale opens a space for discussing political alternatives� Melville’s tale highlights how Hispanicism convinced the US expansionist that his imperialism was just, the chauvinist that he was cosmopolitan, the exploitative manager of his benevolent liberality� In a milieu in which such discourses seemed natural, it was impossible to judge the relative validity of political proposals because assumptions about identity clouded such discussions� How could a proposal be judged when the evidence in favor of it was an obfuscating notion of US-Hispanic hierarchy? Focusing on the pre-political, in such contexts, is of as much political importance as evaluating specific policy options� Sacvan Bercovitch illustrates this challenge when he explains how, when writing The American Jeremiad, he was motivated by his sense that in American traditions of dissent, “the remedy for American abuses was the American promise�” The problem here is that “nay-saying … framed within the America-story … close[s] out alternatives to the culture” (xix)� Options outside the consensus around liberal democracy are off the table� As such, recognizing one’s entrapment within the culture is “the indispensable first step in opening vistas of political transformation” (xxiii)� Melville may not advocate for the radical, non-liberal-democratic measures Bercovitch ponders, but the two concur in suggesting that political dialogue is limited if structured around questions of what is most American, most Spanish, most 13 Compare Herbert on how Typee emphasizes how Americans experience encounter with Marquesans more so than anything concrete about Marquesans themselves (21)� 120 J ohn c. h avard African� Such structures divest dialogue of substance, inhibit innovation, and uphold rapacious power relations� Realizing the limitations set by these structures is thus a precondition for discussing policy alternatives� In this context, Melville’s artistry is a powerful tool� One senses in dismissals of Melville’s politics a dissatisfaction with high literature’s distanced complexity� “Benito Cereno,” indeed, exhibits memorable literary complexity by raising perspective to the level of a multilayered, ironized verbal texture� However, Melville’s construction of literature out of how political questions are framed by perspectives comprises precisely his tale’s pre-political import� Literary complexity is thus Melville’s political point of entry� It is as a literary work of art that “Benito Cereno” devastatingly defamiliarizes Hispanicist exceptionalism� What is more, just as Bercovitch calls for “a scholarly-critical enterprise that might eventuate in a different frame-story for the national narrative” (xxxiii), Melville, while offering no policy alternatives, provides alternative narrative frames, alternatives premised on the kind of literary complexity valued by perceptive critics� Revealingly, T� Walter Herbert claims that in Typee, “Melville’s treatment … preserves critical ambivalences that draw him into deeper and deeper efforts to fathom what his own position truly is. … he finds the concept of civilization coming to pieces in his hands; yet he has no alternative concept with which to replace it” (156)� An analogous point can be made for “Benito Cereno”; in examining Delano’s viewpoint, Melville draws attention to US exceptionalism’s instabilities and misperceptions� Yet in “Benito Cereno,” a mature Melville offers a radical reconception of how stories about identity and relationships can be told, of how answers to such questions can be approached� This reconception is seen in the pre-political, literary aspects of the tale, which are distinguished from the simplicity of the stock narratives upon which Delano’s self-conception relies� This alternative frame is cosmopolitan, but not Delano’s blinding, exceptionalist cosmopolitanism� Another non-hierarchical cosmopolitan manner of describing relationships among identities is available, one that contests how identity-based discourses violently sever human commonality in their construction of types that are, in the end, fictions, even if fictions that tangibly effect our world� This more rigorous cosmopolitanism is premised on a sense for irony, here understood as the ability to denaturalize identity� As Bryant elaborates, Melville’s texts and his writing process exhibit a “cosmopolitical awareness” that entails using writing to put identities into play against one another, to be always aware that there are multiple perspectives (“Cosmopolite” 122)� With such awareness, one recognizes that one’s identity might be viewed differently by someone else than it is by oneself� This nose for irony involves recognizing that things are not always what they seem, that meanings vary with perspective� While this view might seem to threaten an anarchical groundlessness, it in fact grounds a revolutionary process of identity constitution� In this process, rigorously considered change and revision are always on the table when interactions suggest that one’s identity does not work� As Bryant writes, cosmopolitical awareness “is a form of critical thinking designed to familiarize ourselves with three fundamentals: 1) Ironizing Identity 121 identities evolve … 2) texts also evolve because writers and readers revise them; they are fluid texts; and 3) we revise cultural identities as we revise textual identities” (“Cosmopolite” 124)� “Revision” here is key� For the skilled writer, a text is never final, as another perspective can always provide a fresh view on the writing� Similarly, for the cosmopolitan, identity is conditional; frictions of identity can demonstrate the need for reflection on one’s beliefs, customs, and attitudes toward others, potentially demonstrating that they need alteration� The cosmopolitan, as such, has an ear for productive dissonance that signals a need to revise� 14 As said, to many antebellum US Americans, a radical cosmopolitan seemed suspiciously rootless, perhaps because such an individual’s orientation to the world upset stock perceptions of US superiority� Melville, though, found this aspect of radical cosmopolitanism appealing� He perceived that a cosmopolitan in this sense “challenges our apathetic being� … He confronts us with an invitation to trust and yet reminds us of the necessity to doubt” (Bryant, “Citizens” 30)� The cosmopolitan, in this sense, is a far cry from Delano, whose “singular guilelessness” makes him “a man of such native simplicity as to be incapable of satire or irony” (Melville 47, 63)� Delano has abundant evidence that suggests that his perspectives on identity - his belief in inefficient Spanish despotism, black irrationality and servility, and his own benevolence - warrant doubt� For instance, Delano often nearly recognizes that the roles of master and slave have been reversed with Cereno and Babo� Yet, Delano is unable to think outside his stereotypes� So inured is he in his self-understanding that he is “oblivious to the end of the meaning of Babo’s terror and to the murderous satire contained in Melville’s symbolic gesture” (Sundquist 137)� Indeed, in the concluding exhortation to Cereno, he brushes off his experience with clichés: “the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it� See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves” (116)� Such failures to learn from experience exemplify a complacency that is antithetical to cosmopolitical awareness� A major aspect of cosmopolitical awareness is skepticism� Some readings of skepticism and “Benito Cereno” suggest that, through Delano, Melville thematizes humanity’s inability to escape its benighted, limited ability to know� 15 14 Compare Herbert on how “Melville’s art reanimates the self” by “prompt[ing] interpretative efforts and reveal[ing] new qualities as the identities of interpreters shift” (179); and Michael’s discussion of Frederick Douglass’s frictive cosmopolitanism (201-34)� 15 Halpern argues that “Melville’s irony riddles any ground that we might have hoped to stand on” (559) as readers, which means “we cannot assume even the most basic thing about it, such as its status as an antislavery text” (561)� Going a step further, Arsić writes that The Piazza Tales “all relate something about the possibility of leaving the [platonic] cave� More often than not this possibility will turn out to be a failure� … Captain Delano will remain a hostage in his cave, reading only what is written ‘black on white�’ By the force of the law, Babo will be turned into the absolute silence of the beheaded body” (9). While these stories, Arsić argues, may ironize the natural and reveal the constructed character of the epistemological orders they investigate, they also thematize the impossibility of escaping the cave� 122 J ohn c. h avard As such, does Melville present cosmopolitical awareness as a pretense? If such awareness involves recognizing the flexibility of identity, skepticism may deny the possibility of recognition per se� However, “Benito Cereno” presents skepticism not as an aspect of the human condition embodied in Delano but as an orientation to the world opposed to that of Delano� A man whom Melville implies has less “than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception” (47), Delano is characterized by a Hispanicist-and Africanist-funded complacency at odds with the skeptic’s rigorous attention to context and contingency. If Delano was less self-satisfied and had more of the skeptic’s drive to self-question, he might have reacted differently while on board the San Dominick� The falsity of his self-understanding as cosmopolitan is cast against a skepticism that shares much with cosmopolitical awareness� Far from being paralyzed by epistemological limitations, the skeptic can put her/ his acknowledgement of those limitations to work� That self-awareness can lead to a willingness to revise one’s identity and one’s conceptions about others� 16 The relevance to “Benito Cereno” of this more rigorous, skeptical cosmopolitanism is exhibited by the fact that the narrative relies on its existence� Delano’s Hispanicistand Africanist-funded complacency in his self-conception as a benevolent, optimistic cosmopolitan propels the suspense that forms part of the tale’s aesthetic interest by keeping him from seeing what has happened on the San Dominick� In that “Benito Cereno” more concerns a man with such an incapacity than it does slave mutiny per se (Tawil 197), there would be no “Benito Cereno” if Delano were capable of cosmopolitical perception� The tale thus highlights such perception’s relevance to Delano’s experience� Melville’s literary, pre-political approach here becomes most apparently political� Uncomfortably experiencing suspense while inhabiting Delano’s perspective, readers are invited to realize that perspective’s dangers by comparing what the story is to what it might have been� As such, in tethering US exceptionalism to Delano’s point of view and questioning that perspective’s interpretative validity, Melville promotes cosmopolitical awareness as an approach to the world that is qualitatively superior to exceptionalism� For one thing, skeptical cosmopolitanism is more practical than Delano’s complacency� The reader is apprised of the usefulness of being the absent skeptical cosmopolitan in a “perpetually immigrant world” (Bryant, “Cosmopolite” 120)� The ability to rethink one’s self and how one relates with others would likely have served Delano well aboard the San Dominick� Being willing to see Cereno as something other than a despotic, inefficient manager and to see Babo as something other than a slave might have helped Delano understand what had happened aboard the ship before that knowledge is forced upon him� Of course, Cereno has reason to suggest that more precise knowledge 16 Compare Herbert’s assertion that Melville champions a “tolerance for ambiguity sufficient to permit anomalous experience to be made available to consciousness, however inconsistent the resulting attitudes and feelings may appear to be�” His work teaches that in “social interactions we do not find an unchanging absolute logos,” but rather “an inexhaustible discourse, a drama without conclusion” that requires constant attention to context (207-08)� Ironizing Identity 123 would have killed Delano (Melville 115), but perhaps the inability to revise preconceptions is more dangerous� Delano nearly dies many times while on the San Dominick - for instance, when he threatens discipline to the unruly blacks as they attempt to take the food that Delano’s crew has brought aboard� As usual, both Africanism and Hispanicism inform how Delano reacts to this situation; both suggest to him that the blacks need the discipline he threatens, his Africanism because they are infantile servants, his Hispanicism because of Cereno’s failures in management� Luckily for Delano, his preconceptions do not cost him his life, but cosmopolitical awareness might have braced him with the wariness necessary not to leave the case up to chance� In highlighting how Delano might have taken a more active role in protecting himself in the tale, Melville may be warning his audience about the dangers of Delano’s imperialistic attitudes� DeGuzmán suggests that as a “morality tale” regarding what Melville “envisioned as the potentially horrific consequences of becoming an empire,” the tale emphasizes in particular “the part played by slavery as a stain on the aspirations of Anglo-American manifest destiny” (66)� Yet whereas DeGuzmán sees a US American author fretting over whether US imperialism is sufficiently exceptional, I would suggest that the tale’s pre-political, cosmopolitical aspects comprise a critique of US imperial attitudes per se� Melville shows how complacent manners of understanding identity hinder recognition of “the unoriginality of American expansionism” that portends “its nonsuccess” (Emery 63)� His cosmopolitical frame is an alternative to thinking about questions of empire that suggests not that US Americans seek to build an exceptional empire but rather that they recognize the distorting, insidious nature of seductive calls to do so� The most salient value of cosmopolitical awareness, though, is that it is just� Delano’s misconceptions regarding US liberality and benevolence, Hispanic despotism, and African servility inhibit his ability to treat others justly� Here, Babo’s role is illustrative� Babo may seem to pose a problem for my reading� If Melville is suggesting an identity of non-identity, an identity in which identities are always at play against one another, is Babo not the limit case of this logic, in that he is void of identity? And is a silenced slave really what Melville wants to propose as a model? I would contend, though, that rather than presenting Babo as a model for what an identity of non-identity looks like, what is most notable about Babo’s identity is how he serves as a blank slate� For Delano, Babo serves as a proving ground through which Delano can self-construct his cherished fantasies about what it means to be a cosmopolitan, managerial US American� Through paternalistic sympathy with Babo, Delano imagines himself as a man of feeling in contrast to what he views as the heartless, despotic Cereno� Through suppression of the slave revolt, Delano leagues with Cereno against Babo to act out his selfconception as a stern, if genial, commander against savage disorder� In both cases, Delano interprets Babo’s actions in terms of Delano’s self-conceptions, misperceiving Babo by unjustly treating him as a means to an end of selfconstruction rather than as an end unto himself� 124 J ohn c. h avard The fact that Babo is void of identity figures large in Nelson’s reading; she suggests that the narrative “objectifies Babo as fully as the sentence of the Lima Court,” offering no insights into “Babo’s motives and goals, and ultimate humanity�” This “necessarily limited portrayal” is a product of Melville’s privileged, benighted vantage (Word 130)� Leaving aside the fact that Melville seems to have identified with Babo as much as any character in the tale (both, after all, are storytellers), I conclude by asking, would Babo be void of identity if he was not part of a world in which rigid notions of identity played such a dominant, oppressive role? What if Delano - who treats not just Babo but everyone as a tool of exceptionalist identity formation - took a more skeptical attitude toward identity categories and sought to view others outside his own cherished self-conceptions? In such a world, Babo would not serve as a blank slate through which Delano could act out his desires and preferences for self-identification. He could offer Babo an authentic form of sympathy� In this sense, Babo’s identity of non-identity is a limit case not so much in that Babo serves as a negative model, but in that this identity exemplifies the results of how Delano views others. 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” PMLA 122�2 (2007): 558-69� Print� Melville, Herman� “Benito Cereno�” 1855� The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839- 1860� Eds� Harrison Hayford, et al� Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1987� 46-117� Print� Michael, John� Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008� Print� Morrison, Toni� Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination� New York: Vintage, 1993� Print� Nelson, Dana D� The Word in Black and White: Reading Race in American Literature 1638- 1867� Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993� Print� -----� National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men� Durham: Duke UP, 1998� Print� 126 J ohn c. h avard Newman, Lea Bertani Vozar� A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Herman Melville� Boston: Hall, 1986� Print� Norton, Anne� Reflections on Political Identity� Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988� Print� Otter, Samuel� “An Aesthetics in All Things�” Representations 104 (2008): 116-25� Print� Pease, Donald E� “Re-thinking ‘American Studies after US Exceptionalism�’” American Literary History 21�1 (2009): 19-27� Print� Pérez, Louis A�, Jr� Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos� Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008� Print� Post-Lauria, Sheila� “Editorial Politics in Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno�’” American Periodicals 5 (1995): 1-13� Print� Retamar, Roberto Fernández� “Against the Black Legend�” Caliban and other Essays� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989� 56-73� Print� Robbins, Sarah� “Gendering the History of the Antislavery Narrative: Juxtaposing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and ‘Benito Cereno,’ Beloved and Middle Passage�” American Quarterly 49�3 (1997): 531-73� Print� Sundquist, Eric J� To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993� Print� Tawil, Ezra� The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006� Print� White, Ed� “Early American Nations as Imagined Communities�” American Quarterly 56�1 (2004): 49-81� Print� B radley r ay k ing Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks From the first page of Invisible Man, which opens with an epigraph from “Benito Cereno,” Ellison overtly inscribes his abiding fascination with Herman Melville� Throughout both of his novels and in several essays and interviews, Ellison includes dozens of hardly less subtle allusions to Moby- Dick, “Benito Cereno,” and The Confidence-Man� At least part of Ellison’s motivation derives from the prestige that Melville had acquired by the time of Ellison’s own emergence as a novelist in the early 1950s� During this moment, Ellison understood that allusions to and readings of Melville would garner a powerful audience and lend authority to his creative and critical output� In this sense, Ellison’s use of Melville resembles how C�L�R� James wrote a book about Moby-Dick while imprisoned on Ellis Island to capture a broad audience and perform his loyalty to American values� 1 As it did for James, the hypercanonicity of Melville’s work in the wake of the “Melville Revival” offered Ellison unique access to cultural power� 2 This access allowed Ellison to show that African Americans are integral to what he called “the tradition of American literature” and to carve out a space for himself within “that very powerful literary tradition,” as Ellison put it in an essay not coincidentally titled “On Initiation Rites and Power” (525)� Embracing a white canon may seem like a counterintuitive means of exposing the importance of African Americans to American culture� But Ellison was well aware of this irony, and he actually used allusions to Melville’s writings to interrogate precisely this sort of strategic power negotiation, particularly in the manuscripts of his unfinished second novel. Melville’s notable presence in the second novel project has gone unexamined - not surprising, since it is buried in only recently published manuscript pages - but Ellison’s earlier allusions to white American writers have stirred a rich conversation about the racial politics of canonicity� 3 This conversation 1 James was arrested in 1952 under the McCarran Act (also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act) and imprisoned on Ellis Island� While awaiting deportation, he wrote Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, took out a loan to self-publish it, and mailed copies to several prominent critics and every member of the U�S� Congress� James and Ellison discussed Melville together in the 1940s when they were both living in New York (See Wright 163-164)� 2 I borrow the term “hypercanonical” from Jonathan Arac, who uses it to describe a text or author who “monopolize[s] curricular and critical attention” and becomes identified “not just with a nation, but with the goodness of the nation” (Idol and Target 133, 14)� 3 Thanks to the herculean efforts of Adam Bradley and John Callahan, a large portion of the second novel was published in 2010 as Three Days Before the Shooting� The Melville allusions that I refer to here - and discuss extensively below - were not included in Juneteenth, a much smaller sampling of the second novel that Callahan published in 1999� 128 B radley r ay k ing figures Ellison as a democratic “joker” who affirms the canon only to repudiate the racially exclusionary hermeneutic practices of postwar Americanists� 4 Alan Nadel, for example, presents Ellison as a “trickster critic” who deploys allusions to writers like Melville, Emerson, and Twain to “revise the interpretive assumptions that structured the canon” (62)� These allusions, Nadel argues, are designed to appeal to the racial prejudices of postwar Americanists, but they also create a subversive racial “subtext” that “critiques and alters the tradition in which they function” (147)� Similarly, John Wright argues that Ellison’s commitment to canonical white writers represents neither opportunism nor “simple accommodationism,” but instead is the result of Ellison’s “concept of cultural synthesis as a subversive strategy of empowerment” (22)� Nadel and Wright build on Houston Baker’s argument that Ellison donned a “Western critical mask,” which allowed him to infuse white American literature “with the captivating sound of flattened thirds and sevenths” - to modulate the canonical standards into a dissonant, jazz-inflected key by emphasizing racial prejudice and slavery (199)� What all these critics share is a sense that Ellison theorized and practiced a strategic public identity that empowered him to appropriate and “blacken” white American literature� For these critics, Ellison’s canon-based criticism is the work of a pioneer theorist of the subversive, democratic power of strategic racial performativity� This is by and large a compelling account of what Ellison was doing with Melville in Invisible Man and throughout his critical essays� Ellison repeatedly alludes to the racial masquerades of Babo and the confidence-man as he explores “invisibility” as an empowering strategy “to take advantage of the white man’s psychological blind spot” (Ellison, Essays 344)� In Invisible Man, Babo and the confidence man, both protean tricksters who manipulate stereotypical assumptions about blackness, become models for negotiating and subverting the power dynamics of American racism� Ellison also wrote several essays about Melville, Twain and other white authors that praise and affirm the American canon, while at the same time eloquently criticizing the racial negligence of postwar Americanists� In so doing, they exemplify the practice of the “trickster critic,” who, in Ellison’s words, “simultaneously cooperates and resists, says yes and says no” (“Initiation” 496)� Yet this subtle simultaneity of acceptance and rejection was lost on the prominent literary critics and radical black intellectuals who were reading and reviewing Ellison’s work in the 1960s and 70s� These groups repudiated or ignored the racial dimensions of Ellison’s writing about Melville� Both understood him, the former with praise and the latter with condemnation, as an uncritical advocate of a white American canon - as cooperating and saying yes rather than resisting and saying no� During this same period, Ellison 4 My quotations around “joker” allude to work by Ross Posnock, who elaborates and advocates for what he calls Ellison’s politics of “the joker�” This Ellisonian “joker,” Posnock writes, “achieves identity through improvised pastiche” and “playful acts of assemblage�” By assembling multiple identities and “insisting on the primacy of the performative as the unstable grounds of identity,” Posnock believes that Ellison “liberates the cosmopolitan energies of democracy” (“Joking” 1,5,7; Color 206)� Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 129 labored at his apparently unfinishable second novel, a text that in many ways resonates with Ellison’s unfortunate public reception as it takes up problems of cultural and racial boundary-crossing, strategic performativity, and political misrecognition� I argue that these manuscripts gravely question the political efficacy of the “guerilla action,” as Ellison once called it, of his earlier work (“The World,” 169)� Indeed, the second novel - especially its plethora of Melville allusions - erodes any stable distinction between strategically subverting and unintentionally strengthening a hegemonic discourse� The novel’s protagonist, Bliss, attempts to practice a mode of ideological engagement that closely corresponds to Ellison’s idea of “saying yes, saying no�” A black church community raises Bliss, but he grows up to pass as white and eventually becomes a race-baiting U�S� senator who calls himself “Adam Sunraider�” As Sunraider, Bliss self-consciously appeals to the racism of the American electorate during the 1950s to establish and maintain his power� All the while, he tells himself that he is working to subvert the racism of his constituents: “Extend their visions until they disgust themselves,” he tells himself (Three Days 392)� But no one else seems to get his joke� Sunraider is embraced by the racists he aims to undermine and hated and feared by the African Americans he aims to help, one of whom eventually guns him down on the Senate floor. Despite the avowed commitment to racial equality that lies behind his racist performances as Sunraider, Bliss ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the racist discourse he desperately tries to subvert� 5 His too-subtle strategy of cultural critique betrays his own democratic intentions� As Ellison imagines the African Americans who are hurt and horrified by Bliss, this ostensibly democratic joker transforms from a subversively ironic Babo figure into to an exploitative, destructive, and delusional “mammy-made Ahab,” as one character calls Bliss� The second novel project thus marks a stark departure from the protean politics of invisibility in Invisible Man. This departure takes the shape of a deep skepticism toward the political hope in racial hybridity and performativity expressed by critics like Posnock, Nadel, Wright, and Baker� The momentous number of pages and drafts that Ellison devoted to Bliss shows that he remained deeply attached to and compelled by the democratic possibilities of the racial “joker�” But the second novel also explores the darker possibilities of this alluring figure: the 5 The structure of my argument about Bliss is in part inspired by W�J�T� Mitchell’s reading of Spike Lee’s controversial film Bamboozled. This film follows a frustrated African American television writer who proposes a minstrel show to satirize the racism of American television viewers� When the minstrel show becomes a hit, the writer abandons his original satirical intentions, outrages African Americans, and is eventually murdered by a black member of his own staff� As Mitchell compellingly paraphrases the film, “satire descends into tragedy” (229). As it does so, he argues, “the movie thoroughly deconstructs” the writer’s “satirical alibi” because “it shows the satirist destroyed by the very weapons of stereotype and caricature that he has unleashed” (302)� Bliss is not exactly a satirist, but he does unleash obscenely racist rhetoric with the intention of sabotaging that rhetoric’s power, and like Bamboozled’s protagonist, he is destroyed by the very weapons he attempts to deploy� 130 B radley r ay k ing possibility of failing to be understood, and of becoming just as deranged and devastating as Captain Ahab� Ellison’s career-spanning relationship with Melville, I argue, betrays a messier, darker account of Ellison’s complex relationship with the politics of “saying yes and saying no” than Ellisonians have yet provided� I want to suggest the second novel reveals an Ellison who is more challenging and perhaps more valuable to contemporary Americanists, who, as one critic has aptly argued, tend to place “all hopes for cultural resistance” in “the idea of multiple or hybridized identities” (Fluck 78-79)� The Politics of Invisibility Wright refers to Ellison’s stylized intellectual positioning as a result of his “Melvillean ironic temper,” and Invisible Man substantiates the accuracy of Wright’s phrase with its many allusions to Melville’s shrewdest tricksters - Babo and the confidence man (190). 6 Ellison uses Melville’s tricksters to describe characters and images that embody the performativity of racial identity and exemplify the subversive power that such performativity can bring� 7 Learning from these figures, the narrator ultimately embraces his “invisibility,” not only as a necessary condition of living in a culture so laden with racist stereotypes that “people refuse to see me,” but as an “advantageous” “political instrument” (Invisible Man 3, 491)� Using this instrument, the narrator becomes what Hortense Spillers calls “a figure of subversion,” who can “undermine, systematically, all vestiges of the established order that has driven him underground” (Spillers 80)� Invisible Man’s epigraph borrows a line from Benito Cereno that calls attention to the figure of Babo and his haunting power over the white characters in the story: “‘You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; ‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you? ” The answer to the question, which Ellison elides in the epigraph, is “the negro,” referring to Babo, who has concealed a slave revolt from Delano by wearing the mask of a humble, deferent, and docile servant of the supposed captain of 6 Several critics have written about thematic parallels in Melville’s work and Invisible Man, variously noting shared investments in “confusions of illusion and reality” (Omans), images of lightness and darkness (Schultz), literature and democracy (Gray), con games (Leblanc), and inter-textual allusiveness (Arac)� But these comparative accounts leave one with the impression that Invisible Man’s parallels with Melville fiction are almost incidental� They do not explore the depth of Ellison’s fascination with Melville and Melville scholarship� One exception to this comparative trend is Alan Nadel’s insight that Invisible Man uses allusions to Melville to criticize the racism of postwar American literary studies, an insight that I discuss at length below� 7 The most prominent Melville scholars of Ellison’s time tended to interpret Babo as “evil” or as a “monster,” and the same critics read The Confidence Man as an expression of Melville’s descent into depression and nihilism (see Matthiessen 508; Arvin 240, 251)� Ellison’s early embrace of these characters whom his contemporaries seemed to fear anticipates the work of contemporary scholars such as Geoffrey Sanborn and Jennifer Greiman, who celebrate Babo and the confidence man as modeling strategic and theatrical identities which productively challenge racial essentialism� Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 131 the slave vessel, Benito Cereno� Babo surreptitiously controls Delano’s every movement by studiously affirming his belief that “there is something in the negro which, in a particular way, fits him for avocations about one’s person.” (716)� When Delano gets uneasy about the behavior of the other “slaves” or begins to worry that Cereno is acting suspiciously, Babo reassures Delano by tending to his “master”: Sometimes the negro gave his master his arm, or took his handkerchief out of his pocket for him; performing those and similar offices with that affectionate zeal [���] which has gained for the negro the repute of being the most pleasing body servant in the world� (680) The climax of Babo’s performance comes after another “slave” strikes a white sailor with impunity� Babo shrewdly responds to Delano’s consternation by inviting him to watch Cereno be shaven� When Delano sees “the colored servant, napkin on arm, so debonair about his master, in a business so familiar as that of shaving, too, all his old weakness for negroes returned” (717)� Ellison links Bledsoe, the cynical president of his fictionalized Tuskegee College, to Babo through their shared capability to establish power over the white people around them by performing the humble offices of a bodily attendant� The narrator of Invisible Man recalls that Bledsoe “was the only one of us I knew - except perhaps a barber or a nursemaid - who could touch a white man with impunity” (112, my emphasis)� Bledsoe makes a career out of performing a servile, humble identity for the college’s white trustees, who share many of Delano’s expectations for black identity� This paradoxical power becomes clear to the novel’s narrator as he watches Bledsoe manipulate the trustees while they are on stage during a chapel service: “The honored guests moved silently upon the platform, herded to high carved chairs by Dr� Bledsoe with the decorum of a portly head waiter” (112)� Rotund, humbly dressed, and smiling, Bledsoe directs the movement of the trustees just as a shepherd herds a flock of sheep. From a “posture of humility and meekness,” Bledsoe can “exercise a powerful magic” over the trustees in much the same way that Babo exercises power over Delano (112-113)� Invisible Man’s two most explicit allusions to The Confidence-Man are figures that in some sense symbolize Bledsoe’s Babo-esque identity: the “very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed” “Jolly Nigger Coin Bank” and the “confidencing son of a bitch,” Bliss Proteus Rinehart (480). When the narrator discovers the bank while staying in Mary Rambo’s boarding house, he is disgusted by it and furious that Mary would allow such an artifact of racism into her rooms� In an exchange of letters about The Confidence-Man with Albert Murray, Ellison reveals that “the bank image in Invisible was suggested by the figure of the Black Guinea. That son of a bitch with his mouth full of pennies” (79)� Here Ellison cites a scene in Melville’s novel in which the confidence man, calling himself “Der Black Guinea,” appears as a “grotesque negro cripple” who begs for coins (Melville, Confidence 10)� The Black Guinea “would pause, throwing back his head and opening his mouth [ ���]; when, making a space before him, people would have a bout at a sort of pitch penny 132 B radley r ay k ing game, the cripple’s mouth being at once target and purse” (11)� The coin bank found by Invisible Man’s narrator physically materializes the obscenely degrading stereotype performed by Melville’s confidence man. The narrator first notices the coin bank as other residents in the house pound the pipes in the rooms to protest Mary’s frugal use of the heating furnace (312)� Enraged by what he calls their “cottonpatch ways,” the narrator protests their protest by smashing the iron bank against the pipes in his room� Eventually he shatters the bank only to discover that he cannot get rid of this image of blackness that he hates, even after he has destroyed it� The minstrel coin bank remains in the narrator’s briefcase, and he eventually realizes that even within the Brotherhood - Ellison’s allegorization of the American left, from abolitionism to the American Communist Party - he cannot escape the degrading stereotypes of blackness that it represents (312-325)� The narrator learns that he can ironically perform racist stereotypes to subvert their power only after he discovers Bliss Proteus Rinehart, who like Melville’s confidence man tactically transforms his appearance to establish “confidence” with various audiences. In an interview a few years after the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison claims that Rinehart is a “descendent of Melville’s ‘Confidence Man’” because he “is living a very stylized life” and “can act out many roles” (Conversations 75-76)� Rinehart is simultaneously a pimp, lover, gambler, numbers runner, and evangelical preacher at a storefront church� Rinehart opens the narrator’s mind to the instability of the surfaces and depths of one’s identity - between one’s “rind and heart” (Invisible Man 490)� “What is real anyway? ” Rinehart causes him to wonder� “He was a broad man, a man of many parts who got around� Rine the runner and Rine the Gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the reverend� [���] The world in which we live is without boundaries” (490, my emphasis)� After his initial enthusiasm, the narrator momentarily resists Rinehart’s “multiple personalities” and repudiates the fluidity of his identity as a retreat into cynicism� But he returns to Rinehart’s political “possibilities” in the Epilogue, and presents Rinehart’s “many parts” as a “political instrument” for achieving democratic equality� Invisible Man dismisses the stable, authentic personal identity that he has sought for most of the novel: I’ve come a long way from those days when, full of illusion, I lived a public life and attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein� Now I know that men are different and all life is divided and that only in division is there true health� (Invisible Man 567) At this point, Rinehart’s self-division-his “multiple personalities”-becomes an appealing model for political subjectivity: “whence all this passion toward conformity? -diversity is the word� Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states” (567, my emphasis)� Rather than opposing “conformity” to an ostensibly Emersonian “self-reliant” individual, Ellison opposes it to “diversity” - not of the socio-political community, but of the self� The performance of “many parts” becomes an effective mode of political resistance for those who are rendered “invisible” by a society’s prejudices: “The negro’s masking,” Ellison writes elsewhere, represents “a profound rejection Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 133 of the image created to usurp his identity” (“Change” 109)� By theatricalizing - “yessing” - a racist culture’s assumptions and expectations, one practices what Ellison calls “a sort of jujitsu of the spirit,” “a denial and rejection through agreement” (“Change” 110)� Invisible Man presents the strategic racialized performativity “suggested by” Babo and the confidence man as an effective means “to collaborate with [a racist society’s] destruction of its own values” - to “agree ‘em to death and destruction,” as the narrator’s grandfather puts it (Conversations 76, Invisible Man 16)� Indeed, Melville’s tricksters seem inextricable from Ellison’s effort to theorize a democratic politics of “invisibility�” Rinehart’s “multiplicity in ceaseless motion,” according to Kevil Bell, “embodies” this politics by “undermining every certitude, destabilizing every authority, concealing the “truth” of his character by performing its proliferation in public” (31, original emphasis)� Bell - like Posnock and the others I cite in my introduction - leaves his account of Ellison’s “joking” at praising him as a pioneer theorist of the subversive trickster� But following Ellison’s abiding relationship with Melville into the 1960s and 70s reveals the limitations and partiality of this optimistic version of Ellison’s politics of invisibility� For Ellison’s Melvillean critical mask and the tricksters of his second novel undermine the binaries that Bell describes between the truth of one’s character and its performances, between destabilization and authority - binaries without which the subversive power of the trickster becomes practically indistinguishable from complicity with power� Ellison’s “Western Critical Mask” Between the mid 1950s and the 70s, Ellison developed a highly intellectual and stylized academic identity that largely depended on his loyalty to and knowledge of Melville, Twain, and other white authors of the postwar American canon� In many ways Ellison’s “Western Critical Mask” exemplifies Invisible Man’s paradoxical synthesis of collaboration with and destruction of racism� Ellison says yes to the white canon only to repudiate the racially negligent reading practices of postwar critics� The link between Ellison’s literary critical performances and “confidencing” becomes explicit in a letter to his close friend Albert Murray� Murray asked Ellison about his time at Princeton University in 1953, where he was listening to talks by Edmund Wilson and lecturing on American literature to luminaries such as R�W�B Lewis, Alfred Kazin, R�P Blackmur, and Saul Bellow (Rampersad 268, 279)� “They’ve got the old rabbit back in the patch, wearing a black robe and trying to outdo ole Barbee,” Ellison writes in response, comparing himself to the trickster rabbit of black folklore and to Reverend Homer A� Barbee from Invisible Man, who theatrically recounts the founding mythic narrative of Bledsoe’s college to elicit students’ devotion to the school (Trading Twelves 39)� Ellison signed the letter “Rhine,” suggesting that the academic identity he performed at Princeton was in some sense 134 B radley r ay k ing inspired by the “confidencing son of a bitch.” 8 Several times throughout his letters with Murray, Ellison refers to the intellectual setting of the university as “my old briar patch” - a setting, he writes, that demanded “briarpatch cunning” (131, 116�) Ellison’s arguments about Melville, nation, and democracy were integral to his “cunning” appeal to the postwar literary academy� As Paul Lauter has argued, in the decades leading up the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, “Melville climbs the canon” and becomes an icon of national identity in American literary studies-a “characteristic” representative of “American genius,” or in Richard Chase’s phrase, “the grandest expression of the American imagination” (Lauter 6, Chase 91)� Throughout a series of essays, lectures, and university courses during the fifties and sixties, Ellison affirmed Melville’s hypercanonical status and utilized several other tropes of exceptionalist critical discourse - a white canon centered on “classic” nineteenth-century literature, an emphasis on national identity, and a preoccupation with what F�O� Matthiessen called “the possibilities of democracy” (xv)� Yet even as he collaborated with postwar Americanists, Ellison eloquently criticized these critics for overlooking the importance of race and slavery to the American literary imagination� For this critical project, Melville presented Ellison with a particularly viable “symbol of authority,” to borrow a term from Ellison’s close friend Kenneth Burke (Burke 169)� On the one hand, Melville’s writing presents multiple black characters, characters who self-consciously perform versions of blackness, and a sustained attention to the social and political dynamics of interracial relationships� And on the other hand, decades before Ellison began his effort to “blacken” Melville, the “Melville revivers” had praised his work for its unsettling, illicit (albeit nonracial) “blackness�” Raymond Weaver claimed in the first pages of the first Melville biography that “Melville sinned blackly against the orthodoxy of his time” (18)� A few years later Lewis Mumford claimed that Melville “plunged into the cold black depths of the spirit” and “questioned the foundations upon which their [Americans’] vast superstructure of comfort and complacency was erected” (Herman Melville xv)� Weaver and Mumford’s language of blackness alludes to Melville’s praise for Hawthorne’s writing, which most Melvilleans interpret as a comment on Melville’s own aesthetic� “It is that blackness in Hawthorne,” Melville writes, “that so fixes and fascinates me” - “a blackness ten times black” (“Hawthorne” 1158-59)� None these articulations of Melville’s black aesthetic made explicitly racial claims, but perhaps they speak to why Ellison would have been drawn to Melville as a site for critical contestation� For Melville offered Ellison the opportunity to engage a critical discourse on literary “blackness” and enrich it by integrating political valences of slavery, racial exploitation, and the failures of American democracy� 8 As Adam Bradley has documented, Ellison’s spellings of Rinehart are inconsistent, oscillating between “Rine,” “Rhine,” “Rinehart,” “Rhinehart,” “Rineheart,” and “Rhineheart” (130)� Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 135 Ellison began his integrative critical project with Invisible Man, which directly engaged American literary studies through allusions not only to Melville, but also to Melvilleans like Mumford� As Nadel has shown, Ellison’s most obvious critical target is Mumford’s “study of American literature and culture” The Golden Day (1926), the title chapter of which culminates in a reading of Melville’s fiction. Mumford’s “Golden Day” names the “climax” of American literary expression that occurred just before the Civil War, and as evidence of this exceptional moment, Mumford presents Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville - the very same writers who fifteen years later would constitute Matthiessen’s widely influential “American Renaissance” (43)� Nadel writes that Golden Day is an appropriate target for Ellison [���] not because it was the most significant book of its type but because it was one of the earliest and most typical: one that represents a typical whitewashing of American history� (94) In Invisible Man, “the Golden Day” is the name of a bar that sits just off the campus of Ellison’s fictionalization of Tuskegee. The narrator brings Norton, the white, northern college trustee, to this bar after visiting Trueblood� Ellison populates this “Golden Day” with angry, disillusioned, and highly articulate black World War I veterans who, when they returned to the U�S�, were denied access to the professional careers for which they were trained during the war� In Ellison’s “Golden Day,” black voices confront Norton’s ignorance of the discrimination and exploitation faced by blacks with precisely the kind of professional education that his money funds, and they scrutinize the inefficacy of his benign liberalism. For Ellison, the “Golden Day” thus becomes a site where black characters confront white ignorance about the failures of American democracy� “The Golden Day had once been painted white,” Ellison writes; “now its paint was flaking away with the years, the scratch of a finger being enough to send it showering down” (Invisible, 197)� Ellison dedicated many of his essays to scraping white paint off of American literature and calling attention to the exclusionary reading practices of Americanists� Ellison’s 1959 essay “Society, Morality, and the Novel” represents his most forthright criticism of the hermeneutics of whitewashing� By applying “the bright pure light of their methods,” Ellison argues, Americanists have obscured the most democratically valuable concerns of nineteenth-century American fiction - namely, racism and slavery (“Society” 698)� 9 Ignoring these issues, he writes, “reduces the annoying elements to a minimum” and blunts “the moral intention of American prose fiction by way of making it easier for the reader” (724)� The “moral cutting edge” of American fiction that critics suppress, in Ellison’s account, is its representation of African Americans as “the human factor placed outside the democratic master plan” (“Twentieth” 85)� Despite 9 Ellison rarely names the critics who he thinks have corrupted the American canon, but the title of his essay “Society, Morality, and the Novel” alludes to Lionel Trilling’s “Manners, Morals, and the Novel” (published in 1950 as a chapter of The Liberal Imagination), which argues that “American writers of genius have not turned their minds to society” and points to the metaphysical flights of Melville as an example. 136 B radley r ay k ing their inept twentieth-century interpreters, according to Ellison, nineteenth century writers - Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Crane, and especially Twain and Melville - used black characters to mark the failures of American democracy� The exception to Ellison’s claim about the suppression of race in twentieth-century literary discourse is William Faulkner, who Ellison argues “brings us as close to the moral implications of the Negro as Twain or Melville” (“Twentieth” 98)� Ellison argues that “the novel is a moral instrument, possessing for us an integrative function,” because in its best manifestations, it brings white and black Americans together and depicts them in the unfolding drama of American democracy� By ignoring race, Ellison argues, American critics “evade as much of [the novel’s] moral truth as possible” (original emphasis; “Society” 718)� Ellison often speaks in “sweeping generalities” about American literature, as one interviewer put it, but in an essay about legal discrimination Ellison uses “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Benito Cereno to perform a concrete example of integrative criticism (Conversations 224)� Ellison argues that legislative and judiciary racism dates back to the nation’s foundation, when the Founding Fathers “committed the sin of racial pride” and “designated one section of the American people to be the sacrificial victims for the benefit of the rest” (“Perspective” 781)� African Americans thus become “the exception” to democracy in America (“Perspective” 777)� But because of this exceptional status, Ellison writes, “the Black American was endowed linguistically with an ambivalent power - ‘the power of the negative’” (“Perspective” 782)� Ellison argues (as he does on many occasions) that African Americans represent a stinging nettle in the side of American democracy, a negation of its claims of “liberty and justice for all”: “He became a keeper of the nation’s sense of democratic achievement, and the human scale by which would be measured its painfully slow advance toward true equality” (“Perspective” 782)� Ellison reads Benito Cereno and “Bartleby” as dramatizing this “power of the negative” possessed by the “exceptions” to American democracy� Both texts, he argues, center on a socially and economically established white character - “a representative of law and thus of order” - who benefits from America’s selectively applied democracy� The narrator of “Bartleby,” he writes, is “a Wall Street lawyer who, for all his good will, is as imperceptive in grasping the basic connotation as Captain Delano of Benito Cereno is unable to grasp the human complexity of the Africans who believed, like himself, so much in freedom that they would kill for it” (“Perspective” 775)� The “basic connotation” that both characters (and their twentieth century interpreters) miss is that their beneficent democratic ideals are shattered by the characters who confront them during the story� Ellison argues that Melville endows Bartleby with the same “power of the negative” possessed by African Americans, and that he functions in the story in the same symbolic order that blacks do in American political culture - as an “exception” to an otherwise functionally democratic and progressive state� “In reading the story,” Ellison writes, Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 137 one has the sensation of watching a man walking backward past every boundary of human order and desire saying “I prefer not to, I prefer not to,” until at last he fades from sight and we are left with only the faint sound of his voice hanging thinly in the air, still saying no� Bartleby’s last remaining force, the force which at the very last he is asked to give up, is the power of the negative� (776) But “Bartleby is never forced or persuaded or cajoled to agree” (776)� He maintains his “obstinate negativism,” and in Ellison’s reading, he effectively challenges the structure of a society that would abuse and imprison him in the same way that, Ellison argues, African Americans negate the efficacy of American democracy� Bartleby, according to Ellison, becomes symbolic of the resilient, haunting, and sobering voices of repudiation that African Americans bring to American political discourse� As his emphasis on national identity, “possibilities of democracy,” and white canonical male authors demonstrates, Ellison’s literary criticism to a significant degree ingratiates the exceptionalism of postwar Americanists. And Ellison’s appeal to their literary and national values won him their favor� As Wright aptly argued, white literary critics embraced Ellison “as a quiet counterpoint to the discordant literature of Black Power,” and they “evaded Ellison’s attack on racist ideology” (16, 17)� R�W�B� Lewis, Ellison’s close personal friend, epitomized the literary academy’s relationship with Ellison in a 1964 essay on Ellison’s literary criticism� Lewis argued that Ellison’s work surpassed the writings of other black authors because it moved beyond the idea of the black artist as a “wounded warrior,” obsessed with the “struggle for racial justice�” Not coincidently, Lewis also praised Ellison for writing about and working within the tradition of white canonical authors like Emerson, Melville, Twain, and Faulkner (46)� But, Lewis notes, Ellison establishes his relationship with these canonical authors in the “beguilingly specialized terms” of race - terms that Lewis repudiates� “I am not quite convinced,” Lewis writes, “that slavery and the Negro were as central to the imagination of Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Mark Twain as Ellison makes out” (47)� Celebrating Ellison’s writing as a repudiation of black radicalism and an endorsement of the white cannon, Lewis embraces the most conservative dimensions of Ellison’s work without taking seriously his integrative arguments about race and democracy� The sharp edge of Ellison’s cultural criticism was also disregarded and misunderstood by participants in the Black Arts Movement, who repeatedly identified Ellison as a traitor to the cause of racial equality. Throughout the sixties, many black radicals began to castigate Ellison for his allegiance to cultural institutions traditionally controlled by whites� In an essay called “Philistinism and the Negro Writer,” Amiri Baraka claimed that the white institution of academia had “silenced” Ellison, and consigned him to “fidgeting away in some college” (Anger 53)� In 1970, Black World, a major journal of the Black Arts Movement, dedicated an entire issue to berating Ellison, in which Ernest Kaiser called him “an Establishment writer, an Uncle Tom, an attacker of the sociological formulations of the Black freedom movement�” 138 B radley r ay k ing Later in the same issue, Clifford Mason wrote that “what might have been an instructive allusion to white writers in the 60s is Tomism in the 70s” (quoted in Bradley 57)� Ellison reveals his frustration with how his work was understood by both white and black intellectuals in an early-seventies letter to Irving Howe, with whom Ellison had sparred years before over the obligations of black writers to produce “protest art” - an exchange that led to Ellison’s acclaimed essay, “The World and the Jug” (1964-65)� In the letter, Ellison appears exasperated - almost despairing - about living in a moment “when our best minds fail to trace the connections between the black community and the white, historically, morally, and culturally�” Drawing out such connections is precisely what writing about Melville had allowed Ellison to do, but he appears deeply frustrated that no one would take his work seriously� “Denounced by young black militants” and surrounded by white critics like Lewis who “have given up completely on the task of critical evaluation of efforts at art - or thought - coming from anyone who is not white,” Ellison felt “isolated” and worried that nothing he could write “would do any good�” “What does one do,” he asks, “now that the culture of the U�S� is referred to so glibly as ‘white culture’ and ‘black culture’? ” In such a racially divided world, the work of integrative criticism becomes impossible (50/ 11)� 10 Jackson argues that by the mid seventies Ellison “seemed to embrace” his conservative academic identity, and judging by Ellison’s numerous lectures and course syllabi on white canonical authors and his belittling attacks on the Black Arts Movement, Jackson seems right (“Integration” 174)� 11 But at this same moment Ellison was struggling to finish a novel about a psychologically troubled, delusional, and destructive character who also attempts to deploy a racist discourse strategically, yet ultimately becomes indistinguishable from it� The manuscripts of his second novel seem written by a more self-critical Ellison than Jackson describes - an Ellison who doubts the efficacy of his own “invisible” mode of cultural criticism. The Invisibility of Politics The unfinished second novel reveals that Ellison’s interests in Melville and the politics of invisibility persisted throughout his career, but it also betrays grave doubts regarding Invisible Man’s Rinehartean conclusion and Ellison’s Rinehart-inspired “Western critical mask�” If Invisible Man concludes with what Jackson calls “the permanent acceptance of and critical engagement with Rinehart,” Ellison’s second novel picks up where his first one left off - with another “confidence man” named Bliss, who is much more fully fleshed 10 Citations of material from the Ellison papers at The Library of Congress - such as this letter to Howe - list the box and folder in which the cited documents can be found� 11 On several occasions Ellison demeans black radicalism� He accuses its adherents of “rejecting intellectual discipline” and subscribing to irrational mystifications of black identity that Ellison refers to as “blood magic and blood thinking” (“Indivisible” 370; “Little Man” 509)� Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 139 out than his predecessor� 12 In the immensity of pages Ellison dedicated to Bliss, one witnesses his transition from a theatrical young preacher into a “confidence man,” his emergence as a powerful “race-baiting” politician, and the hurt and outrage he brings to African Americans� In many ways, Bliss faces similar problems of misrecognition to those Ellison faced as a literary critic� As a senator who wears the racist mask of Adam Sunraider with the intention of entering the U�S� political system and subverting its racial injustices, Bliss in many ways practices an exaggerated version of Ellison’s own shrewd exceptionalism and canon-based literary criticism� The effusive manuscript of Ellison’s second novel seems pulled in conflicting directions concerning the political possibilities and implications of Bliss� He is characterized both as a shrewd advocate of racial equality and as an Ahabian, self-obsessed demagogue who unleashes his American audience’s deep-seated racism� Several characters, including Bliss himself, espouse an Ellisonian optimism about the subversive potential of cultural hybridity and skilled theatricality� While Bliss’s public political identity is obscenely racist, he privately articulates beliefs about democracy and racial justice that mirror Ellison’s arguments about the brokenness and hypocrisy of a “democratic” society that excludes segments of its population from the political community� But as the manuscripts tell the stories of dozens of black characters who are hurt and enraged by Bliss, the Ahabian portrait overwhelms more sympathetic characterizations� The subversive Babo-esque trickster disappears beneath the domineering public persona of Adam Sunraider- a first name that alludes to Ahab’s intense hatred (“he piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down”) and a last that echoes the delusional cosmic arrogance (“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me”) that leads him to chase Moby Dick (Melville, Moby-Dick 184, 164)� Trained from his youth by a powerful black minister - an office that Ellison describes as “manipulator of eloquence and emotions” - Bliss achieves a level of “eloquence” and rhetorical power that evokes Ahab’s demagogical authority over the crew of the Pequod (“Work in Progress”)� Reverend Alonzo Hickman, a jazz man turned man of God, teaches Bliss the art of audience manipulation as he trains him to be a part of a grotesque evangelical performance� 13 Hickman would have Bliss carried down the center aisle in a coffin, and at a pre-determined moment, Bliss would burst out of the coffin, shout Christ’s words from the cross - “Lord, Lord, Why has thou forsaken me? ” - and then co-preach an antiphonal sermon with Hickman (Three Days 12 Bradley presents conclusive archival evidence that the second novel’s “Bliss” represents a direct continuation of Invisible Man’s Bliss Proteus Rinehart (125)� 13 Michael Szalay has recently argued that Bliss’s “commodification” of his identity as Adam Sunraider represents a betrayal of the “precapitalist wholeness” and the “prelapsarian moment of community in which Bliss lives happily within Hickman’s congregation” (799, 810)� But this strict dichotomy between Hickman and Bliss romanticizes Bliss’s childhood with Hickman, which was fraught with racial, sexual, and financial anxieties. It also inaccurately describes the relationship between Bliss and Hickman, since Bliss first learns the practice of self-commodification from Hickman’s highly theatrical evangelical sermons� 140 B radley r ay k ing 332-334)� 14 After Bliss reaches the height of his power as Sunraider, Hickman worries that he had unknowingly instructed Bliss in the art of “eloquence” during these powerfully effective sermonic performances� Anxiously, he wonders “whether I was conducting a con game or simply taking part and leading a mysterious prayer” (413)� In adolescence, Bliss runs away from Hickman’s congregation and begins passing as white, but he continues using his training in eloquence and theatricality to manipulate the people around him� Indeed, he becomes a remarkably self-reflective master of deception and confidence games. Ellison on several occasions recounts Bliss’s thoughts about his life as a confidence man, which often evoke cinematic imagery as a model for his performances� “Scenes dictate masks, and masks scenes,” he says; Bliss believes he can that play any “scene” to his advantage if only he performs the right part (399)� When the “scene” shifts, he shifts his identity along with it to maximize his power� After leaving Hickman, Bliss’s life becomes a sequence of brief, spottily narrated “scenes” in which he cons a series of mostly black audiences by posing as an evangelical preacher, a Hollywood movie-maker, and a salesman of skin-whitener and hair-straightener. Bliss’s life as a “confidence man” culminates in his identity as Senator Sunraider, who, like Ahab, is a demagogical master of inflammatory rhetoric. If Ahab “play[s] round” the “savageness” of his crew to exhort them in the hunt for the white whale, Sunraider manipulates the deep-seated racism of his constituents to gain and maintain his power (Melville, Moby-Dick 212)� But despite Sunraider’s racist rhetoric, Hickman maintains political hope in Bliss� When Bliss was a child, Hickman had expressed a prophetic democratic hope in the young boy’s prodigious rhetorical power - a power that Hickman believes results from Bliss’s cultural hybridity� Hickman echoes Ellison’s own defense of “cultural appropriation” and creative racial crosspollination in essays such as “The Little Man at Cheehaw Station” (515)� In this essay, Ellison celebrates the hybridized identity of a figure he calls the “American joker”: “His garments were, literally and figuratively, of many colors and cultures, his racial identity interwoven of many strands” (511)� An Ellisonian faith in the democratic possibilities of Bliss’s hybridity - his white skin paired with his upbringing in black culture - leads Hickman to bring up the child in love and dedication in the hope that properly raised and trained, the child’s color and features, his inner substance and his appearance would make it possible for him to enter into the wider affairs of the nation and work toward the betterment of his people and the moral health of the nation� (140/ 3) Hickman believes Bliss’s “mixture of blackness and whiteness” has endowed that child with a command of the Word which was so inspiring that we came to accept him as the living token and key to that world of togetherness for which our forefathers had hoped and prayed� (526) 14 Unless otherwise noted, all parenthetical page citations in this section refer to Bradley and Callahan’s Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)� Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 141 “Because of his power and grace with the God-given word,” Hickman continues, “we imagined him as a means of breaking the slavery-forged chains which still bind our country” (528)� Bliss’s “command of the Word” on one level obviously refers to his mastery of the Bible and his ability to use scripture effectively in his sermons� But it also refers to his power to deploy language itself - a power that Hickman believes is based in Bliss’s “mixture” of racial identities� Even after Bliss has transformed into Sunraider, Hickman holds out hope that his cross-cultural experience and powerful command of language will allow him to “speak for our condition from inside the only acceptable mask” and “embody our spirit in the councils of our enemies” (413)� Privately, Bliss adheres to the same democratic hopes as Hickman� He articulates Ellisonian arguments about how American democracy has failed through its exclusion of blacks and expresses his desire to “destroy” this unfair system from the inside� In notes for the novel, Ellison imagines Bliss saying to himself, “Those who believe in democracy but insist on excluding the Negro really don’t understand that this is the very foundation of the democratic ideal� Reject this foundation, and you reject the very essence of democracy” (140/ 2)� Bliss’s claim echoes Ellison’s often-stated argument that the health of American democracy depends on “the inclusion, not assimilation, of the black man” as an equal member of the political community (“What” 586, original emphasis)� “The senator understands the democratic ideal better than those who ascribe to liberalism,” Ellison writes; “He also understands the weakness done [to] the system through the failure to accept it in its entirety, and he discussed techniques for destroying it” (140/ 2)� Bliss’s technique for destroying the flawed American political system closely resembles Invisible Man’s “jujitsu of the spirit,” or “denial and rejection through agreement” (“Change” 110)� At one point in the manuscripts, Bliss asks himself, “HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET LOVE INTO POLITICS OR COMPASSION INTO HISTORY? ” His paradoxical answer: “strike back hard in angry collaboration” (392)� Ellison calls this “the strategy of a guerilla fighter transposed to the world of politics” (Juneteenth 361)� “Extend their vision until they disgust themselves, until they gag,” Bliss tells himself; “Stretch out their nerves, amplify their voices, extend their grasp until history is rolled into a pall” (392). In his own self-conception, Bliss fights for racial equality by “yessing” in “angry collaboration�” This mode of attacking a racist social structure deeply resonates with how Ellison - in interviews about Invisible Man - describes what the narrator learns from his grandfather and Rinehart: “to collaborate with its destruction of its own values” (Conversations 76)�But Bliss’s racist identity as Sunraider ultimately gets away from him, takes on a life of its own, and eclipses the commitment to racial equality that inspired Bliss’s entry into politics� Bliss performs racism purely for its power to ingratiate his audience, but his spectacular rhetoric slips out of his control - a slippage that destabilizes the boundary between ironic performance and complicit embrace� This slippage comes into focus as several voices from black communities exploited by Bliss recount the destructive effects of his 142 B radley r ay k ing racialized con games� Two of the most expressive of these voices are a savant named Cliofus and an “aspiring intellectual” named Walker Millsap, who both explicitly compare Bliss to Ahab� Both of these characters are accorded significant authority within the novel, the former as a voice of black “community conscience” and the latter as an educated, thoughtful writer, who frequently draws on an intensive knowledge of history and literature in his study of racial identities in America (860)� Cliofus and Millsap embarrass and undermine Hickman and Bliss’s Ellisonian hopes in the democratic confidence man. Rather than love or compassion, these characters (among others) show that Bliss in reality brings vitriol, fear, and hatred into racial politics in the U�S� His “angry collaboration,” in their accounts, collapses into mere collaboration, and Bliss becomes indistinguishable from the racism that he attempts to sabotage� In a difficult, nightmarish segment of the manuscripts, Cliofus suggests that Bliss’s race-baiting rhetoric is a degrading exploitation of African Americans by figuring Bliss as an “Ahab” who kills and showcases a “black whale” (880)� Cliofus is called the “unblinking eye of community conscience” for a group of African Americans in Oklahoma City (Ellison’s hometown) who were particularly damaged by one of Bliss’s pre-Sunraider scams and who kept track of him after he became a senator (860)� Bliss’s scam involved preying on the black community’s desire for equality by claiming to be a director and soliciting donations for a dubious “Hollywood movie” that would star African American actors� Bliss also seduced a beautiful young woman under false pretenses, and just before killing herself she gave birth to his son, who would grow up to be the man who shoots Sunraider� Cliofus’s name (evoking the muse of history) entails that he understands and bears responsibility for mediating the community’s traumatic past, even though he often expresses their history in opaque, hardly intelligible, yet entertaining parables� Cliofus works as a storyteller and toast-giver at a bar, where the audience seems to have heard his story about “Ahab” many times� One character tellingly describes Cliofus as an “oracle,” who “mixes what really happened with tales he’s been told, books he’s read, and stories he makes up” in order to communicate the community’s history (848)� Cliofus’s synthesis of community history with fictional narrative manifests itself in his Melvillean rendering of Bliss as an Ahab who brandishes an embalmed, bedecked black whale to entertain his audiences� When asked to describe Bliss, Cliofus launches into an arcane, disturbing story about going on a field trip with his kindergarten class to “see the great whale” (879)� After walking “way down in the bowels of downtown,” they find the whale, and the children are appalled. “He was rubbery and black and it took three flat cars to support him,” Cliofus remembers. As Miss Kindly, his teacher, tries to give the children a lesson about the difference between fish and mammals, Cliofus and his peers fixate upon the horrific “black whale,” “full of embalming fluid” and surrounded by “light bulbs suspended above him from head to tail, and [���] two big red ones which stuck Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 143 out of the sockets where his eyes had been�” Cliofus also remembers that the whale had several “rope-dangling harpoons stuck in his hump [that] trembled whenever a truck rolled past” (880)� This parodic synthesis of Bliss and Ahab becomes more transparent as the children lose interest in Miss Kindly’s biology lesson, and “a little old white man” appears and “comes hobbling toward us on a short wooden leg” (882). This “Ahab” figure demands “a nickel apiece just for looking at the whale” and a dime more for the story of how he killed it� Miss Kindly pays the man, and he “swears that after he harpooned the whale from his boat and got dragged through foaming seas for two hundred miles and a quarter, the whale jumped salty, knocked a hole in his boat and bit off his leg�” To keep the kids’ attention, “Ahab” “pulls a switch to make the whale’s red eyes flash” and “gives a twist to some kind of valve,” and the whale starts “spouting” water as “Ahab” laughs and shouts, “Thar she blows! ” (883)� Cliofus’s “Ahab” has converted the black whale into a spectacle by replacing its eyes and inner organs with grotesque adornments to attract and amuse a crowd - an apt allegory for Bliss’s degradation of black identity� An embalmed whale adorned by lights and equipped with glowing eyes and a switch-activated spout: this, Cliofus provocatively suggests, is what Bliss makes out of African Americans in order to entertain his audiences and sustain his power� 15 Ellison further elaborates Bliss’s kinship with Ahab and in Millsap’s long letter to Hickman, who had hired Millsap to find and keep track of Bliss just before he emerged as Sunraider� Full of philosophical, literary, and obscure historical references, this almost comically intellectual letter details Bliss’s relationship with a Babo-esque trickster named Sippy - a “confidence man” who “trained” Bliss (693)� Skilled in performance and rhetoric, Bliss, Millsap writes, was “made to order for Sippy’s ultimately subversive plan” (698)� Like Babo, Sippy “can manipulate the stereotype role thrust upon him” to achieve “power”: Babo’s performative “debonair” behavior “about his master” becomes Sippy’s “ironic, debonair respect” for white people, which he performs as he “operates behind the mask of a genial but not too intelligent butler, waiter, bellhop, chauffeur, or yardman” (687, 694)� Millsap writes that Sippy’s performances of servility undermine the power of his white audiences without their even knowing it� He can “lure them into a serene quicksand of black-and-white illusion and leave them as naked as fledgling jaybirds while strutting like the king who wore no clothes” - a reversal of power resonant with Babo’s manipulation of Delano (686)� Millsap believes that Sippy’s equalizing “hustle” has powerful democratic implications� The 15 Although he does not mention Cliofus, Szalay insightfully argues that Three Days Before the Shooting is a text deeply concerned with “whose political interests fantasies of blackness were mobilized” to serve (796)� Szalay maintains that Bliss represents Ellison’s figuration of “hip” Democrats such as John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who attempted to garner support by subtly aligning themselves with what Szalay calls “black style” (798-799)� Szalay’s argument sketches a compelling political context for Cliofus’s Ahabian portrayal of Bliss as having subdued, captured, and commodified a “black whale” - symbolizing his relationship with African American culture� 144 B radley r ay k ing power it affords Sippy is his only chance at “a fair share of American democracy,” and its shrewd reversal of black-and-white power dynamics ironizes America’s claim to “freedom and justice for all” by exposing “the difference between reality and an as-yet unfleshed ideal” (695). But as Millsap’s “little saga” continues, Bliss eventually abandons Sippy after receiving “a free-wheeling Ph�D’s instruction” in con games (698)� Soon after, he becomes what Millsap refers to as “a young mammy-made Ahab”(685)� Not knowing that Hickman had raised Bliss, Millsap speculates that Bliss had been “some kind of poor orphan of a white boy who, as a child, had passed through the loving hands of some Negro nursemaid or cook who treated him as one of her own” (684)� Such a child usually at some point “adopt[s] attitudes more in keeping with its acclaimed racial superiority,” but Bliss, Millsap thinks, failed to sever his connection to his black mammy, and he thus still longs for the love and community of his childhood and suppresses guilt for abandoning them (686)� Bliss’s incomplete severance from his black caretaker has created what Millsap calls “an unmistakable air of defiant loneliness” - a self-perpetuated refusal of all human attachment that resembles Ahab’s selfimposed isolation from both his crew and his wife and child ashore� Millsap implicitly compares Ahab’s severed limb to Bliss’s severed relationship with the black community that raised him: both losses render unhealing psychic wounds that lead to obsession, exploitation, and self-destruction� “Mammy-made Ahab” is also a phrase that fuses Bliss’s powerful “mixture of blackness and whiteness” and the destructive ends to which Bliss puts this mixture� In the context of the letter, “mammy-made” clearly refers to Millsap’s vaguely psychoanalytic theory about Bliss’s upbringing� But Ellison uses the phrase elsewhere to indicate, as John Kevin Young writes, “a transgression or mixture of ostensibly pure racial categories” (174)� Young points to Ellison’s 1952 letter to Murray, in which he calls himself a “mammy-made novelist” because he published the Prologue to Invisible Man in The Partisan Review - a journal edited, written, and read predominately by white intellectuals (Ellison, “Before Publication” 32)� As Jackson points out, before this Ellison had published his fiction mostly in journals with a small black readership, and he “wanted more prestige”: “What he needed,” writes Jackson, “was publicity and the imprimatur of high art” (433-34)� The phrase “mammy-made novelist,” Young argues, is how Ellison “acknowledges the impure roots of his novel’s public appearance” (174)� With this in mind, “mammy-made Ahab” takes on deeper resonances that speak to the complex layers of Ellison’s interest in Melville: his presentation of his work to white audiences, his fervid commitment to mixtures of racial categories, and his hope in the democratic power of the racial “joker�” In Millsap’s account, Bliss’s “mixture of blackness and whiteness” and his resulting theatrical power renders not a democratic savior, as Hickman hopes, but “a monster with two heads inhabiting a single body” (685)� Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 145 Millsap’s account of Bliss in many ways recapitulates Ellison’s own complicated attitudes toward the politics of invisibility� His “little saga” of Bliss’s transformation from a democratic confidence man into to a “mammy-made Ahab” reflects the stark differences between Ellison’s representations of racial performativity in Invisible Man and in the unfinished second novel. In Invisible Man, Ellison expresses hope in Bliss Proteus Rinehart’s “multiple parts” as the basis for subversive, democratizing performances� But when Ellison attempted to practice something like Rinehart’s democratic performativity with his “Western Critical Mask,” his ostensibly subversive ingratiation of the postwar academy backfired: it allowed Ellison to be deracialized and treated as a white-canon-building cultural conservative by both liberal academics and radical intellectuals� In the second novel, Rinehart’s more fully fleshed-out counterpart, Bliss, aspires to use such performativity in the service of democratic, anti-racist ends, but he ends up perpetrating the very racist system he set out to undermine, and he is ultimately destroyed by the offspring of his own deceptive power� Winfried Fluck has argued that political hope in “performance or performativity” and “flexible, multiple identities” represents “the new mantra in Cultural and American studies” (78, 79)� I want to conclude by suggesting that Ellison’s fraught relationship with the democratic confidence man - a relationship that culminates in his fractured and skeptical portrait of Bliss - challenges us to reconsider this “mantra,” which remains fashionable in contemporary Ellison scholarship and in critical and cultural theory more broadly� This political hope resembles the faith that Hickman and his congregation invest in Bliss’s racial hybridity and skilled theatricality - only to be left, in Hickman’s words, “puzzled by the wreck of our dreaming” (527)� Ellison’s struggle to communicate from behind his “Western critical mask” and his conflicted representations of Bliss antagonize any stable distinction between performatively sabotaging and destructively affirming a hegemonic discourse� Without this distinction, the subversive potential of the democratic trickster threatens to mutate into the manipulative and destructive Ahabian power of Sunraider� Ellison’s writing about Bliss thus suggests that while strategic performativity may be a valuable and pragmatic means of acquiring power, it should not be thought of as inherently liberatory or even subversive� For such performativity may betray the oppositional democratic desires of those who practice it, and it may also, as it does for Bliss, lead to blinding fantasies of political efficacy. Works Cited Arac, Jonathan� “Imperial Eclecticism in Moby-Dick and Invisible Man: Literature in a Postcolonial Empire�” boundary 2 37�3 (2010): 151-165� -----� Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Function of Criticism in Our Time� Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P� 1997� Arvin, Newton� Herman Melville� 1950� Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1976� 146 B radley r ay k ing Baraka, Amiri� “Philistinism and the Negro Writer�” Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States� Ed� Herbert Hill� New York: Harper & Row, 1966� Bell, Michael� “The Embrace of Entropy: Ralph Ellison and the Freedom Principle of Jazz Invisible�” boundary 2 30�2 (2003): 21-45� Bradley, Adam� Ralph Ellison in Progress. 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Ed� Albert Murray and John Callahan� New York: Vintage Books, 2000� -----� “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity�” 1953� The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison� Ed� John Callahan� New York: The Modern Library, 2003� 81-99� -----� “What America would be like without Blacks�” 1970� The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison� Ed� John Callahan� New York: The Modern Library, 2003� 581-588� -----� “The World and the Jug�” 1963-64� The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison� Ed� John Callahan� New York: The Modern Library, 2003� 155-188� -----� Ms� Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division� Box 51, Folder 11� Library of Congress, Washington D�C� -----� Ms� Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division� Box 140, File 2� Library of Congress, Washington D�C� -----� Ms� Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division� Box 140, File 3� Library of Congress, Washington D�C� Ralph Ellison’s Melville Masks 147 Fluck, Winfried� Romance with America? Ed� Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz� Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009� Gray, Valerie Bonita� Invisible Man’s Literary Heritage: Benito Cereno and Moby Dick� Amsterdam, Netherlands: Costerus, 1978� Jackson, Lawrence� Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius� Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2002� -----�“Ralph Ellison’s Politics of Integration�” A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison� Ed� Steven C� Tracy� Oxford UK: Oxford U P, 2004� 171-206� -----� “Ralph Ellison, Sharpies, Rinehart, and Politics in Invisible Man�” The Massachusetts Review 40�1 (1999): 71-95� Web� Lauter, Paul� “Melville Climbs the Canon�” American Literature 66�1 (1994): 1-24� LeBlanc, Michael. “The Color of Confidence: Racial Con Games and the Logic of Gold.” Cultural Critique 72 (2009): 1-46� Lewis, R�W�B� “Ellison’s Essays�” 1964� Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison� Ed� Kimberly W� Benston� Washington D�C�: Howard U P, 1990� 45-48� Matthiessen, F�O� The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman� Oxford, UK: Oxford U P, 1941� Melville, Herman� Benito Cereno� 1855� The Piazza Tales. 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Ed� Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G� Thomas Tanselle� Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P, 2001� Morrison, Toni� “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature�” Michigan Quarterly Review 28�1 (1989): 1-34� Mumford, Lewis� The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture. 1926� Boston: Beacon Press, 1957� -----� Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision� 1929� New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc�, 1962� Nadel, Alan� Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon� Iowa City, IO: U of Iowa P, 1988� Omans, Stuart E� “The Variations on a Masked Leader: A Study of the Literary Relationship of Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville�” South Atlantic Bulletin 40�2 (1975): 15-23� Posnock, Ross� “Ellison’s Joking�” The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison� Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U P, 2005� 1-10� Rampersad, Arnold� Ralph Ellison: A Biography� New York: Alfred A� Knopf, 2007� Shultz, Elizabeth. “The Illumination of Darkness: Affinities between Moby-Dick and Invisible Man.” CLA Journal 32�2 (1988): 170-200� Spillers, Hortence� Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture� Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2003� Szalay, Michael. “Ellison’s Unfinished Second Skin.” American Literary History 23�4 (2011): 795-827� Trilling, Lionel� The Liberal Imagination� 1950� New York, NY: New York Review of Books, 2008� Weaver, Raymond� Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic� New York, NY: George H� Doran Company, 1921� Wright, John S� Shadowing Ralph Ellison� Jackson MS: U P of Mississippi, 2006� Young, John Kevin� Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature� Jackson, MS: U P of Mississippi, 2006� g ünter l eyPoldt What Carrie Wants: Romantic Longing and Balzac’s Upward Mobility Novel in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie Reading Theodore Dreiser as an American realist/ naturalist influences our sense of Sister Carrie’s “problem�” It urges us, for example, to see the novel’s closing tableau - Carrie on her rocking chair, rich, lonely, full of obscure longing 1 - as a portrait of arrested development in an advanced stage of Gilded-Age consumer capitalism� In Blanche Gelfant’s empathetic paraphrase: “Poor Carrie� Her desire is illimitable, but her imagination is limited to the world of goods�” 2 For “Dreiser shows,” in Gelfant’s view, that Carrie “is conditioned biologically and culturally to want and buy�” Again: “Poor Carrie� She wanted a real self and ends up a fiery figure of consumption” (183-4). The realist/ naturalist period-slot places Carrie Meeber in the neighborhood of Madame Bovary, whom Flaubert describes as “being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic�” 3 Prompted by Emma Bovary’s indulgence in the “tantalizing phantasmagoria of sentimental realities,” 4 we attribute Carrie’s commodity fetishism to her failure to distinguish between real and illusory values� “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert reportedly said; 5 and Dreiser, too, has been accused of being too enmeshed in Carrie’s reveries for his own good� Since the retrospective framing of Dreiser as post-romantic situates him near the polished and detached point-of-view poetics of Flaubert and Henry James, we discover in him (in Amy Kaplan’s phrase) “two discordant narrative registers�” 6 Suddenly some of the more lyrical moods in Sister Carrie, 1 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed� Donald Pizer (NY: Norton, 3rd edition, 2006) 353-4� Further reference to this text will be parenthetically included in the text as SC� 2 Blanche H� Gelfant, “What More Can Carrie Want? Naturalistic Ways of Consuming Women,” Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, ed� Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 178-210; 179� 3 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed� Margaret Cohen (NY: Norton, 2005) 32� 4 Flaubert, Madame Bovary 33� 5 Reported, that is, by Flaubert’s French biographer René Descharmes in 1909, who heard it from someone who heard it from Flaubert’s correspondent Amélie Bosquet, who reported it as Flaubert’s answer to her question about the provenance of Emma Bovary’s character� See Madame Bovary: le bovarysme et la littérature de langue anglaise, ed� Nicole Terrien, Yvan Leclerc (Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications de l’université de Rouen, 2004) 6, fn�10� 6 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 140� For an early version of this claim, see Charles C� Walcutt’s American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1956), which suggests that the unconscious transcendentalism of such American authors as Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser prevents them from realizing their naturalist aims� 150 g ünter l eyPoldt the sort of passages critics hardly find jarring in the earlier realisms of Balzac or Stendhal, seem maudlin (“Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! ” [SC 354]), moralizing (“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen” …� [SC 1]), or pompously romantic (“the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following” [SC 354])� But how discordant are these “registers” really, given Dreiser’s middlebrow beginnings within the same decade - the 1890s - that saw a Balzac revival, the cult of Trilby, Wagnerism, and various higher and lower kinds of aestheticism that revolved around a mid-cult of genius and the mystique of “bohemia”? The realism/ naturalism construction obscures the messiness of Dreiser’s literary background� It encourages a narrow view of Sister Carrie as a sociologically-minded “condition of the modern city” novel that ignores Dreiser’s investment in the metaphysical and aesthetic discourses of the 1890s� Carrie’s supposed “pathologies” - her sentimentality, drivenness, unstillable longing, amorality, lack of lasting social ties, etc� - can be better understood if we recover Dreiser’s interest in the artist-novel (exemplified by The “Genius,” his most autobiographical work), his fascination with a lateromantic metaphysics of desire, and his attraction to Balzac’s characteristic triangulation of desire and ambition� 1. Desire and the Logic of Consumer Capitalism The idea of two discordant registers became central to Dreiser’s detractors� 7 In order to claim him for a serious American Naturalism, early-twentieth century critics either downplayed his sentimental register as a minor element of his work (secondary to his social realist project) or portrayed it as a kind of countercultural parody (a performative unmasking of “false consciousness”)� 8 One of the most counterintuitive defenses of Dreiser to date - Walter Benn Michaels’ “Carrie’s Popular Economy” (1980) - radicalized the logic of periodization. In Michaels’ view the novel’s language of excessive feeling reflects not an outdated sensibility but Dreiser’s inescapable immersion in consumer capitalism (“Sister Carrie is not anticapitalist at all” but “structured by an economy in which excess is seen to generate the power of both capitalism and the novel”)� 9 Critics have contested some of Michaels’ more unconventional inter- 7 In 1960 Leslie Fielder claimed, for example, that “[t]he fictional world of Dreiser is the absolutely sentimental world, in which morality itself has been dissolved in pity; and in such a world, Charlotte Temple is quite appropriately reborn” (Life and Death in the American Novel [1960; Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997] 253)� 8 The seminal essays are Sandy Petrey’s “The Language of Realism, the Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie�” Novel (Winter 1977): 101-113; and Cathy N� Davidson and Arnold E� Davidson, “Carrie’s Sisters: The Popular Prototypes for Dreiser’s Heroine,” Modern Fiction Studies 23 (Autumn 1977): 396-407� 9 Walter Benn Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” Critical Inquiry 7�2 (Winter 1980 ): 373-90; 390� What Carrie Wants 151 pretive moves, 10 but his essay opened a new faultline of dissent in Dreiser scholarship� The major oppositions of the debate - Frankfurt school vs� Foucault, critique vs� complicity, practical criticism vs� new-historicist revisionism - crystallize in the critical disagreement about the meaning of Carrie’s reading of Balzac: Does her embrace of high literature at the end of the novel suggest a tentative hope for her personal growth or just another turn within the degrading hamster wheel of consumption? A less obvious effect of Michaels’ revisionist intervention, however, is that it strengthened the authority of the realism/ naturalism period-slot, deepening a critical consensus that Carrie’s situation of endless longing follows naturally from the logic of the age, namely “consumer capitalism’s underlying dynamic of unending desire�” 11 Whether the novel is in fact raging against or simply stating the matter, Carrie’s situation follows from the economic rationalities of her late-nineteenth-century milieu - Michaels claims that the explanation for Carrie’s identitarian vacuum (the fact that she is what she desires) 12 is “already implicit” in the writings of “Adam Smith and David Ricardo” (388)� 2. Carrie in the Lonely Crowd The idea that Dreiser explores the psychodynamic consequences of consumer capitalism had already shaped old-historicist readings of Sister Carrie, and it resonated well with the post-WWII discourse of consumption-induced apathy as represented by David Riesman’s popular The Lonely Crowd (1950)� Riesman suggested that previous to the late nineteenth century, when the market was still largely shaped by the logic of production rather than consumption, people were more likely to internalize important sources of authority during their formative years� This enabled them to grow into self-reliant individuals with an “inner compass” of norms and values. When modernity fine-tuned everyone’s “radar” for the consumption practices of their neighbors, this impeded the emergence of a coherent inner value system� Even adults were now hypersensitive to the external authority of consumption-defined and mass-media-inculcated peer pressure� In Riesman’s view the increasingly 10 For example, can one really attribute Hurstwood’s downfall to the waning of his desire? Is it possible to claim that Robert Ames, the bookish Midwesterner who emerges as a kind of tutor-figure to Carrie towards the end of the novel, is not Dreiser’s mouthpiece but a caricature of William Dean Howells (representative of an outdated economy of scarcity)? See Kevin McNamara, “The Ames of the Good Society: Sister Carrie and Social Engineering,” Criticism 34�2 (Spring 1992): 217-35� 11 Phillip Barrish, The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011) 124� 12 In Walter Benn Michaels’ formulation: “What you are is what you want, in other words, what you aren’t” (382). And: “Carrie’s body, infinitely incomplete, is literary and economic, immaterial and material, the body of desire in capitalism” (“Fictitious Dealing: A Reply to Leo Bersani,” Critical Inquiry 8�1 [Autumn 1981]: 165-171; 169)� 152 g ünter l eyPoldt “other-directed” American middle classes developed a feminized, fluid sense of selfhood and were driven by interior motives no more substantial than “diffuse anxiety�” 13 Riesman’s account seems somewhat dated today, 14 and Michaels’ thesis of Dreiser’s complicity attests to rising doubts about whether true inner-directedness ever existed� Still, the revisionist claims about Dreiser’s complicity hardly differ from traditional alienation models à la Riesman where the market-generated fetishistic desire has so thoroughly invaded Carrie’s (and perhaps Dreiser’s) inner world that the distinction between inside and outside has become meaningless� As June Howard phrases this claim, “one could ask for no more vivid description of commodity fetishism” than Dreiser’s account of Carrie’s “desire” as something at once “‘in her’” and somehow “separate from her self and enforcing itself upon her,” so that “what is within and what is without are not easily separable, nor is an authentic self easily located�” 15 3. Romantic Sehnsucht/ Ontological Longing/ Mystical Desire But what if the person in the rocking chair, solitary, longing for an ever-elusive “happiness” (SC 355), were not a realist-naturalist “lost lady” 16 but someone who resembles the iconic late-nineteenth-century images of, say, Wilhelm Meister, Ludwig van Beethoven, Baudelaire, even Walt Whitman? Would the motif of unquenchable Sehnsucht then still strike us as an allegory or symptom of economic incorporation? Carrie’s sensibility perfectly illustrates the nineteenth-century theologies, philosophies, and “art religions” that explain the phenomenon of unending desire in terms of humanity’s attraction to a higher presence (God, the Infinite, the Absolute, Being, Over-soul, Life-Force, etc)� 17 Within the frame of a romantic artist novel, Carrie’s intuitive longing for 13 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale UP, 1950) 26; his emphasis� See Winfried Fluck’s application of Riesman’s terms to distinguish American naturalism from realism, in Romance with America: Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009) 206ff�, and his contrast between Riesman and George Herbert Mead, in “Crime, Guilt, and Subjectivity in Dreiser, Mead, and Lacan,” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 58�2 (2013): 235-58� 14 As do many similar accounts of cultural decline that emerged around such 1950s topics as conformity, culture industry, narcissism, and commercialism� See Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)� 15 June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985) 42� 16 Christoph Den Tandt, “American Literary Naturalism,” A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914, ed� Robert Lamb, G�R� Thompson (London: Blackwell, 2009) 96-118; 110� 17 Classic nineteenth-century theorists of ontological desire are Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and Kierkegaard� The literary discourse of Sehnsucht begins at least with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (Mignon’s plaintive songs are presented as “sympathetic” to the yearning of the bildungs hero)� The religious background of the romantic-period concepts involves St� Augustine’s iconic meditations about how the desire for God accounts for the perpetual “restlessness” of the soul and Jakob Boehme’s What Carrie Wants 153 beauty signifies a visionary-artistic temperament. The logic of period succession implies that the mystical identity model may well have inspired creative breakthroughs in Grasmere, Jena or Vienna around 1800 (and perhaps, too, on the Boston common in 1837), but that with the Age of Realism/ Naturalism it became residual, esoteric, a source of sentimental cliché� The ontological interpretation of desire, however, never lost cultural relevance within the literary field through which Dreiser moves during the 1890s. His digression, in chapter VIII, on the “middle stage” of modern civilization (which leaves “untutored man” as a “wisp in the wind”) (SC 54) rehearses a view of humanity as essentially incomplete (with irredeemable desire as the direct symptom of this incompleteness) that is so deeply inscribed in late-nineteenth-century thought that it dominates cultural theory from philosophical discourse down to the imaginaries of popular magazine culture� 18 As we can gauge from the US reception of George du Maurier’s Trilby, the mystique of the yearning bohemian artist was attractive to the new middlebrow audiences of the 1880s and 1890s that, according to Jonathan Freedman, sought to invoke “the authority of taste, aesthetics, and culture” made available to them by “mass market magazines” and “reading clubs�” 19 Dreiser read Trilby when it was serialized by Harper’s Monthly in 1894, and he later remembered having experienced the novel “with profound emotional perturbation, leaving me sadly craving,” and “lost, for the time, in the beauty of Paris and studio life�” 20 One year previously Harper’s featured Arthur Symons’ article on “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” which praised Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé as exemplars of a countercultural Bohemian avant-garde that was “haunted by the desire to create�” 21 Dreiser wrote about Verlaine in 1896, 22 and presumably felt the currency of motifs that connect bohemian desire with a literary avant-garde� Consider, for example, how Symons describes the French poets in 1899 (in the book version of his Harper’s article): “To Verlaine every corner of the world was alive with tempting and consoling and terrifying beauty�” And: “To him, physical sight and spiritual vision, by some strange alchemical operation of the brain, were one�” 23 Moreover: “With Verlaine […] often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length sensuality may be hurried,” but “sensuality is never more than the malady of love,” and indeed a “love desiring the absolute, seeking in vain, seeking mystical theory on the striving towards light as a general principle underlying the material world� In all of these cases, desire is considered a response to an ontological absence that (in contrast to a material need, which disappears as soon as its object is attained) is essentially unstillable because its object is conceived of as an alterity� 18 On the ubiquity of this motif see Abrams Natural Supernaturalism (NY: Norton, 1971)� 19 Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (NY: Oxford UP, 2000) 93� 20 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days: An Autobiography, ed� T� D� Nostwich (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991) 545-6� 21 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87�522 (November 1893): 858-869; 862� 22 Theodore Dreiser, “[March 1896],” Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month, ed� Nancy Warner Barrineau (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996) 53-4� 23 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899) 82� 154 g ünter l eyPoldt always, and, finally, out of the depths, finding God” (97). We are used to associating Symons’ celebration of French avant-garde bohemia with a modernist generation of poets leading up to T�S� Eliot and Ezra Pound, but his suggestion that love “is a desire for the infinite in humanity” (98) seems hardly out of sync with a highand mid-cultural establishment that perceived Wagnerism as one of its most important aesthetic achievements: Tristan und Isolde premiered in New York in 1886, 24 the Tristan chord being Wagner’s intended expression of “longing without attainment” 25 - “I don’t know what it is about music,” Carrie says to Ames: “but it always makes me feel as if I wanted something” (SC 340)� 4. Varieties of Mystical Desire: Carrie and Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze At question here is not “influence” - Dreiser did not, to my knowledge, care much for French Symbolism, or Wagnerism� But placing Sister Carrie within the larger literary and artistic field of the 1890s can help us to see how the mystical concept of desire stretches across the high-cultural and middlebrow spaces within which Dreiser was trying to establish his literary voice� As a conveniently remote but arguably instructive foil for Dreiser’s mysticism, I suggest we situate Carrie’s journey within the iconic fin-de-siècle conceptualization of desire and beauty in Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, an Art Nouveau mural for a 1902 Vienna-Secession exhibition in celebration of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony� The Beethoven Frieze (Fig� 2) consists of painted and decorated plaster panels that cover three walls of a dedicated room within the Vienna secession building. The first two panels on the left-side wall are almost blank, except for a rhythmical series of vaguely-drawn human silhouettes flowing across the panel’s upper rim towards the ceiling (Fig� 1)� Fig� 1� Detail of second left-hand panel, upper rim: “hovering genii [schwebende Gestalten],” from Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt. Der Beethovenfries: Geschichte, Funktion und Bedeutung (Salzburg: Residenz, 1977) 62� 24 Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 107� 25 Richard Wagner, program note to the Overture of Tristan and Isolde, 1859/ 60, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed� Dieter Borchmeyer, 10 vols (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983) IV: 104� What Carrie Wants 155 Fig� 2� Drawing of the Beethoven Fries by B� Woodcock, from Peter Vergo, “Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze,” The Burlington Magazine 115 (Feb� 1973): 108-113; 112� 156 g ünter l eyPoldt The original exhibition catalogue explains that these are “hovering genii,” symbolizing the “desire [Sehnsucht] for happiness�” 26 Klimt’s composition locates the origin of the genii in a higher region beyond the scope of representation� They break into the sphere of vision as transcendent force� Klimt’s next left-hand panel portrays the “suffering of weak humanity�” Three naked, haggard-looking figures are depicted in a pleading or begging position. Kneeling, with folded hands, they are oriented towards a gold-plated ensemble of three figures, a knight in bright golden armor, and two female personifications. As the program explains, “suffering humanity” is “petitioning” the “well-armored strong man [den wohlgerüsteten Starken]” to fight for them in “the struggle for happiness,” and they are also appealing to “Pity” and “Ambition,” the “inner-driving forces” that motivate the Hero’s struggle� The famous center-wall panels depict personifications of the “hostile forces” the quest for human happiness will have to face (“Sickness, madness, death, lust and wantonness, intemperance, gnawing grief”)� But any heroic engagement with these external antagonisms leaves the deeper reality of human longing untouched: “Humanity’s yearnings and desires fly past” this lurid spectacle of earthly threats and temptations, which indicates the futility of this battle for our attainment of ultimate happiness� The way out of the dilemma seems to lie with aesthetic contemplation: At the end of the first panel on the right-hand corridor, we see that the “floating genii” are interrupted by a goldplated personification of Poetry, whose lyre reaches into the heights of their sphere and contains them completely: “The desire for happiness is quenched [findet Stillung] in Poetry” (Fig. 3). The final panel culminates in an aesthetic apotheosis: Its left side displays a golden vortex with upward flowing female personifications: “The arts lead us into an ideal world, the only place where we can find pure joy, pure happiness, pure love�” On the right, a garden scene shows a “choir of angels of Paradise; ” they sing Schiller’s words to Beethoven’s Ninth (“Freude schöner Götterfunke [Joy thy gleaming spark divine]”)� In front of the choir, a golden structure houses a naked human couple, engaged in an embrace� Again Schiller’s program: “Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt [This kiss to the whole world]�” 27 26 “Max Klinger - Beethoven - XIV� Kunstausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession” (Wien: Wiener Bibliophilen-Gesellschaft, 1902) 25-26; reprinted in Gustav Klimt, Beethovenfries (Wien: Secession, 2002) 40-1� 27 Most critics have tried to stabilize the meaning of Klimt’s cycle of images by mapping it onto Richard Wagner’s writings on Beethoven, though it is significant here that contemporary viewers were mainly struck by its allegorical openness - the Austro-Hungarian art critic Ludwig Hevesi had the impression that the frieze depicted “people’s longing for happiness, more or less, I should say, because allegories should not be completely understandable” (“Sezession [18� April 1902],” Acht Jahre Sezession (März 1997-Juni 1905): Kritik - Polemik - Chronik [Wien: Carl Konegen, 1906] 390-4; 392: “Klimt hat sich die Sehnsucht der Menschheit nach dem Glück gedacht� So ungefähr, sei hinzugefügt, denn Allegorien soll man gar nicht ganz verstehen”)� Interpretive closure began when in 1977 Marian Bisanz-Prakken showed parallels between Klimt’s images and a program that Richard Wagner had written for his Dresden production of Beethoven’s Ninth� Wagner’s paraphrase of the content of the Ninth’s four movements can be made to square with four stations in Klimt’s cycle (see Marian Bisanz-Prakken, What Carrie Wants 157 Fig. 3. Detail of first right-hand panel: “The desire for happiness is quenched [findet Stillung] in Poetry, ” from Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt. Der Beethovenfries 76� Klimt’s mural demonstrates how the mystical account of human longing could be made to resonate with both avant-garde and traditional viewpoints� The idea of ontological desire and the redemptive power of the arts cohered well with the image of music as a divine language that defined the international Beethoven cult� It also accorded with Schillerian-Arnoldian culture models that considered aesthetic bildung a tonic against philistine civilization and implied what Amy Hungerford calls a “living-religious faith” in Gustav Klimt. Der Beethovenfries: Geschichte, Funktion und Bedeutung [Salzburg: Residenz, 1977])� While there is no evidence for this in the context of Klimt, in the anonymous author of the catalogue program, or in the contemporary reception, this reading has become standard and is repeated by most exhibition catalogues� Other interpretations relate Klimt’s images to his biography (his struggles as a maligned artist), Wagner’s 1870 Schopenhauerian treatise Beethoven, or the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (see Kevin C� Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna [NY: Oxford UP, 2013] chap 4)� Wagner’s program uses passages from Goethe’s Faust, and some critics have seen the latter as a relevant source (see Claire Wilsdon, “Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: Goethe, Tempelkunst, and the Fulfillment of Wishes,” Art History 19�1 [March 1996]: 44-73)� 158 g ünter l eyPoldt “literary form�” 28 The popular portrait of Beethoven as a daemonic or heroic genius-prophet who bravely penetrates the “‘Divine Idea’ pervading the visible universe” 29 could be understood in the terms of romantic-period transcendental idealism, whose anticlerical critique of established religion 30 had been considered radical in the 1830s but become more acceptable in intellectual and middlebrow circles around 1900� Yet the Beethoven mystique could also be made to suit the mainstream positions that combined the concept of genius with more traditional forms of Christian belief� 31 Both transcendentalist and Christian views recognize human longing as a positive force that signifies a craving for God or a “feeling for the infinite.” 32 E�T�A� Hoffmann’s famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth (1810) frames the transition from Haydn to Mozart and Beethoven in terms of an increasing sensitivity to desire that indicates a spiritual breakthrough� 33 Hoffmann portrays the “pain” of desire expressed in Beethoven as a cathartic higher emotion that momentarily turns us into “ecstatic visionaries” (98) able to transcend the lower desires of the everyday� From this viewpoint, Klimt’s allegory would seem to suggest a familiar bildungsroman that maps well onto the “sentimental” reading of Sister Carrie: The desire at the root of the human condition propels us forward (Carrie is drawn towards Chicago), but “hostile 28 Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American literature and religion since 1960 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010) xviii� 29 Thomas Carlyle, “State of German Literature,” Edinburgh Review 46�92 (Oct�): 304-51; 329� In a later formulation, Carlyle associates genius with the “musical thought” that the heroic “mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing” detects at the root of a universal consciousness (On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History, ed� Michael K� Goldberg et al� [Berkeley: U of California P, 1993] 71)� 30 As suggested in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-4), Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838) or David Friedrich Strauß’ Life of Jesus (1835/ 36)� 31 Positions that considered music to be expressive not only of “the laws of man’s nature, with all the laws that govern the created universe” but also of “the eternal ideas of God,” as the Boston musicologist John Sullivan Dwight put it in 1845 (“Musical Review,” Harbinger 1 [1845]: 13)� 32 “Religion ist Sinn und Geschmak fürs Unendliche�” Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion: Reden and die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern [1799] (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001) 80. Schleiermacher defines the “longing [Sehnsucht] for the marvellous and supernatural [Wunderbaren und Übernatürlichen]” as a “striving for the higher [Streben nach dem Höheren]” that he considers essential for a fully realized humanity (120)� For him, the ability to experience “holy sadness [heilige Wehmuth]” - a “feeling of unsatisfied longing for a great object [das Gefühl der unbefriedigten Sehnsucht die auf einen großen Gegenstand gerichtet ist]” - is crucial for cultivating the religious sense and thus constitutes the “true and highest aim of virtuosity in Christian practice [das eigentliche höchste Ziel der Virtuosität im Christenthum” (188)� 33 Whereas Haydn’s symphonies mainly evoke scenes of laughter and joy (“no suffering, no pain; only sweet, melancholy longing for the beloved vision floating far off in the red glow of evening”) and Mozart’s music leads us further “into the realm of spirits” (a “first intimation of infinity,” “the gentle spirit-voices of love and melancholy”), Beethoven opens us up to spiritual reality: his “music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning […] in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation, sinks back and disappears�” E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed� David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 97-8� What Carrie Wants 159 forces” seek to destroy us (poverty, sickness) or lure us towards a “wild lust,” as our “restlessness” and “despair” drive us to chase one “new happiness after the other” 34 (Carrie succumbs to a succession of low pleasures, commodities, fame, money)� But aesthetic contemplation connects us to a higher, spiritual love that stills our longing and prepares us for the democratic embrace of humanity (Carrie accepts more spiritual-artistic gifts: Ames rather than Hurstwood or Drouet, Balzac and tragic acting rather than sentimental fiction and cabaret). We might draw out this spiritualist reading by mapping Carrie’s final scene onto the transcendentalist-Buddhist ending of Dreiser’s final novel, The Stoic (1947): There, for the first time, she had experienced the dawn of a spiritual awakening, which was even now enabling her to see more clearly� She must go on, she must grow, she thought, and acquire, if possible, a real and deep understanding of the meaning of life and its spiritual import� 35 Carrie, too, is allowed an epiphanic sense, towards the end of Sister Carrie, that the people and things to which she had been attracted were mere “representations” of a larger spiritual essence: What “she longed for” was not “Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of stage - these were but incidents,” or “representations” that “Time” proved “false” - but “that which they represented” (SC 353), that is, the mystical reality beyond the shifting external clothes� 36 On the other hand, the mystical identity model needs only a minor adjustment to blend into the more negative visions of presence that struck turn-ofthe-century audiences as more cutting-edge or (depending on the viewpoint) more offensive, readings that our period-frames tend to assign to a secular, amoral type of fin-de-siècle aestheticism (Baudelaire and Verlaine, Pater and Wilde, Nietzsche and Hofmannsthal)� One direction of shifting emphasis leads through the reinterpretation of desire in terms of an irrational lifeforce, such as Schopenhauer’s “blind will-to-live” 37 that precedes human consciousness and governs the “thing in itself” (the verbal derivative “Wollen” signifies “to want,” “to desire”). Through Schopenhauer’s eyes, Klimt’s images become considerably darker: “Humanity’s yearnings and desires fly past” the “hostile forces” because the distinction between higher and lower forms 34 Richard Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed� Dieter Borchmeyer, 10 vols� (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983) 9: 21� The quotation is from Wagner’s 1846 program for the Ninth’s second movement that critics have applied to Klimt’s depiction of “hostile forces�” 35 Theodore Dreiser, The Stoic (Cleveland: The World, 1947) 310� The reference is to Frank Cowperwood’s idealized lover Berenice Fleming, who finds her peace, after Cowperwood’s death, through Buddhist meditation� 36 On “clothes” as a metaphor for mediated forms of presence see Carlyle’s influential Sartor Resartus (1833-4) and Emerson’s distinction between substance and its various historical metaphors for “Being” in “Experience” (1844) (Works, Centenary Edition [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903] III: 72-3). 37 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols�, trans� E�F�J� Payne (NY: Dover, 1966) II: 579� In Schopenhauer’s words, “No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still [the individual’s] craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart” (II: 573). 160 g ünter l eyPoldt of desire has become pointless, being both objectifications of blind will (or with Spencer and Freud, the caprice of chemical matter, sexual drives or the id)� The relevance of literary and aesthetic expression lies then not in any redemptive connection with a divine sphere; it merely offers a momentary escape from the suffering of constant longing� 38 Because critics consider the darker viewpoint (arbitrary force rather than transcendent presence) better attuned to a naturalist sensibility and poetics, they wish Dreiser had cut the sentimental overtones from Sister Carrie’s epilogue� 39 If Carrie’s discovery of Balzac marks just another stage in human self-delusion, why celebrate it with romantic clichés? It is not clear, however, that the distinction between a sentimental (transcendentalist) and a naturalist (Schopenhauerian, Spencerian) conception is as sharp in Dreiser’s literary practice as the period breaks that structure our literary histories would imply� Consider, for example, the two endings to Dreiser’s artist novel The “Genius” (1911/ 1915). In the first version of 1911 (which remained unpublished until 2008), Dreiser’s alter ego Eugene Witla has grown into a “stronger and calmer” person who successfully moved beyond the “religious abstrusities” of both conventional Christianity and Christian Science to which he had formerly clung� Stumbling over a volume of Herbert Spencer’s Facts and Comments (1902), Eugene quotes Spencer’s troubled sense of absence in a Godless universe (“the consciousness that without origin or cause infinite Space has ever existed and must ever exist,” Spencer says, “produces in me a feeling from which I shrink”)� Rereading this passage reminds Eugene how far he has progressed: Spencer’s vision of a void “could never trouble me anymore,” because life now seemed governed by “a ruling power” that “rules all - is all, and it is not malicious�” 40 We might say that the development of the 1911 Eugene parallels the generic bildung of the transcendentalist hero, whose loss of traditional religion due to the exposure to the empirical sciences leads through a debilitating phase of skeptical despair (Carlyle’s “Everlasting No”) until the discovery of a higher spiritual reality leads to a redemptive kind of self-reliance (the “Everlasting Yea”)� 41 Now, critics have noted that the revised ending that Dreiser published refuses such a resolution: Spencer’s quotation is now elevated to “the sanest interpretation of the limitations of human thought that I have ever read,” one that indeed seems “peculiarly related to [Eugene’s] view point�” Moreover, “religious thought” is more clearly condemned as a tonic for “ethical and spiritual ease,” “a bandage which man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances�” Because this revision moves the text further towards Schopenhauer and Spencer, critics have found it more in tune with 38 According to Schopenhauer, “knowledge of the whole, of the inner nature of the thingin-itself” can help us to detach ourselves from “all and every willing” and reach a “state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true composure, and complete will-lessness” (I: 379)� 39 Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976) 95� 40 Theodore Dreiser, The Genius, ed� Clare Eby (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2008) 744-5� 41 See Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 7: “The Everlasting No,” chap� 8: “The Center of Indifference,” and chap� 9: “The Everlasting Yea�” What Carrie Wants 161 Dreiser’s naturalism� And yet both endings resolve the problem of “unknowability” with a contemplative vision of beauty that recalls a traditional rhetoric of mystical union� In the 1911, transcendentalist ending, the reason that Eugene is no longer troubled by the doctrines of “natural selection” and the “will to live” is that “[i]t was beautiful now to think of the universe as being good, not evil” (744). In the manner of negative theology, Eugene’s confidence is based on a leap of faith rather than settled knowledge, but this leap is encouraged by his deep sense of aesthetic presence when he looks up at the stars� The 1915, “naturalist” ending makes the same point, merely embellishing the aesthetic brilliance of the scene: Where in 1911 Eugene simply finds the night “cool, brilliant” (746), in 1915 he is dazzled by “Orion’s majestic belt and those mystic constellations that make dippers, bears, and that remote cloudy formation known as the Milky Way�” And he adds: “What a sweet welter life is - how rich, how tender, how grim, how artistic - how like a colourful symphony�” Thus: “Great art dreams welled up into his soul as he viewed the sparkling deeps of space” (907)� In other words, the symphonic fullness of the universe causes the sort of reaction that Klimt’s final panel depicts as aesthetic jouissance and that Walter Pater, the icon of fin-de-siècle aestheticism, described as moments of “intense consciousness” or “pauses of time” that make us “spectators of all the fulness of existence” and “quintessence of life�” 42 Pater is often “detranscendentalized” 43 by a period logic that classifies the fin de siècle in terms of a radically secular moral decadence, and so is Klimt� To the degree that twentieth-century Klimt scholarship deemphasized his mysticism, his work came to embody disenchanted representations of sexual libido that today’s audiences often perceive as art-nouveau kitsch� 44 Dreiser’s detranscendentalization has had a similar effect: his interest in love and desire becomes an embarrassment once it is reduced to the “unsentimental” twentieth-century terms of sexual drives and addictive consumerism� 45 The 42 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 96� 43 On detranscendentalization, see Daniel Malachuck, “Emerson’s Politics, Retranscendentalized,” A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed� Alan Levine, Daniel Malachuck (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2011) 265-304� 44 According to Anna Celenza, writing in 2004, Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze “is more Freudian in nature - a dreamscape inhabited by bestial monsters and deranged, erotic women” that focuses “on the psychosis of man as he strives for pure joy and fulfillment” (“Music and the Vienna Secession: 1897-1902,” Music in Art 29�1/ 2 [Spring-Fall 2004], 203-212; 209)� Like Dreiser’s The “Genius,” Klimt’s frieze was perceived in its time as scandalously explicit (for a summary of the reception, see Kevin Karnes, “Wagner, Klimt, and the Metaphysics of Creativity in ‘fin-de-siècle’ Vienna,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62� 3 [Fall 2009]: 647-654; 688)� For the increasing suspicion from the second half of the twentieth century that Klimt represents bland mainstream eroticism, see his portrayal as “purest mass-hystery producing kitsch” in Thomas Bernhard’s Alte Meister. Komödie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985) 225� 45 Jerome Loving, Dreiser’s recent biographer, exemplifies well the disenchanting viewpoint: He describes Dreiser’s tragic heroes as “victims of relentless concupiscence,” no less, apparently, than the author himself: “Theodore Dreiser’s lechery is fairly well known� While writing his biography, I found it a challenge to tell his entire story 162 g ünter l eyPoldt realist/ naturalist framework, then, has made it harder to recall the normality of Dreiser’s metaphysics within the contemporary literary field. Consider, for example, how unsurprising this metaphysics seems to Randolph Bourne in 1916� In his review of The “Genius” Bourne situates Dreiser with “Dostoevski and Tolstoi” and other “Continental Novelists” whom he considers to specialize in portraying “the inexorable desire of life, a desire which is no more physical than it is spiritual, a desire which consists often of walking in the mud with the face towards the stars,” a “push and yearning” that “makes for religion and art in a kind of insatiable straining towards realization and perfection�” Hence: “[Dreiser’s] hero is really not Sister Carrie or the Titan or the Genius, but that desire within us that pounds in manifold guise upon the iron wall of experience�” 46 Bourne would have recognized, I presume, another aspect of desire that Dreiser draws from a nineteenth-century discourse of heroism� According to this discourse, Carrie’s ability to represent the ineffable desires of her age makes her a “representative” individual� The mid-Victorian and US reception of this discourse is usually associated with Emerson’s Representative Men and Carlyle’s On Heroes and Heroism, but by the 1890s Hegel’s more negative formulation of “historical greatness” had appeared in the high-theoretical and middle-brow sections of Dreiser’s literary field. 47 Hegel suggests that desire emerges when historical change opens up a gap between the national mind and its external conditions (when “inward development” of “spirit” has “outgrown the world it inhabits”)� There is then a sense of “dissatisfaction” in the air, but because ordinary people cannot yet know what exactly it is they are longing for, their desire remains diffuse (it “is not yet positively present; its status is accordingly negative”)� Great men, or “world-historical individuals” are “first” able “to formulate the desires of their fellows explicitly.” 48 Ames’ advice that Carrie live up to her unusual gift shows how in the 1890s this concept has become a trope of middle-brow discourse: “The world is always struggling to express itself,” [Ames] went on� “Most people are not capable of voicing their feelings� They depend upon others� That is what genius is for� One man expresses their desires for them in music; another one in poetry; another one in a play� Sometimes nature does it in a face - it makes the face representative of all desire� That’s what has happened in your case�” (SC 341-2) without ultimately boring my reader� For Dreiser never in his life settled down to one woman” (“Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women� New Letters [Review], American Literary Realism 44�1 [Fall 2011]: 84-85)� 46 Randolph Bourne, “Desire as Hero [review of Dreiser’s The Genius],” The New Republic (January 29, 1916): 5-6; 5� 47 Hegel formulated his ideas of historical greatness in his 1820s Berlin lectures on the Philosophy of World History� Published from manuscripts and student write-ups in 1837 and 1840, these lectures were little known before the second half of the nineteenth-century (the first English translation appeared in 1857). 48 G�W�F� Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, transl� H�B� Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975) 84� What Carrie Wants 163 Carrie is attracted to “the idea that her look was something which represented the world’s longings,” but this scene also recalls Hegel’s point that heroic desire never attaches to a final, knowable, rational objective. Carrie is not intellectually weighing a reasonable proposition about the next step in her career� Rather, Ames’ words strike her as something “her heart craved; ” they render her “aroused” and “warm with delight; ” for they have “unlocked” yet another “door to a new desire,” namely, becoming a more “serious” actress (SC 341-2)� In Hegel’s words, heroic individuals are obsessed with a “ruling passion” that leads them to break with conventional morality, 49 and in order to satisfy this passion they forgo the “happiness” of a “private life; ” devoting “their energy to a particular cause” until, when their task is done, they “fall aside like empty husks” (85-6)� What counts, in the end, is not authenticity but performative success: Carrie will have historical greatness if she shows her contemporaries the not-yet realized direction of their desires� Denigrating this kind of “passion” as “lust” or egoism misses the point, according to Hegel, as it would be mere “psychological pedantry” (87)� 5. Romantic Longing and Upward Mobility: Dreiser, Dickens, and Balzac Once we reduce Carrie’s longing for beauty to a symptom of materialist greed or insecurity-driven social climbing, she seems lacking in the qualities that define the protagonists of canonical nineteenth-century upward-mobility novels� The bildungsroman tradition that dominates the midand latecentury literary field tends to hold the proverbial “rags to riches” motif - in which social advancement is mainly an issue of material-economic success - in productive tension with the motif of “authentic” self-realization as an “inner” process of growth� The prominence of the idea of bildung in nineteenthcentury realism invites us to interpret Carrie’s materialism as a flaw and her encounter with Ames as a redemptive attempt to break out of the “vanity fair” of social ambition� In other words, the period frame encourages us to place Sister Carrie in the tradition paradigmatically represented by Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860/ 61)� At the outset of Great Expectations the protagonist Pip is a young boy destined to a hard but honest life as a blacksmith in the provincial marshes of Kent� His desire to rise in the world emerges when he meets the wealthy spinster Miss Havisham� As in Carrie’s case, this desire manifests itself primarily as a passion for a socially advanced person (Estella, Miss Havisham’s cultivated and arrogant protégé)� When an anonymous benefactor enables Pip to move to London with the means to transform himself into a gentleman, his former social world seems increasingly “common” to him� 50 Dickens por- 49 Note how Dreiser pictures Carrie’s moral guilt as the “voice of the people” that “was only an average little consciousness, a thing which represented the world, her past environment, habit, convention, in a confused way” (SC 67)� 50 Great Expectations, ed� Edgar Rosenberg (NY: Norton, 1999) 59� 164 g ünter l eyPoldt trays Pip’s changing perspective in terms of a delusion that has heartbreaking effects; it prevents him, for example, from seeing that his childhood sweetheart Biddy is more worthy of his love than Estella, and from overcoming his embarrassment when the blacksmith Joe, his warm-hearted substitute father figure, visits him in his posh London abode. Pip’s class shame is triangular in René Girard’s sense: 51 he is “haunted by the fear” that Estella should see him at the forge, “with a black face and hands, doing the coarsest part of my work” (87)� Carrie experiences a similar shift in a Chicago department store, when she is confronted with “the shop girls with whom she now compared poorly�” 52 Once she is approached by the comparatively more genteel Drouet, shop-girls like herself strike her as “common” (SC 38)� In Dickens’ world, triangular desires hinder the attainment of true bildung� At the end of Great Expectations the loss of Pip’s fortune (along with the exposure of his benefactor’s criminal background) proves to be cathartic� The shock of recognition helps Pip to overcome his class shame, to renounce all claims to undeserved wealth, and to focus instead on a humble but honest career as an office clerk - “I work pretty hard for a sufficient living,” he says to Estella in the final scene of the novel; and Estella, too, has suffered, renounced, and personally grown� While Great Expectations is fascinated by how class shame affects one’s embodied perception, 53 it also suggests that the problem can be resolved by developing one’s moral consciousness� Pip’s recognition of the inalienable values of Joe’s and Biddy’s personhood conveniently removes the attraction he felt for a socially higher sphere symbolized by Estella’s beauty� Placed within Dickens’ framework of internal bildung, Carrie’s development seems arrested because her intellectual moral insights have little impact on her felt desire� 6. Carrie and Rastignac The arrested development motif is less clear in the upward mobility narratives of Honoré de Balzac, which Dreiser enthusiastically read� 54 In Balzac, social ambition has a great deal to do with how ontological desire directs itself to a more elevated social world� When Eugène de Rastignac, the hero of 51 René Girard, “Triangular Desire,” Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure [1961] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 1-52� 52 “[W]herever she encountered the eye of one it was only to recognise in it a keen analysis of her own position - her individual shortcomings of dress and that shadow of manner which she thought must hang about her and make clear to all who and what she was” (SC 17)� 53 See especially chap� XIV: “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home� […] Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper� But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. […] Once, it had seemed to me that [as Joe’s apprentice] I should be distinguished and happy� Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal” (86-87)� 54 Dreiser first encountered Balzac’s work in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library in 1894. See his account in Newspaper Days 515-7, and Nancy Watner Barrineau, “Dreiser’s debt to Balzac,” American Literary Realism 24�2 (1992): 70-80� What Carrie Wants 165 Père Goriot (1835), arrives in Paris from the Southern provinces as a young law student, his immersion in the metropolis teaches him “how things are done,” how to “master the capital’s peculiar language” and “grow accustomed to its special pleasures�” Paris broadens his social “horizons,” 55 and this alters his sense of where he stands within the larger social whole� In contrast to his former “childish illusions” and “provincial notions,” he now sees “[t]he tiny Rastignac estate” for what it is from a metropolitan perspective: a minor house that barely manages to scrape along while “squeezing out” Eugène’s stipend like their “family table wine” needs to be “squeezed out of the very leavings of the winepress�” As in Sister Carrie, the perception of status is felt viscerally, as an aesthetic attraction: “his sisters, who had always seemed so beautiful to [Rastignac], as a child,” are now eclipsed by the more dazzling beauty of “the women of Paris” (26-7)� Of course, Balzac frequently plays up the motif of false idols: When Rastignac surrenders to the glamour of the Parisian social elites, the narrator accuses him of having succumbed to “the sizzling voice” of “Satan,” - “that god of vanity, whose tinsel strikes us as a symbol of power,” “draping women in imperial purple, casting a foolish glory on thrones” (93)� It is not hard to interpret Balzac’s moralizing commentaries as a similar critique of alienation that Dreiser scholarship detects in Sister Carrie� Indeed Balzac’s frequent imaging of aristocratic power as a kind of “magic” recalls the Marxist motif of capitalism as a primitive cult: The “religious quirks of the commodity” 56 have led Rastignac astray, awakening an archaic religious desire (fetishism) for material success and power that detracts from the inalienable value of disinterested love� There are moments when Rastignac himself reaches a Marxist recognition of the economic base of his enchantment: When he arrives at the Countess Anastasie de Restaud’s Parisian residence without a suitable carriage, where “the scornful glances of the servants” make him “sharply aware of his inferiority” (44) and the Countess cuts him after a social faux-pas, he suddenly begins to “[see] the world as it really [is],” and to “under[stand] that money is the ultima ratio” (64)� Faced with the arch-villain Vautrain’s cynical account of moral value (“Honesty will get you nowhere,” “there are no principles, just things that happen” [85; 89]), Rastignac experiences a moment of redemptive moral clarity worthy of Dickens’ Pip: “No� I want to work nobly, purely; I want to work night and day, I want a fortune I’ve earned” (91)� But in the world of Balzac such moral principles remain too abstract to be integrated into people’s lived experience� 57 As the narrator puts it, only spiritual virtuosi - hermits who “constantly rejoice at the sound of infinity speaking” - can resist “society’s rules and regulations” (169)� Since Rastignac 55 Père Goriot, ed� Peter Brooks (NY: Norton, 1994) 26� 56 Karl Marx� Das Kapital, Band 1, Erster Abschnitt, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 23, S� 49-98, 85� 57 As Moretti points out “Balzacian ‘realism’ is founded on the rejection of sharp contrasts� Aware that the way of the world will never change at any given stage, it sees all conflict as a necessary and yet transitory passage, which should never become bind- 166 g ünter l eyPoldt is neither a hermit-virtuoso nor particularly good at intellectualist moral reflection, 58 the “enchantment” of social power is a performative reality that he cannot escape� The further he moves into the sphere of aristocratic glamour, the more he is affected by the differing phenomenologies of higher and lower social spaces: The shabby boarding house in which he resides increasingly revolts him, the high-cultural splendor of the Parisian nobility makes him dizzy with awe and desire� Père Goriot emphasizes the difference between theoretical knowledge about power and the affective intensities through which power is felt� Similar to Carrie’s affairs with Drouet and Hurstwood, Rastignac’s upwardly directed courtships are neither in bad faith nor entirely the result of a rationalist scheme� They arise at least partly from intuitive moves towards power, while the moral implications of these moves are always, to a degree, over Rastignac’s head� 59 Though he knows that seducing the wealthy Baroness de Nucingen (the less ruthless of Goriot’s two daughters) is crucial to his social success, Rastignac is also genuinely overwhelmed by the Baroness’s charms, and as their courtship unfolds, he is drawn both to her beauty and the social power she represents� 60 In Dreiser’s characterization of Carrie as a sensitive but more or less unreflective artist-figure, strategic motivations seem even less important: “reason had very little part in this,” Dreiser insists� As a “dreamer” who simply “follows” “the sound of beauty,” Carrie “instinctively” moves towards the spheres of Chicago that seem to offer “more of loveliness than she had ever known” (SC 353)� Carrie is drawn towards an atmosphere in which power, wealth, beauty, and higher values seem to become indistinguishable or reinforce one another through spatial contact� There is thus a difference, according to Dreiser, between the mystical “desire” that propels Carrie forward (like “a variable wind” “filling our sails for some far-off port”) and the “selfishness” that makes people move more “unchangingly, unpoetically” in a certain direction� 61 ing: ‘there are no principles, there are only circumstances�’ In structural terms: to be realistic means to deny the existence of stable and clearly opposed paradigms” (The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture [London: Verso, 1987] 153)� 58 “Damn, I can’t make heads or tails of it,” he says about his moral conundrum� “I don’t want to try thinking it through: the heart’s a good enough guide” (91)� 59 “Without bothering to know exactly how he knew, he already understood that to rise to the top in this world’s complex play of forces, he needed to hitch himself to some vehicle in motion” (101)� 60 The attraction of beauty and power overlap to the point of becoming indistinguishable: “By the time he reached his doorstep, Rastignac had developed a warm passion for Madame de Nucingen, who seemed to him slender and slim, as delicate as a swallow� The intoxicating sweetness of her eyes, the silky softness of her skin (under which it seemed to him he could see the blood flowing), the enchanting sound of her voice, her blond hair - he remembered everything, and perhaps his long walk, which kept his own blood circulating vigorously, helped his fascination develop” (101)� 61 SC 358 - this passage was cut by Dreiser and Arthur Henry before publication� What Carrie Wants 167 7. Higher Atmospheres Both Balzac and Dreiser provide remarkable ethnographic descriptions of how privileged social settings can strike us as “higher atmospheres�” According to Gernot Böhme, atmospheres are perceived affectively rather than intellectually, as part of an aesthetic experience (in a pre-Kantian sense, aisthesis, perception)� 62 When Rastignac and Carrie move up through the social spheres of Paris and Chicago, their feeling of being dazzled by something larger than themselves brings to mind the way we respond to spaces of consecrated culture� Arguably the attraction of these spaces (the “aura” of an art museum, the “presence” of a canonical literary text, the “radiance” of a priceless collection piece or a memorial object) is inseparable from a sense of how they connect to the “charismatic” centers within society’s cultural topography of values� 63 Entering charismatic space can feel like moving closer towards “fullness” in Charles Taylor’s sense, a “place of power” that is experienced as a “motivating intensity” because it embodies (experientially, performatively) “some activity, or condition” where “life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be�” 64 For Taylor fullness is not just a configuration of moral ideas, beliefs, or truth-claims; the most abstract values come in a material shape that affects us with a sense of higher or lower atmospheric attraction� In Webb Keane’s example, you cannot have the quality of “redness” in abstraction, without some materiality that “inescapably binds it to some other qualities as well, which can be contingent but real factors in its social life�” For instance, “redness in an apple comes along in a spherical shape, light weight, sweet flavor, a tendency to rot, and so forth�” 65 Webb’s image of how the materiality of “red” might change if it comes bundled with a rotting apple seems a pertinent metaphor for the “social biographies” of concepts, things, practices, or places, which can become radiant, banal, or obnoxious depending on the material economies in which they are embedded� Martina Löw makes a similar point 62 In Böhme’s example: the buzz of an insect at night might first be experienced as an atmospheric feeling of ominous expectation� The more we recognize the menacing sound more distinctly as the buzz of a mosquito, we gradually move from an affective sense towards a conceptual meaning� Once we “switch on the light and localize the mosquito, the atmospheric quality that was at first sensed breaks down and shrivels up into the mosquito-thing, as an object of perception” (Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre [München: Fink, 2001] 42)� The initial atmospheric sense (something ominous) shifts towards a different, conceptually sharpened atmospheric sense (a mosquito in the room)� To say that atmospheres emerge from preinterpretive experience is to suggest that they are felt rather than rationally deduced, but it does not imply that such experiences are natural or universal (see Martina Löw, “The Constitution of Space,” The European Journal of Social Theory 11�1 [2011]: 25-49; 46-9) On the problems of the term “pre-interpretive” see John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (NY: Free Press, 1995) 133-4� 63 Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) sec II� 64 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007) 5� 65 Webb Keane, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Materiality, ed� Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke UP, 2006) 182-205; 188� 168 g ünter l eyPoldt when she suggests that the atmosphere of a place is shaped by how we perceive the people and things that are “spaced” within or connected to this place� 66 It is hard to separate the experiential atmosphere of an art-museum visit (our feeling of expansion, awe, pleasure, and intensity, say) from our practical sense of the social materialities to which this museum connects (including the social prestige and the economic wealth that attach to the bodies and things that circulate through high-cultural space)� From Carrie’s viewpoint, the sphere where people wear “fine raiment” in “elegant surroundings” is experienced as a higher, happier, more sacred atmosphere, where people “see[m] to be contented” (SC 353)� On the one hand, Carrie perceives Hurstwood intuitively: he “radiate[s] an atmosphere which suffuse[s] her being” and gives her a sense of transformative power: “she brightened under his influence until all her best side was exhibited. She felt that she was more clever with him” (SC 84)� 67 On the other hand, Carrie’s atmospheric perception of Hurstwood is charged by the aesthetic perception of social power: “In this conversation” Carrie does not hear Hurstwood’s words but “the voices of the things” he “represent[s]� How suave was the counsel of his appearance! How feelingly did his superior state speak for itself! ” (SC 84-5)� To suggest that atmospheres are rooted in social configurations is not, however, the same as reducing them to aesthetic illusions whose deeper reality consists in sociological “hard facts” in Philip Fisher’s sense� 68 Focusing on certain “hard facts” about socioeconomic hierarchy is one kind of practice; experiencing an atmosphere as higher or more sacred is another; but it is not clear how both practices relate to one another� Just as our attraction to museum space does not simply go away once we realize its elitist context or its economic foundations, the more cynical analysis of a love relationship to a socially more es- 66 According to Löw: “The external effects of social goods or people [connected to a certain space] do not remain discrete, they develop their own potentiality in joint arrangement� To bring it to a point, the concurrent perception of various external effects generates specific atmospheres, which - as in all perceptual processes - requires active attention� Atmospheres are accordingly the external effect of social goods and human beings realized perceptually in their spatial ordering� This means that atmospheres arise through the perception of interactions between people and/ or from the external effect of social goods in their arrangement” (“The Constitution of Space” 44)� 67 The “words” that Carrie and Hurstwood exchange during their courtship only “dimly represent” the “surging feelings and desires” that “lie behind” their conversation� In Dreiser’s metaphor, the atmosphere of the conversation relates to what is actually being said like “the low music” of an “orchestra” to “the dramatic incident which it is used to cover” (SC 84-5)� 68 In Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (1985), Fisher suggests that the city in the naturalist city novel is a “privileged setting” with which the US literary imagination displaces and explores the “objectification of the self” within consumer culture. This objectification would then constitute the “hard fact” at the root of Sister Carrie, in a similar way that the killing of the Native-Americans and the institution of slavery form the hard-factual basis of such privileged settings as the wilderness in the historical novel and the homestead in the sentimental novel� What Carrie Wants 169 tablished person need not turn this relationship into a pseudo-reality� 69 Even Rastignac - whose name has become a symbol of the ruthless parvenu - shifts between two states of mind: There is Rastignac the arriviste, who in the famous closing scene of the novel envisages his conquest of Paris, and Rastignac the sensitive dreamer who lets his “heart be the guide” and intuitively drifts toward power� 8. Acquired Tastes Both Balzac and Dreiser are interested in how our perception of an atmosphere as “higher” or “lower” is shaped by our social biographies� If the atmosphere of a place depends on how we perceive the bodies and things that are “spaced” around this place, the perceptive schemes for this need to be acquired and trained� 70 For example, at the beginning of his upward journey Rastignac knows about distinctions between aristocratic ranks, but he does not experience them in any meaningful way� He gathers that the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, his tutor figure and benefactress, is “an aristocrat among aristocrats,” but when she invites him for the first time to one of her salons, Rastignac has an inadequate sense of orientation: All distinctions seem to blur, and the higher and lower nobilities appear to him an undifferentiated “horde of Parisian deities” (28), all equally “dazz[ling]” and desirable� As Rastignac habitualizes himself with the topographies of social power, the Vicomtesse’s charisma affects him more intensely (“He could have groveled at her feet, he wished he had some demonic power with which to carry her off” [97])� The more Rastignac attunes himself to the aristocratic field, the more successful his moves become� 71 69 See Bruce Robbins’ summary of how cynical and more generous interpretations of upwardly mobile attraction always tend to be in tension: “We have all seen many versions and degrees of the intimacy that, as in Silence of the Lambs, brings together a younger person on the way up with another who is socially established, more powerful, perhaps inclined to help only for a price� We have probably all vacillated between cynical and less cynical readings of such intimacy� We know that social climbing seeks shelter in love stories, where it can hide its true colors. What better camouflage for the pursuit of social advantages than to make them seem the unintended result of pairing up with the boss or the boss’s daughter, hence as natural and innocent as falling in love? This is just a love story, isn’t it? Do we really have to look under the hood? On the other hand, who can keep from entertaining the mean-spirited hypothesis that the drive toward the final tender embrace is fuelled by high-octane ambition? Where relationships like these are concerned, cynicism and sentimental self-forgetfulness seem equally unavoidable� Yet neither can satisfactorily account for the erotic component in upward mobility” (Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007] xiii)� 70 Martina Löw, “The Constitution of Space” 46-9� 71 Adjusting to the field enables Rastignac to have a realistic view about his relation to the Vicomtesse� Sensing that she is too far removed from his sphere to become his lover, he seeks her help as a “fairy Godmother,” letting her contact charisma render him attractive to the Baroness de Nucingen� 170 g ünter l eyPoldt Carrie is similarly overwhelmed, upon her arrival in Chicago, by the city’s glamour� Her orientation within Chicago’s social landscape is still so vague that the ascending spheres of Drouet, Hurstwood, and beyond dissolve into a diffuse field of transcendence. From Carrie’s relatively low social position, even the most quotidian commercial merchandise seem infused with the phenomenology of the sacred� 9. Carrie and the Voice of the Commodity Carrie’s attraction to things, which Dreiser portrays in some of the most iconic passages in the novel, has been considered key evidence for the arresteddevelopment thesis� Critics usually point to the famous seduction scene in which Carrie is tempted by the siren voice of department-store wares: “Fine clothes” “spoke” to her “tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves” (“‘Ah, such little feet,’ said the leather of the soft new shoes; ‘how effectively I cover them� What a pity they should ever want my aid’”), and when Carrie “came within earshot of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear” (SC 72)� According to the arrested-development thesis, the call of the commodity symbolizes the logic of self-objectification that contributes to Carrie’s emptiness and Hurstwood’s death� 72 Such a reading, however, relies on a distinction between commodities and sacred objects that seems too sharp for Dreiser’s (and Balzac’s) ethnographies of higher atmospheres� The point here is not only to recall (with Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai) that the borders between “commodified” and “singularized” things might shift from one context to the next 73 but also that commodities can possess several simultaneous higher and lower social lives whose materialities might interact and reinforce one another in complex ways� The shoes and lace collars speaking to Carrie have a profane use value (as objects that can be desired, used, exhausted, and discarded), but they also embody for her a more enduring, mystical, transubstantiated materiality that invokes contact with a higher order� Just because department store merchandise can inhabit a lower economy of short-term desires (fetishism in the Freudian sense) does not mean that they cannot at the same time be bundled with “higher” or long-term values beyond the ordinary - the most banal commercial product, as modern advertisers know too well, can become a singularity by being linked to an imagined space above the quotidian� Carrie “was much affected by the remarkable displays 72 According to Fisher, Carrie’s desire for clothes is homologous to the commodification of herself and Hurstwood; that is, people are portrayed in terms of a “life history” of “products and objects which are best when new or fresh and then become worn out and discarded� The life history of a shirt is one of continual decline� All goods are used up and replaced� Within Sister Carrie relationships, houses, cities, and especially living situations are discarded in the way clothing might be” (Hard Facts 174-5)� 73 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things, Ed� Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: CUP, 1996) 64-94; Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” The Social Life of Things 1-63� See my “Singularity and the Literary Market,” New Literary History 45�1 (Winter 2014): 71-88� What Carrie Wants 171 of trinkets, dress, goods, stationery, and jewelry,” not because she regressed into a sensualist stage of thing addiction (as Trina in Norris’ McTeague [1899]) but because these objects embodied for her a higher world, so long, that is, as “she felt keenly the fact that not any of these things were in the range of her purchase” (SC 16)� 10. Atmospheres as Shifting Social Horizons: Carrie and Balzac’s Lost Illusions The Chicago section of Sister Carrie has been read as a “social comedy of mobility” based on a “static” social hierarchy through which Carrie ascends (Fisher 170)� But both Carrie’s and Hurstwood’s selves are functions of social position: their habitus changes from one move to the next� Upon her arrival in Chicago (when “books” and “knowledge” are still “beyond her interest,” and her countrified lower-middle-class body lacks “intuitive graces” [2]), Carrie is still dazzled by department store things, and impressed by Drouet’s socioeconomic station� Her restlessness arises not because she wants more of the same commodities but because her increasing experience of city life under Drouet’s tutorship “double[s]” her “knowledge of grace” and transforms her into “a girl of considerable taste” (SC 75)� In contrast to Dickens’ Pip, who is able to return to a natural horizon of values suitable both to his former life as an apprentice country artisan and his more recent habitus as an white-collar clerk, Carrie’s social biography has transformed her into a different person� Her horizon of charismatic desire recedes into the middle-class world represented by Hurstwood� Hurstwood, too, has a history of social mobility: Setting out as a lowermiddle-class “barkeeper in a commonplace saloon,” he advanced to the more prestigious position as manager in the fashionable Fitzgerald and Moy’s� His talent in “making a good impression” has helped him to make the most of his job (as a manager without “financial control”): he is on speaking terms with those “rich individuals” who frequent Fitzgerald and Moy’s, the “hundreds of actors, merchants, politicians, and the general run of successful characters about town�” While the wealthiest of his upper-middle-class patrons are beyond his reach (“too rich, too famous, or too successful, with whom he could not attempt any familiarity of address”) (SC 32), from Drouet’s perspective Hurstwood comes across as “a very successful and well-known man about town” (SC 31)� Carrie experiences his social power atmospherically, as “a drag in the direction of honour” (94)� With the move to New York, however, this constellation changes significantly: “Whatever a man like Hurstwood could be in Chicago,” Dreiser says, within the grander scale of social life in New York, “Hurstwood was nothing” (SC 205)� Stripped of his social clout and wealth he drifts towards failure and destitution at the same time that Carrie becomes a commercially successful actress� As Carrie becomes the sort of person that can afford to patronize Fitzgerald and Moy’s, her sense of orientation shifts: Earning more money 172 g ünter l eyPoldt than she knows how to spend, the world of department stores and fashionable bars become part of the ordinary� This enables Robert Ames to reroute her desire towards a new horizon (Arnoldian culture) for which Hurstwood’s middle-brow tastes provide no meaningful frame of reference anymore� 74 The context-sensitivity of charisma is a major theme in another novel that Ames assigned for Carrie to read, Balzac’s The Great Man from the Provinces, or Lost Illusions (1837-1843)� 75 The first part of the novel centers on the encounter of two exceptionally brilliant provincials who meet in the city of Angoulême� Marie-Louise Anaïs de Bargeton is a minor aristocrat admired by the countrified social elites for her taste in music and literature. Even though her potential for true cultural sophistication was hampered by the mediocrity of her social environment, she is considered “the social queen of Angoulême,” 76 and the family residence in which she conducts her “salon,” the “Hôtel de Bargeton,” is perceived as a kind of “Louvre” (46)� Lucien Chardon is a young and aspiring poet from an unprivileged background: as the son of an impoverished apothecary and a midwife in a stigmatized part of town (the Houmeau) he would find it hard to gain entry even in the middle-class circles of Angoulême’s social center (the Vieille-Ville)� But when he is presented to Madame de Bargeton as a homegrown “budding genius” [grande homme futur]” (48) who might one day outshine the likes of Victor Hugo, Lucien becomes an instant success� His poetic imagination stands out among the literari and high society that frequent Angoulême’s salons� Longing to be in “touch with genius [connaître le génie]” (48), Madame de Bargeton is “struck by Lucien’s exceptionally good looks, his shy demeanor and his voice” and sees in him simply “poetry incarnate” (50)� Lucien in turn is smitten by the “womanly” charms of the thirty-six-year-old aristocrat and “intoxicated” by her “conversation” (50)� They form a “pure” (platonic) love relationship: the short-term attraction of more immediate desires or pragmatic uses (Lucien Chardon as a beautiful and graceful younger lover, Louise de Bargeton as a stepping stone to material gain) are overshadowed by the lovers’ more spiritual invocation of contact with a higher order� Lucien’s beauty seems all the more alluring to Louise because as a poetic genius he embodies privileged access to ontological vision� Louise’s attractiveness, on the other hand, is enhanced by social distance: “intimidated by this woman’s high rank” Lucien experiences a “fear, hope, and despair” that deepens his love for her (53)� 74 Renouncing both commercial theater and sentimental women’s fiction, Carrie catches up, as it were, with Dreiser’s sense of professional taste: “In her comfortable chambers at the Waldorf, Carrie was reading at this time ‘Père Goriot,’ which Ames had recommended to her� It was so strong, and Ames’s mere recommendation had so aroused her interest, that she caught nearly the full sympathetic significance of it. For the first time, it was being borne in upon her how silly and worthless had been her earlier reading, as a whole” (SC 349)� 75 See p� 368, a passage that Dreiser and Arthur Henry cut from the typescript� 76 Balzac, Lost Illusions, ed� Herbert Hunt (Oxford: Penguin, 2004) 47� What Carrie Wants 173 In the world of Great Expectations Lucien’s awe of social rank would count as a less noble emotion than Louise’s desire to be in touch with poetic genius� In Balzac’s fictional universe, however, the difference is not that clear: From Lucien’s low-status viewpoint the aristocratic center of Angoulême seems continuous with the cultural heights of Paris and - by extension - the higher moral and aesthetic life of the French nation� In Balzac’s terms: “For the inhabitants of L’Houmeau,” the “majesty” of the Bargeton residence (“this small-scale Louvre”) was “as remote to them as the sun itself” (46)� Social distance, in other words, can produce the phenomenology of the sacred� And from the perception of Louise, while poetic genius might seem extraterritorial to social hierarchy, the sacred has a way of embodying itself within a cultural topography, that is, a constellation of places, people, practices, and institutions that are experienced as closer or further away from a larger charismatic authority. Louise places genius with a specific poetic tradition - she imagines Lucien to “outshine Victor Hugo, the enfant sublime, Lamartine, Walter Scott and Byron” (130) - and a distinct socio-spatial figuration, the consecrating institutions and social networks in Paris� 77 Yet when the two lovers abscond to Paris, a larger world with a more powerful charismatic center, their higher atmospheres collapse like force fields unplugged from their electric source: “mutual disenchantment was setting in,” Balzac writes, for in Paris “[t]he poet was seeing life on a larger scale, and society was taking on a new aspect in Louise’s eyes” (162)� The shift in the comparative constellation is ruthless: Lucien begins to see Louise “as she was seen by the people of Paris: a tall, desiccated woman with freckled skin, faded complexion and strikingly red hair; angular, affected, pretentious, provincial of speech and above all badly dressed! ” (169)� Louise, too, is struck by the comparatively “sorry figure” (161) that Lucien cuts in the metropolis - she feels “humiliated in her love” (171), and “mortified by the little impression her handsome Lucien was making” (173)� In the company of the sophisticated Parisian literati Lucien seems “starched, stilted, stiff, and raw like the clothes he was wearing” (173). The shifting power figuration that simultaneously robs Lucien and Louise of their “illusions” (178) about one another also thrusts sublimity on Louise’s distant cousin, the prestigious Marquise d’Espard, who has ties to the Royal court and conducts a renowned salon frequented by “exceptionally illustrious people” (165)� Louise is immediately “seduced, dazzled, and fascinated” by the Marquise, whom she accepts as a tutor figure, and she wishes to become the “satellite to this star.” Lucien, too, feels the “desire” for “the protection of so lofty a person”; the Marquise strikes him with “the same impression” that Louise “had made on him in Angoulême,” and he falls “in love with her immediately” (178)� As matters 77 Locating genius in a Parisian cultural space encourages Louise to conceive of Lucien’s poetic bildung along the lines of social gentrification. To “fashion” Lucien into a “great man” means to help him to attain a suitably high-cultural habitus� Louise thus wishes to “perfect his manners” (55), turn him into a royalist (who drops his “low-class” ideals of “1793” [59]) and make him renounce his lower-middle-class father by taking on his mother’s aristocratic maiden name, de Rubempré (58)� 174 g ünter l eyPoldt stand, however, Lucien’s career resembles Hurstwood’s rather than Carrie’s: While Louise moves on to “désangoulêmer” herself rapidly and successfully, accomplishing a “metamorphosis” into Parisian sophistication so seamless that her former lover hardly recognizes her anymore, Lucien slowly tumbles towards failure� Lucien’s downfall is complex, but, like Hurstwood’s, it arguably follows from his increasing surrender to the short-term economies of pleasure and profit that undo his former allegiances to charismatic values. 78 After being abandoned by Louise and the Marquise, he at first falls on his feet, as he is received into the art-religious circle of literary Bohemians, the “Cénacle,” whose high-principled members recognize his talent and support his artistic calling� But faced with the realities of writerly poverty and the indignity of having to peddle his manuscripts in a philistine market, he gives in to the temptations of journalism (a pernicious culture industry, according to Balzac), at the same time that he begins an affair with the actress and courtesan Coralie, who induces him, in Balzac’s words, to place “sensual love above pure love, enjoyment [jouissance] above desire” (295)� Impressing his editors with an innovative and sharp-witted style of reviewing, Lucien becomes somewhat of a celebrity journalist, and this gets him invited again into the aristocratic salons� The powerful Marquise d’Espard is impressed with his “metamorphosis” (399), and offers to arrange his reunion with Louise (who is now a widow), promising to use her influence at court to get Lucien an “ordonnance” that would allow him to call himself Comte du Rubempré (via his mother’s maiden name), thus making him an eligible marriage candidate for Louise. Lucien is hugely flattered by this, and when one week later he meets Louise at another salon he senses that she is “feeling attracted once more” to him: “In a single moment Lucien and Louise had recovered their illusions about each other and were talking in friendly language” (406)� But Balzac also makes clear that living with Coralie has clouded Lucien’s higher judgment� Just as he mistakes higher and lower kinds of love, he also misreads the polite flattery of his aristocratic hosts and overestimates his position (falsely assuming that “his success in this fine and fashionable world” of the aristocratic salon “was no less great than in the world of journalism”)� Thus at once “intoxicated with vanity” and “intoxicated with Coralie” (406) Lucien “remains undecided” until Louise leaves “with an unappeasable desire for vengeance” (405)� According to Franco Moretti, Lucien fails because he miscalculates: the “illusion” that “destroys” him is not about “hope” but about “not knowing the true value of things�” This puts him not “in contradiction with market society; ” it makes him merely “economically irrational” (he “initially sells himself cheap, and afterwards, when it is too late, asks for too high a price”) (167)� But given Balzac’s distinction between higher and lower desires, Lucien’s miscalculation is linked to his drifting, his choice of Coralie over “the pure idealistic love [l’amour pure, exalté] he had felt for Madame de 78 Jacques Noiray, “Mémoire, oubli, illusion dans Illusion Perdues: L’exemple de Lucien de Rubempré,” L’Année balzacienne 8 (2007�1): 185-196� What Carrie Wants 175 Bargeton” (294), and his embrace of the life-style of a “viveur” whose main occupation is partying and gambling� He miscalculates, in other words, because his “willpower” is “weakened by the sloth which made him indifferent to the fine resolutions taken at moments when he had an inkling of his real situation” (411)� 79 When at the end of the sequel novel, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838-47), Lucien, ready to hang himself in his prison cell, looks out of the window into the “primitive beauty” of Paris’ medieval architecture “with a sense of wonder,” Balzac symbolically separates his higher and lower selves: Lucien now becomes “two Luciens, one Lucien the poet” who is in touch with the higher life of the nation (imaginarily “wandering through the Middle Ages, through the arcades and under the turrets of Saint Louis IX” at the Conciergerie), and “one Lucien ready for suicide,” 80 who, like Hurstwood, has succumbed to the low-economic cycles of short-term desire, exhaustion, and ruin� In Dreiser’s unabridged typescript, Carrie talks about “the sadness of the failure of Lucien de Rubem[p]ré,” and Ames rejoins that he was too obsessed with “love and fortune” (368)� Lucien’s fate functions as a cautionary tale� What if Carrie should tire of the rigorous demands of tragic acting, descend into a more pleasurable, less demanding culture industry, or get erotically entangled with the lower pleasure of sensual love (like Lucien’s entanglement with Coralie, or Hurstwood’s with Carrie)? 81 Might her aesthetic orientation be similarly clouded and induce her to give up her rocking chair for short-term satisfactions? But Carrie is “no sensualist, longing to drowse sleepily in the lap of luxury” (SC 55), and Dreiser suggests that her artistic sensibilities are better attuned than Lucien’s to the atmospheres of society’s charismatic center� 79 He regularly attends the aristocratic salons to which he is invited, but the “strain of Parisian conversation and gambling absorbed the few ideas, the little strength which his excesses left him,” and he “loses the “lucidity of mind and cool-headedness needed for looking about him and displaying the consummate tact which upstarts must employ at every instant” (411)� Lucien’s former ambition to rise is now reduced to his longing for the ordinance granting him an aristocratic name: “Thrilled by the glamour of aristocracy, the poet felt unspeakable mortification at hearing himself called Chardon when he saw that the salons only admitted men who bore high-sounding names with titles to set them off” (408)� He starts to take riding lessons and develops a “pride of caste” and “aristocratic vanity” that alienates his friends, while the real aristocracy (including the Marquise and Louise) begin to manipulate him with the prospect of making him “one of us” (pretending to further his hopes for the right to call himself Comte de Rubempré) (456)� 80 Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 533� 81 As Donald Pizer points out, “Love and romance are not involved in [Hurstwood’s] response to Carrie; he is drawn rather by what an attractive young woman represents to a middle-aged, sexually jaded husband - an opportunity to regain his own youth and freshness by the sexual conquest and possession of a fresh young girl” (“The Problem of American Literary Naturalism and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie,” American Literary Realism 32 [Fall 1999] 9)� 176 g ünter l eyPoldt Works Cited Abrams, M�H� Natural Supernaturalism� NY: Norton, 1971� Balzac, Honoré de� Lost Illusions� Ed� Herbert Hunt� Oxford: Penguin, 2004� -----� Père Goriot� Ed� Peter Brooks� NY: Norton, 1994� -----� Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes� Paris: Gallimard, 1973� Barrineau, Nancy Watner� “Dreiser’s debt to Balzac�” American Literary Realism 24�2 (1992): 70-80� Barrish, Phillip� The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011� Bernhard, Thomas� Alte Meister. 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Ecofeminism, the farm crisis, and, of course, Shakespeare’s King Lear� Ingredients that have received less scrutiny are the generic conventions of tragedy itself� Madelon Sprengnether maintains that Smiley’s novel questions the meaning humanist critics invest in tragedy when they emphasize the “hero’s exemplary character and tragic dignity” (17) and the “unproblematized restoration of moral order” (11)� According to Sprengnether and other readers, Smiley’s rewriting of King Lear demonstrates the sexism inherent in tragedy and much of its critical history� 2 I contend that Smiley’s critique of tragedy also performs other important cultural work� Her novel reveals the ways in which tragedy - as a literary genre, a vernacular term, a sensibility, or an idea - is used to support American exceptionalism� 3 As Smiley depicts the rise and fall of her Midwestern Lear, farmer Larry Cook, A Thousand Acres explores the construction and decline of American exceptionalism. Conflating Shakespearean tragedy with domestic realism, the novel undercuts the ways in which exceptionalists attempt to aggrandize their mythology and its decline� 4 Before I examine Smiley’s novel itself, let me first clarify my use of the terms tragedy and American exceptionalism� I focus my discussion of literary tragedy on theories that seem to have shaped Smiley’s distaste for King Lear, theories that Terry Eagleton calls traditionalist (21)� Key to such theories is A. C. Bradley’s highly influential Shakespearean Tragedy. Bradley’s definition of tragedy, like Aristotle’s, emphasizes a superlative lone male hero “of high 1 I would like to thank Joseph Darda, James Grove, Benjamin Thiel, and Carol Tyx� Their insights helped me refine my ideas in this essay. 2 See Agular; Alter; Brauner; Keppel; Leslie; Mathieson; Schiff; and Strehle, “Daughter’s�” 3 My thinking on the various meanings and uses of tragedy has been shaped by Eagleton; Felski 2-5; and Pirro, “Remedying” and “Tragedy�” 4 I make this claim despite Smiley’s essay “Taking It All Back,” in which she espouses a less “political” interpretation of King Lear (391)� In that same essay, she also wisely tells readers that A Thousand Acres “is more your book now than mine” (392)� 180 m ary v ermillion estate�” This hero’s actions trigger “exceptional calamity” punctuated by his own death� Because his “beauty and greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away,” the audience is both humbled and inspired� Although Eagleton savages this view (133-36), he and Bradley agree on one important element of tragedy� Both critics, like most theorists of the genre, emphasize tragedy’s potential for exploring the interplay between freedom and fate� More important, both Eagleton and Bradley are concerned about how this interplay is represented� Both take great pains to distinguish themselves from others who discuss the relationship between freedom and fate in tragedy as “a simple antithesis” (Eagleton 106)� Bradley disparages Wordsworth for depicting “poor humanity’s afflicted will struggling in vain with ruthless destiny�” Eagleton similarly eschews the “simplistic ‘free hero versus determining cosmos’ ideology” (143)� He attacks theories of tragedy that “thematize the contest between freedom and fate” (119)� Not surprisingly, Eagleton’s mode of challenging this contest differs sharply from Bradley’s� What I find significant is the fact that two radically different theorists of tragedy both seek to complicate the contest between freedom and fate� Their shared concern suggests that the freedom-versus-fate antithesis has a strong hold on the imagination and a prominent place in a range of discourses that define or appropriate tragedy and the tragic. Rita Felski implies that “popular politics” favors a freedom-versus-fate binary, which she labels melodrama: “To portray one’s own side as helpless and virtuous and one’s opponent as powerful and evil is to harness a rhetoric geared toward triggering outrage at the spectacle of injustice” (12)� I maintain that such melodrama is sometimes dressed up in the trappings of tragedy by those who seek to enhance their cultural cachet� Smiley’s A Thousand Acres portrays the high cost of this masquerade - especially as it relates to American exceptionalism� Of course, the masquerade would never work if American exceptionalism had nothing in common with tragedy� For champions of American exceptionalism, America is the hero at the height of his powers: an exceptional and exemplary leader, both mightier and wiser than other entities, and thus their provider and protector� Opponents of exceptionalism tend to emphasize this hero’s hubris and inevitable fall� For opponents, America’s “greatness,” like that of a tragic hero, both defines and destroys. Shakespeare’s tragedies feature “characters whose greatness is inextricable from the things that undermine it” (Danson 117)� So, too, America’s wealth and symbolic power - its image as the anticolonial leader of the free world - rests upon a history of imperialism, slavery, and genocide� Denying this tension, America falls prey to a dangerous exemplarity, a “State exceptionalism” or “exemptionalism,” in which it exempts itself from the example it claims to set� 5 5 State exceptionalism is John Carlos Rowe’s term (15)� Exemptionalism is Hodgson’s (154), but similar concepts are discussed by many writers who have shaped my view of American exceptionalism� See, for instance, Pease 9; Söderlind 3; and the sources cited in notes 10 and 11� The Uses of Tragedy 181 Fraught with contradictions, American exceptionalism resembles the version of tragedy that disturbs both Bradley and Eagleton� American exceptionalism, like this tragedy, exalts both freedom and fate - glorifying the quest for freedom while magnifying, externalizing, and mystifying whatever threatens it� Consider this tension between freedom and fate in two quotations from King Lear� Gloucester emphasizes threats to freedom, insisting that we have no control over our lives: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport” (4�1�37-38)� His son Edgar, in contrast, emphasizes human freedom� He implies that our actions - for better or worse - determine our fates: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us” (5�3�169-70)� “This brace of quotations,” according to Ralph Berry, “props up the tragic spectrum like bookends” (14)� Tragedy, he observes, explores “that mysterious realm between the poles, where intelligent and conscious people, with some control over their lives, encounter a dark and hostile Fate that ultimately overthrows them� For Shakespeare, it is this middle realm that is the arena of contending forces” (14)� And for Shakespeare and many other tragedians and theorists of tragedy, it is this middle realm - a balance between hubristic action and fatalistic passivity - that we should seek in our own lives� As Eagleton maintains, tragedy highlights what is perishable, constricted, fragile and slow-moving about us, as a rebuke to culturalist or historicist hubris� It stresses how we are acted upon rather than robustly enterprising, as well as what meagre space for manoeuvre we often have available. This recognition, indeed, is the positive side of a mystified belief in destiny� What for some suggests fatalism or pessimism means for others the kind of sober realism which is the only sure foundation of an effective ethics or politics� (xvi) 6 A Thousand Acres, however, suggests that American exceptionalism accentuates and glamorizes the poles of freedom and fate, disguising melodrama as tragedy, and robbing tragedy of its ethical power, its ability to help Americans form a soberly realistic view of themselves and their place in the world� In Smiley’s novel, the polarity between freedom and fate is most obvious in Larry and his oldest daughter, Ginny, the novel’s narrator and Goneril figure. At the novel’s beginning, Larry believes he can and should control everything and everybody while Ginny believes she can control nothing� With Larry, the novel critiques uses of tragedy that magnify its celebration of the human will; with Ginny, the novel attacks uses of tragedy that romanticize fatalism� With Larry and Ginny together, A Thousand Acres thus investigates two facets of American exceptionalism: Larry embodies the State’s double standards and worst excesses while Ginny demonstrates its citizens’ disempowered response� 7 6 For a sampling of other sources that explore tragedy’s ethical potential, see Euben; Kottman; Nussbaum; and Pirro, Hannah, “Remedying,” and “Tragedy�” 7 In discussing Cornel West’s thoughts on tragedy and African American life, Pirro explores a binary relevant to my reading of Smiley’s novel: “unreflective activity (defective agency)” and “unmotivated passivity (deficient agency)” (“Remedying” 158). Larry exhibits defective agency while Ginny exemplifies deficient agency. 182 m ary v ermillion Larry dominates what Lori Ween calls the “nationalization” of A Thousand Acres (116)� Several critics argue that he represents various aspects of American culture and identity: the American pastoral dream, Jeffersonian agrarianism, mastery over nature, manifest destiny, Whitman’s “grandiose individual,” an “ethic of ownership,” and the rags-to-riches success story of the self-made man� 8 These concepts and stories all contribute to American exceptionalism, yet no one has explicitly discussed exceptionalism itself in Smiley’s novel� This omission is striking given that American exceptionalism faced strong challenges both in 1979, when the novel is primarily set, and in 1991, when it was published� In 1979, Smiley’s characters face a looming farm crisis, an oil crisis, and the aftermath of the Vietnam War� America was losing its agrarian mythos, its sense of independence, and its belief in its moral superiority and military might. In 1991, the novel’s first readers were adjusting to the end of the Cold War, an ending that forced the United States to redefine its exceptionalism - in part by redefining external threats to its freedom� 9 It is in these contexts that I examine Larry Cook, who represents American exceptionalism and who more than threatens his own family’s freedom� At the start of the novel, Larry resembles Aristotle’s tragic hero, “highly renowned and prosperous�” When eight-year-old Ginny describes Larry in 1951, we encounter an understated and naïve view of American exceptionalism� Ginny listens to her parents compare their farm to other farms, saying, “I nestled into the certainty of the way, through the repeated comparisons, our farm and our lives seemed secure and good” (5)� In the next chapter, when the novel jumps to 1979, it is clear that Larry’s power and sense of moral superiority stem from his land and know-how� Ginny says, “we lived on what was clearly the best, most capably cultivated farm� The biggest farm farmed by the biggest farmer” (19-20)� Larry sees himself as the ultimate provider: “A farmer is a man who feeds the world” (45)� According to his “catechism,” his expansionist duty is clear: “To grow more food”; “To buy more land” (45)� Larry is liberal individualism incarnate� He believes in discipline, hard work, and self-sufficiency: “luck is something you make for yourself” (132). Like a tragic hero before his fall, Larry seems impervious to disaster: “Everyone respects him and looks up to him� When he states an opinion, people listen� Good times and bad times roll off him all the same” (104-05)� When people do criticize Larry, he dismisses them: “Envy likes to talk” (23)� Believing “home 8 Many of these aspects of American identity are interrelated� Nevertheless, it is worth noting representative readings of Larry related to each aspect� On the American pastoral dream, see Alter 155 and Farris� On Jeffersonian agrarianism, see Kirby� On mastery of nature, see Carden, “Remembering” and Sons; Carr; and Mathieson� On manifest destiny, see Carr 133� On “Whitman’s grandiose individual,” see Doane and Hodges 73� On an “ethic of ownership,” see Nakadate 165� On the rags-to-riches story and the self-made man, see Amano; Carden, Sons 121, 127; Strehle, “Daughter’s”; and Weatherford� 9 My understanding of this redefinition is primarily shaped by Pease, but many scholars discuss the ways in which American exceptionalism depends upon Othering� See, for instance, the sources cited in notes 10 and 11� The Uses of Tragedy 183 was best” (64), Larry, like Northrop Frye’s tragic hero, is “exceptional and isolated at the same time” (38)� He is also a scaled-down version of Bradley’s hero, a man whose fate “affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire�” The novel situates Larry as an exemplar of a group that will not take no for an answer� Early in the narrative, Ginny notes that her neighbor Loren Clark was “feeling a little heroic, just as the men around our place were feeling” (6; emphasis added)� This heroism stems from their triumph over forces much larger than themselves� First, the weather: “the spring had been cold and wet, and no one had been able to get into the fields until mid-May” (6). Second, national and international politics: during the wet weather, “all the men were sitting around … worrying that there wouldn’t be tractor fuel for planting� Jimmy Carter ought to do this, Jimmy Carter will certainly do that, all spring long” (7)� Readers sense the farmers’ feelings of powerlessness, their dependence on oil cartels and on a peanut farmer who surely doesn’t know as much as they do. Yet when the fields dry, hard work wins the day: “all the corn in the county had been planted in less than two weeks” (6)� Larry and his fellow farmers are nearly defeated by forces beyond their control, but not quite� They outwit and outwork nature; they are captains of their fate� The end of the novel more explicitly associates farmers with the tragic hero’s indomitable will: “The harvest drama commenced then, with the usual crises and heroics� Men against nature, men against machine, men against the swirling, impersonal forces of the market” (317)� Yet the novel ultimately subverts these “heroics” via the damage caused by Larry� At best, he is self-righteous and shortsighted; at worst, violent and rapacious� When his wife attempts to stop him from beating young Ginny, Larry says, “There’s only one side here, and you’d better be on it” (183)� Such dangerous ego inspires Smiley’s feminist critique of traditionalist tragedy� Her novel endorses Linda Bamber’s claim that “Lear’s demands are obviously unreasonable, yet he is only expressing the unreasonable demands implicit in tragedy as a genre� The tragedy of our individualism lies in our efforts to make the whole world turn around us� … In tragedy we are invited to share in the hero’s fantasies of his own centrality” (23-24)� With Larry’s abuse of his land and his daughters, A Thousand Acres depicts the sad implications of these fantasies - for both a family and a nation� Larry perceives the natural world and his daughters as limitless resources existing solely to meet his needs� He repeatedly raped Ginny and her sister Rose when they were teenagers, but if readers are shocked by this incest, they shouldn’t be� Larry’s abuse of his daughters is the “logical” consequence of his strong sense of entitlement� As Ginny says, “he thinks he has a right to everything� He thinks it’s all basically his” (179)� Such beliefs prompt Larry to revel in waste - perhaps a humorous jab at Bradley’s comment that the central feeling of tragedy “is the impression of waste�” In Bradley’s view of tragedy, we confront “a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture and self-waste�” An alcoholic, Larry gets “wasted” every night� He buys $1,000 cabinets only to leave them outside in the rain� He and his 184 m ary v ermillion neighbor Harold can “eat a whole pie, wedge by wedge” at one sitting, leaving none of the “pie” for anyone else (10-11)� Larry, whose self-proclaimed duty is to “feed the world,” does not care about even his nearest neighbors� He buys their land when they can no longer afford it, pretending to assist them, yet his motto - “what you get is what you deserve” (35) - reveals his disdain for them� Larry does not simply mean that you reap what you sow (in his neighbor Cal Ericon’s case, farm failure); he also implies that you deserve anything you can buy or take� Larry’s land-grabbing obviously represents empire-building, one of the novel’s many representations that challenge the American exceptionalist view of the United States as anti-imperialist� With Larry, Smiley’s novel shows that America is far from remedying the “corruptions” of “Old World” colonialism� This point is further emphasized by the many characters and towns Smiley names after “early explorer/ exploiters” who were European (Alter 155) - and by the fact that Larry Cook himself is the grandson of two white English Protestant immigrants� As David Noble and many others argue, a belief in the superiority of such a pedigree is central to American exceptionalism and its legacy of imperialism (xxiv, xlii)� 10 Larry’s land management further exhibits the imperialism at the heart of American exceptionalism� Larry uses the water beneath his land to bolster his reputation and sense of entitlement� He does not care about the environmental impact of his tiling any more than he cares about the Native Americans (and later his white neighbors) who were displaced so that he could acquire his thousand acres� For Larry, “time starts fresh every day” (216)� He perceives his land as “new, created by magic lines of tile” he “would talk about with pleasure and reverence” (15)� From Larry’s perspective, his drainage system not only displays his ingenuity and his “rightful” dominion over the earth, but it also fuels his own God-like status: he “created” the earth� Yet Larry is also responsible for the poisons that flow through his fields and his family� His culpability subtly surfaces when Ginny equates her father with threatening underground water: “I feel like there’s treacherous undercurrents all the time� I think I’m standing on solid ground, but then I discover there’s something moving underneath it, shifting from place to place” (104)� Ginny’s description of this subterranean water reverses the imagery usually associated with the pilgrims’ safe arrival in the New World� Her description ironically echoes a foundational text of American exceptionalism, Of Plymouth Plantation� William Bradford writes that God brought the pilgrims “over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the periles and miseries therof, againe to set their feete on the firme and stable earth, their proper elemente” (126)� Although Larry takes pride in creating “stable earth,” he resembles the poisonous water he has generated� The water thus calls to mind Donald E� Pease’s understanding of American exceptionalism: it is touted as a grand accomplishment, thus allowing Americans to “disavow” 10 For a selection of writers who analyze the connections between American exceptionalism, imperialism, and racism, see Bacevich 1-14; Dawson and Scheuller 1-21; Hodgson; Kaplan, Anarchy 15-16 and “Left Alone; ” Noble; Pease; and Rowe 16, 23, 45, 50-51� See also the sources cited in note 11� The Uses of Tragedy 185 the violations that sustain it (34)� “American exceptionalism,” Pease writes, “is a transgenerational state of fantasy, and like a family secret it bears the traces of transgenerational trauma” (38). Such trauma flows through Ginny’s story and through the water beneath her feet� It is responsible for her many miscarriages and for her sister Rose’s early death from breast cancer� This water symbolizes Larry’s abuse of power and his unexamined guilt� Larry never even acknowledges his guilt� His loss of power does not lead to anagnorisis or tragic recognition: he is too hubristic to learn anything� Unlike Shakespeare, Smiley refuses to grant the self-destruction and downfall of her Lear an aesthetic dignity� I borrow the phrase aesthetic dignity from Harold Bloom, who argues that characters such as Richard II, Iago, Edmund, and Macbeth maintain an “aesthetic dignity” after they have lost their “human dignity” (268-69)� In other words, their language, their artistry, and their complexity make them compelling even after they have committed atrocities� In “the tragic tradition,” these characters evoke what R� A� York calls “reverence,” prompting us to see “some questionable grandeur in the suffering of the powerful” (137)� Eagleton goes one step further, arguing that traditional theories of tragedy lend “a glamorous aura to suffering” in general (28)� A Thousand Acres steadfastly objects to this use of tragedy� With Larry’s death, Smiley completely subverts the lengthy death scenes that close most tragedies. To better appreciate the significance of her rewriting, consider Michael Neill’s theory that tragedy helps us battle “the horror of indistinction” (33)� The fear that tragedy addresses is not simply that of our own mortality, but that of our expendability, the fear that our existence does not matter because nothing sets us apart from other people and creatures� In tragedy, Neill argues, death, the great equalizer, “paradoxically becomes a powerfully individuating experience, the supreme occasion for the exhibitions of individual distinction” (34)� For instance, Lear’s protracted death is witnessed by every character that has managed to stay alive� His passing reinforces their loyalty, their regret, and their sense that he and his generation are exceptional. As Edgar states in the play’s final lines, “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (5�3�324-25)� Smiley reverses this deathly inflation of the tragic hero with Larry’s heart attack at the grocery store� She condemns the notion that one can seek distinction at any cost - that one can live as if the ends justify the means and be rewarded for it� She lambastes tragedy’s implication that one can engage in any hubristic act and still be forgiven, mourned, and revered� The only character present during Larry’s death is Ginny’s sister Caroline� Readers experience it third-hand when Ginny gets a letter from Rose months after the fact� Ginny describes the death and her reactions to it with some of the novel’s shortest and simplest sentences: “He was pushing the cart; she [Caroline] was guiding it down the aisles� He had a heart attack in the cereal aisle. I imagined him falling into the boxes of cornflakes. The funeral had been a small one� Rose had not gone” (334-35)� More attention is lavished on the suicide of a character that barely appears in the novel, Larry’s rival 186 m ary v ermillion Bob Stanley (339)� Larry is merely one failed farmer out of many� He loses all authority and dignity as his youngest daughter Caroline guides his shopping cart and as Ginny imagines him dying amidst breakfast food that Larry, an eggs-and-bacon man, disdained. Larry’s rolling cornfields are reduced to boxes of cornflakes. Stripped of grandeur and distinction - his hubris utterly de-glamorized - Larry’s death serves to critique American exceptionalism and those who romanticize its decline� But Larry’s obvious lack of aesthetic dignity is always strikingly at odds with his inflated self-perception. The novel provides several early clues that Larry is not as powerful and savvy as he thinks� In the opening chapter, as Larry drives the family’s new Buick, eight-year-old Ginny observes “the farms passing every minute, reduced from vastness to insignificance by our speed” (5)� Any reader familiar with Midwestern history recognizes Smiley’s darkly playful use of the word passing� She foreshadows the “passing” of farms, not from father to son, but from farmer to banker, to large corporation� Even before we recognize the novel’s Shakespearean subtext, we know that Larry’s good fortune cannot last forever� Our sense of foreboding deepens when Ginny states, “In spite of the price of gasoline, we took a lot of rides that year” (5). For the novel’s first readers, Ginny’s words likely called to mind the energy crisis, the Iranian hostage crises, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Persian Gulf War� For post-9/ 11 readers, Ginny’s words summon even more painful memories and fears when we consider the United States’ dependence on foreign oil� We may feel like Ginny: “a passenger in a car … going out of control” (59)� Larry’s Buick, once a symbol of his wealth and success, soon signals his downfall as he drives drunkenly about the countryside� In American culture, the automobile symbolizes individualism, mobility, and freedom - key concepts of American exceptionalism - but in A Thousand Acres cars and trucks primarily represent entrapment and fatality� Pete kills himself by driving his truck into the quarry that is polluted with debris from a gas-guzzling culture: “hubcaps, tin cans, bashed-in oil drums” (247)� After one of Mary Livingstone’s sons is killed in Vietnam, the other is killed in a car accident� Ginny is sometimes captive in her father’s vehicles� When she is six or seven, she is alone in his truck playing with her dolls� “Possibly,” she says, “Daddy didn’t know I was there” (106)� Then she and her parents are off to rescue their neighbor Harold, who is pinned under his truck in some ooze� “[C]areening across fields,” Ginny is “huddled down, bouncing in the corner of the box” (106)� When they stop, Larry asks her to walk across a six-inch plank above the ooze to deliver whiskey to Harold� Although Ginny seems to remember this event fondly because her father praises her, she later says, “I could not drive with Daddy … without a looming sense of his presence” (170)� When she chauffeurs him to a chiropractor’s appointment, he insists that she wait in their stifling hot car. This unreasonable demand is, sadly, only one of many ways that Larry crushes Ginny’s freedom and spirit� After she remembers his incest, she is literally trapped in a dressing room listening to him erase her own history while he talks with Caroline� Ginny compares herself to a horse “haltered in The Uses of Tragedy 187 a tight stall, throwing its head and beating its feet against the floor, but the beams and the bars and the halter rope hold firm, and the horse wears itself out, and accepts the restraint that moments before had been an unendurable goad” (198)� Not surprisingly, Ginny longs to escape “the trap that was our life on the farm” (307)� The word freedom, she says, “always startled and refreshed me� … I didn’t think of it as having much to do with my life, or the life of anyone I knew” (109)� Larry quashes the freedom, the ambitions and individuality, of nearly everyone in his family� Of her brother-in-law Pete, Ginny says, “That laughing, musical boy, the impossible merry James Dean, had been stolen away” (32)� Ginny’s mother, like Ginny herself, was afraid of Larry, afraid to laugh: “She had a great laugh when she let it out” (91)� Rose forces her two daughters to attend a boarding school in order to keep them safe from Larry� Even Larry himself fears captivity� At the Fourth of July church potluck, he broods about nursing homes: “Terrible conditions� Their children put them there” (214)� Images of psychological and actual entrapment also proliferate beyond the Cook family� Ty’s father died in a hog pen� Mary Livingstone is mired in depression over her dead sons: “I could hardly move” (92)� Jess once faced the threat of prison because he avoided the draft, and shortly after he returns to Iowa, he complains that his father wants to keep him on their farm� The novel’s most prominent pet, the ironically named parrot, Magellan, lives in a cage that is often covered to silence the bird� These images of confinement are deeply ironic given the ways in which American exceptionalism and traditionalist theories of tragedy construct freedom� It is the sine qua non of American exceptionalism� With its exemplary freedom, America has the duty to protect and promote freedom everywhere, and when its own freedom is threatened, so goes the exceptionalist myth, it is always by some external force or (racialized) Other: communists, jihadists, or, in earlier days, Native Americans� 11 Similarly, traditionalist views of tragedy feature an external force at odds with the hero’s freedom� According to A� W� Schlegel, “Internal freedom and external necessity … are the two poles of the tragic world” (qtd� in Koelb 276)� “The tragic hero,” writes Frye, “is very great as compared with us, but there is something else, something on the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is small� This something else may be called God, gods, fate, accident, fortune, necessity, circumstance, or any combination of these” (207)� Even Bradley, who resists Wordsworth’s “ruthless destiny,” cannot help but brood about a “system” that may be “called by the name of fate or no�” This system, Bradley reluctantly admits, “does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world�” Oscar Mandel calls this power “inevitability” and maintains that it is “the sine qua non of tragedy” (24)� 11 See Hodgson 92-93� My ideas about this Othering have also been shaped by Strehle (“I Am” and “Chosen”) and writers who explore various types of captivity narratives: Humphreys; Jeffords; and Sayre. I have also benefitted from Pease and the other sources cited in note 10� 188 m ary v ermillion A Thousand Acres reveals Smiley’s distaste for such tragic inevitability� It is not some nebulous fate that destroys Larry and his family� Nor is it some external force or racialized Other that rapes his daughters and decimates his way of life� It is Larry himself� With Larry’s incest, A Thousand Acres not only disputes theories of tragedy that emphasize fate, but the novel also completely inverts a genre that has long bolstered American exceptionalism, the captivity narrative� This narrative, like American exceptionalism and traditionalist views of tragedy, fixates on threats to freedom and sometimes tends toward melodrama. In Indian captivity narratives, a white Christian woman is stolen away and held captive by “heathen” natives� She then comes to represent goodness and innocence in need of white male protection� More recent “captivity narratives” similarly demonstrate the ways in which the United States relies on a vilified Other in order to define itself as the preeminent protector of freedom. In an article published the same year as A Thousand Acres, Susan Jeffords argues that the phrase the rape of Kuwait was used to justify the first Gulf War. The phrase created a “rescue” scenario in which Kuwait was the violated victim, Iraq was the villain, and the United States was the hero (204)� In the 2011 collection American Exceptionalisms: Winthrop to Winfrey, Sara Humphreys similarly argues that “formulaic characters, such as the female captive and the exploited child” - specifically white ones - embody a “threatened national purity” and promote “a brand of righteous, moral American identity” (207)� Ginny Cook is such a character, a white female captive and a raped child� But it is, of course, her father who raped her, and his ideology that holds her captive� A Thousand Acres reveals that the main threat to American freedom is not external, but internal - not some racialized Other, but its own dominant mythology� This rewriting of the Indian captivity narrative becomes more apparent when we consider three other elements of the novel� First of all, the novel calls attention to its own relative silence about Native Americans (a topic I will return to later)� Second, there are no people of color in the novel - an unrealistic absence even for rural Iowa in 1979� Still more unrealistic, the novel’s characters never even mention people of color� When suffering is discussed, it is always white suffering - a key component of Indian captivity narratives and American exceptionalism itself� Lastly, the novel’s rewriting of captivity narratives is evident in its many images of entrapment, particularly its strange allusions to Indian captivity narratives� Ginny feels herself “hook onto” Jess Cook’s smile “the way you would hook a rope ladder over a windowsill and lower yourself out of a burning house” (217)� This passage calls to mind Mary Rowlandson fleeing her burning home after it was set ablaze by her Indian captors� Yet Ginny longs to escape a home that has been made intolerable by her own father� Pete, “stolen away” (32), tells a story that also challenges the captivity narrative’s construction of evil as external� When he is a young musician hitchhiking, a rancher picks him up and feeds him a steak dinner� Then in “the middle of the night,” the rancher, along with his two brothers and wife, hold Pete down and “shav[e] his head and beard” (77)� With this quasi-scalping, the ranchers resemble Larry� They The Uses of Tragedy 189 masquerade as providers and protectors, but function as predators� Opening their home to Pete, the ranchers are not external threats, but “domestic” ones� Yet there is a key difference between the ranchers and Larry� Their victim is not a female child, but an adult male� In A Thousand Acres, captivity is pervasive and complex, refusing to confine itself to any sort of binary. The novel thus suggests that American society itself is captive, imprisoned from within, constrained by its own ideology� This broad cultural commentary remains relevant even if we focus on Ginny as an individual character and as a victim of rape and incest� 12 Certainly, as many readers have argued, Ginny represents America’s raped and polluted land� Yet this interpretation, informed by Smiley’s own ecofeminism, 13 does not do justice to her complex portrait of Ginny or to the full range of symbolism that our culture attaches to sexual victims� According to Sharon Lamb, sexual victimization evokes “almost archetypal images … of victim and perpetrator� The victim is pure, innocent, helpless, and sometimes heroic� The perpetrator is monstrous and all powerful” (118)� 14 In a review of A Thousand Acres and some fifteen other novels that depict incest, Katie Roiphe writes, “Because of the nature of the crime, the characters tend to be separated in crude shorthand: father, evil; daughter, innocent” (69)� This “shorthand” echoes binaries that are central to the Indian captivity narrative, American exceptionalism, and melodrama� Roiphe, I believe, misses the fact that Smiley’s novel ultimately complicates such binaries� Certainly, many of the novel’s characters crave moral absolutes and a sense of innocence - desires that fuel both American exceptionalism and America’s fascination with sexual abuse victims� Yet, near the novel’s end, Ginny attempts to shed these desires, and with her struggles, A Thousand Acres challenges America’s desire to see itself as innocent, to believe that evil exists only outside its borders� 15 Ginny’s struggles also convey the difficulty of moving past American exceptionalism� Of course, Ginny’s struggles are so difficult because her abusive father trained her to see herself as a victim - someone with no power or freedom� Larry cast himself as an omnipotent fate in control of Ginny’s destiny� It is inevitable that Ginny embraces a sense of tragic inevitability, at least for a time� Yet just as the novel refuses to lend aesthetic dignity to Larry’s hubris, so too does it withhold such dignity from Ginny’s fatalism� This is not to say that A Thousand Acres minimizes Ginny’s suffering� The novel creates empathy for Ginny (and Rose and other victims of sexual abuse) even as it participates in a debate about victimhood� This debate, which 12 When referring to Ginny, I use the word victim instead of the more empowering term survivor because of the passivity and learned helplessness she exhibits for most of the novel� The concept of victimhood is also central to the novel’s exploration of tragedy and American exceptionalism� 13 Some readers who emphasize Smiley’s ecofeminism include Carden, “Remembering” and Sons; Carr; Høgås; Ozdek; Mathieson; and Slicer� 14 Janice Doane and Devon Hodges also influenced my view of the importance American culture assigns to sexual victims and their stories (63-78)� 15 My thinking about the externalization of evil has in part been shaped by Grove� 190 m ary v ermillion peaked around the time the novel was published, is especially relevant to American exceptionalism after 9/ 11, when, as Godfrey Hodgson observes, America often casts itself as “uniquely hated” (113)� A key text in the debate about victimhood is Shelby Steele’s controversial book, The Content of Our Character, published in 1990, one year before Smiley’s novel� As Steele warns his fellow African Americans against identifying as victims, he explains the allure of this identity� It offers a moral authority based on the victims’ innocence� “Innocence is power,” but, Steele insists, it is a power that individuals seek at the cost of their own personal power (5)� Other writers (perhaps less attuned to the reality of oppression than Steele) bemoaned what they called the culture of victimization� According to Charles J� Sykes, author of A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, 1991 was a banner year for articles that decried the culture of victimization (13)� This “culture” includes a refusal to take responsibility for our actions and attitudes, a tendency to blame others for our problems, a stake in our identity as victims, and a focus on our childhood grievances� For example, in a 1991 Harper’s article, David Rieff writes, “if we were to use a new Jungian archetype to characterize our time it would be the wounded child” (51)� In a New York Magazine cover story also appearing in 1991, John Taylor states, “In their rush to establish ever more categories of victims, lawyers and therapists are encouraging a grotesquely cynical evasion of the ethic of individual responsibility” (28)� Although Smiley, unlike Taylor, acknowledges that real victims (like Ginny and Rose) exist, and although she details the toll that incest takes on its victims, her novel also rejects a culture of victimization� Smiley creates extremely unflattering portraits of characters that seek innocence via victimhood� When Ginny leaves the farm, Ty plays the martyr: “I gave my life to this place! ” (330)� Jess often sounds like the quintessential “wounded child” of pop-psychology, blaming his parents and their generation for all his problems: “Can you believe how they’ve fucked us over, Ginny? … they have aimed to destroy us, and I don’t know why” (55, 196)� Larry himself tries to play the victim, and after he succeeds, a “look of sly righteousness” spreads over his face (219)� Rose says of Larry and Harold, “When they suffer, then they’re convinced they’re innocent again” (234)� A Thousand Acres makes it clear that there are no winners in the battle for righteousness or innocence� In an essay, “Shakespeare in Iceland,” Smiley writes, As the lawyer for Goneril and Regan, I proposed a different narrative of their motives and actions that casts doubt on the case Mr� Shakespeare was making for his client, King Lear� … The goal of the trial was not to try or condemn the father, but to gain acquittal for the daughters� The desired verdict was not “innocent,” but rather “not guilty,” or at least “not proven�” One thing I learned from Hamlet is that none of us are innocent� (172-73) Insisting that no one is innocent, A Thousand Acres indicts America’s love affair with its own “innocence�” The Uses of Tragedy 191 By showing that Ginny has more in common with her father than she realizes, the novel also establishes a close kinship between American exceptionalism and a culture of victimization: both foster false perceptions about individual agency� Like Lear, Larry and Ginny know themselves “but slenderly” (Shakespeare 1�1�300)� While Larry overestimates his agency, Ginny underestimates - or even denies - hers� Ginny’s passivity is obvious early in the novel when she goes along with the land transfer despite an “inner clang” (18)� She is critical of her own passivity, her tendency to wait� Pondering her miscarriages, she says: “Who would stay with a mother who merely waited? Who accepted things so dully” (147)� Although she tells Larry, “It’s boring to wait,” she waits throughout the entire novel (173)� During the storm scene, she is “waiting for the catalyst” (186)� Later, with a halfhearted attempt to poison her sister, Ginny “wait[s] for Rose to die” (316)� At the novel’s end, after Rose has died from cancer rather than Ginny’s poison, Ginny “waits” tables and claims to be free from “the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen” (367)� We may think we understand Ginny’s passivity and fatalism midway through the novel when we discover the incest, but even after we learn about this abuse, many of Ginny’s fatalistic statements still seem exaggerated - their language too inflated for domestic realism, their sheer quantity far exceeding that of most tragedies� In fact, as the novel progresses, Ginny’s expressions of powerlessness seem less realistic - and more obviously vehicles for the novel’s satiric treatment of tragic inevitability� At the novel’s beginning, Ginny’s worst habit is “entertaining thoughts of disaster” or “expecting the worst” (65, 66)� While these habits caricature our expectations of a tragic plot, Ginny’s words also sound like that of any pessimistic Midwesterner, as do her comments about the land transfer: “We didn’t have any choice” (98)� But consider the following exchange between Ginny and Jess: I [Ginny] said, “Remember this day� This is the day when everything I was worried about came to pass�” “Really? ” I could tell by his face that he didn’t know what I was talking about� I said, “… Just remember that I knew it all ahead of time�” “If you say so�” (100) Here Smiley’s writing has a mock-heroic edge. Ginny’s first comment - with its repetition and its inflated language (“came to pass”) - seems odd in the mouth of an Iowa farmwife� Jess seems to think so too: “Really? ” He is a surrogate for the reader, who (even with an awareness of the Lear subtext) finds Ginny’s blend of fatalism and prescience over the top� Nor is this mock-heroic moment an isolated instance� After Harold humiliates Ginny and Rose at the Fourth of July picnic, Ginny notes that they went “straight home, as if there were no escape, as if the play we’d begun could not end” (219-20)� This allusion to tragedy calls attention to itself, as do the many times when Ginny sounds like a Greek chorus, the doom-saying prophet Tieresias, or a brooding tragic hero about to meet his demise� At the quarry, the last time that Ginny sees Rose’s husband, Pete, before he kills 192 m ary v ermillion himself, Ginny alludes both to Shakespeare’s “mortal coil” and to the Greek image of the three fates: “The rope of my life, coiling into this knot, then out of it, seemed again more like a thread, easily broken” (249)� The sober image of the fates measuring the threads of our lives and then cutting them off is quickly deflated with Pete’s decidedly undignified death: drunk, he drives himself into the polluted quarry� The concept of fate is further diminished by the scene’s darkly comic and heavy foreshadowing� Pete, for instance, glances at the quarry and says, “I suppose you might swim here if you were ready to take your life in your hands” (248)� Tragic inevitability continues to take a comic beating as Ginny’s references to it grow more inappropriate� When she plots to murder Rose with canned poisoned sausage (a comic murder weapon if ever there was one), Ginny muses, Certainly, I thought, this is what they meant by “premeditated” - this deliberate savoring of each step, the assembly of each element, the contemplation of how death would be created, how a path of intentional circumstances paralleling and mimicking accidental circumstances would be set out upon� … The perfection of my plan was the way Rose’s own appetite would select her death� (312, 313) Smiley references the inevitability of the tragic plot and the hamartia of the tragic hero (“Rose’s own appetite would select her death”) as Ginny temporarily assumes the role of tragedian, creating her own revenge tragedy� Yet Ginny does not acknowledge her own creativity or agency: “One thing, I have to say, that I especially relished [about the poisoning] was the secrecy of it� In that way, I saw, I had been practicing for just such an event as this all my life” (312). Ironically, when Ginny finally resolves to exercise her will (albeit, in a typically passive fashion), she feels fated or destined to do so� 16 She similarly erases her own agency when she decides to leave her husband� Instead of detailing her thoughts or feelings, she describes her cooking: “The contained roar of the gas and then, a minute later, the first sizzling of meat juices, took on the volume and weight of oracular mutterings, almost intelligible” (329-30)� Ginny’s most active assertion of will is seemingly out of her hands - determined by a quasi-Macbethian cauldron of pork chops� With such dark humor, A Thousand Acres interrogates uses of tragedy that promote fatalism and foster America’s culture of victimization� This interrogation continues with the novel’s portrayal of tragic catharsis: purification via purgation. Often associated with bloodletting, purgation was designed to remove excess fluids and thereby temper excesses in a person’s character� The goal was moderation and, according to Martha Nussbaum, clarification (388-90). A Thousand Acres suggests that Americans cannot achieve this sort of catharsis because we seek a more extreme sort of cleansing� Enticed by the culture of victimization and American exceptionalism, we mistakenly believe that we can completely cleanse ourselves of guilt, 16 Surprisingly few readers note the humor of this poisoning scene� Exceptions include Cooperman 89; Eder; and Olson 29� However, Olson interprets Ginny’s disposal of the poisoned sausages much more optimistically than I do (29-32)� The Uses of Tragedy 193 a guilt symbolized by the novel’s poisoned water� Just as this water beneath Larry’s farm represents his guilt and America’s guilt, it also represents the repressed guilt of all Americans who refuse to examine their own sense of entitlement and their own acquisition of wealth� 17 The desire to purge or remove such guilt is satirized with the novel’s most clearly comic character, banker Marv Carson� With an “innocent” smile, Marv foolishly details his obsession with toxins (30)� “My main effort now is to be aware of toxins and try to shed them as regularly as possible� I urinate twelve to twenty times a day, now� I sweat freely� I keep a careful eye on my bowel movements” (29)� Marv believes that such purging protects him from “[n]egative thoughts” and “[f]ailure of hope” (29)� This toxin-shedding regimen parodies tragic catharsis� And it is ultimately ineffective: Marv constantly worries about the toxins in his body and “things at the bank” (29)� The novel also critiques the desire for catharsis and purification via Marv’s love affair with bottled water� He is seldom without a bottle, and it is always a different type� After the storm, Marv arrives with “a six-pack of little green bottles of Perrier water from France that he’d ordered from a distributor” (200)� The last time he appears, he has “tall bottles of three different kinds of mineral water on his desk, one from Italy, one from France, and one from Sweden” (364)� Ironically, Marv seeks pure water from other lands while he funds farmers who poison Iowa’s water� Perhaps he believes he can avoid the consequences of his actions� Certainly, he reveals a desire to deny his own complicity in the creation of toxins� With Marv’s wide-ranging attempts to find the purest water, Smiley satirizes America’s attempts to believe in its own invulnerability and innocence� Marv’s obsession with pure water is also a comic version of Ginny’s desire for cleansing� Both characters devote the bulk of their attention to outside forces that they perceive as threats� Just as Marv wages battle with toxins, Ginny struggles with household grime� There is a relentless inevitability to her housecleaning, a sort of domestic fatalism: “On a farm, no matter how careful you are about taking off boots and overalls, the dirt just drifts through anyway” (120)� Ginny keeps “busy seeking perfect order and cleanliness,” and she approaches her psyche in a similar way (308)� As a victim of incest who has not yet come to terms with her past, Ginny continually struggles to feel clean and pure� Always attracted to water (the river, Mel’s pond, the swimming pool), she naïvely yearns for a sort of baptism that will wash her father and all her problems away� When she heads to the quarry, she 17 In “pre-Platonic texts,” words associated with catharsis often referred to “water that is clear and open, free of mud or weeds” (Nussbaum 389)� The water in Smiley’s novel has inspired a range of interpretations. Doane and Hodges link the water to “horrific repressed memories and unexamined economic pressures” (75)� For Marinella Rodi- Risberg, the water conveys “secret family trauma” (197)� York sees it as “a symbol of concealment and moral threat” (136)� Mary Paniccia Carden takes a more feminist approach, seeing the water as “a specifically maternal space, a forgotten, alternate landscape and discourse that undermines the foundation of the father’s authority” (“Remembering” 185)� Almila Ozdek similarly sees the water as a “matrilinear heritage” (68)� 194 m ary v ermillion thinks, “only water, only total, refreshing immersion, could clear my mind” (246)� But the quarry is polluted, and the water that Ginny drinks, poisoned� Purification is not an option. Although Ginny’s desire for purification is poignant and understandable, it also signals her denial - not only of her abuse, but also of her complicity with her father’s value system. For a large portion of the narrative, her financial security and her sense of self rest upon Larry’s worldview. As she reflects on the twenty-five years it took Larry and his father to build their drainage system, she notes that she “was a beneficiary of this grand effort, someone who would always have a floor to walk on” (15). That Ginny also suffers from this “grand effort” - her womb poisoned, her sister Rose taken by cancer - does not erase the fact that she participated in it, admired it, and benefited from it� Her victimization does not guarantee her innocence� Ginny’s complicity largely stems from her narrow perspective - her failure to look much beyond her own sorrow and loss� She rightly claims that her father’s point of view overshadows her own, but it is also true that she seldom seeks other points of view� Nowhere is her lack of curiosity more obvious and more self-destructive than in her ignorance about the water under her feet� Jess once again serves as a surrogate reader when he explodes at her: “People have known for ten years or more that nitrates in well water cause miscarriages and death of infants� Don’t you know that the fertilizer runoff drains into the aquifer? ” (165)� Ginny is shockingly uninformed about her immediate environment, and she knows and cares even less about the world beyond it� She claims that the farm’s underground water teaches her “a lesson about what is below the level of the visible,” but this is only partially true (9)� When she begins excavating her family history, she recognizes the ways in which the American dream silenced and marginalized her female ancestors (Amano), yet, like her father, Ginny seems unaware that this same history damaged Native Americans� Even though she constantly broods over the destruction of the land, her narrative never includes the phrase Native Americans� The word Indian appears in the novel only once when Jess uses it as an adjective to describe a type of grass (247)� In fact, Ginny makes only one oblique reference to Native Americans: “It seemed to me when I was a child in school, learning about Columbus, that in spite of what my teacher said, ancient cultures might have been onto something� No globe or map fully convinced me that Zebulon County was not the center of the universe” (3)� With the de-racialized phrase ancient cultures and her silence about Native American history, Ginny shows that she has yet to move past the Eurocentric view of history she learned as a child� Even though she comes to understand that her family was destroyed by Larry’s belief that he is “the center of the universe,” she fails to understand that “ancient cultures” in America were destroyed by a similar belief� “Ancient” peoples are explicitly mentioned only one other time in the novel: in the title of the essay from which Smiley takes her epigraph, “The Ancient People and the Newly Come�” The author of the essay, Meridel Le Sueur, was a champion of Native American rights, and her essay devotes a The Uses of Tragedy 195 great deal of space to Native American history� Le Sueur depicts white guilt when she portrays her own pioneer family: “The severity of the seasons and the strangeness of a new land, with those whose land had been seized looking in our windows, created a tension of guilt and a tightening of sin” (40)� In A Thousand Acres, none of the characters acknowledge such faces outside the window, but Smiley makes their presence felt with Ginny’s thoughts about what lies beneath the surface of the earth� These thoughts resonate with a story that Le Sueur relates about the Plains Indians: “They had lived inside the mother earth and had come upon huge vines into the light� The vines had broken and there were some of her people still under the earth� … the government could not stop the Indians from prayer and the dances� They would take them underground with the unborn people” (44-45)� Like Ginny’s resilient tomatoes and like her last unborn child, a painful past will make its way to the surface, demanding attention� Ginny’s frequent musings about the “sea beneath her feet” indicate mixed feelings about such knowledge� She wants to understand herself and her world better, but she is afraid of being overwhelmed� She is drawn to the subterranean water, but she also imagines that it is “ready at any time to rise and cover the earth again” (16)� Likewise, our nation’s buried past - the parts of our history at odds with the exceptionalist myth - threatens to engulf America as long as we push it beneath the surface� How much of Ginny’s past remains beneath the surface? How are we to interpret the ending of A Thousand Acres? Critics are divided on this last question, and that division reflects the novel’s stance on tragic closure: even the most ambiguous endings are too tidy� In a 1993 essay, Smiley criticizes the grand gesture of tragic death that ends so many masterpieces� There is, in western literature, what has to be interpreted as a refusal to go on, a willingness on the part of the larger heroes to vacate the mortal world through conflict, suicide, or a failure of the will to live� Need I add that there’s always a mess to be cleaned up afterward that is not the concern of the dead tragic hero? (“Can” 13) A Thousand Acres implies that some messes cannot be cleaned up, some sins cannot be forgiven, and some mistakes have lasting consequences� Such consequences color the novel’s end� Even after Ginny leaves home, and even after she indicts American exceptionalism in the oft-quoted speech she makes to Ty - “You see this grand history, but I see blows” - she remains entrenched in its belief system and damaged by her father’s legacy (342)� Ginny works at Perkins, a restaurant chain that flies huge American flags, obvious symbols of American exceptionalism� Vivian H� Brooks, who works in Public Affairs for Perkins, tells a story about the flags that replicates the language of American exceptionalism: Since our humble beginnings as a single Pancake shop, our loyal patrons have repeatedly told us that the presence of the American Flag above our restaurants not only stirs their innermost emotions, but instills in them a sense of pride, a community bond, an unspoken sense of thanks for being able to enjoy the freedom, and share in the wealth of this great country� 196 m ary v ermillion Waitressing at Perkins, Ginny is more passive and isolated than ever� Earlier in the novel, she recognizes that her ignorance about nitrates cost her five children, and she tells her husband, “We never even asked about anything like that, or looked in a book, or even told people we’d had miscarriages� …- What if there are women all over the county who’ve had lots of miscarriages, and if they just compared notes - ” (259)� But at the novel’s end, three years after she leaves him and the farm, Ginny shuns information just as religiously as Marv shuns tap water: “News was what I didn’t want� I didn’t own a television or a radio� It didn’t occur to me to buy a newspaper” (334)� Even though Ginny is going to college, she forms no community, no bonds with other women� She makes no connection between rural poisons and city poisons� Just as Ginny starts the novel in her father’s car, watching farms “passing” by (5), she ends it on I-35, where “you could hear the cars passing” (333), where “life passed in a blur” (336)� Despite the unceasing passage of cars and trucks on the interstate, Ginny doesn’t understand that she is still part of the same oil-dependent system - the same vicious cycle in which she feeds people who poison the earth, ostensibly in order to feed other people� She sees no irony in the fact that one of her nieces wants to work in “vertical food conglomerates” (369)� More important, when Ginny disposes of her poisoned sausages - a potentially liberating gesture - she chooses a method that echoes her father’s poisoning of the land: “I ground them up, I washed them away with fifteen minutes of water, full blast. I relied, as I always did now that I lived in the city, on the sewage treatment plant that I had never seen. I had misgivings” (366-67). With this final parody of catharsis, we see how little Ginny has learned� She still ignores her own misgivings, she trusts others when she should not, and she still seeks a quick and easy cleansing� Yet Ginny is the character who comes closest to achieving anagnorisis or tragic recognition� Of the three Cook sisters, Ginny is the only one who gains any insight from her family’s history and downfall� The differences between the sisters may, in fact, suggest various ways of responding to the complex and painful legacy of American exceptionalism� Caroline chooses nostalgia and disavowal, and Rose embraces anger� Ginny alone seeks perspective� In the novel’s final paragraph, as she recalls her jar of poisoned sausage, Ginny insists on the importance of remembering and attempting to understand the past: I can’t say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember - the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness� This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all the others� (370-71) Ginny recognizes that her father was not as powerful and free as she thought, and she thus frees herself from the Larry of earlier pages, the larger-thanlife figure “never dwarfed by the landscape” (20). She pays more attention to her inner landscape, to her own impulses and choices� As she considers the poisoned sausages, she acknowledges a connection with her father, a shared The Uses of Tragedy 197 capacity for evil� To be sure, this insight is disturbing, but it is also empowering� Ginny now sees herself as more than a passive onlooker, and certainly as more than a victim� In short, Ginny develops a more nuanced and realistic understanding of both her father and herself� 18 Ginny plans to “safeguard” this fledgling perspective as she would a “gleaming obsidian shard�” Obsidian - a stone that Native cultures used for weapons, tools, and ceremonies - also represents a part of America’s past that Ginny does not yet acknowledge� This volcanic shard demonstrates the power of things long buried: it signals America’s need to look beneath the surface� Just as Ginny probes her family’s secrets and history - and just as Smiley examines our uses of tragedy - our nation needs to excavate its collective past and look beneath the surface of its mythologies� A Thousand Acres urges us to abandon both our hubris and our fatalism and to explore the questions that tragedy demands we ask: How do we exert our wills and exercise our freedom without hurting others? 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Recovery, Co-Dependency, and the Art of Blaming Somebody Else�” Harper’s Magazine Oct� 1991: 49-56� Print� Rodi-Risberg, Marinella� “Trauma And Its Resolution In Jane Smiley’s Novel A Thousand Acres�” Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Perspectives� Eds� Chryssoula Lascaratou, Anna Despotopoulou, Elly Infantidou� Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008� 195-207� Print� Roiphe, Katie� “Making the Incest Scene�” Harper’s Magazine Nov� 1995: 65-71� Print� 200 m ary v ermillion Rowe, John Carlos� Cultural Politics of the New American Studies� Ann Arbor: Open Humanities P, 2012� Print� Rozga, Margaret� “Sisters In a Quest - Sister Carrie and A Thousand Acres: The Search for Identity in Gendered Territory�” Midwestern Miscellany XXII� Ed� David D� Anderson� East Lansing: Midwestern P, 1994� Print� Sayre, Gordon M� “Renegades from Barbary: The Transnational Turn in Captivity Studies�” American Literary History 22�2 (2010): 347-59� Print� Schiff, James A� “Contemporary Retellings: A Thousand Acres as the Latest Lear�” Critique 39�4 (1998): 367-82� Print� Shakespeare, William� King Lear. 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Norton Shakespeare� Ed� Stephen Greenblatt, et al� New York: Norton, 1997� 2479-553� Print� Slicer, Deborah� “Toward an Ecofeminist Standpoint Theory: Bodies as Grounds�” Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy� Ed� Patrick D� Murphy� Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998� 49-73� Print� Smiley, Jane� “Can Mothers Think? ” The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft� Ed� Kurt Brown� St� Paul: Greywolf P, 1993� 3-15� Print� -----� “Shakespeare in Iceland�” Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re- Visions in Literature and Performance� Ed� Marilyn Novy� New York: St� Martin’s, 1999� 159-80� Print� -----� “Taking It All Back�” The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work� Ed� Marie Arana� New York: Public Affairs, 2003� 389-92� Print� -----� A Thousand Acres� New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991� Print� Söderlind, Sylvia� Introduction� American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey� Eds� Söderlind and James Taylor Carson� Albany: State U of New York P, 2011� 1-14� Print� Sprengnether, Madelon� “The Gendered Subject of Shakespearean Tragedy�” Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender� Eds� Shirley Nelson Garner and Sprengnether� Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996� 1-27� Print� Steele, Shelby� The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America� 1990� New York: HarperCollins, 1991� Print� Strehle, Susan� “Chosen People: American Exceptionalism in Kingsolver’s the Poisonwood Bible�” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 49�4 (2008): 413-28� Print� -----� “The Daughter’s Subversion in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres�” Critique 41�3 (2000): 211-26� Print� -----� “‘I Am a Thing Apart’: Toni Morrison, A Mercy, and American Exceptionalism�” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54�2 (2013): 109-23� Print� Sykes, Charles J� A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character� New York: St� Martins, 1992� Print� Taylor, John� “Don’t Blame Me: The New Culture of Victimization�” New York Magazine 3 June 1991: 27-34� Print� Weatherford, Kathleen Jeanette� “Inextricable Fates and Individual Destiny in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and E� Annie Proulx’s Postcards�” Philological Papers 44 (1998-99): 147-53� Print� Ween, Lori� “Family Sagas of the Americas: Los Sangurimas and A Thousand Acres�” The Comparatist 20 (1996): 111-25� Print� York, R� A� The Extension of Life: Fiction and History in the American Novel� Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003� Print� s usan s trehle “Prey to Unknown Dreams”: Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves, and the Exceptionalist Disavowal of History But what is the difference between the influence of instinct upon a wolf and history upon a man? In both cases, justice is prey to unknown dreams� Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves No population has been more significantly harmed by American exceptionalism than the indigenous tribes their colonizers called Indians� To put this under-explored history at its simplest, as many as twelve million indigenous people, living in seven hundred cultural units on the North American continent, were subjected to various forms of “systematic extermination” by European colonizers (Baker 317-18)� The cultures and histories of these “Vanishing Americans” were largely erased, leading John Carlos Rowe to call Native Americans “the repressed contents of an imperial cultural consciousness” (197)� Indeed, the relationship between American exceptionalism and the repression of its victims’ histories is central to Donald E� Pease’s analysis� Interpreting the exceptionalist myth of America as a “fantasy” which attains its efficacy by “supplying its adherents with the psychosocial structures that permitted them to ignore the state’s exceptions,” Pease argues that “structures of disavowal” enabled the state’s exceptions “insofar as they sustained the attitude through which U�S� citizens willfully misrepresented their history as well as their place in the world” (12)� Massively subscribed fantasy has enabled citizens to “experience what was exceptional about their U�S� national identity as the disavowal of U�S� imperialism at home and abroad” and then, in a self-confirming strategy, to believe they had achieved the fantasized ideal nation: “After it defined America as the fulfillment of the world’s dream of an ideal nation, the fantasy of American exceptionalism eradicated the difference between the national ideal U�S� citizens wanted and the faulty nation they had” (21-22)� In relation to the indigenous peoples whose land they expropriated, these “structures of disavowal” enabled Americans to transmogrify a history of genocide into the benign practice of “Manifest Destiny” required for the continent-wide spread of American justice� Disavowal similarly permitted European colonizers to regard the continent they arrived on 202 s usan s trehle as terra nullius or empty land, to think of Indians as a single homogeneous group of savages, and to justify their own barbarous extermination of Native peoples� 1 Native studies scholarship and creative work can be understood, in part, as a sustained critique of such disavowals of Native identities and histories and a necessarily political reclamation of tribal rights in America� Louis Owens, for example, argues that the word “Indian” was designed to disavow Native standing and indigeneity: “Native cultures - their voices systematically silenced - had no part in the ongoing discourse that evolved over several centuries to define the utterance ‘Indian’ within the language of the invaders” (7)� Jace Weaver links the disavowal of Native indigeneity, coupled with the erasure of Native cultures, to a constructed fiction of the colonizers’ own original inhabitancy: “The declaration of indigenous cultures as vanishing or extinct becomes a means in settler colonies of establishing an uneasy illusion of indigeneity (indigenousness) on the part of the colonizers” (228)� Gerald Vizenor comments that an elision of Native presence was common in American writing before Jefferson: “the indian was an absence in histories� That absence has become a theme of romantic tragedy� Many Natives have turned that absence into a fugitive pose” (11)� These examples could be amplified at length; recognition of and resistance against a sustained history of disavowal continues to engage Native scholars and writers� My purpose here is to show that Louise Erdrich, a writer of Chippewa/ Ojibwa and German American parentage, recovers in The Plague of Doves (2008) Native histories that were systematically disavowed by American exceptionalism and uses postmodern narrative strategies for political ends� Praised in 1999 as “one of the most important Native American writers of the past fifteen years and one of the most accomplished and promising novelists of any heritage now working in the United States” (Beidler and Barton 1), Erdrich was also famously criticized by Leslie Marmon Silko, in a 1986 review of The Beet Queen, for pursuing aesthetics at the cost of politics� Silko complained that Erdrich’s prose reflected “academic, post-modern, so-called experimental influences … no history or politics intrudes to muddy the well of pure necessity” (179)� 2 Erdrich’s postmodernism can be traced to her studies at Johns Hopkins with metafictionist John Barth, whom she calls “a genius, a superb teacher” (Halliday; see also Scott); but in Vizenor’s view, postmodern narrative strategies have a longstanding place in Native storytelling� 1 Godfrey Hodgson ironically observes that “Native Americans did not think of America as empty” (163)� But their numbers were quickly and dramatically reduced by plagues of smallpox, measles, and other diseases, as well as war and murder� David Stannard reports that Europeans routinely slaughtered women and children, following a practice that was “flatly and intentionally genocidal” (119). The seizure of Native lands escalated as Americans moved west; Howard Zinn writes, “Indian Removal, as it has been politely called, cleared the land for white occupancy” (125)� What David Baker calls “openly racist official policies of genocide” (319) emerged when political leaders and figures like L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, disavowed the humanity of Indians and issued public calls for their extermination (Stannard 126)� 2 For an extended analysis of Silko’s criticism of Erdrich, see Stirrup (78-85)� “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 203 The separation of aesthetics and politics does not hold in Erdrich’s fourteen novels, which enlist a postmodern aesthetics in the service of a complex politics designed to resist and reverse the disavowal of Native culture� As Rowe puts it, when her texts refuse “to fit correctly the form of the novel,” Erdrich “forces her readers thereby to encounter a political history that otherwise remains largely unconscious, unseen, unthought, and unfelt” (203)� In fact, Erdrich believes that contemporary American Indian writers are called to recover Native histories and stories: “In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe” (“Where” 48)� While Plague was recognized by reviewers as one of Erdrich’s best novels, and while it introduces the community and characters used in Erdrich’s National Book Award winner, The Round House (2012), it has not yet received much critical attention� 3 I will argue that this important novel uncovers the long but unrecognized reach of American exceptionalist history into the present� Indeed, Plague is especially significant for its exploration of the ways an exceptionalist heritage creates historical erasures, leaving specters of disavowed events and motives to deform relationships among Americans of European, Native, and mixed descent� The novel recovers the historical lynching of three Native Americans, hanged without trial for the murder of several members of a white family. As I will argue in a first section of this essay, Erdrich draws on historical accounts of this little-known event, recasting her sources to emphasize the innocence, generosity, and courage of the Native men and the racist assurance of the Euro-American lynch mob that the Indians are both guilty and expendable� Erdrich moves the event, which occurred in 1897, forward to 1911 in order to place one young victim (who survives) as an elderly member of the community in a fictional North Dakota town called Pluto in the 1960s� Adding to the irony of the lynchings, she adds a backstory, also drawn from history: some years before the hangings, Native guides lead a group of Euro-Americans west, enabling them to claim the land that later becomes Pluto� 4 The guides’ youngest brother will be one of the victims of the lynching, orchestrated by the very men whose colonization of western lands was enabled by the guides� Erdrich’s revisions of these two historical sources emphasize the violent racist logic informing the exceptionalist myth: when a white family is brutally murdered, “savage” Indians are assumed to be at fault, while savage white acts like lynching are held to 3 Plague was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and praised by reviewers� Kakutani calls it “arguably [Erdrich’s] most ambitious - and in many ways, her most deeply affecting - work yet”; Charles calls it a “wondrous novel”; Barcott “often gorgeous”; and Frase evidence that Erdrich “gets better and better�” Philip Roth writes in a cover blurb that the novel is “her dazzling masterpiece�” Three essays on the novel appear in Madsen (see also Stirrup 153-58)� The Round House begins about fourteen years after the end of Plague in the household of Antone Bazil Coutts, his wife Geraldine Milk Coutts, and their thirteen-year-old son, Joe� 4 Erdrich moves the western expedition from 1857, the year identified in her historical source, to an unspecified later year, so the twenty-something Buckendorfs who claim land are younger than seventy-something at the time of the hangings� 204 s usan s trehle constitute legitimate exceptions to the rule of law� Since the lynchers ask no questions before hanging the Indians, they can disavow the connections between their victims and the guides who saved their lives as well as their own linked assumptions about race and guilt� These events make visible a set of exceptionalist practices, as the “chosen people” make exceptions to their own laws while disavowing the injustice they apply in the name of justice� In the relationships that emerge among the citizens of Pluto decades after the lynchings, Erdrich traces more ironies as the alternate face of the Euro- Americans’ racism expresses itself in exotic, Orientalized fantasies about the Natives� As I will show in the essay’s second section, Erdrich’s characters living half a century after the lynchings display complex aftereffects of the exceptionalist myth and the disavowals of history it has required: Euro-Americans envision Natives and mixed-race characters as closer to nature, including their own physical nature and sexuality, than people of European descent and thus figures of an attractive vitality and depth. Native Americans and biracial characters look on those of European descent as sophisticated, cultured, definitive of American norms; they are attracted by the “American face” of these Euro-Americans (239)� Disavowing the long series of liaisons and affairs that have generated complex interrelations between them, each set of characters responds to an imagined exoticism and is drawn by an imagined “otherness”; these attractions form the powerful “unknown dreams” shaping their behavior� The unconscious dreams and desires represent the return of the repressed, uncovering what the myth of American exceptionalism required to be disavowed. They baffle and drive the central characters until, in parallel movements, each of them comes to understand the traumatic history specific to their town, its relation to the colonization of Native peoples, and the particular relevance of history to their own choices� These characters discover that their choices have been guided, like the wolf who responds to instincts he cannot rationalize or explain, by the “unknown dreams” that have been repressed and disavowed� The novel itself recapitulates the characters’ mystification and gradual awakening, functioning as a mystery whose resolution depends on the recognition of the exceptionalist myth of American identity� An understanding of American exceptionalism and its required disavowals clarifies the novel itself and Erdrich’s choice of postmodern narrative strategies that led reviewers to call Plague “maddeningly opaque” (Barcott), “a vast, fractured narrative” (Charles), and “an elliptical, jigsaw puzzle of a narrative” (Kakutani)� While the story of an exceptional America takes on the simplicity of a fairy tale, Erdrich’s narrative adopts instead a complex, discontinuous, plural form, as I will show in a third section. Erdrich camouflages the links between past and present, moving between decades in ways that conceal connections, withholding information as characters keep secrets from each other, and sketching only implicit relationships among the separate stories of the central characters. In this way also, Erdrich’s fiction illuminates American exceptionalism - its strategies for the erasure of Native peoples, its required burials of historical events, and its obfuscation of injustices committed “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 205 in the name of the nation� Reading both together places the disavowal of Native American history among the central aims and practices of American exceptionalism� (Re)Visions of an Exceptionalist History Erdrich has commented in an interview that the historical story of the lynching of three Native Americans “haunted me” for some time before she wrote Plague, but “I didn’t know how I was going to get to it” (Goodman)� In another interview, she says that the “wrenching event” was appalling in part because one victim was only thirteen: “You know 13-year-olds--they’re children� How can you lynch a child? ” (Baenen)� Historical archives contain accounts of the historical events: the murders of the Thomas Spicer family, the subsequent trials of the Indians, and the lynchings appear on the North Dakota “GenWeb” site (Fischer) and in an article on November 15, 1897 in the New York Times (“Mob Law”)� These sources exonerate the lynch mob and justify their execution of the Indians� Both sources make bland assertions about the five Natives’ guilt in the slayings of four related white adults (Thomas Spicer and his wife Mary Ellen, her mother, their daughter Lillie Spicer Rowse) and Lillie’s twin baby sons� The account by William Fischer explains that the Indians went to the Spicer farm seeking alcohol and alleges that they mutilated two of the bodies, clubbed the elderly woman to death, and beat Lillie, who resisted, to death with a table leg before killing the twin babies� Two of the Indians - one named Paul Holy Track - confessed, a third was found guilty at trial, though a translator’s services were needed and later questioned, and a fourth trial resulted in a hung jury (Fischer)� When the State Supreme Court ruled that the confessions of two were not adequate to convict all five men in the absence of other evidence, a group of “about 40 masked men appeared,” overpowered the jailor, and hanged the three Indians who were in the county jail (Fischer)� Appearing two days after the lynching, the Times article carried a subheading, “The Courts Were Too Slow,” and praised the lynch mob: “The lynching apparently had been planned carefully, and was carried out without a break in the programme� … The lynchers were quiet but determined�” The first Indian to be executed was asked if the others were also guilty, and “He answered that they had been” (“Mob Law”)� Participants in the lynching were not prosecuted� When Erdrich comments on the murders and the lynchings, she does not invoke the term American exceptionalism, but her comments reflect an appalled awareness of the same underlying investment in Euro-American superiority� She tells an interviewer, “I think vengeance, rather than sitting back and allowing justice to be done over time, is really so much a part of our history� And unfortunately, it’s part of our present, as well” (Baenen)� Both the anonymous reporter for the Times and Fischer, who in 1959 summed up historical sources reporting on the case in the Emmons County Record (North Dakota), imply that the lynching is a reasonable act committed by responsible 206 s usan s trehle men in the name of justice: in both accounts, the Indians were guilty because they were looking for liquor and because two of them confessed - though it is clear that some of the Indians did not speak English and that the confessions were the prosecution’s only evidence� As Fischer points out, “it became apparent that all the defendants would be freed at the next trial since no additional evidence had been uncovered�” The State Supreme Court granted a new trial to the one Indian convicted in the case, Alec Coudotte, because of the language gap between the Indians and the English-speaking court� From the exceptionalist viewpoint visible in the historical accounts, the Indians are always already guilty for crimes against a people whose race and language they did not share� In the logic of exceptionalism, “American” men are right to make an exception to the rule of law when law itself fails (“the courts were too slow”), and under those circumstances they can claim to elevate vengeance to a superior kind of justice� While the historical sources tell one story about the traumatic murders and their equally traumatic aftermath, Erdrich writes a significantly different - even a contrapuntal - story in Plague of Doves� Most importantly, she individualizes and exonerates the Indians, who are never given a trial and who insist on their own innocence in the face of a brutal indifference among the white men� Holy Track, thirteen like his namesake, his guardian Asiginak, Cuthbert Peace, and Seraph Milk (who survives to become “Mooshum”) discover the murdered bodies of the Lochren family, save the living baby girl, milk the cows, and try to alert the sheriff anonymously� Asiginak warns prophetically that, in the eyes of Pluto’s Euro-Americans, “We are no-goods, we are Indians, even me� If you tell the white sheriff, we will die” (63)� And they do - with dignity, humor, and courage that Erdrich emphasizes� Cuthbert Peace jokes about his large nose: “they have rubbed off the worst of my nose� It is a pity to die now that I am handsome” (70)� Asiginak praises Holy Track’s courage in giving himself up, and the men sing with “strength and power” a death song affirming the endurance of their spirits (77-78). While Erdrich also individualizes white members of the lynch mob, some of whom protest against the lynching, she characterizes the leaders as brutal, ignorant racists� Eugene Wildstrand shoots the sheriff’s horse, Hotchkiss rejects Cuthbert’s claim to be “just like you” and slams his rifle into the bleeding Indian, and Emil Buckendorf mocks others who want to spare the young Holy Track (74, 75, 78). In all these ways, Erdrich’s fictional account accentuates the injustice of the executions� Erdrich also foregrounds the racism expressed in the lynching, made doubly ironic when the murderer of the Lochren family turns out to be a white man� Studies of lynching have commonly observed the disproportionate targeting of people of color for alleged crimes against whites, and they have observed a “negative exceptionalism” in the frequency and cruelty of racially charged lynchings in the United States (Berg x-xi)� Like other legal and extralegal executions of American Indians, the lynchings in North Dakota form a coherent part of a generalized, racially motivated pattern of “genocidal colonialism,” as sociologist David Baker writes in his extensive “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 207 study of Native executions: “The history of American Indian executions is clearly nested within a sociopolitical context of genocidal colonialism calculated to dispossess American Indians of their Indianism by removing them from their sacred tribal territories, disrupting their traditional cultures, and continuing their marginalized status in US society today” (316-17)� As part of their racial difference, the “sexualized perception of Native Americans” among white Midwesterners increased suspicion of Native men, according to Michael Pfeifer: “a myriad of cultural sources identified indigenous men as … a libidinous threat to white women” (87)� In Plague, Erdrich highlights the speed of the “rough justice” and the failure to consider any white suspects for murders that included white women (71)� Lurking in demented hostility on the edges of the community, the real perpetrator, Warren Wolde - who “flew into disorderly rages and went missing, for days sometimes” (139), and whose “monologues always ended with ‘I’ll slaughter them all’” (229) - is neither questioned by authorities nor suspected by anyone until the final pages of the novel� Similarly, the historical reporters are so persuaded by the guilt of the Natives that they do not notice the absence of a broader investigation in the community or the lack of physical evidence in the Spicer deaths� Another section of Plague of Doves is based on a historical source, also significantly reinterpreted and rewritten by Erdrich. “Town Fever,” originally published as a story in North Dakota Quarterly, draws on “a historical trip that ended up in Wahpeton,” Erdrich tells an interviewer, adding that Daniel Johnston “wrote the account” (Halliday)� In his historical narrative, published as a chapter in a volume of the Collections of the North Dakota Historical Society, Johnston describes an overland trek he took in the winter of 1857 to claim land and map townsites along the Red River� As he explains, “we were after money, and the glamour of the ‘millions in it’ brightened all the difficult ways we had come” (421)� Johnston writes in 1913, when he is eighty-one years old; he draws on his journal of the expedition fifty-six years earlier. 5 The intervening years enable him to look back with ironic hindsight on his own youthful optimism about the “opportunity [that] had knocked at my door” (411), while his age adds wistfulness to his memories of his own physical strength and courage� He concludes that the townsites they surveyed at such cost and risk “fell into ruins,” while the two hundred lots he was paid were “worthless even for tax purposes”; his experience “cured me of the townsite speculation fever so completely that I have never felt a touch of it since” (434)� Johnston’s account focuses on the hardships suffered by the group: the intense cold, the effort to clear a path through deep snowdrifts, the sudden blizzards, and especially the constant experience of hunger and near-starvation� While he mentions the other men on the trip, his focus is on events and adventures� He notes the presence of two guides, “French and Chippewa half-breeds named Pierre and Charlie Bottineau,” whose knowledge of the northern plains saves the group on many occasions (411)� 5 A footnote explains that Johnston read the account “at the monthly meeting of the Executive Council [of the Minnesota Historical Society], May 13, 1913” (411)� 208 s usan s trehle Erdrich’s story of the expedition taken by the fictional Joseph Coutts follows Johnston’s tale closely in its descriptions of the clothing and provisions taken on the expedition, the adventures with blizzards and cold, and the precarious closeness of starvation as the months go on� For example, Johnston describes “a comforter of wool, padded with cotton batting, about three inches thick and firmly quilted. … We slept with all our clothes on, and there was no chance to change or wash any of them short of the end of our journey� We slept spoon fashion, and when one wanted to turn the rest of us had to turn also” (Johnston 414)� Erdrich follows this lively account, echoing the same details: “Once they lowered the great woolen comforter over themselves, the men began to steam up under the batting, and they slept, though every time one rolled over so did the rest� … But this was only January and there wouldn’t be a chance for any of them to bathe before spring” (Plague 100)� Between blizzards, Johnston observes the sun rise with “a brilliant sun dog on each side of it, and a bright crescent swung down above it” (Johnston 416). Joseph Coutts, similarly, wakes to find “the sun had two dogs at either side and was crowned by a burning crescent” (Plague 101)� Both Johnston and Joseph Coutts kill an otter and find it inedible; both parties suffer starvation as spring melts flood the plains and prevent the delivery of new supplies; when help arrives, it is only “half a biscuit” for Johnston (427) and, for Joseph, “a dozen hard biscuits” to be shared among the men� Even Johnston’s wry conclusion, that he has been “cured … of the townsite speculation fever” (434) finds an echo in Joseph’s concluding declaration: “‘Well,’ he said out loud, ‘I’m cured of town fever’” (113)� Because Erdrich follows the Johnston source so closely, the alterations she makes in her fiction clearly reflect her vision and purpose. Most of the changes serve to develop characters; where Johnston is no more interested in his human companions than in the weather and the buffalo, Erdrich focuses on the human actors� Emil Buckendorf, for example, who will participate as a leader of the lynch mob in his later years, has a proto-Nazi paleness, with “fanglike teeth and eyes so pale that there seemed to be a light burning in his skull” (99)� He has no sense of humor, taking quick offense at a joke made by one of the Chippewa guides (101); he displays a ready violence - “Emil beat his brothers awake” (103) - and later thinks seriously of cannibalism (111)� The Indian guides themselves take on more important roles in Erdrich’s account than they do in Johnston’s, and she characterizes them as men of advanced civilization and extraordinary skill� To be sure, Johnston admires the two guides and reports positively their ability to read the weather and their success in hunting; but he focuses even more attention on his own moments of skill as a hunter (e�g�, 430)� For Erdrich and for her protagonist Joseph Coutts, Henri and Lafayette Peace are exemplary Native people� Lafayette, she writes, “was fine-made and superbly handsome, with a thin mustache, slick braids, and sly black eyes,” while Henri is “sturdy” and has “an air of captivating assurance” (99)� These men own and play a violin, which they treasure, with an artistry described as sophisticated and powerful; they are also “the most devout among the men” (106)� Both their religion and their “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 209 violin arrived with the French priest who colonized their people (214)� While hunger and hardship brutalize the Buckendorfs, Lafayette retains his “scrupulous toilette” (107)� Both Peace brothers remain civil and civilized - indeed, they bury the dead man whom the Buckendorfs want to eat (111)� The Peace brothers laugh about the men’s flatulence, sing and dance to celebrate their survival, sympathize with the lovelorn man who decides to return to St� Anthony, and hunt so skillfully that they keep the men alive� Erdrich’s most significant alteration to her source is her characterization of Joseph Coutts as a man far more complex - indeed, far more transformed by his experience - than Daniel Johnston. While Johnston writes in the first person of his “cure” from town fever, Erdrich uses a third-person perspective limited to Coutts to establish his attunement to a Native view of life� Erdrich’s narrative establishes that Coutts, the white grandfather of Antone Bazil Coutts, marries a Native woman because of the events of the journey - or more precisely, because of his own transformation through those events� Coutts begins the journey with fond memories of a lusty white widow who dislikes Indians (98), but returns to marry a niece of the Peace brothers, “a Metis Catholic whose family was very strict” (104)� In the meantime, he has come to love and admire the Peace brothers and to respect their Catholic faith: “I envy your faith,” he tells Henri, and when Lafayette places his own crucifix on the starving Coutts, “Joseph felt his heart leap” (110-11). Their religion matters less to Coutts than what he perceives as their spirit, a closeness to non-material values; the near-death experiences of the journey lead him away from an interest in land and profits (the same “millions in it” that attract Johnston [Plague 97]) to a “startling awareness” of the precariousness of life (102) and the need for deeper riches than land and money (103)� The early signs of his inward capacity appear in his attentiveness to people and animals, his appreciation for Marcus Aurelius, and his openness to moments of life-altering insight� When an injured ox goes down in the snow, “Joseph leapt toward the ox, hunched over the massive head, breathed his own breath into its foamy muzzle, and spoke in a calm clear voice until the animal groaned to its feet” (103)� Like Johnston, Coutts kills an otter; but Coutts’s otter has “regarded him with the curious and trusting gaze of a young child,” and Coutts, unlike Johnston, ends by “weeping helplessly over the gleaming and sinuous body” of the otter (108)� 6 When he returns to St� Anthony, Coutts chooses love over wealth, marries the Peace girl, and becomes a lawyer, his grandson reports, in order to defend tribal rights and lands (115)� Erdrich incorporates the two historical sources in order to locate Pluto, a fictional town “named for the god of the underworld” and an apt metaphor for the repression of a shameful history, in a recognizable American 6 Rainwater reads this scene as an example of “the text’s decidedly non-Western conception of personhood” (164)� I understand Erdrich, instead, as interested in dialogue between Western and Native ideas, so that productive exchanges are possible� Joseph Coutts is a Euro-American with an intuitive respect for nature and animal life that leads him to pity the otter and encourage the ox; he respects the values of the Peace brothers because he shares kindred assumptions� 210 s usan s trehle history of exceptionalist relations to Native people (297)� Indeed, the titular image of The Plague of Doves evokes European settler colonialism, in John Gamber’s astute reading: “an excessively large, migrating, white mass of life clamping down on the American landscape, overusing the land and starving out the indigenous population bears some slight similarities to Native history” (Gamber 144; see also Noori 12)� Euro-American settlers often resembled the Buckendorfs, virtually ignoring signs of cultured and complex intelligence in the indigenous people they encountered� For them, as for the national narrative of Manifest Destiny, Natives were invisible at best, rendered threatening and savage at worst by the racist lens through which they were seen� By placing the same group of Buckendorfs at the head of the lynch mob, Erdrich characterizes the American exceptionalist as blind, irrational, and afraid, as well as racist, vengeful, violent, and cruel� By recalling a history of Native lynching that is as little known and seldom acknowledged in the factual United States as it is in the fictional Pluto, she underscores the disavowal of history that continues to enable the exceptionalist myth in America� Yet Erdrich does not create a story that is as oversimple as the stories the Buckendorfs would have told: in her history of westward exploration, Euro-American Joseph Coutts learns to respect and value Native culture as a result of his experiences with the Indian guides� In Erdrich’s narrative of the lynching, Mooshum and Cuthbert are seeking alcohol (as the historic source indicates the Indians were), and Mooshum is spared because, drunk, he betrayed the others (251)� While Frederic Vogeli is as savage as some other German immigrants, his son Johann weeps over the cruelty of the lynching and fights to stop his father’s participation (76). Erdrich’s fiction neither exonerates all Indians nor vilifies all whites; although many of their understandings of and interactions with each other are mistaken, flawed, and damaging, she also represents contacts between Euro-American and Native people that demonstrate the transformative potential for community between the races� An Exceptionalist Inheritance Under the long shadow of an exceptionalist history, Pluto’s inhabitants in the 1960s and 1970s view the “chosen” American as a person of European descent; this view is held by Indians on the reservation, Euro-Americans in town, and characters of mixed race who live in both places� While all of the characters share this historically conditioned perception, the Euro- Americans feel a compelling nostalgia for the intuitive connection to an exoticized and sexualized nature that they imagine characterizes Natives, while characters with Native ancestry imagine an exoticized and elevated culture in Euro-Americans� As a result, strong passions unite and divide the contemporary inhabitants of Pluto and damage their relationships� Among the attractions, liaisons, and marriages in the novel, many link Native or biracial people with Euro-Americans: children are produced from connections between Eugene Wildstrand and Junesse Malaterre’s mother, John Wildstrand “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 211 and Maggie Peace; marriages occur between Joseph Coutts and the Michif niece of the Peace brothers, their son and a Chippewa woman, Edward Harp and Clemence Milk, Seraph Milk and Junesse Malaterre, Billy Peace and Marn Wolde; and liaisons or attractions without issue occur between Antone Bazil Coutts and Cordelia Lochren, Evelina Harp and Nonette, Neve Harp Wildstrand and Billy Peace, and Neve Harp Wildstrand and Seraph Milk� As Judge Coutts puts it, the community “is rife with conflicting passions. We can’t seem to keep our hands off one another, it is true” (116)� In their attractions to one another, “unknown dreams” trouble Pluto’s lovers, as the community’s repressed history intrudes to warp their desires and loves� The most vivid instance in Plague of history powering the desire for an exoticized Other appears in the relationship between Dr� Cordelia Lochren and Judge Antone Bazil Coutts� Called “C�” by the Judge, Cordelia makes her history clear only in the last pages of the novel; she is the grown up Lochren baby of the first page, miraculously spared by the murderer of her family. Through the Judge’s perspective, their sexual relationship appears obsessive, secretive, and even abusive, in that the adult doctor seduces a teenaged Antone� The two carry on a decades-long affair involving sexual athleticism so sustained that both partners “have trouble with hunger while making love” (274)� She refuses his requests to marry, claiming that her professional reputation and “the trust of her patients” render marriage to him impossible (279)� In the end, blaming others, she explains that “I was allowed to believe that the lynched Indians had been the ones responsible” for murdering her family and, claiming “an unsteady weakness in their presence,” she refuses to treat Native people (307, 298)� In the affair with Antone, however, she finds her own sexuality liberated by his Native blood, as if to demonstrate Pfeifer’s claim that Midwesterners have a “sexualized perception of Native Americans” (87). With Antone, Cordelia finds license to indulge her own physical desires, from which she perceives Euro-Americans as estranged by hypercivilization. The affair provides her a crucial benefit, identified at the end of the novel by Geraldine: it allows Cordelia to disavow her own racism� “They always need an exception,” Geraldine tells Antone (291); he perceives that the doctor’s relationship to him “was more than your garden-variety bigotry� There was history involved, said Geraldine� I understood, then, that I’d known everything and nothing about the doctor� Only later did I realize: …- I’d always be her one exception� Or worse, her absolution� Every time I touched her, she was forgiven” (292)� The affair with Antone grants Cordelia Lochren the exception she needs; she can disown her investment in the same racism that caused the executions of innocent Natives, while continuing to live inside the exceptionalist and racist values of the lynch mob� While she hides her relationship with Antone from the public, she hides from herself her own responsibility for racism: others are to blame for what she grew up believing, and she herself cannot be blamed for the “paralysis … beyond her control” (298) that prevents her from treating Indians� In this complex way, 212 s usan s trehle Cordelia Lochren demonstrates a refusal of history, including her own recapitulation of the disavowals and repressions intrinsic to American exceptionalism, even as she ironically assumes the role of president of Pluto’s historical society� Billy Peace has a similarly evasive relationship with the traumatic history of his community and family� Descended from the Peace brothers who guided Pluto’s original settlers and from Cuthbert, lynched by some of those same settlers, Billy turns the spirituality that characterized his ancestors into charismatic preaching� Vengeful and obsessed with power, he founds a cult called “the kindred,” composed of Euro-Americans whom he rules absolutely� He designs a religion that dispenses with God, but establishes a code of absolute obedience to himself (158)� In this way he turns a history of American exceptionalism that has scorned his Indian ancestors on its head: he will be the leader of the “chosen people” and their messianic chooser as well, for he personally selects each member of “the kindred�” Early on, he seeks redress for the wrongs committed against Native people; as he takes over Marn’s family farm, for example, he observes, “This was my family’s land, Indian land� Will be again” (152)� But as he assumes a cult identity, he seeks to abolish history altogether� He recapitulates exceptionalist practice, writing a “Manual of Discipline” but excepting himself from the laws that regulate his congregation. He decrees labors and punishments for his flock, procreates as he wishes with the women, forbids parents to raise their children, and appropriates the money raised by the group� He dominates Marn and their children: “You are mine� Your lives are mine� I will do with you as spirit wills” (162)� In an essay focused on the links between patriarchy and nationalism in Plague, Gina Valentino observes that Billy “turns out to be a windigo,” while Erdrich shows “that the version of nationalism he embodies requires a kind of charismatic leadership that is dangerous” (131-32)� Like Cordelia, Billy ignores the very history that has shaped his dreams and deformed his relationships, recapitulating the American exceptionalism that relies on and disavows the extended, systematic, and racist erasure of Native culture and peoples as necessary to the imperialist project� The novel’s three primary narrators, Evelina, Antone, and Marn, awaken in the course of experience to the “unknown dreams” repressed by an exceptionalist legacy. Unlike Cordelia and Billy, these characters make significant changes because of what they uncover about the past� The novel establishes parallels among these characters’ dreams and awakenings, largely those expressing what Antone Coutts calls “the unbearable weight of human sexual love” (281)� Each is mesmerized by a partner who is damaged and damaging, but who appeals to them precisely because of the exceptionalist legacy: attractive blue-eyed Euro-Americans seduce and confuse Evelina and Antone, offering an alternative to the cultural devaluation of Indians, while Marn responds to Billy’s charismatic promise to be the dark-eyed Native savior� Each of their dreams can be traced to the impact of Pluto’s history and to its required repression� All three stories culminate in similar awakenings, when the character experiences a “startling awareness” that makes the “unknown “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 213 dream” visible and frees the character to pursue other, better dreams� These parallel recognitions establish links among characters who differ in age, race, gender, and experience, and they are echoed by awakenings in minor characters like Joseph Coutts and Corwin Peace� Marn, for example, grows up shaped by the bitter aftermath of the hangings: though she doesn’t know it, her uncle Warren has committed the massmurders for which the Indians were lynched on the Wolde property� Marn finds a compelling escape in Billy, with “the face of Jesus leaning his head forward,” (140), the “loud” and “ecstatic” sexuality of “a bull whale” (153), and the demand for her utter submission; at sixteen, “I was too young to stand against it,” she reports (142)� His heritage as a Peace makes her submission to him an ongoing atonement for the sins committed in the name of American exceptionalism, while his epic physical lusts attract her at first. When Billy begins to threaten and punish their children, however, she realizes that she has to rescue them and flee the marriage: “Awakened, things had changed in me” (176)� She becomes aware that Billy’s leadership has brought the kindred to “a discipline of the afflictions,” full of self-punishments designed to hold members in perpetual thrall to their own guilt and thereby also in perpetual submission to Billy� While Billy never understands his own need to dominate and control, Marn recognizes the “unknown dream” that has led her to a husband who claims godliness and certainty� Antone Coutts knows more about Pluto’s history than Marn does; indeed, he serves as an important window into communal history� His attraction to the doctor reflects the shadows of American exceptionalism: he sees in Cordelia the all-American face of European descent, and her seeming choice of him redeems the hurt of that history� Antone records his attraction to Cordelia’s hair (“sun-stroked blond” [282]), her eyes (“a direct blue, the shade of willowware china” [283]), and her bones (which “fitted marvelously beneath her nervous skin” [283]). Sixteen when she seduces him, he finds himself trapped: “once I started having sex with C�, I couldn’t leave sex, or leave her, or leave the town” (276)� The affair goes on for decades, until his mother throws herself down stairs, winds up in a nursing home, and Antone has his first awakening: “All of a sudden I woke in blackness, alive to desolate knowledge� In that moment, I knew … I’d wasted my life on a woman” (286)� The Judge’s second awakening occurs after his marriage to Evelina’s aunt Geraldine, who calls Cordelia “that doctor who won’t treat Indians”; she treated Antone because “They always need an exception” (291)� At this point Antone sees into the heart of American exceptionalism: Cordelia and he have both disavowed the assumptions at the core of their affair about what sort of Americans can be “exceptional�” While Cordelia has used him as “her absolution” (292), he has unconsciously bought into the cultural devaluation of Indians and depended on her “exception” as a sign of his worth; both have disavowed the racism implicit throughout their affair� Like the other two narrators, Evelina narrates an initiation shaped by the history of her people. Evelina is the novel’s first, youngest, and primary narrator; she knows less than the others about the histories that link her family 214 s usan s trehle and the community� As the granddaughter of one victim of the lynchings and the great-granddaughter of one of the leaders of the lynch mob, she is closely implicated in the tangled history through which American exceptionalism expressed itself in Pluto� Indeed, Evelina inherits mixed loyalty and outrage, together with a deep confusion about her identity, desires, and place in the social world� Like Erdrich the daughter of a Euro-American teacher and a French-Ojibwe woman, Evelina serves as the novel’s primary narrator because her gradual awakening to her inheritance requires her to make sense of a conflicted legacy, one in which colonialism and American exceptionalism battle the forces of attraction and love� 7 The novel juxtaposes three parallel Bildungsroman tales, narrated by three main characters whose initiations in love and sexuality occur when they are sixteen; but Evelina’s heritage leads her to confront the most troubling tangles in Pluto’s history� In the first section of the novel, Evelina learns several strands of history, both familial and communal. In fact, the first section consists largely of adults’ narration to the Harp children, aged about ten and twelve, of histories that have been suppressed as too violent or frightening until this point in their lives� From their storytelling grandfather Mooshum, Evelina and her brother Joseph hear about the plague of doves in 1896, his marriage to Junesse and near-lynching in 1902, and the lynching of Cuthbert, Asiginak, and Holy Track in 1911� The children have not heard these stories before; Joseph, for example, asks about Cuthbert and Holy Track, “They lived to be old men, right? ” (76)� When Evelina asks “what happened to the men who had lynched our people” (82), Mooshum tells her that the Buckendorfs and Wildstrands prospered, and her mother complicates her picture of “our people” by telling her that her great-grandfather was Eugene Wildstrand (82, 85). Evelina identifies with the Native side of her heritage, but as she grows up, she sees her implication in histories that preclude easy judgments and simple loyalties� She understands that her classmates and friends have, like herself, lineages pointing to both perpetrators and victims� As the inheritor of these American stories, Evelina intuits complexities even before she can understand them� The novel develops Evelina’s adolescent confusion over the mixed legacies and histories it chronicles. She leaves Pluto for college, where she finds she doesn’t “fit in with anybody,” including white, Native, or mixed-blood girls (222)� As if to disavow both her Native ancestors (and the Native heritage devalued in American culture) and her Euro-American ancestors (and the deadly legacy of their American exceptionalism), Evelina makes Anaïs Nin her model and Paris her goal� In this fantasy escape to a different history, Evelina does not seem to realize that she has chosen the land of the original 7 Erdrich does not write autobiographical fiction, but she shares a birth in 1954 and a Catholic upbringing with Evelina� Erdrich’s father, like Edward Harp, taught in a reservation school� In an interview, she describes her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, as “a persuasive man” who loved to talk, much like Mooshum, and notes that her father, “rightly, picked out a paragraph in The Plague of Doves as a somewhat autobiographical piece of the book” (Halliday)� “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 215 European colonizers of her Ojibwe/ Anishinabe ancestors� Ironically, each of her attempts to evade her history only immerses her more closely in it; for example, when she leaves college for an internship in a mental hospital, she finds Warren Wolde there as a patient. She forms a passionate relationship with Nonette (“I didn’t know at the time women could kiss women in that way anywhere but in Paris” [235]) in hope that the affair has “set me outside the narrative” of Pluto: “None of the family stories could touch me� I was in Anaïs’s story now” (235)� In fact, though, Nonette’s attraction to her (“You’re an Indian or something, aren’t you … That’s pretty cool” [233]) and hers to Nonette (“She looked French” [230]; and “She is beautiful as someone in a foreign movie, in a book, a catalogue of strange, expensive clothes” [236]) recapitulate the pattern through which Euro-Americans and Indians form attachments to exoticized Others in Pluto� After their sexual encounter, Nonette loses her foreignness as Evelina perceives the “American face” (239) she has had all along: “She looks more and more like a girl in a ski commercial� … Now her eyes are scary cheerleader eyes” (238)� Evelina’s attempts to leave America behind have instead led her through the same complex attractions that shaped her ancestors’ histories - and thus led her straight back to the “scary cheerleader” for America, its exceptionalist myth� Evelina’s awakening, like those of Marn Wolde and Antone Coutts, occurs in stages� In the mental hospital, she literally awakens after days of depressed sleep and turns her attention to her family and to Pluto� She thinks “how history works itself out in the living,” reflects on the perpetrators and victims of the lynching, and concludes, “Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope” (243)� When she returns to Pluto, she learns what her Mooshum has repressed and denied: that he got “stinking drunk” and “betrayed the others” in 1911; in effect, Mooshum triggered the hanging of his friends (251)� This discovery further clouds the distinction between guilt and innocence, putting guilt on both sides of the rope of Evelina’s inheritance� She responds by accepting what others have disavowed: the complex dualities and irresolvable contradictions of Pluto’s history and her own, including those expressed in Corwin’s music and those in her feelings: “‘I can’t leave here,’ I say� And I walk out of that place” (246)� She is content to leave her sexual identity undecided, her options open, and her future undetermined� Disrupting the Exceptionalist Narrative As told by Emil Buckendorf or Eugene Wildstrand, the story of the land claims in Pluto and the lynchings in 1911 would not be complicated� Instead, the story would constitute a triumphalist narrative focused on the spread of Euro-American justice and power� While Erdrich has not written that story, she provides a brief glimpse of such an exceptionalist narrative in Plague, imagining the story Corwin Peace tells himself after he steals Shamengwa’s violin: “There are two kinds of people - the givers and the takers� I’m a taker� 216 s usan s trehle Render unto Corwin what is due him” (207)� An oversimple binary division of the world into those with power and those without it, Corwin’s selfserving logic converts himself into Caesar, erases Christ’s admonishment to render other treasure unto God, and legitimates theft� While Corwin’s selfjustification is a simple, secular version of the American exceptionalist narrative, it illustrates the drive to create a coherent myth that consolidates power by the simple act of asserting it� Like the exceptionalist narrative, Corwin’s also deliberately disavows the costs paid by “the givers”: Shamengwa did not “give” the violin, any more than the indigenous Americans “gave” their land to Euro-Americans, but “the takers” in both cases rationalize their theft by asserting that the gain is their “due” by virtue of their identity� The function served by the American exceptionalist narrative requires it to be clear and simple, as easily understood as a fairytale� Based on the Western teleological view of time itself as shaped by a divine force toward a coherent end, it also follows the nineteenth-century novel’s beginningmiddle-end structure� An instance of Lyotard’s grand or meta-narrative, the exceptionalist story assumes a promise-fulfillment shape: after repeated failures in Europe to achieve just government and proper worship, God sends the chosen people to the New World to create the good society on earth� Erdrich’s implicit rewriting of this exceptionalist narrative highlights all it would disavow and foregrounds Native American history, representing the culture of the Native guides, the intelligence and courage of Asiginak, Cuthbert, and Holy Track, the historical lynchings of these and other Natives, and the multiple fracturings of community left in the wake of a racist construction of America� In writing the counter-history that was suppressed by the exceptionalist myth, Erdrich necessarily creates a narrative form that is far more complex and tangled, far less triumphalist and conclusive, than the fairytale version of American history� In Plague, as in all of her fiction, she deploys postmodern literary techniques for clearly political ends� Erdrich’s narrative design refuses any facile coherence, especially in its representation of time� While events are not dated exactly, the novel represents events from about 1884, 1897, 1901, 1911, 1928, 1963, 1972, and 1974� These various slices of time do not appear in order, nor are events fully told in the first narration; the uncertain relation between stories and parts of stories amplifies their mystery. The novel begins, for example, with a glimpse of the 1911 murder of the Lochrens (1); the story of the subsequent lynching of the Indians is told by Mooshum in about 1963 (54-79), then further clarified in about 1974 when Evelina learns of Mooshum’s role (250-53). Cordelia Lochren adds a final revelation, unknown to other characters or to the community at large, when she blandly notes that Warren Wolde actually slaughtered her family (307-10)� Not only does Erdrich scatter pieces of a single story, in this instance to emphasize the bitter irony of the execution of the innocent Natives, but she also obscures connections between different stories related by chronology, causality, or theme� Their arrival on North Dakota land, for example, links the Milk and the Buckendorf families, though the separation of their stories disguises the connections between them� Joseph Milk and his “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 217 cultured Native family leave Saskatchewan for North Dakota in 1884 (21-42), and around that same time, the Peace brothers guide the coarse Buckendorfs to the same place (96-113)� Because these arrivals of white land speculators and Native people are widely separated and introduced by different narrators, their ironic coincidence is camouflaged (21). Early in the novel, Mooshum tells Evelina the comic story of his rescue from a near-lynching at seventeen: when a farm woman is murdered, “the neighbors disregarded the sudden absence of that woman’s husband and thought about the nearest available Indian� There I was, said Mooshum” (17)� Thirty-eight pages later, making no mention of lynch-parties’ tendency to blame Indians, he begins to tell the story of his second lynching ten years later� As multiple characters tell seemingly unconnected stories, the collected narratives yield ironic discoveries, often unknown to the narrators, about damaging encounters between Native Americans and Euro-Americans� The disrupted chronology effectively highlights the hidden, erased, and disavowed linkages between events that leave characters unable to understand their lives and dreams� Erdrich’s scattered references to a history of injustice, itself disavowed in the mythic chronicle of America, add emphasis to the repeated pattern of recovery and awakening among the primary narrators� Her use of plural points of view serves the same purpose as her dislocation of chronology; both postmodern strategies fracture the narrative surface while highlighting the political nature of the forgetting that is required by American exceptionalism� Her four narrators diverge in many ways: born in four different decades, two are Euro-Americans while two are mixed Chippewa and Euro- American� Cordelia and Antone are childless professionals, while Marn is a mother and waitress and Evelina is a college student� As members of the same community, they know and make occasional reference to each other, but they do not narrate to each other or know each others’ stories� Three of the four, however, share experiences of awakening and discovery, while Cordelia illustrates the costs of a refusal to become aware� Marn, Antone, and Evelina come to understand the impact of American exceptionalism on Native peoples, its distortions of human relationships in the long aftermath of contact, and its repeated impulse to bury and deny Native American history. Evelina, Marn, and Antone find what has been submerged: Evelina literally puts together the story of the lynchings; Antone discovers his lover’s racist use of him as an enabling exception; Marn finds poison at the heart of Pluto’s violent history and in her damaged Native lover� The novel’s mysteries all yield similar answers: American exceptionalism has both erased Native history and disavowed its sustained efforts to hide the traces� The Plague of Doves can be understood as a complex representation of America’s exceptionalist history and its impact on the lives of an evolving American community� All of the stories in the novel probe the relationships between Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and biracial Americans, finding a legacy of privilege accorded to Euro-American descent and a damaging mixture of attraction, revulsion, and misconception distorting the relations between members of different ethnic groups� When Antone Coutts suggests 218 s usan s trehle an identity between “the influence of instinct upon a wolf and history upon a man,” for in both “justice is prey to unknown dreams” (117), he points to the novel’s abiding concern: Americans are driven by history, not through an accurate understanding of the legacy of American exceptionalism, but instead through the “unknown dreams” generated by the disavowals, erasures and repressions it requires. Erdrich’s fiction exposes the exceptionalist face of the American dream in an effort to awaken a more reflective America. Works Cited “Mob Law in North Dakota�” New York Times� New York Times, 15 Nov� 1897� Web� 29 July 2012� Baenen, Jeff� “A Dark Event Inspires Erdrich’s New Novel�” News From Indian Country� News From Indian Country, 29 July 2012� Web� 29 July 2012� Baker, David V� “American Indian Executions in Historical Context�” Criminal Justice Studies 20�4 (2007): 315-73� Print� Barcott, Bruce� “Rough Justice�” Rev� of Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich� New York Times� New York Times, 11 May 2008� Web� 31 Oct� 2011� Beidler, Peter G�, and Gary Barton� A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich� Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1999� Print� Berg, Manfred� Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America� Chicago: Ivan R� Dee, 2011� Print� Charles, Ron� “Crimes of the Heart�” Rev� of Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich� Washington Post� Washington Post, 24 Apr� 2008� Web� 25 July 2012� Erdrich, Louise� The Plague of Doves� New York: HarperCollins, 2008� -----� “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place�” Love Medicine: A Casebook� Ed� Hertha D� Sweet Wong� Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000� 43-50� Print� Fischer, William� “Thomas Spicer Family Murders - 1897�” Emmons County North Dakota� GenWeb, 2 Jan� 1959� Web� 29 July 2012� Frase, Brigitte� “A Shot Resounds�” Rev� of Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich� Los Angeles Times� Tribune Company, 27 Apr� 2008� Web� 25 July 2012� Gamber, John� “So, a Priest Walks into a Reservation Tragicomedy: Humor in The Plague of Doves�” Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Plague of Doves� Ed� Deborah L� Madsen� London: Continuum, 2011� 136-51� Goodman, Amy� “Interview with Louise Erdrich�” Democracy Now! Democracy Now! , 6 June 2008� Web� 23 July 2012� Halliday, Lisa� “Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No� 208�” Interview� The Paris Review� The Paris Review, 2010� Web� 28 July 2012� Hodgson, Godfrey� The Myth of American Exceptionalism� New Haven: Yale UP, 2009� Print� Johnston, Daniel S� B� “A Red River Townsite Speculation in 1857�” Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society XV� St� Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1915� 411-34� Google Books� Web� 29 July 2012� Kakutani, Michiko� “Unearthing Tangled Roots of a Town’s Family Trees�” Rev� of Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich� New York Times� New York Times, 29 Apr� 2008� Web� 31 Oct� 2011� “Prey to Unknown Dreams” 219 Madsen, Deborah L�, ed� Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Plague of Doves� London: Continuum, 2011� Print� Noori, Margaret� “The shiver of possibility�” Rev� of Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich� Women’s Review of Books 25: 5, 12� Print� Owens, Louis� Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel� Norman: Oklahoma UP, 1992� Print� Pease, Donald E� The New American Exceptionalism� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009� Print� Pfeifer, Michael� Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947� Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004� Print� Rainwater, Catherine� “Haunted by Birds: An Eco-critical View of Personhood in The Plague of Doves� Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Plague of Doves� Ed� Deborah L� Madsen� London: Continuum, 2011� 152-67� Print� Rowe, John Carlos� “Buried Alive: The Native American Political Unconscious in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction�” Postcolonial Studies 7�2 (2004): 197-210� Print� Scott, Steven D� The Gamefulness of American Postmodernism: John Barth & Louise Erdrich� New York: Lang, 2000� Print� Stannard, David E� American Holocaust� Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992� Print� Stirrup, David� Louise Erdrich� Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010� Print� Valentino, Gina� “’It All Does Come to Nothing in the End’: Nationalism and Gender in Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves�” Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Plague of Doves� Ed� Deborah L� Madsen� London: Continuum, 2011� 121-35� Print� Vizenor, Gerald� Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence� Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998� Print� Weaver, Jace� “Indigenousness and Indigeneity�” A Companion to Postcolonial Studies� Eds� Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray� Malden: Blackwell, 2000� 221-35� Print� Zinn, Howard� A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present� 1980� New York: HarperCollins, 2001� Print� c hristine m. P effer City upon the Convexity: The Satire of American Exceptionalism in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest “Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray - a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate�” Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa” Achebe’s assessment of the racist forces at play in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is not meant to disparage Conrad alone, but an entire European culture, that, in the 19th century, viewed the continent and people of Africa as a mysterious, terrifying “other” that existed as the perfect antithesis to “civilized” Western ideals� Not only did European nations exploit the people and the resources of Africa, they depicted the continent as a fearsome “other” by defining it with qualities that did not match the self-image they wanted projected on themselves� The modern idea of American imperialism, from westward expansion to United States involvement in the Middle East, bears some notable similarities to 19th century British imperialism in its portrayal of the “other�” The increasingly taboo concept of American imperialism has become a facet of the 20th and 21st century concept of American exceptionalism, a worldview that has engendered much debate and starkly different opinions in recent political and philosophical conversations� On one hand, there are those who regard the idea with nationalistic pride, associating the concept with an altruistic duty on the part of the United States to promote American ideals as a way to make the world a better, more democratic place� There are, on the other hand, those who take a more skeptical view of the idea; for them, the belief in America’s exceptional status results in a misguided sense of entitlement, which in turn provides a pretense for selfish purposes or justifies an exemption from the rules and norms Americans work to enforce elsewhere in the world� In the latter view, the self-entitlement promulgated by exceptionalism has allowed the allocation of stigmatized characteristics to the “other,” which has been represented, for example, by the Cold War Soviet Union� There is only room for one city on the hill, and thus several critics of American exceptionalism see the “other” as troublingly imperative in maintaining a foothold as the world’s ideal, democratic society� Donald Pease is one of these critics� In his book The New American Exceptionalism, Pease discusses the negative implications of American exceptionalism, a state fantasy that has allowed Americans to view the U�S� “as 222 c hristine m. P effer the fulfillment of the national ideal to which other nations aspire” (7). Pease offers a succinct summary of some of this notion’s origins, citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, John Winthrop’s idea of “City Upon A Hill,” and the American belief in Manifest Destiny as factors that shaped the early inception of American exceptionalism� Against this background, an elaborate fantasy has been created - one in which America, blessed with an “exceptional historical role as the result of its distinctive geopolitical positioning” (8), is able to justify essentially any actions it takes, as long as these actions reinforce or support American hegemony in a variety of geopolitical crises� Another New Americanist critic, William V� Spanos, draws similar comparisons between George W� Bush’s post-9/ 11 outlook and that of its earlier manifestations� Spanos delineates the destructive nature of exceptionalism and ultimately asserts that although its proponents would call this outlook innocuous, it emerges instead as violence that contradicts and “delegitimizes…exceptionalist logic” (Spanos 176)� In Spanos’ argument, exceptionalism has reached its terminus as a logical worldview, what he calls its “liminal point,” and the Bush administration’s attempts to preserve such ideals in the wake of 9/ 11 have proven both fruitless and frightening� David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, has been subject to much critical scrutiny in recent years� However, not much has been said about the interesting ways that Wallace’s novel seems to offer a critique of American exceptionalism� The novel is set in a dystopian near-future where North American boundaries have been redrawn, ostensibly for the benefit of all nations but in fact only for the benefit of the United States, and this setting provides the context for the novel’s parody of 21st century American politics� An anti-exceptionalist sentiment seems to inspire Wallace’s satirical treatment of this bizarre political situation, which he augments by literalizing several aspects of American exceptionalism, including the creation of an “other,” and American imperialism, renamed in the novel as experialism� Wallace offers a subtle critique of American exceptionalism by ultimately portraying exceptionalism and its proponents as absurd, damagingly elitist figures, and the disturbed, least “clean” members of the novel’s urban underbelly as fixtures that most embody what it means to be human. Creating the “State of Exception” or “Emergency State” According to Pease, American exceptionalism psychologically represents a state fantasy that was agreed upon by the citizens and the state during the Cold War� With the specter of impending nuclear holocaust lurking somewhere in their peripheral, Americans readily relinquished their say in defining the national narrative, dissociated themselves from any double standards practiced by the State of Exception, and allowed the state to make decisions that were justified by national security and ascendancy - all this as long as the state promised to keep them safe from the Soviet threat� Spanos also addresses the perpetual necessity of having “a new frontier or enemy” City upon the Convexity 223 by dissecting the rhetoric of neoconservative political scientist, Samuel P� Huntington� Spanos notes the shift in attitude that occupied the chasm between the Cold War and the War on Terror, saying, “It is not the peace following the implosion of the Soviet Union that Huntington celebrates� On the contrary, this peace, according to his exceptionalist narrative, brings ‘uncertainty’: the disturbing absence of a national enemy” (Spanos 178)� In Pease’s and Spanos’ arguments, the threat of communism during the Cold War acted as a sort of catalyst for American exceptionalism� The fear of impending nuclear holocaust was enough for citizens to buy into the new state fantasy� Wallace depicts his dystopian, ravenously consumerist society as being in danger of complete environmental catastrophe� The streets of the novel’s U�S� are “chemically troubled,” and the president, Johnny Gentle, vows to “rid the toxic effluvia choking the highways and littering the byways, grungeing up our sunsets and cruddying our harbors” (Wallace 383)� Gentle, known for his obsession with cleanliness, won the presidency by running under the banner of the Clean U�S� Party, C�U�S�P� - one of Wallace’s many original acronyms that adds to his infamous authorial jargon - whose campaign slogan, “A Tighter, Tidier Nation,” hinges on the promise of literally cleaning up the United States� The politics of Infinite Jest are driven by the Gentle administration’s act of Reconfiguration, which creates the Organization of North American Nations, or O�N�A�N� O�N�A�N� is an interdependent alliance comprised of the U�S�, Canada, and Mexico� After the Reconfiguration, Gentle oversees what is ostensibly his purpose for establishing O�N�A�N� - Canada’s forced annexation of a chunk of formerly New England territory that serves as a dumping ground for American waste, known as the Great Concavity by Americans, and, perhaps more fittingly, the Great Convexity by Canadians� Gentle erects massive fans to surround the Concavity, to keep even the toxic fumes out of his “Tighter, Tidier Nation�” The Need for State Fantasy The proponents of exceptionalism, according to Pease, were able to exert influence over the American psyche by offering American citizens an agreement that basically said, If you give up some of your civil liberties, we promise to keep you safe and free from the spread of communism� This sentiment rose to the surface during the second Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s with the call to relinquish certain freedoms in the name of national security, and has been reinvigorated in the post-9/ 11 climate, according to Pease and Spanos, by the Patriot Act� Pease claims that state fantasies act as “unacknowledged legislators” that unconsciously demand subjects who “want the state to govern them�” He goes on to say that these fantasies also cause their subjects to “structure their desires within the terms of the fantasy” (6)� What Americans wanted between 1950 and 1990 was a promise of safety from nuclear holocaust� This 224 c hristine m. P effer desire fit into the state’s fantasy by assuring them that whatever measures the state took to provide this protection were justified, all the more so because the state is exceptional - the democratic standard for the rest of the world� Wallace’s Johnny Gentle steps into the presidency after promising to handle the pollution besmirching American streets� Wallace describes Gentle as a president “who said he wasn’t going to stand here and ask us to make some tough choices because he was standing here promising he was going to make them for us� Who asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show” (383)� Wallace characterizes Gentle as an absurd figure whose rhetoric is that of an entertainer, not a politician - the first president to swing his microphone around by the cord during his inaugural address� Through Gentle, Wallace satirizes the idea that the leader of the U�S�, the quintessential democracy, according to exceptionalists, should be given the authority to make decisions for its citizens� Wallace further satirizes the willingness of American citizens to relinquish their civil rights with his creation of the “Entertainment”: the mysterious video that, once a person begins viewing, he is essentially paralyzed by pleasure and will continue to watch the tape until his death� The Quebecois terrorist group in the novel is perpetually seeking out this video with the hope of releasing it to the American public� I will discuss the parallels Wallace draws between exceptionalism and consumerism in a later section� Creating the “Other” American exceptionalism, in Pease’s argument, has allowed the allocation of stigmatized characteristics to be unloaded on the “other,” which has been represented, for example, by the Cold War Soviet Union� There is only room for one city on the hill, and thus American exceptionalism requires the “other” to maintain a foothold as the world’s ideal, democratic society� If others do not remain as such - undesirable, inferior - the United States’ shine is by comparison not quite as brilliant� When “other” begins to take shape as not simply “different” but “less desirable” or “inferior,” the geopolitical scales are thrown out of balance, leaving room for racism and violence to thrive� The Soviet Union slowly evolved into this fearsome “other,” during the Cold War - the communist antithesis to democratic ideals� Exceptionalism became a helpful tool that neoconservatives fashioned so that they might advance their ideology of America being exceptional by arming “us” against the threat of “them�” While policymakers disavowed communism, the idea of it was necessary in painting Russia as the “other�” Without communism as the main characteristic separating “them” from “us,” the U�S� would not stand out as the democratic ideal it needed to in order to remain exceptional� Similarly, Wallace’s Gentle despises the idea of filth and waste, and yet he needs it in order to show his nation’s cleanliness in comparison to a heavily polluted Canada� City upon the Convexity 225 One of the novel’s Canadian characters, Remy Marathe, points out what he sees as the American necessity of “hating some other…un ennemi commun,” and the narrator also comments on the panic that arose with the absence of some “Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear” (319)� Hugh Steeply, an American, responds to these sentiments by explaining that there has always been “some third thing” between the U�S� and the other: “Revenue, religion, spheres of influence, Israel, petroleum, neo-Marxism, post-Cold-War power-jockeying” (Wallace 422)� This laundry list, while remaining stylistically consistent with his satire and exaggeration, illuminates Wallace’s ostensible philosophical alignment with the likes of Pease and Spanos - what he sees as the apparent need to constantly keep something, anything that can be justified at the time, between “them” and “us.” According to Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell, Infinite Jest’s America is seeking, “amid the void left by the end of the Cold War…to unite the country in opposition to ‘some cohesion renewing Other’” (124)� The passage Boswell refers to comes from the narration of Gentle’s inaugural address, when he refuses to blame the American government for what he calls, “terrible internal troubles,” saying, “there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame� To unite in opposition to” (Wallace 384)� Boswell’s assessment of Gentle’s rhetoric corroborates Pease’s and Spanos’ assertion that creating an “Other” is necessary for U.S. citizens to somehow feel more unified in their own identity� In the world of Infinite Jest, the threat of environmental collapse fills the need for a threat, and Canada fills the need for an “Other.” Charles Philippe David, an editor of “Hegemony or Empire? : The Redefinition of US Power under George W. Bush,” argues that the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early-mid 2000s were representative of the Bush administration’s “discourse about ‘the enemy’” which served as “a justification for a military response rooted in appeals to empire and American exceptionalism” (221)� Similarly, David Noon asserts in his article, “Cold War Revival: Neoconservatives and Historical Memory in the War on Terror,” that 21st century neoconservatives have viewed the War on Terror as “the next phase in a war for democratic expansion that began in earnest after the Second World War” (88)� It became a chance to reinvigorate the mindset of the “National Security State” in which exceptionalism could flourish. Wallace himself raised questions about American involvement in the Middle East in relation to drilling for oil and the effects this relationship has had on American consumers� The necessity of “othering” countries from which the U�S� hopes to gain something - or, in the novel’s case, dispose of something - in order to perpetuate its lifestyle is at the heart of exceptionalist notions� As the exceptional nation, the U�S� should be allowed to involve itself in the affairs of the “other” and benefit from such involvement, even while simultaneously disparaging the culture of this “other�” Wallace saw this connection, and said in a 2003 interview - seven years after the publication of Infinite Jest - with a German media outlet, ZDFmediatek, 226 c hristine m. P effer Our voting for people who are deciding to go over and very possibly kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in order to kill a few enemies…the fact that no one here is talking about the connection between how we live and what we drive and the things that are happening� The speed with which it’s become those bad people, those bad fanatics, they’re evil, what they really hate is our freedom and our way of life…which is just hard to swallow…who hates freedom? People hate people, not freedom� [My emphasis] Wallace is aware of what labeling Middle Easterners as a strange and distinctive “them” has done to justify U�S� involvement and the animosity this has created between this invented image of “them” and “us�” Wallace’s “Experialism” and Other Terminology Americans have constructed this identity upon the foundation of the assumption that other nations aspire to be like them, and that the United States must be allowed certain privileges of hegemony in order to fulfill a global responsibility as, for example, the defender of “freedom” against the spread of “antidemocratic” communism� It is for this reason, Pease argues, that Americans disavowed the idea of imperialism as inherently un-American and, instead, a tactic of the enemy� Imperialism, in Pease’s exceptionalist argument, becomes one of the qualities the American national identity must lack so that it is distanced and distinguished from the “other�” Maintaining a distance from the other is the only way American culture can stand at the forefront of civilization as the model of the ideal� So while American exceptionalists disparaged imperialism as an adverse characteristic of the communist “other,” they, in order to prevent other nations from exercising their control imperialistically, recognized that the United States would need to do so first. The rationalization was that if the United States used imperialism as a means of preventing other nations from doing the same, it was acceptable� Pease argues, American exceptionalism produced the desire within U�S� citizens to construe U�S� imperialism as a nation-preserving measure that would prevent Soviet imperialism from destroying America’s national ideals� (21) Because America was established as exceptional, it was allowed, according to Pease, to break some of the rules that had been applied to the Soviet Union in order to keep the perceived threat of the “other” at bay� Pease notes the Cold War state’s authorization to “carry out illegal covert activities” made possible by the “continuous noneventuation of the nuclear holocaust�” Legislature like the Truman Doctrine served as “exceptions” that rationalized the necessity of destroying “imperialism as a Russian way of life” (21)� Noon states that the Truman Doctrine “struck neoconservatives as a landmark declaration that effectively Americanized the entire project of internationalism” (88)� Using the term “internationalism” implies that there is give and take on the part of all nations involved - however, “Americanizing” this process seems to City upon the Convexity 227 undermine the whole idea of balance� Allowing one nation to be the main beneficiary because it has a purportedly greater “responsibility” in determining the world’s progress seems to subvert the intent of such a goal entirely� Wallace’s creation of O�N�A�N� seems to raise similar questions about American foreign policy� Gentle and Tine, when negotiating with the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister, assert that O�N�A�N� is necessary because “North Americans have to stick together” and become “interdependent” (Wallace 386)� However, Gentle assigns the roles within this alliance so that he is the Chair, while the other two leaders share consolatory Vice-Chair duties� This arrangement echoes Noon’s succinct delineation of “Americanizing internationalism�” Wallace critiques the ability to establish these exceptions by literalizing the concept of “othering�” In Pease’s view, American exceptionalism became a means of defining the national identity through a series of absences and presences - what the United States does that other countries do not, and vice versa� Wallace plays with this idea of absent and present qualities, and turns them into physical commodities� The diction of the Concavity/ Convexity, for example, inherently resembles the psychology of the absences and presences used in the exceptionalist argument to differentiate the United States from the “other�” The different names of the territory itself play with the idea that there must either be something missing (concave) or something extra attributed (convex) to keep the distance between Gentle’s clean, untarnished nation and Canada, the “other�” While Gentle and Tine refused to allow the U�S� to contain filth and waste, it was necessary to impose this load on Canada. Tine says, “No way we can possibly permit territory publicly exposed as this befouled and waste-impacted to continue to besmirch the already tight and tidier territory of a new era’s U�S� of A” (Wallace 401)� By separating the United States from its physical waste and instead forcing the annexation of the Concavity/ Convexity, Gentle and Tine wash their hands of the waste that becomes Canada’s problem� Wallace has taken the psychology of American exceptionalism as it developed during the Cold War and literalized it in creating his satirical portrayal of “experialism,” which also inversely echoes the containment policy of the Cold War mindset - instead of containing communism, Gentle is containing waste� Rather than using exceptionalism as a pretense for geopolitical expansion, Wallace instead depicts the psychology of exceptionalism as gaining control over a region to discard something of its own that it no longer wants� This, in turn, helps to create Gentle’s “Tighter, Tidier Nation�” While Pease argued that, during the Cold War, exceptionalists attributed, or “gave,” any problematic qualities to the “other,” Gentle gives away a portion of land that contains all the waste that would physically contaminate the United States’ image or identity� Wallace’s satire is largely effective through this use of original, pointed terminology that brings the reader into the fold of the novel’s world and reinforces its message - I have already discussed the Convexity/ Concavity and experialism� The term Wallace uses when referring to O�N�A�N�’s new 228 c hristine m. P effer division of territory, or the Reconfiguration, also plays a role as it becomes a starting point for slang words used throughout the novel� “Demapping” is a term Wallace uses for characters to talk about death� When a character is “demapped,” it means he or she has died or been killed� He makes the connection when a character is mentioned as having his “map seriously…reconfigured” (914). Canada’s map was reconfigured to subsidize the whims of the self-involved President Gentle, and this concept has been likened to the slang term for death, which speaks to the public opinion or view of the reconfiguration and its implications� The students at Enfield Tennis Academy, along with the majority of the other American characters in the novel, refer to Canadians as “Nucks�” While perhaps seemingly innocuous, Wallace’s implications of racism show yet another facet of exceptionalist critiques and further augments his use of exaggeration to complete the satire� Using Canadians as the target of racial slurs, Wallace is emphasizing the hypernationalism and neoconservative, monocultural aims promulgated by the novel’s American government� This term is also indicative of the exceptionalist strands of racism Pease mentions in conjunction with Vietnam and the Rodney King incident� Racism was manifest in these events, according to Pease, as a component of exceptionalism that allowed the stigmatization and confinement of the “other” to a term that not only keeps them at a distance, but does so by keeping them below the image of the “ideal�” “Americanizing” the World Stage Harry Truman’s tenure as President is marked, in part, by the creation of the United Nations, the Truman Doctrine, and the containment policy during the early stages of the Cold War� Pease says that Truman “invoked the representation of America as the ‘Leader of the Free World’” (9)� While the United Nations was meant to promote balanced internationalism, the United States filled the role of global police officer, vowing to contain communism, and to lend help to nations that might have been in danger of falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. Truman’s National Security State and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier helped to “legitimate the United States’ place as the subject and telos of universal history” (165)� In his “negotiations” with the leaders of Mexico and Canada, Rodney Tine suggests that not only will the establishment of the Concavity be a reinventing of government, but it will also be a reinventing of history: “Torch the past� Manifest a new destiny� Boys, we’re going to institute some serious intra-O�N�A�N� interdependence” (Wallace 403)� The new destiny that Tine and Gentle want to write into the history books not only has the United States at its center, but also as the author of this geopolitical narrative� In his second inaugural address, Gentle says, “Let the call go forth, to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched by a new and millennial generation of Americans” (381)� He is concerned only with City upon the Convexity 229 the place the United States will hold in the world and uses the term “interdependence” as a pretense for asserting his authority as O�N�A�N� chair over both Canada and Mexico� Gentle orchestrates the agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada that establishes the “interdependent” Organization of North American Nations, where the U�S� president is the chair, with the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister sharing vice-chair duties� These roles were selected by the United States government and show the inherent hierarchy within the organization� This relationship is meant to solely benefit the United States, but the other two leaders accept the terms with “tightlipped handshakes” (394), suggesting that the agreement would have gone ahead regardless of their approval, and that such a confluence of “interdependent” views is really just a fiction. Wallace also seems to be playing with the fictitious governmental body, O.N.A.N., as it relates to onanism, and the self-gratifying, masturbatory nature of the U�S� he depicts� Gentle and Tine bring the psychology of the unwanted traits and the “other” into existence, by physically giving Canada the territory that would contain all American waste, thereby “proving” that the U�S� itself is waste-free� American historian Thomas Bender asserts that the self-identified features of difference and autonomy have caused Americans to look “inward, implying an American history unlike and unconnected with all others” (qtd� in David 24)� Tine recognizes that his and Gentle’s desire to create what they perceive as an ideal United States is impossible without Canada’s forced compliance� However, the ultimate goal of purifying the country using the Concavity/ Convexity as an outlet holds no positive gains, but rather serious implications, for the Canadians� Tine and Gentle claim that the Reconfiguration - Canada’s annexation of the Concavity/ Convexity - will reinvent history, but in their disconnected, entitled way never mention how it will affect any other parts of the world� One of the only times other countries are mentioned in the novel at all, in fact, comes during the traditional game played by the Enfield Tennis Academy students - Eschaton - which is essentially a children’s game loosely resembling “capture the flag” and “Risk.” This virtual absence of the rest of the world further enforces the Gentle administration’s Americentric worldview� It is also ironic that the players in the Eschaton tournament are all the younger students at Enfield, children who are coached and watched by the older pupils for entertainment� This underscores the idea that Wallace is showcasing international politics only as, literally, child’s play� Marathe and Steeply: Opposite Ends of the Continuum The ongoing conversation between Hugh Steeply and Remy Marathe that takes place throughout the novel highlights the different ways Americans and Canadians perceive the political relationship between the two nations� Marathe sees what he repeatedly refers to as the Americans’ “freedom to 230 c hristine m. P effer choose” as a destructively self-indulgent worldview, while Steeply simply sees it as a necessary facet of democracy, calling Marathe’s Canada “Cuba with snow” (320)� While there are certainly problems with Steeply’s view of the world through his O�N�A�N� American lens, Marathe’s character is not without its faults� In David Lipsky’s book, Although of course you end up becoming yourself: a road trip with David Foster Wallace, Wallace states bluntly in his discourse with Lipsky that Marathe is a fascist, and is representative of the fictional Canadian culture� In the pair’s discourse about what freedom means in their respective cultures, it becomes clear that Steeply is a staunch believer in democracy, while Marathe’s fascist views center around the idea of the government as a father figure. He asks Steeply: But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from…How to choose any but a child’s greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose? (Wallace 320) Marathe’s character does not necessarily serve to make the American characters look more justified in their appeals to exceptionalism, but he does add a layer to the complexity of the conundrum posed by having two characters, Marathe and Steeply, who are on complete opposite ends of the political spectrum when it comes to the question of free choice� In the same interview from Lipsky’s book, Wallace elaborates on Marathe’s political alignment and the novel’s Canadian polity as a whole when he says: You’re talking about a culture that teaches people how to make moral choices, that teeters very easily into…a totalitarian, authoritarian culture� But a culture that doesn’t, and that prides itself on not…I think we’re just beginning to see, that on either side of the continuum there are terrible prices to pay� (qtd� in Lipsky 158) Wallace does not intend to paint either Steeply or Marathe as right or wrong; instead, he intends them to show the dangers of either extreme� As political foils of one another, Marathe and Steeply highlight the deeply flawed aspects of both nations that have entered, either passively on the part of the Canadians or forcefully on the part of the Americans, into the O�N�A�N� compact� Ironically, Wallace depicts his American citizenry as apathetic to this “freedom to choose,” as Gentle is consistently allowed to engender Red Scare/ Patriot Act-like domestic policies� The reason Wallace gives for this apathy is, in part, the people’s surrender to ravenous consumerism and pleasure-seeking that makes a threat like the Entertainment video a plausible threat� Marathe, when confronted by Steeply about the Quebecois terrorist plot involving the Entertainment, simply responds, “Us? We will force nothing on U�S�A� persons in their warm homes� We will make only available� Entertainment� There will be then some choosing, to partake or choose not to…How will U�S�A�s choose? ” (Wallace 318)� Though the satire is absurd, and humorous, the concepts suggest Wallace’s earnest concern for the way American citizens have chosen to accept the state fantasy and ideology of the “Tighter, Tidier Nation�” Overlaying Wallace’s City upon the Convexity 231 fiction and nonfiction provides some valuable insight into his political concerns� In his essay detailing the 2000 presidential campaign of John McCain, “Up, Simba! ”, Wallace expresses concern for the role of the individual in government: If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day� By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting� In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote� (207) Although Gentle has, to some extent, coaxed the American citizenry to buy into his exceptionalist schemes, Wallace colors the issue so that the people are not blameless� Gentle, a multiple-term president, is noted as being “roundly disliked for over two terms,” but is allowed to remain in office. The Role of Consumerism Pease claims that state fantasies act as “unacknowledged legislators” that unconsciously demand that subjects “want the state to govern them�” He goes on to say that these fantasies also allow for their subjects to “structure their desires within the terms of the fantasy” (6)� Gentle’s version of Red Scare rationale (and I leave out the Patriot Act here simply because the novel pre-dates 2001) and his subsequent control over the collective American psyche, implies that if his citizens relinquish their constitutional right to have a voice, he will handle the “burden” of making tough choices, essentially allowing Americans to give up their right to play an active role in the U�S� government� Pease maintains that the doubt sown by the Vietnam War was combated with a similarly altered relationship between the government and its citizens, as the “cold war spectacle repositioned that doubt itself as a threat to the national security, and thereby effectively depoliticized the relations between U�S� citizens and the security state’s mode of governance” (53)� The main component of this relationship becomes the “freedom from” the difficulty of decision-making that Wallace satirizes through Gentle and Marathe, whose political views line him in opposition to this concept� Though Wallace’s plot thread of Gentle and the C�U�S�P� is different from what Pease calls the Cold War state’s authorization to “carry out illegal covert activities” achieved through what Spanos calls an “always threatening crisis,” Wallace’s satire is effective in its humor and depiction of the relinquishment of any political voice by the citizens of the novel’s United States� In her article, “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, And Identity In Infinite Jest,” Elizabeth Freudenthal links the obsessions with brand-name products in Infinite Jest to the obsession with toxic waste 232 c hristine m. P effer production and removal when she states that the novel’s American society is “dominated at every level by a global commodity system, from the plethora of brand-name goods to energy sourced from toxic nuclear waste” (195)� The use of Subsidized Time in Infinite Jest is an ingenious, subtle imposition of the fictional state’s will to sell out even the names of years to fund experialism, throwing an entire way of chronologically structuring and recording events into an indecipherable, arbitrary chaos that sells the name of the next year to the highest bidder� This is ingenious because the need to refer to the name of the current year and years past as reference points is ever-present in all O�N�A�N� citizens’ lives� Thus, they must be reprogrammed by necessity to refer to the years not by their chronological numeral, but by their commercial names, essentially turning time into a commercial entity� Freudenthal asserts that the aims of Gentle’s administration come from a “debilitating interiority,” which relates to Thomas Bender’s diagnosis of a problematic American view that renders historical text unable to connect to any history that exists outside of the United States’ self� By organizing their very unit of measuring time and events based on a consumerist system, the system subsequently underscores the importance of America’s ability to not only produce and spend, but to own - as O�N�A�N� essentially leaves the United States in an “ownership” of sorts with Canada and Mexico� Pease states that America’s shift into a contemporary brand of exceptionalism is linked to its self-representation as “Conqueror of the World’s Markets” (8)� This self-representation also indicates where the novel’s United States places emphasis, which is on the market, and thus inescapably on producing, buying, and owning� Furthermore, all of the companies buying rights to year names are American� The subsidization of O�N�A�N� time is something that will change the geopolitical landscape not only of the West but of the world, and the looming figure of American consumerism that funds the Concavity/ Convexity cannot be ignored� Through his use of absurd year names like Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar and Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, Wallace is hinting at the absurdity of such extreme materialism that, in his United States, has permeated even the most unchanging regulation of time� Pease and Wallace both use the terminology of “desires for self,” or “desires of self-interest,” which are crucial in the understanding of Pease’s American fantasy of exceptionalism and Wallace’s solipsistic, materialistic American culture� In his interview with ZDFmediatek, Wallace comments on the reality of America being looked at as a cripplingly consumerist, hedonistic society: The idea that America is one big shopping mall, and that all anyone wants to do is, you know, grasp their credit card and run out and by stuff is a stereotype, and it’s a generalization, but as a way to summarize a certain kind of ethos in the U�S�, it’s pretty accurate� In Infinite Jest, he portrays the mass influx of brand-name products as one of the debilitating contributors to the cycle of purchasing and discarding that will conceivably continue to perpetuate the need for the Concavity and the fans that contain it� Freudenthal also notes that the two years containing the majority of the novel’s plot, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and City upon the Convexity 233 the Year of Glad, “are sponsored by products that contain waste while creating more of it” (198)� The adult undergarments and trash bags, though they are used to contain two types of human waste, are ironically only adding to the mass that the Concavity/ Convexity imposed upon Canada is steadily becoming� Freudenthal succinctly summarizes the roles of Gentle and Tine as the absurd figures that advance an ideology of exceptionalism and rampant consumerism in what she calls Wallace’s “funhouse mirror reflection of our own dangerously corporate government, our potentially apocalyptic addictions to consumption” (197)� The People of Infinite Jest as Byproducts While the Gentle administration is easily able to throw its weight around in the implementation of Reconfiguration, Wallace juxtaposes the topically clean, waste-free United States with his grotesque portrayal of the seedy urban culture that one-time Ennet House resident Randy Lenz refers to in the novel as “one big commode�” Boswell appropriately describes the streets of Infinite Jest’s Boston, which are “overrun with bewildered drug addicts and ‘feral hamsters’ bloated to monstrous size, thanks to the toxic and radioactive waste of the Great Concavity” (124)� The novel’s Boston is teeming with characters who each have their own unique, often horrifically disturbing private lives, and Gentle is incapable of eradicating this type of “befoulment” from his “Tighter, Tidier Nation�” The impossibility of removing all waste, even in the form of human life, would be impossible� As one native Quebecois says, Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity� It creeps back in� What goes around, it comes back around� This your nation refuses to learn� It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away all your filth and prevent all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back� (Wallace 233) The exceptionalist ideal as portrayed in Infinite Jest is extreme, but as a satire it shows that no matter how many metaphorical fans a nation builds, there will always be “filth” that cannot be stamped out - humanity will always be riddled with imperfections� The Alcoholics Anonymous/ Narcotics Anonymous subculture that the reader is thrust into when first approaching the Ennet House drug and rehabilitation center is one that resounds as something of a rebel yell directed at the “mainstream” culture overrun by sterilization, corporate media, and capitalism� The great lengths Wallace goes to in painting most of these characters as intensely disturbed and/ or grotesque set a stark contrast to the policies held so dear to the Gentle administration� For example, Bruce Green, a resident at Ennet House, represents one such character� His mother died of a heart attack after opening a Christmas present from Bruce only to find that it had been rigged by Mr� Green to conceal a “coiled cloth snake” as a joke� The description of her death is what takes the scene from being absurdly comical to disturbing: “…Brucie’s Mama’s hand at her delicate throat becomes clawshaped and she claws at her throat and gurgles and slumps over to starboard 234 c hristine m. P effer with a fatal cardiac, her cyanotic mouth still open in surprise” (580)� Bruce’s father becomes completely unhinged after the death of his wife, and is sentenced to die by lethal injection after “grotesquely decapitating” three Rotarians by concocting a batch of explosives� The majority of characters on the streets of Boston or living in the Ennet House have similarly bizarre and disturbing backgrounds� And yet, they are the ones that emerge as the heroic, most human characters� It is Bruce Green, for example, who helps Don Gately when he is defending the house’s residents from an agitated and violent band of “Nucks” and helps tend to Gately before taking him to the hospital after he was shot� Green and his fellow addicts at the Ennet House provide an exception to the rule of Gentle’s exceptionalist goals in their extremely raw representation of humanity� Mario Incandenza, the middle Incandenza child, is, however, probably the best example of Wallace’s portrayal of the disparity between the “clean” and the grotesque. This disparity almost works to flip the appearances, as the grotesque characters become the most human and the Tines and Gentles of the novel are illuminated as self-interested, elitist, and ultimately surreal� Mario, who is probably the most morally sound character in the novel, is also one of the most severely deformed and disabled� His birth scene is an especially bizarre, grotesque occurrence that Wallace does not gloss over: He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb to whose sides he’d been found spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached by cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the same material� He was…terribly premature, and withered, and he spent the next many weeks waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the Pyrex ceilings of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires and cupped in sterile palms, his head cradled by a thumb� (313) As he grows older, Mario does not grow out of these abnormalities but rather further grows into them and must simply learn to adapt� Despite all of his struggles, he remains an endlessly compassionate and innocent figure throughout the novel who is idolized and adored by his physically and intellectually superior younger brother, Hal� Conclusion Infinite Jest is a dense, multilayered novel, but Wallace’s satire of American exceptionalism, despite its subtlety, stands out as one of the most poignant critiques he makes of American politics� The images of waste permeate through the novel as a constant reminder of the Gentle administration’s self-pleasing worldview, and act an exaggerated literal portrayal of some key components of exceptionalism as it has become manifest throughout American history, especially since the beginning of the Cold War, and has experienced a resurgence since 9/ 11� Though the satire is absurd, and humorous, the concepts suggest an earnest concern for the way American citizens have chosen to accept the state fantasy and ideology of the “Tighter, Tidier Nation,” City upon the Convexity 235 as evidenced by his attitude in “Up, Simba! ” and various interviews� In the ZDFmediatek interview, specifically, Wallace again expresses concern for the role of the individual in perpetuating destructive exceptionalist ideals: It works really well in an economic way� Emotionally, spiritually, in terms of citizenship, in terms of feeling like a meaningful part even of this country, forget the world, and I’m sure the U�S� government’s sort of arrogance and disdain for the rest of the world is unpleasant, but it’s also a natural extension of certain cultural messages we send ourselves about ourselves that work very well in some ways and make us very rich and very powerful…it’s all, complicated� The rhetoric with which a nation and its people choose to structure their national narrative has implications not just for all of the “others” created along the way, but for the “State of Exception,” as well� By living within a limited sphere of fantasy and defining a national identity by what it lacks when compared with some “other,” combating it against some “other” or creating an “us” versus “them” mindset, the identity can find no secure footing. Pease discusses the desire of the citizens for the state to govern them - Wallace depicts the implications of a comatose, consumerist society that allows Gentle and Tine to run the show� Despite Gentle’s best efforts, his nation is rotting from the inside out, and the disfigured, addicted outcasts ultimately emerge as the nation’s only chance for redemption� Works Cited Boswell, Marshall� Understanding David Foster Wallace� Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2009� Print� David, Charles Philippe, and David Grondin� Hegemony or Empire? : The Redefinition of US Power under George W. Bush� Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006� Print� Freudenthal, Elizabeth. “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, And Identity In Infinite Jest.” New Literary History 41�1 (2010): 191-211� Academic Search Premier� Web� 12 Sept� 2012� Lipsky, David, and David Foster Wallace� Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace� New York: Broadway, 2010� Print� Noon, David Hoogland� “Cold War Revival: Neoconservatives And Historical Memory In The War On Terror�” American Studies (00263079) 48�3 (2007): 75-99� Academic Search Premier� Web� 11 Nov� 2012� Pease, Donald E� The New American Exceptionalism� Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009� Print� Spanos, William V� “Redeemer Nation and Apocalypse: Thinking the Exceptionalism of American Exceptionalism�” Literature Interpretation Theory: Literary Counterhistories of US Exceptionalism 25�2 (2014): 174-200� Web� Wallace, David Foster� “David Foster Wallace on Gas Prices, War, and the Economy of Comfort�” Interview� YouTube� ZDFmediatek, 6 May 2011� Web� 22 Nov� 2012� <http: / / www�youtube�com/ watch? v=2ybffCLFPpI>� -----� Infinite Jest� New York: Back Bay, 1996� Print� -----� “Up, Simba! ” Consider the Lobster� New York: Back Bay, 2006� Print� B imBisar i rom Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel: Transnational Disjunctures in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland 1 The general consensus among critics of contemporary U�S� culture seems to be that the events of 9/ 11 have wrought far-reaching alterations in the nature of U�S� state power with consequences that we are yet to fully comprehend� For instance, in his magisterial The New American Exceptionalism, Donald Pease argues that earlier versions of American exceptionalism revolved around a “structure of disavowal” that functioned as an ideological masking strategy making citizen-subjects envision the nation through a fantastical lens that “eradicated the difference between the national ideal U�S� citizens wanted and the faultyy nation they had, by representing America as having already achieved all that a nation could be�” 2 Following the 9/ 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration inaugurated a State of Exception that “did not require this [earlier] structure of disavowal because it was its construction of itself as The Exception to the discursive norms of American exceptionalism that constituted the grounding authority of its power to rule�” 3 This new exceptionalist regime openly revealed the U�S� state’s intentions as, in George Steinmentz’s words, “domestically authoritarian and geopolitically imperialist�” 4 In short, the policies of the U.S. state after 9/ 11 are defined by a constrictive tightening of focus in the domestic arena as well as by an expansive engagement in maintaining global power� The consequences of the state’s investment in centripetally focused hegemonic imaginaries to manage domestic populations has been summed up in Pease’s suggestive comment that, in the post-9/ 11 climate, “U�S� citizens became internal émigrés who migrated from the nation to the homeland�” 5 I wish to trace possible responses to these mutations in state power by way of the post-9/ 11 American novel and its particular affiliations with transnational imaginaries� For one, transnational imaginaries, by locating the U�S� within osmotic mapping systems that continually chip away at the barriers between ‘home’ and the ‘foreign,’ engage with both the domestic 1 A version of this essay appeared in The Journal of Transnational American Studies 6�1� 2 Donald Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 22� 3 Ibid�, 180� 4 George Steinmetz “The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 341� 5 Donald Pease, “Introduction: Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn” in Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed� Winfried Fluck, Donald Pease and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011), 22� 238 B imBisar i rom and the global dimensions of state power� The fracture effected by the “transnational turn” in American studies lends a valuable perspective as it resurrects, what Pease calls, the “two interrelated dimensions of the disavowed underside of American exceptionalism - US imperialism and US global interdependencies�” 6 In light of the nation’s ‘geopolitically imperialist’ ambitions, it also becomes all the more crucial to delineate oppositional transnational practices that do not repeat the hegemonizing moves of the state that often operate under the semantic guise of the ‘transnational�’ To be sure, there are latent dangers in reading transnational practices as always oppositional and ideologically pure enterprises devoid of slippages and fault lines� Not the least among these dangers is that of what Thomas Bender calls “new blindnesses” that might result from working free of the national ideology “only to embrace the ideology and process of globalization…the danger of complicity, conscious or not, in a triumphalism that justifies the current state of capitalism.” 7 The cautionary notes in the particular context of American studies have taken two general directions. The first is seen in the attempt to link the broad development of the ‘transnational turn’ to its enabling socio-political conditions� In this vein, Leerom Medovoi has ably demonstrated that our understanding of the recent transnational focus cannot be divorced from the post-Fordist mode of production and wealth management and he places an important injunction to historicize the transition: “If post-Fordism relies upon the retooled state and upon the new world organizations for many of the same regulatory functions that the Keynsian state once provided to Fordism, then does post-Fordism also rely on any unique ideological formations comparable to the national narrative that enabled Fordism? ” 8 The direction of the second critique has been to tease out points of osmosis and contrasts between transnational moves dictated by the state and finance capital and a version of transnational American studies attentive to the aspirations of neglected populations and buried histories� Amy Kaplan clearly states this when she urges scholars “to think more creatively and critically about what we mean by internationalizing the field when Bush has his own vision of ‘a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests�’ For indeed empire is a 6 Shelley Fisher Fishkin uses the term in her “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004�” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 17-57� See Pease, “Re-thinking ‘American Studies after US Exceptionalism,’ American Literary History, 21: 1 (2009): 20� 7 Thomas Bender “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed� Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 12� 8 Leerom Medovoi “Nation, Globe, Hegemony: Post-Fordist Preconditions of the Transnational Turn in American Studies�” interventions 7 (2005): 168� According to Medovoi, “Nation-centered American studies bore a relationship to Fordism that was not merely generic…but materially situated: it served as a pivotal knowledge project of the…Fordist university� So too post-national American studies must be historicized alongside the post-Fordist turn in American higher education” (166)� Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel 239 form of transnationalism�” 9 Johannes Voelz, arguing against transnational American studies’ self-portrayal as the oppositional Other to state power, demonstrates that the boundaries are much more porous and he critiques transnationalist scholars for lacking “an adequate framework to address the role of the state and its changing properties in the global era when talking about transnationalism�” 10 Even with these cautionary notes, it remains undeniable that the energies released by the ‘transnational turn’ not only has a history of oblique opposition to the state’s visions of what the nation should become but they have also enabled, in Pease’s words, “a rethinking of the national in the light of newly invented spatial and temporal coordinates�” 11 Invoking the transnational in this sense - of rendering unfamiliar what we accept as ‘natural’ - I map how post-9/ 11fiction speaks back to the state’s hegemonic imaginaries through an analysis of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Netherland’s themes straddle two overlapping concerns: on a broader scale, the text reimagines ways in which the transnational aesthetic might respond to the alterations in state power after 9/ 11 and, more narrowly, Netherland is a crucial intervention in the debate over post-9/ 11 American fiction. A quick recap of this seemingly narrow debate about a literary sub-genre will reveal that it rehearses several larger concerns about envisioning the U�S�’s role in the world� The critical discussion largely centers around whether the form has become, in Bruce Robbins’s term, “worldly�” 12 In his wide-ranging critique of the American literary responses to 9/ 11, Richard Gray argues that “new events generate new forms of consciousnesses requiring new structures of ideology and the imagination to assimilate and express them…And it begs the question of just how new, or at least different, the structures of these books are� The answer is, for the most part, not at all�” 13 Expressing consonance with many of Gray’s assertions, Michael Rothberg writes that “a reaccentuation has not taken place ” and that the “fiction of 9/ 11 demonstrates…a failure of the imagination.” Rothberg calls for “a fiction of international relations and extraterritorial citizenship…a complementary centrifugal mapping 9 Amy Kaplan “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003�” American Quarterly 56 (2004): 10� Medovoi makes the related point that “a post-national imagination does not of itself make for a progressive vision in a post-Fordist age� The question is not ‘whether transnationalism’, but rather whose” (170)� 10 Johannes Voelz, “Utopias of Transnationalism and the Neoliberal State” in Re-Framing, ed� Fluck, Pease and Rowe, 356� In the same volume, Pease makes a similar point that although the “transnational prevents the closure of the nation…[it] is not the Other of the nation� The transnational names an undecidable economic, political, or social formation that is neither in nor out of the nation-state� Inherently relational, the transnational involves a double move: to the inside, to core constituents of a given nation, and to an outside, whatever forces a new configuration”, 5-6. 11 Donald Pease “Introduction” in Re-Framing, 5� 12 Bruce Robbins “The worlding of the American novel” in The Cambridge History of The American Novel, ed� Leonard Cassuto (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 1096� 13 Richard Gray “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” American Literary History 21, (2009): 128-151� 240 B imBisar i rom that charts the outward movement of American power�” 14 Robbins writes that the event of 9/ 11 “has created its own unique local surround, a restricted time/ space that replaces and cancels out any abstract planetary coordinates�” He concludes: “the point seems to be that the novel’s field of vision has contracted, not expanded�” The dominant critical consensus, therefore, seems to be that the sub-genre has failed to embrace the transnational imperative to remap the U�S�’s relationship with the rest of the world and it has, instead, sought refuge in the rituals of the domestic� This quick recap demonstrates that the core issue is about how the U�S� cultural-aesthetic sphere might incorporate the transnational perspective in a post-9/ 11 world� In what ways should literature best respond to the mutations in state power? How might fiction effect transnational mapping strategies that speak back to the state’s regulatory practices of reinforcing national borders and dividing home and the foreign? And in what ways are those strategies compromised by affiliations with the hegemonic imaginaries of both state and non-state structures? If we subscribe to Aihwa Ong’s suggestive definition of the prefix “Trans” as denoting “both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something,” and if we remain partial to her suggestion that “transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination…incited, enabled, and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism,” 15 Netherland, with its pronounced engagement with the narratives of recent immigrants in New York city and with its sustained meditation on the meanings of American identity in the post-9/ 11 landscape, is obviously qualified to stake claim to the transnational label. While Netherland takes up the challenge of imagining worldliness through its various transnational counternarratives, the essay locates its reading between the osmotic spaces wherein the constituent elements of the transnational bear varying relations of resistance, conflict, and consonance with power structures. In this sense, the essay’s intervention partly derives its theoretical ballast from what Arjun Appadurai calls “relations of disjuncture” by which he means that “the various flows we see - of objects, persons, images and discourses - are not coeval, convergent, isomorphic or spatially consistent…the paths or vectors taken by these various kinds of things have different speeds, different axes, different points of origin and termination, and different relationships to institutional structures in different regions, nations or societies�” 16 In Netherland, these disjunctures effect an unsettled and ambivalent series of counternarratives with unstable relations to power structures� In reading the disjunctures overdetermining Netherland’s transnational entities and in locating the novel’s aspirations towards a post-9/ 11 worldliness between the 14 Michael Rothberg “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/ 11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray,” American Literary History 21 (2009): 152-158� 15 Aihwa Ong Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 4 16 Arjun Appadurai “Globalization and the Research Imagination�” International Social Science Journal, 160 (1999): 230-1� Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel 241 competing pulls of globe and nation, 17 we come to a fuller comprehension of the ways in which nation-states still exercise a spectral fascination upon the imagination and how novels might more fruitfully gesture towards challenging such tenacious hegemonies� Netherland’s transnational ethics is articulated through a trichotomous entity: the narratives of its two main protagonists Chuck Ramkissoon and Hans van den Broek, the game of cricket, and the imaginaries of new geospatial technologies such as Google Earth� The central narrative is built around the unlikely friendship between Hans, a Dutch banker married to an English lawyer, and Chuck, a Trinidadian immigrant� Constructed as a series of flashback vignettes from the narrative present of 2006 in London when Hans hears of Chuck’s death, the narrative traces the estrangement of Hans and his wife Rachel after their first arrival in New York city in 1998, Rachel’s return to England with their young son after the 9/ 11 attacks, Hans’ search for companionship following this personal crisis and his growing friendship with Chuck whom he meets through the games of cricket, and Hans’ eventual return to England and reconciliation with Rachel� On the surface, then, Netherland follows the “familiar romance pattern” of many post-9/ 11 American novels “in which couples meet, romantic and domestic problems follow, to be concluded in reconciliation or rupture�” 18 But the narrative, even while relying on domestic tropes, opens up an incomplete longing for the worldly through its transnational counternarratives� It is crucial to draw some distinctions between the main protagonists to illuminate the extent to which each carries the burden of transnational counternarrativity� As an upper-class white man working in the global economic order as an equities analyst, Hans’ relationship to national borders is different from that of Chuck� James Wood notes that Hans can, in fact, “come and go in America on a banker’s whim�” 19 Hans’ nebulous relationship with formal American citizenship demonstrates Daniel T� Rodgers’ observation that those “who enter these transnational labor systems that circulate through the United States are not in the first instance headed for America, though their jobs might lie there� They are, rather, workers who belong simultaneously to more than one country and culture, moving through transnational networks of information, neighborhood, and kin…in short, scattered: diasporic�” 20 17 This competing pull can be noted in the fact that while the book has been readily incorporated as a fine example of the transnational imaginary, O’Neill asserts in an interview with Katie Bacon that his novel is “an American novel…my first novel as an American novelist� Now that I’ve lived here for ten years, I feel able to insert myself into the rather welcoming field of American literature.” See O’Neill’s interview “The Great Irish-Dutch-American Novel” in The Atlantic� <http: / / www�theatlantic�com/ magazine/ archive/ 2008/ 05/ the-great-irish-dutch-american-novel/ 6788/ > 18 Gray,134� 19 James Wood “Beyond a Boundary�” The New Yorker (May 26, 2008) <http: / / www� newyorker�com/ arts/ critics/ books/ 2008/ 05/ 26/ 080526crbo_books_wood> 20 Daniel Rodgers, “American Exceptionalism Revisited,” Raritan, 24: 2, 2009, 34� 242 B imBisar i rom It might be argued that Hans’ actions throughout the novel introduce a new twist to our understanding of the diasporic figure within American culture� Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar argue that the critical potential of the diasporic figure has been defanged by its absorption into the hegemonic national imaginary of American multiculturalism� They write: “The diasporic figure…could in fact be made to underwrite the American Century thesis…By privileging the trope of America as destination, the vernacular incorporation of diaspora reinscribes the unique path of American democracy from political resistance (against Britain) to socioeconomic redistribution… to recognition of cultural and other identities of difference�” Hans’ oblique unsettledness, in other words, perhaps articulates a new version of this earlier coming-to-America narrative by introducing what the authors call “the perspective of shifting critical nodes�” Instead of a narrative of return that likely risks absorption into the national imaginary, we now have Hans “passing through” highlighting the fact that “diasporic subjects who arrive in the United States do not come to ‘America’ as a (final) destination but rather to the United States as a holding place�” As Edwards and Gaonkar note, such ‘passing through’ helps recast the U�S� “among a proliferating set of trajectories, national, subnational, and regional, that make up the present global matrix�” 21 To be sure, O’Neill romanticizes Hans’ unsettledness and his seeking “alternative forms of allegiance” 22 through the game of cricket as a critical aspect of challenging formal citizenship� It is also crucial to note that while Hans’ actions help us rethink the U�S� “not as terminus but rather as node through which people are passing,” this critical unsettledness is somewhat compromised by the fact that it is enabled, above all, by Hans’ membership in the ‘transnational capitalist class�’ The ambivalence of passing through is reflected in Hans’ apathy towards political opinions of any kind and his general sense of social disengagement as he drifts through most of the novel in a daze of misery� Unlike his wife Rachel who becomes increasingly vocal in her resistance to the U�S� invasion of Iraq, Hans remains indifferent: “I, however, was almost completely caught out… my orientation was poor� I could not tell where I stood� If pressed to state my position, I would confess the truth: that I had not succeeded in arriving at a position…I had little interest� I didn’t really care� In short, I was a politicalethical idiot�” 23 While it is reductive to claim that Hans’s apathy might be a direct function of his membership in the “transnational capitalist class,” 24 his character also resonates with the kind of transnationality that Wai Chee Dimock has strongly critiqued� Referring to the Asian business elite, Dimock writes: “Transnationality of this sort points not to the emergence of a new 21 Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar, “Introduction: Globalizing American Studies” in Globalizing American Studies, ed� Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 26� 22 Voelz, 366� 23 Joseph O’ Neill, Netherland (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 109� All quotations are from this edition and will hereby be referenced parenthetically within the paper� 24 See Leslie Sklair’s “Sociology of the Global System” in The Globalization Reader (2nd edition), ed� Frank J� Lechner and John Boli (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008): 72� Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel 243 collective unit - a global civil society…but to the persistence of an old logic…of capitalism. Market born and market driven, it is infinite in its geographical extension but all too finite in its aspirations. It offers no alternative politics, poses no threat to the sovereignty of the state�” 25 In Hans we can sense several contradictory impulses: his disregard for formal American citizenship poses challenges to state sovereignty, while Hans’ affiliation with corporate citizenship foregrounds the political ambivalence of certain sectors within the transnational umbrella� In contrast to Hans, Chuck, the big-talking entrepreneur and smalltime businessman given to verbosity is, as Wood notes, “ever eager to be grounded in America�” This is symbolized in his gaudy 1996 Cadillac, which was “a patriotic automobile aflutter and aglitter with banners and stickers of the Stars and Stripes and yellow ribbons in support of the troops” (74)� But Chuck’s narrative is not one of seamless absorption into the U�S� national imaginary� Even if Chuck can be defined as an immigrant who, as Joan Didion notes, seeks “a traditional road to assimilation, the visible doing of approved works, the act of making oneself available for this steering committee, for that kickoff dinner” 26 he might also be understood as what Nina Schiller et al� call a “transmigrant” who remains “engaged elsewhere�” 27 This is foregrounded in the image of various transnational axes crisscrossing Chuck’s car: an “intercontinental cast of characters passed through the old Cadillac� From Bangalore there came calls… From Hillside, Queens…an Alexandrian Copt…And, from a private jet to-ing and fro-ing between Los Angeles and London, there was Faruk Patel…And then there were strictly local characters - lawyers and realtors and painters and roofers and fishmongers and rabbis and secretaries and expediters” (161- 2)� It is a layered irony of the text that despite his express wish to be cremated and buried in Brooklyn, Chuck’s wife decides to send his body to Trinidad� It is only in death that Chuck escapes what Rothberg calls “a form of re-domestication” by the American national narrative� 28 Chuck also functions as Hans’ guide by introducing the unfamiliar perspective of other histories through what Caren Irr calls “the less advantaged expatriate illuminating the world for the more advantaged�” As Irr continues: “By coming to know Chuck…Hans learns to read alternative routes, histories, and faces; his map of the world expands to include these wavering perceptions of the mobility of others� It is not solely his own movements on which 25 Wai Chee Dimock “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational,” American Literary History 18 (2006): 220� 26 Joan Didion, Miami (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 111� 27 Nina Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration�” Anthropological Quarterly, 68 (1995): 48� The authors write that transmigrants “are not sojourners because they settle and become incorporated in the economy and political institutions, localities, and patterns of daily life of the country in which they reside� However, at the very same time, they are engaged elsewhere…they maintain connections, build institutions, conduct transactions, and influence local and national events in the countries from which they emigrated” (48). 28 Rothberg, 155� 244 B imBisar i rom he need (or can) rely to image a geopolitical scene�” 29 Chuck exists to enable Hans’ redemption and it is the European/ American self who ultimately bears responsibility for crafting an ethics for the future� In Hans and Chuck, then, we see two figures not wholly reducible to the interpellative strategies of national ideologies� While foregrounding the lack embedded within each worldview - the risk of ‘re-domestication’ in Chuck and a nebulousness lacking a narrative sensibility attentive to the pitfalls of globalization in Hans - Netherland is located in an ambivalent site pressured by the immigrant and exilic consciousnesses� The differences between Hans and Chuck are further underscored by their divergent relationships to narratives� Hans is the befuddled narrator simultaneously trying to connect the scattered dots in his domestic life and piece together a narrative from the vignettes supplied by Chuck� On one of his flights back from England, Hans admits he did not know how to organize his old photographs properly: “There were…people who organized such things into files and folders…I envied them…for their faith in that future day when one might pull down albums and scrapbooks and in the space of an afternoon repossess one’s life” (129)� Hans’ narrative disorder is in contrast to Chuck who has charted out a complete autobiography beginning with his childhood in Trinidad, continuing through his present American odyssey, and ending in his anticipated future cremation in Brooklyn� Netherland is, thus, poised between Hans who lacks narrative skill and Chuck, the supreme teller of stories� Hans arrives at Chuck’s door in search of a narrative balm when faced with absolute despair regarding his family life� This is rendered through the trope of failed navigation as Hans flunks his first driving test. Chuck gets a chance to take charge as the driver and guide of Hans’ stalled narrative� Netherland crafts a path between Hans’ disembodied existence that, in its lack of narrative impetus, might stultify agency and Chuck’s naïve and unflinching belief in the narrative of the American Dream. Given that this blind faith might have something to do with Chuck’s death, Hans’s obliqueness toward narratives can be read as a mode of survival� Part of Chuck’s burden in the novel is to supply a narrative capability and restore a belief in stories to Hans, perhaps not a belief as naively blind as his own, but a skeptical one that will allow Hans to survive� In Hans and Chuck’s varied relationships to story-telling, Netherland reveals narrative’s duplicity: while enabling people to make sense of their lives, narrative is also the medium through which the state makes obedient subjects of their citizens by rendering events into a sensible political order� In contrast to the voluble Chuck, Hans’ quiet mother plays the crucial role of an ethical guide� Hans describes her mode of parenting thus: “My mother, though watchful…was not one for offering express guidance, and indeed it may be thanks to her that I naturally associate love with a house fallen into silence” (90)� The mother’s role in shaping Netherland’s ethical vision, in 29 Caren Irr “Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in Twenty-First-Century Expatriate Fiction�” American Literary History 23�3 (2011): 670, 671� Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel 245 helping Hans see and redirect his vision when needed, is most clearly illustrated in the novel’s ending and in an episode when Hans visits Holland� 30 Standing by the window of his old bedroom, Hans recalls his boyhood self mesmerized by the lighthouse: “He was an only child…but my recollection of watching the light travel out of Scheveningen contained the figure of my mother at my side, helping me to look out into the dark� She answered my questions” (87)� Neither the lighthouse of the European past nor the glittering towers of the Manhattan present alone will be adequate for Hans to craft an ethics of the future and, as we shall see in Netherland’s ending, his mother transcends both these imaginaries to posit an optics of the dialectic constituted by both the past and the present� This dialectical optics is more prominently visualized in the scenes featuring cricket� One might argue that O’Neill uses the concept-metaphor of cricket in a Levinasian sense to breach the enclosed totality of the national imaginary (‘Being’ in Levinas’ terms) by effecting an ethics of moral injunction to the uninitiated American observer of the game� According to Levinas: “ethics arises in relation to the other and not straightaway by a reference to the universality of a law� The ‘relation’ to the other man as unique…would be, here, the first significance of the meaningful.” 31 O’Neill writes that, to most Americans, “cricket is among the most mysterious and unimportant of sizeable human activities…[but] The combination of triviality and obscurity is what’s significant.” As “the stuff of a national blind spot” wherein “one’s intuition and judgment always fail,” O’Neill envisions cricket as the absolute Other to the hermetic American imaginary� 32 Cricket has the potential of drawing out the American national self from its enclosure by confronting the bewildered viewer with a moral imperative to acknowledge the Other: “the ability to locate, in a mostly static herd of white-clothed men, the significant action. It’s a question of looking” (149). This instance of paying heed to the Other is, as Levinas suggests, an instructive moment: To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression…It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I…to have an idea of infinity� But this also means: to be taught� The relation with the Other, or Conversation, 30 In an interview, O’Neill points out the centrality of the concept-metaphors of vision and seeing in Netherland: “the novel is deeply involved with a quest for vision� Hans is forever looking at things, peering out windows…much of the drama involves perception, or misperception� There is a constant search for meaning: Where do I look? What am I supposed to be looking at? What do I see? What do I make of what I see? ” (15) See O’Neill’s interview with Charley Reilly, Contemporary Literature 52 (2011): 1-20� 31 Emmanuel Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be? : Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed� Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011), 114� 32 Joseph O’Neill, “Bowling Alone: A review by Joseph O’Neill,” The Atlantic (September 11, 2007)� <http: / / www�powells�com/ review/ 2007_09_11> 246 B imBisar i rom is…an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching…not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain� 33 In Netherland, this ethical gesture of noticing the Other on the cricket field operates through a double-optic that requires the observer to concurrently maintain two mutually contradictory scales of vision� One scale focuses on the minute strip of the batting pitch, while the other encompasses the larger field of play: “One contradiction of the sport is that its doings simultaneously concern a vast round acreage and a batsman’s tiny field of action…The uninitiated onlooker is…puzzled by the alternation of two batsmen and two bowlers and two sets of stumps - a dual duel - and the strange activity that occurs after every six balls, when the fielders stroll, for chaotic seconds, into positions that imperfectly mirror the positions just abandoned” (149)� This dialectical double-optic demanded of the uninitiated viewer stages two significant transnational strategies; first, that of closely observing the granules that constitute the national terrain for signs of interpellation by the ‘foreign’ through a gesture of what Peter Mallios calls “molecular intensity” marked by “pulling…so closely within the territory claimed by a national frame…that what once were its coordinating figures are now seen as part of a terrain which…at the microscopic level, is found to be pervasively and indissociably constituted and coinhabited by ‘foreign’ signs and mediations”; 34 and second, of pulling back far above and beyond the borders of the state in a transcendent intervention that reveals the nation as a temporal unit best illustrated by Dimock’s “deep time” to breach the fiction that “there can be a discrete, bounded unit of time coinciding with a discrete, bounded unit of space: a chronology coinciding with a territory�” 35 In the above description of the game, Netherland maintains this simultaneity as a dialectical vision as the seeing I/ eye observes both the ‘vast round acreage’ and ‘the batsman’s tiny field of action.’ This ethics demanded of the cricket viewer is incarnated in another form as a persistent binary between the aerial and the earthly, noted in the scenes featuring the geospatial imaginary of Google Earth, the London Eye, and in Hans’ comparisons of cricket to baseball� In addition, the American version of cricket also serves as a metaphoric scale to measure the losses - psychic, emotive, and physical - that immigrants undergo during the process of Americanization� The sport thus brings a tone of critical counternarrativity to the American Dream as can be noted in Hans’ description: Play such orthodox shots in New York and the ball will more than likely halt in the tangled, weedy ground cover…Consequently, in breach of the first rule of batting, the batsman is forced to smash the ball into the air…and batting is turned into a gamble…This degenerate version of the sport…inflicts an injury that is 33 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans� Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969), 51� 34 Peter Mallios, Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 11� 35 Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American Literature and World History�” American Literary History 13 (2001): 759� Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel 247 aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions…as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors� (8-9) The immigrant cricketer’s mastery of batting strokes in his native land is rendered almost useless while playing on American soil and, as Jeffrey Hill notes, “thus through a perverse form of natural selection cricket in America becomes rather like baseball�” 36 The travails of the immigrant cricketer represent what Dimock, referring to the granting of citizenship, calls “a subtractive aggregation, in the sense that the new citizens are admitted into the nation only on reduced terms, unbundled and rebundled, into less than what they were…Induction into the nation comes at a price; it disciplines the inducted by the very logic by which it purports to be universal�” 37 The American Dream is not what it claims to be and cricket, located at the circumferential cusp of the nation, simultaneously casts its gaze inward to the lack at the heart of the national imaginary and looks outward onto other lands and other histories� Netherland’s invocation of cricket as a counternarrative, however, is burdened with troubling political consequences� For one, Netherland argues for a more just acknowledgement of immigrants by yoking together the U�S�’s racial history and the British colonial past� This becomes visible when Chuck tries to remap the other-ness of cricket and its immigrant players through the socio-geography of American culture: “It’s like we’re invisible� Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown…You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer� Put on white to feel black” (16)� But this yoking is more of an uneven sleight-of-hand rather than a considered engagement with both terms of the equation� O’Neill also frequently references British colonial history without seriously engaging with the ways in which the sport functioned as a key hegemonic component for exercising imperial discipline� 38 Hans tells us: “I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice” (121). Besides the somewhat obvious anachronism - the game has moved far beyond its idyllic origins with the involvement of giant corporate sponsorships - this recourse to imperial history evades the ways in which the sport was implicated in the racial hierarchies of colonization� Elizabeth Anker rightly critiques O’Neill: 36 Jeffrey Hill “The American Dream of Chuck Ramkissoon: Cricket in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland�” Journal of Sport History 37 (2010): 226 37 Wai Chee Dimock “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational�” American Literary History 18 (2006): 220� 38 Among the many studies of cricket as an imperial discipline, I found Appadurai, Ashish Nandy, and Orlando Patterson’s work to be particularly useful� See also Ashis Nandy’s The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and Destiny of Games (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000)� See also Orlando Patterson’s “The Ritual of Cricket” in Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, ed� Hilary McD Beckles and Brian Stoddart (Manchester/ NY: Manchester University Press, 1995: 141-147)� See Appadurai’s “Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed� Carol A� Breckenridge (Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)� 248 B imBisar i rom “This elision of racial struggle largely emerges from a romanticization of the sport…which O’Neill amnesiacally uncouples from the cartography of the British Empire� Cleansed of its imperial legacies, cricket is instead heralded to vindicate O’Neill’s vision of cosmopolitanism�” 39 One could make the case that O’Neill’s appropriation of cricket is not a simple case of historical erasure and that the residual histories of imperial inequities and hegemonic sleights of hand emerge, however dimly, in an ironical manner to undercut his representation of cricket as a romanticized counternarrative� For instance, the darker side of the sport is revealed when Chuck, unwittingly, recounts the story of the Trobrian Islanders who were civilized and given “a crash course in democracy” through cricket by the British missionaries� 40 Chuck’s story functions in a duplicitous manner revealing the close association between colonial brutality and the narrative of the civilizing mission crafted to hide such a history of violence� What compounds the irony is that the civilizing narrative is repeated and endorsed by Chuck, himself a product of the indentured labor of colonial history, to Hans, a white Dutchman whose country played a prominent role in imperial history� 41 But these references to cricket as an imperial disciplinary strategy emerge through an irony that escapes Chuck and perhaps the narrative itself� Moreover, the references are not sustained enough to be read as an integral part of Netherland’s political commitments� The ambivalence of cricket is further underlined by the sport’s close affiliations with global corporate finance. Chuck’s grand dream is to use the sport to become a key player in global commerce: “We’re thinking a TV and Internet viewership of seventy million in India alone…Do you have any idea how much money this would bring in? Coca-Cola, Nike, they’re all desperate to get at the South Asian market” (80)� The Indian businessman Faruk Patel takes Chuck’s dreams even further: “My idea was, you don’t need America� Why would you? You have the TV, Internet markets in India, in England���America? Not relevant� You put the stadium there and you’re done” (251)� While these imagined futures question the ‘natural’ boundaries of the nation, they are also problematic for their uncritical acceptance of finance-capital driven globalization and remind us of Peter Fritzsche’s important caution that “moving from the nation to the world is not a guarantee of political virtue�” 42 39 Elizabeth Anker “Allegories of Falling and the 9/ 11 Novel�” American Literary History 23�3 (2011): 468� 40 Orlando Patterson eloquently describes the pedagogical imperative embedded in the game: “The most striking thing about cricket, as a game, is its emphasis on order��� cricket is exceptional both for its complexity and its almost consciously articulated ideology of obedience and authority, the latter being symbolized in the person of the umpire� Nor is it an accident that cricket is one of the few games which requires two umpires�” See Patterson’s “The Ritual of Cricket” in Liberation Cricket, 146-7� 41 As James Wood points out: “Hans is not a ‘colonial’ like his fellow-cricketers but a colonist, part of the history of Dutch imperialism that has marked places as different as Java and America�” 42 Peter Fritzsche, “Global History and Bounded Subjects: A Response to Thomas Bender” American Literary History 18 (2006): 284� Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel 249 Unlike Chuck, Hans’ relationship with cricket is more personal and the sport provides an ameliorative balm as he associates it with “unhurried time” (45) and idyllic childhood scenes with his mother watching him play� But the memories also ultimately hinder Hans’ abilities in the American version of the game: “There was nothing, in principle, to stop me from changing my game, from taking up the cow-shots and lofted bashes…I could not…I would not change…self-transformation has its limits; and my limit was reached in the peculiar matter of batting� I would stubbornly continue to bat as I always had, even if it meant the end of making runs” (48-9)� It is through cricket that we glimpse Hans’ complicated relationship to the national imaginary and his paradoxical gestures towards his identity� As opposed to the programmatic procedure of earning formal American citizenship symbolized by the bureaucratic nightmare of the DMV office with its “extraordinary clutter of columns” and “faces of sullen hostility” (65), Hans describes a ‘naturalization’ of a different sort that stages the complex transmigrancy of his life� During his last league game in the U�S�, Hans, at Chuck’s insistence to retool his batting style, executes an unorthodox shot with “an unsightly, crooked heave” repeating it again “with a still freer swing” (176), hitting sixers with the remaining balls� Even though Hans soon loses his wicket and his team loses the game, he demonstrates his competence in the American version of cricket: “What happened after that…ultimately didn’t count…what counted was that I’d done it� I’d hit the ball in the air like an American cricketer, and I’d done so without injury to my sense of myself” (176)� This initiates a process of recovery that culminates in Hans acquiring a narrative and navigational capability symbolized in his passing the second driver’s license test� He indulges in this celebratory moment of abandoning past burdens and describes his dream of a cricket stadium in breathless prose: “All of which may explain why I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium, and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers…there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion steps onto this impossible grass field in America, and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized” (176)� The implications of this passage are layered� We see Hans yoking together incommensurables: dream and reality in the phrase ‘to dream in all seriousness’; the racial harmony of the future in the black, brown, and white faces united by the cricketing spectacle in the ‘impossible’ grass field; and Hans’ paradoxical assertion of being ‘naturalized’ when, in fact, he does not pursue formal American citizenship� My analysis of Netherland’s worldly gestures will be incomplete without taking into account the sections featuring the geospatial imaginary of Google Earth� These segments further extend the novel’s worldliness by foregrounding the transnational potential of new technologies and their ability to circumvent the nation’s borders while revealing the weaknesses of these new modalities in generating an ethics of the double-optic previously demonstrated on the cricket field. Google Earth represents the subversive potential 250 B imBisar i rom of the geospatial media that offers us the possibility, unlike traditional cartography, of imagining a future without national boundaries� In Netherland, Google Earth is resonant of what Rita Barnard calls “a noncorpum” which is “a simultaneously familiar and alien entity that moves in and out of various bodies, minds, and locations, traverses the world�” 43 The noncorpum is a grammar of the mobile optic able to short-circuit national borders and establish narrative vantage points beyond the nation’s hegemonic narratives� As a geospatial imaginary that, according to Sangeet Kumar, “challenge(s) the very concept of defined international boundaries due to their ‘borderless’ architecture”, Google Earth resonates with transnational potential� 44 We first see Hans using Google Earth as a compensatory gesture for his absent family: There was no movement in my marriage, either; but, flying on Google’s satellite function…I surreptitiously traveled to England� Starting with…the United States, I moved the navigation box across the north Atlantic…and with the image purely photographic, descended finally on Landford Road. It was always a clear and beautiful day…the scene was depthless� My son’s dormer was visible…but there was no way to see more, or deeper� I was stuck� (123-4) Even though the passage describes the potential of the geospatial imaginary to zip headily across the Atlantic in disregard of national borders, it also foregrounds a limitation as Hans notes that the scenery always remained unchanging and that there was no way for him ‘to see more, or deeper�’ Google Earth’s limitations to account for the sentient are further underlined as the above passage immediately segues into an episode highlighting the failure of another vision; Hans’ inability to see into his estranged wife’s life� Hans confides that he had no other knowledge about Rachel besides the perfunctory details of her work life: “Of what one might suppose to be a crucial question of fact - the question of other men - I had no knowledge and did not dare make inquiries� The biggest, most salient questions - What was she thinking? What was she feeling? - were likewise beyond me� The very idea that one’s feelings could give shape to one’s life had become an odd one” (125)� The second episode repeats the heady freedom of Google Earth that we have already noted: I go to Google Maps…I rocket westward…to America…It is, necessarily, a bright, clear day…Nothing seems to be going on…consequently with a single brush on the touch pad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all - have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere� From up here though, a human’s movement is a barely intelligible thing� Where would he move to, and for what? ���The USA as such is nowhere to be seen� (252) 43 Rita Barnard “Fictions of the Global,” Novel 42 (2009): 213� 44 Sangeet Kumar, “Google Earth and the nation state: Sovereignty in the age of new media�” Global Media and Communication 6(2): 158� Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel 251 In both the Google Earth scenes, we clearly sense its liberatory potential in the heady un-tethering of physical limitations� But the images are also deceptive as they represent a static monovalence unable to capture the complexities of human reality� The geospatial imaginary is representative of only one side of the double-optic; that of the distanced view approximating Dimock’s perspective of ‘deep-time�’ The technologically mediated imaginary is unable to generate, on its own, the double-optic central to the novel’s transnational vision that holds the aerial and the earthly in a meaning-generating nexus� Having noted the failure of the geospatial imaginary, the novel moves towards a reiteration of its central vision in its penultimate scene where Hans and his family go up the giant Ferris wheel on the banks of the Thames� Thedouble optic that threads Netherland’s narrative is reiterated in the attempt to marry the binaries of the technological and the human, to fuse the critical potential afforded by the distanced view and the intimate connections of the domestic sphere� As Hans goes higher up the wheel, O’Neill uses the defamiliarization technique to hint at the political possibilities embedded in the distanced view: As a Londoner, I find myself consulted about what we’re all seeing. At first, this is easy…But the higher we go, the less recognizable the city becomes� Trafalgar square is not where you expect it to be� Charing Cross���must be carefully detected. I find myself turning to a guidebook for help. The difficulty arises from the mishmashing of spatial dimensions, yes, but also from a quantitative attack: the English capital is huge…‘Buckingham Palace? ’ one of the Lithuanian ladies asks me, and I cannot say� (254) While the passage notes the positive interventions of the aerial view in rendering strange what was once familiar and proximate, there is also a clear overlap with the static vision of Google Earth in the inability to detect a ‘sign of life�’ As they reach the top, Hans’s confusion segues into a tranquil domesticity when he reaches out to Rachel: “A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attached itself to this slow climb…that they have made it thus far, to a point where they can see horizons previously unseen, and the old earth reveals itself newly” (254)� More than a statement of domestic sentimentalism, the presence of the human element - here Rachel is recast in her earlier role as “a human flashlight” (90) - renders the initial confusion of the lifeless, defamiliarized landscape into a meaningful metaphor for the future by re-inserting the double-optic central to Netherland’s vision� By bringing in Rachel, the character associated with the ground and the surface, the novel tempers the heady confusion of the non-corporal aerial vision 45 with the corporal and the sentient� 45 The play between the aerial and the terrestrial is embedded in the very title of the novel� Stephen Amidon notes in his review that the title “suggests the birthplace of its narrator…But it also describes the desolate state of his marriage to Rachel…And then there is the patch of Brooklyn lowland where the unhappily single Hans comes to spend his weekends…there is [also] the lowest land of all, the pit a few blocks from 252 B imBisar i rom Netherland ends with a scene of profound ambivalence as Hans recalls a Staten Island Ferry ride with his deceased mother where “finally, inevitably, everybody looked to Manhattan…A world was lighting up before us…in the lilac acres of two amazingly high towers…To speculate about the meaning of such a moment would be a stained, suspect business…I wasn’t the only one of us to make out and accept an extraordinary promise in what we saw - the tall approaching cape, a people risen in light” (255-6)� This ‘extraordinary promise’ rendered by the narrating eye/ I glancing towards the shores of the United States is, however, immediately undercut as Hans also recalls that his mother, the European alien who does not share his vision was, instead, “looking not at New York but at me, and smiling” (256)� Hans’ mother diverts our gaze away from Manhattan’s towers towards her son� Netherland ends with Hans replicating his mother’s gestures - “Which is how I come to face my family with the same smile” (256) - and his gaze is diverted once again by an unseen and as yet indescribable vision associated with his son Jake� Netherland’s ending, with its competing and parallel gazes that simultaneously draw the reader toward the shores of the United States and divert her from such national moorings, stages, once again, the novel’s ambivalent response to the national imaginary� This tussle between competing gazes, however, remains confined to the Euro-American protagonists as Chuck’s perspective is left out� In analyzing Netherland’s counternarratives, we can, then, trace the ways in which the post-9/ 11 American novel engages with the U�S� state’s constrictive hegemonic imaginaries by hinting at a yet-to-arrive-worldliness through its transnational imaginaries and by revisiting the problematic of American identity while retaining ambivalent affiliations to the powerful appropriative impulses of the nation, globe, and the visions of a globalized present/ future driven by finance capital. While Netherland takes on the challenge of imagining worldliness and re-mapping the United States through buried histories and the efferent affiliations of its protagonists oblique to the accumulative forces of state power after 9/ 11, we can also trace - in the gaps, fissures, and slippages that mark the various entities operating under its transnational umbrella - the cultural-aesthetic sphere’s difficulties in sustaining the ethical burden of constant vigilance against power structures and their hegemonic imaginaries� Hans’s loft where the twin towers once stood�” See his review “Netherland by Joseph O’Neill�” The Sunday Times (June 8, 2008) <http: / / entertainment�timesonline�co�uk/ tol/ arts_and_entertainment/ books/ fiction/ article4074760.ece> Towards a Worldly post-9/ 11 American Novel 253 Works Cited Amidon, Stephen� “Netherland by Joseph O’Neill�” The Sunday Times (June 8, 2008) <http: / / entertainment�timesonline�co�uk/ tol/ arts_and_entertainment/ books/ fiction/ article4074760.ece> Anker, Elizabeth� “Allegories of Falling and the 9/ 11 Novel�” American Literary History 23�3 (2011): 463-82� Appadurai, Arjun� “Globalization and the Research Imagination�” International Social Science Journal, 160 (1999): 229-238� Barnard, Rita� “Fictions of the Global,” Novel 42 (2009): 207-15� Bender, Thomas� “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives�” Ed� Thomas Bender� Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002: 1-21� Didion, Joan� Miami, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987� Dimock, Wai Chee� “Deep Time: American Literature and World History�” American Literary History 13 (2001): 755-775� -----� “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational�” American Literary History 18 (2006): 219-228� Edwards, Brian and Dilip Gaonkar, “Introduction: Globalizing American Studies” in Globalizing American Studies, ed� Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010)� Fishkin, Shelley Fisher� “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004�” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 17-57� Fritzsche, Peter� “Global History and Bounded Subjects: A Response to Thomas Bender” American Literary History 18 (2006): 283-287� Gray, Richard Gray� “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis�” American Literary History 21 (2009): 128-151� Hill, Jeffrey� “The American Dream of Chuck Ramkissoon: Cricket in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland�” Journal of Sport History 37 (2010): 219-34� Irr, Caren� “Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in Twenty-First-Century Expatriate Fiction�” American Literary History 23�3 (2011): 660-79� Kaplan, Amy� “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003�” American Quarterly 56 (2004): 1-18� Kumar, Sangeet� “Google Earth and the nation state: Sovereignty in the age of new media�” Global Media and Communication 6(2): 154-176� Levinas, Emmanuel� Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans� Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969� -----. Is it Righteous to Be? : Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas� Ed� Jill Robbins, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011� Mallios, Peter� Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity� Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010� Medovoi, Leerom� “Nation, Globe, Hegemony: Post-Fordist Preconditions of the Transnational Turn in American Studies�” interventions 7 (2005): 162: 79� O’Neill, Joseph� “The Great Irish-Dutch-American Novel�” Interview with Katie Bacon� The Atlantic� <http: / / www�theatlantic�com/ magazine/ archive/ 2008/ 05/ the-great-irish-dutch-american-novel/ 6788/ > 254 B imBisar i rom -----� “Bowling Alone: A review by Joseph O’Neill�” The Atlantic (September 11, 2007)� <http: / / www�powells�com/ review/ 2007_09_11> -----� Netherland. NY: Pantheon Books, 2008� -----� Interview with Charley Reilly� Contemporary Literature 52 (2011): 1-20� -----� “Netherland: The Novel of the Age�” Radio conversation with Christopher Lydon� http: / / www�radioopensource�org/ joseph-oneills-netherland-the-novel-of-the-age/ � Ong, Aihwa� Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke UP, 1999� Patterson, Orlando� “The Ritual of Cricket�” Ed� Hilary McD Beckles and Brian Stoddart� Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture. Manchester/ NY: Manchester UP, 1995: 141-147� Pease, Donald� The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2009)� -----� “Re-thinking ‘American Studies after US Exceptionalism,’ American Literary History, 21: 1 (2009)� -----� “Introduction: Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn” in Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed� Winfried Fluck, Donald Pease and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011)� -----� “Obama’s ‘Transnational’ Presidency�” Radio conversation with Christopher Lydon� <http: / / www�radioopensource�org/ donald-pease-obamas-transnational-presidency/ > Robbins, Bruce� “The Worlding of the American Novel” in The Cambridge History of The American Novel, ed� Leonard Cassuto (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011)� Rodgers, Daniel� “American Exceptionalism Revisited,” Raritan, 24: 2, 2009� Rothberg, Michael� “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/ 11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray�” American Literary History 21 (2009): 152-158� Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc� “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration�” Anthropological Quarterly, 68 (1995): 48-63� Sklair, Leslie “Sociology of the Global System�” Ed� Frank J� Lechner and John Boli� The Globalization Reader (2nd edition), Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008: 70-76� Steinmetz, George� “The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” Public Culture 15 (2003)� Tayler, Christopher� Review of Netherland� The Guardian (14 June 2008)� <http: / / www� guardian�co�uk/ books/ 2008/ jun/ 14/ saturdayreviewsfeatres�guardianreview7> Voelz, Johannes� “Utopias of Transnationalism and the Neoliberal State” in Re- Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed� Winfried Fluck, Donald Pease and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011)� Wood, James� “Beyond a Boundary�” The New Yorker (May 26, 2008) <http: / / www� newyorker�com/ arts/ critics/ books/ 2008/ 05/ 26/ 080526crbo_books_wood> J ohannes v oelz Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security When critically examining American exceptionalism of the cold war period, American studies scholars have frequently focused on the anticommunist left� The reasons for this focus now appear rather obvious: cold war liberalism, as articulated by a wide range of writers, intellectuals, and politicians from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, seems to offer the prime example of what Donald Pease has called the “Janus-faced” structure of American exceptionalism: conceived within the coordinates of the liberal worldview, the United States appeared as exceptionally committed to freedom and democracy� In light of what was seen as the expansive will of the totalitarian other, the U�S� appeared as the only hope� The rituals of consent to a set of “American” values that liberals not only enacted but morally coerced simultaneously created the space for the U�S� state to systematically act out imperial violence that grossly contradicted what America purportedly stood for� 1 Recently, scholars have come up with an explanation for how Americans managed to live with the contradictions arising from American exceptionalism’s two faces: the magical resolution was provided by “national security” - a rhetoric and a logic of action which was articulated at the very moment the cold war became an entrenched bipolar world order. Based on the redefinition of aggression as the defense of freedom, “national security” provided a legitimation for state violence and thus made exceptionalism’s two faces appear indistinguishable� A closer look at postwar liberalism’s theory of security, however, reveals that American exceptionalism did not amount to a seamless and unified system of thought or belief, but was instead marked by contradictions� These contradictions did not primarily inhabit the place that ideology critique appoints to them� Rather than operating beneath the level of intelligibility, coming to the fore merely as symptoms, the contradictions that run through cold war liberalism’s approach to security constitute liberalism’s critical impetus� Indeed, I will show that liberal intellectuals tended to be conflicted about “security” because the concept in its primary denotation stood for an excess of rationality that was seen as a threat to the virtues enshrined in civilization� 1 Pease writes, “After analyzing what I called the Janus face of American Exceptionalism, I concluded that the relations between US citizens’ belief in US exceptionalism and the state’s production of exceptions to its core tenets might be best described in psychosocial terms as structures of disavowal� By the state’s exceptions I referred to measures … which violated the anti-imperialist norms that were embedded within the discourse of American exceptionalism� In enabling US citizens to disavow the state’s exceptions that threatened their beliefs, the discourse of exceptionalism regulated US citizens’ responses to historical events” (“Re-thinking” 19)� See also his The New American Exceptionalism, particularly 141� 256 J ohannes v oelz Cold war liberalism did not only underwrite the aspirations of American global hegemony as “leader of the free world,” but also articulated a critical theory that was invested in a multifaceted ideal of insecurity that emerged from the aversion to security� This ideal of insecurity found its full articulation in the liberal theory of aesthetics� Though this theory is now commonly seen as an attempt to depoliticize culture and the public sphere with the effect of entrenching the status quo, in fact postwar liberals’ ruminations on the aesthetic were deeply political, as becomes clear by reading them with an eye to the problem of security and insecurity� For this purpose, I will analyze the formal and informal literary criticism of three very different cold war intellectuals: journalist Whittaker Chambers, who became a founding figure of Christian conservatism but nevertheless shared many of the convictions characteristic of postwar liberalism, literary critic Lionel Trilling, and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr� All three were staunch anticommunists during the 1940s and 1950s, a position Chambers and Trilling took up after renouncing their earlier communist sympathies (Schlesinger is the exception here: born in 1917, he was too young to participate in the full trajectory from 1930s communism to postwar anticommunism); all three emphasized the falseness and danger of the ideal of security; all three turned to the aesthetic realm to explain why an anti-totalitarian society needed an appreciation of insecurity in both the aesthetic and the political realm; and while they all were skeptical of the militarization of society undertaken in the name of “national security,” all three nonetheless harmonized their critique of the ideal of security with American exceptionalism’s claims to global leadership, even if this involved violence� I am suggesting in this article, then, that a post-exceptionalist perspective on American exceptionalism needs to be able to take seriously exceptionalism’s constitutive contradictions and its internal contestations� What this means is that a post-exceptionalist analysis of American exceptionalism should neither blindly follow the categories devised by exceptionalism, nor exhaust its intellectual energies in the critical debunking of those categories - with the result of ascribing more coherence to them than they ever possessed� In taking up this act of redescription, I also hope to contribute to recent attempts to reassess the tradition of liberalism, not in order to singlemindedly defend it against the critiques leveled at it over the last decades, but to reclaim its critical potentials� 2 2 Among literary scholars, see for instance, Amanda Anderson, “Character and Ideology; ” among intellectual historians, see John McGowan, American Liberalism; among political theorists, see Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom�” A common touchstone for recent reconsiderations of liberalism is the work of late political theorist Judith Shklar, particularly her essay “The Liberalism of Fear�” Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 257 I. Embracing National Security, Rejecting the Ideal of Security: Liberalism, Realism, Tragedy During the early years of the cold war, the term security became a buzzword for politicians, intellectuals, and the broad public, and it did so in two contrary ways� It is during the years immediately following World War II that “national security” became an established - and ideologically powerful - phrase� Up to that point, the established terms had been “national interest” and “national defense�” In 1947, the National Security Act and the founding of the National Security Council institutionalized the term (hitherto used occasionally though not self-reflexively 3 )� The corresponding discourse demanded priority for national security in all areas of life, and “national security” became the subject of the hour� 4 As one journalist wrote, “it has become impossible to read a newspaper, or leaf through a magazine, or go to a dinner party, without being made sharply aware by a story or an article, or a chance remark, of the widespread interest in the future security of the United States” (qtd� in Neocleous 76-77)� But simultaneously the term “security” was in heavy use in a different sense as well� Here, security was connoted negatively, as an ideal to be rejected� I argue in this article that these two understandings of security did not exist side by side, as homonyms, but rather stood in dialogue with each other, and that this dialogue contributed to the complex of significations that made up American exceptionalism� The sudden prevalence of the notion of security that we find in the phrase “national security” and that seems to have done the ideological work of resolving the contradictions between American idealism and American power politics can therefore be understood only if it is related to security’s other meaning� In this complementary dimension, security stood for an excessive trust in progress and rationality, a political utopianism that had ended up in a kind of dialectic of the Enlightenment� The ideal of security in this sense was seen as harmful because it was an illusion that allowed people to shy away from reality and because it led to catastrophic results once the ideal was put into practice� In the opening pages of The Vital Center (1949), Arthur Schlesinger gave voice to the first of these two aspects: “We must recognize that this is the nature of our age: … security is a foolish dream of old men, [and] crisis will always be with us” (10)� Reinhold Niebuhr stressed the second aspect� He argued that the philosophy growing 3 Mark Neocleous lists a number of earlier occurrences of the term “national security,” among them the National Security League, a nativist organization formed in 1914, and articles on foreign policy by Edward Mead Earle and Walter Lippman from the late 1930s and early 1940s. He concludes that “what is significant is that although the term appears in these [earlier] texts there is little substantive analysis of what it is or might mean” (Critique 209n2)� 4 On this point, see Neocleous: “The most forceful advocate of the concept, Navy Secretary James Forrestal, commented that ‘national security’ can only be secured with a broad and comprehensive front, and made a point of adding that ‘I am using the word security here consistently and continuously rather than defense… ‘I like your words national security,’ one Senator commented” (Critique 76)� 258 J ohannes v oelz out of the Enlightenment, “intent … upon eliminating the natural hazards to comfort, security and contentment,” created “the ironic situation that the same technical efficiency which provided our comforts has also placed us at the center of the tragic developments in world events” (Irony 43, 45)� Schlesinger, Niebuhr, and their fellow anticommunist intellectuals consequently began to call for a repudiation of the ideal of security� They associated their critical stance variously with political, moral, and theological “realism.” Rarely defined precisely, these variants of realism shared the conviction that evil was ineradicable, that human nature was prone to weakness when tempted by vanity and power, and that plans to engineer a future free of conflict and hardship would run up against the stubborn facts of the human condition� As Richard Pells writes in his classic intellectual history of postwar liberalism, “Niebuhr, Schlesinger, and Trilling all [argued that both liberal progressives and socialists] overlooked the extent to which people were unmanageable and unpredictable, and both assumed that society could be made to conform to some preconceived plan or ideal� Such innocence about history and human nature no longer seemed charming to the postwar intellectuals; they preferred a political philosophy that was sensitive to the illogical and accidental elements in social life” (Pells 137)� 5 For the individual, this meant that one had to face the messiness of all action, its necessary implicatedness in that which the action was designed to oppose� Essentially, the realist view emphasized the tragic character of the modern condition: morally forced to act in a world full of evil, the individual couldn’t help becoming evil’s helper, at least to some degree� 6 5 Pells emphasizes the crucial role Hannah Arendt played in anticommunist intellectual circles� Not only was she a frequent contributor to Partisan Review, but her Origins of Totalitarianism became a key text in defining a politico-philosophical position of antitotalitarianism� In particular, Arendt emphasized totalitarianism’s (and by implication: security’s) problematic aspiration of expunging the contingency of the future� In Pells’s summary: “If American and Europeans did not appreciate the virtues inherent in these venerable political doctrines [of rights, proceduralism, and civic engagement], [Arendt] feared, the totalitarians would make good their promise to reorganize their world� Against those who called themselves the sovereigns of the future, she hurled the accumulated wisdom of the past” (94). It is difficult to find an explicit rendition of this view in Origins, but the following passage shows how she creates an irresolvable conflict between “human dignity” - which she grounds in part in human creativity - and planning the future: “For respect for human dignity implies the recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world� No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course of all events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something so new that nobody ever foresaw it” (Origins 458)� 6 Amanda Anderson has recently emphasized the degree to which mid-century liberalism adopted a moderately pessimistic outlook on life and thus articulated a sharp divergence from eighteenth-century liberalism that was organized around characterizations such as ‘optimistic’ and ‘blissfully progressive�’ Like myself, Anderson sees liberalism’s turn toward the skeptical as a political critique that should not be hastily brushed aside by the notion that liberalism disavowed its own investment in power struggles: “Liberalism in this twentieth-century form is thus Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 259 Realism thus served as the antithesis to what anticommunist writers interpreted as an inhumane, mechanical, thoroughly rational, and mistakenly optimistic worldview� While they interpreted this worldview as characteristic of the international communist left of the 1930s and the emerging communist bloc of the post-war years, it is important to understand that the early cold war intellectuals did not simply engage in a strategy of othering - a kind of Schmittian politicization emerging from the distinction between friend and enemy, as a result of which the Soviet Union would have appeared as the evil foe� This is precisely because their threat construction was more abstract and theoretical, drawing on critical theories of modernity� Since, in their minds, the gravest threat to civilization arose from a philosophical outlook that overvalued instrumental reason and understood the world as raw material to be shaped according to human designs of order, danger lurked everywhere, at least theoretically: the communist bloc, the United States, the entire West were at risk, since the reign of radical rationality seemed to be spreading everywhere� Indeed, on one level the anticommunist critique of the ideal of security ran counter to any easy distinction between “us” and “them,” considering that it was to a large degree a self-critique: after all, nearly all postwar anticommunists had been affiliated with the communist left only a few years earlier, either as party members or fellow travelers� If it is true that cold war liberals became supportive of domestic and foreign policies of national security only against the background of rejecting the ideal of security-as-rationality in a self-critical maneuver, we must also revise the dominant explanation of the triumph of “national security�” For in this dominant view, security gains political cachet precisely because it helps draw and foster the boundary between inside and outside, friend and enemy� 7 To be sure, cold war discourse can be seen as the attempt to transpose internal divisions and conflicts into a binary identity-logic of us-versus-them, and in that sense cold war liberals exacerbated the rigidity of cold war anticommunism. But at the center of cold war liberalism we nonetheless find deeply rooted resonances of a post-Romanticist critique of the Enlightenment� And this critique located the object to be criticized in the history of the West, and thus made the problems represented by communism not a property of “them” but of “us�” As I noted above, security, however, was not merely seen as the major source of threat; security was also seen as an unavoidable concern around which the response to the threat had to be organized� In a sense, the cold war project of anticommunist intellectuals could be captured by the slogan “Security From Security�” This phrase is less paradoxical than it sounds, for it combines two different concepts of security� However, only one of them precisely a rejection of the progressive optimism that was seen to mark nineteenthcentury liberalism and its heir, twentieth-century radicalism� In this sense, a certain noncommunist liberalism aims to preserve the democratic project against considerable dangers as manifested on both the right and the left” (“Character and Ideology” 217)� See also Anderson’s “The Liberal Aesthetic�” 7 This line of thought finds expression, for instance, in the works of Dillon and Campbell. 260 J ohannes v oelz - absolute rationality - can be clearly defined. The competing notion of security, which would inform the cold war intellectuals’ stance toward policies of national security and the infrastructure of the national security state, remained more elusive because it rested on an unstable balance: it had to find ways of actively confronting threat without, in doing so, succumbing to the same radical rationality that posed the threat in the first place. Harking back to the romantic critique of modernity, and articulating revisionist versions of liberalism that widened liberalism’s narrow base in the Enlightenment (what Nancy Rosenblum has called “Another Liberalism”), anticommunist writers and thinkers frequently turned to the aesthetic - and particularly to literature - in order to find an effective response to the threat emerging from security-as-rationality� In the views of Whittaker Chambers, Lionel Trilling, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr�, whose dual conceptions of security I will explore in the following pages, literature provided insights, applicable to the political world, in how to face a world dependent on human action yet recalcitrant to human planning� In Michael Kimmage’s succinct phrase, “tragedy was a gift that art could give to politics” (164)� This turn to the tragic could take an immanent or a transcendent turn� In the immanent version (seen in Trilling and Schlesinger), fiction demonstrated the necessary failure of grand political projects, from revolution to utopian communities� In the transcendent version (Chambers), literature demonstrated the failure of human design and brought to awareness the primacy of God’s order� In both cases, the aesthetic provided a domain in which to experience the limits of the human capacity to order the world and plan the future - and thus brought home a realist view of things� When it came to literature, however, the commitment to “realism” didn’t translate into the period-style of the same name: the literature these thinkers favored could be romantic, realist (though decidedly not social-realist), or modernist� What mattered was that it did not openly endorse a particular political ideology, nor aim to push an agenda, but insisted on the discontinuity between the realms of politics and culture without thereby rendering culture apolitical� Aesthetically, this meant that literature was not to submit to the social realism dogmatically favored by the Communist Party� When Partisan Review, in 1937, severed its ties to the Communist Party and re-appeared as an independent publication with an aesthetic orientation toward what might be described as “moderate modernism,” the “Editorial Statement” of the re-launch issue declared, “Formerly associated with the Communist Party, Partisan Review strove from the first against its drive to equate the interests of literature with those of factional politics� Our reappearance on an independent basis suggests our conviction that the totalitarian trend is inherent in that movement and that it can no longer be combated from within” (“Editorial Statement” 3)� But evading the totalitarian tendencies of the Communist Party by granting independence to the interests of literature and politics turned out to be more difficult than it seemed. In fact, independence here meant basing literature and politics on the same set of liberal principles� As Amanda Anderson remarks, “the terms that were advanced to deepen the Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 261 political debate on the left - pessimism, tragedy, irony, paradox, ambiguity, and complexity - were also the aesthetic terms valorized by those on the literary left, and coincide with the aesthetic values of modernism” (“Character and Ideology” 220), though it should be emphasized, again, that Trilling, Schlesinger, and Chambers found these “modernist” aesthetic values in nineteenth-century fiction as much as in modernist writing. If realism was a touchstone for both liberal and conservative anticommunists in their struggle against the utopian belief in security, it is also what propelled the embrace of security as it appeared in the phrase “national security.” In such influential government communiqués as George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” cabled from Moscow in February 1946, the Clifford-Elsey Report of the same year, and Kennan’s X-article published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 - all of which were instrumental in establishing the reign of national security - political realism seemed the only possible stance toward the Soviet Union� Since Soviet leaders were perceived as unwilling or unable to work toward a settlement, the aim of ever achieving stable peace became denigrated as unrealistic� Therefore, rather than serving as a synonym of peace, national security became associated with the anti-isolationist and anti-utopian position of engaging in the world in order to defend freedom against totalitarian forces� Though defense at times lost its primary connotation of passivity or reaction and instead became associated with a pro-active stance that aimed to be one step ahead of the totalitarian enemy, national security was nonetheless differentiated from the imposition of order� That the “defense of freedom” was inevitably beset by contradictions and required acts of violent aggression impossible to square with the values of Western democracy was what, in the eyes of cold war thinkers, made national security a tragic - and for that matter all the more humane - affair� To put it differently, national security was seen as a defense strategy of freedom that was necessarily bedeviled by the hazards of chance and inconsistency, and for that very reason appeared as an antidote to, and triumph over, the rationalist ideal of security� II. Whittaker Chambers and the “Will to Security” Most anticommunist intellectuals had aligned themselves with communism during the early 1930s, either as party members or fellow travelers, and had eventually experienced their moment of disillusion (their “Kronstadt,” as it was frequently called in reference to Lenin’s violent suppression of the 1921 rebellion in the naval fortress Kronstadt)� 8 Once they had turned against their former political conviction, literature could become a vital weapon in the fight against communism. Anticommunist intellectuals insisted on the irreducibility of art to politics, but the capacity of art to make clear this 8 For an account of the significance of the Kronstadt for anticommunists, see Louis Fischer’s introduction to The God that Failed (edited by Richard Crossman), a 1949 collection of “Kronstadts,” among them Richard Wright’s and Arthur Koestler’s; see also Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn, chapter 3 (78-108)� 262 J ohannes v oelz distinction was itself seen as the most political function of art� For Chambers, Trilling, and Schlesinger, literature became the domain of insecurity, and insecurity encompassed both an aesthetics of the uncertain, and a politics averse to non-dialectical rationality� In the remainder of this article, I will detail how Chambers, Trilling, and Schlesinger each articulated a cultural critique of security by engaging nineteenth-century fiction. I will begin with Whittaker Chambers, who in my “liberal” trio acts as the odd man out: anti-progressive, pessimistic, and nearly zealously religious, his conservatism seems to set him apart from the tradition of liberalism altogether� Yet considering that postwar liberalism defined itself predominantly against the progressivism of the 1930s, it might be more accurate to say that Chambers simply went furthest in repudiating his former allegiances� Beginning my discussion with Chambers means beginning with the limit case of cold war liberalism� I turn to Chambers not because I see in him a resource for reclaiming the critical potentials of cold war liberalism, but because I wish to signal right away that key features of postwar liberal thought, which in the case of Trilling and Schlesinger warrant renewed attention, were compatible with the conservative antimodernism of a Whittaker Chambers� Revisiting cold war liberalism, in other words, is historically incomplete without taking the conservative variant into consideration� This is all the more the case since anticommunist liberals like Trilling and Schlesinger themselves would eventually have an impact on neoconservatism at least as much as they would on the left� Chambers’s autobiography Witness (1952) quickly became a manifesto of postwar conservatism, a status which the book has kept to the present day� From a literary perspective it presents a confessional conversion narrative in which the protagonist details his fall - he becomes attracted to communism out of personal and existential despair and soon becomes an underground agent for the party - and his ensuing conversion back to a faith devoted as much to Christianity as to an anticommunist United States� The confessional mode not only offered an intelligible moral framework for Chambers’s life story but also came with immediate political benefits: it conveniently legitimized informing on other members of what was presented as a communist conspiracy (the elevation of informing to a moral virtue would soon be picked up in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, released in 1954)� Moreover, the book served as a justification of Chambers’s testimony in the Alger Hiss case, which became necessary because the two Hiss trials of 1948 and 1950 were unable to settle the debate about Hiss’s role as a communist spy and thus about the truth of Chambers’s allegations� But most of all, the conversion formula allowed Chambers to give meaning to his life by elevating his experiences to the existential struggle of Western civilization in light of vital threats stemming from communism, which was itself presented as the radicalization of Western rationalism� Michael Kimmage astutely comments that “Chambers’s highest ambition for Witness was to weave his life story into the history of Western culture� In this ambition, his three models were Augustine, George Fox, and Henry Adams� Christianity united these three Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 263 figures, who were otherwise far apart in historical moment and sensibility. They were Christian writers who wrote about themselves in part to confess their own sins and the sins of those around them” (216)� Chambers drew on a familiar repertoire of topoi to articulate his conservative reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and the resulting danger and appeal of communism. The first of these resources was pastoralism. From the very beginning of the introductory chapter - the “Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children” - Chambers situates his confession in nature, far away from the corruption of the city: “Beloved Children, I am sitting in the kitchen of the little house at Medfield, our second farm which is cut off by the ridge and a quarter-mile across the fields from our home place, where you are” (3)� But Chambers’s pastoralism is never entirely credible� Though lacking the suave urbanity of the New York intellectuals, Chambers was too cosmopolitan, polyglot, and intellectual to be a convincing yeoman farmer� 9 Chambers, however, attempted to reconcile nature with culture, mediating them by way of religion� Both expressed the sanctity of creation and demanded “reverence and awe for life and the world, which is the ultimate meaning of Beethoven and Shakespeare” (19)� Clearly, Whittaker Chambers was a man of letters, and he used his autobiography to fashion himself that way� He relates how he read his way through his grandfather’s library as a boy; later, he absorbed the “Great Books” education at Columbia� From his college days on, he moreover was an occasional writer of literature himself, at one point with considerable success: in 1932, shortly before he became an agent in the underground of the Communist Party, he published four proletarian short stories in the New Masses, which gained him much praise from the communist literary left, and an editorial post at the New Masses� 10 It is not surprising, then, that Chambers looked to literature to support his critique of security along the lines of the Christian tradition - a tradition that, since Augustine, had identified the feeling of being secure as a lack of humility in the face of human limitation and God’s infinite and inscrutable will, and that insisted on defining true security as resting with God� 11 In Witness, Chambers singles out Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) as the literary work ideally capable of battling against the Enlightenment mindset of godless rationalism by returning the reader to a Christian ethics of 9 In a sense, his pastoralism is reminiscent of George Kennan’s, who claimed that his weekend farm life was the best training for his work as a policy strategist, and who referred to his farm - one imagines with a sense of ironic relish - by the name of the little Pennsylvania town on whose outskirts it was located: “East Berlin” (see John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan 157)� 10 See Witness 261-64, and Kimmage 48-52� 11 For Augustine, “securitas” denoted the antithesis of the proper fear of God, and usually referred to a mistaken assurance of salvation (see Schrimm-Heins I: 137)� On this view, a sense of danger in this world fulfills a crucial task for remaining appropriately fearful of God� In John Hamilton’s summary, “Augustine … claims that to be utterly secure in this world would threaten true security with God� It would deceive us with a resting point, when the only valid resting point should be in the light of God’s grace” (63)� 264 J ohannes v oelz humility� Here, as throughout Witness, Chambers’s own experiences are burdened with providing the immediate proof of his argument, and thus turn his own experience into a representative case: “In [the novel’s] pages can be found the play of forces that carried me into the Communist Party, and in the same pages can be found the play of forces that carried me out of the Communist Party” (Witness 134). Chambers defined the “communist vision” as a “vision of Man without God,” which challenged man “to prove [the vision] by reducing the meaningless chaos of nature, by imposing on it his rational will to order, abundance, security, peace” (10)� Rejecting the progressive optimism exemplified by the communist vision, Chambers declared the rational will to security (and to order, abundance, and peace) itself a threat, and supported his argument by pointing to the atomic arms race: “If man’s mind is unequal to the problems of man’s progress, … he will sink back into savagery (the A and the H bombs have raised the issue in explosive forms)” (10)� While his role in the Alger Hiss case aligned him with the anticommunist fear-mongers who were instrumental for the spread of the ideology of “national security” (a phrase which does not appear once in Witness), by implication his critique of the will to security also rejected the craze for national security, which was after all the context in which the H bomb was developed, supposedly allowing the United States to remain on top in the struggle for the maximum power of deterrence� For Chambers, the conservative Christian, scientific progress outran the capacities of the human mind, and the military build-up of the cold war, commonly justified by the necessities of national security, only proved the point� 12 In his autobiographical reconstruction, it was Les Misérables that led him to this insight: [Hugo’s novel] taught me two seemingly irreconcilable things - Christianity and revolution� It taught me first of all that the basic virtue of life is humility, that before humility, ambition, arrogance, pride and power are seen for what they are, the stigmata of littleness, the betrayal by the mind of the soul, a betrayal which continually fails against a humility that is authentic and consistent� It taught me justice and compassion, not a justice of the law, or, as we say, human justice, but a justice that transcends human justice whenever humanity transcends itself to reach that summit where justice and compassion are one� It taught me that, in a world of force, the least act of humility and compassion requires the utmost exertion of all the powers of mind and soul, that nothing is so difficult, that there can be no true humility and no true compassion where there is no courage� That was the gist of its Christian teaching� (134) 12 Kimmage remarks that Chambers’s radical conservatism threatened to put him at cross purposes with fighting the cold war. Pointing to the last chapter of Witness, in which Chambers turns to the uncertain future of Western civilization, Kimmage argues that ultimately the need of winning the cold war led Chambers to subdue his conservative resistance to the security-program of military build-up: “Chambers’s hostility to all things middle class, capitalist, and modern militated against the basic constituents of America’s geopolitical power, against capitalism and technology� As a consequence, Chambers’s conservatism demanded compromise at best and self-contradiction at worst� Chambers was able to compromise because his priorities were very clear� The Cold War had to be won at all costs and no antimodern dreams were to get in the way” (226)� Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 265 Humility, however, is only one of the two lessons Chambers attributes to Hugo’s social epic, the other being revolution. Significantly, the concept of revolution Chambers reconstructed from reading Les Misérables gained its appeal from its distance to the Marxist (modern) notion of revolution� As we will see, Lionel Trilling, too, singled out a literary work as the quintessential anticommunist weapon in which revolution could be wrested from communism� What both Chambers and Trilling sought was an essentially romantic attitude toward social upheaval in which an inner voice of morality asserted itself against the injustice of the social order, without believing that injustice could be undone by the installment of a different order� Here is Chambers on the novel’s lesson on revolution: [Les Misérables] taught me revolution, not as others were to teach me - as political or historical fact - but as a reflex of human suffering and desperation, a perpetual insurgence of that instinct for justice and truth that lay within the human soul, from which a new vision of truth and justice was continually issuing to meet the new needs of the soul in new ages of the world� (135) For Chambers, then, the two teachings of Hugo’s work - humility and revolution - are essentially indistinguishable: they resurrect an awareness of a feeling for transcendent justice, a feeling that “requires the utmost exertion of all the powers of mind and soul,” while also elevating the intuitions of the soul over the calculating operations of the mind� Humility and revolution are two facets of an attitude that distrusts the self-aggrandizement of rational calculation by courageously standing up for the passions of justice� But humility also continuously checks the “instinct for justice and truth,” shielding it from the danger of turning into a fanaticism of its own� This was particularly urgent because Chambers’s critique of communism did not merely warn of Enlightenment rationalism taken to its cruel conclusion� He also described communism as a kind of romantic revolution that became difficult to resist because it afforded the only chance for heroic action: “I was willing to accept Communism in whatever terms it presented itself …� For it offered me what nothing else in the dying world had power to offer at the same intensity - faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die” (196)� But without faith in God, such an Ersatzreligion could only end in the horror of actively promoting totalitarian creeds like communism: “[O]ut of my weakness and folly (but also out of my strength), I committed the characteristic crimes of my century” (449)� If Witness is part conversion narrative, part conservative manifesto, it is certainly not a work of literary or cultural criticism� Hence Chambers provided no explicit theoretical explanation for the power of literature to make people turn away from the rational will to security. However, we do find implied suggestions for this capacity, and they help us see how Chambers weaves together religion, aesthetics, and morality in order to articulate an alternative sensibility to cold-blooded rationality� His reconstruction of his first reading experience of Les Misérables at the age of “eight or nine” (133) is revealing in this regard: “When I read those lines [on the novel’s first page], there moved through my mind a solemn music that is the overtone of justice 266 J ohannes v oelz and compassion� A spirit moved upon the page and through my ignorance I sensed that spirit” (134)� Chambers’s vocabulary is unmistakably religious, but his metaphors also suggest that the novel’s spiritual power derives from its aesthetic nature� In fact, the imagery of “solemn music” and “overtones” indicates that the instinct of justice can be experienced only aesthetically, and that the teachings of literature amount to an education sentimentale, in which aesthetically induced feeling is prioritized over the will� For Chambers, however, what Hugo had to offer was more specific than the romantic opposition of sentiment (religious in nature, and located in the realm of aesthetic experience) to rational will� He also implied that the “teachings” of fiction result from the capacity of the novel’s characters to act as models of morality� In particular, he singled out the Bishop of Digne (Muriel), whose gentleness and selflessness helps the protagonist Valjean regain his belief in humanity and reenter society� Rather than reading the Bishop as a martyr whose suffering propelled historical progress in a Hegelian manner 13 , Chambers interprets the “upright man” (as Hugo calls the Bishop in the heading of the first chapter) as a hero who is free of self-righteous hubris and who, an anticommunist intellectual avant la lettre, harbors no utopian hopes for the rational improvement of society� Neglecting the novel’s repeated insistence that human misery can only be solved by changing the social structure, and denying the continuities between Proudhon’s utopian socialism (which directly influenced Hugo’s novel) on the one hand, and Marxist thought on the other, Chambers explicitly positions Hugo’s character against Marx and Lenin� Here is Hugo’s description of the Bishop as cited by Chambers, and the analogy Chambers draws to himself: “He inclined toward the distressed and the repentant� The universe appeared to him like a vast disease; he perceived fever everywhere; he auscultated suffering everywhere� And without trying to solve the enigma, he sought to staunch the wound� The formidable spectacle of created things developed a tenderness in him����” 14 My life failed at the moment when I began to try to “solve the enigma” and “staunch the wound,” for Marx and Lenin did little more for me than give me a modern diagnosis and a clinical ways and means to deal with that “vast disease” which the Bishop of Digne felt and that “social damnation” which his author first made me conscious of� Even as a Communist, I never quite escaped the Bishop� I put him out of my mind, but I could not put him out of my life� (137) 13 Richard Lehan aligns Hugo’s philosophy of history with that of Hegel’s, and thus, indirectly (though, as it were, upside down), with Marx’s: “Hugo felt that his story of Jean Valjean, Javert, and Marius was inseparable from that historical process, that the contradictions which would cancel the lives of both Valjean and Javert were the contradictions of history, and that the spirit of a higher will was working through Marius, a spirit that would redeem Paris, both as the capital of France and as the container of the poor� Hegel could not have expressed it any better” (Lehan 55)� 14 Chambers quotes Isabel F. Hapgood’s translation, commonly used since the first American edition from 1887� For a widely available edition using this translation, see the Signet Classics edition (New York: Penguin, 1987)� The citation can be found on p� 57� Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 267 Chambers stresses the religious components of Hugo’s romantic realism in order to drive a wedge between Marx’s and Lenin’s secular rationalism - driven by a will to security - and a sense of social justice that retains an acuteness to divine mystery and the futility of human efforts to not merely staunch the wounds of the social world but prevent future injuries, as it were� In Chambers’s account, his own life lived according to the “communist vision” was doomed to failure� Luckily, the novel’s capacity to sound “the overtone of justice and compassion” could not be suppressed forever, and ultimately saved him from the moral deafness produced by the will to security� The afterglow of his religio-aesthetic experience of Les Misérables early in his life smoldered inside him during his phase of moral disorientation, and thus served as the foundation of his conversion� III. Lionel Trilling: The Adventure of Insecurity Lionel Trilling shared neither Chambers’s conservatism, religious outlook, nor penchant for pathos� A conversion narrative like Witness must have appeared as hopelessly crude and embarrassing to Trilling� Nonetheless, Trilling’s commitment to a liberalism steeped in a tragic worldview overlapped with Chambers’s position in several regards: he rejected the optimism of Enlightenment rationalism and desired from literature a lesson in what he called “moral realism: ” an awareness of the corrupting influence civilization has on all of us (in Chambers’s Christian variant, this idea was simply the “problem of evil”)� To Trilling, great literature could only be produced by artists who contained, as he phrased it in his essay “Reality in America,” “a large part of the dialectic [of their times] within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions” (Obligation 76)� 15 Literature, as the realm of contradictions, was impossible to square with the stark rationality underlying cold war intellectual’s construction of the ideal of security� But Trilling took this belief a step further than Chambers� For Trilling, literature was essentially about insecurity� Not only did it stand up against the belief that humans could rationally access moral truths with certainty, or that they could translate moral insight into the perfect social order� Literature, Trilling argued in “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” was itself a force of disorder which had to be described in the most physical of terms: “structures of words [literary writers] may indeed have created, but these structures were not pyramids or triumphal arches, they were manifestly contrived to be not static and commemorative but mobile and aggressive, and one does not describe a quinquereme or a howitzer or a tank without estimating how much damage it can do” (388)� The damage great literature 15 I am quoting from The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier, which collects a large number of Trilling’s essays in their original magazine versions, before they were edited for his various books of essays� 268 J ohannes v oelz could do was directed against the civilized order from which it emerged� Literature was a counteragent to the tendencies of modern society to ossify, to restrict individual freedom in its desire for order� Literature - and, to some degree, the arts in general - possessed this force in ways that social movements could not� Thus, Trilling’s theory was built on the belief that literature, and culture in general, could be genuinely adversarial� But when he used the term “adversary culture” (which he made popular in the 1960s - particularly in the preface to Beyond Culture, from 1965 - but which had been gestating in his writings for some forty years), he intended it to be understood ironically, which, ultimately, meant dialectically� Once the adversarial stance had become a culture of its own, it degraded into another bourgeois, conformist, and spiritually dead phenomenon - what Trilling, in Beyond Culture, called a new “class” - that mistakenly continued to believe in its own anti-bourgeois mythology� Trilling declared this type of a hegemonic absorption of dissent to have diluted culture’s power to disrupt the political stasis effected by the middle class� In the preface to Beyond Culture he wrote, “The change has come about, we may say, through the efforts of the adversary culture itself� It has not dominated the whole of its old antagonist, the middle class, but it has detached a considerable force from the main body of the enemy and has captured its allegiance” (554)� Culture, in other words, had the potential to be adversarial, but an adversary culture did not� Therefore literature could be deeply political, but only if one was ready to grant that politics ultimately stood in the service of the freedom of the individual, and had to do its work on the level of individual experience� In 1965, Trilling reconstructed the present moment as belonging to “the modern period,” which “had its beginning in the latter part of the eighteenth-century and its apogee in the first quarter of the twentieth century” (552)� He principally agreed with the organizing belief of this period “that a primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment” (552)� But he combined this essentially Romantic conviction with an Enlightenment ideal of culture, a combination that made him a prime example of mid-twentiethcentury liberalism and aligned him with the likes of Isaiah Berlin� Thus, as early as the 1920s, he regarded the politics of the Communist Party as a degraded attempt at liberation that was in truth wholly bourgeois - a mere adversary culture� In Ross Posnock’s succinct phrasing, for Trilling “the paradox of Stalinism was that it was a political ideology devoted to destroying politics” (Posnock 66)� For his dissertation and first book, Trilling turned to Matthew Arnold and his Victorian ideal of culture as the only promising path to preserve individual autonomy against civilization’s power of absorption� In the most famous passage of Anarchy and Culture (1869), Arnold had written that “culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 269 and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically” (Arnold 5)� If culture resisted the mechanical tendencies of civilization, Trilling concluded with Arnold, then the most forceful critique of civilization consisted of the dissemination of culture� Trilling’s position was deeply ambiguous, and at times verged on contradictions that can no longer be resolved as signs of a dialectical mind: he espoused bourgeois culture in order to protect the individual from the cultural decay brought about by bourgeois society; he had firm allegiances to leftist political aims (true leftism, in his mind, was wholly different from Stalinism), but his political leftism hinged on an aesthetic individualism that in turn rested on a concept of culture which was at once romantically transgressive and committed to the conservative aim of enshrining a canon of Western civilization� 16 It is this dual investment in transgression and conservation that makes Trilling an exemplar of the divided allegiance running through the cold war notion of security� In his essays from the 1940s, a selection of which was collected in the best-selling The Liberal Imagination (1950), Trilling came to identify the politics of literature with the struggle of anticommunism� He found ideal texts to develop his position among the romantics (Wordsworth), realists (Twain), and modernists (Eliot) alike, and in developing his stance, he relied at least as much on critiquing what to him were the antipodes of the liberal imagination: the naturalist novel, the social realism of the Popular Front, the socially engaged criticism of Vernon Louis Parrington� But it was in Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886) that he discovered the basis from which he thought communism could be hit the hardest� That basis was described by a phrase which Trilling adopted from James: “the imagination of disaster,” which made look “life … ferocious and sinister” (Obligation 151; Trilling quotes from a letter James wrote to A� C� Benson in 1896)� Trilling argues that what was clear to James in the 1880s was later entirely forgotten and had to be “painfully learned from our grim glossary of wars and concentration camps, after having seen the state and human nature laid open to our horrified inspection” (151). The optimistic outlook of progressivism, of utopian political movements in general, led to a wholly inadequate understanding of the world� James’s novel, in a manner Trilling “venture[d] to call … incomparable,” acted as a much needed corrective (176)� 16 Over the last thirty years, the dominant reception of Trilling has highlighted his conservative side, and denigrated his affirmation of contradiction as a sign of political complacency� In this way, Trilling has served as a prime example of the ideology of liberalism� For readings in this vein, see Donald E� Pease, “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon”, Russell Reising, “Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, and the Emergence of the Cultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism,” Daniel T� O’Hara, Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation, and Gustavo Guerra, “Trilling’s James: Liberalism and Selfhood in ‘The Princess Casamassima’�” 270 J ohannes v oelz Like Les Misérables, James’s novel combines the exploration of urban misery (it stands out in James’s oeuvre in this regard) with a fascination for social revolution� Indeed, for the purpose of consolidating the link between literature, insecurity, and anticommunism, the novel seems to have appealed to Trilling for mainly two reasons, which I will explore at some length in the following pages� On the level of plot, the story features a young tragic hero who becomes involved in an anarchist terror organization� Unable to muster the determination required for a violent act of terror, he kills himself instead of his designated victim� On the level of form, Trilling highlights James’s combined use of romance and realism� Thanks to the text’s realist aesthetics, the squalor of the urban ghetto, the lived reality of class differences more generally, and the dealings of anarchists take on precise shape� But ultimately, it is the romantic dimension of the novel that comports with Trilling’s brand of adversarial liberalism, his “rationalism after romanticism,” as Leon Wieseltier has aptly called it (Wieseltier xv)� Trilling stresses that romance, for James, is not to be confused with the outright fantastic� If romance relies on the imagination, it is the imagination of the scientist� The imagination of romance and the imagination of science, in this view, are related in that both are a kind of “experiment” (155), a form of experience which is, in James’s words, “experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that usually attach to it” (155)� In the case of James’s anarchist world, the romance’s accuracy centers on the protagonist’s dialectic capaciousness� After having become involved in an anarchist terror plot and having pledged to kill a target to be identified to him by letter, Hyacinth Robinson travels to Paris and Venice and discovers the grandeur of the artistic achievements of Western civilization� He realizes that he can no longer subscribe to a program of destruction, although he continues to share the anarchists’ conviction that this very civilization is responsible for the misery of the masses� As a consequence of what to the cold war mind may have looked like his “Kronstadt,” however, Hycianth does not denounce the secret anarchist organization - which is the path Whittaker Chambers would choose - but commits suicide� The novel seems to lend itself to be read as a conflict between contemplation and action, between a Paterist withdrawal from the world into art and a political commitment to revolution� It is against this type of interpretation that Trilling unfolds his own� He turns Hyacinth into a hero who, rather than being caught up between art and action, is torn between two different kinds of action� And rather than choosing one, he combines both� In the course of this reading, Trilling argues for an unorthodox interpretation of both anarchy and culture that has immediate import for his literary politics of anticommunism� It also distantly echoes the lessons Whittaker Chambers’s gleaned from Les Misérables: revolution and Christianity� Resonating with Chambers’s extracting from Hugo’s novel a notion of revolution that differs from what he presents as Marx’s and Lenin’s attempt to “’solve the enigma’ and ‘staunch the wound,’” Trilling initially seems drawn to James’s rendition of anarchism� Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 271 James envisaged revolution, and not merely as a convenience for his fiction. But he imagined a land of revolution with which we are no longer familiar� It was not a Marxian revolution� There is no upsurge of an angry proletariat led by a disciplined party which plans to head a new strong state� Such a revolution has its conservative aspect - it seeks to save certain elements of bourgeois culture for its own use, for example, science and the means of production and even some social agencies� The revolutionary theory of The Princess Casamassima has little in common with this� There is no organized mass movement; there is no disciplined party but only a strong conspiratorial center� (158) To Trilling, James’s anarchy is not so different from Matthew Arnold’s culture - a force that unsettles everything mechanical - but radically at odds with a communist adversary culture, which, as Trilling had maintained time and again, was ultimately conservative and bourgeois� What’s despicable about Marxism, Trilling’s embrace of anarchism suggests, is the fact that it is radically rational, antiromantic, and non-organic: it is driven by party discipline, a strong and bureaucratic state, and it is enthralled by scientific progress. Compare this to Trilling’s definition of anarchism: “[A]narchism holds that the natural goodness of man is absolute and that society corrupts it, and that the guide to anarchist action is the desire to destroy society in general and not merely a particular social form” (158)� Clearly, this kind of anarchism has affinities with an understanding of art that does “damage” in order “to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture,” as he would put it in 1965 (552)� Anarchism came very close to being adversarial in the best sense� James’s novel, then, was not only a romance of experimental intelligence, but one with a romantic subject: the heroic uprising against oppressive order and convention� 17 But Trilling’s sympathy for anarchism had its limits� Anarchism threatened to succumb to the blind, single-minded fanaticism of the Marxist brand of revolution after all� The problem began with anarchism’s tenet that “the natural goodness of man is absolute�” Man’s absolute goodness required making the destruction of society into an objective of unequalled importance. The conflict was a simple one: It was society versus man. Nothing was to get in the way of assuring man’s victory - not even art� Trilling notes that “in the 1890s there was a strong alliance between the French artists and the anarchist groups� But in the logic of the situation art was bound to come under the anarchist fire. Art is inevitably associated with civil peace and social order and indeed with the ruling classes” (159)� For Trilling, of course, the idea that art was reactionary - “a frivolous distraction from revolution” (159) - was completely wrongheaded, and “inevitable” only “in the logic of the situation” of the 1890s� Art, for Trilling, had little to do with 17 Posnock has drawn attention to the fact that Trilling’s commitment to the opposition between individual and society derives from his premise that the authentic self is ultimately pre-social� For Posnock, this marks the crucial distinction between Trilling and Henry James: “James does not conceive of consciousness as somehow immune from the tyranny of culture and history� … For [James] the attempt to go beyond culture is less an act of emancipation than obedience to the seductive myth that untrammeled freedom is the American birthright” (Posnock 70-71)� 272 J ohannes v oelz civil peace� Thus, after having reinterpreted anarchism, the next step of his essay was to provide an interpretation of art that could undo the distinction between art and action� When James’s protagonist Hyacinth decides, while reveling in the sensuous pleasures of Paris and Venice, not to carry out his terrorist assignment because he realizes, as he writes to the Princess in his letter from Venice, that “I have been cold all my life, even when I thought I was warm” (Princess 352), Trilling is at pains to emphasize that “the artist quite as much as any man of action carries his ultimate commitment and his death warrant in his pocket” (Obligation 167)� But of what does the action of art consist? Trilling seems to have quarreled with this question, and in the end he provides three answers which overlap, even build on each other, but are not wholly compatible with each other� In his first answer, Trilling sees the Jamesian action of art as driven by “the imperious will, with the music of an army with banners” (168)� Poetry is linked to “the triumphs of the world” and “has an affinity with political power in its autocratic and aristocratic form … it is not a friend of the democratic virtues” (168)� Thus, Hyacinth Robinson, in favoring art over terror, is not exchanging political action for contemplation, or war for peace, but one type of revolution against another� For both types of revolutionary act, the commitment is absolute� Trilling’s second take on the nature of literary action takes the first to its moral conclusion� In Hyacinth’s letter from Venice, Trilling writes, He understands no less clearly than before “the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past�” But now he recognizes that “the fabric of civilization as we know it” is inextricably bound up with this injustice; the monuments of art and learning and taste have been reared upon coercive power� (169) Setting him apart once and for all from his anarchist friends, this view leads Hyacinth not to reject art, but to accept “that civilization has a price, and a high one” (170)� Civilization is worth that price - indeed it is indispensable - even if that requires that one strike a deal with the powers that be� For political radicals, this stance would define the action of art as plainly reactionary. But in Trilling’s reading, this type of worldly commitment to the arts, or rather commitment to the world through art, and the acceptance of the guilt it entails, is a sign of “moral realism.” “Moral realism,” as Trilling defines it in this essay in a tone that fuses Nietzsche and Freud, rests on the acceptance that idealism and power go hand in hand� It contrasts with the self-deceptions of bourgeois society, which is incapable of moving beyond “will that hates itself and finds its manifestations guilty and is able to exist only if it operates in the name of virtue” (176)� The moral realism of art-action faces up to its own will to power and breaks free from the superego’s tight leash of guilt� There is, finally, Trilling’s third answer to the question in what sense art is committed action. If the first answer defines art as driven by an imperious will to power, and the second answer justifies this will as a necessary ingredient of the most idealist striving, it is only in the third answer that Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 273 Trilling addresses why the imperious acts of art are so indispensable, and why they cannot be given up for the equally imperious will driving political revolution� It is at this point that Trilling draws on the critique of security well established in romantic thought and developed perhaps most fully by Nietzsche� Art, but not political action, whether it is anarchist or Marxist, is set against security, and favors the uncertainty of adventure� In doing so, art, and art alone, does justice to life� [E]very known theory of popular revolution gives up the vision of the world “raised to the richest and noblest expression�” To achieve the ideal of widespread security, popular revolutionary theory condemns the ideal of adventurous experience� It tries to avoid doing this explicitly and it even, although seldom convincingly, denies that it does it at all� But all the instincts or necessities of radical democracy are against the superbness and arbitrariness which often mark great spirits� It is sometimes said in the interests of an ideal or abstract completeness that the choice need not be made, that security can be imagined to go with richness and nobility of expression� But we have not seen it in the past and nobody really strives to imagine it in the future� (170) If the “richness of nobility of expression” stands in the service of the full life, if the longing for adventurous experience, “undaunted by fear yet fearful of the total eradication of fear” (Hamilton 248), is erected as the opposite of an ideal of security, a state in which all fear and worry (cura) has been removed, we have entered a Nietzschean realm of thought� “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! ” he demands in The Gay Science, “Send your ship into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! ” (§283, p�228)� 18 Nietzsche’s aim in courting danger is not the elevation of death over life, or the giving in to a sheer recklessness that stops making sense altogether� It is rather the attempt to live according to the principles of life itself, and these are, to use Trilling’s terms, “superb and arbitrary�” Trilling’s invocation of the duality of adventure and security, it must be stressed once more, gets its anticommunist edge from opposing adventure to political revolution� The romantic strife against security might be said to support all kinds of social movements� But the point of James’s novel, in Trilling’s reading, is precisely that even the most romantic and order-averse of such movements - anarchism, with its philosophy of amorphism - must ultimately deny the fullness of life, and its “richest and noblest expression�” 18 James Der Derian succinctly summarizes the Nietzschean critique: “Originating in the paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox” (“The Value of Security” 156)� On Nietzsche and security, see also Hamilton 245-255� When writing about Nietzsche in “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” Trilling by contrast emphasizes the moderating intent of Nietzsche’s dialectic between the Dionysian and the Apollonian� “This sadic [sic] and masochistic frenzy, Nietzsche is at pains to insist [in The Birth of Tragedy], needs the taming hand of Apollo before it can become tragedy, but it is the primal stuff of great art, and to the modern experience of tragedy this explanation seems far more pertinent than Aristotle’s…” (Obligation 392)� 274 J ohannes v oelz Trilling praises James’s extraordinary vision of turning Hyacinth into a heroic martyr figure who comprehends and embodies the contradictions of his culture and, in experiencing the impossibility of their reconciliation, becomes a tragic character: “He is a hero of civilization because he dares do more than civilization does: embodying two ideals at once, he takes upon himself, in full consciousness, the guilt of each� … By his death he instructs us in the nature of civilized life and by his consciousness he transcends it” (172)� Trilling here commits a remarkable slippage� Is it Hyacinth he is praising? The bookbinder who combines the commitment to art with the commitment to social change by sacrificing himself in order to honor both commitments? Or is Trilling praising James as embodied by Hyacinth (who, towards the very end of the novel, takes up writing rather than binding books)? Or is the true hero of the essay Lionel Trilling himself? 19 The commitment to civilization in life and death, and the transcendence of civilization in consciousness, is precisely the promise an adversarial literature holds out� The model to be followed by intellectuals, Trilling suggests, is not the man who combines the commitment to both art and political radicalism, but the literary artist who imagines, with the experimental intelligence of the romancer, the transgression of civilization in the service of civilization� In contrast to Hyacinth, whose only solution to live this dialectics is suicide, the literary intellectual has the ability, in Adam Kirsch’s words, “to ‘embody two ideals at once’ and still live - indeed, to flourish” (Kirsch 68). If the romancer shares the scientist’s experimental imagination, this kind of intelligence is not at all described by a cold mechanical rationality generally associated with the sciences� The experimental romancer is an adventurer, a great spirit marked by “superbness and arbitrariness�” His orientation to life is averted to security, and thanks to this investment in insecurity, he can procure humanity’s future flourishing within civilization. IV. Arthur Schlesinger: Insecurity, Tragedy, National Security Like Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, historian Arthur Schlesinger found a resource in literature for an explicitly antitotalitarian argument against the ideal of security� In The Vital Center (1949), writers play a key role in the fight against totalitarianism because they are the “prophets” of “a new sense of the meaning of freedom”: they “refused to swallow the fantastic hypocrisies involved in the defense of totalitarianism” (147)� The most prominent place among literary prophets Schlesinger assigns to Hawthorne, whose The Blithedale Romance he presents as a work that speaks with urgency to the threats to liberty arising from a blind faith in progress and human perfectability� His embrace of Hawthorne’s novel is a rather obvious choice� 19 Critics have suggested as much� In Ross Posnock’s words, James’s novel becomes “a political allegory in which an Arnoldian apostle of high culture is sacrificed to the machinations of Stalinist fellow travelers” (67)� And in Mark Krupnick’s reading “Hyacinth becomes a version of Trilling’ own idealized self as a hero of culture” (Krupnick 71)� Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 275 Hawthorne’s work is famously marked by a deep-seated pessimism about human nature; moreover, politically Hawthorne was on the conservative end of canonical mid-nineteenth-century writers� And by satirically taking up the utopian community of Brook Farm, Blithedale was furthermore an almost inevitable candidate for a mid-twentieth-century critique of optimistic progressivism� But turning to a nineteenth-century classic has another advantage for Schlesinger� It allows him, similarly to Trilling, to tell the story of a regrettable amnesia that amounts to a national sin: With his intense conviction of the weakness of man before the temptations of pride and power, Hawthorne extrapolated unerringly from the pretty charades of Brook Farm to the essence of totalitarian man� Yet during the next century the serene course of progress seemed to give little warrant to the violence of Hawthorne’s political imagination� The insights into the egotism of power consequently vanished from the mind of the liberal intellectual� (162) Instead of heeding Hawthorne’s warning, Schlesinger complains, progressives attacked Hawthorne’s skepticism as a form of political quietism� Schlesinger is particularly critical of Vernon L� Parrington (who is also the target of “Reality in America,” Trilling’s perhaps most vicious polemic): “’the figure of Hollingsworth,’ Parrington could remark with sarcasm, is ‘Hawthorne’s reply to the summons of the social conscience of the times�’ … the Brandeises and Parringtons were caught off guard, … nothing in their system prepared them for totalitarianism” (163)� Hawthorne, on the other hand, “with the artist’s prescience glimpsed the ultimate possibilities of a belief in perfectibility” (161)� We’re familiar by now with the corner stones of the kind of argument Schlesinger rehearses: the dangers of optimistic progressivism and its the pursuit of the illusion of security; the persistence of evil; the need to come to terms with human limitations; the key role accorded to literature and its prescient creators in demonstrating all of the above� However, Schlesinger’s account differs from Chambers’s and Trilling’s in two respects - though less in position than in emphasis� First, he sees the attractiveness of communism in the social ramifications of the industrial revolution. While Chambers explains the appeal of totalitarianism to come out of its providing a last opportunity for heroism and faith, and Trilling is too preoccupied with the potentials and impediments of the liberal imagination to tackle this question explicitly (considering his judgment of the cultural expression approved by communism, it is indeed vexing wherein might lie its appeal), in Schlesinger’s view it is modern industrial society itself that has created the problem: “Our modern industrial economy, based on impersonality, interchangeability, and speed, has worn away the old protective securities without creating new ones� It has failed to develop an organizational framework of its own within which self-realization on a large scale is possible” (51)� This is where totalitarianism comes in, by selling an illusion as a solution: “As a system of social organization, it purports to invest life with meaning and purpose� Against the loneliness and rootlessness of man in free society, it promises the security and comradeship of a crusading unity, propelled by a deep and driving faith” (54)� 276 J ohannes v oelz Though Schlesinger does not make this explicit, “security” for him lies at the core of the problem of totalitarianism in two distinct, but related senses� Security expresses a belief in Enlightenment rationality that underestimates how this very rationality can turn into a nightmare of immorality, made all the more likely by the moral weakness of man, which subscribers to optimistic Enlightenment overlook� But security, in Schlesinger’s usage, also refers to the psychological state attending organic wholeness in the realm of sociality, which has been replaced by the modern condition of alienation, and has in turn become all the more desirable� Consequently, the longing for security has become open to political exploitation� Strictly speaking, security as radical rationality and security as an emotional state are rather different entities� But if Schlesinger does not point out their difference, it is because for him they share three things: both are predicated on the assumption of the total absence of contingency, which allows for a state without fear or worry (securitas in its literal sense); both are what totalitarian systems - meaning, primarily of course, the Soviet Union - promise to provide; and both need to be accepted as permanently outside the reach of humanity� For security as rationality, this has always been the case; as to the psychological security of social belonging, its impossibility is the result of industrial modernity� Schlesinger, secondly, differs from Chambers and Trilling in his determination to think through the consequences which the above analysis has for policy� If the absence of security in its two dimensions - as rational progress, and as psychological bliss growing out of social organicism - must be accepted, what is the role the United States is to adopt in a world threatened by spreading totalitarianism? Schlesinger’s answer is a justification of the containment policy first devised by George Kennan in the “Long Telegram,” given full expression in the Truman Doctrine (of which Kennan became a sharp critic), and institutionalized in NATO, as well as a wholehearted approval of the Marshall Plan� 20 In Schlesinger’s benevolent interpretation, neither containment nor the Marshall Plan is “a policy of threatening Soviet interests in what has become the settled sphere of Soviet power” (224)� And both policies only work together: “Without the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine would become a program of resisting Communism by sheer force - and would be doomed to failure” (226)� For Schlesinger, these two dimensions of cold war policy are of a piece with the view that history is “tragic” - a view shared by Kennan and Niebuhr (as well as Chambers and Trilling, who speak less, however, about 20 See John Lewis Gaddis’s biography of Kennan, particularly chapter 10-12� For the debates surrounding the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, see also Craig and Logevall’s America’s Cold War, and for a special focus on the policy debates with regard to the emerging ideology of national security, see Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron� Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 277 policy)� 21 In “Policy and National Interest,” a review of Kennan’s American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 - and the Challenge of Soviet Power, written for Partisan Review in 1951, Schlesinger writes that the Kennan approach … comprehends [the revelations of international amorality] in his understanding of the tragedy of history� … The fact that international relations are amoral does not mean to him that moral factors play no part; nor does it absolve the individual from moral responsibility� This, indeed, is in his view the tragedy of history: man cannot escape decision, but the complexity of events diffuses the burden of guilt, and, beyond this, so much is inherently insoluble� (709) The United States, we might say, shares the condition of Hyacinth Robinson� Being on the side of civilization morally imposes action, but action cannot be engaged in without incurring guilt� Not acting at all, however, would only compound guilt� An analogous argument also goes for the makeup of the U�S� state� “[U]nder the pressures of industrial organization,” the liberal state has begun to break away from its mission to ensure the individual’s flourishing in freedom (Vital Center 8)� But if the state has fallen short of its promise, it is still to be preferred to the totalitarian alternative: “[T]he liberal state acknowledged many limitations in its demands upon men: the total state acknowledges none� … If organization corrupts, total organization corrupts totally” (8-9). For the cold war liberalism exemplified by Schlesinger, there is no alternative to robustly defending the national interest, and to restructuring the state accordingly� 22 Neither isolationism, nor antistatist libertari- 21 One gets a sense of Kennan’s flair for tragedy from a journal entry from 1965 (at which point Kennan had lost his influence in the policy-making world). He muses on “the injustices you have done to people; the tragedies that may not yet have happened, but do happen - and are bound to; - in short, the whole tragic bedrock of existence” (qtd� in Gaddis 598)� Niebuhr, for his part, distinguished between irony, tragedy, and pathos: “My effort to distinguish ‘ironic’ elements in our history from tragic and pathetic ones, does not imply the denial of tragic and pathetic aspects in our contemporary experience� It does rest upon the conviction that the ironic elements are more revealing” (Irony xxiii)� What Niebuhr meant by irony is not principally different from what Schlesinger referred to as tragedy (as his benevolent interpretation of U�S� cold war policies attests): “The ironic situation is distinguished from a pathetic one by the fact that the person involved in it bears some responsibility for it� It is differentiated from tragedy by the fact that the responsibility is related to an unconscious weakness rather than to a conscious resolution” (xxiv)� 22 There is some ambiguity in Schlesinger’s account about what the precise nature of the liberal state’s shortcoming (understood as a necessary evil) is. In his final chapter, Schlesinger calls for turning freedom into a “fighting faith.” He envisions a “new radicalism,” which, “drawing strength from a realistic conception of man, dedicates itself to problems as they come, attacking them in terms which best advance the human and libertarian values, which best secure the freedom and fulfillment of the individual” (256)� In this light, the liberal state’s inevitable weakness seems to lie in the cold formalism of a legalistic liberalism which robs citizens of the possibility to be actively committed to the res publica� The problem of the free society, then, is anomie, which the Soviet system exploits� But what runs against this interpretation - which essentially reads Schlesinger as critiquing liberalism from a republican position - is his emphasis on civil liberties as the core of the free society� The necessary evil of the liberal state would then be the necessary restriction of individual liberties in the fight 278 J ohannes v oelz anism appear as acceptable positions once the cornerstones of the cold war paradigm are accepted� American destiny has become manifest once again: “History has thrust a world destiny on the United States… [W]e are in the great world to stay; and two world wars have made us aware of this fact with a sad sense of irrevocability� No one need argue the interventionist-isolationist debate any more” (219)� Throughout his writings of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Schlesinger’s term of choice for describing the impetus of U�S� engagement in the world is “national interest�” It may be that he clung to this term in order to avoid what sounded like a paradox: namely that accepting the fact that security is unattainable requires a commitment to national security� Indeed, Schlesingers’ work from the early cold war period captures the moment at which the resemanticization of the term “security” is still in full swing� But to be precise, what we observe here is less a resignification than a layering of meanings, which alone explains the full complexity of the postwar concept of security� It isn’t just that the ideal of security becomes replaced by the idea of security as a tragic defense of freedom� It is rather that the latter notion negatively builds on the former, keeping both alive in a single term� To give just one example of this palimpsestic assemblage: In his review of Kennan’s book, Schlesinger mentions that Kennan “looks for American security to be preserved by preventing any single power from dominating the Eurasian land mass” (708)� For Schlesinger, such a preventive step in the name of national against communism� And this, of course, was indeed the central issue in the debate over national security� Notably, it led to Walter Lippman’s critique of Kennan’s containment policy, which, Lippman argued in a series of articles in the New York Herald Tribune, would lead to U�S� military engagement around the world, and to the militarization of society� Lippman collected the articles in a book, called it The Cold War, and thus had coined a seminal term� As becomes clear in Michael Hogan’s painstakingly detailed account of the policy debates of the national security policies, the supporters of national security insisted on big government that “would concentrate authority in a strong executive or in a series of administrative czars who would manage military affairs on an efficient basis” (23). Military affairs, in this context, had to be understood in a broad sense, relating to “civilian and military resources behind a permanent program of peacetime military preparedness” (23)� Seen from this perspective, Schlesinger’s defense of a “necessary evil” aligns him with the liberal promoters of the national security state, whose vision is summarized by Hogan: “Although government would grow larger, taxes would go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none of these and other transformations would add up to the crushing regime symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state� The outcome instead would be an American national security state that was shaped as much by the country’s democratic political culture as it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold war” (22)� It should be noted, however, that Schlesinger was strictly opposed to McCarthyism and related attempts to abrogate civil liberties� Without liberty, he argued, no free society, and without free society, the victory of totalitarianism was certain� “Hysteria is … a useful secret weapon for the enemies of free society,” he writes in The Vital Center (208), and calls for a broad anticommunist consensus (which makes for one of the meanings of his book’s title): “The non-Communist left and the non-fascist right must collaborate to keep free society truly free” (209)� Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 279 security becomes necessary because one has to be pessimistic about human nature (i�e�, about the Soviet leaders), and surely it will involve the U�S� in political tragedy� But all this still presupposes that “security [can] be preserved�” Growing out of the anticommunist critique of the ideal of security, then, is a revised understanding of security that stresses an active engagement in the world and connotes the full range of what cold war intellectuals mounted against the “communist vision,” including a tragic sense of history, an affirmation of human limitation, the aim to preserve the fullness of life in its richness and nobility, and the related imperative to live life as an adventurous experience� In a truly palimpsestic manner, the search for security - and the politics of national security - could thus become a heroic, tragic, and adventurous endeavor that nonetheless kept alive, beneath the surface as it were, the old notion of the ideal of security as the absence of threat, the arbitrary, and adventurous� Put differently, cold war intellectuals increasingly thought of security as an adventurous process, without relinquishing the conviction that security is a mistaken dream of a state in which there is nothing to worry about� At times, the two semantic layers of security became indistinguishable, and the tensions between state violence and the ideals which the state embodied became resolved in a powerful ideology of American exceptionalism� When this was the case, the aspiration to a state of security became palatable because the ideal of security became defined as a state of order and peace of a particular kind: what was ensured to survive there was characterized precisely by the fullness of a life lived as an adventurous experience� In this mode, the politics of security turned into an engagement in insecurity, the goal of which was to secure insecurity� But because “securing insecurity” only made sense against the negative vision of a detrimental, overly rationalist ideal of security - as embodied in the Soviet Union - the two semantic layers of security in liberal discourse could not be kept in stable congruity: since security continued to be defined by the expunging of the contingent, accidental, and adventurous, insecurity by definition could not be “secured.” The critical thrust of liberalism’s commitment to the accidental, uncertain, and “adversarial” - modeled on the “lessons” of literature - made it difficult to fully subscribe to the national security state, even if that state claimed to offer the only defense against totalitarianism� The attempt to normatively justify national security on the basis of the rejection of the ideal of security remained a self-defeating endeavor� While national security could be successfully harmonized with the tragic view of politics espoused by Schlesinger, the liberal engagement with literature suggested that it could not in the long run be squared with the demands of doing justice to life. Only art could do that. This, I suggest, is the final political implication of the cold war liberals’ insistence on the autonomy of art� 280 J ohannes v oelz Works Cited Anderson, Amanda� “Character and Ideology: The Case of Cold War Liberalism�” New Literary History 42�2 (Spring 2011): 209-229� -----� “The Liberal Aesthetic�” Theory After ‘Theory.’ Eds� Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge� New York: Routledge, 2011� 249-61� Anon� “Editorial Statement�” Partisan Review 4�1 (December 1937): 3-4� Arendt, Hannah� The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951]� Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1958� Arnold, Matthew� Culture and Anarchy [1869]� Ed� Jane Garnett� Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006� Campbell, David� Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992� Chambers, Whittaker� Witness� New York : Random House, 1952� Craig, Campbell, and Fredrik Logevall� America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009� Crossman, R� H� S�, ed� The God that Failed� New York: Harper, 1949� Der Derian, James� “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard�” Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays� New York: Routledge, 2009� 149-166� Dillon, Michael� Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought� London: Routledge, 1996� Gaddis, John Lewis� George F. Kennan: An American Life� New York: Penguin, 2011� Guerra, Gustavo� “Trilling’s James: Liberalism and Selfhood in ‘The Princess Casamassima’�” Papers on Language & Literature 34�4 (Fall 1998): 388-419� Hamilton, John T� Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care� Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013� Hogan, Michael� A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-54. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998� James, Henry� The Princess Casamassima� Henry James: Novels, 1886-1890� New York: Library of America, 1989� Kimmage, Michael� The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009� Kirsch, Adam� Why Trilling Matters� New Haven: Yale UP, 2011� Krupnick, Mark� Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism� Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1986� Lehan, Richard: “The European Background�” The Cambridge Companion to American Naturalism and Realism� Ed� Donald Pizer� New York: Cambridge UP, 1995� 47-73� McGowan, John� American Liberalism: An Interpretation For Our Time� Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007� Müller, Jan-Werner� “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War Liberalism�’” European Journal of Political Theory 7�1 (2008): 45-64� Neocleous, Mark� Critique of Security� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008� Niebuhr, Reinhold� The Irony of American History [1952]� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008� Nietzsche, Friedrich� The Gay Science� Trans� Walter Kaufmann� New York: Vintage, 1974� O’Hara, Daniel T� Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation� Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988� Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security 281 Pease, Donald E� The New American Exceptionalism� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009� -----� “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon�” boundary 2 17�1 (Spring 1990): 1-37� -----� “Re-thinking ‘American Studies After US Exceptionalism�” American Literary History 21�1 (Spring 2009): 19-27� Pells, Richard� The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s� New York: Harper and Row, 1985� Posnock, Ross� The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity� New York: Oxford UP, 1991� Reising, Russell J� “Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, and the Emergence of the Cultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism�” boundary 2 20�1 (1993): 94-124� Schlesinger, Jr�, Arthur� “Policy and National Interest�” Partisan Review 18 (November/ December 1951): 706-711� -----� The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Schrimm-Heins, Andrea� “Gewissheit und Sicherheit� Geschichte und Bedeutungswandel der Begriffe certitudo und securitas� Teil 1�” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte XXXIV (1991): 123-213� Shklar, Judith� “The Liberalism of Fear�” Liberalism and the Moral Life� Ed� Nancy Rosenblum� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989� 21-38� Trilling, Lionel� The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays� Ed� Leon Wieseltier� New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000� Wieseltier, Leon� Introduction� Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays� Ed� Leon Wieseltier� New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000� ix-xvii� i da J ahr Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies In 1957, Rockefeller Foundation officer Erskine McKinley wrote the following after a meeting with the Norwegian economist Petter Jakob Bjerve, head of Statistics Norway and soon-to-be Norwegian Minister of Finance: [P. J. Bjerve] is a fine man. His genious is not that of an H. Wold. Neither, by the way, is his taste in art� HW recommended the Munck [sic] collection at the National Gallery which is truly a national treasure� PJB, on the other hand, never saw it but regards the city hall with esteem� EWM later checked� It’s a real WPAtype horror: Peasant-poster thick ankled gilt-touched vulgarity� Oh well - he is a good economist� But so is Wold! (McKinley) Credibility and trust is inherently social, also in academic knowledge production� McKinley’s notes on his meeting with Bjerve show two things� Firstly, that taste in art and political astuteness are often conflated; taste has a tendency to be seen as a marker of sufficient cultural intelligence. And secondly, they show the political nature of this kind of social academic network� The Rockefeller Foundation officer clearly did not have much love for what he calls WPA (the New Deal Works Progress Administration) type horrors� Rockefeller grants were instrumental in the postwar rebuilding, and the postwar restructuring, of European academia� Rockefeller fellowships did not just provide their recipients with knowledge of the latest developments of their field and professional authority; they also both created and were dependent upon international social networks of scholars, foundation officers and state functionaries. Giles Scott-Smith argues that these ”stateprivate networks” of elites in areas as seemingly disparate as the university and intelligence, foreign policy establishments and libraries was a key aspect of the complex process of “Atlanticist” ideological alignment between European and American elites in the immediate postwar period (Scott-Smith The Politics of Apolitical Culture)� In an article from the 1960s where he explored the history and methodological fruitfulness of the American Studies movement, Sigmund Skard, who was the first professor of American literature in Norway and a central figure in the institutionalization of American Studies in Europe, wrote that The results of the great conflict 1939-45 made it inevitable that the study of the United States and its civilization experienced a further expansion, this time all over the globe� The omnipresence of the Americans, and the impact they made, challenged mankind to try to find out what their civilization was really about. Much of this swiftly accelerating activity in war-devastated countries needed American help� By coincidence of circumstances part of this assistance came to 284 i da J ahr be closely tied to the ideology of the American Studies movement� And both its strength and its weakness is revealed thereby� (Skard “The American Studies Movement” 33) The situation for most universities in Europe after WWII was dire� There was little money for books and even less for teaching� It was indeed no coincidence, but circumstances, that led European scholars to seek money from American foundations and the United States Information Service (USIS)� It was also not coincidence, but circumstances, that made the Americans want to fund American Studies in Europe� Skard’s phrasing tries to draw a veil of separation between cultural development (the inevitability of the need to find out what the American civilization was really about) and its institutionalization and funding (the assistance that was closely tied to the ideology of the American studies movement�) On the other hand, in his implementation of American Studies in Norway, and in his descriptions in his American Studies in Europe: Its History and Present Organization, Sigmund Skard was very aware of the importance of institutionalization for the development of knowledge, and it is important to take that insight seriously by looking at what role the institutionalization of the field had in the alignment of European and American elites� As Skard’s quote above shows, the development of this particular field was an important part of what one might call the geopolitics of international knowledge production, and “both its strength and weakness is revealed thereby�” I. Discussions of the early history of American Studies in Europe cannot avoid the Cold War dimension of the institutionalization of the field. The John F. Kennedy Institute and the entire Free University of Berlin was liberally funded by state and private actors in the United States both at the founding of the University and throughout the University’s history� The German American Studies Journal, published by the Halle-Wittenberg Universität, started its life as the American Newsletter of the land of Baden-Würtemberg in 1960, consisting of 20 stenciled pages and distributed by the USIS in Stuttgart (Grabbe)� The field of American Studies in Europe is a child of WWII and of the Cold War (Gleason; Buell “Theorizing the National; Holzman), but just as interestingly, the interdisciplinary field of American Studies in the U.S� is just as much a child of the trans-Atlantic European-American relationship� David Shumway’s story of how Yale presented their American Studies program as a bulwark against communism in order to win a 500 000 dollar foundation grant is one good example (Buell “Theorizing the National”)� Another one is the American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, spending its entire first issue reporting from the first Salzburg Conference of American Studies and on the view of America and impact of American literature in Europe (Curti; Nash Smith; Beloff). This gives this scholarly field a particularly interesting history from a perspective of the geography and Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 285 social history of knowledge, and the ways in which institutional academic history intersect with conceptual history of ideas� American Studies is institutionalized literature research halfway between the concept of the “Great American Novel” and postwar international relations� Georg Henrik von Wright once wrote that the institution of the University has two different masters to serve� “Scholarship is one if them� Power, in a wide sense of the word, is the other” (von Wright 9)� 1 Even in less overtly political fields of study than ‘American Studies’, debates over science are fundamentally political debates. However, the field of American Studies in Europe lends itself particularly well to explorations of the ways in which knowledge and power intersect in academia, seeing as the field was institutionalized in Europe as part of an attempt to “modernize” European culture out of fascism� The field is interesting from this perspective because of its overtly political nature� The spread of interdisciplinarity was a stated goal in the institutionalization of American Studies in Europe in the postwar era, as insular disciplinary traditions (particularly in Germany) were seen as one of the situations that made it possible for instance for German universities and German knowledge production to be complicit in atrocities during the war� Sigmund Skard’s description of the rise of American Studies in Germany in particular is a progressive narrative of importance of American ideas to dispel German conservatism (Skard American Studies in Europe esp� ch� IV: Germany)� Former president of the British Association of American Studies Harry Allen wrote in 1980 that “In a fearful sense, Hitler made Americanists of us all���” (Allen 6)� Donatella Izzo argues that Italian American Studies has always been politically charged� During WWII, Italian Americanists used America as an image of a democratic heterotopia to destabilize fascist politics� Intellectals used the myth of America to counteract fascism� America was seen as positively barbarous and positively barbarous� This was American Exceptionalism, but not of the American variety� Italians created an American Exceptionalism of their own through their choice of texts to represent America� Cesare Pavese “was a passionate translator of Melville, and a competent and appreciative critic of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, John Dos Passos, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright, but never even mentioned, say, Henry James: his America was robustly democratic, physical, committed to the celebration of the language and experience of the man in the street - everything that Italy under fascism was not” (Izzo 590)� According to Izzo, “American Studies in Italy … started as a politically progressive pursuit committed to change in both society and literary taste, and was resisted by those who were more steeped in nationalistic notions of the superiority of European civilization” (Izzo 591)� The situation in Sigmund Skard’s Norway was somewhat different� For Skard, the politically progressive pursuit took the guise of nationalism, and he found this in the American tradition� One could make a convincing argument that this difference has to do with Italy and Norway’s different experiences during the war� For the left 1 My translation from the Swedish� 286 i da J ahr progressives in Italy, the nationalist tradition was as bankrupt as Sigmund Skard claimed the German academic tradition to be, whereas in Norway the occupation and the exile government opened up for a narrative of nationalist progressive democracy� In so much of the literature, the field of American Studies was and is described as a movement� This moniker, too, points to political, ideological and scholarly considerations converging in a sense that this particular field was necessary for the development of western culture as well as western academia� One of these ideas was that it was considered about time that American literature was taught and studied separately, as an expression of American culture (Skard The Study of American Literature), or, in the jargon of the time, an expression of the American Mind (Commager)� However, it also points to a sense of political idealism in the movement itself� A well-known story is the one Leo Marx tells of a young American Fulbright scholar in England, trying to explain American Studies to Richard Hoggart, founder of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, and exclaiming: “But you don’t understand, I believe in America! ” (Marx 399-400)� This political project was not monolithic, of course. Within any field, there are power struggles between central and more marginalized groups� In American Studies internationally, the fault lines have been many� The uneven interdependencies of American Studies in Europe and the U�S�, as well as the specific historical moment of institutionalization of American Studies in post-war Europe, lead to interesting disturbances in the force field of power structures of the relational geography of interdisciplinary American Studies� Some of these I have explored in my PhD dissertation When I Think of America at Night, No More Sleep for Me: Sigmund Skard’s American Studies Between Hegemons (2013), the title of which plays upon the fact that Skard, when wanting to describe his ambivalent relationship to his object of study, the U�S�, turned to quoting a German poet, Heinrich Heine, talking about Germany. The story of the beginning of American Studies in Norway is the story of Norway’s move from a German to an American academic sphere of influence, with all the realignment this entails. The complex intersections between directions of teaching and research and the structures of the academic public sphere, the incentive structures and the networks of scholars that were built in the postwar world, need analysis� Within which and through which (social, academic, state-private,) networks academic knowledge is being produced and in within which and through which networks the producers of knowledge are being produced is important to understand the growth of our field. In this article I am looking at some of these relationships and the maneuvering towards ideological alignment between Norway and the U�S� and Europe and the U�S� through the institutionalization of American Studies in Europe� I want to shed light on this through Skard, who was the first professor of American literature in Norway but also a founding board member of the European Association Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 287 of American Studies (EAAS), and the author of the book that has been referred to by almost everyone writing on American Studies in Europe, namely American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization (1958)� Recent writers on the academic field of American studies have pointed out that the early American Studies scholars, when looking for “the American Mind,” very easily could imagine that there was such a thing, because the environment in which they worked and moved was quite homogeneous; a small and uniform milieu (Buell “The Timeliness of Place”)� In his biography of Shepard Stone, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy, Volker Berghahn emphasizes the social networks of Stone as imperative to the development of European- American relations in the post-war period, and hopes that his book will further stimulate research into the importance of social networks in the “sociology of …European-American relations” (Berghan 59)� In the late 1960s the close working relationships of what Giles Scott-Smith calls “state-private networks” were read as this generation either conspiring with or being duped by American intelligence forces, in particular the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)� The Ramparts magazine’s exposure of the CIA backing of Cultural Cold War efforts in 1967 fed this interpretation, which became a large part of the generational conflict in the humanities in the late 1960s and early 1970s in general, and in American Studies� In his article on the history of the European Association of American Studies (EAAS), Hans Bungert points out that EAAS Secretary General Arie den Hollander was worried that young people in Europe were less than thrilled at the importing of American culture to Europe through the universities� In fact, as Bungert points out, “the 1968 generation had traumatic effects on Committee members for several years� Den Hollander’s experience at the University of Amsterdam led him to the conclusion that radical Dutch students saw the EAAS as part of the CIA” (Bungert 130)� This interpretation has been strengthened by stories of the Cultural Cold War such as Frances Stonor Saunder’s book Who Paid the Piper? : The CIA and the Cultural Cold War from 2000 (Saunders)� However, lately others, such as Hugh Wilford in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, has argued that the secret funding of magazines, labor unions, did not necessarily get the CIA what they wanted (Wilford)� Bungert’s article, from 1994, states from the outset that the EAAS has always been completely independent of American government money� To him, Skard’s book American Studies in Europe proves that the field in Europe was “not exported from the United States to Europe after the Second World War, for it was already there�” Bungert writes that Skard’s book is proof that American Studies in Europe was and is “a purely intra-European event, independent of any American influence” (Bungert 126). Skard’s example shows that the Atlanticist realignment of European elites, also in the University in Western and Northern Europe after WWII, was indeed highly dependent on a strong American push for influence, but it was not a conspiracy� It didn’t have to be� 288 i da J ahr II. The institutionalization of academic knowledge production has important structuring effects on the knowledge produced� Institutionalization makes physical certain and not other relationships� Through organization into offices and classrooms, break rooms and shared printers, institutionalization creates working environments that are conducive to certain and not other forms and directions of research and collaboration, both by physical manifestations and by what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the performative magic of the social” (Bourdieu The Logic of Practice 57)� The physical spaces in which scholarly knowledge production happens, shape the reproduction of the scholarly environment� As David Livingstone says, “It is also within these spaces that students are socialized into their respective scientific communities. Here they learn the questions to be asked, the appropriate methods of tackling problems, and the accepted codes of interpretation” (Livingstone 18)� In the Logic of Practice, Bourdieu argues that knowledge is constructed through institutions and embodied structurations that are both the products of and the producers of history� The actor in history is limited in her choices to the practical possibilities and the social possibilities of the situation and the institution in which she finds herself. Institutionalization in the university involves both the creation of physical spaces, and the organization of teaching disciplines and their relationship to research disciplines� Theories develop through academic practice, and so the institutionalization of scholarly fields both in a physical sense and in the structures of the university is important both for the conceptual development within these fields and for the exploration of this conceptual development� Looking at practice is necessary to learn how American Studies has made itself distinct from other neighboring fields (Bauerlein) as well as what the categories used are being used for (Fluck)� Heinz Ickstadt has argued that the fight against vested interests in the traditional English and history disciplines was a contributing factor to the defining of an American Studies identity (Ickstadt), and the way American Studies has done this is by insisting on its interdisciplinarity� The institutionalization and funding structures, and networks of the historical beginnings of American Studies in Europe has produced a very specific set of interdisciplinarities within the field - one which often is at odds with the version of interdisciplinarity of the U.S. field of American Studies. At the same time, however, U.S. journals, organizations and conferences were and are the center to a European periphery with regards to prestige and methodological innovation� As Liam Kennedy has written, America has at once been the object of study and the object of desire for many European Americanists (Kennedy). Indeed the field of American Studies and the interdisciplinarities of American Studies can mainly be defined through the historical structurations of the field itself, and how the “relational geography” (Hones and Leyda) is manifested in institutional structure and in the work of the scholars in that field. The delimitation of the movement and the field resists an analytical approach, and are Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 289 as such better defined historically. Scholarship is at once both transnational and inter-national, and the so-called internationalization of academia has its own specific political consequences for the creation of cores and peripheries and semi-peripheries not just of an economic world order (Wallerstein) or of literature (Moretti) but of a world order of knowledge production� 2 The academic field of American Studies in Europe is thus both a part of and a reaction to a postwar reorganization of the academic and economic and literary world-system� Sigmund Skard was very aware of the impact of institutionalization on research� His own book American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization, published in two volumes in 1958 and created with help from a travel grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, was written as a response to a conflict over syllabi and teaching at home in Oslo, as an attempt to create a tradition for American Studies, and places great emphasis on institutionalization� He argues that in the mid-20th century, there was a “veritable invasion of Europe by American civilization” (Skard American Studies in Europe 39), and the universities could not be left to their own discretion when it comes to American Studies� “It was recognized more and more generally that the beginnings of American Studies made before the war were inadequate, and that their development could no longer be left to chance” (Skard American Studies in Europe 40)� Skard’s story of American Studies in Europe is a political story about universities and a story of the politics of universities� American Studies is part of this story as “involved in the battle” between conservative and liberal forces in the university systems in Europe (Skard American Studies in Europe 30)� And the battle is fought with institutional means� In his book on the institutionalization of scientific practices, Timothy Lenoir explains maneuvering within institutional constraints with an analogy to a virtual reality world within the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson� There are walls and obstacles that the “players” have to take into account� These are programmed into the world, and which limit the kinds of movements their avatars can make, even within a world that is technically not real� However, a good player has both acquired through practice embodied skill at swooshing around these walls and obstacles on her or his motorcycle, and has, through practice, discovered which obstacles are truly impenetrable, and which it is possible to penetrate with her sword, for instance, if not with her body� Lenoir uses this as an example of how the worlds of institutions work (Lenoir)� Good “players” know which rules are impenetrable, which you can bend, and which you can break with impunity� They have also embodied skill at maneuvering the obstacles of funding committees, institute boards and quality commissions� It helps to have the same background as the ones who have built the roads and walls� 2 For instance, the much discussed so-called crisis in the humanities can be framed as partly a result of the internationalization of academic funding structures, often in the image of the natural sciences and with the institutionalization and cooperation patterns of the natural sciences in mind� 290 i da J ahr In the total war environment of WWII and the immediate postwar period, moving into the Cold War, people moved between the different worlds� Sigmund Skard was subject specialist in Norwegian at the American Library of Congress, then specialist for the Nordic Countries at the Office of War Information (OWI), before becoming Professor of American Literature at the University of Oslo� Both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead did work for OWI, Benedict full time and Mead on a project basis (Gleason 356)� Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, was also executive secretary for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1940s� John Hay Whitney of the Whitney Museum was a former agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and sat on President Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board� Nelson Rockefeller, another intelligence alumnus, who called abstract expressionism “free enterprise painting,” was in a position to fund hundreds upon hundreds of young academics to study the new social sciences and other subjects in the United States� (Rockefeller quoted in Wilford 107)� Shepard Stone, head of the Ford Foundation’s international division, was first an American graduate student in Germany, thereafter a journalist in the U�S�, then responsible for the approval of new press in the American occupation zone in Germany, then a journalist again, then Director of Public Affairs for Occupied Germany, then Director of International Affairs in the Ford Foundation, then President of the anti-communist organ the International Association of Cultural Freedom before becoming Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin (Berghahn)� These networks were also tangential with, and more importantly, important for, the wider literary world outside of the University� Norman Holmes Pearson, head of European operations for OSS’ counter-intelligence wing X-2 and later institutional father of American Studies at Yale, was an important figure in developing an American literary world from the 1930s on, “working on anthologies, socializing with everyone from the Sitwells to Gertrude Stein, writing introductions and letters of introduction, finding publishers, arranging lectures and readings” (Holzman 73). 3 The academic social networks so important for this movement - what Giles Scott-Smith calls state-private networks - was instrumental in the development of American Studies in Europe� Inderjeet Parmar argues that this kind of elite networking was also important in the rise of American economic and political power in the 20th century, that the work of the academic foundations were, in fact, the foundation upon which the so-called American century was built� He also stresses that the philanthropic foundations operated on a particular principle of efficiency and business logic which, through the work of these foundations, infused most philanthropic work in the 20th century and also many of the institutions with which the philanthropic foundations swapped personnel: the intelligence community, the UN, government 3 The OSS was the war-time military predecessor of the CIA run by William Donovan� Holmes Pearson’s position in X-2 incidentially resulted in him being the American representative at the liberation of Norway in May 1945� Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 291 structures, and the university� Parmar describes this elite as a loose group he calls the Establishment, who “share assumptions so deep that they do not need to be articulated…” (Geoffrey Hodgson quoted in Parmar 17)� One of the assumptions shared was that international and especially European resistance to American leadership was a result of old-fashioned ideas, which could be dispelled by exposure to American education, American literature and fresh air� Others assumptions were the value neutral nature of the work they were doing, and a pragmatist approach to the problems at hand� “The fundamental instinct of the Establishment was for the political center ‘between the yahoos of the Right and the impracticalities of the Left’” (Parmar 17)� The Norwegian university historian Fredrik Thue stresses that the susceptibility of different scholarly cultures to the leadership and influence of American scholarship after WWII was not solely determined by the amount of pressure and funding from the United States, but also by the institutional structures and the cultural orientations of local academic elites� Norway was particularly susceptible to influence from the United States because of a preexisting cultural affinity between American and Norwegian academic elites (Thue)� Norwegian, like Italian, radicals during the war, looked to the United States for support and for intellectual inspiration� This postwar development was not so much a break with an isolated European academic tradition, as part of a series of exchanges� The Americanization of postwar social science and humanities scholarship was grounded upon two interrelated ideas -that all scholarship follows the same trajectory, and that the humanities and social sciences were in some way underdeveloped� American Exceptionalism and scientific progress here went hand in hand, and American intellectual leadership was seen as an antidote to totalitarianism� Academia was central in the re-orientation effort� But these innovations were never a wholesale adaptation of American models� They were, according to Thue, a strategic adaptation through bargaining with the social environment� Sylvia Hilton and Cornelis van Minnen argue that “The aims and strategies of U�S� diplomacy after 1945 were born out of the belief that the Cold War must be fought on all fronts, but that each front had its own characteristics and imposed its own rules” (Hilton and van Minnen 17)� Totalitarianism, in this case communism, was to be overcome by generosity and superior weapons of persuasion and by showing that America had cultural values worthy of a world leader� This is, according to Hilton and van Minnen, the reason why U�S� public policy became more interested in academia and culture� The idea behind the promotion of American Studies in Europe was to show that there was cultural as well as economic leadership in the States� Yet still, in their article, they quote Skard from both American Studies in Europe and from the American Myth and the European Mind that the decisive interest in the study of America in Europe is the European interest, posited against an American interest� I want to argue that neither the “European interest” nor the “American interest” are monolithic coherent phenomena, but that there are other interests that are more conducive to analysis� I think this situation, though described 292 i da J ahr using different conceptual language by Hilton and Van Minnen, Parmar and Thue (and as we shall see later also Scott-Smith and Helge Danielsen) can be fruitfully explored using the concepts of practice and habitus by Pierre Bourdieu� Parmar’s Establishment mentality is very close to what Bourdieu describes as the habitus of the academic elite� In Bourdieu’ conception this habitus of the builder of institutions is structured both by his past and through the present situation, and thereby reproduced� Genre conventions determine what is considered sensible, what is thinkable and what is unthinkable within the world that you are maneuvering within, whether this is an institutional world or a loose social network� Bourdieu talks about the physiognomy of a social milieu� One can also talk about its geography using the same terms: the horizons that are closed, the places that are inaccessible, the careers that are closed and therefore unthinkable� Important to this discourse is the thinkable and unthinkable, the sensible and not sensible, the natural and unnatural, and how these categories are reproduced� Bourdieu’s habitus is a disposition that grows out of particular situations� The practical situation we find ourselves in requires action, and this action can take one of a set of different forms, but it cannot take any form� Bourdieu mentions the board meeting, the speech at the commensurate ceremony, and the exam� I want to add the interview for funding, such as the interview that Petter Jakob Bjerve had with the Rockefeller Foundation officer Erskine McKinley, and the many interviews and meetings that that Sigmund Skard had with USIS, Rockefeller, and Ford� One can also add the funding proposal, such as the ones sent to Ford and Rockefeller by the EAAS, or the newspaper opinion piece answering someone else’s claims of complicity in American secret intelligence work� These, and even smaller institutionalized situations require immediate action, which is governed by acquired disposition, by habitus� Bourdieu explicates it well by pointing to the situation of the virtuoso instrument player or the virtuoso speaker� Speech genres, literary tools, etc are available to the virtuoso to ply her craft� But these genres and tools are also at the same time constricting of what she can do (Bourdieu “Strukturer” 61; Bourdieu The Logic of Practice 57)� As an example, the Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad argues that Skard’s 1985 book American Studies in Europe contained several “ideological parts,” like Skard’s insistence in that book that the threat of the Soviet Union “forced the Western nations to close their ranks under American leadership” (Skard American Studies in Europe quoted in Lundestad 77) but that Skard’s year in the United States in 1957-58 made him change his attitude so that the when the book “was published in a revised and abbreviated form in 1961 as The American Myth and the European Mind most of the more stridently ideological passages had been removed” (Lundestad 77)� I believe that a more fruitful way of looking at this shift is not so much as a change in attitude, but in terms of practice, as a change in audience, as well as a change in function� The former book was, as Skard has written elsewhere, written to create a tradition for American studies in Europe� The latter abbreviated version was a collection of lectures Skard gave on the topic in the United States while he Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 293 was there - written to explain European American Studies to an American academic audience� The “more stridently ideological parts” would have sounded out of tune� Habitus is a harmonizing of common experience, of the spaces of institutionalization, but also common experience of larger outside historical forces� Bourdieu calls the merging of horizons within the class or group through the habitus-creating practice “playing in concert without a conductor” (Bourdieu “Strukturer” 64)� 4 This image really brings out the necessity that is contained in the habitus concept� Since we are all in this together, as the player (this time of an instrument rather than a computer game) I have to make sure that I am in tune with the rest of the orchestra, so that we can accomplish this task that is before us� When two separate elites are going to merge, there has to be a certain amount of negotiation between horizons, open and closed, and some tunes will be out of tune� III. Like the others in his network, Skard acquired his Establishment habitus through the watershed experience of WWII� At the time of the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Skard had already had experience with the new fascist movements in Europe, having been in Munich during the Kristallnacht in 1938, and interviewed German scholars about the regime� 5 He increasingly spoke about the dangers of the German cultural development, and having moved to Sweden shortly after his wife Åse Gruda Skard (who, as the daughter of the Norwegian exile government Foreign Minister, was recommended to stay in Sweden, where she was currently working), he spent his time writing against the German Nazi regime and the Norwegian fascist collaborators� Through the contacts of his wife, and her father Halvdan Koht, in Oslo and Washington, a scholarship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to work at the Library of Congress as part of a group of “displaced scholars” was made available for Skard� Through contacts in Stockholm and London and at the American and Russian embassies, they were also able to the secure money and visas that made it possible to take the three-month journey through Russia and Japan to the United States, where they spent the next 5 years� In Washington they were joined in 1941 by Koht, who had been pushed out of the exile government in London� Skard worked for Head Librarian Archibald MacLeish at the Library of Congress for the first two years, and both he and his wife both wrote and travelled extensively giving speeches on behalf of the Norwegian war effort, in person and on local radio stations, to women’s clubs, Veteran Societies and Norwegian American Communities� According to a letter Skard sent to the Rector of the University of Oslo in 4 My translation from the Norwegian� 5 His notes from these interviews are in the Norwegian National Library’s collection of Skard’s papers, but unfortunately they are written in code� 294 i da J ahr June 1945, Skard estimated that the two together gave about 600 lectures in the United States over the course of the period (Skard Letter to Didrik Arup Seip, June 18., 1945)� 6 Working at the Library of Congress, Skard immediately became part of the world of academic intelligence, in that MacLeish had promised “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS, the use of any of his scholars for the war effort (Waller 73)� While he was there, Skard also got the Office for War Information (OWI) to procure one hundred scholarships for Norwegians who wanted to study in the United States (Skard Norsk Utefront)� After the first two years, Skard’s ACLS funding was discontinued and he became Chief Regional Specialist for Norway at the OWI, where he was in charge of procuring information about the situation in Norway for use for the printed and radio propaganda material� In the very last part of the war, he also gave speeches on OWI radio broadcasts to Norway himself, among other things a reportage on the funeral of Franklin Roosevelt and a book review of Vidkun Quisling’s autobiography (not a very positive one), and worked on a report for use for the American intelligence service in Norway after the war� Skard wrote in his autobiography Solregn that during his time in the OWI he struggled with meddling opposition and media standing in the way of important work� As an example: my own office at the OWI was for two months given highly confidential excerpts of all Norwegian letters that had gone through American censorship, a valuable contribution to our purpose� (It happened once in a while that I had to hide a smile, as when my father-in-law happily showed me a letter that had been smuggled out of Norway, and I had read it long ago in my office.) That pipeline was abruptly severed when a busybody congressman pulled the issue out into the public sphere (Skard Solregn 166)� 7 After the end of the war, Skard was heavily involved in the work of rebuilding and the reorientation of the humanities in Norway, through his work on collecting a bibliography of the most important scholarship in the United States during the war years for dissemination among Norwegian research libraries, and also through procuring large shipments of duplicate books given away by American libraries to the war-decimated libraries of Europe� Skard had written to several agencies and Norwegian officials that he believed it was very important to create American Studies at the University of Oslo as part of the effort to help Norwegians be more positive towards the United States� Both of them worked to get American organizations to pay for Norwegian students to come to America (Skard Norsk Utefront)� 6 Gruda Skard worked as psychologist for American children, and was in the last years of the war involved in the cultural organization that was to become UNESCO, and on the basis of this was sent as one of the Norwegian delegates to the inaugural San Francisco conference of the United Nations� 7 ”Som eit døme: mitt eige kontor i OWI fekk i to månader høgkonfidensielle utdrag av alle norske brev som hadde gått gjennom amerikansk sensur, eit verdifullt tilfang for vårt føremål� (Det hende stundom eg laut smila i i sjegget, som når verfar min lukkeleg synte meg eit brev som var smugla ut av Norge, og eg hadde lese det for lenge sidan på kontoret mitt�) Den leidninga heim vart brått skoren av då ein geskjeftig kongressmann drog saka fram offentleg�” Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 295 The Rockefeller Foundation was specifically interested in three areas of the Humanities at the University of Oslo in 1946: The efforts of philosopher Arne Næss and his students to create an instrumentalizable philosophy of peace, 8 efforts to modernize the administration of the University, and the American Institute of Sigmund Skard� The requests from the University of Oslo for funds to send the students of Næss, and Halvorsen and Skard to the States for different periods of time are, according to John Marshall, even more justified than might be the case in other countries; Norway is small, the University of Oslo was the only university, and there was a strong connection between university academics and other sectors of public life (Marshall)� Sigmund Skard’s position as professor of American literature initially was part of an early optimism on Norway’s part, wanting to be in the position to mediate between the two new superpowers that had emerged out of WWII� These two new superpowers were described by Skard, quoting the Norwegian poet Wergeland, as two tall mountains casting their shadows of influence over Europe - the two pyramidic shadows reaching each other in the middle, eclipsing the sun over the European plateau� In 1835 Henrik Wergeland wrote in a Norwegian newspaper, ‘The shadow of America’s grandeur already stretches across the ocean and deep into our hemisphere and meets in Germany, which is thus buried in the vilest darkness, the shadow of Russia’s pyramid�’ In these words, written more than one hundred years ago, Wergeland has characterized with the foresight of genius the world in which we are living today and the position of the United States in it� Even twenty or thirty years ago, it was still possible to regard western Europe as a kind of mountain plateau, where the mountain peaks of course were of very different size, but the difference was not all-important� Today, as you know, western Europe feels itself to be a narrow gorge between two overpowering mountains, the Soviet Union in the East and the United States in the West� And if we are not thrown into the camp of the one, we will unavoidable, by the law of gravitation, veer toward theother (sic)� This means that in this world of ours, which we may like or not but we have to live there anyhow, the impact of the United States is increasing tremendously in practically all fields within the whole Western orbit. (Skard American Impacts on Norway 27-28)� 9 As part of being awarded the Rockefeller-funded professorship, Skard was given an additional Rockefeller scholarship to go to the United States for a year to familiarize himself with his new subject� He sat in on classes, interviewed professors and other contacts in the United States, visited old friends and family, and bought books to be shipped home to the Oslo University Library, and what would later become the Institute of American Studies there� While in the United States, he met with Robert Spiller and Kenneth 8 This effort was intricately tied up with the establishment e�g� of UNESCO, though Næss was deeply frustrated at the inertia of working within the U�N� system� 9 The manuscript from which this quote is taken is undated, but the same quote from Wergeland is used and discussed, in much the same phrasing, though in Norwegian, in the first chapter of Skard’s 1949 book Amerikanske Problem� See Sigmund Skard, Amerikanske Problem, Edv� Normanns Legats Skrifter (Trondheim: F� Bruns Bokhandels forlag, 1949) 9� 296 i da J ahr Murdock, but also Robert Frost, Norman Holmes Pearson and Bryn Hovde, Dean of the New School of Social Research, and through him, W� H� Auden and Henry Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt, among others� He spent three months at the University of Minnesota, one at Harvard, one in Philadelphia, and visited 15 other universities� Skard himself was highly active in the process to procure the funds from the Rockefeller Foundation� In a letter to David Stephens, one of his contacts at the foundation at the time, and again during a meeting with Stephens, he asked for money for the 1946 study trip to the U�S� arguing that “the spirit of the American college is one of the most valuable Americana to take home to a country where the German Geist has been strong in university life�” (Skard Letter to David Stevens, Oct. 12., 1945) He points to the fact that many Americans, too, see this establishment of a chair in American literature in Norway to be important� He mentions Waldo Leland and Robert Spiller as well as H� A� Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation and says “I need not repeat to you my conversations with these men; the main point is of course that the establishment of the first chair in a field of American culture at the University of Oslo (probably the first chair of its kind in all of Scandinavia) is not exclusively of interest to the Norwegians” (Skard Letter to David Stevens, Oct. 12., 1945)� Later, after he was established in his Chair at the University of Oslo, Skard gave the reason for the creation of his book American Studies in Europe thus in his application for Fulbright money to conduct a trip to supplement his written material with interviews and contacts: The most immediate usefulness of the book will pertain to the further organization of American Studies in Europe� Such work is now being carried on almost everywhere, but without the slightest coordination; several of my colleagues in various countries have expressed how much they look forward to a survey of what is being done elsewhere� But the investigation also proves to give interesting results from a more general point of view: it shows the baffling difference between the various parts of Europe, as far as American studies are concerned� It may therefore prove to be a useful tool in the more long range planning of American educational work in Europe (Skard Copy of Letter to Dr. Nordstrand)� Skard is also fairly straightforward in letters about the usefulness of American studies for the American government in Europe� He argues that it does not “need to be explained in detail, that the book in question, when finished, will directly serve the purpose of the U.S. Educational Foundation, and be of immediate use to its work, not only in Norway, but all over Europe, and also will be welcomed by other foundations and agencies in the field of research and information” (Skard Copy of Letter to Dr. Nordstrand)� In a letter to Edward D’Arms in March 1953, he writes that his study trip to Germany has been particularly useful because Germany is “the real testing ground of American studies just now” (Skard Excerpt from Letter Sigmund Skard to EFD [Edward F. D’’Arms], March 16.)� Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 297 When Skard describes what he sees as the necessary remedies to fight ingrained anti-American prejudice in European academia, he is very much on the same page as both the Rockefeller Foundation officers and USIS. Bring the people who will later be in important positions to America and give them an American education, and make sure that the people hired have some American experience� Skard thus tried to use the Rockefeller Foundation and the network he had there to create an English department where American Studies would be an integrated and natural part by making sure that the successor in the chair of English philology would have an American background� The chairs in English Literature and English philology would be vacated in 1954 and 1957, and Skard writes, “I think it is extremely important even to the development of American studies here that these chairs be then filled by the scholars who have studied in the States and understand its importance” (Skard Letter to John Marshall, June 19., 1951)� He tried to make sure of this by telling the Rockefeller Foundation who might be eligible and when would be the best time to bring them to America� In American Studies in Europe, he writes that American studies is important because it will reorient European culture, and because the theoretical and cultural integration that Skard finds in American Studies as a field fits very well with his own concerns about theoretical and “cold” scholarship in Europe� Even in the Old World there had long been a growing concern about the overspecialization, the lack of social commitment and contact with life in European schools and universities; many Europeans felt these shortcomings to be one of the reasons for the European disaster� Such ideas found expression in many countries in movements for the establishment of a studium generale in the universities� American authorities were in agreement with these efforts (Skard American Studies in Europe 41)� Skard hopes the book can further the growth of American studies “and in doing so serve that international cooperation to which the book by its origin is a living testimony” (Skard American Studies in Europe 13)� IV. In his article “Laying the Foundations: U�S� Public Dipliomacy and the Promotion of American Studies in Europe,” Giles Scott-Smith shows just how important American Studies in Europe was seen to be by officials in the United States, based on letters between the United States Information Service (USIS) stations and country assessment reports of the State Department� He quotes he USIS Paris office from 1963, to say that they are ”convinced that the French will never fully understand our policies, much less approve them, without a great appreciation of our history, literature, social, economic, and political systems.” The office is convinced that this will take time and sustained (financial) effort, and that ”one of the most logical means to sustain it is the promotion of ’American Studies’ in the 19 universities throughout 298 i da J ahr France” (USIS Paris to Department of State, Aug 1963, quoted in Scott-Smith “Laying the Foundations” 47)� Scott-Smith argues that the establishment of American Studies in European higher education was predicated on this particular interest from the American State Department� He shows that American government agencies provided both assistance and encouragement, which had as its aim to secure a permanent place for the field institutionally in Europe� This approach to public diplomacy was seen as particularly useful for cooperation between public and private initiatives, like the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations� As Scott-Smith says, “There are risks involved … , since the government has to grant the private agencies the freedom to act as they see fit. However, the advantages are greater. The government remains in the background, thus distancing the public diplomacy from any direct association with foreign policy goals and giving it extra credibility” (Scott-Smith “Laying the Foundations” 48)� The government and the foundations - the public and the private agencies - had overlapping, but not necessarily the same, goals� As Parmar has also shown, the large foundations’ work was “grounded in the conviction that American technocratic efficiency and progressive socio-economic modernization needed to be exported for the general good,” whereas the State Department had more shortterm goals in mind� However, their interests and efforts did “coalesce around the belief that the promotion of American Studies abroad was of paramount importance as a means to legitimize U�S� political and cultural leadership” (Scott-Smith “Laying the Foundations” 49)� This was achieved through the “deliberate fostering of local elites” who could then “act as guides and interpreters of American culture within their own national communities” (Scott- Smith “Laying the Foundations” 51)� According to Scott-Smith, Sigmund Skard, who he, based on American Studies in Europe and letters found in State Department archives, calls “an avid Atlanticist,” as well as “a pivotal figure in developing this transnational network in Western Europe,” “recognized exactly what was going on” (Scott- Smith “Laying the Foundations” 53, 52) To show this, he quotes Skard’s 1958 book, and highlights that Skard writes that the development of American Studies “could no longer be left to chance…If this movement is compared to that following the First World War, it is not only much more general, it has the support of American institutions on a much larger scale” (Skard quoted in Scott- Smith “Laying the Foundations” 52-53)� 10 Scott-Smith has also argued that in the Netherlands, the focus of the State Department, the United States Information Agency (USIA) and other state agencies involved in public diplomacy and cultural cold war efforts, was on the comparatively slow methods of leader and academic exchange and academic promotion of American studies, because of the high literacy and small public sphere of the country� In an article on American public diplomacy efforts in Norway in 1950-1965 tellingly called Making Friends at Court, Helge Danielsen argues that the same case can be made for Norway� 10 Italics are Scott-Smith’s� Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 299 Danielsen points out that Norway’s geopolitical position, neutrality before WWII and influence on other Nordic countries made it an important country for the United States� This led to a separate bi-lateral relationship between the United States and Norway, “an alliance within the [NATO] alliance” (Danielsen 181)� The U�S� Information Service in Norway was fairly small, but its activity and achievements were high� In proportion to its population, Norway was one of the European countries that sent most of its leaders and academics to the United States through exchange programs and fellowships, and the number of grantees was high, also in absolute terms� Only a few countries (the UK, West Germany, France and Italy) were awarded more grantees than Norway� On the other hand, since “Norwegians were also known to resent obvious propaganda” (Danielsen 186), the high literacy rates and the small and easily mapped public sphere of Norway created a main focus on “’slow’ or ‘indirect’ media” of exchange programs (for union leaders, political figures and academics) and American Studies (Danielsen 183)� There was little focus on anti-communist messages, and more on building an image of the U�S� as a responsible leader of the free world� The interchange of ideas, productions and exhibits on the cultural level in Norway have direct bearing on the attitudes Norwegians develop toward the United States as a world leader� Their respect for and understanding of the United States as a nation worthy of leadership will in the long run depend upon ability of the United States to show evidence of cultural depth in its national life (USIE-Oslo to State Department Jan 11, 1952, quoted in Danielsen 183)� The objective of these programs, in particular the exchange programs like Fulbright, was to let Norwegians, through study in the United States, “adopt the American mentality and methods voluntarily” and to develop “a commitment to the US model of modernisation” (Scott-Smith Networks quoted in Danielsen 191), as well as influence (“modify”) negative impressions of “US trade unions and of US race relations” (Danielsen 192)� In this way, local intermediaries were needed to bring across the American messages, it was a kind of “public diplomacy by proxy” (Danielsen 184)� Among these important local intermediaries were the participants in foreign leader exchange programs, academic exchange programs like the Fulbright program, the newly created Institute for Social Research, and Sigmund Skard� Scholars and grantees alike were seen to fulfill roles as mediators who could spread the message� Skard was seen as especially important, both because he cooperated with the USIS in Norway and not least because he was influential internationally� His role as a perceived neutral scholar at a respected university was seen to be important by American officials, especially his work on American Studies in Europe. American officials saw the American Institute at the University as vital� The institute provides exactly the kind of fertile ground where the seeds of American generosity - not to say self-interest - can be best planted with every expectation of a bountiful yield� This is particularly true inasmuch as there is a devoted gardener in attendance, in the person of Professor Sigmund Skard, whose appointment to the fill chair of ‘Literature, especially American’ in 1946 gave the 300 i da J ahr initial impetus for the founding of the American Institute, for the inclusion of much American literature in the University’s English courses and for making use of American Fulbright professors as visiting lecturers� (Joint USIS-Oslo/ Embassy dispatch to USIA/ State Department Sept� 28, 1959, quoted in Danielsen 195) American Studies took a central place in American public diplomacy in Norway� The promotion of American Studies in Norway was praised by American officials as both important and efficient. And they relied on the model of cultivating elite groups as links to the populations of the country in question� Thus American Studies was, in a 1965 report, described as “a cornerstone of US cultural diplomacy in Western Europe” (Annual Report to Congress on the International and Cultural Exchange Program Fiscal Year of 1965, by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, quoted in Danielsen 196)� As in other parts of Europe, the exchange programs were meant to transform Norwegian academic organization and scholarship� Interdisciplinary work was meant to foster democracy in academia, in the hope that this would transfer to the larger society� The Norwegian public saw the programs like the Foreign Leader Exchange program as “a form of ‘propaganda’ grants with the objective of ‘selling’ the United States” (Danielsen 190), and the academic programs, among them the institutionalization of American Studies, were considered to be less tainted� Norway and the Netherlands were indeed among the leading countries in the adoption of American Studies as a field, and Skard and the Dutch scholar Arie den Hollander were both strongly involved in the European Association of American Studies from its creation in 1954 until Skard’s retirement and den Hollander’s death in the early 1970s� These small countries, due to lack of ‘ingrained’ scholarly traditions, and with a common history of occupation and of liberation by western Allies, can be said to have been the source of important mediators of American Studies� Already in 1946, Edward D’Arms justified granting money to the University of Oslo by the fact that humanities scholars in the occupied countries seemed to have been given an additional boost of incentive by the experience of occupation itself� “Whether at home, in exile or even in imprisonment, they saw put in jeopardy everything they valued … Thus humanists in these liberated countries seem now more serious, more aware of their responsibilities as humanists to society and to their students” (D’Arms University of Oslo Grant Proposal)� At the end of the 1960s the Ford Foundation was reviewing its efforts within American Studies in Europe� The general impression was very positive� Howard Swearer wrote in a preliminary report in 1968 that “By all accounts the American Studies Program in Europe has been highly successful� … Thus if our future grants were to be guided solely by good services rendered, American Studies would stand near the top when the prizes are being passed out” (Swearer 2)� Later in the report he makes explicit what he means by the success and good services rendered by American Studies in Europe� The variety of mechanisms to improve knowledge of the U�S� is matched by the mixture of academic, humanistic, cultural and political motives which have inspired them� Although it is impossible to untangle this skein of motives, there is Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 301 little doubt that at least initially the political purpose was primus inter pares� To say this is in no way to debase the program� [Ford Foundation International Affairs Division] quite rightly regarded American Studies as a means to build a solid foundation of understanding for greater Atlantic political and economic cooperation� … Despite the faint odor of cultural imperialism, it was quite proper given the circumstances to promote American Studies (Swearer 2)� Other motives and “results perhaps not originally intended” were the opening up of humanities, arts and social sciences and thus the erosion of parochialism of European academia and greater internationalization of the world of knowledge� At the same time, Swearer points out that despite the great results, it might soon be time to move on to other projects� Though the Ford Foundation should not terminate funding to American Studies, they will have to cut back, and since the State Department is cutting back, there will be requests for money that cannot be filled. He wanted to move the funding of American Studies in Europe from the Office of International Relations to the Arts and Humanities Division, since most of the money goes to “history, literature and the arts” (Swearer 4)� 11 The Office of International Relations could then go back to what they did best, “give priority to fostering: joint research and other cooperation between American and European specialists on more narrowly defined common problems of international relations and industrialized societies; discussions between American and European leaders in various fields through travel and study awards, meetings, conferences and round tables, linkages between European Studies in this country and American Studies in Europe; ” and somewhat more surprisingly, considering what he has just said about American Studies in Western Europe, “the development of American Studies in Eastern Europe” (Swearer 6)� Conclusion In a recent Call for Papers for a conference on “Academic Culture and International Relations,” the organizers write that More often than not national interests and political ideologies have compromised the integrity of the idealized ‘republic of letters’, still, academic culture continues to be perceived as an international, even transnational sphere� It, therefore, presents a unique space for the study of international relations at the intersection of culture, politics and diplomacy (Lerg)� In several texts, Skard alludes to the dilemma of the scholar between scholarship and funding structures� As he writes in his introduction to American Studies in Europe, when trying to examine a field of knowledge, one soon discovers that there is theory and then there is praxis� The gap between regulations and actual practice, between claim and achievement, is always wide in a new field, and no less so when that field has the friendly backing of a great foreign power� American Studies were always the focus of 11 He also recommended that Ford commissioned a sequel to Skard’s American Studies in Europe� 302 i da J ahr conflicting interests, and are still controversial. The student of the subject is often entangled in susceptibilities, national, professional, and even personal, which make it hard to distinguish between fiction and fact. (Skard American Studies in Europe 10-11) However, these admonitions not to take words written to secure funding too seriously, does not stop him from writing words to secure funding himself� I would argue that “national interests and political ideologies” do not “compromise the integrity” of the world republic of letters, they make up one of the foundational pillars on which this republic stands� Therefore I agree wholeheartedly that the small global worlds of literature and academia, in our case of interdisciplinary American Studies, are perfect for studying transand international cultural power dynamics� American Studies clearly exemplifies and gives light to the drastic shift in academic hegemony in the West in the postwar era� Earlier in this article, I quoted from a passage in Skard’s American Studies in Europe, also quoted by Scott-Smith, where he justifies his own book as well and the funding of American Studies in Europe by American agencies by the “veritable invasion of Europe by American civilization” (Skard American Studies in Europe 39), after the war� Skard writes, “It was recognized more and more generally that the beginnings of American Studies made before the war were inadequate, and that their development could no longer be left to chance” (Skard American Studies in Europe 40)� Scott-Smith highlights and italicizes the fact that Skard writes that the developments could no longer be left to chance� I want to focus on a different part of the sentence� Skard writes here that “it was recognized,” but he does not write by whom� The lack of agency in this grammatical construction signals Skard’s distancing himself from what he is writing� He is trying to both be the European whose interest the European Association of American Studies (EAAS) is to safeguard, but also maneuver within the constraints of practicalities of what he needs to accomplish here and now� Earlier in the book he has written that though there was nothing “American” per se about the many interwar period “trends of modern technical civilization [which] obviously ran counter to essential values in Western culture,” still, concern over the “Americanization of the World” spread also among “responsible Europeans” (Skard American Studies in Europe 31-32)� The term responsible here has very little understandable meaning, as it is used as a stand-in for Skard himself� This continued and almost mantra-like focus on responsibility and sensibleness really does place Skard in Parmar’s Establishment, “between the yahoos on the Right and the impracticalities of the Left�” Thus we have several versions of “players” here, and several versions of playing� The player in Timothy Lenoir’s description of the virtual reality of institutions has attained embodied skill to maneuver the world in which she finds herself. Bourdieu posits his theory of practice against thinkers who see practices as the mere “playing of scores or the implementation of plans” (Bourdieu The Logic of Practice 52)� He describes two more players, the virtuoso, who both has the embodied skill to use but is constricted by the genres Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 303 and tools at her disposal, and the player in the orchestra without conductor who needs to stay attuned to the others around her in order to accomplish the task at hand� While Frances Stonor Saunders book title Who Paid the Piper? insinuates that the paying for the playing is the important part, despite its title, Hugh Wilford’s book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America actually argues against the interpretation that students, intellectuals and labor unions were somehow an instrument that the CIA could play, however much the CIA would want this to be the case� According to Hilton and van Minnen, how American Studies academics have “navigated the different (often contradictory) demands, constrains and opportunities, arising from their official job descriptions and institutional affiliations…” creates a picture of academic development, because these demands, constrains and opportunities encourage different opportunisms as projects adapt to changing circumstances� (Hilton and van Minnen 7)� The strategic adaption through bargaining with the social environment, which is how Fredrik Thue phrases it, happens within structures that structure what is considered feasible and sensible and responsible responses� The habitus prefers experiences that fit with its conception of common sense. However, this is not always possible, and in situations of great upheaval, scholars, as do all people, “cut their coats according to their cloth” (Bourdieu The Logic of Practice 65)� Sigmund Skard’s example shows the important structurations of practice and of common experiences and common short-term goals� Skard was famously ambivalent about American cultural influence on Europe and Norway in particular, and was to a certain degree somewhat of an anti-modernist� He himself wrote that from the very beginning his “thought-world” had “its roots in the pre-industrial world” (Skard Solregn 268)� 12 However, his practice still made him an important figure in the Atlanticist alignment of academic elites� Research into networks can, if done superficially, be accused of playing a guilt-by-association game� However, Bourdieu’s habitus and practice concepts show that association does create common feeling, and the common fight against “totalitarianism” during the war created an especially powerful esprit du corps� I began this article with a dichotomy between the writers who have equated ties to American funding agencies and state agencies to either being duped by or complicit with shadowy intelligence forces, and the ones who have been claiming, often citing Skard’s writing, or Skard’s work institutionalizing the European Association of American Studies, that American Studies in Europe was a purely European affair, independent of American influence. Both of these approaches are to a certain degree based on the premise that American funding precludes European agency� However, the categories upon which that premise is based, those of ‘European’ and ‘American,’ obscures the common habitus of the scholars and functionaries in question� It is not a matter of whether European scholars took American money� We know they did� It is not even a question of whether European 12 ”Heilt frå barndomen i Laksådalen og oppvoksteren min på Fagerheim hadde tankeverda mi feste i den førindustrielle verda�” 304 i da J ahr scholars took CIA money� The interests of the American State Department, the big Foundations, the CIA and the European scholars of American Studies aligned for a while though a common fight against “totalitarianism” and disciplinary specialization� And their cooperation created further alignment� Works Cited Allen, Harry C� “Foreword�” Journal of American Studies 14 1 - BAAS Jubilee Issue (1980): 5-7� Print� Bauerlein, Mark� “The Institutionalization of American Studies�” REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19 (2003): 37-45� Print� Beloff, Max� “The Projection of America Abroad�” American Quarterly 1 1 (1949): 23-29� Print� Berghahn, Volker R� America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy and Diplomacy� Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001� Print� Bourdieu, Pierre� The Logic of Practice� Trans� Nice, Richard� Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990� Print� -----� “Strukturer, Habitus, Praksiser�” Trans� Nilsen, Remi� Agora: Journal for metafysisk spekulasjon 24 1-2 (2006): 53-73� Print� Buell, Lawrence� “Theorizing the National in a Spirit of Due Reluctance�” REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19 (2003): 177-99� Print� -----� “The Timeliness of Place: Response to the Presidential Address�” American Quarterly 58 1 (2006): 17-22� Print� Bungert, Hans� “Importing the United States, Exporting Internationalism: The First Forty Years of the EAAS, 1954-1994�” The Insular Dream: Obsession and Resistance� Ed� Versluys, Kristiaan� Amsterdam: Veuven University Press, 1995� Print� Commager, Henry Steele� The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880’s� New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950� Print� Curti, Merle� “The Reputation of America Overseas (1776-1860)�” American Quarterly 1 1 (1949): 58-82� Print� Danielsen, Helge� “Making Friends at Court: Slow and Indirect Media in US Public Diplomacy in Norway 1950-1965�” Contemporary European History 18 2 (2009): 179-98� Print� D’Arms, Edward F� “University of Oslo Grant Proposal” Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG1�2, Series 767R, Box 3, Folder 37, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY, 1946 Fluck, Winfried� “A New Beginning? 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Ford Foundation Archives Collection, microfiche, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY� Thue, Fredrik W� In Quest of a Democratic Social Order: The Americanization of Norwegian Social Scholarship, 1918-1970� Oslo: Unipub forlag, 2006� Print� von Wright, Georg Henrik� “Til universitetet og vitenskapen�” Universitetets idé gjennom tidene og i dag� Ed� Wyller, Egil A� Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1991� 9-10� Print� Waller, Douglas� Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage� New York: Free Press, 2011� Print� Wallerstein, Immanuel� “The World System after 1945�” Eurozine Sept� 4�, 2011 (2011)� <http: / / www�eurozine�com/ articles/ 2011-04-29-wallerstein-en�html>� Wilford, Hugh� The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America� Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008� Print� s imon s chleusener Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism In his book The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, Colin Crouch argues that neoliberal capitalism has by no means collapsed as a result of the global financial crisis of 2008, but, paradoxically, returned from it even more powerful than it was before. “Whereas the financial crisis concerned banks and their behaviour,” writes Crouch, “resolution of the crisis has been redefined in many countries as a need to cut back, once and for all, the welfare state and public spending” (Crouch 2011, viii) 1 � If this assessment is fairly correct - and one of the motivations of this essay is the understanding that, in fact, it is - the question of why neoliberalism has so far succeeded in persisting is in need of an intelligent explanation� To be sure, there have been critical voices and protests in the aftermath of the crisis, most notably in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement� But if it is nevertheless true that, all things considered, neoliberalism has hardly been harmed by the crisis, its persistence can indeed be rendered a “strange” phenomenon� A key question by which this essay has been inspired is therefore: How can one make sense of this “strange Non-Death of neoliberalism�” 2 One way of explaining this curious persistence would be to take a look at what could be called the cultural and affective backbone of neoliberalism� Although this aspect certainly cannot explain the ongoing dominance of neoliberal capitalism as a whole, this essay seeks to show that it is indeed an important factor. Of course, especially with