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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? Transnationalisms�” New Literary History 42 3 (2011)� Print� Gleason, Philip� “World War II and the Development of American Studies�” American Quarterly 36 3 (1984): 343-58� Print� Grabbe, Hans-Jürgen� “Editor’s Note�” American Studies Journal 49 Special Edition (2007)� Print� Hilton, Sylvia L�, and Cornelis A� van Minnen� “The Academic Study of U�S� History in Europe�” Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future� Eds� Hilton, Sylvia L� and Cornelis A� van Minnen� Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007� 7-45� Print� Funding Fathers: A Case Study of Networks of American Studies 305 Holzman, Michael� “The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale�” American Studies 40 2 (1999): 71-99� Print� Hones, Sheila, and Julia Leyda� “Geographies of American Studies�” American Quarterly 57 4 (2005): 1019-32� Print� Ickstadt, Heinz� “American Studies in an Age of Globalization�” American Quarterly 54 4 (2002): 543-62� Print� Izzo, Donatella� “Outside Where? Comparing Notes on Comparative American Studies and American Comparative Studies�” American Studies: An Anthology� Eds� Radway, Janice, et al� Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009� Print� Kennedy, Liam� “American Studies without Tears, or What Does America Want�” Journal of Transatlantic American Studies 1 1 (2009)� Print� Lenoir, Timothy� Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines� Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997� Print� Lerg, Charlotte� “CFP: Academic Culture and International Relations� A Transatlantic Perspective�” HSozUCult (2011)� Sept� 28�, 2012 <http: / / hsozkult�geschichte�huberlin�de/ termine/ id=16980>� Livingstone, David� Putting Science in its Place: The Geographies of Scientific Knowledge� Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003� Lundestad, Geir� “History and Politics: Research on the United States in Norway, 1945-1980�” American Studies in Scandinavia 14 2 (1982): 69-98� Print� Marshall, John� Report on the University of Oslo, Apr. 3., 1946� Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG1�2, Series 767R, Box 3, Folder 37, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY� Marx, Leo� “Thoughts on the Origin and Character of the American Studies Movement�” American Quarterly 31 3 (1979): 398-401� Print� McKinley, Erskine� Notes from Meeting with Petter Jakob Bjerve� Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG 2, Series 767R, Box 71, Folder 472, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY� Moretti, Franco� “Conjectures on World Literature�” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68� Print� Nash Smith, Henry� “The Salzburg Seminar�” American Quarterly 1 1 (1949): 30-37� Print� Parmar, Inderjeet� Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power� New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012� Print� Saunders, Frances Stonor� Who Paid the Piper? : The CIA and the Cultural Cold War� London: Granta Books, 1999� Print� Scott-Smith, Giles� “Laying the Foundations: U�S� Public Dipliomacy and the Promotion of American Studies in Europe�” Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future� Eds� Hilton, Sylvia L� and Cornelis A� van Minnen� Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2007� 47-61� Print� -----� The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post- War American Hegemony� London: Routledge, 2002� Print� Skard, Sigmund� American Impacts on Norway� Collection 110 Usortert Sigmund Skard, Box 3, Norwegian National Library, Oslo� -----� American Studies in Europe: Their History and Present Organization. Vol I� Vol� 1� 2 vols� Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958� Print� 306 i da J ahr -----� “The American Studies Movement: Problems and Prospects�” Americana Norvegica: Norwegian Contributions to American Studies, Vol. 1� Eds� Skard, Sigmund and Henry H� Wasser� Oslo/ Philadelphia, Penn�: Gyldendal/ University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966� 11-44� Print� -----� Amerikanske Problem� Edv� Normanns Legats Skrifter� Trondheim: F� Bruns Bokhandels forlag, 1949� Print� -----� Copy of Letter to Dr. Nordstrand, Chairman of the Norwegian Fulbright Committee, Attached to Letter to Edward D’Arms, Jan 8., 1953� Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG1�2, Series 767R, Box 3, Folder 35, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY� -----� Excerpt from Letter Sigmund Skard to EFD [Edward F. D’Arms], March 16. Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG1�2, Series 767R, Box 3, Folder 35, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY� -----� Letter to David Stevens, Oct. 12., 1945� Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG1�2, Series 767R, Box 3, Folder 36, Rockefeller Archove Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY� -----� Letter to Didrik Arup Seip, June 18., 1945� Folder: American Institute Organization and History, University of Oslo Humanities Faculty Archives, Oslo� -----� Letter to John Marshall, June 19., 1951� Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG1�2, Series 767R, Box 3, Folder 35, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY� -----� Norsk Utefront I USA 1940-45� Oslo: Aschehoug, 1987� Print� -----� Solregn: Ein Sjølvbiografi� Oslo: Samlaget, 1980� Print� -----� The Study of American Literature� Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949� Print� Swearer, Howard R� Memorandum to Bell, Sutton, Kohl, Gordon: American Studies, Feb. 19., 1968. 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 regard to the United States, reflecting about the cultural dimension of capitalism has a long tradition� Max Weber, for instance, explained the functioning of American capitalism by highlighting the role of the protestant work ethic in the cultural make-up of American society (cf� Weber 2001)� This essay, however, will follow a different path� For while the value of Weber’s analysis is surely debatable concerning the link between Calvinism and capitalism in 18th and 19th century America, it is obvious that an investigation of protestant morality will hardly shed light on the culture of capitalism in the age of globalization and neoliberalism� Instead, 1 On the history and consequences of this “politics of austerity,” see Blyth 2013� 2 The title of Crouch’s book alludes to George Dangerfield’s publication The Strange Death of Liberal England (originally published in 1936) in which the author attempts to explain why liberal political ideas, having dominated England’s politics in the late 19th century, experienced such a sudden decline at the beginning of the 20th century� With regard to the neoliberalism of the 21st century, Crouch writes accordingly: “The equivalent task today is, however, not to explain why neoliberalism will die following its crisis, but the very opposite: how it comes about that neoliberalism is emerging from the financial collapse more politically powerful than ever” (Crouch 2011, viii). 308 s imon s chleusener in order to understand the culture of the “new capitalism” (cf� Sennett 2006), it is worthwhile to investigate what Jim McGuigan - following authors such as Thomas Frank (cf� Frank 1998) as well as Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (cf� Boltanski/ Chiapello 2007) - has termed “cool capitalism,” meaning “the incorporation, and thereby neutralization of cultural criticism and anti-capitalism into the theory and practice of capitalism itself” (McGuigan 2009, 38)� Among other aspects, a critical analysis of cool capitalism hence needs to consider neoliberalism’s “affective” capacities, thereby following up on Fredric Jameson’s astonishment about how “the dreariness of business and private property […] should in our time have proved to be so sexy” (Jameson 1992, 274)� 3 Different from Jameson, however, who famously diagnosed a “waning of affect” in the postmodern age of late capitalism, this essay will argue that the mobilization of affects is a crucial component not only regarding the link between capitalism and culture, but also of the very functioning of neoliberal capitalism itself� 4 To put it simply, one might say that the legitimation of capitalism in the context of cool capitalism tends to switch from the field of “ideology” and “ethics” (that is, the central aspect in Weber’s analysis) to the realm of “affect” and “aesthetics�” In the course of this essay, I will try to explain this development by examining a number of Hollywood films, most importantly Wall Street (1987) by Oliver Stone, The Social Network (2010) by David Fincher, and Jobs (2013) by Joshua Michael Stern� Among other things, my analysis will reveal that since the crisis of 2008 the alleged “sexiness” of contemporary capitalism seems to decline with respect to Wall Street and the financial sector, while it continues to figure prominently in the cultural depiction of high-tech business and the internet industry� Before focusing on film, though, I will first turn to the work of Ayn Rand and her two most famous novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957)� I will do so because Rand’s work can be understood as an early example of a tendency which I will also concentrate on in my analysis of the selected films, namely the tendency to transform the capitalist entrepreneur 3 To be sure, one could sense a certain contradiction here because “coolness” and “affectivity” are typically set in opposition to each other, with coolness signifying affect control rather than affectivity proper� In contrast to such a categorization, however, I tend to see coolness as an affective force in its own right, signaling a particular emotional stance (see also Stearns 1994 and Fellner et al� [eds�] 2014)� 4 Although Jameson diagnoses “the waning of affect in postmodern culture” (Jameson 1992, 10) primarily with regard to art and aesthetics, his analysis seems to imply that he conceives of the phenomenon as a general tendency rather than simply an art phenomenon� It is striking, in this respect, that Jameson, despite his awareness of the postmodern propensity to render capitalism “so sexy,” is rather disinterested in examining the link between affect politics and the hegemony of late (or neoliberal) capitalism, favoring instead a more traditional conception of ideology critique� For an interesting discussion of Jameson’s position from the perspective of recent affect theory, see Shaviro 2010 (4-6)� More generally on the relationship between affects and capitalism - a relationship which involves the mobilization of a wide array of affective responses, ranging from fear and insecurity to confidence, optimism, and hope - see, for instance, Massumi (Ed�) 1993 and Massumi 2002, Hardt/ Negri 2001 (289-294), Illouz 2007, Berlant 2011, and Lordon 2014� Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 309 into a figure representing not only freedom - which is still a fairly traditional strategy - but also resistance, opposition, and dissent� While Rand’s work thus embodies some of cool capitalism’s most characteristic features, it would nonetheless be misleading to see her as a proponent of cool capitalism tout court� For as will become clear in the following section as well, the type of laissez-faire capitalism Rand advocates still retains some version of an “ethical” basis (or at least pretends that it has one)� Ayn Rand: Capitalist Morality and the Spirit of Dissent A condensed definition of the type of capitalism Rand advocates can be found in the first chapter of her book The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) - a book title which already makes perfectly clear that the question of ethics plays an important role in Rand’s work indeed� Here, in a chapter with the telling title “The Objectivist Ethics,” Rand writes: When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissezfaire capitalism - with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church� A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start� Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future - if mankind is to have a future (Rand 1964, 37)� Now, besides its prophetic rhetoric and uncompromising conviction, what is interesting about this quote is the curiously utopian dimension of Rand’s definition - an outwardly “exotic” particularity which, nonetheless, represents a necessary feature of the neoliberal and libertarian legitimation of laissez-faire capitalism� More precisely, when claiming that a “pure system of capitalism has never yet existed,” it becomes possible to then blame any kind of capitalist crisis (that is, for instance: massive unemployment, poverty and substantial inequality, inflation, economic depression or recession, but also market concentration and the formation of monopolies) not on capitalism itself, but on supposedly external factors such as “government control�” Thus, according to this kind of belief system, a crisis of capitalism, by definition, does not exist� Instead, any actual crisis is attributed to be the product of government action, never of “pure capitalism” or the market itself� 5 Of course, such a view is not only held by Rand and the followers of her objectivist 5 As an example of an approach which completely reverses this model, see, for instance, the concept of political economy developed by the French regulation school� As Michel Aglietta writes, the regulation approach rejects the idea of “a pure economy in a natural state of equilibrium,” seeing capitalist development instead as inherently asymmetric, unequal, and prone to crisis� Thus, in order “to ensure that the distortions created by the accumulation of capital are kept within limits which are compatible with social cohesion,” capitalism can only exist on the basis of a particular “mode of regulation�” Government control, then, is not seen here as something external to capitalism (as is the case in Rand’s conception), but, on the contrary, as the very condition of its possibility (see Aglietta 2000, 389-391)� 310 s imon s chleusener philosophy, but in a similar manner by many proponents of laissez-faire capitalism, including neoliberals like Milton Friedman (cf� Friedman 1962) or the adherents of the so-called Austrian School of Economics� It is therefore interesting to take into account how Rand - who saw herself not as an economic theorist, but as a philosopher as well as a novelist 6 - responded to such theories� When once asked about the Austrian School of Economics, for instance, she claimed that “they are a school that has a great deal of truth and proper arguments to offer about capitalism - especially von Mises - but I certainly don’t agree with them in every detail, and particularly not in their alleged philosophical premises� They don’t have any, actually� They attempt […] to substitute economics for philosophy� That cannot be done” (Rand 2005, 43)� Consequently, Rand’s own specific contribution to the theory and practice of laissez-faire capitalism can be seen as supplying it with two things: A) a proper philosophy (including, most prominently, an “ethics”); and B) a model of aesthetics� In a way, both - philosophy and aesthetics - are already present in her novels� 7 But after finishing Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Rand abruptly ended her career as a novelist for good and concentrated strictly on further developing her philosophy of objectivism which she then propagated in a number of non-fiction books and through her periodical The Objectivist Newsletter (later called The Objectivist)� Today, it is above all think tanks like the Ayn Rand Institute or the Atlas Society which have taken up the task of promoting objectivism and Rand’s neoliberal ideology� But what, exactly, is the place of “ethics” in Rand’s framework? As is clear from the start, what she considers to be ethical about capitalism has hardly anything to do with Weber’s “protestant work ethics” anymore� Since religion plays no part at all in Rand’s system, she claims instead that the first ethical imperative is “the pursuit of one’s rational self-interest�” And she continues: “[T]he central purpose of one’s life is to achieve one’s own happiness, not to sacrifice oneself to others or others to oneself. ‘Selfishness’ means to live by the judgment of one’s own mind and to live by one’s own productive effort, without forcing anything on others” (Rand 2005, 109)� Hence, the pursuit of one’s own profit motive - one’s “selfishness” - is understood here as a kind of moral imperative, implying both a subjective and an objective dimension� On the subjective level, “to live by the judgment of one’s own mind” and “one’s own productive effort” is better for the individual because it strengthens her self-esteem and enlarges her happiness� But, on the objective level, to live by this axiom is hypothetically better for society as well, for if every member 6 See Rand 1963, vii: “I am often asked whether I am primarily a novelist or a philosopher� The answer is: both�” 7 “In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework; the novelist’s only choice is whether that framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly […]� This involves another choice: whether his work is his individual projection of existing philosophical ideas or whether he originates a philosophical framework of his own� I did the second. That is not the specific task of a novelist; I had to do it, because my basic view of man and of existence was in conflict with most of the existing philosophical theories” (Rand 1963, vii-viii)� Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 311 of society simply follows his or her own selfishness, society at large would profit by becoming more productive and competitive. 8 This idea is of course not new, dating back at least to Adam Smith’s conception of the “invisible hand” of the market� As Smith writes in his seminal Wealth of Nations: [I]t is only for the sake of profit that any man employs a capital in the support of industry […]� As every individual […] endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can� He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it� By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention (Smith 2008, 291-292)� This assumption that the individual’s pursuit of his or her own profit motive is not just something that shall be tolerated and accepted but which entails an ethical value, for, in the end, everybody will profit from it, is certainly one of the core features of the capitalist imaginary - and as such, it also lies at the heart of Rand’s objectivist philosophy� 9 While, in itself, Rand’s conception of a capitalist ethics is therefore not particularly new, her uncompromising willingness to transform terms like “selfishness” into something positive (cf. Burns 2009, 42) renders her thinking much more radical and provocative as that of the average apologist of capitalism at the time� In a sense, then, the rigorous aestheticization of capitalist competition that finds expression in stylized phrases such as “the virtue of selfishness” seems like a foreshadowing of Gordon Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech in Wall Street, about which I will say more later in this essay� Before that, however, I will first take a brief look at The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, seeking to point out more specifically how Rand’s capitalist ethics is presented aesthetically� In doing so, I will focus on those of Rand’s characters who embody “the pursuit of their rational self-interest” in the most uncompromising (and thus most perfect) manner� In The Fountainhead, this character type is, above all, embodied by the architect Howard Roark, who “breaks with tradition, recognizes no authority but his own independent judgment, struggles for the integrity of his own creative work against every form of social opposition - and wins” (Rand 1963, 73)� In the course of the book, Roark designs a government housing project for another architect 8 This type of reasoning is already expressed in Rand’s as yet unpublished “Individualist Manifesto” from 1941 in which she holds that “one of the greatest achievements of the Capitalist system is the manner in which a man’s natural, healthy egoism is made to profit both him and society” (qtd. in Britting 2005, 74). 9 This does not mean, however, that Rand’s neoliberalism is simply a continuation of classical liberalism in the tradition of Adam Smith� For one of the best accounts of the differences between liberalism proper and neoliberalism (with regard to the relationship between market and state), see Foucault’s lectures on the topic in The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault 2008)� 312 s imon s chleusener - the “second-hander” Peter Keating - “on the agreement that it would be built exactly as he designed it” (83). When the building is finally constructed, Roark discovers that the agreement has been broken by the government, thus deciding to blow up the building with dynamite� In his testimony before court, Roark defends his action with a drawn-out speech in which he celebrates the value of selfish individualism, succeeding in affecting the jury in such a way that, eventually, he is found not guilty� Not surprisingly, Roark’s speech can be best understood as an articulation of the key elements of Rand’s own philosophy at the time� 10 The testimony’s dramatic leitmotif - colorfully illustrated by a wide array of examples - is the pseudo-Nietzschean distinction between “independent creators” on the one hand, and “parasites” or “second-handers” on the other: 11 “The creator originates� The parasite borrows� […] The creator lives for his work� He needs no other men� […] The parasite lives second-hand� He needs others” (Rand 1952, 679)� Placing himself in the long tradition of “great creators” who “stood alone against the men of their time” (678), Roark justifies his dynamiting of the housing project by claiming to protect the integrity of his work - even if his destruction of the building caused harm to the underprivileged future lodgers desperately in need of affordable housing: “It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work� That their need constituted a claim on my life�” But “the integrity of a man’s creative work,” Roark concludes, “is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor” (684)� Thus taking a stand against the morality of self-sacrifice, Roark’s testimony is in fact a statement promoting the virtue of selfishness. 12 In other words, the ideas Roark draws on in order to justify the destruction of the building are essentially the same ones that inform Rand’s writings on capitalism� The Fountainhead, however, is not primarily a book about capitalism; it is a book, rather, about an architect who struggles against social conformity and the forces eager to restrict his creative impulse, artistic freedom, and personal independence. The same arguments with which Rand justifies capitalism are therefore used in The Fountainhead to dramatize the struggle between creative integrity and social conformity, individual freedom and collective 10 King Vidor’s film version of the book from 1949 (starring Gary Cooper as Howard Roark) contains a condensed version of the speech� Although the movie initially received rather negative reviews from critics, it helped popularize Rand’s ideas, leading, among other things, to a significant increase in the sales of the novel. 11 As is well-known, Rand’s early work is to a large extent influenced by her reading of Nietzsche� In fact, Rand originally set out to begin each section of The Fountainhead with an aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil but ultimately decided to eliminate all direct references to Nietzsche from the text (cf� Burns 2009, 87), perhaps realizing that, after all, their philosophies have hardly anything in common� Nietzsche, of course, was not in the least an “objectivist” believing in “the primacy of reason and the existence of a knowable, objective reality” (5)� Nor, for that matter, did he endorse the type of self-contained individualism advocated by Rand (see, for example, Deleuze 1983)� 12 In one of the last sentences of his testimony, Roark dramatically states: “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing” (see Rand 1952, 684). Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 313 oppression� Roark, then, is a typical “Randian hero” embodying the spirit of capitalism, without, however, being a capitalist� While not a capitalist in the technical (economic) sense, he nonetheless possesses all the qualities and features characteristic of Rand’s heroic entrepreneurs, most classically depicted in Atlas Shrugged� Consequently, The Fountainhead can be said to aestheticize capitalism by presenting the fundamentals of Rand’s capitalist ethics in a predominantly “artistic” context, seemingly devoid of what Jameson describes as “the dreariness of business and private property, the dustiness of entrepreneurship” (Jameson 1992, 274)� Yet in Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s last and most influential novel from 1957, capitalism is celebrated in an even more obvious and blatant manner� Different from The Fountainhead and its comparatively realist setting, Atlas Shrugged is not set in the historic present but in an unspecified dystopian time in which the United States has become increasingly socialist� In opposition to skyrocketing taxes and ever-new types of regulation imposed by the government, more and more of the nation’s most industrious and wealthiest people “go on strike,” thereby significantly harming the economy. It is now the mysterious character John Galt who takes on the role of Roark in The Fountainhead and best embodies Rand’s objectivist ethics� 13 Galt is the organizer of the strike, representing the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race� Well, their turn has come� Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function� This is the strike of the men of the mind” (Rand 1996, 677)� Somewhat paradoxically, the “strike of the men of the mind” is in fact the strike of the capitalists who, in Atlas Shrugged, are transformed into resistance fighters against the tyrannical power of the state - a move which surely corresponds with Rand’s political staging of laissez-faire capitalism as an alternative counter project to the American establishment of the 1950s and 60s� In The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, then, the capitalist hero is identified with “dynamite” on the one hand, and a “strike” on the other, both of which are symbols and methods of political action usually identified not, to be sure, with the capitalists but, rather, with proletarian resistance� Hence, what Rand accomplishes in her novels is a complete role change, an aesthetic transformation of the capitalist subject into a figure of rebellion, resistance, opposition, and dissent� Therefore, although the context of her version of laissez-faire capitalism is not yet that of cool capitalism (as it pretends, at least, to be based 13 Interestingly, Rand’s fictional character John Galt has recently become a popular reference of contemporary politics, when Tea Party activists protested against the bailout policies of the Obama administration with slogans like “Who is John Galt? ” (the constantly recurring opening sentence of Atlas Shrugged) or “I am John Galt�” What this attests to is Rand’s continuous status as an icon of the American right� On this point, see, for instance, Burns 2009, 4: “Atlas Shrugged is still devoured by eager young conservatives, cited by political candidates, and promoted by corporate tycoons […]� For over half a century Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right�” 314 s imon s chleusener on an ethics), her works nonetheless attempt to achieve what Jim McGuigan sees as one of cool capitalism’s most distinctive aspects: “the incorporation, and thereby neutralization of cultural criticism and anti-capitalism into the theory and practice of capitalism itself” (McGuigan 2009, 38)� Cool Capitalism and Affect Politics: Wall Street (1987) Now turning to the medium of film (and the historical period of cool capitalism proper 14 ), I aim to illustrate how the operation I have thus far described by reference to the work of Ayn Rand is carried out in a number of Hollywood films, within a context, however, in which ethical and ideological questions are more and more replaced by questions of aesthetics and the affects� A case in point in this regard is Oliver Stone’s Wall Street from 1987, a classic cinematographic depiction of the rise of cool capitalism in the 1980s� Yet, despite being steeped in the aestheticized coolness of postmodern finance and entrepreneurship, the film’s main antagonist, the Wall Street broker Gordon Gekko, exhibits features that closely resemble the virtues of selfishness already embodied by the heroic protagonists of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged� To refer only to the most obvious example: Gekko’s famous “greed-is-good” speech, for instance, seems to have come right out of Rand’s literature� In that particular scene of the movie, Gekko is addressing the stockholders of Teldar Paper (a company he intends to take over), attacking the management’s “bureaucrats with their steak lunches, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes.” In doing so, Gekko presents himself as a defiant man of action fighting against the power and privileges of an incompetent bureaucratic elite� And he continues: The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good� Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit� Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind� And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U�S�A� By thus stating that greed is not only good for the greedy, but for the well-being of the nation at large, Gekko articulates precisely the same ideology which also informs Rand’s conception of a virtue of selfishness, dating all the way back to Smith’s notion of the invisible hand of the market. Later in the film, however, the viewer finds out that Gekko uses the ethical context of his argument merely as a pretext, being completely aware of the utter senselessness 14 In terms of periodization, McGuigan generally follows Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, identifying “the marriage of counter-culture and corporate business” in the 1960s as the starting point of cool capitalism’s advancement� Both McGuigan and Frank, however, see the actual breakthrough of cool capitalism in the 1990s, when “business became ‘funky’, having shed its reputation for bureaucratic conformity” (McGuigan 2009, 7). While the 1990s are of course highly significant in this respect, I will argue - using the example of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street - that coolness had already become a major ingredient of capitalist culture and aesthetics in the course of the 1980s� Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 315 of his own profession which, as he coldly admits, contributes nothing to society� “What I do,” Gekko explains, “stock real estate speculation, it’s bullshit […]� I create nothing - I own�” What becomes rather obvious in lines like these is that Oliver Stone originally intended Wall Street to be a critique of the “greed is good” mentality and the excesses of finance capitalism. Interestingly, however, despite being exposed as a dishonest opportunist and crook who acquired his wealth by making use of illegal insider trading, Gekko has oftentimes been received by the audience in a manner that seems to entirely contradict the film’s message. Along these lines, the co-writer of Wall Street, Stanley Weiser, remarked in 2008 that he finds it “strange and oddly disturbing […] that Gordon Gekko has been mythologized and elevated from the role of villain to that of hero,” adding that numerous people have told him: “The movie changed my life� Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business� I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko�” Weiser thus concludes: “You have succeeded with this movie, but you’ve also failed� You gave these people hope to become greater asses than they may already be” (Weiser 2008)� It is crucial to point out, though, that the seemingly confusing reception of Wall Street is not simply due to a misunderstanding� In fact, the kinds of viewers who adore and identify with Gekko are typically well aware of the film’s intended message. Jeffrey Tucker, for instance, in a blog article on the website of the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute, argues that the “film ends with a paean to labor unions and governments that save companies from rapacious capitalists, but it seems artificial, like a Victorian novel that had to have a happy ending lest the readers revolt�” Similarly, a commentator on the same website holds that “Gekko is still inspiring despite the way he’s demonised and the unions are glorified. I wonder what Michael Douglas actually thought of that character and that way of looking at life - he’s extremely convincing” (Tucker 2009)� It can therefore be argued that what leads at least some viewers to identify with Gekko - although his character clearly contradicts the film’s ideological message - is the affective appeal that Stone’s cinematography attaches to his persona: his stylized coolness and looks (most notably the suspenders and his slicked-back hair, both of which have become iconic trademarks of the glossy Wall Street style in the 1980s and 90s), but also the heroic determination with which he engages in the battle of the stock market against all opposition, including government authority� As the libertarian Tucker remarks, it is above all “the larger-than-life quality of its main character - the rich, savvy, and unstoppable Gordon Gekko” who turns Wall Street into “a legendary story that remains strangely inspiring in ways that its maker, Oliver Stone, surely did not entirely intend” (Tucker 2009)� Wall Street, then, is not only a critical portrait of the culture and mentality of cool capitalism, but, analogous to McGuigan’s take on Jeremy Rifkin’s book The Age of Access (Rifkin 2000), can also be understood as a “profound statement of cool capitalism insofar as it 316 s imon s chleusener simultaneously both incorporates and quite possibly neutralises critique�” 15 In Wall Street’s case, however, this “certain schizophrenia” (McGuigan 2009, 44) seems to be less due to mere ideological ambiguity than to the fact that the film, at one and the same time, aesthetically celebrates what it criticizes in terms of ideology� Thus, when seeking to effectively analyze the political consequences of a movie like Wall Street, it is not enough to engage in a mere critique of the film’s ideology, without, simultaneously, considering the affective side of its politics - its “affect politics” - as well� 16 With this in mind, Wall Street can indeed be considered as both a portrait and a statement of neoliberal capitalism: while (moderately) criticizing the excesses of finance capital, the film has likewise become a major reference for those who refuse to conceive of Gordon Gekko as the personification of the market economy’s nasty downside but, instead, see him as an affective source of encouragement and inspiration� From Wall Street to Silicon Valley: The Social Network (2010) and Jobs (2013) More than twenty years after the initial release of Wall Street, Oliver Stone directed a sequel to the movie (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, 2010), starring, once again, Michael Douglas in the role of Gordon Gekko� In the beginning of the film, Gekko is released from prison after having served eight years due to insider trading and investment fraud. Although most of the film’s plot takes place during the financial crisis of 2008, it treats the subject rather superficially, focusing instead on Gekko’s conflicting desires regarding his still existing financial ambitions and the wish to reconcile with his daughter, who is deeply critical of her father’s activities� Thus, by turning the choice 15 For McGuigan’s discussion of Rifkin’s cultural-capitalism thesis, see McGuigan 2009, 37-44� Among other things, what McGuigan rightly criticizes is Rifkin’s “claim that physical production is no longer very important in the world economy […]� It looks like that only from the vantage point of an American business school where future cadres of high-tech capitalism are being trained” (38)� 16 That is to say that the political dimension of Wall Street’s affective logic cannot simply be qualified as an extension of the film’s ideological positioning. Indeed, such a conception would be problematically reductive, downplaying the fact that what one believes must not necessarily correspond to what one desires� Hence, in due consideration of the Spinozist insight that affects and desires do not merely concern an individual’s “interiority” but are intrinsically bound up with the action-oriented question of “what the body can do” (Spinoza 1996, 71), it would be a mistake to preclude the question of affects from political analysis. More specifically, if affects and desires do not simply follow from (ideological) beliefs, it is necessary to analyze political formations with regard to both, forms of ideological persuasion and forms of affect modulation� Along these lines, Brian Massumi has made the useful distinction between, on the one hand, a typically belief-centered politics that addresses “subjects from the positional angle of their ideations,” and, on the other, an affective politics which addresses “bodies from the dispositional angle of their affectivity” (Massumi 2005, 34)� On the question of affect politics (and the relationship between “affects” and “desire” in this regard), see also Schleusener 2011� Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 317 between money and a happy family life into the film’s leitmotif (with Gekko dramatizing the conflict between “affective” family investment and “economic” financial investment), Stone’s critique of the excesses of capitalism seems even more conventional in the sequel than it had been in the original� 17 As it presents an aged and slightly reformed Gekko, who has, nevertheless, retained parts of his former egotism and edginess, the film seeks, on the one hand, to cash in on its antagonist’s cool-capitalist image, while, on the other hand, avoiding the more extreme depiction of the earlier Wall Street� Hence, while the film’s subject is surely contemporary - given the fact that it was released within two years after the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression reached its climax - the final result turns out to be rather trivial. In comparison with the relatively uninspired Money Never Sleeps, Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) in a sense appears to be the more adequate follow-up of Stone’s classic from 1987� Indeed, while continuing Wall Street’s tradition of cinematographically depicting a stockbroker’s uncompromised lust for money and wealth, The Wolf of Wall Street is also much more expressive of the changed cultural attitudes toward the financial sector and investment banking since the crisis of 2008. Although the film is based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort - a former Wall Street broker who went to prison for stock market manipulation and now, ironically enough, makes a fortune as a motivational speaker - the parallels to Wall Street are fairly obvious� To be sure, the escapades depicted in Scorsese’s film are typically of a more extreme sort than anything shown in Wall Street, with Belfort (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio) functioning as a somewhat comical and over-the-top version of Gekko� But with its accentuation of Belfort’s uncompromised greed, his excessive desire for money, drugs, sex, and a luxurious lifestyle, his hedonistic disregard for conventional morality, and his resistance to law enforcement and the government, the film clearly picks up on the cool-capitalist image of the broker as a transgressor and non-conformist of sorts� Something, however, has changed: Although Christina McDowell, the daughter of one of Belfort’s former business associates, has openly criticized Scorsese and DiCaprio for “glorifying” the lifestyle of relentless crooks like her corrupt father (cf� McDowell 2013), there is in fact nothing glamorous about the film’s depiction of Wall Street greed� While Stone’s classic managed to inspire business students across the world to become stockbrokers, this seems rather unlikely in the case of Scorsese’s film, which ultimately renders banal and trivializes 17 In both Wall Street movies, Stone tends to “oedipalize” (Deleuze/ Guattari 2007, 91) desire, politics, and social relations, highlighting the protagonist’s search for a father figure. In the original Wall Street, it is the young and ambitious broker Bud Fox who is torn between the two father figures in the movie, his real father, the union leader Carl, and Gekko, whom he admires and who, for most of the film, functions as a symbolic father and role model. In the film’s sequel, it is now the equally young prop trader Jacob Moore, whose role seems like an almost exact copy of Bud Fox� While Stone’s familialism in the second movie is more oriented towards the relationship between father and daughter, the constellation nevertheless resembles the original in that Moore also switches between two different father figures (his mentor Louis Zabel and, once again, Gordon Gekko)� 318 s imon s chleusener the very lifestyle Wall Street so efficaciously aestheticized. This is to say that Gekko, for all the visible surface appeal his character is equipped with, also entails something invisible, an aura of mystery and inexplicability, which is totally absent from Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street� Here, everything is so vulgarly visible, exposed, and explicit that even the markers of the most highclass and luxurious way of life tend to lose their affective appeal, becoming what they are in the first place, namely trivial commodities. 18 Thus, while Belfort’s quirkiness, determination, and consistently outrageous behavior may surely fascinate parts of the audience, it is questionable whether the average viewer is able to see in him the kind of capitalist coolness (formerly embodied by Gekko) as to actually identify with him� This is certainly not to say that The Wolf of Wall Street is an “anti-capitalist” movie, nor, for that matter, that Scorsese is an “anti-capitalist” director 19 � It can be argued, however, that the different aesthetic models of Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street signal a certain change in the cultural attitudes toward stockbrokers and investment banking since the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, these changed attitudes have certainly not led to any decline of the cultural logics of cool capitalism as a whole (nor, to be sure, to a real transformation of the capitalist economy)� Instead, one can observe that cool capitalism still figures prominently in other areas, most importantly the realm of high-tech business and the internet industry� Accordingly, Kevin Roose notes in his book Young Money: 18 In a recent article, Florian Sedlmeier examines “the cultural production of a consumer cool” which “mystifies the thing and obscures the economic and social effects of the production processes�” Against this backdrop, he discusses items like the Apple iPad, arguing that in the context of consumer capitalism and libertarian economics, “objects” are typically represented as “things” (Sedlmeier 2014, 273)� With respect to The Wolf of Wall Street, though, one could indeed claim the opposite, namely that the film tends to present “things” as “objects,” occasionally demystifying the cool status usually assigned to consumer commodities. To be sure, the film mostly accomplishes such “demystification” in a rather blunt and superficial manner, as, for instance, when Belfort fails to bribe two FBI officers on his yacht, furiously throwing bank notes and lobsters at them for their “subway ride home�” Nevertheless, somewhat comparable to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012), the effect of Scorsese’s undermining the “dynamic of detachment and proximity” (Sedlmeier 2014, 273) specific to the neoliberal representation of cool commodities is that the items of consumer capitalism now tend to lose any kind of “distance” necessary for them to obtain their special “aura” (cf� Benjamin 2007, 222)� Consequently, Belfort’s lifestyle in The Wolf of Wall Street, although based on the same level of luxurious abundance, appears to offer much less to be desired than does Gekko’s in Wall Street� 19 The latter point can easily be substantiated with reference to Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) - a movie based on the career of filmmaker and industrialist Howard Hughes, which perfectly lends itself to an analysis of the logic of cool capitalism� Hughes, though being one of the richest Americans of his time, is portrayed here as a troubled but visionary “underdog” (Cantor 2009, 165) who, with his airline company TWA, challenges the alliance of government authority and big business as represented by the monopoly position of Pan Am� Not surprisingly, libertarian critic Paul Cantor thus praises the film as “one of the great American motion pictures because it celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit that made America great” (185)� Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 319 In late 2011, the technology sector was the hottest thing going� Facebook was preparing to go public the following year, at a valuation that many people expected could reach $100 billion� Apple had become the biggest consumer-facing company in the world, and venture capitalists were throwing money wantonly at brand-new tech start-ups, in a manner reminiscent of the dot-com boom of 1999 and 2000� The tech industry was also riding a wave of popular interest that had climaxed the year before with the release of The Social Network, the Aaron Sorkinwritten film about the creation of Facebook. […] Meanwhile, Wall Street banks were the opposite of sexy� They were laying off thousands of people, cutting back on salaries and bonuses, and nixing recruiting events for college students� And they were still unpopular as a result of the crisis� A 2011 survey conducted by the consulting firm Universum ranked Google, Apple, and Facebook as the most coveted workplaces in America among young professionals; JPMorgan Chase, the highest-ranking Wall Street bank on the survey, was forty-first. Given the choice between crunching Excel spreadsheets at a bank in a shrinking and reviled industry and working at a beloved tech company where they could wear jeans to work, get perks like free catered lunch and massages at work, and live on a much less demanding schedule while still making lucrative wages, many bank analysts were finding the balance tipping in Silicon Valley’s favor. […] Tech companies appeared democratic, nonhierarchical, and unconcerned with appearances […]� They were places where a talented twenty-three-year-old could make a real impact, rather than just doing rote repetition of the same ten financial exercises (Roose 2014, 178-179)� This trend - that is, “the balance tipping in Silicon Valley’s favor” - can be observed in Hollywood’s post-crisis treatment of entrepreneurship as well, with Wall Street generally being portrayed less positive than the technology sector� While The Wolf of Wall Street, for example, can easily be interpreted as a critical engagement with Wall Street greed and, simultaneously, an attempt to somewhat “demystify” the logic of cool capitalism, a movie like the above mentioned The Social Network (directed by David Fincher) is, on the contrary, completely steeped in that logic� Along these lines, Roose cites an NYU computer science professor, stating: “I’ve heard people say The Social Network is the Wall Street of this generation” (178)� Similar to Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, the protagonist of Fincher’s film, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg, is not portrayed as a particularly likeable character. In the beginning of the film, he is quite appropriately called an “asshole,” something which he proves to be true on many occasions, as, for instance, when he creates a campus website called “Facemash” (which enables the users to rate the attractiveness of female Harvard students) or when, later in the film, he dilutes the Facebook shares of his former best friend, Eduardo Saverin� But although Zuckerberg is presented as being recklessly arrogant, frequently making use of unfair practices in the course of his social and financial advancement, the general viewer is nevertheless made to sympathize with him and his project� That this is the case can be referred to the film’s depiction of its protagonist as an outsider, competing not only with the establishment of Harvard University, but also with the elitist Winklevoss twins, who personify the aristocratic values and habits of high society� Consequently, similar to Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko or the Randian heroes 320 s imon s chleusener Howard Roark and John Galt, Mark Zuckerberg is distinctly portrayed as a rebel and a non-conformist, thus embodying characteristic features of cool capitalism� Zuckerberg’s coolness, however, is of a totally different sort than Gekko’s� By frequently presenting him wearing sports sandals and a hoodie, being selfimmersed and inattentive when being in conversations with others, Fincher withdraws Zuckerberg from the typical image of a successful businessman and renders him an almost autistic nerd, who, to be sure, lives “by the guidance of his own mind” (Rand 1967, 9), but clearly lacks the larger-than-life heroism of Gordon Gekko, Howard Roark, or John Galt� Nonetheless, what is celebrated in The Social Network is precisely this post-heroic nerdiness, an attitude through which Zuckerberg appears not as a figure representing authority, but, rather, as someone who subverts authority, embodying the supposedly “post-hierarchical” coolness of the internet age� In this, The Social Network strongly resembles Joshua Michael Stern’s Jobs, a 2013 film based on the life of the eponymous co-founder and longtime CEO of Apple Inc�, perhaps the cool-capitalist company par excellence� 20 Unambiguously celebrating “[t]he ’cool’ mystique of Apple” (McGuigan 2009, 125), which, ironically enough, is deployed against the backdrop of IBM’s image as a company representing “big business,” the film seems to assemble basically all the ingredients of what Jim McGuigan has termed cool capitalism� Along these lines, the viewer is able to witness how the charismatic Steve Jobs (portrayed by Ashton Kutcher) advances from an idealistic hippie and college drop-out to the head of the by now most valuable company on the planet, without, however, losing his former nonconformism and visionary outlook on life� Hence, as the viewer is repeatedly informed, Jobs’ role models are not dull managers in suits and ties, but artists like Bob Dylan and Pablo Picasso� 21 This symbolic fusion of capitalism and anti-capitalism is perhaps most strikingly expressed in a scene in which Jobs looks for personnel to join his “Macintosh team,” recruiting a talented engineer whose desk is located, surely not by accident, in front of a political poster calling for “A Socialist Workers Party.” The film ends with Jobs recording the text of 20 On Apple’s strategy of presenting itself as a decidedly “cool” company, see, for instance, Sedlmeier 2014. The focus of this article is specifically on the marketing of the Apple iPad, the representation of which is analyzed in conjunction with libertarian economist Leonard Read’s depiction of the capitalist commodity in his 1958 text “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E� Read�” 21 In this regard, it can be argued that Apple has been particularly successful in neutralizing what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have termed the “artistic critique” of capitalism� All the more, however, the company certainly lends itself to the other type of critique the authors have conceptualized, namely “social critique” (Boltanski/ Chiapello 2007, 38)� Indeed, while the former has been largely absorbed by what McGuigan refers to as the “front region” of capitalism - that is, its seductive coolness and “cultural appeal” - the latter, in order to be effective, would have to succeed in drawing attention to capitalism’s “much less appealing back region, manifestations of which are perpetual sources of disaffection” (McGuigan 2009, 1)� Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 321 Apple’s famous “think different” campaign from 1997 - a statement which, in the most obvious fashion possible, embodies the cool-capitalist strategy of simultaneously incorporating and neutralizing critique� The text reads: Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes� The ones who see things differently� They’re not fond of rules� And they have no respect for the status quo� You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them� But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them� Because they change things� They push the human race forward� And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius� Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do� Capitalism, Affects, and the 2008 Financial Crisis In their “Notes on the New Planetary Vulgate,” sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant demonstrate how the advocates of neoliberalism have succeeded in propagating a novel kind of “Newspeak,” influencing discourse in such a way that critique of capitalism is to a large extent either silenced or neutralized (Bourdieu/ Wacquant 2001)� As I have tried to show in this essay, this matter is further complicated by a neoliberal aesthetics which captures and incorporates features that are better known from the context of anticapitalism or the counterculture� Analyzing the cultural backbone of neoliberal capitalism, then, is not only a matter of semiotics or discourse analysis, but it is also a matter of investigating the affects that are being channeled and mobilized (through various aesthetic practices) in the context of today’s mediascape� Hence, the “neoliberal affects” I have highlighted in this essay are not simply reflections of a capitalist culture, but can also be understood as contributing to the very functioning of capitalism as a political-economic entity� Cool capitalism, in other words, is not just the “superstructure” masking an economic “base,” but is directly involved in the capitalist process as a whole� All that being said, though, one should not overlook that American capitalism is, in fact, facing some difficult challenges - including the problem of legitimation - since the crisis of 2008� Indeed, the Occupy Wall Street movement and, more recently, the fairly astonishing reception of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) are signs of a new sense of insecurity about deeply mythologized ingredients of American culture, such as the still very powerful notion of the “American Dream�” Up to now, however, this tendency has not led to any substantial changes in terms of actual policies and, at least in the mainstream discourse, is typically conceptualized as an outrage against individual “greed” rather than a call for abolishing its structural and political conditions� In other words, while the image of stockbrokers, in particular, has surely suffered in the last few years (as movies like The Wolf of Wall Street seem to confirm), more general and systemic questions regarding the relationship between society and the market have thus 322 s imon s chleusener far been discussed, if at all, rather superficially. 22 Hence, despite the recent signs of uncertainty and disaffection, one of the reasons for the continuity of the “Non-Death of Neoliberalism” (Crouch 2011) seems to be that the capitalist mentality is still so deeply ingrained in American culture as to prevent any substantial change from happening� Using an example from the terrain of current American political debate, I would like to end this essay by emphasizing, yet again, the role of affects in this context� A case in point in this regard is Jim DeMint’s recent book Falling in Love with America Again (DeMint 2014), a text that is particularly useful in illustrating the strategies American conservatives and libertarians tend to utilize in response to the current crisis� 23 Having been a Republican Senator from 2005 to 2013, being aligned with the Tea Party movement, and now serving as CEO of the influential Heritage Foundation, DeMint is, without doubt, a leading figure of American conservatism. Although his book is far from being an analysis of the financial collapse of 2008, it is nevertheless steeped in a sense of “crisis,” relating, among other things, to “[e]conomic weakness and cultural decay,” the threat to the “American dream,” the forces which have “divided America,” and, most prominently, the failure of “big government” (2-4). At first sight, DeMint’s solution to these problems seems rather trivial� As he explains over and over again, the “one way to start to change America’s course” is this: “We must fall in love with America - again” (3)� Despite its simplicity, however, the wording of this phrase is interesting in a number of ways� First of all, by inviting his readers to “fall in love with America again,” DeMint acknowledges that their initial “romance with America” (Fluck 2009) has recently been challenged, that, in fact, they must have fallen out of love with America� Secondly, then, the crisis DeMint has in mind not only harms the economy, job opportunities, and a balanced budget, but is, above all, a threat to what he defines (with reference to Edmund Burke) as “public affections�” Such public affections, DeMint explains, mean “love of country, love of community, and love of our fellow man� It involves pride in our country and gratitude for our way of life� It is the source of patriotism and the fuel of responsible citizenship” (DeMint 2014, 5)� Now, what is interesting about remarks like these - and, eventually, about the language and style of the book as a whole - is their thoroughly affective tone� In other words, if we understand the book’s central message to be 22 See Shaviro 2010, 189: “[T]he neoliberal credo […] inverts the relationship of part and whole: instead of the market being understood as a part of society, all social processes are now exclusively understood in terms of the market […]� The economic crisis that started in 2008 has, alas, not led to any rethinking of this fundamental assumption�” 23 Although the book does not participate in the logic of coolness, it is nevertheless relevant for the topic of this essay in that it exemplifies the role of affects in political discourse� In particular, it illustrates how affects can be used to “overcode” one’s ideological message in case the mobilization of emotions seems strategically more promising than the attempt to persuade with ideas� (Strictly speaking, though, the matter is somewhat more complicated� For since any idea has an affective dimension, these strategies - while allowing for a conceptual distinction - frequently intersect when being carried out in actual situations�) Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 323 the appeal to “fall in love with America again,” then DeMint’s solution to America’s crisis is an entirely affective one� This is not to say, of course, that there are no other, more properly “political” messages to be found in the book� These, however, are the kind of propositions conservatives and libertarians are likely to make in any case, regardless of the particular context� DeMint, for instance, calls for restricting the power of the “federal government,” “moving dollars and authority from Washington to the states,” creating “a simple, progrowth tax-code,” reforming “welfare programs to rescue Americans from dependency,” and reducing “federal taxes” (268-269) 24 � Paradoxically, then, DeMint’s neoliberal response to the crisis relies on precisely those measures that have caused it in the first place, namely a trickle-down politics of tax cuts and “deregulation” which has not only been responsible for the recent collapse of Wall Street, but also for the “explosion” of inequality since the implementation of Reaganomics in the 1980s (Piketty 2014, 294-298)� Yet, by transforming the crisis of capitalism into a crisis of “big government,” DeMint renders it possible to confidently articulate the one and only demand any staunch neoliberal is always ready to subscribe to: more capitalism! The fact, however, that DeMint overcodes his political message of orthodox neoliberalism with the overly affective rhetoric of “love,” “attachment,” “little platoons” (instead of “big federal agencies”), and “public affections” (DeMint 2014, 8-9) might be a sign that he has second thoughts about his program’s ideological persuasiveness in the current political context� Consequently, he ends his book, once more, on an affective note, passionately stating: “And so, my friends and fellow Americans, let’s fall in love with each other and this exceptional nation, with this land of the free and home of the brave� Let’s fall in love with America, again and again and again” (275; emphasis added)� Assuming that “America,” translated into post-exceptionalist terms, is simply another word for “capitalism” here, it seems that even a firm neoliberal like DeMint is convinced that the onset of the next crisis is only a matter of time� Amidst the language of affect, then, the threefold repetition of “again” simultaneously articulates the anticipation of all the future crises of capitalism, and the anticipation of their respective solution: a politics, that is, not of seeking to abolish the conditions that facilitate such crises, but of an everlasting affective attachment, a continuous romance with capitalism, regardless of both its vulnerability to crisis, and the “grim realities” (Harvey 2009, 119) belonging to its standard way of functioning� With that said, I would like to point out, in conclusion, that although I have consistently stressed the significance of studying affects and “affect politics” in this essay, this was not meant to neglect that politics are typically based 24 Besides such neoliberal measures directed against the carefully constructed bogeyman of “big government,” DeMint also favors “secure borders” and “a strong and technologically advanced defense” (DeMint 2014, 269-270)� Thus, not surprising for a conservative, his attack on big government characteristically stops short of criticizing military spending and the national security state� Curiously, however, although his agenda seems like the quintessential embodiment of the American right-wing mentality, DeMint maintains that his propositions “should unite rather than divide” (268)� 324 s imon s chleusener on ideas, concepts, ideologies, and belief systems� Nonetheless, the point of emphasizing the role of affects in this regard is that the analysis of pure ideas will most likely not suffice if the task is to identify the actual dynamics taking place in the messy terrain of concrete political actions� By looking at the various ways in which ideas are charged with affect and transmitted in affective contexts, and by pointing out the possible dissonance between the affective and ideological dimensions of a particular politics, the study of affect politics, at least in my understanding, ultimately aims at a non-idealist, strictly immanent concept of the political� This, I believe, is a task that should resonate with the demands of a post-exceptionalist American Studies� Works Cited Aglietta, Michel (2000)� A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience� London and New York: Verso� Benjamin, Walter (2007)� Illuminations� New York: Schocken Books� Berlant, Lauren (2011)� Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke UP� Blyth, Mark (2013)� Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea� New York: Oxford UP� Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello (2007)� The New Spirit of Capitalism� New York: Verso� Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant (2001)� “NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the New Planetary Vulgate�” Radical Philosophy� Jan/ Feb 2001 (105): 2-5� Britting, Jeff (2005)� “Anthem and ‘The Individualist Manifesto’�” Essays on Ayn Rand’s Anthem� Ed� Robert Mayhew� Lanham: Lexington Books� 70-80� Burns, Jennifer (2009)� Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right� New York: Oxford UP� Cantor, Paul A� (2009)� “Flying Solo: The Aviator and Libertarian Philosophy�” The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese� Ed� Mark T� Conard� Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky� 165-187� Crouch, Colin (2011)� The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism� Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press� Deleuze, Gilles (1983)� Nietzsche & Philosophy� New York: Columbia UP� Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (2007)� Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Vol� 1)� London and New York: Continuum� DeMint, Jim (2014)� Falling in Love with America Again� New York: Center Street� Fellner, Astrid M�, Susanne Hamscha, Klaus Heissenberger, and Jennifer J* Moos [Eds�] (2014)� Is It ‘Cause It’s Cool? Affective Encounters with American Culture� Münster and Wien: LIT Verlag� Fluck, Winfried (2009)� Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies� Eds� Laura Bieger and Johannes Völz� Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter� Foucault, Michel (2008)� The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France (1978- 1979)� New York: Palgrave Macmillan� Frank, Thomas (1998)� The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism� Chicago: University of Chicago Press� Friedman, Milton (1962)� Capitalism and Freedom� Chicago: University of Chicago Press� Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri (2001)� Empire� London and Cambridge: Harvard UP� Harvey, David (2009)� A Brief History of Neoliberalism� New York: Oxford UP� Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism 325 Illouz, Eva (2007)� Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism� Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press� Jameson, Fredric (1992)� Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism� London and New York: Verso� Lordon, Frédéric (2014)� Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire� London and New York: Verso� Massumi, Brian [Ed�] (1993)� The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press� ----- (2002)� “Navigating Movements: A Conversation with Brian Massumi�” Hope: New Philosophies for Change. Ed� Mary Zournazi� London: Lawrence and Wishart� 210-242� ----- (2005)� “Fear (The Spectrum Said)�” positions (13�1): 31-48� McDowell, Christina (2013)� “An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself�” LA Weekly (Vol� 36, No� 6), 26 Dec� 2013� McGuigan, Jim (2009)� Cool Capitalism� London and New York: Pluto Press� Piketty, Thomas (2014)� Capital in the Twenty-First Century� Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press� Rand, Ayn (1952)� The Fountainhead� New York: Signet� ----- (1963)� For the New Intellectual� New York: Signet� ----- (1964)� The Virtue of Selfishness� New York: Signet� ----- (1967)� Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal� New York: Signet� ----- (1996)� Atlas Shrugged� New York: Signet ----- (2005)� Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A� New York: New American Library� Rifkin, Jeremy (2000)� The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-for Experience� New York: Penguin Putnam� Roose, Kevin (2014)� Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits� New York and Boston: Grand Central Publishing� Schleusener, Simon (2011)� “Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire�” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (Volume 27: States of Emergency - States of Crisis)� Eds� Winfried Fluck, Katharina Motyl, Donald E� Pease, and Christoph Raetzsch� Tübingen: Narr Verlag� 121-142� Sedlmeier, Florian (2014)� “The Cool Touch of Things: Libertarian Economics, Complex Simplicity, and the Emergence of the Tactile Erotic�” Is It ‘Cause It’s Cool? Affective Encounters with American Culture� Eds� Astrid M� Fellner, Susanne Hamscha, Klaus Heissenberger, and Jennifer J* Moos� Münster and Wien: LIT Verlag� 273-293� Sennett, Richard (2006)� The Culture of the New Capitalism� New Haven and London: Yale UP� Shaviro, Steven (2010)� Post Cinematic Affect� Winchester: Zero Books� Smith, Adam (2008)� Wealth of Nations� Oxford and New York: Oxford UP� Spinoza, Baruch de (1996)� Ethics� London: Penguin� Stearns, Peter N� (1994)� American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style� New York and London: New York UP� Tucker, Jeffrey (2009)� “Capitalism as Drama�” Ludwig von Mises Institute: Mises Economics Blog� 19 July 2009� Web� 29 May 2014� <http: / / mises�org/ daily/ 3576>� For comments on this entry, see <http: / / archive�mises�org/ 010318/ >� Weber, Max (2001)� The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism� London and New York: Routledge� Weiser, Stanley (2008)� “Repeat After Me: Greed Is Not Good� The co-writer of ‘Wall Street’ worries that the movie’s message is misunderstood� Especially now�” Los Angeles Times, 5 Oct� 2008� 326 s imon s chleusener List of Films Jobs (2013)� Dir� Joshua Michael Stern� Open Road Films� Spring Breakers (2012)� Dir� Harmony Korine� A24� The Aviator (2004)� Dir� Martin Scorsese� Warner Bros� The Fountainhead (1949)� Dir� King Vidor� Warner Bros� The Social Network (2010)� Dir� David Fincher� Columbia Pictures� The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)� Dir� Martin Scorsese� Paramount Pictures� Wall Street (1987)� Dir� Oliver Stone� Twentieth Century Fox� Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)� Dir� Oliver Stone� Twentieth Century Fox� 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 1 My one aim is and has always been…to hold a torch for the children of a group too long exploited and too frequently disparaged in its struggling for the light…� In the simple words of the Master, spoken for another nameless one, my humble career may be summed up to date: -‘She hath done what she could�’ Anna Julia Cooper, “Souvenir” (Undated) On April 29, 1992, the city of Los Angeles, California, was in flames. Following the acquittal of the four police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department who were involved in the brutal beating of Rodney Glen King, an African American construction worker - Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Stacey Koon - uncontrolled violence broke out in South-Central Los Angeles in scenes of arson, mass looting, random violence and rioting crowds� From April 29 until May 4, 1992, the riots in South-Central Los Angeles continued, even though soldiers from the California Army National Guard, in addition to 2,000 U�S� Army soldiers and 1,500 U�S� Marines, were called in to restore order because the local police were overwhelmed and could not dispel the chaos� All told, during those six days, more than 50 people lost their lives, over 2,000 others were injured, more than 1,100 buildings were damaged, over 3,000 fires were set, and the city of Los Angeles suffered $1 billion in property damage� (Gray; McDonald; Devore) 2 The violent disorder that was the result of the acquittals did not stop at Los Angeles, however� Spreading to other parts of the country as well, it created a strange sense of moving backward in time, of revisiting the American landscape of 30 years before, making real again the racial upheavals and the civil unrest of the Civil Rights Movement which, captured and chronicled for all time in the excellent photography of Life magazine, 3 had seemed to have long ago receded into a distant, less enlightened past, as compared with the modern, soon-to-be-turn-of-the-century present of the 1990s� In this vein, the Rodney King beating seemed an abrupt and violent usurpation of that present, which had all the appearance of being comfortably removed from the 1 Research for this essay was made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame� 2 The South-Central Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King beating were considered more severe than the riots of the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement thirty years earlier, even the Los Angeles Watts riot of 1965� 3 See a selection of Life Magazine Civil Rights issues at http: / / life�time�com/ ? N=0&Nty =1&p=0&cmd=tags&srchCat=LIFE&s=civil+rights+movement� Web� 15 July 2014� 328 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier embarrassments of prior racial strife� It brought that same past tumult front and center into that present, because in at least 84 seconds of the fateful video, shot by George Holliday, which documented the incident, there existed for all to see, over and over, a scene which belied its seemingly untroubled truth superior in all respects to that supposedly - and gratefully - far away past� 4 The truth of the video, on the other hand, could not be denied - it depicted a defenseless, helpless black man crawling on the ground amid a shower of blows administered by three white men while another looked on, all of whom were not just white men but uniformed white men from the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), signaling their status as representatives of the power and authority of a state whose law and order they were sworn to uphold, maintain and protect� Obviously, something was very wrong with the story told by the video, something that went radically counter to the story told by the idea of an unruffled present, in which such things could only be considered gruesome representations of an unfortunate but happily bygone era� The visual truth of the video asked a bald question of the present, that is, was it really so comfortable as one would surely want to believe, and as one had been led to believe, at least by appearances alone? Or was there something of that difficult racial past that had remained, albeit submerged, lurking unseen in the neglected corners of contemporary reality? The disjuncture between commonly held beliefs about American culture’s advancements in the realm of race relations since the 1960s, and the visual reality of the Rodney King video tore a ragged hole in that belief system, beyond which lay an unassimilable truth: perhaps American culture had not really advanced beyond the more egregious difficulties of its troubled racial history, so much as it had simply buried them beneath a powerful façade that imagined it in terms more in keeping with the best of what it had always been meant to be� In his recent work, The New American Exceptionalism, Donald Pease describes this situation in terms of his notion of the “state fantasy,” which “does not refer to a mystification but to the dominant structure of desire out of which U�S� citizens imagined their national identity�” (1) In developing this idea of “state fantasy,” Pease relies on Jacqueline Rose’s conception of the role played by fantasy with regard to states and nations in her study States of Fantasy, one in which the state becomes an entity that is completely bound up with the idea of fantasy, especially in terms of the relationship between the state and its citizens� As Pease explains: State fantasies lay down the scenarios through which the state’s rules and norms can be experienced as internal to the citizens’ desire� Fantasy endows the state’s rules and laws with the authority of the people’s desire for them� Fantasy does so by investing the state’s rules with the desire through which the state’s subjects imagine themselves to be the authors of these rules and laws as well as their recipients� The state’s subjects’ capacity to recognize a series of events as belonging to the same symbolic order also requires the guidance and supervision of state fantasies� These fantasies align the people’s beliefs with the regulative discourse through which the state is empowered to bring the chaos of political events into order� (4) 4 “Rodney King Beating (Full Version)” YouTube. Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 329 The visual image displayed in the Rodney King video could not be assimilated to the extant state fantasy articulating the untroubled present, as there was no narrative within that fantasy that could incorporate it� Instead, the truth of the image potently “recovered the memories…of slaves beaten by their masters, of migrant laborers forced into transfer centers, of Indians slaughtered by the thousands, or Vietnamese families dragged from their huts and shot and burned, of Iraqis forcibly separated from their homeland - that haunted the present with this record of injustice from the historical past…” (38-39) For Pease, the Rodney King video thus represents an “empty space” (39) standing between past and present� Through it, past and present are, as a result, also brought into uneasy relation with each other� In this unsettled relation, however, this “empty space” can also be said to represent a tell-tale moment in American culture, one reflecting a hidden juncture at which both the image and the film’s visual interpretation of reality collide with the subject’s interpellation as an American citizen and his or her own personal relationship to and understanding of the film’s visual content. (Fluck, “Transnationalisms” 365) 5 Because the Rodney King beating was not just yet one more racial incident, subject to run-of-the-mill reporting in newspapers and other media outlets, but was accompanied by an image whose power was neither diluted nor mediated by words, it signifies in American culture with many different meanings on many different registers� These various significations serve to challenge the narrative of the dominant state fantasy with multiple alternative narratives of American reality, whose origins lie in the meaning of the connection of many different individuals to the incident, at an individual level� Due to the multiple nodes of this juncture, the cultural meaning of the event is necessarily stratified across a trajectory from personal to communal, rendering its meaning much more complex than would seem on the surface, especially when it is approached not just from the perspective of its role in American culture, but from a view of how it might signify to the individual American citizen in the context of American culture, and in what ways it might in this way disturb the interpellation of that individual to the state fantasy of what it is to be an American citizen� In other words, through its revelation of the invisible fault line that exists in America between white and black 6 , state and citizen, power and authority, weakness and subjection and any number of other such binaries, and because it does this along a racial alignment, the video powerfully reveals the radical failure of the exceptionalist American idea which would ordinar- 5 Fluck describes the problem of interpellation to the nation-state as one of subjection, the escape from which has been made possible by the emphasis on minority voices and subject positions within the transnational turn, which destabilizes the primacy of the nation-state by ranging beyond its borders and focusing on those cultural locations and intersections that lie between nation-states� 6 This is not to say that the line between white and black is the only racial line to be drawn in American culture� There are of course many other ethnicities that may be considered in this context, but I have chosen to focus on this one because it plays a central role in the Rodney King beating, and the author whose work I will treat later in the essay is also an African American� 330 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier ily operate to conceal this problematic reality behind a fiction or “fantasy” of American democratic ideals� The video in a sense went “viral” before going viral became a commonplace of contemporary American culture; it was displayed, again and again, on the national news, discussed in all major media outlets and in this way fuelled a submerged outrage on the part of those not on the side of state authority that quickly bubbled violently and uncontainably to the surface on a national playing field. Considering the Rodney King beating from this vantage point brings out a number of subtle nuances that would otherwise be lost� When the “empty space” represented by the Rodney King beating is, for example, considered in relation to what Günter Lentz would call the “gaps” (Lentz Kindle File) that exist between the internationalization, globalization and/ or transnationalization of American Studies, it becomes possible to see in what ways this moment in American culture and history can become a particularly revelatory one� This is so especially in terms of what Shelley Fischer Fishkin identifies as the transnational turn in American Studies and its potential for an American Studies practice that can move beyond what Amy Kaplan has described as its struggle with the tenacious grasp of exceptionalism, thus opening the door to the exploration of a new, post-exceptional possibility in the study of American culture� Transnationalizing the Exceptional It goes without saying that this turn toward the transnational in terms of its potential to open up American Studies to a much broader and more ethnically, culturally and historically complex understanding of American culture has become one of the most important (if not the most important) contemporary issues in the field. Because it shifts the terms of debate from a direct engagement with the idealistic notions of American culture described by American exceptionalism to a critical stance toward those ideals based on its grounding within perspectives long excluded from the exceptionalist understanding of American culture, it creates a fissure from which vantage point it is possible to gain a completely different perspective on the meaning of America� Or does it? In considering the broad issue of theories of American culture, Winfried Fluck addresses precisely this problem, by suggesting that although transnational American studies is presented in contemporary critical discourse in the field as an “antidote” (Fluck, “Theories” 61) to the problem of American exceptionalism, it too, like that construct, must be considered a “theory of American culture�” In Fluck’s view, all critical perspectives are embedded in a set of assumptions reflecting a “number of underlying premises about one’s object of study and the best way to analyze it,” without which “we would not be able to make meaningful claims about a particular object of interpretation within a larger context” and would not, in effect, “have any object” (62)� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 331 The problem that Fluck identifies here is extremely important, however, in terms of any consideration of the field of American studies that would seek to transcend the difficulty of American exceptionalism, as a closer look at its implications will reveal� As critical debate in American Studies has moved from the wholehearted embracement of American exceptionalism to the questioning stance of transnationalism to the effort to envision what some have begun to call a “post-exceptional,” or “post-national” American Studies (Rowe; Pease, “C�L�R�”), it yet continues, as Fluck observes, to build itself around the same object of study, in essence, creating and recreating new and different “narratives” about “America,” suggesting that newer perspectives like the transnational approach do “not mean that we have come to the end of American Studies and of theories of American culture, but that prior versions of American Studies and American culture are replaced by new versions�” (59) Taken at face value, what this idea would seem to suggest is that because the object of study will remain the same in any case, the effort to escape or transcend the problem of American exceptionalism is not really a question of analytical approach, as the exceptional standpoint is always already embedded in the idea of “America�” In this sense, not only is there no escape from the problem of exceptionalism, but focusing on trying to escape or transcend it actually muddies the waters by diverting critical energy away from new interpretive avenues that might lead to real progress� In this light, the question becomes not whether or not transnational studies should supplant American studies in becoming the “new” American studies, nor whether or not exceptionalism must always be viewed as a kind of unwanted specter inevitably hiding in the shadows of any attempt to analyze U�S� culture in isolation� Perhaps moving beyond the idea of exceptionalism in American Studies requires not the entire repudiation of American exceptionalism, but rather a more concerted investigation into its meaning, its claims, its implications, its significance in light of the turn toward transnational studies� What, for example, does it mean that American Studies is, in contemporary discourse in the field, internationalized, globalized, transnationalized? While Fluck, Lentz and others discuss the gaps introduced in the interstices between these conditions as potentially problematic because they may be construed as consciously or unconsciously reinstating exceptionalism in a different way, what if they are also viewed as providing a potential opportunity to write beyond the exceptional? (Pease, “C�L�R�”; Giles; Kaplan, “Violent”; Rowe, “Said”; Waller; Kadir; Kaplan, “Tenacious”; Fluck, “Inside”; Emory; Pease, “Re-thinking”; Traister; Shulman)� 7 What if exceptionalism is understood as something that has been built upon a rhetorical and linguistic structure that denies itself even as it instantiates itself? What if, within the idea of exceptionalism itself, are to be found the clues to its own unravelling? And what if, in fact, the issue is not either the advocation of transnationalism, internationalism, or exceptionalism in isolation, but the acknowledgement 7 Contributions to this debate are too numerous to list, so what appears here is a representative sampling of perspectives since the year 2000� See also Jay for a discussion of these debates from the perspective of the influence of globalization in literary studies. 332 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier and practice of all three, together, weaving in and out of each other in a complicated fabric of signification within which alone can be found the most subtle nuances of understanding regarding American culture? Object Lessons It is in approaching this question that it becomes possible to begin to identify the true crux of the problem. While contemporary debate in the field of American Studies centers on the battle between these three vectors and what they may offer to an understanding of the proper focus of the object of study, in so doing it overlooks what may be learned by critiquing the role of an object of study itself� What exactly is the function of the object of study in critical interpretation? Without an object of study, it is, as Fluck has established, difficult if not impossible to produce meaning. (62) Taking this further, it becomes in this instance, difficult if not impossible to produce knowledge. The object of study provides a central focus around which meaning may be ascertained, what in the Foucauldian sense would constitute a “unity�” But, equally in the Foucauldian sense, such unity may be considered as itself problematic, embedded as it is and must be in a vast system of discursive relations whose variety and dissemblance from one another would seem to belie any possibility of true unity, as given this situation, the solid ground upon which such unity must be founded cannot exist� From this perspective, that solid ground, in other words, must always be an assumption, albeit one that is, in Foucauldian terms, equally subject to interrogation in terms of its source or origin and the authority by which it is given expression� (Foucault Chaps� 1 &2) Or, as Bernard Traister has described it, the problem of the object in American Studies becomes that “we are to study something other than what goes by the name of America, or to study ‘America’ only and perhaps exclusively to the extent that our studies lead us out of its constitutive fieldimaginary and into a post-American critical paradise�” (3) Viewed in this way, then, “America,” as object of study, cannot be considered in isolation from the vantage point of any one of either the self-aggrandizing America of American exceptionalism, the sovereign America as one such country among many others of international American studies, or the interrelated America as imbricated in a global system of international, political, economic and historical associations of transnational American studies� Rather, it must be understood, at one and the same time and at any given critical moment, as simultaneously containing elements of all three� What this means is that it is not because one adopts the viewpoint of transnationalism that one escapes or repudiates American exceptionalism� In other words, it must be understood that the transnational perspective does not and cannot absolve the American studies scholar of the legacy of American exceptionalism� When considered in this way, the need to interpret American culture from a perspective that is internal to itself also does not and cannot automatically imply or involve the accusation of a hermetically sealed Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 333 American exceptionalism. The need to recognize the significance of all three of these vantage points to an understanding of American culture reflects the fact that the legacy of American exceptionalism indelibly remains - not to engulf any interpretation that does not make clear its distance from that relationship to the U�S�, but to complicate those readings through the more profound consideration of the reality of American culture that its recognition makes possible. The challenge for the field of American Studies, then, is not so much to determine in which of these directions the terms of future debate in the field must lie, but to understand the complexity of their multifaceted contributions to and combined impact on that debate, and in what ways the recognition of their complicated interrelationship might serve to advance it beyond what any one of these directions could do alone� Fluck underwrites this understanding by recognizing that although there has been much “consensus” (Fluck, “Transnationalisms” 365) among American Studies scholars with regard to the cultural significance of the transnational turn, it cannot be viewed as a simple substitution that becomes a panacea for all of the difficulties presented by the problem of American exceptionalism� He writes: Like any other term, transnationalism can acquire different meanings in different contexts, depending on the interests…that motivate scholars to pursue this approach. It is thus not sufficient to discuss transnationalism merely as an interpretive procedure that is open-minded enough to go beyond the borders of the nation-state� A method or interpretive procedure is always used for certain purposes and always stands in the service of certain interests, so that a term like transnationalism can actually hide very different agendas… There is not just one approach called transnationalism; there are several different versions of transnationalism that give different reasons for going beyond the borders of the nation-state and envision different rewards for doing so� The transnational can thus not be separated from the national from which it takes its point of departure� In effect, one constitutes the other, and both remain interdependent� Seen from this perspective, transnational American studies, despite their own programmatic claims to go beyond the American nationstate, also imply theories for and about “America�” …The transnational project … also pursues the goal of reconceptualizing America - that is, the very thing from which it apparently wants to escape or distance itself� Consciously or not, there is always��an underlying assumption at work about the current state, not only of American studies, but also of “America,” and this assumption will determine the direction in which a transnational approach is taken� (366-67) From this vantage point, then, what may be understood as “consensus” among American Studies scholars describes only the surface significance of the transnational turn, while eliding the underlying complexity of the approach, which on that level must not only recognize the problem of American exceptionalism, but radically engage with it as well� Thus, what would seem to be “consensus” regarding the cultural significance of the transnational in American Studies becomes merely an outward attempt to create unity - a problem that has been amply examined and critiqued by Donald Pease, Winfried Fluck and John Carlos Rowe in their 2011 anthology Reframing the Transnational Turn. 8 8 See especially the Preface and Introduction in this volume� 334 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier Marginal Exceptions, or the (Post)Exceptional Margin What then is the larger import of this recognition of the complicated interweaving of contemporary approaches within the field of American Studies? If transnationalism is to be understood as a critical response to the moral superiority of an American exceptionalism whose tenets “had been carried to a point where subjection by means of interpellation through the nation-state seemed to be all pervasive, so that resistance had to resort to ever more marginalized subject positions as possible sources of disinterpellation,” (Fluck, “Transnationalisms” 365) then it is only one step away from a critical reality in which “the search for subject positions that would not yet be subject to the power-effects of interpellation…[leads] to border regions and intercultural spaces …[going] beyond the border altogether into spaces like the Southern hemisphere, the Pacific Rim, or the transatlantic world, or still even further, to reconfigure the object of analysis as global or planetary.” (365) The difficulty here, however, is that because it does not transcend the object of study itself, “America,” the seemingly endless search of the transnational cannot avoid leading right back to that which it attempts to deny, that is, the American exceptionalism that is unavoidably, inextricably and inevitably imbricated in that object of study� It is then, in the identification of the significatory multiplicity of “America” as object of study that another American Studies, one not limited on the one hand by a stubbornly persistent American exceptionalism, nor on the other by a seemingly free-floating, endlessly seeking transnationalism, can be discovered� This American Studies is one in which there exists no fear that the interpretation of cultural issues internal to the U�S� will engender the accusation of American exceptionalism, because it acknowledges and embraces in advance the complexity of its exceptionalist legacy, perceiving that legacy as not just unavoidable, but as a vital and obligatory piece of a labyrinthine cultural puzzle. Neither is it one in which the field of American Studies is necessarily transformed into a deterritorialized transnationalism serving as a shield against a difficult and unpleasant historical past, because unless the implications of that problematic past are brought to the fore, any transnational inquiry must end up lacking in a certain depth� In unloosing itself from the parameters of a troublesome debate often seemingly stalled on a number of important issues, this is an American Studies that becomes post-exceptional, moving toward another, more encompassing critical practice substituting interpretive complexity and nuance for critical impasse� In this American Studies, there is not one, unified understanding of “America,” the object of study� Rather, the subtleties of multiple meanings, the acknowledgement of various cultural goals and perspectives and the recognition of disparate cultural voices and locations becomes more important than the critical consensus by which viable contributions within the knowledge industry has been Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 335 characterized in the traditional university� (Readings 69; Said 43-44, 316) 9 Considering the cultural importance of the Rodney King beating, then, from the perspective of such an American Studies opens the door to the untrammeled consideration of its multiple nodes of signification, with the necessity to ponder neither the charge of American exceptionalism nor that of a transnationalism seeking to use the marginalized subject position as a means to resist its overweening interpellation� If the Rodney King beating is understood to have signified in American culture on many individualized registers, then at the level of the individual its particular nuances may be identified and interpreted in a way that digs deeper than could simply the effort to consider the global ramifications of an act of police brutality in American culture. A case in point is my own experience of the incident� On April 30, 1992, I was at the University of California, Berkeley, for the “Passions, Persons and Powers” conference that was being held there for the International Association of Philosophy and Literature� Just one day after the acquittals of the police officers charged in the Rodney King beating and the eruption of riots and random violence in South-Central Los Angeles, the cultural climate in California was already very tense� In Berkeley, the very air seemed to crackle with an unfamiliar energy which seethed below a surface normality that was marred by the strange occurrence of merchants closing up shop early mid-week and boarding up their windows in the manner of those in other parts of the country threatened by an advancing hurricane� Despite the charged atmosphere outside, however, the conference continued to roll along for the most part as conferences normally do, with plenaries, panels and my own presentation taking place in due order� The one break in that unremarkable trajectory came on the evening of April 30, 1992, when the conference 9 Describing the project of the modern University along the lines of Humboldt’s plan for the University of Berlin, Readings discusses the University as an entity in which the University’s social mission becomes one where “the state and the University become two sides of a single coin,” in which the “University seeks to embody thought as action toward an ideal; the state must seek to realize action as thought, the idea of the nation� The state protects the action of the University; the University safeguards the thought of the state� And each strives to realize the idea of national culture�” This idea of “national culture” then finds its most perfect realization in “the invention of the notion of national literature.” The point Readings is trying to make is that knowledge production in the university becomes centered upon the expression of a national identity, which is most visibly and concretely expressed in the form of a national literature� See also Chaps� 3, 4 & 6� Said discusses the transformation of knowledge from the more Humboldtian vision of Weltliteratur or world literature described in comparative literary studies to an understanding of the “modern history of literary study” as having “been bound up with the development of cultural nationalism, whose aim was first to distinguish the national canon, then to maintain its eminence, authority, and aesthetic autonomy�” This aesthetic autonomy is something that Said describes as a somewhat Foucauldian discursive web within which is deeply embedded a hierarchical, imperialist understanding, placing the West in a position of power over and against all of its others, and this, for Said, is as clearly realizable in the discipline of literature as it is in other disciplines� As a central characteristic of American Studies has been an emphasis on literary study, approaching it from this perspective can reveal to what extent American exceptionalism may be understood to bring a potentially unavoidable influence to bear over the field. 336 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier participants were gathered on the Berkeley campus for an opening reception� The usual mixing and mingling with hors d’oeuvres in one hand and a drink in the other was going on among the scholars in attendance, when there was a sudden sharp inflow from the outside, slicing the crowd into two sections and centered on two female scholars who rushed in with wide eyes, panicstricken faces and an ominous warning “They’re rioting outside! They’re rioting! Breaking windows and looting and starting fires! ” All seemed to hear the word “rioting” in shock� There had just been the cataclysm of Los Angeles which had been broadcast across the nation and those images were extremely fresh in the minds of all� There was an abrupt and heavy silence, and then shock waves began to spread throughout the crowd and people started eyeing each other in dawning yet confused and alarmed comprehension� I soon noticed that many of them were eyeing me, albeit in not the same way that they were eyeing each other� I immediately felt that this had much to do with the fact that as the Los Angeles riots of which the Berkeley riots were the offshoot had had a racial and class conflict at their root, and as I was the only African American in the room, the panic and hysteria being caused by the events outside were being easily transferred to me as a representative of that racialized threat, even more threatening, perhaps, because right there in the same room, seeming to bring the pandemonium raging beyond closed doors into acute and too-close range� Nothing verbal was said, but many of the glances spoke a language of their own, visibly translating the image they saw into potential danger, menace and possible attack, outside of all probability of a common desire to avoid being caught up in the chaos without� Not only did those glances not suggest any recognition of a common goal, it seemed to me - they denied any such possibility� Along with the glances, as we learned more in hasty revelations, “Telegraph Avenue is covered in glass and looters are everywhere! ,” “There are crowds of people running in the streets! ,” “The city shut down the BART system and closed off this area! ,” “It’s going to be really hard to get out! ,” a small but noticeable space opened up around me, as if the crowd had been pulling back in one single motion of unconscious concert� Even so, reactions to the news were extremely dissimilar, ranging from outright fear to amazement� As I watched these developments I began to feel an overwhelming sense of déjà vu 10 that was as uncomfortable as it was strong, and that sense began to permeate my understanding of the many reactions to the shocking news before me, as it slowly took on a historical significance. Outright fear, for example, seemed to be on the faces of many of the older scholars, those who had taught on university campuses or been a part of Berkeley itself during the Berkeley Student Riots of the 1960s, when hundreds of students involved with the Free Speech Movement took over Sproul Hall, the University’s administration building, in the wake of the 10 A spate of newspaper articles from the time of the beating and after also represent this idea, comparing the incident to the 1965 Watts race riots and revealing the greater magnitude in damages of the Los Angeles Rodney King Riots to this and other race riots of the 1960s� For a representative selection, see Applebomes; “Poverty”; Aubry; Samad� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 337 arrest of Jack Weinberg, a graduate student� (Cohen and Zelnik 115-21; Cohen 1-5) Other conference participants seemed simply confused or apprehensive� Most seemed concerned about their safety and that of others, in the event that things were to get out of hand in Berkeley to the extent that they had already done in Los Angeles� And almost everyone seemed to be affected by a collective cultural memory of Berkeley’s history, the legacy of the progressive stance it had taken in the 1960s to all authoritarian power and control, as well as the reputation in general of San Francisco itself to a larger degree, through the growth of the Haight-Ashbury community and its liberal ideology� I too shared in that collective memory, but this was also tempered by my own individual experience of that memory� For even as I recognized my physical interpellation in the event as a black individual and thereby for some, if not many, an objectified representation of all that was feared beyond the parameters of the event, I also registered the mistake - the enormous error of that interpellation if indeed this is what it was� The error was there plain as day, but discernable only to me in my own individual experience of déjà vu in relation to the event: although I was physically perhaps a symbol of the altercation for some, subjectively, and in historical material reality, I couldn’t be further away from that understanding� The Berkeley Rodney King Riots brought back to me powerful memories of the Civil Rights Era which I had experienced not as an activist but as a child-witness to the vigorously committed activism of others while growing up during the 1960s in Yellow Springs Ohio, the home of Antioch College, a progressive stronghold of liberal attitudes from its founding in 1853, and a prime bastion of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. There, hippies and flower children had proliferated throughout the 1960s and 1970s, bean sprouts and tofu abounded, astrology, meditation and yoga were part of life’s everyday fabric, and the most familiar scents, beyond those of nature, were those of patchouli and incense� The knowledge that riots swarmed outside brought all of this back to me in a powerful realization that while during that time I had been but a bystander, now I was at the center of events swirling beyond my control, and perhaps even soon to be a victim of them� The similarity between the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s and the racial overtones of the current situation were definitely not lost on me, and I wondered at this fact, though thirty years stood between my childhood experience and my current experience of the Berkeley Rodney King Riots� But it was the error of the interpellation that was most compelling to me, brought to stark reality because of the socio-historico-cultural context of its manifestation� What assumptions lay behind the fact of those glances? How did those assumptions translate into a horizon of possibility or limitation with regard to my own personal intellectual engagements and endeavors? Had I been old enough during the 1960s, certainly there would have been no way that I would have found myself in the middle of that room at Berkeley, full of philosophy and literature scholars� This would have been a realm that would most likely have been entirely closed to me, primarily because of my race, and perhaps even because of my female gender� While the difference from that time was marked for me by the fact that I did indeed find myself 338 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier in the middle of what would probably have been that historically off-limits room, it was strangely similar to that time in that even with the passage of thirty years, I was the only black person in that room in 1992� What was wrong with that picture, I thought, was not unconnected to the cultural significance of the Rodney King beating. Why I was the only black person in the room was not unrelated to the question of why were there not more black scholars working in the area of philosophy and literature in 1992� Although this did not necessarily mean such scholars did not exist, I did not know of any, other than myself� This in turn was not unrelated to the fact that when I arrived on the SUNY/ Buffalo campus as a first-year doctoral student in the fall of 1988, I was met not with intellectual engagement and curiosity, but proudly presented with a gift, a copy of Henry Louis Gates Jr�’s recently published “Race,” Writing and Difference, no questions asked, even though my stated field was modernist studies. What assumptions lay behind the offering of this gift? They did not seem to be terribly different from those that I had encountered at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature conference reception, in the problematic glances of those who surrounded me on the night of the Berkeley Rodney King Riots� These were unarticulated assumptions, certainly not acknowledged on a conscious level� Surely the assumptions behind the Buffalo gift had incorporated an understanding of how short the time had been since African American literature had assumed the status of a field of inquiry in the academy - undoubtedly this must be the field of any black scholar, particularly the only black doctoral student in the department� It had been, I realized, a gesture of kindness, intended to make me feel welcome� Assuming the Exceptional While Embracing the Post- By discussing these assumptions, however, I want to bring to the fore the way in which they are very subtly linked to a discourse of American exceptionalism that has been so deeply submerged within the field of American Studies - and even the academy itself - that it is not even recognized as such� The suppression of this understanding, that of the relation between physical reality and intellectual preoccupation, or representativeness, what Robyn Wiegman would call an “epistemology of the visible,” especially in the field of American literature, is one of the most profoundly exceptionalist of critical ideas, yet the implications of this reality have not been adequately engaged in critical discourse� (23) Nevertheless, this idea is so deeply ingrained within the object of study - “America” - that it is simply taken for granted� It is there in stark simplicity, in the disciplinary norm that recognizes American literature and African American literature as two separate entities, as well as recognizing Ethnic literature as something apart from American literature proper, while also carefully separating the literature of each specific ethnicity within its purview� Toni Morrison examines this problem as inextricably, almost symbiotically, tied to our understanding of American literature� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 339 For her, the question of race cannot be extracted from any understanding of American literature. It is this recognition that reveals the deep significance of American exceptionalism within it and, by virtue of its relation to American Studies, in that field as well. In this vein, American exceptionalism is not just about the notion of America as somehow special, as morally superior to other nations� It is the understanding of this specialness and this superiority as also being subtly, silently and ineradicably tied to whiteness and the hegemony of white supremacy. Morrison describes this difficulty in terms of the way in which American literature was shaped as an area of inquiry: For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States� This agreement is made about a population that preceded every American writer of renown and was…one of the most furtively radical impinging forces on the country’s literature� The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination� (4-5) What Morrison suggests here is that American literature has been described from its inception in terms of an invisible racial dividing line that places the “black presence” outside of that literature’s disciplinary formation� In other words, when American literature was formed as a discipline, this racial division was incorporated and naturalized within it, so that it was not even necessary to consider it when evaluating the cultural significance of the field. 11 In fact, following Morrison, it was because of the invisibility of this racial dividing line that American literature was even formed as it was� Post-Exceptionalism, in a Literary Sense The incorporation of racial difference, in Morrison’s view, lies at the heart of the project of American literature� In this sense, then, it can also be understood that very deeply embedded within the idea of American literature is the belief that it refers to an understanding of “America,” the object of study, as a white America, one that institutes and solidifies its whiteness against a submerged and suppressed blackness without which it could not have succeeded in establishing its whiteness as preeminent� Thus, from Morrison’s perspective, whiteness is blackness as much as blackness is whiteness in American literature� For her, in this context, the two are virtually inseparable. The subsequent naturalization of this cultural situation, then, reifies this problem and renders it for the most part invisible� Morrison asks, “What part does the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction 11 This is an idea which Said later frames more broadly, as described above, regarding the hierarchical relation between Western and non-Western cultures� 340 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier of what is loosely described as “American’? ” (9) She then critiques what she identifies as what was at that time a glaring lack of critical attention to this issue: One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse� Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate� (9-10) Certainly over the last twenty-four years since Morrison wrote these words in 1990 the attention to race in literary critical discourse has radically increased� However, there are perhaps yet traces of what Morrison reveals that still remain, particularly in terms of the way in which the relationship between the different ethnicities that make up American literature are organized, considered and studied� Why, for example, is American literature of whatever stripe not considered as, simply, American literature? Would doing so mean that there would be no opportunity to study ethnic literatures in their historical specificity? Or would it offer a singular yet unrecognized opportunity to consider both ethnic literatures and American literature overall in a context that could bring far more historical depth and complexity to bear on the critical endeavor in this area of inquiry, what might begin to represent what John Carlos Rowe has identified as a “post-nationalist” American Studies practice? (Rowe 12-15) In light of these issues, what Morrison’s analysis offers is a perspective on the questions facing the field of American Studies today, questions which are deeply disciplinary, and which go to the heart of the academic enterprise, especially in terms of its central project of knowledge production� The biggest question facing American Studies today, then, is not, in the face of the challenges posed by transnational American Studies, whether or not it should be substituted by that new perspective, but rather how exactly should the terms of knowledge production in this area of inquiry be re-negotiated in relation to the changes brought about by the transnational turn? Contemporary literary knowledge production exists in and through particular critical categories that are described by centuries and nation-states, as well as the specific cultural project of whatever nation-state is in question, much like what Gauri Viswanathan has elaborated with regard to the inculcation of British literature in 19th-century India� 12 In the 1970s, women’s literature, black literature, and the literature of ethnic others were added to this basic epistemological structure in the same way, using race or sex or some other qualifying characteristic as the central organizing factor of the category along much the same epistemic lines as described the use of the nation-state in literary knowledge production� The problem with the idea of transnational American studies is therefore not whether or not we approach 12 See also Said, Note 8 above, and 101� In Note 8, Said discusses the structure of literary study in the modern university� On page 101, he describes the indoctrination with British literature as being meant also to instill in Indian subjects a sense of the power, majesty and above all, superiority, of British culture� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 341 the field from this perspective, but how we do so� In other words, to reiterate this point: the question is not whether or not transnational American studies should take the place of American studies nor, equally, whether or not it should become the overarching field-imaginary, but rather, in what ways we can begin to think about it as a method, one which allows certain kinds of approaches to the study of the materials it organizes that would be precluded from a more traditional standpoint� (Fluck “Transnationalisms” 366) 13 Rather than thinking about transnational American studies as a new category to be instituted along the lines of traditional knowledge production, then, what would thinking about it as a method bring to a deeper understanding of the field? Such an approach would immediately suggest a radical change in the terms of knowledge production, since as a method transnational American studies would promptly imply a seemingly infinite number of critical possibilities� Such a large number of possibilities becomes intellectually overwhelming, however, only if considered from a more traditional approach to knowledge production - that is, one in which the object of study remains at the center of the critical project, with mastery in terms of overall knowledge as the end goal� But what if the end goal were to become exploration and interrogation instead? What if the acquisition of knowledge were to be judged by breadth, complexity and depth, rather than mastery alone, or some combination of all of these things? (Said 43-44)� 14 These are questions whose implications are certainly much more difficult to implement than simply raising them would suggest, as there are many unavoidable professional, institutional and pedagogical issues that would necessarily come into play. But the ramifications of transnational American studies, or perhaps simply those of transnational studies itself, in any discipline, would seem to point in the direction of at least asking these types of questions and others along such lines� Such questions would begin to reconceive of the place of literature in the traditional university, where its role has been, and is often still today, to reinforce a particular understanding of the nation� Approaching American literature in this way would not only suggest the subtle ways in which American exceptionalism is to be found within this area of inquiry, but also the ways by which it can be laid bare, not in order to be eradicated once and for all, but to foster and encourage deeper investigation� 13 Related to this idea is Fluck’s admonition to move beyond the recognition that transnational American Studies opens up broad new vistas of intellectual inquiry, to consider to what uses the approach is being put� For Fluck, examining the way in which the approach is being used is much more likely to provide a new understanding of the re-conceptualization of American Studies� 14 The distinction made in this line of questioning is one that Said makes between “criticism,” what we as scholars practice today, and “scholarship,” what Said identifies as an early 20th-century practice that “has now almost disappeared�” In this vein, he describes the comparatist as someone who was not just qualified in terms of a narrowly defined critical category of which he or she has become a master; rather, for Said, the comparatist is first and foremost a “philolog,” someone who is so extremely learned across such a broad range of intellectual inquiry that we could not hope to approach such vast knowledge using the methods by which scholars are trained today� 342 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier A Post-(Trans)-Exceptional Study of Exceptional Magnitude To open the door to this possibility is to move toward the post-exceptional in identifying this hidden reality and accepting not only its legacy but its contemporary influence. Considering “America” from a transnational perspective whose premise is to deny this exceptionalist history by co-opting a marginalized subject position as the means of escape from it is to both radically distort the cultural register and undermine the very goal it seeks to accomplish� But to move in the direction of post-exceptional American studies would demand the embracement of this troubled history so that a deeper understanding of “America,” as object of study, might be gained, by reading it in, through, and out of its painful contradictions from the vantage point of its gaps and silences, rather than its enunciative realities� This is especially useful in terms of an American Studies approach to literary interpretation� Within those gaps and silences, considered in terms of their relation to American exceptionalism, rather than as a representation of cultural resistance to it, it is possible to discover new approaches to and readings of texts and authors whose significance might seem, from more traditional perspectives, less meaningful than they appear when studied for what might be learned about American culture from the interaction between those gaps and silences and these “less important” authors and texts� One such author is Anna Julia Cooper, a 19th-, early 20th-century black female intellectual whose work is only now slowly beginning to gain broad recognition� Anna Julia Cooper published one full-length book during her lifetime, a collection of essays about the role of black women in American society, entitled A Voice From the South. Since its re-publication as part of Henry Louis Gates Jr�’s Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, this collection of essays has been the subject of not a little critical attention, especially from the perspective of its importance to black feminism� But it is in both Cooper’s speeches and her dissertation, which have received little or no critical attention 15 , that it is possible to derive an understanding of how her relationship to the gaps and silences in American culture can suggest an approach to a cultural understanding of “America” as object of study within American literature, one that might serve also to suggest a likely postexceptional American Studies� Reading Anna Julia Cooper from a perspective that uses transnational American studies as a method, rather than a field identifier, avoids the problem of American exceptionalism, first because Cooper is already positioned outside the traditional “American” category, and second because by reading her in this way, it is possible to understand the significance of her work in ways that would be impossible from within that category, traditionally defined. As a result, rather than a slippery slope, in this instance, American exceptionalism becomes an insightful way to understand Cooper’s significance within American literature with new depth and complexity� Read from a transnational perspective, Cooper’s work suddenly becomes “literary” in 15 For an illuminating look at Cooper’s work, see Vivian May� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 343 ways that would ordinarily be denied it because it does not adhere to the established norms of what is considered literary, especially in the terms of American literature as traditionally construed� First, Cooper’s corpus is woefully small, compared to that of the greats of American literature� But what falls out of the equation in this regard is the socio/ cultural/ historical context of that truncated output: that Cooper was a widow who had to work to sustain herself, that she adopted and raised five children alone, that she was black and a woman at a time when both designations denoted a lack of privilege and an oppressive daily reality not conducive to creativity, which in her case was already deeply challenged by the paucity of available time at her disposal. Second, Cooper’s corpus is made up primarily of non-fiction pieces, speeches and essays whose goal is to analyze with sharp rhetorical specificity the egregious inequalities that she recognized in the world in which she lived, and which she had no choice but to bear� As such, because not fictional, Cooper’s work falls out of the realm of “art,” as it must be construed within a traditional canon of American literature� Using transnationalism as a method, however, allows for a reconsideration of Cooper’s work along lines that can revalue its cultural importance� This is because once the apparatus of the nation-state is troubled, so too are the norms around which the literature of the nation-state has been organized� In this new relation, Cooper’s “non-literary” work can become a different kind of literature, and its contribution can then be considered as an alternative example of American literary output� In addition, this destabilization also troubles the racial differentiation by which Cooper’s work would ordinarily be categorized� In this regard, the fact that she is American becomes more important than the fact that she is African American, whereas under the old rubric, the appellation African American would be the primary determinant of the role and place of her work� This does not mean that it becomes impossible to consider her work solely in terms of its meaning for African American literature� But once Cooper’s work is repositioned in this way, it can take on a completely different cultural significance, one that enables its meaning to be considered in both larger and smaller contexts� No longer devalued because “not literary” and “not quintessentially American,” it can also begin to speak more fully on its own terms� What is interesting in this regard is that a closer examination of Cooper’s work from this standpoint reveals that she effects a very subtle rearticulation of the very terms upon which American exceptionalism can be said to rely - the notions of universality, of democracy, of purity, equality and freedom, of moral right, of justice, of faith and human kindness, and the expansive and all-encompassing glory of Christian piety� The core of American exceptionalism, as expressed by John Winthrop in his notion of America as a “city upon a hill,” is the evangelical sense of mission and of right, which can be found in these selfsame values and ideals� But for Cooper, none of these ideals could describe the parameters of her daily life� For Cooper, daily life was a perpetual reminder of their constant violation� In her estimation, this unceasing violation was the great wrong of American civilization, an egregious 344 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier misstep of an otherwise great nation which must at all costs be righted� To repair this wrong, then, was the great “mission” of Cooper’s work - a mission every bit as encompassing as was the supremely “American” mission of “manifest destiny�” But in prosecuting this mission, even in creating it as a mission, Cooper unveils the possibility of a complete rearticulation of American exceptionalism, by using the terms of the “American” mission itself to rewrite the meaning of that mission� This rewriting entails creating within the American mission the effort to bring about true equality and true democracy, things which, as Cooper inevitably saw them, through W� E� B� DuBois’s veil of race, were grievously lacking in the American context� By turning these American exceptionalist values in upon themselves, then, Cooper effects a radical alteration of their cultural import� Transforming them in this way, she uses the exact same values to mean something entirely different� In, effect, she engages in a rhetorical battle for power and control over the cultural terms of signification. But this battle, and its implications, can only be seen in its full measure from a transnational viewpoint, where the transnational is used as a method to get at what lies outside the more traditional frames within which knowledge production is conventionally effected� Approaching Cooper’s work in this way is about building neither an American nor an African American canon of literature� Rather, it becomes a post-exceptional representation of what it is possible to learn from a cultural artifact freed from the artificial constraints of the identitarian politics lying at the heart of American exceptionalism, as well as the conventional structures that undergird the work of knowledge production in that context� A Post-Exceptionalist Exception On May 18, 1893, Anna Julia Cooper gave an address at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, one of only three late 19th-century black women who had obtained the right to speak as part of the renowned Chicago World’s Fair, which was held from May to October during that year� Cooper’s address, entitled “Women’s Cause is One and Universal,” sought to give voice not only to the historical plight of black women, but to the courageous response of those women to what were and had been at that time their deplorable circumstances, while simultaneously, and in keeping with the overall goal of the Fair, outlining the great advances these women had helped their race to make since its emancipation from slavery 28 years before� In this 1893 speech, Cooper evidenced many of the basic values that undergird all of her work, including her later dissertation, L’Attitude de la France à l’ égard de l’esclavage pendant la revolution (Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists) -most importantly her perspective on the significance of women’s contributions in any major effort to achieve social progress� Given the untenable historical position of African Americans in American society at this time however, a people only just released from the bonds of slavery, finding themselves at the tail end of a failed Reconstruction, Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 345 hemmed in on all sides by legal, illegal and even extralegal limitations on their hard-won freedom, Cooper’s efforts to make a space for consideration of the plight of black women seemed sure to fail, if only because it would have to compete with so many other and much more pressing problems whose worthiness appeared to be more assured� Thus, in proffering a speech that sought to provide a factual understanding of the new place of black women in 19th-century American society, Cooper, whose position at the Congress of Representative American Women was itself dubious, (Davis 68) 16 revealed the staunch courage and belief in her cause which lay beneath her carefully chosen words and which motivated her larger work� The opportunity to utter those words in a potentially hostile environment, in a context where no black woman had been granted any sort of managerial role in the organization of the event, where public participation of this kind on the part of any black woman was an exception obtained only by struggle and assuredly not the rule, presented Cooper with a difficult dilemma: certainly to tell the truth, certainly to offer as accurate a vision as possible of the current state of affairs in the black community, particularly that concerning the activities of black women - but also how exactly to convey, without overly forceful criticism of the very powers that had afforded her the possibility of speech in that context, all that yet remained hidden from view concerning the untenable social condition of African American women in the late 19th century� No critique at all would have meant an opportunity of great magnitude lost to be heard; overly aggressive critique would have brought about the same result in a different way� A great responsibility thus rode on Cooper’s shoulders, a staggering weight with only one goal: to speak for herself and others to good effect� Because she was to speak at the Congress of Representative Women, in the context of the World’s Columbian Exposition, whose most important and central purpose was to reveal the immense progress American society had achieved since the time of Columbus, Cooper assuredly had to highlight the strides made by African American women since Emancipation; but because the opportunity to be heard in a such a public venue on any subject was of such rarity for any black woman at this time in American history, it was necessary also for her to do everything she could to make of herself that muchneeded representative for all African American women, herself included� What this instance describes, however, is a cultural juncture at which Cooper may be said to have been over-determined by the values of American exceptionalism� Here Cooper strains the state fantasy to its limits in both speaking and appearing in a context within which, for the state fantasy of the time to be able to maintain the order it prescribed, her designated role had to be both invisible and silent, completely devoid of agency� That role would 16 Davis describes the position of other black women at the World’s Columbian Exposition as heavily commercialized, such as was Nancy Green, who was the living embodiment of Quaker Oats’ Aunt Jemima� Against this vision of black womanhood, Cooper’s appearance at the Congress of Representative Women becomes even more radical� 346 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier not, in other words be to deny the fair its “one-way white gaze�” (Ngai 61) 17 If not invisible and silent, then in keeping with that fantasy, she could only appear as representative, as dictated by the constraints of an American exceptionalist cultural understanding that viewed black civic participation in a particular and very truncated way� As representative, then, Cooper’s situation becomes strikingly similar to that of my own at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature conference reception after the Berkeley Rodney King Riots� However, it also differs in that while ostensibly accepting the terms of her representativeness, Cooper performs a subtle rhetorical maneuver that forces the American exceptionalist terms within which it is grounded to signify in a way that is inclusive, rather than exclusive, of her racial heritage, thereby broadly negating the power of those terms to frame her cultural reality in the public sphere� (Habermas Parts I, III & IV; Anderson Chaps� 3, 5 & 6; Black Public Sphere Collective; Piepmeier 130 )� 18 Charged with the public task of putting forward one overt message, i�e�, the progress made by African American women since Emancipation, and the private task of delivering one more covert message, i�e�, the unacceptable social condition of those same African American women since Emancipation, Cooper focused not just on the message she was trying to get across, but also on the language she was to use in order to do it� For Cooper, this was a delicate proposition, because the structural inequality under which black women had been forced to live during slavery and beyond was rooted in 17 Ngai discusses the role of cultural “others” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in terms of the way in which the transnational turn has foregrounded the issue of “human agency,” by virtue of the fact that a focus on the transnational can serve to transform the ‘other,” by revealing the subjectivity of non-western cultural perspectives� This does not, however, solve the problem of whether or not the transnational, in so doing, actually co-opts the minority voice� 18 Aspects of Cooper’s role at the World’s Columbian Exposition relate in very important ways to Habermas’ idea of the bourgeois constitutional state, which arises in the 19th century and seeks to couple the public sphere to law through the rational-critical debate that, in his view, came about in the 18th century, in coffee-house discussions around literary culture� Cooper’s position in the public sphere as a black woman, thereby hopelessly inferior on all fronts, is radically policed by a discursively normalized public consensus grounded in the authority of law, which is also a discursive formation� Habermas’ notion of the rise of the 19th-century public sphere in this regard can also be reinforced through a consideration of Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” and the rise of nationalism in connection with the development of print culture� In this context, Cooper’s position is also clearly affected by the norms of 19th-century American print culture, in which the dictates of rape-lynch mythology, the idea that black men, who were being lynched on a routine basis in 1893, were the victims of such violence because their overweening desire for white women had to be kept in check� Newspaper reporting regarding the lynching of black men was common during this time. Its flip side was less commonly noted - the unspoken but prevalent consensus that black women were promiscuous and sexually depraved� Considered in this context, however, these were not just ideas about black life and experience, but a “nationalizing” discourse (Piepmeier)� The Black Public Sphere is a collection of essays devoted to the kinds of problems Cooper would have faced in 1893 due to the precarious public position in which she found herself as one of only a handful of black women with the right to speak at the Congress of Representative Women� Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 347 a politics of silence whose power was established and maintained by and within the rule of law, as that law was expressed in language and then enforced in material fact� (Tamanaha; Binham) Through the authority of law, the American exceptionalist values that would exclude Cooper by virtue of her racial heritage were sealed into both language and belief� In order to counter the cultural reality they evidenced, then, the only recourse open to Cooper was her own rhetorical prowess� To reclaim the black female voice denied - even made invisible - by established law and custom, then, Cooper thus had to address the power of law to both create and naturalize an artificial reality that left no door open to question� As a result, in her Columbian Exposition speech, as well as in most of her work, she relies on what I have termed a subtly articulated and interwoven “rhetoric of law,” through which she incorporates both silence and voice by making skillful use of the opposition between natural law (the law of nature or the idea that law obtains its authority because it can be justified by reason) (Burlamaqui; Waldron) and positive law (legislation created by man to bestow or remove privileges from an individual or group)� (Murphy) The American exceptionalist values Cooper sought to resist are almost symbiotically related to the tenets of natural law, which often derive from an overtly pious, humanitiarian and Christian worldview� Thus, by using her work to pit these two understandings of law against each other, Cooper weaves a complicated textual fabric in which she creates authority for her “silenced” voice as that of a black woman by couching her assertions in the frame of natural law, while simultaneously posing numerous implied questions that challenge the status quo as it has been articulated within the frame of positive law (which covertly creates and overtly upholds that status quo, a simultaneous, unremarked and essential aspect of the racial legislation of the time)� In so doing, she both conveys and authorizes the alternative social understanding of which she is a committed advocate, by communicating its silenced reality through the surety of natural law while simultaneously challenging and weakening the unquestioned hold of positive law over the cultural understanding of American social reality - particularly that between the different races� Positioning herself in opposition to positive law in this way, Cooper radically challenges and then completely rearticulates one of its foundational assumptions, that the racial reality it legislates is part of a preexisting natural order of things, rather than one that is covertly brought into being as a result of such legislation� In her World’s Columbian Exposition speech, Cooper reveals her implication in this violent language-based battle by both identifying the black woman as one who could only be “silent” before others whose adjudicated right to speak had not had the same challenges to overcome, and recreating that same black woman as the champion of humanity, as a woman like other women, as part of a group whose cause goes beyond mere womanhood to include all of humanity, in following a naturally determined path of moral right: 348 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier ��� while in the eyes of the highest tribunal in America she was deemed no more than a chattel, an irresponsible thing, a dull block, to be drawn hither and thither at the volition of an owner, the Afro American woman maintained ideals of womanhood unshamed by any ever conceived� Resting or fermenting in untutored minds, such ideals could not claim a hearing at the bar of the nation� The white woman could least plead for her own emancipation; the black woman, doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent� (Cooper “Universal”) In this passage, Cooper makes a rhetorical gesture which uses the tenets of natural law to subsume race within gender, thus also sidestepping the moral imperative facing black women in the 19th century to place the problems of the race over and above those of gender - to work to better the condition of the race at the expense of the equally pressing demands of gender� In so doing, she replaces that moral imperative with one greater and more urgent, concerning the question of natural law and its relation to morality, and how this in turn relates to all of humanity, from the perspective of both race and gender, thus beginning to broaden the American exceptionalist terms embedded within it to include those of her racial heritage, as well as those of her gender. In her description of the difficult social condition of the black woman, Cooper immediately identifies the opposition between positive and natural law, by discussing the power of what she calls the “tribunal” of the nation, as supposed arbiter of American social reality, to classify the African American woman as no more than a “thing�” In highlighting this, Cooper marks an important parallel between the historical or objective condition of the black woman in America, that of a “chattel” or “dull block” with no will of its own, and the authoritative arbiter of that reality, the institution of law, or the “highest tribunal in the land�” In this context, then, by making reference to the idea of the African American woman as a “chattel” or “dull block” in the eyes of the law, Cooper would seem to make two crucial points� First, she suggests the possibility that the legal perspective on the black woman is only just that - a perspective - and as such, only one among many other possible perspectives; more importantly, however, in so doing, she also links her critique to the idea that the reality to which the law refers is an artificial reality that has nothing to do with actual historical reality but that is, even so, taken as such, as a given, as established law and thereby incontrovertible fact� Counter-Exceptionalism, Transnationalism and the Minority Voice Always in view of these two points, Cooper manipulates terms and language to suggest a number of perspectives whose implications radically - and silently - counter those which she expressly communicates� It is thus equally in what Cooper writes or gives voice to, and in what she doesn’t write, or her silence, that Cooper is able to put forward her counter-exceptionalist message� Playing silence off of voice and vice versa, Cooper highlights the problems of silence, silencing and being silenced, and then transforms them into a skilled and powerful weapon, so that silence in all its forms becomes both what it is and what it is not, in becoming a surprisingly effective yet subtle Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 349 way to speak, and forcefully, without voice� In order to grasp the full import of Cooper’s message, then, it becomes necessary to read between the lines, so as to consider what is revealed in both what is conveyed in Cooper’s language itself, and what that language doesn’t convey or, rather, what it might be said to imply� In this regard, Cooper’s use of the word “tribunal” becomes significant, as in it she conveys by allusion much more than what a simple consideration of the word on its face might suggest� A brief examination of the etymology of the word “tribunal” reveals that in the context in which Cooper uses it, it signifies on many simultaneous levels, all of which are rich with relevant meaning� The fact that Cooper uses the word at all brings the issue of law squarely front and center in her argument, as in both the past and the present, the word “tribunal” had/ has a legal signification. In ancient Rome, “tribunal” was a derivative of “tribune,” which referred to the raised semicircular or square platform where magistrates were seated in the Roman basilica, forming a court of justice where legal cases were heard and judged� The basilica was a building that served as both a marketplace and a place for the adjudication of law, thus representing an important center of public social contact� (Adkins 136-37) The words “tribune” and “tribunal” come from the Latin tribunus, which is also related to tribus, the Latin word for “tribe” - “tri-” meaning “three,” and “bu” meaning “to be,” or to be a tribe (OED)� The word “tribe” originally refers to the three tribes of Rome, “Ramnes,” “Tities,” and “Luceres,” but it also points to the Twelve Tribes of Israel, so it incorporates within its etymology both a secular and a religious or spiritual meaning (OED)� However, since both “tribunal” and “tribe” come from the same root, Cooper’s use of the word “tribunal” also suggests that the tribunal to which she refers represents the law of a particular tribe, in this instance, that of white Americans - a “tribe” to which African Americans, including herself, do not belong� By highlighting this idea, Cooper insinuates that rather than the democratic society meant to be the cornerstone of American culture, in keeping with its exceptionalist values, given its policies on race, it is in fact more like those early, less “civilized” cultures that existed before the advent of the nation-state, organized according to various tribal interrelationships based largely on kinship - its laws, therefore, serving to protect only the interests of the “tribe” or “clan” in power� This notion becomes even more telling when considering the etymology of the word “tribune” in this context� In addition to referring to the raised platform representing the court of justice in the Roman basilica, the word “tribune” designated a very important elected official in the society of ancient Rome� In 490 BCE (494 BC), the common people, or plebeians, won the right to elect their own officials to represent their interests against those of the upper classes, or patricians. These officials, “tribunes,” were charged with the task of protecting the lower classes, and ensuring that the laws created by the upper classes were enacted fairly, and did not unduly take advantage of those less powerful. (Mackay 32-39) The word “tribunal” was meant to refer to the office of the tribune, and is therefore closely connected with the idea of establishing 350 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier and maintaining justice for those without power� As representatives of the people, the tribunes were thus meant to ensure justice for the plebeians, and to restore a modicum of equality with regard to the balance of power in ancient Roman society� Moreover, as representatives of the people, the tribunes were also meant to be the embodiment of the people, and therefore sacrosanct, or extremely sacred, existing in a distant realm far above the daily lives of those they were elected to represent� (35; Flower 17-21) Because they were sacrosanct, tribunes were made powerful in the person, that is, as tribune, they possessed an inviolate personhood, which also became the source of their power� (McCormick) In alluding to the “tribune,” then, Cooper also underscores the demonstration of her own personhood, particularly as a representative of the black woman, at the Congress of Representative Women: if the figurative “tribune” alluded to in her use of the word “tribunal” is not truly a representative of the people, then that “tribune” also cannot be the embodiment of the people and, as such, cannot possess the inviolate personhood which is the sole foundation of the tribune’s power� Since that power can only be found in one who performs the function of representative of the people, of those who are poor and downtrodden, and if that is indeed the function which Cooper assumes in delivering her speech, then she has set up a very powerful rhetorical opposition that, in demonstrating and re-establishing her own discredited personhood in the form of her own embodiment in language, simultaneously casts doubt on the legal authority by which that personhood was originally denied� By allusion, then, through the use of just one word, Cooper quietly exercises the exceptionalist authority of history and historical jurisprudence to question the normalized power wielded by what she has termed the “highest tribunal in the land” in denying the personhood of the African American woman through the use of legislation to transform her into a “thing�” The Law(s) of (Post)Exception Having carefully presented this perspective as ineradicably aligned with natural law in the form of shared moral values that transcend the problem of race, Cooper is then able to create an express construction of the institution of law - as the most important moral foundation of society - in which it would seem to be the one place where it is possible to turn and expect to find a reliable truth; instead, she instigates an ingenious shift in the reader’s understanding, one that questions the truth value and authoritative vision of a legal institution that would perceive and construe the black woman in the way she describes. By casting doubt on the significance of law in this way, Cooper opens up the possibility that it is in fact, not the unshakeable and unquestioned bedrock of truth, justice and right that one would normally desire and/ or expect it to be, but rather an uncertain, possibly even misguided, and horrific distortion of the very cultural beliefs it is meant to uphold and protect� In this, she makes her most radically counter-exceptionalist statement, Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 351 by reversing the underlying signification of these values so that it is possible, through this juxtaposition, to understand them at one and the same time as what they are and what they are not� Thus, through her covert critique of the views on black women of the “highest tribunal in the land,” Cooper brings the silent and silenced reality of black women into direct confrontation with the power that both created this forcibly hushed reality and would seek to maintain it as such� It is, however, precisely because she does not approach the problem from the vantage point of a direct challenge, seeking instead to give it voice through an indirect critique of the status quo, that Cooper provides the means to break its hold over the experience of black women in American culture� By using her work to translate her vision of the unheard reality of black women’s experience into the English language, Cooper positions herself to wage a powerful and symbolic battle, a linguistic parry in which she seeks to wrest from language - and its power both to convey meaning and create worlds - the cultural relation to language that, for her, black people were denied from the moment of their entry into a soon-to-be globalized slave system in the early 17th century� It is thus through Cooper’s rhetoric of law that the African American woman, while in Cooper’s view conceived of as a “thing” with no volition of her own save that of an “owner” (and who in this condition would seem only to be able to attain the corporeal reality of a beast, and even that with difficulty), becomes in actuality a being whose inner resources sought and maintained the highest of ideals available to all womankind, without reference to nor circumscription of color, and who achieved this immense moral height against all the odds stacked against her� By couching her assertions in a lofty rhetoric drawing on deeply religious, exceptionalist values and ideas of justice, morality, civilization and culture, or natural law, and placing the black woman within this frame, Cooper seeks to address the immense incongruity between her desire to recover a sense of the black woman’s lost claim to inviolate womanhood (what Barbara Welter in her now classic and oft-quoted essay of the same title has called “the cult of true womanhood”) and the most prevalent view of the black woman in late 19th-century America, that of a highly sexed and wantonly promiscuous near-animal� (Carby; Morton 9, 28, 32, 109, 149) In describing this circumstance, however, what Cooper brings to light is not the reality of the basic racial injustice that lies at the heart of the U�S� American democratic experiment; knowledge of this reality was not new in her time, nor before her time, and is certainly not new beyond her time� It is thus not the knowledge of this reality that is salient� Rather, for Cooper, what is crucial is to recognize not so much that this difficult reality exists, but that it has been silenced, made invisible and powerless, and that were this situation not so, should a language finally be found to communicate the actual experience of this reality, it is only this that could even hope to radically change how we think about, understand and view the world in which we live, and only this by which that change could also be made manifest in the material world in ways that could palpably change social reality for all - not just African-Americans - and for the better� And it is only in this way as well, in 352 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier Cooper’s estimation, that the artificial reality by which the black woman’s voice is silenced can be overthrown, her perspective brought to bear on the racial problems plaguing the U�S� American social reality of her time, and the attributes of true democracy made more tangibly evident in everyday life� Without it, for Cooper, all assertions of democracy must remain mere pretense, only a seemingly democratic sham� What stands out most clearly in this regard is Cooper’s effort, through language, to recreate not just herself as an African American woman, but all black women, and beyond that, all black people touched by the vicissitudes of Western society, with its hereditary and racially determined slave system, by and within which black civic, social and cultural participation was historically eschewed� Moving beyond even this recreation of all black people, Cooper sought to cast her efforts with those who hoped to change the world itself, to make of it a more loving, just, and equitable place whose emblem could be compassion and caring, rather than the satisfaction of greed and the desire for power� Giving credence to her famous words, in her 1892 essay, “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race,” Cooper’s work represents the material manifestation of her belief that “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’” (Kindle File N� pg�) In all of her efforts always conceiving of herself as a representative for all African Americans, Cooper’s most heartfelt desire was to open doors previously closed, to create possibilities where before there were none, through her own sweat, toil and suffering to forge an easier, clearer path for those to follow, in the hopes that their race would as a result be less of an impediment to them than it had been for her� Putting it clearly in her Columbian Exposition speech, Cooper explained: Now, I think if I could crystallize the sentiment of my constituency, and deliver it as a message to this congress of women, it would be something like this: Let woman’s claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract� We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether or sex, race, country, or condition� If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken� A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier an [sic] its weakest element� Least of all can woman’s cause afford to decry the weak� We want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this Congress, demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity� The colored woman feels that woman’s cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, is sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; not till the universal title of humanity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is woman’s lesson taught and woman’s cause won - not the white woman’s nor the black woman’s, not the red woman’s, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong� Woman’s wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her Object Lesson By Déjà Vu 353 “rights” will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of the earth� (Cooper “Universal”) In this passage, Cooper continues her efforts to bring about a radical alteration in social reality, using her rhetoric of law to create the justification and authority for her black female voice� Firmly grounded in the tenets of natural law, Cooper uses its spiritual authority to support the “rightness” of her argument that the cause of woman is one and universal� What is important to recognize, however, is that in this passage, coming at the end of her speech, Cooper no longer speaks from the perspective of the black woman, nor of all black women, but from the perspective of all women, regardless of color� In putting forward this view, Cooper makes a very important and suggestive rhetorical shift, one to which she has been building throughout the body of her speech� Jumping from a consideration of the kinds of advances made by black women in the years since Emancipation, Cooper suddenly speaks simply as a woman delivering her “message to this congress of women�” From here, she uses a very significant “we,” eradicating the problem of race altogether by addressing the Congress of Women as one of their own number� In so doing, she aligns the racial inequality experienced by black women with the gender inequality experienced by white women, powerfully linking both forms of inequality to an exceptionalist idea, what she calls the “unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms�” In this she implies that both gender and racial inequality are manifestations of such “special favoritisms,” and, therefore, wrong� She then consolidates this perspective by using the metaphor of a chain which must necessarily be considered broken if even one link in that chain is broken� Suggesting here that all women, regardless of color, form a part of the same chain, she provides a convincing justification for the recognition of the unjust condition under which the black woman is made to labor, and for an understanding that, as a result, the black woman represents a link in the chain that is broken� (Cooper “Universal”) After creating this strong solidarity, Cooper then comes firmly back to the voice of the black woman, in saying that hers also is a cause that is “one and universal” - that the colored woman wants, like the white woman, to see the “universal triumph of justice and human rights�” And in keeping with this desire, the colored woman wants, therefore, to return home from the Congress of Representative Women having put forward one pressing demand: not to be given “an entrance…through a gateway” for herself, but to build together with white women “a grand highway for humanity�” In this Cooper suggests that the creation of this “highway for humanity” would naturally encompass the “gateway” that would allow black women, in addition to all black people (including other groups who also found themselves poor, downtrodden or otherwise excluded from mainstream prosperity) access to the true justice that was sorely needed and so glaringly missing in the social reality of late 19th-century America� 354 c yraina J ohnson -r oullier By making this larger claim, Cooper also draws the Congress of Representative Women into an assumption of “right” - that the “solidarity of humanity” and the “injustice of all special favoritisms” are rights belonging to all regardless of color, class, or any of such “special favoritisms�” In so doing, she broadens the tenets of American exceptionalism, from which she would ordinarily be summarily excluded, to include those of her racial and gendered heritage by emphasizing the actual meaning of the terms themselves� Believing wholeheartedly in the essential “rightness” of natural law derived from her deep-seated religious commitments and faith in God, Cooper thus asserted a justice that transcended that of the courts of her day, where “justice” - 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Barack Obama, 2014 The storm of the economic crisis in the United States blew down the house of cards of American exceptionalism� The American Communist Party, 1930 Despite a widely held belief to the contrary, 1 President Barack Obama is an advocate of American exceptionalism� He has repeatedly and passionately pronounced his firm belief in the doctrine, although he has never explained precisely what he means by this term� When deployed by presidents, the concept usually amounts to a collective ego-boost that is intended to unite a people in times of crisis, as when George W� Bush deployed the rhetoric of American supremacy to wage a war on terror both abroad and at home� Unlike his predecessor, whose presidency was defined primarily by foreign policy issues, Obama has had to confront the decline of America’s economy and thus has had to face issues of class, which go to the core of the nation’s self-understanding� Founded as a classless society, America distinguished itself from - and believed to be superior to - the aristocratic European system� This ideological foundation is relevant to an understanding of the most recent manifestation of American exceptionalism, as personified by Barack Obama, who has simultaneously pledged his allegiance to it while also acknowledging the profoundly precarious state of the economy and the nation� In contrast to Bush’s imperialist and supremacist rhetoric, Obama admits the “imperfect” state of national affairs, a self-critical stance has not been without 1 See James Wilson (2009), Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation� Apart from conservatives like Wilson, most Americans did not think of Obama as an advocate of American exceptionalism� When asked in 2010 which “president believes or believed the United States has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world,” Ronald Reagan scored 86% and Obama 58%� This might explain Obama’s affirmation thereof in 2014. See Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans See U.S. as Exceptional; 37% Doubt Obama Does�” 360 s ieglinde l emke political repercussions� Some commentators have charged the president of promoting a kind of anti-American exceptionalism that demolishes collective faith in the nation� 2 The president’s understanding of the nation, and its symbolic meaning, is indeed complex� It wavers between two positions� On the one hand, he affirms and embodies exceptionalism; 3 on the other, he admits to the nation’s current weaknesses and warns against the threat that these may diminish its foundational promises� Obama’s wavering position is indicative of the balancing act that characterizes diplomacy in general but that is even more inexorable at a time marked by drastic political polarization� Since Obama very often embraces two positions that are taken to be mutually exclusive, his ostensibly contradictory position on American exceptionalism as well as the aporia represented through the gridlock typifies his deconstructive approach to politics� This article is less concerned with presidential rhetoric than it is to understand American exceptionalism more broadly as the discourse about the ways in which America and its citizens define, sustain, and protect their national identity� The construct of American exceptionalism has two major components: in domestic affairs, a view that heralds America as the land of opportunity or an exemplary democracy; and in foreign affairs, the view that America is a global police force that protects democracy and liberty worldwide� Focusing on domestic instead of foreign affairs, concentrating on America’s constitutional promise instead of its imperialist endeavors, I argue that the recent manifestation of American exceptionalism is fundamentally different from the ones that have preceded it� This post-American exceptionalism, as it were, builds on and diverges from the New American exceptionalism - which, according to Don Pease, is informed by a “state fantasy” and the rationale of the “state of exception” (Pease 2009) - by taking into account unflattering socio-economic realities. If the New Exceptionalism is a state fantasy that managed to imbue nationalist interests with a collective desire to the effect that Americans tolerated violations of its democratic principles, the fantasy driving Obama’s version of American exceptionalism is informed by a rising awareness that America is a class-ridden, immobile und increasingly unequal society. If the new exceptionalism “opened fissures in the myth of 2 See: Ginni Thomas (2014), “Dinesh D’Souza: Obama Mobilizes Resentment Toward America To Grow His PowerApart from D’Souza, several other conservatives including Sarah Palin, Monica Cowley, and Charles Krauthammer have also charged Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism� See “The Big Lie” (2010) and also “Sarah Palin: Where Is Obama’s ‘Faith In American Exceptionalism? ’” (2010)� 3 Obama has incessantly, in his memoir as well as in numerous speeches, cast his own life story in terms in the American-Dream-come-true format� After all, he comes from a middle class background and made it into the Ivy League as well as the White House, bringing along a first lady whose life story Obama has repeatedly casted in the rags-toriches formula emphasizing her working class background� For example, in December 2013, in his economic mobility speech, he referred to Michelle as “the daughter of a shift worker at a water plant and a secretary�” See “Remarks by the President on Economic Mobility�” American Exceptionalism in the Age of Inequality 361 exceptionalism,” (Pease) the latest version registers the schism that defines post-crisis America: the gap between rich and poor and the attendant polarization between blue and red America� To understand this current version and to assess how its construction of America’s national identity differs from its predecessors, it is helpful to step back and take a diachronic approach� The discourse of American exceptionalism, which has in different contexts and for different purposes proposed that there is something distinctive, even superior about America, extends back for four centuries� It has its roots in the 17th century and the religious ideal of creating a model “brotherly community” to be emulated in the rest of the world (John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill”)� Citing documents like Franklin’s Autobiography, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, foreign commentators like Crèvecoeur and Tocqueville helped shape the myth of America’s civic and democratic virtues and argued for its distinctiveness as well as superiority to other countries� This belief was expanded throughout the 19th century by philosophical (Ralph Emerson), poetic (Walt Whitman), fictional (Horatio Alger), non-fictional (Frederick Jackson Turner) and visual texts (Currier & Ives’ Ladder of Fortune) and was reinforced by the cult of positive thinking promoted in 20th century self-help literature (e�g� Dale Carnegie, Vincent Peale, or Napoleon Hill’s bestseller Think and Grow Rich)� The belief in the protestant work ethic and meritocracy drives this narrative, which remains hegemonic, despite a century’s worth of fiction and nonfiction exploring the personal and political costs of the success myth and America’s notorious optimism (from The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided). Even contemporary fictional renderings that modify the traditional narrative by making an African-American or a woman the main protagonist still produce uncritical versions of the same rags-to-riches meritocratic narrative (e.g. films like The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith or Erin Brockovich starring Julia Roberts) known as the American Dream� This short survey serves as a reminder that American exceptionalism has taken on ever new manifestations in order to adapt to the cultural and political demands of the time of its assertion� Like all constructs, it has incorporated ever-new connotations - from self-determination to wealth creation, from aspiring personal success to a social vision of a civic community bound by affection and trust - accumulating many meanings and functions� In recent years, commentators have begun to start talking about “the end of American exceptionalism” (Bacevich 2009) or about the decline of the nation (Krugman 2010), 4 wondering who “stole” (Smith 2012) or who was responsible for “betraying” the American Deram (Barlett and Steele 2012)� A CBS News feature summarizes the main thrust of this “boom of American Declinism” as follows: “We are broke; we are poorly educated; we 4 “ We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end,” Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman noted, “but most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic�” Paul Krugman (2010), “America Is Not Yet Lost�” 362 s ieglinde l emke are uncompetitive; we have gone soft; our political institutions are broken…” 5 In contrast, or perhaps in response to this narrative of decline, there has been a revival on the right of discourse that exalts America’s “Greatness” (Romney 2010), or explains why America is “a Nation Like No Other” and “why American exceptionalism matters,” to quote the subtitle of Newt Gingrich’s book (Gingrich 2011)� America by Heart is the telling title of Sarah Palin’s patriotic expose on why America is “a model to the world” (Palin 2010)� Her use of a romantic metaphor resonates with Jim De Mint’s Falling in Love with America Again (2014)� Both Palin and De Mint use American exceptionalism and patriotism interchangeably� 6 The four above mentioned conservative reconsiderations have appropriated parts of the cultural legacy of American exceptionalism to combat the perceived decline of a super power� 7 Alongside a diachronic account, it is important to place a synchronic account of American exceptionalism� According to Seymour Martin Lipset, the concept “can be defined in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez faire” (31)� His list comprises ideologies championed by liberals (individualism, laissez faire) and progressives (egalitarianism, populism) with “liberty” as the common denominator� 8 In regard to the cultural work the concept of American exceptionalism has taken on, Winfried Fluck differentiates among five cultural agendas and myths, each of which expresses a slightly different romance with America: the myth of a heroic individual who sets himself (traditionally it is a he) off from the masses, the “outlaw-and-defiance romance,” “the 5 This observation is followed by “the Obama administration does its part, with sloganeering like ‘reset,’ ‘lead from behind,’ ‘post-American world,’ and America as exceptional only to the degree that all nations feel exceptional�” Obama is accused of causing the decline since he is not convinced of America’s superiority and uses a defeatist language� See Victor Davis Hanson for CBS News: “Beware the Boom in American ‘Declinism�’” Whatever, or whoever, caused the decline the perception of a loss of power seems to drive much of the recent renaissance of the discourse on American exceptionalism� 6 See Mitt Romey (2010)� No Apology: The Case for American Greatness; Newt Gingrich (2011), A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters; Sarah Palin (2010), America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag; and there is also the above-mentioned study by James Wilson� For a compelling reading of Jim De Mint ‘s Falling in Love with America Again, see Simon Schleusener’s contribution to this volume “Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism�” 7 I was reminded of a statement by Richard J� Tofel, who observed in another historical context, “as our unquestioned supremacy recedes, we need to decide what ‘America’ means to us, and what it means to the world” (1980)� The more recent diagnosis of the American zeitgeist, while speculative, is also revealing I think: “We’re gripped by concern we’ll soon be a nation of austerity and dependency, not opportunity, that America’s spiraling into insolvency with Greece” (McCoy)� 8 The foundational value of liberty embodied by America’s national icon the Statue of Liberty, is a good case in point for the need to historicize the core values that generate American exceptionalism since this particular symbol of American national identity has served numerous political agendas as it has been instrumental in struggles for nationalistic and egalitarian purposes� See Sieglinde Lemke (2011), “Liberty: A Transnational Icon�” American Exceptionalism in the Age of Inequality 363 tragic-nobility-romance,” the myth in which individual freedom and creativity converge; the myth of a democratic culture understood as “a romance of the common man” (Fluck 2000, 89-90)� When Donald Pease explains American exceptionalism synchronically, he refers to specific political and socio-economic elements, notably clusters of absent (feudal hierarchies, class conflicts, socialist labor party, trade unionism, and divisive ideological passions) and present (a predominant middle class, tolerance for diversity, upward mobility, hospitality toward immigrants, a shared constitutional faith, and liberal individualism) elements that putatively set America apart from other national cultures� (Pease 2009, 8) However, if a strong middle class, upward mobility, a lack of class consciousness, and a shared faith in the constitution are what defines America, the realities of the new economy might blow down this house of cards� America today, as social scientists and journalists have pointed out, is defined by a shrinking middle class, a lack of mobility, and a rising conflict between the top 1% and the 99%� Many Americans feel uneasy about the current state of the economy and about the partisan rancor, gridlock, and lobbying that characterize the political scene� 9 The President himself has publicly and repeatedly called attention to the daunting “challenges” the U�S� faces: an extremely unequal economy, a polarized government, a rising national deficit, an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots� 10 How does he frame this unpleasant message? For one, he compares America’s exceptionally bad situation with that of other countries to infer “it is harder today for a child born here in America to improve her station in life than it is for children in most of our wealthy allies - countries like Canada or Germany or France�” Then he adds in a daunting tone of voice, “they have greater mobility than we do” to continue with rhetorically reaffirming this view by the parenthesis “not less” (2013). By Obama’s account, Americans live in an “economy that’s become profoundly unequal” and he singles out economic inequality to be the “defining challenge of our time” (2013)� Yet, he fails to expound on the ways in which this new reality undermines any claims to American distinction or greatness� In his candid speech on the economy Obama implicitly commented on American exceptionalism, saying “the premise that we’re all created equal is the opening line in the American story� And while we don’t promise equal outcomes, we have strived to deliver equal opportunity - the idea that success doesn’t depend on being born into wealth or privilege, it depends on effort and merit” (ital� SL) The claim to meritocracy and equal opportunity plays an essential role in this well-known story� The promise that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules is likely to move up the social ladder makes this narrative extremely 9 Rebecca Riffkin, “U.S. Economic Confidence Index Retreats Slightly to -15.” 10 Obama explicitly mentions all these faltering elements, and more, in his “Remarks on Economic Mobility�” This speech, delivered on December 4, 2013 and hosted by the progressive think-tank the Center of American Progress, is remarkable since Obama pronounces the precarious state of the nation when “a growing number of Americans barely get by�” 364 s ieglinde l emke compelling to all who believe it is true� Legal equality is associated with the possibility of economic success� The foundational premise of the Declaration of Independence, which Obama does not mention in this passage but alludes to by the near-homophone, bestows every American with the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. The symbolic efficacy of American exceptionalism is grounded in these four interrelated mythemes - meritocracy, opportunity, equality, happiness - and augur will power, self-determination, success, and possibly bliss� 11 The opening line in the American story, “we are all created equal,” also implies that its political system is one that is governed by the people, rather than a few aristocrats or a single monarch. The U.S. represents the first modern democracy in the original (Greek) sense of the word - the rule (kratia) of the people (demos)� Founded as a republic, the former British colonists opted for self-government and invited a wider, though still limited, group to participate in politics� It was a self-declared government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” in Abraham Lincoln’s arresting phrase� The premise of the democratic experiment was that when people (as long as they were male and of European origin) were assured economic liberty and political rights circumstances were promising for the expansion of their property and wealth� This is precisely the premise and the promise that is now at risk� Obama alerts the audience of his speech to “the dangerous and growing inequality and [the] lack of upward mobility which has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain - that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead�” In other words, inequality jeopardizes belief in the construct of American exceptionalism. Social scientists of various fields have amassed a host of data that demonstrate the lack of economic mobility in the fabled land of opportunity. The data and particularly the official measurement of income distribution, the Gini coefficient, suggests that what sets America apart from Europe is actually its high degree of income inequality� The 2013 Country Report for the United States, for example, maintains that “income inequality in the United States has always been the highest among rich OECD nations and it still leads the pack in 2012 in both level and trend among the rich countries in the OECD (excluding Mexico)” (Kenworthy and Smeeding 9)� 12 Of course, the U�S� is not unique or exceptional in regards to 11 I am alluding to the replacement of the term “property” for “happiness” in the last version of The Declaration of Independence� More than terminological quibble, this foundational moment was a game changer that set America, or its history of ideas, on a particular path� The meaning of happiness is inextricably intertwined with the history of American exceptionalism� 12 The social scientists Lane Kenworthy and Timothy Smeeding distinguish between the Money Income Index, which stood at 0�477 in 2011, and the Gini-Index of Income Inequality, which amounted to 0�38 in 2008 (Kenworthy and Smeeding, 2013)� They conclude that, “among the world’s affluent countries, the United States can be considered an especially revealing test case� The level of income inequality is very high, and it increased very rapidly in the past generation� If income inequality has adverse impacts on social, political, cultural, or other outcomes, they are likely to be particularly visible in the United States” (3)� Not only is the U�S� exceptional, its development American Exceptionalism in the Age of Inequality 365 the class divide; wealth inequality is a pertinent feature of many nations around the world (Afghanistan, Mexico, Pakistan, Angola and various other African countries rank much higher)� Inequality has also risen in European countries, but the recent data about economic mobility certainly damages claims to American superiority (Piketty 544)� The report of the World Health Organization is another telling indicator because economic inequality impacts, among other areas of social life, the rate of life expectancy� Globally, the U�S� ranks 35th after Greece, Portugal, and Slovenia� 13 A third global measurement is the World Happiness Report which, in 2013, listed the U�S� 17th (below Panama and Mexico)� Social democratic countries such as Denmark and Norway are on top of the list when it comes to the subjective perception of happiness� 14 The discrepancy between the Declaration’s call to pursue one’s happiness and a relative lack thereof in today’s America is noteworthy because it calls into question the relationship between mere opportunity and actual result� The Great Gatsby Curve, which illustrates the stark differences in economic mobility between counties as well as the correlation between inequality and downward mobility� It shows that today economic mobility in the U�S� is lower than that of many developing nations, whereas social-democratic countries like Sweden or Denmark grant the highest level of economic mobility to its citizens� The likelihood of a child born in Denmark to move out of poverty is twice as high as that of a child born in the U�S� 15 Social mobility in Germany is 1�5 times higher� Since the Great Gatsby Curve is part of a governmental report released in 2012 by the Council of Economic Advisors, President Obama was aware of these facts when he gave his speech on inequality� Paul Krugman’s response to this report - “very illuminating - and disturbing” (2013) - might equally have been the presidential reaction� After all, economic immobility undermines the promise of equal opportunity pricking more than national pride� A different study went so far as to argue that 70% of the children at the bottom of society will never make it into the middle class� 16 The probability of an American child raised in a family from the bottom quintile to reach the top quintile of the national income distribution varies from 4�4% (Charlotte) also anticipates trends that are likely to affect other Western European countries in the near future� The OECD also lists 0�38 after taxes and transfers and 0�49 before taxes� See “Income Distribution and Poverty: by country - Inequality�” Compared to other European countries like Germany (0�30) and the United Kingdom (0�34), the U�S�’s income distribution is exceptionally high� See “The Rise of Income Inequality Amongst Rich Countries” on Inequality Watch� On a global scale it ranks with Pakistan and many African countries (“GINI Index”)� On this issue, see also Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez who, starting in 2001, have gathered extensive qualitative data on income inequality in the U�S� (“Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998”)� 13 “Life expectancy: Life expectancy Data by Country,” WHO, 2012� On the many social manifestation of inequality, see Pickett’s and Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level� 14 John Helliwell et al�, eds�, World Happiness Report 2013� 15 “Bloomberg Visual Data - The Great Gatsby Curve: Declining Mobility�” 16 “Moving On Up - Why Do Some Americans Leave the Bottom of the Economic Ladder, but Not Others? ” 366 s ieglinde l emke to 12�9% (San Jose), according to a study conducted at Harvard University in June 2014� 17 The chances to get ahead in 21st century America are predetermined by one’s zip code and family background� 18 The idea that success does not depend on being born into wealth or privilege has also been shattered by Piketty’s revelations about “patrimonial capitalism�” Compared to other Western nations, America’s exceptional level of economic inequality, combined with the recent trend of economic immobility does indeed make it distinct and particular - in an unfortunate way� Not only the President is aware of the contradiction between myth and reality: according to a poll conducted in 2012, the majority of the America population (60%) have also started to doubt the validity of the rags-to-riches story� Only 40 percent of those interviewed thought it was “common for a person in the United States to start poor, work hard, and become rich�” 19 Not only is the belief in meritocracy faltering, two in three Americans are aware of the existence of “strong conflicts” between the rich and the poor. 20 A broad majority (61% of Republicans; 68% of Democrats) of Americans considers the income gap a serious “problem�” 21 60% subscribe to the view that the economic system in the U�S� “unfairly favors the wealthy” while 82% feel “the government should take steps to reduce poverty�” 22 The collective awareness of conflicting class interests is also striking since it runs counter to the ideology - that all Americans are members of one class, the middle class - that is the backbone of the ideology of American exceptionalism� Polls, however, have also proven the tenacity of the collective fantasy� When asked in 2010, 80% agreed “the U�S� is the greatest country in the world�” 23 This USA Today/ Gallup study, which differentiated the responses along social stratificatory lines, shows a discrepancy between class, age, and gender. The public apparently doubts that meritocracy and opportunity are enough to determine success in life. Likewise, the general confidence in equality is waning� The media has become fascinated by the inequality debate, to which several hundred thousands of pundits, journalists, filmmakers, 17 Raj Chetty et al�, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States�” 18 See Richard Morrill, “Rich, Poor, and Unequal Zip Codes�” 19 “Moving On Up - Why Do Some Americans Leave the Bottom of the Economic Ladder, but Not Others? ” 20 Rich Morin, “Rising Share of Americans See Conflict Between Rich and Poor.” 21 Susan Page and Kendall Breitman, “Poll: United We Stand On Wealth Gap - Income Inequality and the Government’s Role�” 22 Ibid� There is an interesting paradox underlying this Pew poll, since 60% of all interviewed held on to the classic belief in upward mobility (“most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard“) but only 38% said that “the rich are rich because they worked harder than others�“ This shows that the conservative view still defines the cultural hegemony; nevertheless, 64% realized that wealth is not a sign of hard work or diligence but inherited� 23 Jeffrey M� Jones, “Americans See U�S� as Exceptional; 37% Doubt Obama Does�” This study also finds that those more likely than average to affirm America’s greatness are male, conservative, older, and affluent. Women, liberals, younger people, and those with an annual income of less than $ 20,000 were less likely to say so� American Exceptionalism in the Age of Inequality 367 bloggers, and politicians have contributed since 2008� 24 The general distress about the rising gap between the rich and the poor - once the preoccupation of left-leaning activists and the Occupy Wall Street movement - has gone viral� 25 The division between the 1% and the 99%, a phrase the OWS popularized, has been incorporated into everyday language� The hype surrounding economist Thomas Piketty’s surprise runaway bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century is further evidence that Americans are taking the idea that inherited wealth drives inequality and that the remedy for this problem might be higher taxes seriously� 26 Even the Republican Party, once a bastion of outright inequality denialism, can no longer ignore the economic data, and has begun to consider ways to participate in the discourse� The debate on inequality is having a profound impact on America’s sense of self� To start with, it has impacted the President’s view of his nation and his people� When addressing the growing gap between the rich and the poor in December 2013, President Obama speculates that “people get the bad taste that the system is rigged, and that increases cynicism and polarization, and it decreases the political participation that is a requisite part of our system of self-government” (2013)� His passing remark on lobbying implies that the wealthy manipulate the system in their favor� The rich have stolen the America Dream, as Smith puts it, whereas the majority of Americans, Obama surmises, looses its interest in politics and its faith in America� 27 Obama’s cautionary note on the state of American democracy therefore undermines the very ideological foundation he tries to uphold with every fiber of his political being� Let’s take this paradox as the springboard to further explore this new understanding of American exceptionalism, which acknowledges the existence of economic immobility and inequality defining features of American life. A good starting point is Seymour Martin Lipset’s American Exceptionalism: A Double Edged Sword (1997) because it grapples with class-related issues such as the absence of trade unions, the lack of a socialist or labor party, and the overall reluctance to finance social welfare programs. 28 By his account, “the United States has stood out among the industrial nations of the world in frustrating all efforts to create a mass socialist or labor party” (77)� In fact, the original usage of the term American exceptionalism has been attributed to Joseph Stalin, who in 1929 rebuked Jay Lovestone, the leader of the American 24 For an overview of this heated debate see Sieglinde Lemke, PrecarioUS: American Inequality and Poverty in the 21st Century (forthcoming)� 25 The entries on inequality in the U�S� and inequality in America produced more than 80 million hits the last time I checked� 26 For a closer analysis of the inequality debate, see the first chapter of my book PrecarioUS (forthcoming)� 27 For an extensive view of this argument see Hedrick Smith (2012), Who Stole the American Dream? as well as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010), Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned its Back on the Middle Class� 28 “The U�S is a ‘welfare laggard’,” Lipset observes (289) claiming that “the fact has occasioned a considerable literature seeking to explain this aspect of American exceptionalism…” (Lipset 77)� 368 s ieglinde l emke Communist Party, for arguing that the American proletariat was uninterested in revolution and that Marx’s understanding of historical development did not apply to America� (Pease 2007, 108)� 29 A few months later, after the Wall Street crash, the American Communist Party used it to express their mischievous joy that the crash of 1929 had shattered America’s long tradition of collective self-flattery: “The storm of the economic crisis in the United States blew down the house of cards of American exceptionalism” (McCoy)� Thus, the Party was implicitly agreeing with Stalin� Class-based narratives of American exceptionalism project their collective desires and reflect the socio-economic and political realities of their time. Writing in the era of Clinton, Lipset (who did not mention Stalin’s remark) had reason to think of the U�S� economy as exceptional due to its immense productivity and remarkable job creation (Lipset claims that between 1973-87 a total of thirty million jobs were created in the U�S�)� In productivity gains, the U�S� far exceeded those of Germany and Japan� Lipset’s optimism about the state of the economy and his appraisal of America’s exceptionally high living standards as well as its high degree of economic equality - “workers as a group are fully sharing in economic gain” (57) - make more sense if considered in the context of the economic boom of the Clinton Presidency� Since the real wages and salaries of American workers have stagnated since the 1980s, however, and given that 95% of income gains since the 2008 crisis went to the top 1% of American households, American workers today are not sharing in economic gain� Given that the living standards of the middle and lower classes have fallen drastically in the past six years, Lipset’s understanding of American exceptionalism has to be updated and adapted to the economic realities of the Great Recession (Kenworthy and Smeeding 2)� Apart from a weakened economy, the public attitude towards inequality has also changed� Americans have traditionally tolerated high degrees of inequality� Winfried Fluck and Welf Werner aptly argue in Wieviel Ungleichheit verträgt die Demokratie: Armut und Reichtum in den USA (2003) that the acceptance of inequality is a distinct feature of American culture since the majority of Americans do not consider the wealth gap to threaten democracy� This view has since changed as the above-cited polls on the perception of the economy, mobility, and class conflict indicate. Six years into the recession, we might wonder how much longer will Americans tolerate the relentlessly increasing wealth gap� Possibly, there is a breaking point for a democracy when it turns into a financial oligarchy with 442 billionaires and 150 Million have-nots who live in or near poverty� In recent years the voice expressing discontent with this imbalance have grown� In 2009, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, for example, argued that “inequality is socially corrosive” (29) and insist on reducing inequality since this is “the best way of improving the quality of the social environment” 29 See Ben Zimmer, “Did Stalin Really Coin ‘American Exceptionalism’? ” Here, the origin of the term is dated back to 1861, to a statement about America’s self-image during the Civil War� American Exceptionalism in the Age of Inequality 369 (29)� In The Spirit Level the authors maintain that “greater equality makes societies stronger” and that America can no longer afford inequality because it weakens the nation as it leads to a high crime rate, low life expectancy, a rise of mental and physical disease, and an exorbitant incarceration rate� 30 Only a decade ago, the experts and scholars who insisted that inequality mattered and who warned of its “poisonous consequences” (Lardner and Smith) were a small group of voices crying in the wilderness� 31 Today, theirs is a commonly held view� Seven years ago the view that “social class is simply not on the radar screen of American political consciousness,” (Kenneth Oldfield, qtd. in Cahill and Johannessen 7) had as much validity as the observation, “bemoan[ing] the absence of class discourse in the United States becomes the discourse itself” (Jones 7)� Today, the discourse on inequality is booming� Moving beyond the long-standing denial of class issues and the lament about its absence (Michaels 2006), the past decade witnessed a surge in awareness of class matters� 32 Hence the President and now also members of the GOP (notably Paul Ryan) jumped on the bandwagon� This acknowledgement of the limits of America’s presumed superiority distinguishes this version from the bolder American exceptionalism of the Bush Era� As Donald Pease argues, the New American Exceptionalism created a state fantasy that “caused U�S� citizens to want to participate in the state’s imperial will by changing the objective cause of their desire” (21)� This allowed for the toleration of the government’s abuse of human rights (Abu Ghraib) and collective neglect of impoverished African-American citizens (Hurricane Katrina)� 33 30 US crime rate in 2009 was 3466 crimes per 100,000 residents, see <http: / / www�disastercenter�com/ crime/ uscrime�htm>; the incarceration rate 2009 was 743 in 100,000 residents (highest documented incarceration rate in the world)� See <http: / / bjs�ojp�usdoj� gov/ content/ glance/ tables/ corr2tab�cfm> and <http: / / bjs�ojp�usdoj�gov/ content/ pub/ pdf/ cpus09�pdf>� 31 “Inequality Matters“ was the title of a conference held in 2004, years before the economic crisis hit, and the subsequent volume is subtitled The Growing Economic Divide in America and its Poisonous Consequences� 32 What about the academic field devoted to examine American literature, history, and culture? Class has long been a blind spot in American Studies (Jones 2006)� While there are a few path-breaking studies on class-related cultural issues (Amy Lang, 2009; Walter Benn Michaels, 2006; Gavin Jones, 2007; William Dow, 2009; Josef Entin, 2007) one might expect a rise in academic articles devoted to cultural aspects pertaining to inequality over the next years� 33 To Pease, “the more or less agreed upon archive concerned with what made America exceptional would include the following phrases: America is a moral exception (the “City on the Hill”); America is a nation with a “Manifest Destiny”; America is the “Nation of Nations”; America is an “Invincible Nation�” These conceptual metaphors, Pease aptly argues, “give directions for finding the meanings that are intended to corroborate the belief in American exceptionality� All of which leads to the conclusion that American exceptionalism operates less like a collection of discrete, potentially falsifiable descriptions of American society than as a fantasy through which U.S. citizens bring these contradictory political and cultural descriptions into correlation with one another through the desires that make them meaningful�” In the state of exception, 370 s ieglinde l emke The American Exceptionalism in the era of Obama relates to domestic issues and class matters, to be specific, propelled by a collective awareness of the economic divide it has potentially disaffecting consequences, as Obama himself noticed a growing sense of “frustration” (2013)� If people lose their faith in meritocracy and democracy, the phantasmagoric nature of the construct becomes painfully evident� The President’s audacity to call out the devastating economic situation and to concede that 50% of all Americans have experienced poverty at one time in their life is remarkable� 34 No longer trying to conceal the inconsistencies at the heart of exceptionalism, the President flaunts them. By publically admitting to the disintegration of the ideological foundation, on which the discourse of American exceptionalism rests, the President deconstructs this myth in the all-American tradition of the jeremiad� Beginning with the Puritans, the jeremiad, as Sacvan Bercovitch has so aptly described, became a fixture of the American rhetorical tradition. The jeremiad links lament to exultation, a ritual that evokes an ideal state while naming and condemning the shortcomings of the existing one� Despite the recognition of and lament over the distance between promise and reality, the jeremiad actually bespeaks an ideological consensus, Bercovitch argues, that preempts radical alternatives� Instead of bringing about real change, these expressions of dissent ultimately produce cultural cohesion� Just so, Obama’s jeremiad, which alerts his audience to the daunting threat of a dysfunctional economy operated by a self-serving financial industry, evokes the possibility of economic democracy while lamenting America’s precarious socio-economic reality� Instead of emphasizing that the U�S� is not immune to the effects of the post-crisis global economy, however, his jeremiadic oratory reverts at crucial moments to the long-standing myth of American exceptionalism� In so doing, Obama uses this ideological tradition - which in the past was upheld by writers, thinkers, and political dissidents - and imbues it with presidential authority� Even if he is aware that exceptionalism is merely a construct, Obama trades on it when it is politically necessary. “With every fibre of [his] political being,” he affirms his belief in this construct, attempting to forge a national consensus that will keep the daunting specters of political polarization and economic inequality at bay� when democratic rights are violated, this collective desire causes U�S� citizens “to want to participate in the state’s imperial will” instead of pursuing their own self-interest or political will� 34 That number is low compared to some accounts� Mark Rank argues that 79% of all Americans experience economic insecurity at least once in their life - i�e� unemployment, income-threatening health problems, dependence on food stamps or living at 150% of the poverty level: “four out of every five United States adults “struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives” (Yen)� American Exceptionalism in the Age of Inequality 371 Works Cited Aglietta, Michel (2000)� A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience� London and New York: Verso� Bacevich, Andrew J� (2009)� The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism� New York: Holt Paperbacks� Barlett, Donald L� and James B� Steele (2012)� The Betrayal of the American Dream� New York: PublicAffairs� “Bloomberg Visual Data - The Great Gatsby Curve: Declining Mobility�” Bloomberg� Bloomberg L�P� 6 Oct� 2013� Web� 30 June 2014� Cahill, Kevin, and Lene Johannessen, eds� Considering Class. 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Zimmer, Ben� “Did Stalin Really Coin ‘American Exceptionalism’? ” Language Log� WordPress, 25 Sep� 2013� Web� 30 June 2014� a hu t anrisever Subprime Heroism: Revisiting the Trope of the Male Breadwinner in the New Millennium Within the multitude of representations of fatherhood in post-9/ 11 literature and visual culture, it is possible to identify a cluster of contemporary narratives centered on “migratory” fatherhood� These popular stories of fathers on the run/ road clearly mark their journey as a paternal one by pairing the father with his child, which is almost exclusively a son. Besides the feature films Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes, 2002), Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003), The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino, 2006), or The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009), this motif particularly informs James Mangold’s 2007 Western remake 3: 10 to Yuma. All of these films of post-9/ 11 migratory fatherhood have in common that the patriarchal heterosexual nuclear family is imagined to be in a state of emergency - through the death of the mother (Finding Nemo and Road to Perdition), the mother’s abandonment of the family (The Road and The Pursuit of Happyness), or the questioning of the patriarch as the rightful head of the family (3: 10 to Yuma)� Domesticity is thus connoted with a notion of crisis, and this precarious scenario propels a unitary response: the fatherson road trip, that means a perilous journey through non-domestic spaces transforming both offspring and, more importantly, the (now) single father� Regardless of individual variations, these paternal road movies (apparently) end with the (re-)establishment of patriarchal authority, which also hinges on the narratives’ pronounced affective work most visible in the films’ conclusions - either heightening the father’s status by a happy ending or, more crucially, by capitalizing on tragedy through the father’s death at the end of the journey� Yet, while the perpetuation of male hegemony is certainly part of these narratives’ cultural work, it is particularly the motif of the father’s death that complicates any reading by constituting an aesthetic experience simultaneously affirming and undermining paternal authority� My analysis of Mangold’s 3: 10 to Yuma explores this ambivalence as an indicator of an overall shift in the conceptualization of individualism and of identity in the new millennium� As the cultural manifestation of a growing awareness about the intersectionality of various social parameters in identities, 3: 10 to Yuma articulates the crucial role of class in shaping social realities, in particular by linking this to a heightened notion of vulnerability, realized through its trope of maimed and moribund fatherhood� For Dan Evans, 3: 10 to Yuma’s protagonist, the exceptionalist idea of the American Dream does not entirely add up� I read this increase of notions of ambivalence, inadequacy, and failure not as the mere incorporation of economic, political, or military setbacks into conceptions of American exceptionalism but, rather, as a decisive turning away from the narrative of “exceptionalist individualism” 376 a hu t anrisever (which so poignantly informs narratives of the American Dream achieved by heroic males striving for individual recognition). To be more specific, it is within its contemporary socio-economic context of the 2006/ 07 subprime mortgage crisis that I consider this post-9/ 11 Western as a radical questioning and critique of the late-modernist concept of the male breadwinner, a figure whose cultural glorification was brought about by the fusion of exceptionalism, masculinity, and capitalism in post-World War II US society� Against this background, in turn, revisiting the narrative’s 1950s figurations reveals these texts to constitute early critiques of the growing influence of finance capitalism on the nuclear family� This oscillation between the narrative’s various realizations, ultimately, discloses how 3: 10 to Yuma’s progressive and critical elements markedly disrupt the romance with US hegemony and hegemonic concepts of gender identity� Trapped in Suit(e)s: 3: 10 to Yuma and the Heroic Breadwinner of the 1950s Published in the Dime Western Magazine in March 1953, Elmore Leonard’s short story “Three-Ten to Yuma” revolves around the themes of individual heroism and masculine anxiety� Written in the past tense and rendered in the subjective third-person narrative mode, the story is focalized through the character of Deputy Marshal Paul Scallen, who is charged with delivering a sentenced outlaw, Jim Kidd, to the Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona� Excluding both beginning and ending of this prisoner transport from Fort Huachuca (near Bisbee) to Yuma, the narrative exclusively focuses on the two men’s stopover in Contention City to board the eponymous train� Upon their arrival, they are received by Mr� Timpey, a representative of the banking and transport corporation Wells, Fargo & Co� (the aggrieved party)� As requested, Mr� Timpey has arranged for a hotel room for the unlikely duo, where the deputy hopes to pass the hours until the train’s arrival unnoticed by any of Kidd’s outlaw friends� Gradually, however, Scallen’s goal of boarding the train with Kidd is exposed as an all but impossible task� While Scallen represents institutionalized law, the narrative equally emphasizes the individualism of Scallen’s heroism; going above and beyond the call of his professional duties, Scallen’s moral integrity motivates him to complete his assignment in spite of being outnumbered by the outlaw gang (seven to one) and, thus, facing the prospect of certain death when marching Kidd off to the train� During the build-up to the climactic walk to the station, the narrative highlights the peculiar bond between deputy and prisoner, Scallen’s disciplined work ethic (linked to his pride in and dependency on having a steady monthly income), and his dedication to his family� Most of the story is literally confined to the hotel room and acted out through the dialogues between Scallen and Kidd, which foreground the changing nature of their relationship (shifting from professional and ironic detachment to mutual amicability Subprime Heroism 377 and respect). Significantly, Scallen’s status as a representative of institutionalized law is presented as both a consequence of his virtue and, equally important, of his need for monetary security: Then he [Kidd] said right after it, his tone changing, “What made you join the law? ” “The money,” Scallen answered, and felt foolish as he said it� But he went on, “I was working for a spread over by the Pantano Wash when Old Nana broke loose and raised hell up the Santa Rosa Valley� [���], so the Pima County marshal got up a bunch to help out and we tracked Apaches almost all spring� The marshal and I got along fine, so he offered me a deputy job if I wanted it.” He wanted to say that he started for seventy-five and worked up to the one hundred and fifty, but he didn’t� (Leonard 184) References to Scallen’s modest salary abound in the brief story to enhance the scale of his bravery (facing death for a negligible amount of money), to emphasize his integrity by refusing any form of bribery in spite of his meagre income, and to position him as a responsible breadwinner committed to his family’s well-being� Thereby, the narrative repeatedly stresses that Scallen’s unfailing efforts to deliver Kidd to the authorities is primarily motivated by professional and not personal reasons, as he is determined to perform well in his job� All the while, through the subjective third-person narrative mode, the reader has access to Scallen’s thoughts and feelings that mark him as an ordinary human being with fears and concerns for his loved ones� Detecting Kidd’s friends from the hotel window (and thus realizing that he will run into an ambush on the way to the train), the deputy’s thoughts subvert his image of a stoic and solitary Western hero: He [Scallen] saw his wife, then, and the three youngsters and he could almost feel the little girl sitting on his lap where she had climbed up to kiss him goodbye, and he had promised to bring her something from Tucson� He didn’t know why they had come to him all of a sudden� And after he had put them out of his mind, since there was no room now, there was an upset feeling inside as if he had swallowed something that would not go down all the way� It made his heart beat a little faster� Jim Kidd was smiling up at him� “Anybody I know? ” “I didn’t think it showed�” “Like the sun going down�” (Leonard 186) Significantly, this crack in the deputy’s (self-)presentation is not only a latent textual element dependent on reader reception but an overt part of the story’s negotiation of gender� Through Kidd’s comment on the deputy’s shifted air and Scallen’s confession of both his concerns and his efforts to hide those (“I didn’t think it showed�”), heroic masculinity is acknowledged to be a performative act rather than an essentialist quality of a few select individuals� Zooming in on Scallen’s angst, then, the narrative articulates the abundance of multiple masculine anxieties about failure to perform, exemplified by the protagonist’s worries about failing as a husband and father (as the patriarchal breadwinner) and a professional law-enforcer (as a deputy) but also regarding his “act” of performing heroism� 378 a hu t anrisever At two-fifteen Scallen looked at his watch, then stood up, pushing the chair back. The shotgun was under his arm� In less than an hour they would leave the hotel, walk over Commercial to Stockman, and then up Stockman to the station� Three blocks� He wanted to go all the way� He wanted to get Jim Kidd on that train ��� but he was afraid� He was afraid of what he might do once they were on the street� Even now his breath was short and occasionally he would inhale and let the air out slowly to calm himself� And he kept asking himself if it was worth it� People would be in the windows and the doors, though you wouldn’t see them� They’d have their own feelings and most of their hearts would be pounding ��� and they’d edge back of the door frames a little more� The man out on the street was something without a human nature or a personality of its own� He was on a stage� The street was another world� (Leonard 189-90) Echoing the famous Shakespearean quip on identity and play, the narrative describes the street as a “stage” for masculinity with scripted norms and practices of gender identity, whose observance is enforced by social structures and omnipresent anonymous surveillance� Exiting the hotel, Scallen’s concluding fate returns to the traditional narrative of victorious hegemonic masculinity by incorporating the deputy’s anxieties into the narrative’s representation of heroism (emphasizing his perseverance in the face of utmost fear during the showdown)� Managing to resolutely march Kidd off to the station, the train platform becomes the stage for the deputy’s display of sober-mindedness and marksmanship� All by himself, he succeeds shooting Prince and another outlaw, engaging the other gang members in a gunfight, and forcing Kidd to jump onto the departing train� In its concluding paragraph, recognition, in form of a job well done (and, thus, rightfully earning his salary), is both granted by the outlaw - stating, “You know, you really earn your hundred and a half” (Leonard 193) - and awarded by Scallen to himself - as “[h]e was thinking pretty much the same thing” (Leonard 193) -, which turns his adventure in Contention into a classic trial by fire as an initiation into heroic manhood. Sustaining its popularity from the time of its release down to the present day, Delmer Daves’ 1957 black-and-white filmic adaptation of “Three-Ten to Yuma” was selected into the National Film Registry in 2012 (US Library of Congress). Preserving the core plot, characters, and conflicts of the short story, 3: 10 to Yuma features significant additions, elaborations, and modifications, which enhance its explorations of masculinity, heroism, and the struggle for familial and communal security� In addition to providing a background story for its principal characters, the adaptation is most notable for amplifying the story’s notions of gender insecurity and for intimately linking its negotiation of heroism to the nuclear family� Utilizing a cattle herd as a barricade, a gang of gunmen led by the infamous outlaw Ben Wade forages a stagecoach and shoots its driver, while the herd’s owner, the rancher Dan Evans, comes across the robbery with his two sons and witnesses the criminal act without intervening� Subsequently, the gang rides to Bisbee to celebrate in a saloon (fooling the marshal into riding out to the stagecoach), while Dan drives his scattered cattle home afoot with Subprime Heroism 379 his sons (as Wade took away their horses)� In the ensuing conversation with his wife, it becomes clear that the ongoing drought has left Dan in dire need for money (to buy water rights for six months), and he leaves for Bisbee to ask for a loan. Helping the stagecoach owner, Mr. Butterfield, on his way, they run into the marshal and his posse, who realize Wade’s diversionary tactic and form a plan to arrest Wade (who enjoys an amorous tête-à-tête with the barmaid, while his gang leaves for Mexico)� Through Dan’s commitment, the outlaw is then arrested, which is witnessed by Wade’s righthand man, Charlie Prince (who darts off to assemble the gang and rescue Wade)� The marshal plans to deliver Wade to the authorities and asks Dan to join his posse as a deputy, which Dan refuses (pointing out his need to take care of his business)� Yet, Dan fails at getting a loan and, overhearing Mr. Butterfield’s offer of paying a two-hundred dollar reward for each of the two required men to deliver Wade to the Yuma Territorial Prison via the train that leaves from Contention City the next day, he volunteers for the job (as does Alex Potter, the town drunk), while all other men shun the dangerous task� Pretending to transport Wade to a different city, the marshal and his posse manage to exchange Wade for another man at Dan’s house and continue their journey as distracting bait for Wade’s henchman Prince� After having dinner with Dan’s family, the three men leave the ranch and ride to Contention� Without depicting their journey, the action continues with their arrival in town in the early morning, where Mr. Butterfield has arranged for a hotel room to wait for the train’s arrival without being noticed by anyone� Interrupted by glimpses of the action taking place outside, most of the narrative is focused on the interaction between Dan and Wade in the hotel room� To no avail, Wade tries to cajole Dan into releasing him by bribing Dan, intimidating him, or even insulting his pride as a husband� All the while, Dan successfully fends off Bob Moons (who attempts to kill Wade for the murder of his brother) in a brawl that reveals their hiding-place to Prince� As Dan’s psychological duel with Wade intensifies, he is ultimately left to his own devices in walking Wade to the train (all volunteers flee at the gang’s arrival, Alex is killed by the outlaws, and Mr. Butterfield wants to abort the mission)� Notwithstanding his wife’s arrival in Contention (to beg him to give up), Dan walks Wade to the station, where he confronts the gang on the platform� Prince yells at Wade to drop down (to shoot Dan); yet, the outlaw surprisingly tells Dan to jump on the passing train with him� Finally relaxing in the baggage car (after shooting Prince), Dan wonders about Wade’s help, upon which Wade replies that he wanted to get even with Dan for saving his life (and adding that he managed to flee from Yuma Prison before). The film ends with both men on the train and looking down at Alice, while rain starts pouring down on her� Straying both from the largely action-oriented plot of the Western genre (regularly featuring chases, gunfights, brawls, or duels) and the trope of the Western hero as an unattached loner, 3: 10 to Yuma stages its hero as a devoted husband and father who is primarily concerned about his family’s economic well-being and, thus, worries mostly about his qualities as 380 a hu t anrisever patriarchal breadwinner (amplified by the casting of Van Heflin for the role of Dan Evans)� 1 Significantly, the film stresses that Dan’s authority is intact yet endangered at the action’s outset; his first on-screen familial interactions indicate latent cracks in Dan’s recognition as the family’s patriarch� During the opening scene, which cross-cuts between the robbery and the male members of the Evans family, it is Dan’s inactivity and not the gang’s felony that is presented as the actual unseemly incident through his son’s questions� MARC� You gonna let them do this to you? DAN� Not much else I can do� [shift to the robbery of the stagecoach, where the stagecoach driver takes hold of a gang member, and Ben Wade shoots both of them] MARC� Aren’t you gonna do something? DAN� What, and get myself shot too? That must be Ben Wade and his gang� [shift to robbery, where Wade asks for the driver’s name, Bill Moons, and tells the stagecoach owner to make sure Moons gets a proper burial in his hometown of Contention; afterwards they take the horses from Dan and his sons, promising to let go of them close to Bisbee] MARC� [yelling after the departing gang] You wait! My pa will kill you! DAN� [appeasingly] Marc� [they watch the gang ride away] Let’s get the cattle� (3: 10 to Yuma, 00: 04: 20-00: 06: 11) Marc’s filial uneasiness in the face of his father’s determination not to act (recognizing the futility of any intervention) represents the narrative’s first juncture in aligning its negotiation of heroism with fatherhood and, in consequence, the patriarch of the nuclear family� Here, prioritizing their personal and economic well-being, Dan opts out of any cultural script envisioning him as a hard-nosed Western hero standing up for communal law and order with no regard for consequences� This rational, individualist, and entrepreneurial mindset of Dan’s not only jars with his sons’ expectations of proper masculine behavior but, more drastically, with those of his wife� Noticing their return home afoot and hearing about the unpleasant encounter with the outlaw gang, Alice appears more distressed about Dan’s passivity than relieved (given the harm averted)� ALICE� [walks over to Dan at his horse and stares intensely at him] What did you do? DAN� They was [sic] twelve� What could I do? [���] ALICE� Well, I’m glad you’re back safe� Heavens anything could have happened� [stands about without helping Dan and merely continues looking at him wonderingly] [���] It just seems so terrible� [���] 1 Heflin was best known to contemporary audiences through his role in another popular and extremely successful Western (released four years prior to 3: 10 to Yuma)� In Shane (George Stevens, 1953), Heflin embodies the figure of the homesteader Joe Starrett, who represents one of the film’s masculine ideals. Firmly grounded in the realm of the nuclear family, Starrett is presented as a husband, father, and industrious farmer, who consequently needs to abstain from executing violence, as he is closely associated with the “civilized” space of “tamed wilderness” in the imaginary realm of the frontier� For this purpose, Starrett is contrasted with the film’s other hero, the errand and unbound buckskin-clad Shane (played by Alan Ladd), who is both experienced and skilled with his six-shooter and helps the homesteaders in their fight against the cattle baron Ryker. Subprime Heroism 381 DAN� What’s the matter? ALICE� Nothing� ��� It seems terrible that something bad can happen, and all anybody can do is stand by and watch� DAN� Lots of things happen where all you can do is stand by and watch� ALICE� I know, but to have you stand by and to have the boys watch - [stops abruptly] DAN� Alright, so that’s life� You can have to watch a lot of terrible things� People get killed every day� Lightning can kill you� Three years of drought killing my cattle, that’s terrible, too� What can I do? I can’t make it rain� [���] ALICE� Dan, why are you so cross? [her facial expression grows softer again] DAN� I don’t know� You just seem to expect something from me that I’m not� ALICE� No, I don’t� Not really� DAN� I can’t go chasing after outlaws, my cattle dying all over� If I don’t save them, I don’t know what I’m gonna do� (3: 10 to Yuma, 00: 07: 22 - 00: 08: 45) Picking up on the short story’s fine-tuned musings on the constructedness of masculine bravado and the pressure to publicly “perform heroism,” it is telling what Alice perceives as “terrible” about the incident� Although she stops short of finishing her thought, it becomes clear that it is not merely Dan’s failure to perform but, rather, the fact that the sons have to bear witness to their father’s passivity and subjection to Wade’s commands� These ruptures of Dan’s authority are not only played out through the dialogues but also through the visual realization of this scene: Throughout their conversation, it is Alice, who is highlighted by frequently positioning her in the center or the foreground of the frame, literally placing her distress and disappointment center-stage. Furthermore, not only is Dan often confined to the margins of the frame, but other framing devices separate him from his wife and children, symbolizing rifts in the texture of this nuclear family� Clearly, Dan refuses to participate in any cultural convention that prioritizes violent masculine behavior over his business interest; he is only concerned about his cattle and his ranch, the family home� However, as in the introductory scene (fusing Dan’s cattle with Wade’s robbery), his private concerns as breadwinner are related to the public pressure of enforcing law and order when Dan admits not knowing how to save his cattle (“What can I do? ”)� While Alice’s subsequent plea, “Oh, Dan, you have to do something� You can’t just stand by and watch” (00: 09: 20-00: 09: 25), is directed at his efforts as a rancher, her words echo her previous remarks on the robbery (“It seems terrible that something bad can happen, and all anybody can do is stand by and watch�”)� This criticism of Dan’s behavior represents the climactic burst of familial uneasiness, explicitly denouncing the crisis management skills of the patriarchal head of the family (and, in addition, it is Alice who then suggests borrowing money to purchase water rights)� Aligning Dan’s business enterprise with the hunt for Wade through Alice’s call for action, the film’s central arch of tension is established, and Dan leaves for the city of Bisbee to ask for a loan, which appeases Alice� Thus, the familial crisis can be averted� As becomes clear at the scene’s end, after its interim gloomy and dismal mood, Alice reverts back to the role of the loving and supportive wife 382 a hu t anrisever idolizing her husband� Still, while depicting the Evans household as an ultimately integral family displaying obedience and reverence for its patriarchal head, the scene nevertheless discloses the tensions and ruptures beneath the surface - resulting from Dan’s economic failure as the family’s breadwinner - by expressing lingering but growing unrest that threatens to question and diminish Dan’s authority� In the logic of 3: 10 to Yuma, the greatest threat to Dan’s self-assurance emanates from this domestic realm and not the public sphere of masculine interactions� To no surprise, the crucial episodes of the two men’s struggle for domination are set in locales representing or symbolizing domesticity, the Evans’ home and a bridal suite� After the marshal and the posse leave the Evans’ ranch with their fake prisoner to distract Wade’s gang, the outlaw is invited to join the family for dinner, while Alex remains on the porch to observe the surroundings� By now, Wade has been established as an intriguing masculine figure through both his outlaw lifestyle and amorous adventures, and he self-confidently takes center stage in this ritualized domestic scene� While calming his sons, Dan is presented as a humble and obliging host, who even lowers himself to cutting the handcuffed outlaw’s meat, only to put up with Wade’s quips� Caught between these two contrasting men located at either end of the dinner table (the selfless, peaceable, and nurturing Dan versus the egomaniac, aggressive, and provocative Ben Wade), Alice’s reservation and taciturnity indicate the inherent ambivalence in both constructs of masculinity� For all his deadliness, Wade’s sex-appeal and charm cast him as a desirable man; Dan, on the other hand, is clearly a considerate and virtuous husband, yet distinctly lacks any thrilling qualities� To no surprise, in Dan’s brief absence from the table, Wade easily manages to momentarily charm Alice by engrossing her in a conversation about one of his past liaisons, which the returning Dan then ends abruptly by calling Alice outside on the porch (to jealously condemn her behavior towards the notorious criminal)� Again, the narrative stops short of dethroning Dan as the ultimately revered and unquestioned head of the family by merely hinting at Alice’s desires for an alternative version of masculinity� As Dan starts acting on his own initiative and takes charge of their departure, the tension during the dialogue on the porch is canceled by Alice’s rekindled admiration for Dan� This (temporary) conflict in Alice’s contradictory feelings for the “good” and the “bad” guy is indicative of the narrative’s overall affective work in arousing the same ambivalent feelings in the audience towards the two main male characters (and, in this regard, Glenn Ford’s casting against type as the outlaw is instrumental in amplifying the antagonist’s appeal)� While contrasted, the rancher and the outlaw never appear as antithetical� This is underscored by two important variations on Leonard’s short story, as the film not only casts its principal male characters as middle-aged men of roughly the same age (eliminating the explicit age difference between Deputy Paul Scallen and the younger outlaw Jim Kidd) but also renames them with the similar-sounding (fore)names, Dan Evans and Ben Wade� In the narrative’s Subprime Heroism 383 negotiation of its masculine ideal, the pursuit of money (albeit, to different ends) drives both men; as Dan is increasingly staged as the story’s hero, it remains suspenseful what prize he will have to pay for claiming that position� Skipping the men’s ride to Contention City and only briefly depicting their arrival in town, the main strand of action (focusing on the relationship between rancher and outlaw) is quickly re-located to the hotel room� Thereby, deviating from its literary source anew, the film presents the room explicitly as a bridal suite, a coincidence ridiculed by Wade, who spends most of his time sitting or laying on the bed� Acknowledging the sexual connotation of the locale, I nevertheless hold the cultural function of this modification not to be indicative of displaced (homo)sexual tensions but, rather, to be related to the narrative’s negotiation of masculinity within the confines of the domestic realm of the nuclear family� 2 With its distinct mise-en-scène, 3: 10 to Yuma becomes a textbook example of Thomas Elsaesser’s remarks on the aesthetics of excess of 1950s family melodrama, stating that an “acute sense of claustrophobia in décor and locale translates itself into a restless and yet suppressed energy surfacing sporadically in the actions and the behavior of the protagonists” (361)� Accordingly, the notion of confinement is foregrounded in the men’s long layover in the bridal suite, particularly in the visual staging of the narrow room dominated by the matrimonial bed, which leaves only limited space for movement� While not quintessentially noir, 3: 10 to Yuma is a (melodramatic) noirish Western due to its intense interrogation of gender anxieties, reduction of action sequences, the primarily psychological duel between its principal male characters, and its prominent usage of light and darkness� A closer look at the bridal suite sequences (regularly crosscut with scenes of the outside action) reveals that it is not only the outlaw who is locked but, simultaneously, the scenes’ cramped mise-en-scène and pronounced low-key lighting (casting multiple shadows, which also cover Dan in the shape of bars) suggest that the rancher is equally trapped� Whereas it is institutionalized law that keeps hold of Wade, Dan is rather encased by the confines of marriage. After all, both men end up in the bridal suite for identical reasons, their striving for money� In this regard, another deviation from the short story proves instrumental in resignifying the narrative’s representation of its hero. Unlike the literary figure of Paul Scallen, Dan Evans is not a deputy marshal but a rancher, who is forced into heroism by dire economic needs (and not professional reasons)� It is the monetary award, advertised by the stagecoach owner, which motivates Dan to volunteer for the prisoner transport� Putting up with mortal danger, Dan hence subordinates his existence to the financial needs he is expected to meet as the 2 In spite of identity politics and progressive developments in US society through social movements ever since the 1960s, the nuclear family is still largely perpetuated as a heteronormative social construction, founded through the institutionalized act of marriage (traditionally expected to be consummated in the wedding night)� Thus, while not a domestic space in itself, the bridal suite links the struggle between Dan and Wade to the question of domesticity and continues the film’s interrogation of heroism against the background of the nuclear family� 384 a hu t anrisever Evans family’s breadwinner� Hence, what 3: 10 to Yuma ultimately stresses is that Dan’s authority is contingent upon his economic success; financial sustainability ensures his status as the patriarchal head of the nuclear family; as seen in interactions with Alice, monetary precariousness fosters ruptures within the familial domain and, ultimately, gender insecurity� Depicting the potential fatal outcome of this logic, closely linking masculinity with capitalist success, is the narrative’s critical cultural achievement� 3: 10 to Yuma thus envisions its gender crisis to originate from the protagonist’s economic crisis, depicting how the familial hierarchy of the Evans family is questioned as a consequence of Dan’s failure as the breadwinner� In the logic of the film, this failure manifests itself most drastically through the hardship endured by his wife, encapsulated in the enigmatic remark that she has to “work hard” (articulated both by Alice herself and by Wade)� After all, it is Alice’s initial call for Dan’s action that propels his journey to Yuma with Wade� Her growing uneasiness is the driving factor in undermining Dan’s patriarchal authority, pushing his existence dangerously close to the brink of death� Hence, Dan’s masculine redemption can only be granted by his wife� In consequence, the showdown in Contention City is heralded by Alice’s arrival in town, which foreshadows both the end to his economic hardship (as rolling thunder signals the drought’s end) and yield’s him envious recognition by the outlaw� Frantically calling for her husband in the hotel lobby (where Alex’s corpse hangs from the chandelier), she starts running towards Dan and, subsequently, begs him to abandon his mission� ALICE� [with tears in her eyes, embracing Dan] If I ever said anything that made you think I was complaining o’r how hard things were, but it just isn’t true, because I love everything� Every minute� All the worry, the work, all the hurts of life� MR� BUTTERFIELD� [hearing their conversation from inside the room] If it’s the twohundred dollars you need, I’ll pay you anyway� ALICE� Don’t go through with it, dear� [���] Oh, Dan� I don’t want a hero� I want you� DAN� Honest to God, if I didn’t have to do it, I wouldn’t� But I heard Alex scream� The town drunk gave his life because he believed that people should be able to live in decency and peace together� You think I can do less? ALICE� Don’t� No, please don’t go through with it� DAN� You know I never have been able to give you very much� No pearls, nothing� Sometimes not even enough food for you and the boys� Maybe this will be something worth remembering� ALICE� [shocked] What are you saying? ��� Don’t you think you can make it? DAN� Oh, yes, of course� When it gets to be three o’clock, I’ll just walk to the station� That’s all� ALICE� Then why are you talking about a memory? DAN� Well, I mean for the boys� The boys will always remember how their old man walked Ben Wade to the station� (3: 10 to Yuma, 1: 18: 15-1: 19: 43) Unequivocally, Alice revokes her earlier comments indicating her distress and disappointment about the living conditions provided by her husband, resignifying initially bemoaned hardships as cherished parts of a priceless Subprime Heroism 385 marriage� Renouncing her desire for a man embodying the heroic quality of the controlled exertion of violence, Alice thoroughly re-establishes Dan as the unquestioned head of the family� It is through her act of readily submission to patriarchal authority that Dan’s fate turns around, which is highlighted by the scene’s cinematography: Significantly, Alice’s body screens Alex’ hanging corpse when she walks toward Dan (thus, literally, erasing the prospect of a fatal outcome of Dan’s mission)� Throughout their conversation, the couple is firmly framed by the case of the bridal suite’s open door; as Alice sinks into Dan’s arms, she consequently succumbs back into the confines of normed gender identities, cancelling her earlier transgression of hierarchical boundaries� In addition, the viewer gazes at this interaction through the eyes of Wade, as the alignment of the camera reproduces his perspective on the couple from inside the room� The outlaw thus witnesses this unconditional recognition of Dan by his wife, which will later influence his behavior during the climactic showdown on the platform� While Dan insists on taking Wade to the train, he repeatedly avoids explicitly answering Alice’s question regarding his motivation to do so; yet, his remark on creating a memory for his sons is telling� By taking Wade to the train, Dan redeems his paternal authority, eradicating future filial rebellions with this public display of heroism. Ultimately, Dan’s action does not establish institutionalized law but, primarily, re-establishes his status as patriarch� It is through this linking of heroism with the nuclear family that Wade’s final move (voluntarily subjecting himself to Dan by initiating their jump) represents a logical bow to the imperative maintenance of patriarchal domination, embodied by the successful male breadwinner. This absoluteness of the father figure is mirrored in the film’s closing that is fraught with religious undertones� As the drought is ended by the starting rain and the two men on the train pass Alice, the editing enforces Dan’s lofty status by eyeline matches that depict his wife (whose attire is reminiscent of biblical costumes) in high-angle shots, subordinating her to her husband� How can 3: 10 to Yuma’s masculine ideal be interpreted within its historical context? As I hold, not by localizing the film within the “golden age” of 1950s Western movies but by interrogating larger contemporary socioeconomic and cultural transformations in US society that pertain to the narrative’s central theme of the heroic male breadwinner� Hence, I argue that 3: 10 to Yuma is less related to Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon (a link insinuated in the majority of the film’s reviews and interpretations) but, rather, performs cultural work that is also accomplished by narratives centered on the figure of the man in the gray flannel suit. Steven Cohan examines the (discourse of a) post-WWII masculinity crisis through his analysis of popular 1950s Hollywood movies, whereby Cohan discloses how a particular notion of masculinity was crafted as the new hegemonic norm in a post-WWII consumerist US society, installing a specific (privileged) subject position as the universal masculine standard� By “trad[ing] in his 1940s khaki regulation uniform for a 1950s gray flannel one” (Cohan 38) after demobilization, the new hegemonic male emerged: “the white, heterosexual, corporate, WASP, 386 a hu t anrisever suburban breadwinner as personified by the ubiquitous figure of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (Cohan xi). This figure has come to represent a coherent and self-disclosed notion of masculinity endowed with agency; yet, Cohan subverts this master narrative of the 1950s middle-class breadwinner by revealing the contradictory gender ideals it had to incorporate (xii), which make up for its inherent instability and explicit negotiation of gender performativity� Interrelating gender to the spread of corporate capitalism, Cohan poignantly describes this figure’s cultural function in “link[ing] gender (manhood) and male psychology (maturity) to a heterosexual goal (mating) and economic obligation (breadwinning), [���] to secure the cultural hegemony of the professional managerial class in the face of other, older as well as marginalized and excluded, social interests” (35)� Yet, in the end, this hegemonic concept of the male middle-class breadwinner is a deeply paradoxical figure: While occupying the hegemonic position in a hierarchy of competing masculinities, its socio-culturally elevated status can only mask, but never eradicate, the “subjection of its ordinary, middle-class Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to corporate power” (Cohan 78)� It is against this background of the new hegemonic ideal of the masculine breadwinner and corporate capitalism that I locate 3: 10 to Yuma’s ideal of heroic masculinity� As my analysis illustrates, the notion of masculine confinement through domesticity is omnipresent in 3: 10 to Yuma� However, unlike the explicit masculine discontent articulated in other 1950s narratives centered on middle-class breadwinners (in film noir and male melodramas), much of 3: 10 to Yuma’s critical stance on its heroic breadwinner is achieved through covert and visual rather than manifest and textual elements� To put it bluntly, Dan Evans does not wear a gray flannel suit. Yet, particularly during his interim containment in the bridal suite, we realize that he is likewise trapped within the confines of heterosexual marriage, in which paternal authority hinges on economic success - a logic that serves neither men nor women but primarily the interest of corporate capitalism� Having this in mind, we have to recollect what propels Dan’s mission: the two-hundreddollar reward paid by Mr. Butterfield, the owner of the robbed stagecoach and, thus, a representative of the rapidly growing influence of corporate power in post-Civil War USA (particularly, after the completion of the transcontinental railroad)� By the narrative’s mythic framing provided through the Western, 3: 10 to Yuma evades its hero’s complete subjection to capitalist exploitation by having Dan walk Wade to the station nevertheless (in spite of already having earned his financial reward) and ending the film with rain (thus, signalling that Dan will not need the money to buy water rights, after all)� Staged as a voluntary act and not hired labor, Dan’s concluding fate still perpetuates a glorified notion of individual agency on its surface. Yet, 3: 10 to Yuma registers the growing demands of corporate capitalism, which has begun to monopolize marriage as a tool of regulating gendered and sexualized identities and, moreover, as a guarantee of a constant fresh supply of male breadwinners, voluntarily subjecting themselves to corporate power in exchange for their status as heads of their households� Subprime Heroism 387 Fighting Foreclosure: The New Millennium’s Moribund Breadwinner Marking the fifty-year anniversary of Daves’ adaptation, Mangold’s remake of 3: 10 to Yuma spearheaded a wave of Westerns in late-2007 Hollywood filmmaking (Andrew Dominik’s traditional Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Joel and Ethan Coen’s contemporary Western No Country for Old Men, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s drama There Will Be Blood), prompting critics to diagnose a “western revival” (Scott, n� pag�)� Thereby, like its competitors, Mangold’s adaptation opened to positive, if not rave, reviews (as, for example, by Bruce Westbrook, Kenneth Turan, or Roger Ebert)� In existing scholarship on the remake (see the essays by Thomas A� Horne, Carol A� MacCurdy, and Mary P� Nichols), it is remarkable that all interpretations explicitly focus on the narrative’s modified intersection of masculinity and heroism� As if to prove true Cynthia Miller’s observation that “[f]ifty years can change a lot about a man ... and a film” and that “3: 10 to Yuma, in its original and remade versions, gives testimony to both” (127), all analyses oscillate between the two adaptations to elaborate on their semantic complexity within their respective historic contexts� Yet, without presuming to diminish the contributions of these publications, the significance of the continuity and increase of the trope of the father-as-economic-provider within the narratives’ negotiations of domesticity (and the nuclear family) has so far only been insufficiently interrogated. The “uncanny” timing of the remake’s critique of corporate capitalism through the story of a male breadwinner desperately struggling to avert the impending foreclosure of his family home has, rather, only been touched upon in few reviews that immediately followed the film’s release: James Hoberman notes that the “railroad, as personified by corporate official Dallas Roberts, is the real villain” (n. pag.); Richard Schickel insinuates the film’s link to present times, observing that “Dan [���] may live in 19th century Arizona, but he’s leading a 20th century - or sub-prime - sort of life” (n� pag�)� As I hold, the cultural function of 3: 10 to Yuma’s central trope of heroism, its moribund breadwinner, can only adequately be grasped within its contemporary socioeconomic context of the US housing bubble that gained momentum in early 2006 and, entailing an increasing number of private foreclosures, snowballed into the subprime mortgage crisis of 2006/ 2007 (a connection hitherto absent from critical discourse on the film). Having first exposed the links between money/ capitalism and gender in both short story and first adaptation, my interpretation interrogates the negotiation of gendered economic anxieties in this Western tale of a maimed father embodying “subprime heroism�” Thereby, my analysis restricts itself to those narrative modifications that amplify the remake’s confrontation with compromised fatherhood as well as its critique of corporate power: the concept of heroism embodied by Dan, the privileged father-son relationship (linked to their mutual road trip), and the film’s radically altered ending. 388 a hu t anrisever Whereas the first adaptation begins with the stagecoach robbery, the remake sets out by highlighting Dan’s economic distress and his troubled relationship to his elder son, 14-year old William� After seeing William reading a dime novel on the exploits of an outlaw (foreshadowing his fascination with Wade), we witness Dan’s helplessness to protect his barn from being burned by the henchmen of local businessman Glen Hollander, to whom the rancher owes money. From the narrative’s onset, Van Heflin’s 1957 portray of Dan Evans presents a tarnished yet loved and respected patriarch with agility, marksmanship, and leadership qualities� Christian Bale much rather embodies a tragic Dan, for his is a disillusioned and tormented existence that is constantly reverted to its physical limitations� A Civil War veteran, Dan returned home with an amputated foot and dependent on a wooden prosthesis, which not only fails him at trying to react swiftly to this nightly attack but has him hobble and stumble through this mythic landscape filled with violent, able-bodied masculinities as the eternal (physically) inferior� As the camera highlights how father and son helplessly stare at the fire, we realize that the simmering uneasiness of the 1957 version has grown into a blaze of familial contempt and reproaches� Dan’s amputation becomes the primary signifier of the imperiled state of his gendered existence, highlighted by the cinematography (and, later, by Wade’s repeated questions about how exactly Dan lost his foot)� As the exposition unfolds, Dan is established as a literally broken hero, not only regarding his physical impairment but also in light of the curtailment of (marital) romance, (paternal) recognition, and (property) rights in Dan’s life� In contrast to his wife’s reserved pity, his adolescent son condemns, rather than commiserates, Dan for his vulnerability; only his younger son, the tuberculosis-stricken Marc, admires his veteran father (and will later brag about Dan’s service to Wade, which discloses the glorification of men as weapons as naive infatuation)� Most crucially, Dan’s business is not merely adversely afflicted by a drought; this rancher is at the brink of an economic collapse, facing the eviction and foreclosure of his ranch if he fails to amortize his loan within a week� The changed framing of Dan’s economic hardship is crucial: Whereas, in 1957, a three-year drought figures as the sole cause for financial concerns (preserving the glorified autonomy of the pre-Industrial Age rancher), the 2007 remake disrupts this monocausal logic by disclosing how the mystified landscape of the “Wild West” had already been pervaded by a complex system of finance capitalism long before the alleged “closing” of the frontier. Due to the drought, Dan was forced to borrow money from Hollander (to pay for living costs, Marc’s medical care, and his cattle’s feed)� Having entered the capitalist system, Dan was soon trapped in this purely profit-oriented market, as becomes clear during his request for an extension of his repayment period: DAN� You got no right to do what you done� You hear me? That’s my land! HOLLANDER� Come next week, it’s not, Evans� You borrowed a good deal of money and I got rights to recompense� Subprime Heroism 389 DAN� But you dammed up my creek� You shut off my water� How’d you expect me to pay off my debts if you can’t let - [thrown to the ground by Hollander’s henchman, Tucker] HOLLANDER. Before the water touches your land, it resides and flows on mine. And as such, I can do with it as I fuckin’ please� Go home and pack up� DAN� Can you [hands Hollander his wife’s brooch], can you just let me get to spring? I can turn the corner� HOLLANDER� Sometimes a man has to be big enough to see how small he is� Railroad’s coming, Dan� Your land’s worth more with you off it� (3: 10 to Yuma, 00: 32: 21-00: 33: 12) The effects of the drought were drastically amplified by Hollander’s manipulation of Dan’s access to water, after the rancher had drawn on a credit� Depriving Dan of basic resources, Hollander thus subjects the rancher into the position of a subprime debtor, capitalizing on Dan’s long-term inability of full repayment (by increasing his profit through interests and further loans)� Against this marketplace rationale, Dan’s negotiation with Hollander is prescribed to fail� Markedly, this is not due to any blame on the part of Dan, but solely motivated by capitalist interests and the growing presence of corporate power� The anticipated rise in land price with the railroad’s arrival in Bisbee turns the foreclosure of Dan’s ranch into a more lucrative business than enabling a hard-working debtor to pay off his loan� This motif of subordinating all - moral, economic, and judicial - decisions to the railroad (and to the company’s financial interest) dominates the remaining narrative. In consequence, the 2007 journey of delivering Wade to the train to Yuma assembles various men whose lives all intersect along different economic lines with the railroad corporation. In contrast to the first adaptation, the remake adds original screenplay to the plot, depicting the posse’s adventurous and deathly ride to Contention, whereby Dan is no longer the leader but only a hired hand of the person in charge, Mr. Butterfield (representing the Southern Pacific Railroad). With no prospect of any romantic or religious redemption, Dan’s metamorphosis into a hero hinges on his success on this exclusively homosocial journey, which also teams him with his son William� The remake replaces the first adaptation’s strong notion of confinement with grand, fast-paced, and action-driven outdoor sequences, extensively increasing the film’s body count. While this also pertains to the staging of the stagecoach robbery and the climactic shootout in Contention, the shift towards a plot that puts dialogues on equal level with actions and physicality is most pronounced in the extensive depiction of the posse’s ride to Contention� As, one by one, the men fall prey to Wade (or hostile forces encountered en route), this sequence follows the traditional logic of masculine rejuvenation through a violent encounter with the frontier; thereby, Dan’s gradual transformation into an authoritative and active leader is continuously linked to money, as he relentlessly pursues the objective of delivering Wade to the train despite numerous setbacks� The need for earning his commission of two-hundred dollars becomes the rancher’s mantra of endurance, reiterated at various points of the posse’s cumbersome journey� 390 a hu t anrisever All the while, Dan’s striving for economic success as his family’s breadwinner is linked to fatherhood, deviating from the 1957 adaptation by pairing father and son on the journey (as William secretly follows the posse and comes to its rescue when Wade is about to escape)� In doing so, it is striking that the troubled father-son duo is persistently triangulated by the figure of the outlaw� Visually, in ever-shifting compositions, one of the three characters is placed in the center of the shot (framed by the remaining two)� The increased complexity of both rancher and outlaw, mirrored in both their physical performances as well as their psychological intricacy, is carried over to William’s stance on both men, caught between two diverging role models for adult manhood that differ regarding their relation to money (how to earn it), domesticity, and violence (restraining or celebrating one’s execution thereof)� As 3: 10 to Yuma’s male figures orbit around each other, regroup, or face one another in disputes and brawls, sympathies shift, which increases the difficulty of siding with one character, as binary oppositions of good and evil - fundamental to any morality tale - crumble� With some alterations, the action in the bridal suite sequence follows its predecessor(s), highlighting that Dan remains the only adult man willing to complete the mission of delivering Wade to the train� Yet, crucially, it is not Dan’s wife but his son, who begs Dan not to go on with his assignment; the narrative thus stresses Dan’s status as a father rather than a husband in its negotiation of the heroic breadwinner� Realizing their hopelessness, Mr� Butterfield releases Dan from his commitment and wants to pay Dan his twohundred dollars in the bridal suite: DAN� You know, this whole ride, that’s been nagging on me. That’s what the government gave me for my leg. $ 198.36. And the funny thing is that, when you think about it, which I have been lately, they weren’t paying me to walk away. They were paying me so they could walk away. WADE� Don’t muddy the past and the present, Dan. DAN� No, no, no, Wade� I’m seeing the world the way it is. WILLIAM� If you take him to the train, Pa, I’m going with you� DAN. No. Mr. Butterfield’s gonna take you home. [...] MR� BUTTERFIELD� I’ll get him to Bisbee, Dan� I promise you� DAN� Oh, you’re gonna promise me a lot more than that, Butterfield. I want guarantees that Hollander and his boys will never set foot on my land again, and that my water’s gonna flow. And I expect you to hand my wife one-thousand cash dollars when you see her. You got money to spare. [���] WILLIAM� Pa� ��� I can’t� I can’t just leave you� DAN� I’m gonna be a day behind you, William� Unless something happens, and if it does, I need a man at the ranch to run things, protect our family, and I know that you can do that because you’ve become a fine man, William. […] And you just remember that your old man walked Ben Wade to that station when nobody else would. (3: 10 to Yuma, 01: 33: 19-01: 35: 00, emphasis added) Witnessed by the outlaw, father and son seal their homosocial bond of generational transition as William articulates his loyalty to Dan, stressed by his usage of the affectionate address “Pa�” Most crucially, the remake’s capitalist Subprime Heroism 391 logic, which has been pervading the narrative from its very start, culminates in Dan’s final negotiation. Delivering Wade to the train is not primarily accounted for by Dan’s goal of promoting institutionalized law or establishing his paternal glory� Those reasons are clearly subordinated to his economic interest� “[S]eeing the world the way it is,” Dan literally capitalizes heroism and exploits the completion of his mission, securing his water and property rights and arranging a significantly higher cash reward. Realizing the commodification, and instrumentalization, of the grand narrative of heroic masculinities and having literally suffered its crippling consequences for individuals (put off with a mite by a government that neglects its veterans once they have fulfilled their “heroic soldierly duty”), Dan leverages this capitalist logic to advance his business� Importantly, however, Dan strives for a larger margin of profit not for greed but solely for the purpose of securing his family’s economic security. It is this ultimately self-sacrificial (and not capitalist) act of breadwinning that (re-)establishes the male provider as the remake’s hero� The resolution of Dan’s precarious economic status cancels all ambivalences that mark his relationship to his son; during their terminal handshake, the camera highlights how Wade is now firmly excluded from the homosocial pact between father and son (thus ending the film’s aesthetics of triangulation)� Wade’s recognition of Dan’s authority as legitimate patriarch is symbolized by disclosing the portrait that the outlaw drew during his stay in the bridal suite; through an eyeline match of William, we behold a sketch of Dan on the cover page of a bible� In contrast to the first adaptation, the subsequent march to the train station proves to be almost insurmountable for Dan, who is not only confronted with the gang and numerous bounty hunters but also distinctly physically limited in mobility and swiftness� As the rancher and his prisoner traverse the trigger-happy streets, we realize that Dan only manages to hold his ground because Wade voluntarily cooperates (if not to say assists the rancher)� Thereby, the remake reconnects with the strong notion of performing heroism prevalent in the original short story (and absent in the 1957 film). Having willingly obeyed Dan for the first half of their walk to the station, Wade decides to opt out of this charade as the two men pause in a shed� WADE� I ain’t doing this no more, Dan� [door opens, Dan kills the entering man] DAN� [grabs Wade] I’m getting you on that train, Wade� WADE� [Wade easily throws Dan to the ground] Stubborn bastard! [to Dan on the floor] The boy’s gone, hero� Ain’t nobody watching no more� You still got that one good leg� Why don’t you use it to get home? [���] [Dan attacks Wade, they fall to the floor, Wade strangles Dan, who is helpless] DAN� I ain’t never been no hero, Wade� Only battle I seen, we was in retreat� My foot got shot off by one of my own men� You try telling that story to your boy� See how he looks at you then� [Wade let’s go off Dan and looks outside] WADE� Ok, Dan� (3: 10 to Yuma, 01: 40: 30-01: 41: 49) 392 a hu t anrisever Clearly, Dan’s heroic act of walking Wade to the train station through a hail of bullets is unmasked as dependent on Wade’s cooperation� Much more, the narrative explicitly articulates that this was a conscious decision on the part of the outlaw to make Dan appear as a “hero” in front of his son� As the target audience (William) is not watching anymore, Wade’s cooperativeness comes to its end� The rancher’s attempts to physically force Wade to continue their walk fail, as he is easily overpowered by the outlaw� Pinned to the ground and strangled by Wade, it is only now that the outlaw (and the audience) finds out about Dan’s military service and his injury� Dan is a vanquished veteran of a war; yet, his confession makes us wonder what battle he lost exactly, as he seems mostly traumatized about not living up to his sons’ expectations� Hereby, Dan’s desperate commitment to this mission is primarily framed as paternal perseverance, leading even a cold-blooded outlaw like Wade to succumb to Dan’s passion� As the sound level of the score increases, both men start running to the train station with Wade’s gang and an armada of bounty hunters on their heels. This final montage of the prisoner transport (lasting just under eight minutes) thoroughly transforms Dan’s journey into a paternal Via Dolorosa� Battered and bruised, shot in his leg by Prince, feeding on his last ounce of strength, and covered in dust, blood, and sweat, Dan and his prisoner arrive at the railway building� So comprehensively is Dan now identified as a self-sacrificial character laden with religious imagery that the question no longer remains if but only how this heroic father will die� With the help of William, who has secretly followed the men and releases a herd of cattle to distract Prince, Dan reaches the train’s prisoner cabin with the outlaw� After Wade enters the cabin and congratulates the rancher on his accomplished mission, we see the outlaw stare off screen (screaming “No! ”), before Dan is shot four times by Prince� This changed ending amplifies the remake’s negotiation of father-son dynamics. Throughout the film, Wade’s relationship to his second-in-command is represented in very ambiguous terms, suggesting that the outlaw functions as an ersatz father; the final showdown now pits both fathers (Dan and Wade) and sons (William and Prince) against each other� Now that paternal primacy has been established through Dan’s mystification, transgressions of patriarchal boundaries are ruthlessly penalized� Wade not only descends the train but descends upon his men as a deathly avenging angel re-establishing Dan’s authority by killing the entire gang, with the outlaw’s colt aptly named “Hand of God�” After running to his dying father, William assures Dan of the completion of his mission, while the camera captures Dan in a point-of-view shot over William’s shoulder� Wrestling with the urge to shoot the outlaw, William points his gun at the motionless Wade. Yet, finally siding with his father as the viable role model for mature masculinity, William forgoes killing Wade and returns to kneeling at his father’s side� As the viewer is looking down on this dying father, both narrative and visual staging of the scene invite us to look up to Dan’s self-sacrificial accomplishment: Mr. Butterfield’s gaze at this scene of carnage beholds both Dan’s death and Wade’s final boarding of the train to commence his journey to fulfil the condition of Dan’s business Subprime Heroism 393 agreement� Still, as the train leaves Contention, Wade whistles for his horse, which starts running along the vehicle, insinuating that the outlaw will escape his imprisonment long before the train’s arrival in Yuma� A Road Trip into Patriarchy? 3: 10 to Yuma’s Critique of Finance Capitalism In his programmatic interpretation of 3: 10 to Yuma as an Iraq War Western, Thomas Horne connects the film’s altered and blood-soaked ending not to economic but primarily to political and military contexts, arguing that the rancher’s death illustrates that “even someone as fundamentally decent as Dan Evans [���] cannot be saved from the consequences of foolish missions amid violent men” (47)� Highlighting the mission’s failure (Wade will not be imprisoned) and the persistence of corporate power (the railroad goes about its business as usual), Horne considers William’s development as the narrative’s prospect of alternative routes for masculinities and politics to “overcome the romance with violence that seems embedded in our national history and public myths and that keep us from achieving modest goals that are within our reach through peaceful means” (48)� For Horne, it is “the mission itself and not Dan’s character that this film calls into question” (47); the remake “causes us to reflect on the first 3: 10 to Yuma and now to recognize that film as dangerous fairy tale” (Horne 47), whereby Dan’s death is the primary means of de-romanticizing violence (Horne 46)� Important as Horne’s reading of 3: 10 to Yuma as an anti-war film is, it neglects to link the persistent importance of money in the remake to its predecessors� The motif of the heroic breadwinner, carrying out his mission to provide for his family, not only represents an integral part of the short story’s kernel but also becomes the first adaptation’s main theme. As illustrated above, the 1957 version is responsive to shifting notions of hegemonic masculinity and the growing demands of corporate capitalism, which monopolizes marriage and the nuclear family as regulating tools for consumerism and subjection. Thereby, it is particularly the notion of masculine confinement, stressed through cinematography, which communicates the narrative’s ultimately critical evaluation of socio-economic developments� Through displacing contemporary socioeconomic anxieties within the established narrative frame of the Western genre, 3: 10 to Yuma participates in complex negotiations of gender that jar audience expectations, as is illustrated by this restrained review of the remake: Traditionally, the western is a genre in which elemental human drama of good versus evil can be staged in the vast arena of the frontier� But for me, that ethical contest here became muddled, and not obviously in the interests of complexity or ambiguity. It appeared to fudge the issue of precisely what sacrifices the good guys have to make if the bad guys are to be brought to book, and it began to look to me not merely as if the movie’s sympathies were sneakily on the villain’s side, but as if the sacrifices endured by the virtuous did not even have the effect of defeating evil� (Bradshaw, n� pag�) 394 a hu t anrisever What is criticized as 3: 10 to Yuma’s crucial deficiency in light of the generic Western plot, that “the sacrifices endured by the virtuous did not even have the effect of defeating evil,” is, rather, precisely the important cultural function accomplished by this modified trope of the heroic breadwinner. Dan has to fail in defeating “evil,” as the forces he fights against are not individuals but abstract, faceless, and all-encompassing power structures and systems� The threat faced by the Evans home is finance capitalism; Dan’s fatal struggle for recognition has its source in his lack of recognition by his wife and firstborn, which, in turn, stems from his failure as the family’s breadwinner; this equation of gender identity with economic performance, on the other hand, is a carefully crafted concept of masculinity perpetuated in post-WWII society to accelerate and stabilize the advance of corporate power and notions of American exceptionalism in the US� Hence, Dan’s death at the end of 3: 10 to Yuma must be seen as a radical questioning and critique of the late-modernist concept of the male breadwinner, which is exposed as a fatal construct. The figure of Dan is not another manifestation of the self-sacrificial father who chooses death to ensure family’s survival (another popular trope of fatherhood in turn-ofthe-century texts)� Rather, Dan is a father who tries everything to ensure his family’s survival (which, in our times, reads economic sustenance) - and dies as an inadvertent yet inescapable consequence of this struggle� Overall, through the lens of post-9/ 11 narratives of “migratory” fatherhood, it becomes apparent how 3: 10 to Yuma intersects its moribund heroic figure with the topos of the (family) home to question and critique the latemodernist concept of the male breadwinner and, hence, the growing influence of finance capitalism on the nuclear family. As a liminal figure bridging the strongly gendered division of (feminized) victimhood and (masculinized) action, the remake’s protagonist departs from the predominant imagination of heroes as exceptional(ist) individuals - the traditional powerful figural/ narrative construction instrumental in and central to the maintenance and perpetuation of gendered, racialized, and otherwise marked concepts of US hegemony. This figure of the maimed and moribund male breadwinner hence disrupts what Kaja Silverman identifies as the dominant fiction, which functions as the “imaginary mediator” (34) in processes of individual subjection to both ideological and economic norms that create consensus for the absolute, heteronormative, and patriarchal hegemonic ideology in capitalist US society� If, as Silverman argues, the collective belief in the coherence of the unimpaired male subject is central for the perpetuation of the US dominant fiction - which prioritizes white masculinity, capitalism, and heteronormativity on an individual and collective level (Silverman 41-2) -, 3: 10 to Yuma offers textual and visual moments of subversion and resistance that complicate viewers’ subjection to the ideological paradigms of individualism and American exceptionalism through the trope of the moribund breadwinner, a figure that transcends the limits of the spectatorial fetishization of masculine pathos and discloses the premises of US hegemonic ideology to be fatal� Subprime Heroism 395 Works Cited Bradshaw, Peter� Rev� of 3: 10 to Yuma� Guardian 14 Sep� 2007� 27 Aug� 2013 <http: / / www� theguardian.com/ film/ 2007/ sep/ 14/ russellcrowe.actionandadventure>. Cohan, Steven� Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties� Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997� Ebert, Roger� Rev� of 3: 10 to Yuma� RogerEbert.com 6 Sep� 2007� 27 Aug� 2013 <http: / / www�rogerebert�com/ reviews/ 310-to-yuma-2007>� Elsaesser, Thomas� “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama�” Film Genre Reader II� Ed� Barry Keith Grant� Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995� 350-380� Hoberman, J� “Still Waiting for That Train: James Mangold Remakes a Classic Western for Our ADD Times�” Village Voice 28 Aug� 2007� 27 Aug� 2013 <http: / / www� villagevoice.com/ 2007-08-28/ film/ still-waiting-for-that-train/ full/ >. Horne, Thomas A� “James Mangold’s 3: 10 to Yuma and the Mission in Iraq�” Journal of Film and Video 65�3 (Fall 2013): 40-48� Leonard, Elmore� “Three-Ten to Yuma�” 1953� The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard� New York: Harper, 2007� 179-93� MacCurdy, Carol A� “Masculinity in 3: 10 to Yuma�” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 26�4 (2009): 280-92� Miller, Cynthia� “3: 10 to Yuma/ 3: 10 to Yuma�” Kansas History 32�2 (Summer 2009): 127-28� Nichols, Mary P� “Revisiting Heroism and Community in Contemporary Westerns: No Country for Old Men and 3: 10 to Yuma�” Perspectives on Political Science 37�4 (Fall 2008): 207-16� Schickel, Richard� “The Perfect Time for 3: 10 to Yuma�” TIME 7 Sep� 2007� 27 Aug� 2013 <http: / / content�time�com/ time/ arts/ article/ 0,8599,1659969,00�html>� Scott, A� O� “In the Ol’ West, a Very Tough Commute�” Rev� of 3: 10 to Yuma� New York Times 7 Sep� 2007� 27� Aug� 2013 <http: / / movies�nytimes�com/ 2007/ 09/ 07/ movies/ 07yuma�html? _r=0>� Silverman, Kaja� Male Subjectivity at the Margins� New York: Routledge, 1992� Turan, Kenneth� Rev� of 3: 10 to Yuma� Los Angeles Times 7 Sep� 2007� 27 Aug� 2013 <http: / / www�latimes�com/ entertainment/ movies/ moviesnow/ cl-et-yuma7sep07,0,3093281� story>� United States� Library of Congress� Press Release� “2012 National Film Registry Picks in A League of Their Own�” Dec� 19, 2012� Sep� 6, 2013 <http: / / www�loc�gov/ today/ pr/ 2012/ 12-226�html>� Westbrook, Bruce� Rev� of 3: 10 to Yuma� Houston Chronicle 7 Sep� 2007� 27 Aug� 2013� <http: / / www�chron�com/ entertainment/ movies/ article/ 3-10-to-Yuma-1845595�php>� Films 3: 10 to Yuma. Dir. Delmer Daves. Perf. Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, and Felicia Farr. Columbia Pictures, 1957� 3: 10 to Yuma� Dir� James Mangold� Perf� Christian Bale, Russell Crowe, and Logan Lerman� Lionsgate Films, 2007� Finding Nemo� Dir� Andrew Stanton� Perf� Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres� Pixar Animation Studios, 2003� No Country for Old Men� Dir� Joel and Ethan Coen� Perf� Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, and Tommy Lee Jones� Miramax Films and Paramount Vantage, 2007� 396 a hu t anrisever Road to Perdition� Dir� Sam Mendes� Perf� Paul Newman, Tom Hanks, and Tyler Hoechlin� DreamWorks Pictures and 20th Century Fox, 2002� Shane. Dir. George Stevens. Perf. Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, and Brandon deWilde� Paramount Pictures, 1953� The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford� Dir� Andrew Dominik� Perf� Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, and Sam Shepard. Warner Bros., 2007. The Pursuit of Happyness� Dir� Gabriele Muccino� Perf� Will Smith and Jaden Smith� Columbia Pictures, 2006� The Road� Dir� John Hillcoat� Perf� Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee� Dimension Film, The Weinstein Company, and Icon Productions, 2009� There Will Be Blood� Dir� Paul Thomas Anderson� Perf� Daniel Day-Lewis� Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films, 2007� h eike P aul Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies I. Introduction In order to establish a post-exceptionalist agenda for the field of American studies that has for the longest time been defined by a discourse of American exceptionalism, scholars have for the past decades probed new critical paradigms, most prominently transnational American studies (cf� Fisher-Fishkin; Fluck 2007; Pease 2011; Rowe 2014)� In following these endeavors, I argue that the framework of “critical regionalism” is useful for conceiving of American studies not in narrowly confined national and exceptionalist models and that it allows us to address matters of space, place, and, occasionally, ‘placelessness’ (i�e� the conspicuous absence of a particular location of Americanness) in terms of interconnections and comparison moving beyond and across the nation state� “Regionalism” has been discussed in different disciplines and often with very different meanings and implications and is “a loosely and variously defined zone that cuts across the boundaries of the academic landscape” (Powell 6)� The program of “critical regionalism” may be viewed as one particular trajectory of more recent revisionist regionalist scholarship� The term itself has entered cultural studies debates via contemporary architectural criticism as it has first been coined by Alexander Tzonis und Liane Lefaivre in 1981 and has been programmatically used and expanded upon by Kenneth Frampton in his manifesto Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance (1983)� 1 Frampton advocates critical regionalism not as a nostalgically tinged return to earlier architectural styles but as an ethical principle for the architecture of late capitalism and as a critique of its increasing uniformity and, subsequently, its erasure of ‘placeboundedness�’ In American studies, it is in the works of Cheryl Herr and Douglas Reichert Powell, among others, that critical regionalism has been more fully explored with regard to cultural studies projects creating “model[s] of region 1 In the field of architecture, there is a separate and very complex discussion on regionalism that we can trace back at least as far as to Lewis Mumford’s early works on regionalism and on the American city (cf� 1986)� 398 h eike P aul making as a practice of cultural politics” (Powell 8) and working out how the conceptualizing of a region or regional difference is intricately connected with more general ideas of the conceptualizing of place and space� 2 In order to flesh out critical regionalism more fully, also with regard to older variants of regionalism, I will trace its emergence on the basis of foregoing paradigms of regionalist scholarship to which it at times appears to be in stark opposition� Critical regionalism (re)turns scholarly attention to the region and interrogates the discursive ‘production’ and the role of regions in larger geopolitical constellations - often under the conditions of colonialism/ empire and/ or modernism, neo-liberalism, and globalization� Thus, it critically reflects, first, on a traditional paradigm of regionalism that was often invested in essentialist, at times romanticized and nostalgic notions of regional formations and identities as well as, second, on an earlier abandonment of the concept as somehow site-specific for the sake of nation-specific models� The former is manifest in much (regionalist) criticism of 19th century so-called local-color writing as well as in the programmatic writings of Southern agrarians in the first half of the 20th century and their insistence on regional difference and opposition to the nation; the latter has given the discipline of American studies its foundational images: the New England of the Puritans (Samuel Eliot Morison, Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch) and the West of European explorers and settlers (Henry Nash Smith, Frederick Jackson Turner) expanding into the nation� Both, the New England landscape and the West have been so thoroughly allegorized that they ‘appear to disappear’ as specific locales and regions. Thirdly, critical regionalism conceptualizes alternative geographies that register and affirm geographical formations both, beyond and below the level of the nation-state� These revisionist geographies produced concepts such as Aztlán (as identified and revised by Gloria Anzaldúa and Guillermo Gómez-Peña), diasporic geographies such as the Black Atlantic (famously introduced by Paul Gilroy) and Chinatowns as diasporic sites, and they point to histories of colonialism, migration, dispossession, and empire that have often been ‘lost’ or gone unregistered in hegemonic narratives that consider the formation of the US nation their telos� ‘Below’ the nation state, we may conceive of the US in terms of their plurality of “states” rather than in terms of their “unity” by focusing on internal differences (past and present) that are evocative of American regions as “rival nations” (cf� Colin Woodard’s latest publication American Nations) and that have historically been prompted by a pronounced federal structure� And critical regionalism certainly also complicates our sense of ‘traditional’ regions, such as the South or the West by pointing to internal tensions and transnational connections, both diachronic and synchronic� Fourthly, critical regionalism is generally interested in connections among regions� i�e� in 2 A small but growing critical regionalist canon can be identified in cultural studies and would include, next to Herr and Powell, some of Neil Campbell’s and Krista Comer’s work, Susan Kollin (2007), and Timothy Mahoney/ Wendy Katz (2009)� In a slightly different disciplinary context, Doreen Massey’s and Edward Soja’s works are relevant for this discussion� Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 399 interregional exchange, or interregionality and brings to light significant links between seemingly contingent pairings by accounting for phenomena of cultural mobility, “shed[ing] light on hidden as well as conspicuous movements of people, objects, images, texts, and ideas” (Greenblatt 250)� Critical regionalists often think in terms of transnational connections that establish important relations between allegedly isolated and remote regions and between at times vastly different locales, e�g� the Midwest and Ireland (Herr) or the Appalachians and Scotland (Blaustein) or Johnson City, TN and the rest of the world (Powell), or off the grid and on the grid in Canada (Vannini)� Over all, critical regionalism clearly moves away from positivistic descriptions and former discourses of idealizing and/ or allegorizing the regional and is informed instead by a constructivist, neo-Marxist concept of place in the wake of the spatial turn making places “the outcome, not the backdrop, of social, cultural, political, and economic activity” (Powell 4; cf� Doreen Massey’s work, in particular For Space). In what follows, I will briefly review all of those different aspects of critical regionalist scholarship in the vein of post-exceptionalist American studies: its critique of ‘traditional’ regionalism and of using the region merely as allegory of the nation, its evocation of alternative geographies as well as the interregional dimension following local-global connections� I will use the concept of “crossmapping” which I appropriate from the work of Elisabeth Bronfen and which is to be understood both, literally and figuratively, in my engagement with regional (and national) fantasies in recognition of complex processes of cultural mobility� It is a comparative, new historicist reading strategy that engages and connects “visual imagery” and “figures of thought” in different ‘texts’ that are not in any narrow sense intertextually connected but can be brought into play to productively signify on each other� The concept of crossmapping adds another level of abstraction to critical regionalist discourses as it seeks to scrutinize how accounts of regions are circulated to produce and be absorbed into new regionalisms elsewhere, so to speak, and to become ‘re-territorialized’ in terms of their symbolic capacities� In the second part of this essay, my case study will be a critical regionalist reconstruction of the ‘career’ of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis in post-war Germany, a topic that may seem a bit on the surprising side, at first glance. The German reception of Turner’s best known work that envisions the nation emerging out of frontier regions takes place amidst ‘competing’ German and US exceptionalisms that both reach back into the 19th century and yet intersect in the post-war moment� Their reconstruction points to the overlapping spatial designs and desires that are produced and reproduced in an emerging cold war constellation, a constellation that also has, time and again, affirmed the exceptionalist paradigm of the field of American studies (cf. Pease). It is in a framework of comparative imperial state exceptionalisms (here: USA and Germany) suggested by 400 h eike P aul Donald Pease (2010) and in the observation of the translation and ‘folding’ (cf� Herr) of one into another that I will explore a series of ideological formations that hinge on the production of areas and regions� 3 Generally speaking, the concerns of critical regionalism in its different facets may be seen as invested in a post-exceptionalist paradigm, both of the region and of the nation, and thus can be considered as a revisionist intervention into US-centered American studies and thus as another form of critical engagement in the transnational mode� In that sense, critical regionalism also exposes the problematic narrow focus of spatial conceptualizations linked to the (US) nation that is at once seen as an exceptional place and yet at the same time as awkwardly ‘placeless’� In Amy Kaplan’s words: A key paradox informs the ideology of American exceptionalism: it defines America’s radical difference from other nations as something that goes beyond the separateness and uniqueness of its own particular heritage and culture� Rather, its exceptional nature lies in its exemplary status as the apotheosis of the nationform itself and as a model for the rest of the world� American exceptionalism is in part an argument for boundless expansion, where national particularism and international universalism converge� […] If the fantasy of American imperialism aspires to a borderless world where it finds its own reflection everywhere, then the fruition of this dream shatters the coherence of national identity, as the boundaries that distinguish it from the outside world promise to collapse� (16) It is precisely this precarious (im-)balance that also informs my critical regionalist reconsideration of Turner’s work in a transatlantic context� I would like to conclude my introduction with a note on terminology: the definition and meaning of regions continues to call for conceptual work. It is not always unequivocally clear what is considered to constitute a region: the term is used in ways similar to “section” and in contrast to “nation” - even as it is often used concurringly with both terms� It is sometimes associated with the rural - i�e�, it is used in contrast to the urban� The term “regional studies,” however, at times also is used synonymously with “area studies,” and the difference between the concepts of region and of area seems foggy - regions can be both, subnational and supranational� In his Keywords, Raymond Williams, indicates that regionalism is used, on the one hand, to characterize the provincial and marginal in contrast to the urban and the metropolitan center, while on the other hand, regionalism carries an “alternative positive sense” of a “valuably distinctive way of life” (266). Even as the first meaning seems to be the common one, the second defines much of regionalist scholarship� Clearly, “[r]egions are culturally constructed spaces of the collective imagination and not simply coherent entities located inside clear lines on a map” (Lassiter/ Crespino 11)� Traditional regionalist approaches and various ‘returns’ to the regional run the risk of isolating regions in an essentialist framework of mentality studies, a regionalist imaginary, and the like; still, regionalism is politically ambiguous since regionalisms ‘on the right’ and 3 Pease argues for a critique of comparative exceptionalisms involving a whole range of other empires ranging from the British to the Russian and for “resituat[ing] U�S� American exceptionalism within this expanded field of imperial exceptionalisms” (2010: 80). Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 401 ‘on the left’ (cf� Michael C� Steiner’s collection and Michael Denning’s notion of a “proletarian regionalism” 133) have been identified as quite divergent. As I move along in my argument, I will clarify the ways in which region has become operative in different kinds of contexts� Certainly, “‘regions’ only exist in relation to particular criteria� They are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered; they are our (and others’) constructions” (Allen et al�: 2)� Yet, the fuzziness of regions and of regionalisms and their function for exceptionalisms of all kinds will also become apparent in my subsequent remarks and in my discussion of Turner’s ‘German career�’ II. The Region and the Nation Revisiting the regionalist paradigms in the field of early/ earlier American studies, it appears that regionalist scholarship can be loosely divided into two different kinds: the kind that focuses on the region in opposition and contradistinction to the nation and with some critical investment in localized cultures as “subnational units of variable size” (Bradshaw 18) vis-à-vis the kind that conceptualizes the region predominantly as the kernel/ germ of the nation that it ultimately tries to describe via the regional as its original primal scene. In some instances, of course, this distinction does not hold as we find oscillation between both poles, so to speak, and for the most part, we have to assume a dialectical relationship between the region and the nation as somehow co-constitutive� The term “regionalism” was only coined in the late 19th century “in response to the centralizing discourse of state-sponsored nationalism” (Ladd 51)� Still, in many instances both variants of regionalism also differ greatly, and in the context of the US, different regions seem to have lent themselves for different kinds of purposes, as we will see� Exploring the “sensation of rootedness” (Greenblatt 251), much scholarship in regional studies (political, cultural and literary) has traditionally been produced on particular regions of the US (i�e� New England, the West, Appalachia, the South, the Northwest, etc�) and thus occurs in “relatively self-contained, if not parochial, areas of interest” (Powell 7)� Regionalist scholarship thus has been looked at in its various institutional pockets and frameworks as it establishes a particular “regional geography” (Cresswell 16)� In particular phases of US history this kind of regionalism was rampant� Most prominently in the context of 19th century literary production as well as in the early decades of the 20th century that saw a revival of regionalism� For the former, Richard Brodhead has tried to demystify the status of regional writing (‘local color’) and its alleged particularity in terms of “literary opportunity” - of course, this argument has long been made for women writers and African American writers. Richard H. King identifies the emergence and articulation of an “ideology of regionalism” for the period of 1918-1945 that is invested in a strong cultural critique often considered anti-modern: it posits the regional as the ‘real,’ rural-based America that is threatened by processes of urbanization and industrialization (55) and it demands that federal policies accommodate 402 h eike P aul regional specificities and needs. To single out a prominent instance of the kind of regionalism that is directed against the nation, we may consider the Southern Agrarians and their manifesto “I’ll Take My Stand” (1930)� Written at this time of regionalist revival and on the verge of a deep economic crisis, the collection is a critical intervention into discourses of modernity, such as industrialization and urbanization as it represents a kind of utopian conservatism that rejects consumer culture and materialism in favour of agrarian traditions and self-sufficient farming. Robert Dorman calls it a “regionalist revolt” (1993: 105)� The manifesto’s “Statement of Principles” is in defense of the “traditional Southern life” (li) and in rejection of “industrialism” as an “evil dispensation” (lii). It defines the South as rural and agricultural and affirms “the South’s timeless defiance of national norms” (Lassiter/ Crespino 3). Slavery, the institution that many would probably associate most readily with the South and its history, and its aftermath are not frowned upon, at times the texts are only barely falling short of an outright defense of slavery (cf� Owsley)� There is no sense of self-critique in the “self-consciously reactionary stance” (Donaldson x), only criticism voiced against the North and the system of capitalism making region, i�e� the South, a central framework in the culture wars of the 1920s and 1930s (ibid� xi), fully rejecting emancipatory concerns along the lines of gender and race (xv)� It interpellates white southern men as the inheritors of a “regional heritage” (xix) while making agrarianism into a “distinct brand of regionalism” (Conkin 98) and defining Southernness against the national ‘other’ (Gray xvi)� The regionalism of the Southern Agrarians uses the region, i�e� the South, as a vehicle of cultural critique as it develops an organic, wholesome, heroic (even though unappreciated and marginalized) and clearly essentialist sense of the region� It is the “mind of the South” that is also addressed by Vernon Parrington in his multi-volume US intellectual history and one of the early works of American studies-scholarship, Main Currents in American Thought which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928� To begin with, Vernon Parrington’s work unfolds an American genealogy in “regional drama[s]” (Thomas 236) in its attempt to reconstruct a history of ideas� Yet more prominent than the ‘Southern mind’ and far more relevant to nation-building in Parrington’s work than the South certainly is “The Mind of New England�” In his descriptions of the latter, we see the second variation of addressing the region: the over-writing of local specificity for the sake of ultimately creating a national history and making the regional past anticipate the national present and future. Vernon Parrington thus begins the first part of his study as follows: Common report has long made out Puritan New England to have been the native seat and germinal source of such ideals and institutions as have come to be regarded as traditionally American� Any critical study of the American mind, therefore, may conveniently seek its beginnings in the colonies clustered about Massachusetts Bay and will inquire into the causes of the pronounced singularity of temper and purpose that marled off the New England settlements from those to the south, creating a distinctive New England character� (3) Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 403 Parrington’s analogy between the “American mind” and the “New England character” has the former appear as a result and continuation of the latter� Clearly Parrington is not the only scholar to suggest this connection� Other American scholars as well as European observers (among them, most prominently, Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt) have made similar claims� “The Mind of New England” (271) becomes the “The Mind in the Making” (133) and results in “The Awakening of the American Mind” (179) - the various “minds” and “mindsets” differing in regional and national attribution are often used interchangeably, if only to affirm the overall argument that one is a pars pro toto for the other - one is “folded” into the other (Rice 205-207; cf� Herr)� In addition to those two examples, the Southern agrarians’ manifesto and Vernon Parrington’s study, we can easily think of further instances, where the regional is identified as particular, localized, somewhat essentialized, one the one hand, and where it is elusively allegorized as the national, on the other hand� The two examples at hand also demonstrate that - for obvious reasons - particular regions have a greater propensity to figure as particular, local, and as the ‘other’ of the nation (such as the South at various points in history), whereas some regions (New England, the West) appear to lend themselves more readily for the larger claims of having inculcated the ‘national spirit’ (or ‘mind’)� From a critical regionalist perspective the Southern agrarians and Vernon Parrington have different agendas only to the extent that they employ and perpetuate different kinds of exceptionalisms� Whereas the former claim a territorial Southern exceptionalism of sorts (complete with a regional civil religion) that they see as counter-hegemonic in relation to a dominant discourse (of course, it is also used by the dominant discourse for purposes of ‘othering’), the latter develops American exceptionalism out of the exceptionality of New England that is foundational for the formation of the US as a nation state� In the decades to follow, New England-based historians (many of them Harvard-trained) will pick it up from there and turn it into the dominant paradigm of the ‘New England way’ that no longer even conceives of New England as a region at all� In Sacvan Bercovitch’s seminal The American Jeremiad (1978), the South only appears in a footnote to an argument that considers the Puritan North/ New England as the ‘origin’ of American identity (cf� Monteith/ Jones 3)� When Andrew Delbanco recently published an anthology on New England literary culture, somewhat misleadingly titled Writing New England (2001), a glance at the table of contents reveals that most of the texts do not necessarily ‘write’ New England in any particular way, but rather advertise ‘the city upon the hill’ or ‘the errand into the wilderness’ even as they are perhaps written in New England (Winthrop’s text clearly is not, of course). Promotional historical discourse fills many pages of this book. As one reviewer notes: “The few living writers excerpted […], compared to the feast of authors from the past, gives the collection an elegiac feel - and raises the question of whether today’s mobile society can establish a regional literary heritage” (Kirkus review)� Delbanco does still use the language of ‘mind’ and mentality when introducing the ‘original region’ - notwithstanding the 404 h eike P aul many caveats in his introductory remarks, he is clearly not a critical regionalist and has little to say about the implications of the regional dimension which one anticipates from the title� There are normative claims attached to regionalism and to the making and studying of regions: “The life and people of certain favoured regions are seen as essentially general, even perhaps normal, while the life and people of certain other regions are, well, regional” (Williams 1973: 199)� Thus, regionalism is about power relations and power asymmetries and appears to be “a symptom of centralized cultural dominance” (Gray xiii)� Once a ‘region’ is the cultural and political center, it apparently ceases to be a ‘region; ’ and yet, local and regional formations continue to be produced and stabilized - be it for political, social, or economic reasons� Critical regionalism gives accounts of those power relations and makes visible the investments in regional identity and alterity� III. Alternative Geographies and Crossregional Trajectories In his coffee table book, Lost States: Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It (2010), Michael J� Trinklein re-introduces an element of contingency to the “nice, round number” of the fifty states in order to suggest that it “wasn’t nearly that tidy” (8)� His book unfolds in a series of not entirely serious accounts of regions and their representatives who at one point or other had unsuccessfully claimed statehood for their provinces� The stories of those ‘failed states’ today echo past regional interests and formations even as those seem to have lost their identificatory momentum and are hardly reclaimed; still, they do point us to alternative maps of the US� Certainly, regionalist scholarship involves more than the “study of spatial variations within a national culture” (Steiner 3) taken as a given, and critical regionalism has been concerned with such alternative geographies that can be developed within and beyond the US national framework� To fully grasp the contingency of regional and national formations and their quasi-natural existence is one of the main aims of critical regionalist practice� Group-based geographies may or may not converge with recognizable regions or, politically speaking, sections or states� When we turn back once more (and, again, exemplarily) to the South that has been addressed in the last section in terms of an ‘older’ version of regionalism, we can find reconfigurations of that discourse in critical regionalist terms: traditionally, as Paul Lyons notes, “sectionalists have heroicized the struggle of individual will (shaped by regional ethos) against incursion and poverty rather than analysing the relays between global and national forces and regional self-understanding” (117)� The American South, of course, is not a monolithic entity but has to be conceived of as in itself heterogeneous� For the context of literary studies, Barbara Ladd has asked questions that could very well be extended to a larger field: Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 405 What will happen to southern literary studies if we decenter the Civil War and decenter the discourse of nationality that surrounded it and delineated the parameters and the meaning of southern literary study? What if we take a look at southern life (past, present, and future) within a multinational context and within a longer and more complex history than the one afforded by the historiography of the Civil War? (Ladd 54)� Apart from Ladd herself, a number of writers and scholars have added their observations to these queries� In his travel account of the American South, V�S� Naipaul in A Turn in the South (1990) comments, among other things, on “how close, in the slave days, the slave territories of the Caribbean and the South were” (87), after all, “Barbados was the model for the South Carolina plantation colony” (ibid.). Naipaul repeatedly finds that closeness surprising and hard to accept as he himself is steeped in a discourse that has kept the British empire and the US empire categorically apart� Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez once quipped that he had more in common with the American southerner William Faulkner than with any other Latin American author� And in scholarly terms, more recently, Matthew Guterl described Haiti, Cuba, and the American South as the “American Mediterranean” pointing to 19th century discussions involving ‘civilization’ in the tropics, “slave-holding solidarity” (103) as well as various kinds of anxieties regarding cultural, political, and racial difference and contact� His account of the relations between the South with other regions across the hemisphere prompts him to wonder: If we establish that the deep South reached out to the Americas, engaged in trade, institution building, and intellectual exchange, and verged on social, economic, and cultural distinction from the rest of the United States, are we, then, illuminating a historic South that was, at one point, politically independent? Or are we simply establishing that the history of the United States - including its various and diverse regions and regional histories - cannot be contained by the national archive? (112) Guterl’s rhetorical questions gestures toward a post-exceptionalist logic regarding the South as well as the US by excavating an alternative genealogy of the ‘South’ in hemispheric terms� Thus, it partakes in a critical regionalist understanding of variations of ‘Southernness’ as provisional and shifting and questions accounts of the South as a unified region. Similar critical frames for the South can be found in Ward, Bone, and Link’s The American South and the Atlantic World and in Just Below South: Performing Intercultures in the Caribbean and the South of the United States by Adams, Bibler, and Acillien� These critical regionalist works take up the initiative to articulate “postsouthern” cartographies (Simpson, Bone) that unsettle both, the myth of Southern exceptionalism conceived of in an essentialist regionalist agenda as well as myths of the nation that ignore the cultural specificity of regional formations and their transnational connections as interpretive frameworks or, alternatively, have engaged in simply ‘othering’ what is perceived as regional difference and ‘deviation’ from the national norm� 406 h eike P aul Moving from constructions of ‘the South’ to another prominent ‘region,’ that of ‘the West,’ we can detect a similar dynamic: new Western histories have been written to address hidden and submerged aspects that may at times even fundamentally redirect our perception of the object in question (cf. Limerick’s work in general and more specifically on conceiving of the West ‘from the West’ and not, in classic Eurocentric terms, from the East), and “postwestern cultures” have been identified by Susan Kollin and the contributors to her volume of the same title� In his study The Rhizomatic West, Neil Campbell seeks to define “westness” (41) beyond a national paradigm and considers the West as a “travelling” and “mobile discourse” (ibid� 1) and, with James Clifford, as a “travelling concept” (1997: 4)� And Paul Giles has asked us to view “native [American] landscapes refracted or inverted in a foreign mirror” in order “to appreciate the assumptions framing these narratives and the ways they are intertwined with the construction and reproduction of national mythologies” (2)� The approach of critical regionalism allows us to focus on the West in its local and global dimensions simultaneously, and to look at the connections between both� Such a critical regionalist view also necessitates looking more closely at economic factors and the neoliberal logic that shapes the identity of regions and their international reception/ consumption in a globalized world: Critical regionalist scholars have their eyes on processes of globalization that also ‘produce’ regions as marketable commodities, and the West - as (part of) a “corporate geography” (Herr 3) - has been such a commodity for a long time, a commodity that sells products and politics (cf� Comer: 35-36)� A transnational critical regionalist framework also pays new attention to comparative frameworks of analysis� The West and its myth(s) are analyzed from such angles, for instance, by The Comparative Wests Project at Stanford University, which researches “the common histories and shared contemporary issues among Indigenous populations and settler colonialists in Australia, New Zealand, Western South America, the Western United States, Canada, and the Pacific Islands” (comparativewests.stanford.edu). The American Midwest and Ireland have been analyzed as two regions whose histories have been connected to and have shaped each other over a long period of time (cf� Herr)� Herr discusses these non-proximate regions as coming together and as linked in “cross-regional assemblages” (Herr 28) that recognize “a partly repressed, partly scripted identification of one region with the other’s desired object, the use of one region to speak the other’s fear of abandonment, loss, and mourning” (ibid� 169)� In this highly theoretical and poetical work, Herr uses Adorno’s negative dialectics in order to explore the purposefulness of local knowledge and difference “in opposition to relentless worldwide homogenization” (ibid�) while reminding us of the contingency of particular regional constellations that need to be meaningfully connected, much in the same way in which Doreen Massey dwells on the production of spaces that may be intent on obscuring or acknowledging transnational linkages (cf� Massey)� Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 407 From a historical perspective, Edward Watts urges us to study the West (in particular the Midwest) not only as an American region in an intranational context but also as a colony - or “hypercolony” - “within the context of the global European diaspora of the nineteenth century,” as it shares certain features with other Dominions of the British Empire at the time (166, 169, 174); Watts holds that it turns more on the scholarly redefinition of what a colony is (and what its relationship to its metropolis is) than on whether the Midwest was ever a colony to the East the same way Massachusetts was a colony of the British Empire in 1776� A colony in the eighteenth century was one thing; in the nineteenth, another� And the Midwest can and should be studied alongside not just the other regions with whom it shares a nation, but also alongside the other colonies with whom it shared a century� (ibid� 187) Critical regionalism thus calls for an internationalization of the study of regions and for connecting ‘the West’ as region, fantasy, and brand to concepts of (neo)colonialism and globalization� A critical regionalist and post-exceptionalist approach in American studies has not only complicated and re-worked our sense of ‘traditional regions,’ such as the South and the West, as part of larger geopolitical constellations and histories, ‘other’ regions have been put on the agenda, regional constellations that have been produced by histories of migration, displacement, and slavery� Geopolitical formations such as the Black Atlantic, the Chicano homeland of Aztlán, or Chinatowns as diasporic sites have come to be studied as prominent scenarios of an alternative modernity/ geography, and much research has been done that for the most part connects well with critical regionalists concerns� The Black Atlantic can, in fact, be considered as a critical regionalist concept that challenges national and cultural-nationalist exceptionalisms: Gilroy defines the Black Atlantic as an “intercultural and transnational formation” (ix) that is propelled by the desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity� These desires are relevant to understanding political organizing and cultural criticism� They have always sat uneasily alongside the strategic choices forced on black movements and individuals embedded in national and political cultures and nation-states in America, the Caribbean, and Europe� (Gilroy 19) Although Gilroy has also been criticized for his own limited scope (that privileges Europe and the US and does not make room for Africa, Canada, and Latin America) and for an, at times, strangely dichotomous and euphemistic argument, the Black Atlantic has been enormously resonant for African diaspora studies and critical race theory as it has produced a new historiography along with new archives that pay attention to the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of African diasporic histories, and it echoes in much contemporary cultural production, film and fiction (see, for instance, the phenomenon of so-called neo-slave narratives that have come to be a transnational genre)� The Black Atlantic connects productively with scholarship on black geography (cf� McKittrick) and is a point of reference for 408 h eike P aul abolitionism’s “investment in geography as an idiom of political critique, by turns liberal and radical, practical and utopian” (Schoolman) whose claims move beyond the classical North-South, East-West divisions� The concept of Aztlán is localized in discourses of Chicano nationalism that may appear nostalgic and essentialist rather than displaying a constructivist sense of place (cf� Pisarz-Ramirez)� However, in the critical feminist readings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga and others, it becomes a complex, multi-layered, spatial configuration. In addition, we find instances of revisionism and crossmapping regarding Aztlán as geography and as a region than can serve as the basis for cross-regional solidarity� In Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War, George Mariscal shows how a Chicano anti-war movement is articulated by ‘mapping’ Aztlán onto Vietnam and thereby forging a specific Mexican-American anti-war formation� Similarly, Lorena Oropeza‘s ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Viet Nam War Era (2005) looks at the cultural production (poems, non-fiction, visual art) that has been created in the context of this discursive crossmapping of Aztlán and Vietnam by Mexican-American artists� 4 More recently, Guillermo Gómez-Peña has created an online, interactive experiment that involves the audience in a self-reflexive ‘racial profiling’ by asking viewers to match images, artists, and regions� In that sense, “The Chica-Iranian Project: Orientalism Gone Wrong in Aztlán” (Gómez-Pena and Ali Dagdar) is also suggestive of a crossmapping that involves an Arab- Aztlán and that points to the contingency of racist biases connected to particular locations (cf� López 207)� Finally, Lisa Lowe’s contention about “the international within the national” in Asian-American cultural politics becomes evident in the study of Chinatowns as diasporic sites that bespeak critical regionalism’s trajectory as at once local and gobal (as well as globally connected)� Recent work on Chinatown geographies includes the volume by Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer on Chinatowns in a Transnational World whose contributors “map the global Chinatown” (Mayer 2011: 4) via its different local manifestations in places as diverse as San Francisco, Rotterdam, Liverpool, and Hamburg (among others) and find it both, a “projection surface and a lived reality” (ibid� 14)� Chinatown as an ‘exotic’ region of otherness within the Western urban landscape conjures up notions of far-away regions that then are spatially allocated and yet contained within the metropolitan centers of the West� More generally, studies of Asian diaspora cultures in the US and of the so-called Pacific Rim as a transnational framework have also drawn on a critical regionalist terminology� In his analysis of local Hawaiian cultures as an exemplary region, Rob Wilson invokes Hawaii as the space of counterhegemonic discourse and a “critical regionalism” capable of resisting, by means of community imagination, threats of external domination and internal sublimation” and by way of a strategic essentialism and a “foreground[ing of] certain qualities, attitudes, and aspirations that would make up this culture of the “authentically local�” (Wilson 287-88) 4 Thanks to Carmen Brosig for bringing this work to my attention� Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 409 The conceptualization of these exemplarily introduced alternative geographies can be considered as “practices of subaltern region making” (Clifford 2013: 58)� They constitute “transnational geographies […] inhabited by excepted peoples” (Pease 2011: 27) and once more link critical regionalism to postexceptionalist American studies of the kind that is also advocated by the editors of Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies� It is “within an encompassing geopolitics of knowledge” that studies on these ‘regions’ can develop new “disciplinary protocols” (Pease 2011: 1), re-mapping our world, however tentatively and provisionally, and our discipline� 5 In this sense, they figure as projects within an archaeology of knowledge that uncover lost histories and connections particular to the respective ‘region’ while also challenging our epistemological toolkit that is informed by a model that divides the world into seven continents, or in eleven ‘areas of concern,’ etc�� In addition to these alternative regional configurations and their emphasis on interregionality and transnationalism, the critical regionalist perspective also prompts a revisiting of straightforward reception processes in light of cultural mobility and with a new historicist methodology� The ‘career’ of ‘regions’ put into the service of the nation may be illustrated by the reception of Frederick Jackson Turner, whose work on regions and sectionalism in US culture is much less prominent than his somewhat counter-intuitive, yet highly resonant ‘frontier thesis�’ IV. A Critical Regionalist Case Study: The Recycling of Turner’s Thesis after World War II The writings of Frederick Jackson Turner and their somewhat strange and uneven reception point to the already established dialectic between the regional and the national� Turner (as scholars have repeatedly pointed out) was actually a historian of the region (i�e� the section; region/ section are often referred to as cultural/ political designations, albeit both are not the same) more than of the nation. Yet his text on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) has become a highly canonical and foundational text for the nation, while his work on the “The Significance of Sections in American History” (1932), published during the Depression (and where he backtracks a little from the earlier frontier-thesis), has received comparably less attention� It is quite recently that this part of Turner’s oeuvre has been re-considered - in the light of larger claims concerning the role of regions in American history and with regard to their critical regionalist potential (cf� Ginette Aley and Edward Watts in Timothy Mahoney’s and Wendy Katz’s volume Regionalism in the Humanities)� 5 John Carlos Rowe has researched the history and the making of area studies (along with the definition of areas) and the geopolitical polarities that this has lastingly produced� I see his scholarship also in the light of a critical regionalist perspective, in particular as it gives an account of how post-war power structures are mirrored and reproduced in the new ‚ordering‘ of the world (Rowe 2012)� 410 h eike P aul Of course, discussions of Turner’s frontier thesis have been highly controversial and they fill whole libraries - and I have already briefly referred to the myth of the West underlying it� Initially, i�e� in 1893, many scholars still favored Herbert Baxter Adams’ thesis about the Germanic origins of America, but Turner’s argument soon became widely accepted and by the 1920s had turned into the dominant scholarly opinion on American national history, rendering the American Historical Association, as one critic has it, “One Big Turner Verein” (Billington 3)� The persuasiveness of Turner’s argument had been amplified in the previous decades by semior pseudo-scholarly works such as Theodore Roosevelt’s multi-volume The Winning of the West (1889-96), which identifies “race expansion” and “Western conquest” as foundational for American nation-building and as a monumental and successful effort at “carv[ing] states out of the forest and the prairie” (Vol� 9, 527)� Throughout the Great Depression and especially after Turner’s death in 1932, critical assessments of Turner’s work came to the fore focussing on the (a) speculative, (b) hyperbolic, and (c) entirely unempirical character of his argument, which to many no longer seemed convincing: “How could a frontier environment, which persisted only briefly before the settlement process was completed exert such an enduring influence over […] the nation as a whole? ” (Billington 4)� More fundamentally, the Great Depression led to a reconsideration of the frontier myth in general� For one thing, Turner’s historical safety valve argument was reversed in the sense that cities on the Eastern Seaboard rather than the rural West were attributed the function of containing and defusing social turmoil (cf� Shannon)� In a broader framework, George Pierson argued that Turner’s thesis had merely replaced “the God of the Puritans,” who had until then vouched for American superiority, with a seemingly “natural force” - the frontier - “as source and justification” of American exceptionalism (39). Rather than supporting a reaffirmation of exceptionalist designs, Pierson early on argues for a comparative/ transnational perspective on US history and settlement (cf� ibid� 40)� In the 1950s in the context of the ‘Cold War,’ the Turner Thesis once more is widely praised (in the name of a national/ ist approach to American history and in search of a simple argument) only to be yet again radically critiqued in the 1970s by revisionist scholars such as Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, and Patricia Nelson Limerick, who have emphasized the violence of colonization and expansionism, the masculinist matrix of discourses about the West and empire-building, and the Eurocentric and ethnocentric biases involved in the frontier logic� Slotkin in particular has addressed the historical guilt inherent in the ways in which “the inanimate world of nature” was “humanized” in the appreciation and appropriation of the West, while the Native Americans at the same time were “dehumanized” (1998: 53)� The Native American genocide can be considered the gaping absence in Turner’s thesis as well as in much of its early revisions; it has only been addressed more fully in the past decades in alternative histories of “how the West was lost,” not won by Native Americans (cf� Calloway), of which Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970) is perhaps the best-known example� In contemporary Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 411 scholarship of the so-called New Western Historians, the frontier has become the “f-word,” as Patricia Limerick quips (1994: 72)� But even if many scholars have found Turner’s argument utterly problematic, if not ridiculous, it has not lost its powerful grip on the popular imagination with its focus on the concept, not the region, of the West and continues to be quite effective in what John Carlos Rowe refers to as the “nationalizing of the international�” In what follows, I want to zoom in on the Turner of the cold war� In the 1950s, Turner’s Thesis once more was widely praised and came to renewed prominence, since after World War II it serves, once again, as an anchor of defining Americanness and as a tool of affirming American ‘virtues’ of individualism and democracy at home and abroad particularly in the geopolitical constellation of the ‘cold war’ (cf. Hartz’s affirmative argument about the liberal tradition in America)� As Amy Kaplan notes, “[t]he domestic and the foreign have long met on ‘the Frontier,’ a major conceptual site in American studies” (Kaplan 1993: 16)� In 1947, in the political climate of West-German reeducation/ reorientation, Turner’s major work, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, is published in German/ Germany for the first time. I will contextualize Turner’s argument within German and American discourses of space/ place, expansionism, and democracy and reconstruct some of its ‘preferred readings’ and cultural translations in this particular transatlantic moment� This will lead to more general observations regarding the potential of critical regionalism as an analytical framework� The year is 1947� It is the year of the Truman doctrine (May 12) that shifts the ground of geopolitical confrontations for the next 40 years, and in June, at Harvard University, the U�S� Secretary of State, George C� Marshall, outlines an economic recovery plan for Europe� The House Un-American Activities Committee begins its investigations into alleged communism in Hollywood; 1947 is the year in which Simone de Beauvoir visits the US and is amused by - and alarmed about - encountering only “Ex-Communists” (America: Day by Day); it is the year in which the “Gruppe 47”, a group of German writers, meets to think about a new democratic German literature (most prominently the former US prisoners of war, Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch) that counters the “destruction of language” (“Sprachzerstörung”) perpetrated by the national socialists by way of propaganda, lies, and pathos. 1947 is also the year in which the first German edition of Turner’s The Frontier in American History is published� The volume of Turner’s writings is based on the 1920 US-edition published by Henry Holt and comes out in Germany by Walter Dorn in Bremen (as a major port for supplies, Bremen was also part of the US military zone even as it was in the North)� The book is printed with the registration number (granting permission for publication) US-W-1003 allotted by the military government (“Nachrichtenkontrolle der Militärregierung”); its initial run being 1000 copies� The German title is Die Grenze - “the border�” Whereas today, we can easily use “frontier” as a word in the German language as part of our anglicized newspeak, and quite frequently this is done, in 1947, this word was apparently still foreign to the Germans, hence the translation� This publication has to be viewed as 412 h eike P aul part of the reeducation/ reorientation effort: Immediately after its publication, Turner’s translated thesis was available for a German-language readership in the Amerika-Häuser, the US information centers; the copy that the university library in Erlangen holds was formerly the property of the local Amerika- Haus library� 6 German readers encountered the geographical determinism of Turner’s frontier thesis exactly at the moment when they were having to overcome their own kind of geographical determinism that had proven disastrous� The hegemonic Nazi version of German geopolitics and its territorial claims, still rampant at the time, can be summed up in the phrase of the “Volk ohne Raum” - “A People without Space�” In many ways, Turner’s thesis in a postwar transatlantic moment may have been considered, by some Germans at least, as a response to this fantasy that is deeply embedded in German fascist ideology and was used by Adolf Hitler himself in many speeches and in his infamous manifesto Mein Kampf� It suggests that the lack of German Lebensraum, i�e� space, will lead to the suffocation and starvation of a whole people (cf� Fülster 9)� In Mein Kampf, Hitler had identified four ways for the German people to “escape such a future development”: regulation of birth rate, internal colonization, further industrialization, and the acquisition of more space for settlement (Fülster 10)� Among those options, Hitler advocates the latter by way of a war of expansion: “For Germany, the only possibility to practice a healthy politics of the soil is through the acquisition of new land in Europe itself�” [“Für Deutschland liegt die einzige Möglichkeit zur Durchführung einer gesunden Bodenpolitik nur in der Erwerbung von neuem Land in Europa selbst�”]� Moreover, is “this new land to be gained only in the East” [“die Gewinnung neuen Bodens nur im Osten zu erreichen”] (ibid� 11)� Mapping a policy of eastward expansion, Hitler delineates the German Reich with its civil religious superstructure of blood and soil-ideology: “Never forget that the holiest right on this world is the right to the soil that one wants to cultivate one’s self and the holiest sacrifice is the blood that you shed for this soil” [“Vergeßt nie, dass das heiligste Recht auf dieser Welt das Recht auf Erde ist, die man selbst bebauen will, und das heiligste Opfer das Blut, das man für diese Erde vergießt”] (ibid� 139)� Fascist ideology disseminated the topos of “Volk ohne Raum,” but the phrase was actually coined as the title of a novel, a 1300-page novel by Hans Grimm that was first published in 1926 and widely read - by 1935, more than three hundred thousand copies had been sold (cf� Baranowski 152)� Grimm advocates classic colonial schemes: The feeling of “crampedness” and a “critical shortage of space” ‘logically’ lead to expanisionism and colonialism, in Grimm’s plot this project takes place in Africa� In four sections (“Heimat und Enge”, “Fremder Raum und Irregang”, “Deutscher Raum” and “Das Volk ohne Raum”), we learn about the fate of Cornelius Friebott, born in rural Germany and luckless as a farmer (he has no access to farmland) and no opportunity to become a skilled worker (he 6 Skimming the pages in this book, the writing in the margin of a German reader signalling disapproval as well as agreement is at least as interesting as studying the German translation itself� Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 413 cannot undergo an apprenticeship to become a skilled worker and a craftsman); he decides to go to the city and work in the industries in the Ruhr-area (Bochum). Due to his union activism he gets into conflict with the authorities, is briefly arrested, and decides to emigrate to South Africa. After many ups and downs, he settles as a farmer in the Lüderitzbucht in the German colony of Southwest Africa� After World War I, he is arrested and returns to Germany only to be reunited with his childhood friend and the love of his life, Melsene� Back in Germany, he becomes a public speaker advocating expansionism and colonialism for the “people without space”; he dies shortly before the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch on November 9, 1923, at the hands of an enraged worker� As many critics have pointed out, Grimm uses quite an old-fashioned style and a grammar and vocabulary that were already outdated at the time when his novel was published, but this, of course, nicely fits the 19th century colonial agenda� His representation of German society is as schematic and stereotyped as his description of Africa which is explicitly racist and denigrates the indigenous inhabitants� The book has an overtly chauvinist and racist message written under the impression of the German ‘defeat’ in World War I� Kurt Tucholski reviewed this text under the title “Grimm’s Märchen” (Grimm’s fairy tale)� Under national socialist rule it became a mandatory text book to be read in all classrooms� The colonialist text was used to legitimate a war of aggression within Europe, i�e� to do the cultural work of propaganda: “No other text shaped the semantics of German space as greatly as Grimm’s did” (Simons 167). If Turner’s thesis is often linked to its first presentation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Hans Grimm’s novel also has a claim to fame concerning such an event: in 1933/ 34, it was the only German book presented as “German literature” at the World Exposition, again in Chicago, with the title “A Century of Progress�” The motto itself is suggestive of a colonial agenda and converges with some of Grimm’s notions of ‘progress�’ His racist renderings of life in Africa seemed to blend in with an overall ideological framework, a kind of transnational mood if you will, of colonialist fantasizing and racist iconographies at the site of the exhibition� Apart from some faint analogies in the two fantasies of nation-building and territorial expansion under consideration (it remains unknown to me whether Hans Grimm was familiar with Turner’s work and I doubt very much that he was), the preferred reading of Turner by a German audience in 1947 certainly was supposed to identify fundamental differences rather than similarities or inverted analogies between the self-proclaimed “People without Space” which was left “without space,” i�e� with less space, once more, and the American people who had been, according to Turner’s thesis, formed and moulded at the ever expanding ‘frontier’ between civilization and wilderness in their westward course� My initial reaction to coming upon this 1947-publication was to wonder about the seeming paradox that German readers were offered a text that seemed to condone and even idealize expansionism; a text that from today’s point of view is notorious for concealing many problematic aspects of American history� There does not seem to have 414 h eike P aul been any sense of irony involved in the German publication of Turner’s work, a text that jubilantly describes the territorial expansion of a nation to an audience who had just lost an aggressive war of previously unimagined scope and who was now supposed to be taught to stay within its new borders, demilitarized, peaceful, and preferably democratic� In the context of the time, any tensions and contradictions obviously went unnoticed and, instead, critical differences were identified that need to be unpacked. Let me point to four major issues here that directly point to the project of re-educating the Germans: First, Turner’s rendering of US history describes westward expansion as peaceful (and inevitable), and thus the movement along the different frontiers (even as it entailed battling the forces of nature), in Turner’s logic was imagined as a largely peaceful process of settlement, a circumstance that is corroborated by much iconographic visual material (cf� John Gast, American Progress and Francis Flora Bond Palmer, Westwards the Course of Empire): But the larger part of what has been distinctive and valuable in America’s contribution to the history of the human spirit has been due to its nation’s peculiar experience in extending its type of frontier into new regions; and in creating peaceful societies with new ideals in the successive vast and differing geographic provinces which together make up the United States� [In German: Aber die Hauptsache dessen, was für den amerikanischen Beitrag zur Geschichte des menschlichen Geistes entscheidend und wertvoll war, verdankt man der besonderen Erscheinung im Leben dieser Nation, daß sie ihre Grenze in immer neue Gebiete vorverlegte und friedliche Gesellschaften mit neuen Idealen in den sich aufeinander folgenden weiten und verschiedenartigen geographischen Provinzen, die zusammen die Vereinigten Staaten ausmachen, bildete�] Thus, Turner ‘advertises’ peaceful US expansion as the total opposite of the violent and brutal war led by Germany (and as the total opposite of what we have come to understand as the result of Indian wars and Native American removal)� Second, Turner’s argument focuses on the individual who triumphs over nature and eventually ‘masters’ the wilderness� A dominant individualism and self-reliance engendered by a radical experience of space feeds into a bottom-up, rather than a top-down perspective, and again produces a contrast: between anti-authoritarian, self-help individuals and a totalitarian state apparatus that has conditioned and rendered obedient its citizens/ soldiers in a collectivist fantasy of supremacy and conquest. Turner identifies individualism, non-conformity, and ingenuity as quintessential American, by implication we are to conclude that opposite characteristics are European, in particular German, and need to be reformed� Third, Turner describes America as a “frontier melting pot” that creates a new race (in the German translation: “eine Mischrasse”) which is described in positive terms as strong, independent, and free from older racial/ national Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 415 idiosyncrasies� Thus, racial mixing, at least in the limited way that Turner imagines it, is promoted in the text - in stark contrast to other views about race prevalent at the time in Germany (and the US)� Fourth, that the US derives from its unique history a responsibility and a sense of mission in the world is stated by Turner in no uncertain terms� In his preface, Turner defines Americanness in the spirit of manifest destiny not only westward but also with regard to influences on Europe. It is this 1920-passage that seems to come in handy for the project of reeducation/ reorientation and the project of democratizing Germany, and thus I quote at length: Writing at the close of 1796, the French minister to the United States, M� Adet, retorted to his government that Jefferson could not be relied on to be devoted to French interests, and he added: ‘Jefferson, I say, is American, and as such he cannot be sincerely our friend� An American is the born enemy of all European peoples�’ Obviously erroneous as are these words, there was an element of truth in them� If we would understand this element of truth, we must study the transforming influence of the American wilderness, remote from Europe, and by its resources and its free opportunities affording the conditions under which a new people, with social and political types and ideals, could arise to play it sown part in the world, and to influence Europe. (vi) [In German: Der französische Gesandte bei den Vereinigten Staaten� M� Adet, berichtete Ende des Jahres 1796 an seine Regierung, dass man sich nicht darauf verlassen könne, dass Jefferson den französischen Interessen diene, und er fügte hinzu: ‚Jefferson, sage ich, ist Amerikaner, und als solcher kann er nicht unser aufrichtiger Freund sein� Ein Amerikaner ist der geborene Feind aller europäischen Völker�’ So offensichtlich falsch auch diese Worte sind, ein Körnchen Wahrheit steckt in ihnen� Wenn wir dieses Körnchen Wahrheit verstehen wollen, müssen wir den umgestaltenden Einfluß der amerikanischen Wildnis studieren, die, entfernt von Europa, durch ihre Hilfsquellen und freien Gelegenheiten die Bedingungen gewährte, unter denen ein neues Volk mit neuen sozialen politischen Vorbildern und Idealen aufsteigen konnte, um seine eigene Rolle in der Welt zu spielen und seinen Einfluß auf Europa auszuüben. (vi-vii)] Placing Turner’s thesis in such a transatlantic context from a critical regionalist perspective reveals various kinds of geographical determinisms and the currency they have - and lose� It becomes part of a narrative of ‘westernization’ as it also privileges a Eurocentric view of the US� 7 The discursive context of the German reception is shaped by long-standing ideologies of colonialism (cf� Grimm’s “People without Space”) and fascism (cf� Hitler’s appropriation of the “People without Space”) that are cast - by implication - in sharp opposition to Turner’s thesis about the making of Americans rather than pointing to similarities� And, of course, there is no middle ground� 7 At this point I am not aware whether Turner’s work was translated into Japanese and presented to a Japanese audience at that same historical moment� In terms of the European reception of the US myth of the West that Turner promoted, I have been informed that there was a discourse in Poland that apparently operated with the rhetoric of this myth in order to talk about the country’s massive and once more traumatic territorial changes after World War II westward� 416 h eike P aul Germans who were raised as much on Hans Grimm as on Karl May (who was as successful as Grimm both in the Weimar republic and in the Third Reich) must have felt cognitive dissonances of some kind - in particular because of their strong identification with the noble savage Winnetou. Yet, the landscape Turner writes about is not the landscape of May - they exist on different planes or, more to the point, both are as placeless as they are fantasmatic� According to a recent study of bestsellers in Nazi Germany, Hans Grimm ranks at position 25, Karl May at 38, and somewhere in between, at 35, is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind - another dubious regionalist fantasy� 8 Reading Turner with May may raise the question that the Native American poet Jimmy Durham recently put as follows: “What if you could be the cowboy AND the Indian. A perfect set-up for profits both psychological and economical” (qtd� in Hillis 284)� Of course, I can only speculate about the German Turnerian fantasies instigated by that peculiar reeducational move and about replacing one regionalist exceptionalism with another, and we may ponder on the question which contradictions and interferences it might have produced� Here, I would like to address one last ‘turn’ in the making of a German ‘Turner’� As a cold war text, Turner’s thesis was not only published in German for a German audience, it also became a topic of newly emerging disciplinary discussion: American studies in Germany� It is Hans Galinsky (1909-91), who had already been a quite prolific, even if - in retrospect - certainly dubious scholar during the Third Reich, who becomes one of the first post-war German Americanists of international standing and an expert on Turner’s work� In fact, Galinsky’s scholarship on the American West and on early American history would become quite renowned (cf� Mackenthun)� Born on May 12, 1909 in Breslau and raised catholic, Galinsky had eventually ‘converted’ from Catholicism to National Socialism (cf� Hausmann 458)� 9 From 1927-32 he studied and worked in Heidelberg, Breslau, London, and Manchester enthusiastically putting his efforts into the service of German foreign relations-propaganda (“begeistert in den Dienst der Auslandspropaganda”, ibid�)� In 1934, he returned to Germany and prepared his Habilitation in Berlin� In 1935, he published a book on “British Fascism” for use in schools� To Kurt Wais’ anti-semitic literary history Die Gegenwartsdichtung der europäischen Völker, published in 1939, Galinsky contributed a 80-something pages long article on the literature of the “English and Anglo-Irish” investigating “literary production as a function of a people in fighting for their survival and expansion” (“die Dichtkunst als eine Lebensfunktion des Volkes im Kampfe um den Lebensbestand und die Lebensentfaltung”)� However, Galinsky argues, the English are not one people but are a composite of different groups: English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh� 8 Robert H� Brinkmeyer has analyzed the reverse cultural mobility by addressing Southern affinities to European fascism in his book The Fourth Ghost (2009)� 9 In this paragraph, I am relying mostly, as indicated, on Frank-Rutger Hausmann’s research in Die Geschichte der Anglistik und Amerikanistik im Dritten Reich (2003) and on some of the archival sources that he has uncovered� Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 417 No people, no Volksliteratur (ibid� 142)� In this logic, he clearly favors an essentialist model of racially constituted regions. In addition, the Jewish influence is identified as strong and thus problematic (he drops names, such as Zangwill’s, but, of course, does not address any work by a Jewish author); what he calls “the Jewish theory” (Freud) is also excluded from the analysis� Because of his German wife, D�H� Lawrence is credited by Galinsky with some deeper insights about the German race and its exceptionality (ibid� 144)� A prime exemplum of a “racist literary history,” according to Hausmann, Galinsky’s essay fits well into the collection. In this and other publications, he engaged in what K� Ludwig Pfeiffer has described as the main task of German Anglistik during the Third Reich: to refute the English culture ideology (“englische Kulturideologie”), to thoroughly dismantle the positive aspects of the British image regarding cultural, political, and military achievements and superiority (Pfeiffer 40), and to reject “the British world mission” (Hutton 28) by affirming a German exceptionalism for all of Europe (Galinsky 1943: 40)� In one of his early publications, Galinsky critically discusses “the erosion of the Nordic character of the British nation” and wonders how to revive the Celtic element (Hutton 131); in another he discusses Europe with regard to German interests and English isolationism (“der Großraum-Gedanke und seine europäische Verwirklichung durch Deutschland” 1943: 30); and in yet another, he indicates that the British reception of German literature has been distorted in England by Jewish critics and publishers (1938: 482)� Because Galinsky was married to Edith Margenberg, born in Martigny-les- Bains (in Elsaß-Lothringen), Hausmann suggests, he was appointed in 1941 as professor in Strassbourg, the so-called “Kampfuniversität,” where he was supposed to aid the re-launching of academic training in the spirit of nationalist socialism (Hausmann 458-59)� In 1945, Galinsky was removed from his university position, yet after a brief period of time, he apparently could be reappointed, in 1952, and in 1957 he even became chair of American studies at the University of Mainz, launching his ‘second career’ while refraining from listing most of his pre-1945 publications in his research bibliography� Ludwig Pfeiffer sees him critically as one of those scholars who remain attached to a blood-and-soil ideology and “die nach dem Krieg schnell wieder aufsteigen und sich sogar um die Entwicklung neuer Fachzweige wie der Amerikanistik verdient machen, ohne einem heftigen, zumindest privaten Antisemitismus jemals abzuschwören” (43). As one of the first post-war Americanists, Galinsky read and taught Turner’s work in English and did not have to rely on the German edition that I have discussed above� That he read it is certain� With Hans Galinsky, Turner’s thesis helps to launch German American studies� Among his post-war publications is an edition on “The Frontier in American History and Literature” (1960) as well as a monograph on Regionalism and the Pursuit of Unity in the US (1972)� The former argues for myth-and-symbol approach to US culture that ‘integrates’ history and literature into a larger ‘universal narrative’ of the US (cf� Mackenthun); the latter is in-part a linguistic and an overall positivistic study; Galinsky locates regionalism, for instance, in the linguistic difference of “the negro; ” this difference 418 h eike P aul indicates, according to Galinsky, that race consciousness could negatively impinge on or endanger the “national consciousness” (28)� Galinsky became well-connected and established co-operations with German and American colleagues as he quickly came around to teaching and advertising a new (and yet old) geographical exceptionalism - in any case different from the one he earlier swore by� 10 Thus, in some weird way, he has “wielded American studies as a double-edged sword” (Pease 2010: 50 with reference to Lipset)� It is not without irony that the current German Wikipedia entry labels him - in the spirit of his Turnerian wanderings and expertise - the ‘pioneer’ of German American studies� 11 The final part of my argument, thus, only reinforces once again, that there is no such thing as a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ exceptionalism (ibid� 56) when it comes to the critique of imperial state fantasies� Turner’s German career can be viewed as an instance that calls for a critical regionalism, one that engages in a crossmapping in light of what Donald Pease has referred to as a comparative approach within an “expanded field of imperial exceptionalisms” (cf. Pease 2010: 80)� These exceptionalisms carry a spatial and a temporal index, and they obviously have served very different political ends and means with very different results as they are “linked to different states of exception” (ibid�)� For one thing, Turner’s West as “travelling concept” (to invoke James Clifford and Neil Campbell again) and as a regional fantasy provided a fantasy of relief, exoneration, and escape (an Entlastungsfantasie), i�e� a way out for postwar German fantasizing about place/ space and thus produced a new kind of regionalist and nationalist longing� It is ubiquitous and placeless at the same time and thus resists easy refusal (as we find a popular belief in stark contrast to elite revisionism)� The roots and routes of Turner’s frontier thesis that I have traced directly and indirectly in my essay evidence what John Carlos Rowe calls “the military-industrial-scholarly complex” (Rowe 2014) in the mid-20th century and thus the concept of the frontier is mobilized and mobilizing at the same time as the re-education-agenda collides with (or rather slides into) a cold war scenario� A critical regionalist perspective engages with narrow regionalist fantasies (such as those of the blood-and-soil kind) but also looks at the transnational reverberations of regional narratives� In analyzing the various forms of regionalisms, it insists on an ideology critique of the various strategies of immunization that regionalist agendas provide� In contemporary German literature, the ideology of the ‘frontier,’ of the West, and, in particular, of going West is remembered and re-articulated� Wolfgang Büscher, journalist and travel writer, has chronicled his ‘walk 10 For a critical discussion of Galinsky’s later work and his investment in American exceptionalism and in the radically ‚different degrees of civilization‘ that come into contact in colonial America when white explorers meet the native population, see Mackenthun 1993: 226-28� 11 It has been pointed out repeatedly that the institutionalization of American studies in Germany was not a post-war development but one that had been begun by the nationalsocialists (Gassert 42-43; cf� Hausmann)� Critical Regionalism and Post-Exceptionalist American Studies 419 across America’ in his non-fiction book Hartland (2011)� Toward the end of his notes he muses about the fascination the (American) West held for Germans back in the post-war moment: Warum Amerika? Die andere Himmelsrichtung schied aus - es war die Richtung, in der die Männer verschwunden waren� Der Osten lag auf der Seele, bange Ahnung, Verlust� Verriegelt, verrammelt, er sendete nichts - nur schwache Signale von Düsternis und Untergang. […] Die Bemerkung meines Vaters fiel mir ein: ‚Zu Fuß wäre ich damals nach Amerika gegangen�’ Sein Damals war die Zeit nach dem Krieg� Ein junger Mann von achtzehn, zwanzig Jahren und der Wunsch, raus hier, raus aus dem Schlamassel, dahin, wo alles leicht ist und jung, wo die Sieger wohnen� (Hartland 243-44)� Why America? The other cardinal direction was out of the question - it was the direction into which men had disappeared� The East lay heavy on the soul, anxious thoughts, loss� Barred, blocked, it did not signal - only week signals of darkness and downfall� I was reminded of my father’s remark: on foot I would have walked to America back then� His ‘back then’ was the post-war period� A young man of 18, 20 years and the desire to get out of the misery to a place where everything is light, young and where winners live� (my translation) Thus Büscher’s recollection of German “frontier magic” (Slotkin 1998: 40) once more indicates the impact of the myth of America and the West (a fantasy of conquest and territorial gain and of individual self-realization) and the desire it produces as an unattainable region of the mind� Questioning and deconstructing such fantasies of placelessness and region (in the light of Amy Kaplan’s problematization quoted above) will be one of the ongoing tasks of critical regionalist scholarship� V. Conclusion In this essay I have worked through various ways of ‘doing’ critical regionalism in the context of post-exceptionalist American studies� This critical practice involves the interrogation of how regions are constructed and produced - as the ‘other’ of the nation or its natural embryonic exceptionalist state� It also involves the questioning of regional as well as national exceptionalisms and an insistent challenge to the ‘territorial integrity’ of regions and, in fact, to “territorializations of all kinds” (Rice 8)� Among the best-known ‘territorial regions’ of the US are those that I have revisited in this essay as part of my argument and that appear almost as stereotypical, yet that have been defined and re-affirmed by generations of Americanists/ regionalists, among them Frederick Jackson Turner� In Barbara Ladd’s words: “[T]he United States was made up of an intellectual new England, a cosmopolitan Mid-Atlantic, an agricultural Midwest, a defeated but resurgent South, and a West of opportunity and promise” (Ladd)� These topoi, or rather clichés, are of little use for a critical regionalism� Instead, its practice involves particular attention to alternative geographies that we may valorize as counter-hegemonic formations, at least for the time being� 420 h eike P aul My own more specific case study has shown the importance of a discursive, new historicist crossmapping that allows us to explore the function of regional formations and the services they are put to in scholarly and non-scholarly spheres� I see this kind of crossmapping as a productive critical practice in order to explore the meaning(s) and contingencies of regional and other spatial formations� The perspective of critical regionalism sheds light on the kind of maps produced by the heritage industry, the local activist, the real estate agent, and the scholar of regionalism� These maps can be analyzed with regard to their cultural imaginaries, their potential local-local or local-global trajectories, and the kind of regionalist fantasies they nourish or debunk� It is this kind of critical regionalist work that is committed to post-exceptionalist American studies� Works Cited Allen, John, Doreen Massey, and Allan Cochrane� Rethinking the Region. 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In 2005 and for sixteen days in the month of February, New York City’s Central Park was the site of an exhibition called “The Gates: Central Park New York 1979-2005,” by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude (C/ J-C)� The installation consisted of 7,500 “gates,” with luminous orange drapes, hanging from their tops� “The Gates” created what the artists described as “a golden river weaving through the bare trees,” “a work of joy and beauty in total freedom” stretched along 23 miles of serpentine footpaths of the park (Henry)� The event was ardently supported and promoted by the New York Times, the local TV stations, NYC ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and a private, not-for-profit organization that administers Central Park, the Central Park Conservancy (CPC)� Moreover, as American art critic and historian Hal Foster stated, “[I]f the actual location of ‘The Gates’ was the park, its effective site was the global media: that is to say, its site was everywhere” (32)� Naturally, 4 million people visited the Park in order to attend the artistic event� “The Gates” turned out to be a tourism gold mine for New York, generating 254 million dollars for the city’s economy, according to Bloomberg’s official statement. 1 The spectacular success of the event (in terms of its popularity and economic assets) brought to the forefront many questions concerning this iconic urban space that can be summed up as follows: who controls, who uses Central Park and for what purpose? More important, how does the use of this historically singular public space reflect and sustain the American ideology of space? And, to what extent is the ideology of space entwined with and affected by the grand narrative of American exceptionalism? 2 To be sure, there have been a significant number of studies about America’s premier democratic space, most notable among which is Roy Rosenzweig and 1 Qtd� in Jesse Lemisch’s “Art for the People? ” The author, who is a Professor Emeritus of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, posted his original critique as well as the ensuing debate on the H-Net American Studies list� 2 A substantial part of my argument is grounded in Leo Marx’s essay “The American Ideology of Space” in Denatured Visions� See also, Marx’s “Pastoralism in America,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, in which Marx addresses a similar issue� He asks: “To what extent is the attraction exerted by pastoralism on the American left another expression of ‘American exceptionalism’? ” (36); and “Does Pastoralism Have a Future? ” 426 t heodora t simPouki Elizabeth Blackmar’s The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992)� In it, the authors examine Central Park as both “a social institution and a space, an aspect of the city rather than just a natural or designed landscape” (3), engaging in the historical and contemporary issues related to the meaning of public space� While I fully endorse the authors’ conclusion which highlights the Park’s cultural, political and property based dimensions (6), in this essay I seek a reading of Central Park within the deep-rooted discourse of American exceptionalism� I take American exceptionalism to refer to an ideology that sees the United States as different and unique but not necessarily exemplary and superior to other national cultures, although this last version of exceptionalism has been embraced by many American historians and cultural theorists� The distinctive character of the nation is putatively based on democratic ideals and individual liberty, but also on material differences resulting from the continent’s abundant resources� That these ideas have been repeatedly distorted and misused, but still provide “U�S� citizens with a representative form of self-recognition” (Pease, New American Exceptionalism 7), is proof of the ideology’s protean nature and remarkable resilience� In this essay, I investigate the ideological and material permutations of Central Park in relation to the prevailing American ideology of space taking up examples of the park’s contemporary use as well as of fictional representations of it. With reference to the historically specific sociospatial processes that produce it, I will show that, as urban site, Central Park has been closely tied to assumptions of space that are reflective of the ideology of American exceptionalism. In the same way that America was regarded as the first nation founded on democratic ideals and personal liberty, the first urban park of the nation, too, carried an implicit democratic promise to foster an urban culture based on equal opportunities in civic participation and environment� The promise may have never fully materialized, as a result of the contradictions and paradoxes that pertain to exceptionalist ideology, but for more than a hundred and fifty years it has remained alive. The abandonment, in more recent decades, of public spaces with the subsequent reliance on private sources to maintain and administer them, constitutes “a betrayal of that promise and a retreat to an openly hierarchical and segmented society” (Blake 233) and, in my opinion, an unfortunate, albeit irreversible universalization of America’s exceptionalist attitude toward space� The underlying premise of my argument is that American exceptionalism, whether fantasy or an ideological construct, remains relevant in the minds of Americans, forming one of the core elements of American national identity� Put in Winfried Fluck’s terms, “the essential glue, still largely untarnished, is the idea of American exceptionalism” (Interview)� “The initial romance with America,” for Fluck, lives on, despite revisionist attempts within the field of American Studies to escape it. 3 3 Fluck has pursued this compelling argument in “American Studies and the Romance with America” in Romance with America? , where he argues that even oppositional discourses end up reinforcing traditional American narratives. Elsewhere, he identifies the revisionist New Americanist program as an instance to overcome the current crisis in the humanities (“The Humanities” 211)� Once Upon a Time in Central Park 427 More specifically, contemporary use and stewardship of Central Park replays a deeply rooted American exceptionalist conflict of ideas about space: the opposition between a democratic, egalitarian use of public space and a use that is increasingly oriented toward efficiency, profit and technocratic concerns, which has resulted in a “trenchant reregulation and redaction of public space” (Low and Smith 1)� Without explicitly referring to American exceptionalism, Leo Marx identified a distinctly American ideology of space imbued with a utilitarian outlook� In The Machine in the Garden and in subsequent publications, he has provided one of the most incisive discussions to date of the “dubious blend” among three main variants of that ideology, “three more or less distinct ways of locating meaning, value, and social purpose in American space” (“American Ideology” 63): the “primitive” (pristine and unmodified state of nature), the “pastoral” (middle landscape) and the “utilitarian” (commodity exchange value of space)� Despite the persistence of tension mainly among the last two versions, “the nation’s overall direction in its treatment of space,” according to Marx, “has been set by the dominant utilitarian ideology of progress as: the maximizing of economic growth; trust in the operation of the market; the commodification of land” (74). Although there seems to be no doubt that Marx is correct in positing a prevailing American ideology of space, it is my contention that this dominant, utilitarian approach toward landscape is chiefly attributable to American exceptionalist ideology� Underlying the privatization of public space, I claim, is the specter of American exceptionalism and its concomitant conflation of America’s democratic exemplarity with a market vocabulary� If, according to Seymour Martin Lipset, the nation’s ideology “can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire” (31), it seems but a short step from the pursuit of equality of opportunity and individual empowerment to the enhancement of market potencies through privatization and private profit maximization. Thus, American egalitarianism becomes consistent with individualism and laissez-faire� Moreover, given the fact that, as Donald Pease convincingly states, American exceptionalism “has undergone decisive shifts in its self-representation” (New American Exceptionalism 9) and that accounts of the discourse’s content are reconfigured “to address the change in geopolitical circumstances” (“Introduction” 21), it follows almost naturally that one element, in this case anti-statism and laissez-faire economics, is elevated “into the position of the metaconcept empowered to represent the entire cluster” (New American Exceptionalism 9)� Scholarly emphasis on neoliberalism and its policies of privatization and state noninterference should not obscure how “similar clusters of elements” are also present in the narrative of American exceptionalism� To be sure, whether privatization correlates to American exceptionalism or it is merely another variant of exceptionalism in the home front is an issue that goes beyond the scope of this paper� Nevertheless, the essay makes the general claim that the privatization process of urban public spaces is pertinent to the exceptionalist conviction for “open, competitive and unregulated markets liberated from all forms of state interference” (Brenner and Theodore 2), and, to the extent 428 t heodora t simPouki that such process be replicated and generalized, it would further exacerbate social disparities, uneven development and citizen involvement in decisionmaking processes� In this regard, while the form of private-public partnership has been highly successful in administering Central Park, it nevertheless has eroded the public space of its relevance and power, turning it into an increasingly orderly, controlled space for tourist attraction, entertainment and recreation, passively experienced by park users, in which public interaction is mediated and to which access-within is tightly regulated� And, while - admittedly - Central Park has progressed from the gloom of the 1970s to the bloom of 2010, there is no doubt that this sort of “collaborative governance” promotes neoliberal market ideology through privatization of the commons, and foreclosure of democratic and collective activity, at the same time as it professes to stand as “exemplary” and “a next step in an evolution of American democracy�” 4 In its more recent reinvention of itself, the “Janus-faced” 5 American exceptionalist ideology has favored privatization and profiting from public spaces, rendering manifest some of the most glaring inequities in the United States in the way public spaces are designed, maintained, and regulated� 6 To the extent that the societal and institutional orientation toward public spaces is consistent with the American value system that relies as thoroughly as possible on markets to organize social relations and thus much less on public engagement and intervention, Central Park can serve as a case study, exemplifying both the material and cultural reinvention of traditional exceptionalist assumptions� As a matter of fact, it is not surprising that the Central Park Conservancy was first formed in 1980 under three-term mayor Ed Koch (1978-1989) who, according to his biographer, Jonathan Soffer, “pioneered the Democratic Party version of neoliberalism, which allowed for government to shape and subsidize private enterprise, but…remained diffident about creating new programs for redistribution or social insurance” (4)� In the remaining of this essay, I will show how changes in perception and use of Central Park have transformed “the city’s most famous public space,” affecting its meaning, social purpose as well as its artistic representations� I will begin by discussing the history and growth of the park in three phases, arguing that from its inception up to its contemporary development, Central Park was affected by the double-edged ideology of American exceptionalism� Next, I select two literary texts that belong to different stages in the public-private partnership of the park but which I see as reflecting the conflicts and contestations around the meaning of public spaces and the prevailing version of exceptionalism� I conclude by arguing that privatization policies of public spaces, such as Central Park, undermine local democracy and the treatment 4 See “Who’s Afraid of Central Park? ” (56) by John D� Donahue, Frank A� Weil, and Richard J� Zeckhauser� 5 The term belongs to Donald Pease� 6 See Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism� Once Upon a Time in Central Park 429 of space as a public good in favour of private wealth maximization, while simultaneously they justify a new brand of American exceptionalism designed to support US economic and cultural expansion around the world� II. As late as 1857 not a single city in the US had a major, completed park; Central Park became the first urban landscaped park in the US and for this reason it was accorded special significance. However, parks are not just physical places but also socially constructed entities 7 which reflect dominant nationalistic sentiments and aspirations� From its inception in the early 1850s, Central Park was conceived as a manifestation of 19th century American exceptionalism, i�e�, of American democratic aspirations and ideology of expansion� Its construction was based on the award winning design, the “Greensward Plan,” also known as “the founding text of landscape design” in America (Germic, American Green 30)� The plan was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux� Olmsted, in particular, who was an active antislavery author in his youth and more a student of parks and public landscapes than an architect himself, was concerned with the democratic potential of urban design� 8 Indeed, Olmsted’s design for Central Park envisioned promoting “civic brotherhood and civil equality” (Roulier 317)� On the eve of the Civil War and during a period of severe economic crisis when the city faced the threat of urban rebellion, 9 Olmsted believed that the aesthetic design and physical topography of public spaces, like Central Park, would nurture the vibrant and resilient democracy of the United States� In designing the Park, he wanted to establish an egalitarian site, to perform an experiment in spatialized democracy - a class leveler as well as a space to escape from the confinement and bustle of the city. 10 According to Olmsted: 7 See Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Harvey’s Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (esp� chapter 11)� 8 Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, first Central Park Administrator, wrote that “Olmsted felt conflicting emotions toward the city, and out of his ambivalence arose his great contributions to it� He was primarily a Jeffersonian at heart, but at the same time he put a high premium on the value of ‘civilization’ and its accompanying social and material amenities�” As a matter of fact, “he took the Jeffersonian rural ideal and carried it into the heart of the city” (7)� 9 In his book-length study, American Green, Germic includes an episode narrated by Olmsted when the construction of Central Park was ongoing during the panic of 1857� According to Olmsted, hungry, unemployed men confronted him with a banner that read “Bread or Blood,” making the threat of urban rebellion real (18)� 10 Rosenzweig and Blackmar tell a different story about Olmsted’s conception of the park� According to the authors of The Park and the People, Olmsted and Vaux differed in their conceptions of the park’s public purpose� It was Vaux who considered the park an instrument by which “a man of small means may be almost on the same footing as the millionaire” (139)� By contrast, Olmsted promoted policing in the park, prohibited sports activities and championed the park’s role as a visual respite from urban living (135)� 430 t heodora t simPouki The Park is intended to furnish healthful recreation for the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous, so far as each can partake therein without infringing upon the rights of others, and no further� (212-13) To be sure, Olmsted perceived Central Park as a democratic institution by virtue of the “human mixture” within its boundaries, a site where differences of class and race would be erased and the physical and moral corruption of the city would be alleviated� He contended that the Park’s democratic intentions were reflected in the spaciousness of the land and the sense of freedom such spaciousness evoked� This exceptionalist imaging of the park, with an emphatic pronouncement of freedom and egalitarianism, was enhanced by a design aiming to conceal the artificiality of the project and to manipulate nature so that it gave the illusion of limitlessness� In this respect, Olmsted’s “spacious design” is closely related to what Leo Marx terms a “middle landscape,” that is, a pastoral approach to space which sought “greater harmony between the man-made and the natural” and where artifice and nature would sublimely cooperate (“American Ideology” 74) for aesthetic and moral individual and national development� It was Olmsted’s conviction that a successful park represents a “marriage” of town and country, a rural oasis embedded in the urban environment� Thus, an army of (exclusively white) laborers were mobilized to transform the swampy and rocky property of the park to an uncorrupted countryside landscape� In order to further create “a sense of enlarged freedom” 11 transverse roads below the level of the park were constructed to carry crosstown traffic. Olmsted’s skillful concealment of human artifice in the design and construction of Central Park, which Leo Marx would later identify as “pastoralism,” was a “relatively rare, partial and temporary” reconciliation between reverence of nature and social utility, between primitivism and progressivism, and, according to the American cultural historian, it “has not issued in a genuine alternative to the dominant ideology” of space and “probably never will” (74)� More important, the Park’s construction marked a historical period when the dominant “metaconcept” (Pease) representing American exceptionalist ideology was freedom of people’s involvement in the establishment of their own public park use� In the words of Rosenzweig and Blackmar, “[t]he association of a new park with the ‘public’ meant that a much broader cross section of New Yorkers would ultimately claim their rights to this new cultural institution than the relatively narrow groups of wealthy (and often self-interested) New Yorkers who actually carried the proposal for a park through the political process” (38-9)� Nevertheless, this exceptionalist conception of Central Park as an agent of cultural democracy was burdened by dualistic tendencies which masked the Park’s main function as a tool of social control and cultural enlightenment and did not recognize it entirely as a space of social and political contestation� As Dorceta Taylor explains in her analysis of Central Park as a model of social control, the Park became a site of contestation between the bourgeois elites who conceptualized, designed and managed the park, and the working class 11 The expression belongs to Olmsted in Murphy’s “Distant Effects�” Once Upon a Time in Central Park 431 who were employed for its construction and who related in a different, often “unacceptable” manner to the park� 12 Stephen Germic, too, demonstrates how Central Park manufactured a “geography of exclusion” by repressing the “abject and unstable character of American identities based on class�” 13 Furthermore, not only access to the distant park (Central Park was 6 miles away from the city center) was limited to middle class whites, but about 1600 Irish and German immigrants (in “Pigtown”), including the Black community of Seneca Village which was located within the boundaries of the park, were to be evicted for the purposes of construction� 14 Reiterating the rhetoric of “blank canvas” or “unclaimed” space to enable territorial expansion, and that of egalitarianism to mitigate social and economic crisis and obfuscate class antagonism by homogenizing lifestyles, the discourse surrounding Central Park functioned to reinforce perceived American exceptionalism in the second half of the nineteenth century� As Germic succinctly argues, Olmsted’s urban masterpiece, Central Park, “materialized the nineteenth century’s greatest abstraction and ideal: the nation” (American Green 17), representing the landscape as America, as available, unowned land, emptied of conflict and promising infinite resources, while at the same time, through a visual and spatial rhetoric, contributing to define “Americanness” at a time when social identity was remarkably unstable� Circumfused with a mythical and exceptionalist aura, “this synthetic Arcadian carpet” (23), as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas labeled Central Park a little over a hundred years after its construction in his urban manifesto, Delirious New York (1978), would become Manhattan’s moment of relief from the city’s architectural ideology of relentlessly rectangular arrangement� A simulacrum of wild and unpredictable nature, this uninterrupted artificial green carpet was considered a visual articulation of resistance to the homogenization and dullness of the grid� But, like the grid, which transcends topography, Central Park was more than a major recreational facility of Manhattan, it was, to quote Koolhaas, a “colossal leap of faith” (21) invested with social and political significance. Like the grid, the Arcadian carpet was imposed on Manhattan, which the Dutch architect called “a man-made Wild West, a frontier of the sky” (87), in an effort to pacify the socio-geographic tensions 12 An environmental sociologist, Dorceta Taylor has published widely on the development of urban environments� Taylor uses Central Park as a case study in much of her work in order to address issues of social exclusion and economic inequality� Very interesting is her examination of how the discourse around urban financing has evolved from the 19th century onward and how Central Park is still influencing the way in which parks are financed today. See “Central Park as a Model for Social Control; ” chapter I of Environment and Social Justice; and Environment and the People in American Cities� 13 In “Nature, Naturalism, American Exceptionalism�” 14 Rosenzweig and Blackmar give a detailed account of the eviction of these communities which opened the possibilities to the massive removal of minorities and poor whites� Contrary to the view that saw the occupants of the land before the Park’s construction (called “pre-parkites” by the authors) as having a loose relation to the land, Rosenzweig and Blackmar argue that the establishment of churches and schools deepened the population’s connection to the land (65-78)� Taylor (2010) argues that Central Park was an early form of gentrification on a massive scale (39). 432 t heodora t simPouki and contestations implicated in the gridded space� Embracing a celebratory exceptionalist rhetoric, Koolhaas describes Central Park as “a taxidermic preservation of nature” (21), which emphasizes the fusion between technology and nature, hinging upon Leo Marx’s pastoralist view of landscape as the prevalent ideology of space, as far as the Olmstedian phase of historical development of the park is concerned� III. If Olmsted’s design and fashioning of Central Park inaugurated the first era in the history of the Park, the second major era began with the appointment of Robert Moses as City Parks Commissioner in 1934� By then, years of neglect and the Great Depression had rendered the Park in a state of decline� Robert Moses undertook to remedy all this, and a lot more, always opting for master plans based on efficiency and rationality rather than on the urban fabric that evolves organically� 15 His technocratic principle of order stands in stark opposition to what Leo Marx sees as a native, Americanized aesthetic tradition based on the doctrine of organic form� 16 Besides, as Marshall Berman reminds us, it was almost impossible to oppose the man who boasted that “when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax” (294)� In his characteristic authoritative style, Moses enforced his own metropolitan manifest destiny attitude onto New York City, a major part of which involved Central Park. Influenced by the playground movement of the early twentieth century, he redesigned the Park to accommodate recreational facilities, distancing himself from Olmsted’s plan that favored conservation rather than recreation� Intent on imposing his “utilitarian” vision, even while ignoring the concrete patterns of urban life and the real needs and desires of people who lived in proximity to the park, Robert Moses built more than 20 playgrounds, athletic fields, and renovated the Park zoo� 17 However, a notable instance of protest against Moses’s controversial initiatives in the Park came in 1956 by a group of upper west side neighborhood mothers who disapproved of his plan to construct a new parking lot for the adjacent elegant restaurant of Tavern on the Green� The much publicized episode which became known as the “Battle of Central Park,” forced Moses to cancel the parking lot plan and rebuild a new playground� Not only was it 15 In his Pulitzer award winning biography from 1974 The Power Broker, Robert Caro documents Robert Moses’s preeminent role in the massive urban renewal projects of last century� 16 Marx traces the origin of “organicism” to Coleridge and German romantic philosophy, but sees its “first Americanized” version in “Horatio Greenough and Ralph Waldo Emerson�” Later, the organic principle of form was applied “with stunning originality to literary form by Henry Thoreau (in Walden) and by Walt Whitman (in “Song of Myself”); and most effectively translated into the language of architecture by Louis Sullivan, Montgomery Schuyler, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Lewis Mumford” (“American Ideology” 73)� 17 Under powerful Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, Central Park became “essentially a playground” (Rosenzweig & Blackmar 449)� Once Upon a Time in Central Park 433 a victory of public good over private interests but the negative press this episode received, which coincided with Jane Jacobs’s ferocious attacks on what she called “anti-city ideals” of Moses’s “progressive” urban planning ethos put an end to his unquestioned imperious regime� 18 It also paved the way for community development as well as for the visibility and importance of gender in the public sphere in the modern city� In the decade that followed, the 1960s, urbanized public space took on a new meaning as the object of conflict over claims to its control and over rights of occupation� At the same time, public space provided the necessary setting for enactment of those conflicts. Inspired from or, perhaps, reacting against Kennedy’s exceptionalist presidential address and the zeitgeist of the period, a generation of young Americans rose up to fulfill America’s promise, by challenging conventional lifestyles and institutions, protesting the materialism and consumerism of American society, and demanding withdrawal from the war in Vietnam� The streets, the squares and the parks became sites for such protest, albeit often turning into violent clashes and race riots� 19 Paradoxically, in spite of its location in the heart of the bustling city, and because of its size and masterful Olmstedian construction, whose scenography evokes the Arcadian notion of nature (according to Leo Marx), 20 Central Park thrived as a symbol for counter-culture events and urban revival� Many rock concerts, political marches, peace demonstrations, large-scale antiwar rallies and festivals took place there� “Love-ins,” “be-ins,” and “fat-ins” became regular features, blending pastoral and anti-urban sentiment with utopian imaginings of belonging, and infusing the Park’s social, cultural, and increasingly political atmosphere� Granted, the high-impact activities and events of a scale unprecedented in the history of the Park had caused the deterioration of its once-verdant lawns, picturesque paths and lush vegetation� What is remarkable, however, was that Central Park fulfilled its function as public urban space, a true “people’s park,” an open and uncontrolled site where groups of every description and conviction could achieve “public visibility, 18 Incidents like this over the use of the park’s space inspired Jane Jacobs’s seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In relation to parks, Jacobs claimed: “Parks are volatile places� They tend to run to extremes of popularity and unpopularity� Their behavior is far from simple…They contain a significant diversity of different people, functions and activities� They don’t necessarily increase the commercial value of a neighborhood but they can also bring it down” (89)� 19 “Major race riots have occurred in the United States at least since the Harlem Riots of 1948, but the 60’s surpassed anything previously experienced. The five day Watts riot in August, 1965 saw 34 people die and a thousand injured; and the 1966 Detroit riot, 43 deaths� Following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, rioting broke out in over 120 cities including Chicago and Washington�” In “The Sixties�” (http: / / scholar�library� miami�edu/ sixties/ urbanRiots�php)� 20 As stated above, in The Machine in the Garden Leo Marx used the term “middle landscape” which he defined as “a middle state between primitive nature and an over-refined civilization” (v)� As a matter of fact, Marx’s book is itself a product of the sixties culture which articulates its anti-urban, and post-romantic representations� Also, in his essay on “Pastoralism,” Marx speaks of “a much deeper continuity between the nineteenth-century pastoralism and the radical movement (or counterculture) of the 1960s” (38)� 434 t heodora t simPouki seek recognition and make demands” (Goheen 480)� The Park’s democratic realization led Rosenzweig and Blackmar to remark that “[t]he greatness of Central Park has more to do with these democratic possibilities than with the artful arrangement of trees, shrubs, bridges, paths, and lawns” (530)� As a matter of fact, aesthetic appreciation of nature in Central Park was never deemed enough to legitimize the centrality attributed to it in public imagination, much more so during the 1960s racial tensions and social unrest confronting a corporate society� That cultural and aesthetic conceptions of the landscape as a garden of Eden of pristine and abundant natural beauty had become anachronistic, was reflected in the land art movement which emerged in America during the 1960s� Land artist Robert Smithson, in particular, whose earthworks sought to break away from the boundaries of “natural” landscape in order to articulate the artificial interventions, became interested in Olmsted’s creation because he saw Central Park, like his own work, as “a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region” (160)� In other words, as he asserted in his 1973 Artforum essay “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” the Park did not exist as “a thing-initself” (160) but as a site specific work of art demonstrative of the continually transforming relationships between man and landscape� In order to compose the essay, Smithson had taken a walk through Central Park, looking for visual evidence of Olmsted’s attempt to create a “concrete dialectic between humans and nature” (164)� He heralded the Park’s creator, as an artist of serious worth and magnitude, creating ponds and not simply contemplating them and having the capacity to “translate Democratic ideas to Trees & Dirt�” 21 He recognized the profound interactivity of a public park - socially, ecologically and materially, dismissing the notion of the park “as static entity,” and emphasizing instead change and chance, “a range of contrasting viewpoints that are forever fluctuating, yet solidly based in the earth” (165). In Smithson’s view, Central Park was always already becoming a “thing-forus,” rather than a “thing-in-itself” in “dialectic” intercourse between physical landscape and its temporal context, between nature and people (160)� IV. Before there was time to assess critically the 1960s gain of vitality in the public sphere and to determine the changing conception of Central Park as public space, the 1970s urban fiscal crisis hit the Park. This is the time President Gerald Ford denied federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy� 22 The effect of the city’s financial hardships on its park system combined with absence of effective management had contributed to the park’s alarming condition, which in turn led to the formation, in 1980, of a joint public-private partnership, the Central Park Conservancy� Thus begins the third major era 21 In fact, it is Vaux who used this phrase according to Rosenzweig and Blackmar, 136� 22 On Oct� 30, 1975, on the occasion of this denial, the front page of The Daily News read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD�” Once Upon a Time in Central Park 435 of the Park that marks a turn from municipal financing to privatization or, to put it in terms of my argument, a shift from exceptionalist democratic egalitarianism to exceptionalist market driven economy� In the case of Central Park, private funding, raised through fundraising and investment income, and efficient park stewardship did contribute to the park’s renovation and landscape restoration� At the same time, through a series of selective policies of rehabilitation of the park “as the original creators saw it,” 23 the Park was gradually transformed to an elite cultural institution removed from its democratic past� Despite the large degree of skepticism with which the Conservancy’s formal recognition was greeted, this was not registered in the official rhetoric. Instead, the Conservancy was hailed as “the long-awaited restorer and protector so avidly desired by the various Park betterment groups,” and this model of “collaborative governance” was regarded by some as the “next step in an evolution of American democracy” (Donahue et al� 56)� The ideal of American democracy is evoked again only to mask the fact that the ideological conception of space has shifted from pastoralism toward the “utilitarian ideology of progress,” to recall Marx, or, to put it differently, from the land of the free to freedom of enterprise� This kind of exceptionalist rhetoric serves to reinforce the “specialness” of American treatment of space through reaffirming the nation’s belief in progress, economic freedom and minimal government interference with the market forces� To paraphrase Walter Benn Michaels, “the American Dream turn[ed] into the neoliberal dream” and “the fear of (or the hopes for) American exceptionalism” - like worries about the state of democracy - to a “kind of nostalgia” - like the reference to Olmsted’s original vision of the Park (34)� In 1998, New York City’s government under Mayor Rudolph W� Giuliani agreed to an important move: It delegated stewardship of Central Park to the Conservancy, establishing the ground rules for a permanent collaboration that granted important decision-making authority to the Conservancy� 24 While privatization was hardly new to New York City government, this highprofile privatization of the nation’s most famous urban space was a very controversial arrangement� 25 It established an “exemplary” model of privatization at the same time as it raised numerous questions regarding the attenuation of democratic process� In reality, the transformation of the Park into a capitalist commodity on which the Central Park Conservancy has exclusive control, inevitably gave it the power to take what should be public decisions out of public hands� Urban economist Oliver Cooke persuasively argues that the Park’s locational, aesthetic and cultural uniqueness allows it to capture and capitalize significant resources which the Central Park Conservancy has exclusive 23 According to Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the 1980s administrator of Central Park Conservancy (Taylor, “Equity” 43)� 24 For more information on the contract between the Giuliani administration and the Central Park Conservancy, see Oliver Cooke’s “Class Approach to Municipal Privatization” and Rethinking Municipal Privatization. 25 The election of Rudolph Giuliani (1994-2001) as New York City’s mayor marked a turning point for New York City government� Giuliani made privatization a key platform of his 1993 campaign� See Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism� 436 t heodora t simPouki responsibility to manage� As a result, the Conservancy decides on the type of activities that take place in the park, depending on whether it is profitable, protects the organization’s investments or might offend potential donors� 26 This issue came to light in the summer of 2004 when the Conservancy in collaboration with the city denied permit to hold a large Protest rally on the Great Lawn of Central Park during the 2004 Republican National Convention, explaining that an event of this magnitude would severely damage the Great Lawn and the cost of re-seeding it would be too high� Clearly, the Great Lawn’s aesthetics was judged more important than its symbolic significance, as “the heart and soul of New York,” as the place where many rallies had been held in the past (such as the 1982 anti-nuclear rally, an anti-apartheid rally in 1986, a Gay Pride rally in 1989, and Earth Day in 1990)� 27 “What does this closure of the most symbolic of public spaces portend? ” Setha Low rhetorically asks (“Erosion”43)� While the Conservancy denied protesters the democratic right to demonstrate against the Iraqi war, it ardently promoted Christo’s installation, as we have seen, hailing the exhibit rather than the rally as “a Great Communal Event�” 28 Obviously, this decision is evidence of the loss of democratic discourse and confirms Rosenzweig and Blackmar’s concerns (quoting architectural critic Paul Goldberger) that “these new and privately owned public spaces have become an artificial substitute for a true public realm” (509). Undoubtedly, privatization of Central Park has brought what Mike Davis has called “the death of … the Olmstedian vision of public space” (226)� Further, argues Davis, Olmsted “conceived public landscapes and parks as safety valves, mixing classes and ethnicities in common (bourgeois) recreations and pleasures” (227)� But, if privatization has marked “the death” of Olmsted’s reformist vision of public space, it also marked the abandonment of the 26 “The Central Park Conservancy holds the right to demonstrate to donors that their investments are well used and protected� Any risky decision from the part of the Conservancy might imperil the organization’s fundraising efforts and there is danger it might offend potential donors” (Cooke, “Class Approach” 127)� 27 Passavant 108� The author discusses how the privatization of public spaces circumscribes the exercise of freedom of speech� He examines several lower level court decisions regarding the right to protest, putting them in the context of neoliberal, post- Fordist urban economy� Among the cases discussed is Central Park which is seen as a place of attraction of mega-events as long as these produce “a brandable image” of the city (103)� See also, Jennifer Steinhauer and Diane Cardwell: “‘The Central Park Conservancy runs Central Park and they’ve been very possessive about it,’ said City Councilman Bill Perkins, who is in favor of letting United for Peace and Justice rally there� ‘In some years they’ve considered whether there is too much activity in the park because to them activity is a maintenance issue�’” 28 Jesse Lemisch argues persuasively that there seemed multiple clear conflicts of interest behind the event� More precisely “the CPC bought many of the drawings, as did Mayor Bloomberg, who was already a Christo collector and would now see his Christos skyrocket in value� So, trumpeting The Gates enhanced the value of Bloomberg’s and CPC’s investments�” In the same article, the author explains that in “‘this public-private partnership’ CPC’s ‘Corporate Partners’ include Bloomberg, J�P� Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Consolidated Edison, ABC, Prudential, Goldman Sachs, Martha Stewart Living, NY Stock Exchange Foundation, Pfizer, and others.” Once Upon a Time in Central Park 437 egalitarian ideal and the elevation of the laissez-faire ideology into the position of American exceptionalism’s “metaconcept�” As I have said at the beginning, I apply Donald Pease’s argument, who observes that “the semantic indeterminacy of American exceptionalism” allows it to adjust to the changes in socioeconomic circumstances when one version of it no longer suits “extant socioeconomic demands” (“Re-mapping the Transnational Turn” 21)� More recently, in 2008, and as America’s economy cratered toward recession, the Chanel Fashion Company rent a part of Central Park to celebrate its designer handbags in a gleaming white pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid� 29 Just before the realization of this “ambitious project,” Parks & Recreation Commissioner proudly announced: “Our partnership with CHANEL continues the great tradition of bringing world class cultural offerings to New York City’s parks�” 30 Ironically, as one critic noted, while Olmsted had planned the park as a great democratic experiment, the “Chanel project reminds us how far we have traveled from those ideals by dismantling the boundary between the civic realm and corporate interests�” Instead of enjoying the therapeutic benefits of time spent in the park, visitors of the pavilion “spiral ever deeper into a black hole of bad art and superficial temptations, into an elaborate mousetrap for consumers” (Ouroussoff)� Clearly, as Cooke poignantly argues in his book-length study on municipal privatization, Central Park had become “a good that no longer constituted a mere-use value, but one that also comprised exchange value�” “Put otherwise,” Cooke goes on to say, “the privatization process commodified Central Park” (57). The extent to which Central Park is perceived as commodity was also made apparent when former president Clinton settled for a Harlem office, determined as he was to have an office with an unobstructed view of Central Park. Thus, the Park’s exchange value extends to include the Park’s view and not just its use� V. Obviously, the Park’s privatization seems to have influenced both the material use and its imaginary representation, effectuating a reduction of the site’s diversity, or complexity, and gradually divesting it of its social signification. A fictional example of this can be seen in Jonathan Safran Foer’s mythical tale of New York City’s Sixth Borough that evokes Central Park in 29 The exhibition, called “Mobile Art,” was conceived by Chanel’s designer Karl Lagerfeld� It ran from Oct. 20 to Nov. 9, 2008 in the park’s Rumsey Playfield. Chanel paid the city $400,000 to rent the space and made an undisclosed donation to the Central Park Conservancy� 30 Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe� Along the same line, the president of the Central Park Conservancy Douglas Blonsky declared that “[a]s one of America’s most important works of art and a treasured New York landmark, Central Park is the perfect setting for CHANEL’s innovative and free public art exhibition� As caretakers, the Central Park Conservancy works in partnership with the City to create a safe, beautiful and inviting space where cultural opportunities such as this can flourish.” In “Central Park to Host Mobile Art�” 438 t heodora t simPouki magical terms� First published as a short story in the New York Times (2004), it was later incorporated in the author’s highly acclaimed novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close� According to the story, The Sixth Borough was an island separated from Manhattan by a body of water that could be jumped across by the world’s greatest long jumper� It was eventually discovered that the island was drifting further away from New York until it became totally detached� The key image of the tale is Central Park which used to reside in the center of the Sixth Borough but - using giant hooks - it was relocated to Manhattan as the island began to move (Mullins)� As part of a novel that addresses the traumatic experience of 9/ 11, “The Sixth Borough” has been read as a parable of the inextricable connection between victimized communities that transcends national, racial and religious demarcations� Central Park was interpreted to depict the unity between the New York world, before and after 9/ 11� But as separate piece, “The Sixth Borough” encourages a reading that underscores a dematerialization of Central Park, a place detached from the reality of the surrounding environment, as a result of the phantasmagorical modes of representations through which this heterotopic space acquires its meaning� In Foer’s bitter-sweet fantasy, Central Park is salvaged by being pulled “like a rug across a floor, from the Sixth Borough into Manhattan” (221), but its relocation involves a complete loss of its social significance. In his imaginary exploration of Central Park, Foer writes: “Children were allowed to lie down on the park as it was being moved� By the time the park found its current resting place, every single one of the children had fallen asleep, and the park was a mosaic of their dreams” (221)� Foer’s Central Park has turned into a utopian landscape, totally liberated from the historic constraints of the traumatic present, but also totally divested of the needs of real-life city-dwellers who might use it as a negotiable location of everyday practice� To the extent that urban space represents the spatial manifestation of social practices, then Foer’s imaging of Central Park surreptitiously undermines it as a potential site of sociability and politics� Juxtaposed to Foer’s post-9/ 11 utopic representation of Central Park is Paul Auster’s 1960s Central Park which reflects the era’s conceptualization of public space as a concrete, real, urban site of democracy� Written in the late 1980s when the Park’s privatization was under way, but chronologically set twenty years earlier, Moon Palace depicts the novel’s young protagonist, MS Fogg, undergoing a series of identity crises� In an early one of those, Fogg is evicted from his apartment and finds refuge in the friendly, all inclusive confines of Central Park. Although it is situated at the center of New York, the Park is “devoid of associations” (56), as Fogg admits� Its vastness and unlimited sky give him a sense of freedom from the ugly and stressful city� Emptied out of its urban associations, the Park evolves into a frontier setting, to which the protagonist has to adapt with determination and resourcefulness� In Auster’s Central Park, Fogg can enjoy his privacy, living as a homeless, and can benefit from his proximity to nature, “blending into the environment,” as he says, without being isolated� In fact, it makes him feel happy to experience urban civility, to realize that, in the Park “[p]eople smiled at each Once Upon a Time in Central Park 439 other and held hands, bent their bodies into unusual shapes, kissed” (57)� Moreover, he depends on the generosity of other park users who offer him food, exchange news or invite him for a game of softball� Cooperation among people in the Park, therefore, becomes crucial for his survival both physical and psychological� In addition, his sojourn in the Park frees him from the corrupted materialism and capitalism of the streets as well as the burden of performing his social identity according to normative standards of behavior� “There were eight hundred acres to roam in, and unlike the massive gridwork of buildings and towers that loomed outside the perimeter, the park offered me the possibility of solitude, of separating myself from the rest of the world� In the streets, everything is bodies and commotion, and like it or not, you cannot enter them without adhering to a rigid protocol of behavior” (56)� Although Central Park is represented as an urban “sanctuary” (56), it is not idealized, romanticized or invested in pseudo-innocence� Fogg comes across criminals as well as the official authorities who threaten to put an end to his precarious settlement in the park� In addition, he is perfectly aware that there “is no romance in stooping for crumbs” (60), as he says� Nevertheless, no danger, hardship or humiliation can diminish his enjoyment in being directly involved in this “man-made natural world” (62), a “miniature world” (63) that contains an infinite number of sensory, aesthetic and social variables traditionally associated with the frontier� In this respect, Auster’s invocation of the enduring myth of the frontier, and its themes of radical individualism, selfreliance and equality of opportunity in relation to Central Park, brings to the forefront the link between American exceptionalist discourse and the pastoral spatial ideal� As stated above, Central Park in the 1960s was still experienced as the common ground where people would carry out the “functional and ritual activities that bind a community” (Carr et al� xi) and create a civic bond� VI. As “the foundational ideology” of American Studies (Fluck, “Concept of Recognition” 168) and a “cultural supplement to the political nationalism promoted by the state” (Pease, Keywords 110), American exceptionalism has exercised a powerful influence in the nation’s self-understanding and self-representation. Its resurgence after the dismantling of the Soviet Union confirmed its remarkable resilience to the extent that, far from losing its effectiveness and accountability or being left to lament its “end” (Bell), American exceptionalism “has returned, and with a vengeance” (Hodgson 27)� As is well known and sufficiently documented, recent academic and political discourse has witnessed a renewal of interest in this most enduring tenet of American self-fashioning� In recent scholarly discourse, even when American culture is supposedly examined through the transnational perspective, such critical analysis gains its legitimacy only to the extent that it may “cast aside notions of American exceptionalism” (Fluck, “Theories” 60)� As Fluck remarks, however, intellectually what is “considered the cutting edge of the field,” i.e. 440 t heodora t simPouki transnationalism, “is merely the latest installment in an attempt to escape from the field’s initial romance with America” and still operates within the intellectual framework of “theories of American culture” (Romance 87)� Moreover, in his “Theories of American Culture,” Fluck identifies a number of critics who view transnationality, not in its own right, but as a critical perspective that would potentially undo “the tenacious grasp of American exceptionalism” and would challenge the cohesive borders of a mythical America (Kaplan 154)� Finally, without wishing to underestimate the revitalizing power of these innovative trends to American Studies, whichever prefix they announce themselves with (trans-, post-, meta-, inter-) I wish to draw attention to Donatella Izzo’s line of argument which insists on the paradox of the present moment in American Studies: the all-encompassing, “virtually boundless,” “’progressive’ narrative of unfolding radical potentialities” of the field suspiciously conflates the creation and circulation of the nation’s own cultural self-representations with the material (economic, political, military) underpinnings of the ascendancy of the United States (593)� Izzo illustrates her critical position by referring to transnationalism, and the term’s appropriation by American Studies from its former field of economic application, in particular from multinational corporations� She succinctly argues that “[t]ransnational American Studies thus figures as what might be termed a technology of transnationalization, effecting the translation of the newworld wide horizon of the economy into culture and transferring the old nationalistic version of American identity onto a globalized stage” (595)� In my analysis I have avoided a (macro scale) deterritorialized perspective of transnationalism, focusing instead on a (micro scale) local analysis, and tracing the changes in current uses of Central Park as public space that resulted from the shift in dominance of elements that comprise the American exceptionalist “metaconcept” (Pease)� As I have said at the beginning, since its creation, the nation adopted a distinctive American ideology of space which has become inextricably linked to America’s view of itself as exceptional� While the changes in the character and meaning of public space were in accordance to the realities of historical developments and the political context, they have also been safely and deeply rooted in American exceptionalism� Alternating between what Leo Marx termed the pastoralist or the economic utilitarian perspective, nationalist ideology toward space drew (and still draws), on the same clusters of distinctively American characteristics that were liberty, equality, populism, individualism and free-market economy (as summarized by Lipset)� I chose Central Park as a case study in order to illustrate this ideological shift toward space from the democratic egalitarianism of the Park’s Olmstedian beginnings (pastoralism) to free market economy’s advocacy of its privatization (utilitarianism)� Both ideological approaches exist within the (broad) confines of American exceptionalism and both make claims for their unique American character� 31 But, to recall Lipset, American 31 According to Seymour Martin Lipset, “[t]he United States, almost from its start, has had an expanding economic system� The nineteenth-century American economy, as compared to the European ones, was characterized by more market freedom, more Once Upon a Time in Central Park 441 exceptionalism is a “double-edged sword�” Privatization of Central Park has revitalized the Park, drawing a large number of people on a daily basis to its restaurants, coffee shops and other facilities and generating funds through individual contributions and corporate charitable donations� At the same time, making Central Park a privatized success has brought about its commodification, as well as a foreclosure of democratic and community activity. For over two hundred years, Americans enjoyed the “exceptional” belief in their nation’s greatness� Whether based on America’s democratic values, its military preeminence or/ and economic growth, exceptionalist ideology was always already a source of pride for Americans, linked as it had become to core qualities of “Americaness�” Today’s deep uncertainty about American national identity and a growing concern for the nation’s place in the larger world have led to a renewal of interest in the term� What the future form and shape of this protean ideology will be is hard to know� It is my understanding, though, that taking pride in the achievements of privatization is the new, albeit distorted, dominant “metaconcept” of American exceptionalism� Given the country’s economic crisis, privatization, which marks the process of reallocating assets and functions from the public sector to the private sector, seems to bring a special national promise of renewed economic development� The promise of market-based economic growth, however, ought not to hide privatization’s political and cultural dimensions� It remains to be seen whether this brand of American exceptionalism will carry its course at the expense of democratic gains of the past� Works Cited Auster, Paul� Moon Palace� New York: Penguin Books, 1989� Bell, Daniel� “The End of American Exceptionalism�” Public Interest 41(Fall 1975): 193-224� Berman, Marshall� All That Is Solid Melts into Air� New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982� Blake, Casey� Rev� of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, ed� Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar� Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 54�2 (1995): 233-235� Brenner, Neil, and Nik Theodore� Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe� Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2002� Caro, Robert� The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York� New York: Knopf, 1974� Carr, Stephen, Mark Francis, Leanne G� Rivlin and Andrew M� Stone� Public Space� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992� “Central Park to Host Mobile Art; Chanel Contemporary Art Container By Zaha Hadid�” Artdaily.org� 26 July 2008� Web� 21 June 2014� Cooke, Oliver D� Rethinking Municipal Privatization� London: Routledge, 2008� -----� “Class Approach to Municipal Privatization: The Privatization of New York City’s Central Park�” International Labor and Working-Class History 71�1 (2007): 112-132� Davis, Mike� City of Quartz� New York: Random House, 1992� individual landownership, and a higher wage income structure-all sustained by a national classical liberal ideology� From the Revolution on, it was the laissez-faire country par excellence” (54)� 442 t heodora t simPouki Donahue, John D�, Frank A� Weil, and Richard J� Zeckhauser� “Who’s Afraid of Central Park? 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Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009� -----�“Central Park as a Model for Social Control: Urban Parks, Social Class and Leisure Behavior in Nineteenth-Century America�” Journal of Leisure Research 31� 4 (1999): 420-477� “The Sixties�” University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida, n�d� Web� 25 June, 2014� c hristina m aria k och Occupying Popular Culture: Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, and the Guy Fawkes Mask as a Political Icon I Introduction In photographs of protests over the last years - against ACTA in the Polish parliament, against the Euro Plus Pact in Spain, against the Turkish government in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, against corruption and the erosion of public services in the wake of the 2014 Soccer World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, against the Venezuelan government, in the “Blockupy” protests of Frankfurt/ Main, in “Occupy” demonstrations in New York City and beyond - one image appears across the board: demonstrators wearing the same particular mask� 1 Their facial guise shows a typified white face with a slim black Van Dyke beard, the mouth shaped into a broad smirk, the eyes almost closed to slits� Its style and expression may evoke a host of labels ranging from genteel or carnivalesque to poised, sarcastic, superior, or even snobbish� 2 An avid consumer of European or North American news media may correctly link this mask to the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, and may also be able to identify it as the “face” of the collective of Anonymous “hacktivists” (a portmanteau of “hacker” and “activist”)� The mask has been such a darling of press photographers and camera operators that it has become a trademark for a geographically and politically wide range of recent demonstrations denouncing inequalities of income and wealth distribution, corporate power, and governmental ills and woes, or simply any kind of protest that invokes an “us against the system” rhetoric� Academic publishers have picked up on the trend as well - Alfio Mastropaolo’s Is Democracy a Lost Cause? (2012) and Florian Grosser’s Theorien der Revolution (2013) fittingly sport the same mask on their book covers� Lastly, the wide dissemination of 1 Parts of this article in preliminary stages were presented at the 2013 “Philosophy and Social Science” Colloquium in Prague. I wish to thank the organizers and specifically Nancy Fraser, Brian Milstein, and Christiane Wilke for their instructive feedback� My thanks also go to Carmen Birkle, Maximilian Jablonowski, Fabio Wolkenstein, and Lukas Etter for their many helpful comments on this project� 2 A Wikimedia Commons image search in the category “Demonstrators and protesters wearing masks of Guy Fawkes” yields many examples from different countries� See also Nordhausen (for Turkey); Olson, “ACTA” (for Poland); “Wachsender Druck” (for Venezuela); http: / / www�anonymousbrasil�com/ brasil/ (30 May 2014; for Brasil)� 446 c hristina m aria k och the image of this mask has provoked countless spin-offs in internet memes, YouTube video clips, comic strips or cartoons, and street art, which are then popularized on the internet yet again� By now, the mask’s far-reaching appeal seems to render the question of its origin less and less important for those who actively engage with it� The actual historical reference for the “Guy Fawkes mask,” as it is sometimes termed in news coverage, is precisely that notorious 17th-century English Gunpowder Plot conspirator� Yet it is not so much the face of the historical person represented in paintings or engravings but rather the mask of a fictional hero, for which Fawkes is said to have been the inspiration, that has reached an unforeseen popularity: It covers the face of “V,” protagonist of the 1980s graphic novel V for Vendetta and the subsequent 2005 film adaptation of the same name, until it has begun to adorn the faces or be the avatar of onand offline protesters around the globe from around 2008 onwards. In this process the mask and its image have “traveled” from the medium of graphic narrative to film, then to the internet, until they have finally reached the streets. Although lifted from its fictional dystopian origins to become a transmedial phenomenon, this contemporary protest icon has not been entirely stripped of some historical and fictional traits and connotations its source carries - the power of anonymity, the ambivalence of political secrecy, the feeling of superiority conveyed by the appeal of vigilantism, mass agitation, and antagonistic politics, to name but a few� It is needless to say that elements of works of (narrative) fiction can lend themselves very readily to being alluded to in political or any kind of discourse� However, the case of the Guy Fawkes mask seems unprecedented in several respects. It is used both as an image onand offline and as a material artifact in the streets; it is increasingly detached from its narrative source and brought to a wide variety of sometimes conflicting political and/ or cultural uses; it has not simply made a sporadic appearance but has had a significant impact on the public image of a network of activists and a protest movement; and, lastly, as an icon it has seen a wide transnational dissemination� The latter point, the mask’s globalized appeal, raises interesting questions about the “identity work” (Benford and Snow) of digital activists and new social movements or protest formations with international offshoots� The Guy Fawkes mask as a readily available and highly recognizable protest icon can act as a unifying device for otherwise disparate collectives whose goals may be shared with international counterparts (e�g� attacking internet censorship) or who may adapt transnational political concerns (e�g� global corporate power or the financial crisis) to local struggles (e.g. the Spanish housing bubble)� My discussion of the iconic Guy Fawkes mask as a transnational phenomenon is not founded on an in-depth empirical analysis� Rather, I will analyze its symbolic functions and effects, beginning with a close analysis of the mask, including its ties with the iconic historical figure Guy Fawkes, and a contextualization with other uses of masking and other political icons used to visually frame social movements. A retrospective of the uses and significations of the mask in its texts of origin, the graphic novel V for Vendetta and Occupying Popular Culture 447 the eponymous film adaptation, will then attempt to uncover continuities and ruptures in its political implications� Finally, I will trace how the mask and its image have come to be used by the hacktivists of Anonymous and the protesters of Occupy Wall Street, and what I see as the political import and ambivalence of this protest icon� In this endeavor, several particular problems will come into the limelight, to which I will offer some tentative conclusions� One of these issues is the gendered and raced face of the mask (among other categories) versus its surrounding rhetoric of universality and inclusiveness� Another second one is the question of whether the mask as an icon has really become a “free floating signifier” (Call) or if it rather still necessitates a core message, stripped to the bare minimum to allow for maximal usability, as it were� Linked to this is the at first slightly puzzling fact that the Guy Fawkes mask may sometimes not only be used by activists to self-identify as sympathizers of Anonymous, Occupy, or any other protest at hand� Rather, it may also appear in combination with a costume to stage an adversary (the stock figure of the greedy banker, for instance)� Finally, there is the question of the revolutionary impetus of the icon in different cultural settings, or in other words, how much the mask as a transnational phenomenon may still be invested with the United States as the “motherland” of neoliberal capitalism and fear of government surveillance, or how much critical appropriation, repurposing, or iconoclasm we may suspect� II The Mask as a Cultural Icon The iconic status of the Guy Fawkes mask seems undisputed� “The face of Fawkes is everywhere now,” Lewis Call states, “at peace rallies and anti-nuclear demonstrations” (157)� 3 In 2011, it was “the top-selling mask on Amazon�com” (Bilton), available at low cost. More significantly, though, it is perceived as ubiquitous although only a minority of “offline” protesters seems to actually wear it - and if they do, not always on their faces (with the exception of occasional Anonymous street protests in which most activists are masked, I should add)� 4 Further below I will disentangle why I believe the mask is used differently in the cases of Anonymous and Occupy. For now, suffice it to say that there are obvious pragmatic restrictions (in street protests and occupations, wearing a mask may be cumbersome and sometimes downright illegal) and 3 Contrary to Call, I believe it is precisely not the “face of Fawkes” but the “mask of V” (with face-like qualities)� 4 This is an impression gained from following news reports on Occupy and other antiestablishment protests from 2011 onwards in North American, British, and German mainstream media, image databases, and community news outlets such as blogs� Although this can hardly count as an empirical validation, I think the observation is not far-fetched if one compares mainstream press protest close-ups of masked protesters with wide angle shots, in which much less masks appear� The mask simply seems to make for a good shot� 448 c hristina m aria k och that we can conclude that the mask becomes increasingly proliferated as a visual representation - from protest footage to street art or online banners� The physical engagement with the mask as an artifact seems to take a backseat� In their otherwise highly instructive analyses of the Guy Fawkes mask, Ruiz and Kohns neither make this distinction nor dwell on the significance of the circumstance that relatively few protesters conceal their faces with the mask� 5 The status of the Guy Fawkes mask as a widely disseminated icon is thus apparent in three dimensions: as an iconic image constantly remediated, as a cultural icon being a material artifact (the mask being worn), and as bearing traces of iconic personhood, coalescing the figures of the fictional avenger “V” and the historical icon Guy Fawkes� The status of a cultural icon, as Günther Leypoldt explains, is related to “the production of collective memory and cultural authority” (5)� The mask is an example of how cultural icons are an expression of cultural self-understanding, their meaning being constantly renegotiated as different groups attempt to re-inscribe and appropriate them for their purposes (Leypoldt; Müller)� We may add that the shifts between artifact and image imply processes of “repurposing,” Bolter and Grusin’s understanding of the term as reusing and redefining “properties” of one medium in another, of “borrowing content” without a conscious interplay between media (44-45)� In the case of the Guy Fawkes mask, the reciprocity of meaning-making has both journalists and activists avail themselves of the icon and simultaneously reinforce its status and re-adapt meaning� The wide usage, sustained media attention, as well as the spin-offs of the mask can moreover hardly be imagined without its low costs, reproducibility and recognition value� From the rich cultural heritage which feeds into the cultural icon of the mask, a few examples deserve to be mentioned briefly for contextualization. In Greek (and later Roman) theater, masks de-individualized and often typified their wearer (Storey and Allan 79, 180) 6 , who gave voice to a dead, absent, supernatural, or inanimate being - hence the origin of the Latin term persona from per-sonare, “sound through” (Kaltenbrunner; Menke 118-19)� In V for Vendetta, this would approximate V’s self-proclaimed position as vox populi. Another both aesthetically and symbolically fitting context is the tradition of charivari or carnival, widespread in Europe under various names from the 13th century onwards until today� The moralist vigilantism and “authorized transgression” (Eco qtd� in Rozik 212) of carnival, prominently theorized by Bakhtin, will resurface in the following discussion of masking in protest� Both carnival and politics lead us to the example of the Venetian society mask bauta, a white half-mask worn with cape and hat which allowed 5 In his discussion of V for Vendetta, specifically the mask, as an identity-establishing text for the Occupy movement, Kane Anderson does mention that not all demonstrators wear masks. He does not assign much significance to this, arguing that the Occupiers “insert themselves into the already existent intertextuality of transmedial meanings that intentionally and unintentionally assign meanings to the larger Occupy Movement” (144)� 6 This typification also occurs in the Commedia dell’Arte tradition of masks (Tims 36)� Occupying Popular Culture 449 its wearer to “save face” in the confines of Venice’s political system (Johnson xi-xii; Kotte 203), and which bears aesthetic similarities to the masked hero’s costume in V for Vendetta. Iconic fictional references are masked swashbucklers such as Zorro and the Count of Monte Christo (Alexander; Keller) and the “capes and masks iconography and � � � secret identity thematic” of classical U�S�-American superhero narratives (Jenkins 27)� Alan Moore, the writer of V for Vendetta, has described his attempt to integrate, amongst others, literary associations such as Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, and Pynchon, and heroical figures like Nightraven, Batman, and Robin Hood, before artist David Lloyd suggested the iconic historical figure of Guy Fawkes (Moore 274). Guido “Guy” Fawkes was one of the Catholic conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 to kill King James I and instigate mass turmoil in the hopes of assuming power� Soon after the thwarted revolt and the execution of its instigators, the Fifth of November or “Bonfire Night” became a date of commemoration with public festivities still popular to this day in England (Call; Sharpe)� Inspired by the reference in V for Vendetta, many online actions or street protests of Anonymous make use of the symbolic value of this date� After this digression let me return to the current usage and iconic status of the Guy Fawkes mask� Since only a minority of Occupy protesters dons it and since Anonymous activities are primarily mediated visually and textually online, the iconic image of the Guy Fawkes mask is used by and attributed to both movements or collectives as an “anchor point” for their otherwise elusive nature and political stance� Oliver Kohns helpfully suggests reading the mask as part of the “visual politics of revolt” through “programmatic images” (Erben qtd� in Kohns 89)� Kohns stresses the importance of visual journalism and argues that this kind of “short-hand iconography” carries significant “identificatory potential” (90). As such, we can view the mask as reciprocally both a source for and an expression of collective identity, a central concept in the study of social movements. Polletta and Jasper define it as “an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution” (285; see also Snow)� Collective identities can overlap with or contain personal identities, they may be imagined rather than experienced, brought to collectives externally and/ or constructed internally, are procedural rather than fixed (Snow 2213), and they “are expressed in cultural materials - names, narratives, symbols, verbal styles, rituals, clothing, and so on” (Polletta and Jasper 285)� The mask as an icon is more than an expression of identity, it is also part of the framing processes of the collectives and movements by which it is used� This can be observed in the fact that the messages of Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street are highly self-referential� “We are Anonymous� We are legion” and “We are the 99 %” signify collective identity (or the potentiality thereof, see Kohns 94) - to adapt McLuhan’s catchphrase, “the movement is the message,” as it were. Yet, the significance of collective identity that I posit does not mean that it determines interests and structures (see Polletta and Jasper 285)� I will return to this later on� The analytical perspective of framing in social movement studies emerged as part of other work on “ideational and 450 c hristina m aria k och interpretive issues” (Benford 410) in the mid-1980s� The concept of “frame” derives from Goffman’s understanding of the term as “schemata of interpretation” (qtd� in Benford and Snow 614)� In the context of social movements, Snow and Benford have established “collective action frames,” which “also perform this interpretive function by simplifying and condensing aspects of the ‘world out there,’ but in ways that are ‘intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists’” (qtd� in Benford and Snow 614)� The construction of meaning becomes a key point in analyses of framing: “Whatever else social movement actors do, they seek to affect interpretations of reality among various audiences” (Benford 410)� I believe this focus on framing as the “signifying work” of activists in social movements rather than an understanding of frames as “cognitive frameworks” (Benford 416) is most applicable for the case of the Guy Fawkes mask� It is a “symbolic resourc[e],” “cultural material” for the production or amplification of interpretive frames and collective “identity work” in social movements (Benford and Snow)� 7 Specifically, the uses of the iconic mask can be understood as “visual frame amplification,” a process by which, in this case, images condense and intensify a message and allow for a faster reception, and thereby “amplify” frames of collective identity and collective action (Morrison and Isaac)� 8 Vital aspects in these processes are the communication practices and the dissemination and remediation of images via a host of different media, especially through online “social media” and the “internet as an image machine [Bildmaschine]” in general (Bredekamp 21, my translation)� Much has been speculated about the role of new media in movement mobilization, for instance in the case of the “Twitter revolutions” of the Arab Spring� This is not the place to chime in to the debate, but I think we can safely conclude that the role of social media and diversification of online new media outlets will continue to grow in the study of social movements (see Stein), not to speak of the growing attention for “cyberactivism” (see McCaughey and Ayers)� 7 Another analytical perspective is Anderson’s interpretation of the Guy Fawkes mask as an example of Henry Jenkins’ “cultural activator” (qtd� in Anderson 145) and Joanne Finklestein’s take on popular culture as “toolkits for staging social identity” (Anderson 148)� 8 It is important to note at this point that I am not aiming at establishing a causal relationship between the use of the iconic Guy Fawkes mask by activists and their mobilization efforts� This had been a concern of Benford in 1997 in his critical evaluation of framing approaches when he states that “we tend to work backward from successful mobilization to the framing activists proffered and then posit a casual [sic] linkage between the two” (412)� Rather, similar to Oliver Kohns, my concern is to uncover symbolic functions and effects of the iconic mask through interpretation, cultural contextualization, and tracing the historical development of this iconography� Also, I am adapting this analytical framework in light of the fact that Anonymous might, strictly speaking, not constitute a “social movement” as a “social network[] that engage[s] in sustained collective actions, ha[s] a common purpose and challenge[s] the interests and beliefs of those with power” (Stein 750 referencing Tarrow)� Occupying Popular Culture 451 Fig� 1� Masked protester� Original image by Flickr user Strevo, 10 Feb� 2008, CC-BY-SA 2�0� III The Mask in Political Protest In political protest, masks and masking obviously carry a lot of baggage from a rich cultural history of masks in performance, ritual, and play (Kotte 197- 98)� 9 Depending on their specific style and usage, they can evoke connotations that range from the (para)military to the theatrical, from playful mystery to a lack of sincerity or honest intentions (Ruiz 265)� Plain face coverings such as balaclavas may be called masks, while a stricter use of the term reserves it for “iconic representations � � � [of] the face” (Köpping 78), which can then also express certain “character” traits (see Rozik 214)� If we imagine a setting in which political actors don masks in public, the functions of masking range from “the utilitarian” to “the theatrical” (Wilsher 11-12), in other words, lie on a continuum of disguise and display (Kotte 198-209; see also Kohns 93)� In contrast to disguises, “[m]asks hide a true identity in a visible way,” James Johnson asserts (qtd� in Ruiz 266)� 10 Thus, concealment and expression are two sides of the same coin (Kotte 203)� 9 The examples I mention are cases that have found their way into a North American and/ or European discourse, even if their origin may lie elsewhere - in Latin America, for instance� 10 Here, Jameson omits the possible notion of mask-wearing as transformative, e�g� in Shaman rituals (Rozik 211; Tims 36), something that fed into a Christian aversion to “demonic” masking or theater altogether (Kotte 200-01)� Also, Jameson’s mention of a concealed “true identity” should be taken with a grain of salt� 452 c hristina m aria k och For cases of political masking in which pragmatic concealment is foregrounded, Ruiz lists terrorist organizations, guerrillas, and “black bloc” protesters� Scarves concealing parts of the face and particularly black balaclavas are the primary means of masking here, the “popular iconography” of which evokes secrecy, illegality, and/ or military connotations (Ruiz 266)� Often worn in combination with black or camouflage clothing suitable for unhindered body movement or even combat, these guises become part of a quasiuniform (Ruiz 267) and “provide anonymity, de-individualize, and increase impenetrability” (Kohns 94)� For these political actors it is paramount to hide their identity from direct opponents, e�g� from neo-Nazis eager to launch antileftist vendettas, or from legal persecution on behalf of the state (see Ruiz 268)� 11 In the words of the Harvard Law Review, “[m]asks can be a powerful aid to unpopular speech” (“Constitutional Law”)� Especially in a time in which almost every protester, counter-protester, and member of the police forces - with obviously varying degrees of power - can employ a smartphone camera or professional surveillance equipment to render adversaries identifiable and publicize their actions, masking once again is a pragmatic response to imminent threat, something that should not be forgotten in an analysis otherwise concentrating first and foremost on symbolic dimensions. The interests of state authorities to identify individual demonstrators have resulted in legal codification of masking as well (see Ruiz 266). Indeed, particularly the aforementioned New York City’s Mask Law of 1845 has been in the spotlight of recent protest movements up to the fact that the “legal fact sheet” of the Occupy Wall Street website provides information on mask-wearing in public (“Legal Fact Sheet”)� The mid-19th century law prevents people from wearing masks in gatherings except for cases of “a masquerade party or like entertainment” (N�Y� Penal Law § 240�35(4) qtd� in “Constitutional Law” 2777)� It was originally a reaction to the so-called “antirent movement” of poor tenant farmers, who dressed up as “Indians” and attacked police officers in protests against de facto feudal structures (Bogad 78)� The “masquerade” loophole, intended to preserve upper-class entertainment (78), now encourages protesters’ attempts to circumvent the ban by emphasizing carnivalesque and performance elements� Notwithstanding the masquerade-like elements of the Occupy protests, the law seems to have been enforced quite liberally (Jilani; Hallas)� 12 In addition to the pragmatic concerns mentioned above, the mask appears to be a comment on political secrecy, “undermin[ing] the public sphere ideal of transparent communication” (Ruiz 265) and calling attention to the secrets of power jarring with “modern democracy’s ideal of transparency” (Horn 105)� 11 I am disregarding the specific challenges of combat situations and focusing on street protests in so-called Western countries here� 12 Due to Occupy Wall Street’s nascency in New York City, I have focused on the local anti-mask statute there� A similar law exists in parts of Washington D�C� (Freed), and Canada and the UK have seen discussions of mask bans before announced Anonymous protests on the Fifth of November (Ruiz 266; Vaas), to just name a few other examples� Occupying Popular Culture 453 Of course, the functions of plain face coverings of terrorists, guerrilleros, or black bloc protesters listed above also serve the aim of expression� Revolutionary or terrorist groups - Ruiz lists the IRA, ETA, and Hamas; one might add the visually iconic Black September Organization of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack - may calculate a particular psychological effect� Beckstette explains that the use of military symbols can simulate larger organizational structures and thus increase the perceived dangerousness (417)� Likewise, masking can evidently carry “menacing undertones” (Ruiz 269)� On the other hand, guerrilla attire also invites sympathies or romanticizing attitudes� A well-documented case is that of the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas, Mexico, an example which also figures prominently in Ruiz’ analysis. By now the most famous figure of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico (1994-), Subcomandante Marcos is an iconic character with interesting similarities to the trope of anonymity and universality we can observe in Anonymous contexts� Besides other iconic props Marcos is known for covering his face with a black balaclava� 13 Despite the fact that other Zapatista rebels also hide their faces, Marcos has acquired almost mythical qualities� He regards the mask as a mirror inviting others to identify with the struggle or even the figure Marcos himself (Klein 3), thereby stressing the role of the collective (Ruiz 268)� Similar to the way in which the Guy Fawkes mask purports to offer a condensed image of V as the vox populi (Moore and Lloyd 189), of Anonymous as “the people” (TheAnonMessage), or of protesters united as “the 99%,” the iconic personhood of Marcos is universal in the sense that it invites manifold re-inscriptions and significations. Marcos and the Zapatista movement appear as a modern, televised, internet-transmitted revolutionary movement, which enables them to foster transnational support networks (Olesen; Garrido and Halavais), but also to approximate images of older rebellions: Marcos meets journalists on horseback, smokes a pipe, and wears guerillero clothing - strongly reminiscent of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, transnational revolutionary icon of the Left from the 1960s and 70s until today� At the end of May 2014, the fate of Subcomandante Marcos took a surprising twist: He announced his own disappearance� In a speech at a memorial event for the killed Zapatista “Galeano,” he explains in his characteristic rhetoric (Khasnabish 134) that the figure of Marcos was but a “carnival costume [botarga]”, a “trick of terrible and marvelous magic [un truco de magia terrible y maravillosa]” conjured up for modern media� The new generation, he states, is able to fight needing neither leaders nor saviors (“ni líderes ni caudillos ni mesías ni salvadores”) (Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, my translation)� Regardless of the probability that the “man behind the mask” will continue to be active in the Zapatista struggle under different pseudonyms, the statements are interesting in that they move the iconic figure Marcos closer to the case of the Guy Fawkes mask� In other words, even though they might be of a more obvious pragmatic use value in protests or combats, the iconic images of guerrilla fighters may be more carnivalesque and theatrical 13 See Henck for a history of “the man and the mask�” 454 c hristina m aria k och than appears at first glance. 14 Marcos’ identity is, in fact, not a secret, just like Anonymous’ actual technical measures for anonymity are few (Pras et al�; Mansfield-Devine). Moreover, the emphasis on a flat hierarchy and rejection of a personality cult speaks to both Anonymous and Occupy. Yet, the figure of Marcos is an example of “iconic personhood” (Leypoldt) in which the rhetoric of “everyone can be me” has never truly prevented the emergence of a single heroic figure, which stands in contrast to the Guy Fawkes mask. As mentioned above, the fact that the Guy Fawkes mask shows a simplified “face” emphasizes the expressive function of masks. The now iconic features - “the arched eyebrows over slitted eyes; the thin mustache upturned over a mirthless grin; the long goatee dropping from the jaw; the ivory complexion of a corpse,” in Webbs’ words (543) - may be reminiscent of some of the historical drawings and engravings of Fawkes� 15 Yet, the face is typified and shows little verisimilitude - it exhibits few details and those existing are strongly contrasted, perhaps reminiscent of the exaggerated contours of pantomime face paint (e�g� the Pierrot/ Pagliaccio character of the Commedia dell’Arte)� The universalization of a white male “face” connoting European cultural traditions, to some extent belying the heterogeneous image of the protesters that engage with it, provokes further investigation in a later section of this article� Arguably, the most prominent feature of the mask is the aforementioned broad grin� This is the face of a trickster, reveling in his own mysteriousness and ambiguity about his status as hero or villain� The smile is provocative because it asserts superiority, and as part of the mask it is unflinching: The challenged authority cannot “wipe the smirk off your face.” The mask’s “face” does not lose its composure and resort to plain anger; rather, any action taken by an opponent will suggest that “the joke is on them�” The aesthetic qualities of the Guy Fawkes mask bring it close to typified “theatrical” costumes - consider the pair of “tragic” and “comic” masks which has become an iconic representation of theater. The fictional and nonfictional settings in which it appears display both “theater-like” elements as well as theatricality in the broader sense of a “culture of staging” (Fischer- Lichte, Einleitung)� While the demonstrators may not view themselves as actors on a political stage, they still stage a protest and voice their resistance towards an addressee, as abstract as this latter may be� Their protest cannot be meaningful if there is no audience - Keller asserts the same for terrorism (46) - and yet the audience does not need to be bodily co-present� The presence of cameras - including the protesters’ own smartphones - inspires a confidence that there is and will be an audience, a larger online community of supporters or mediatized bystanders or opponents, which is aware of the 14 A stronger focus on aestheticization and media appeal can be observed in the cases of the Russian performance art/ activist group Pussy Riot and the U�S�-American feminist artist collective Guerilla Girls� The former satirically appropriates terrorist or guerrilla insignia in turning the knitted black balaclava into brightly colored and adorned masks, while the latter uses oversized gorilla masks in their public appearances� 15 Webbs cites a caricature by George Cruickshank of 1840; I deem an engraving by Crispijn de Passe the Elder entitled The Gunpowder Plot Conspirators (1605) even more fitting. Occupying Popular Culture 455 protest� Many demonstrations exhibit the traits of staging, or mise en scène, in that they require a “process of planning � � �, testing, and determining strategies which aim at bringing forth the performance’s materiality” (Fischer- Lichte, Transformative Power 188)� This brings us back to carnival as a kind of cultural performance� The political import of carnival is its function of “reinforcing social order by allowing its temporary subversion” (Bruner 138)� Yet there is a chance for resistance when carnivalesque protest transcends the temporal and spatial limits of institutionalized carnival to become, for instance, a form of civil disobedience (138). Similar to what the figure of the trickster (or jester) symbolizes, the emancipatory potential lies in the process of breaking rules in order to render them visible and to expose their “hidden abstract dimensions” (Köpping 88): “By those transgressions, the actual, concrete violence of life in a hierarchically structured society is metaphorically put on the table” (88)� Carnivalesque forms of protest can be found in activist performance art such as Carnival against Capitalism, Reclaim the Streets, Art and Revolution, The Church of Life After Shopping, The Billionaires for Bush, or the Yes Men (Bruner 139; Wiegmink)� These forms of protest can, of course, also be observed in demonstrations in which participants do not regard themselves as actor-activists but still employ, for instance, satirical slogans or expressive masks� Ruiz argues that “the more frivolous, carnivalesque connotations of mask wearing” are particularly appealing to those “committed to nonviolent direct action,” but then introduces a much more convincing restriction in saying that many of these examples of masquerade are “only effective because of [the mask’s] more menacing undertones” (268-69)� I think this holds especially true for the usage of the Guy Fawkes mask� Carnivalesque protest plays with a defining aspect of theater, i.e. “reduced consequences�” By this, and by another aspect labeled “emphasis,” Kotte means the foregrounding of theatrical action by, e�g�, gestus or acoustic signals, and that conflict within the role play of the scenic sequence does not entail real-world consequences (37-39)� Activists “performing” acts of civil disobedience, for instance, operate precisely in this gray area of audiences’ judgment (Wiegmink 69)� While political protests using masks do not promise reduced consequences, this aspect leaves a trace in the effect of the mask to veil one’s individuality and redirect responsibility to the collective - albeit symbolically rather than de facto� Demonstrations with traits of carnival tend to test the limits of authorities in that they operate within constraints of time and space� As Bruner states, “when the window of opportunity closes carnivalesque humor, especially political consequential humor, is no longer tolerated or welcome” (140)� 16 Employing humor for political purposes is daring in general� As Marjolein ’t Hart summarizes, “[i]n strongly polarized settings, humour is one of the 16 Although I think Bruner’s take on carnivalesque protest is very insightful, his frequent anthropomorphizations of the state as a being capable of displaying humor are, despite his occasional mentions of “state actors” instead, somewhat misleading and risk to obliterate complex structural relations of power� 456 c hristina m aria k och first victims” in order not to jeopardize the righteousness of one’s claims or simply because humor gives way to anger and fear (2)� The success of jokes is, of course, further complicated by their dependence on a given context and culture� Leaving the risks aside, humor can be a powerful tool to unite and empower political movements, a “true ‘weapon of the weak’” (1)� Masking can also alleviate the vulnerable position of protesters having to utter collective demands in a discursive environment that often does not work in their favor� 17 As Ruiz very convincingly reasons, the mask may be “the coalition movement’s postmodern answer to the banner�” In contrast to the banner as “a textually prescriptive technology of communication,” the mask facilitates “an open-ended range of protesting positions�” Ruiz concludes that this can unite “activists from both idealistic and antagonistic traditions” (274) - the mask can be a statement without the wearer having to make a statement, so to speak� IV A Point of Departure: The Guy Fawkes Mask in V for Vendetta as Graphic Novel and Film How the Guy Fawkes mask is lifted from its fictional origins is reminiscent of Tarrow’s metaphorical “costumes of the revolution” (qtd� in Herkenrath 48) and of the ways in which movements are, in his words, “both consumers of existing cultural meanings and producers of new meanings” (qtd� in Benford and Snow 629). The texts of origin, the graphic novel and film adaptation of V for Vendetta, are already laden with complex political messages� Although the mask has become a transmedial phenomenon (Wolf) and can become a prop in protests without any recourse to its source, especially Anonymous hacktivists sometimes still appropriate the story’s rhetoric and aesthetics� 18 I will outline some of the aspects which I believe still surface in the contemporary engagement with the mask in online activism, street protests, and popular culture in general� Alan Moore and David Lloyd set their work V for Vendetta in the near future, a dystopian Great Britain ruled by a fascist dictatorship which persecutes and murders ethnic minorities, political opponents, and homosexuals� On the 1997 anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, the anarchist terrorist V, the protagonist of the story, blows up the Houses of Parliament in an overt reference to Guy Fawkes� This triggers the regime’s efforts to catch him and cover up the political damage via the potent government propaganda machinery� V rescues the sixteen-year-old orphan Evey Hammond, who then lives with him in secrecy� He wears a mask at all times during the narrative - neither the reader nor the characters (except one) ever see his face� Likewise, his life story remains largely undisclosed� Evey gradually comes to support his cause but 17 See Stein 750 for an overview of studies in which mainstream media mechanisms of distortion and exclusion of social movement positions are analyzed� 18 Whereas Ruiz’ brief discussion of the mask does not differentiate between its settings, Kohns’ more extended analysis draws on the aesthetic and political implications of both fictional narratives. Occupying Popular Culture 457 is appalled at V’s ready use of violence and nonchalance about it� V stages a hoax imprisonment as a rite of passage for Evey (Carretero-González 215), who eventually embraces her transformation� When V is tracked down and killed, she completes his plan to destroy Downing Street and publicly assumes his guise, but even in death V’s mask is not lifted once� In the graphic novel, the mask is a central element for the “secret identity” theme common to superhero narratives (R� Reynolds; Jenkins)� The mask disguises and protects as well as empowers its wearer. We find a complex play with illusion and its disruption, with masking and unmasking on the levels of both story and discourse� This foregrounds the materiality and functions of the mask instead of allowing it to fully become V’s “face” - at one point, V even changes into the costume and mask of a vaudeville conférencier for a cruel game with one of his former tormentors (Moore and Lloyd 31; see also Anderson 146)� V’s carnival and humor, his staging of the “grand illusion” (Moore and Lloyd 31) is brutal to even the person closest to him, which at first glance hardly makes him an apt candidate for veneration� However, V himself evokes self-ironically the demonic connotations of masking (Moore and Lloyd 54) and makes clear that he strives to be seen not as an irreplaceable individual but as the mere embodiment of an idea, thus rising to an “all-purpose symbol” (Moore and Lloyd 252)� This universality would not be possible without his anonymity, Little explains and adds that “if anyone could be the man behind the mask, the suggestion is that anyone can stand up to fascism, anyone can make a difference” (185)� The visual prominence of the mask in the graphic novel, evidence also for the eventual realization of the regime that “[p]eople need symbols” (Moore and Lloyd 252), may already foreshadow the iconic status the mask has gained after transcending page and screen� In the highly successful film adaptation of V for Vendetta, significant changes of plot and setting shift the graphic novel’s conflict between anarchy and fascism and roots in Thatcherite Britain to a projection of U�S�-American post-9/ 11 neo-conservative politics of law and order and mass surveillance (Booker; Keller 34; Call)� 19 The film opens with a re-enactment of Guy Fawkes’ arrest and execution, a scene which is not part of the original narrative but makes the adaptation intelligible for a North American audience more likely to be unfamiliar with the historical event (Booker 187)� The spotlight is turned on a more individualized V as an “archetypal hero - the good man wronged” (R� Reynolds 129) and the complicated intimacy between him and Evey� As such, the film invites followers to continue V’s legacy much more strongly than the graphic novel, which rather suggests that the person is exchangeable, the idea is not� Still, neither the characters nor the spectators see V’s face unmasked and his universality is repeatedly emphasized. The filmic V offers 19 Writer Alan Moore frankly determined that the screenplay was “’rubbish’” (qtd� in Itzkoff) and, causing a great public stir, demanded to be taken off the film credits. The anti-fascist, anarchist tenets of the original narrative are a general trait of his work that is rooted in the UK counterculture and activist art of the 1970s (see Gray, “Underground”; “Resistance”)� Alan Moore’s supportive medial presence in the context of the Occupy movement (Walker) is interesting in this respect� 458 c hristina m aria k och an approach to social upheaval quite different from the one in the graphic novel: He has developed from the sarcastic and aloof vigilante and terrorist to a carnivalesque, violent, yet sincere elite revolutionary (see Anderson 143), whose carefully orchestrated mass broadcasts supposedly enlighten the slumbering masses (see Walsh)� Kohns follows Call’s analysis that both V’s mass broadcasts and his acts of terrorist destruction serve to create “a narrative about the possibility of capturing and seizing official representation” (96). Kohns connects this to Thomas Hobbes’ concept of the state as an “artificial person,” derived from the Latin persona for mask, which is representative of its subjects (94-95)� Wearing the mask, Kohns argues, the thus anonymized individual revokes the authorization of representation once passed on to the government (97)� Towards the end of the film version, V’s public announcements encourage a massive flow of identically clad and masked citizens to confront the military, to walk past it and to stop and uncover their faces, in awe of the violent spectacle of explosion V has prepared for them� The ambivalence of this scene has been pointed out by James Reynolds, who argues that the film omits the graphic novel’s anarchist and “uneasy imperative to choose what comes next” and instead simply (and problematically) presumes “a better world” (133; cf� Anderson 149)� Likewise, critic David Walsh condemns the film, arguing that it is ultimately antidemocratic to suggest that mass insurrections can be provoked by political assassinations and acts of terrorism� He asks, “[s]ince the population has taken no part in the ‘revolution,’ has not advanced its own social awareness in any noticeable manner, how is a new, liberated society supposed to emerge from all this? ” Finally, Kohns makes another enlightening observation about the film’s climax. Evoking Carl Schmitt’s democracy theory, that is, his argument that “the people as such must become visible to be able to emerge as a political actor” (99), Kohns notes that the mass assemblage of people is staged like a river, a “steady flow” (100). This iconography is borrowed from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin (100) and enforced here through present-day cinematography and the uniformity of protesters in their masks and capes� Kohns concludes that “democracy at its most theatrical moment - the moment when the people are forming themselves into a political subject - can only resort to the same visual aesthetics as totalitarian ideology” (101)� I will return to these problematic implications in the following section� For now, let me add a comment on the “other side” of the antagonistic spectacle that unfolds here. Of course, the aesthetics of the filmic protesters are also a comment on the (literal) uniformity of their opponents� With reference to Debord, Anderson reminds us that “[d]emonstrations are always theatrical events� They put real bodies on display as a spectacle of dissention” (147; see also Bruner)� In a politically conservative essay from 1982 on the “staging” of German protests within the peace and environmentalist movements, the author casts the demonstrations as “open-air performances” generating their own audiences, including the anticipated appearance of the “cops” in “martial costumes like medieval warriors” (Hildebrandt 43, my translation)� Occupying Popular Culture 459 Nevertheless it is evident that we as onlookers and in hindsight should not overemphasize the theatrical aspects of protests, in which costumes are also quite pragmatic protective gear and the theatrical protagonist-antagonist logic can have very real consequences for both sides� V The Guy Fawkes Mask of Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street - “We the People” in Post-Democracy? Now how did V’s mask enter the realm of online activism and street protests? Leypoldt, once again, regards cultural icons “as conceptual markers for the felt experiences � � � of collective forms of attraction” (12)� Especially in this case, where the iconic mask is transposed from a fictional source to the context of protest and activism, the emotional investment with the mask and its significations suggest processes of fandom, e.g. the “detachability” of cult objects from a text (Hills)� As quoted above, the mask as artifact was originally sold as fan gear� Anderson judges the fact that mask-wearing Occupiers reap profits for the mask-selling corporations as a sell out to their anti-capitalist agenda (161)� Granted, it is ironic that Time Warner earns royalties from mask sales (Bilton), but too simplistic to infer a movement’s partial failure from this� As Call comments, “if we use consumer markets to acquire the tools we require to critique capitalism, we are only making practical use of the existing instruments in order to transcend the existing order of things - a very anarchist proposition” (171n2)� Before Occupiers in New York City sported the mask, though, it was seized by the hacker/ activist collective Anonymous� From its 2003 beginnings in the online message board 4chan to its latest alliances with the Occupy Wall Street movement, the progression of Anonymous has left government officials, journalists, and scholars more or less in the dark about the inner workings of what is often misguidedly viewed as a distinct group� 20 As obscure as individual “Anons” may be, their graphic representation is known all the better: A stylized figure in a suit, a question mark substituting its head, in front of a globe encircled by a laurel wreath (reminiscent of the United Nations emblem) functions as Anonymous’ logo� The other signature sign is the Guy Fawkes mask, appearing in street protests, worn in video clips on the internet, or simply as an image in avatars or memes� The mask originally appeared in 2006 on a “subchannel” of 4chan, an online image board founded in the United States in 2003 which has become hugely popular and at the same time “widely perceived to be one of the most offensive quarters of the Internet” (Coleman, “Weirdness” 83; see also Stryker; Mendoza)� 4chan requires no previous registration; consequently, the majority of posts are labeled “Anonymous�” Parts of 4chan are committed 20 Whenever I speak of unspecified Anonymous operations I refer to activities which seem to have garnered broad support in the “hive mind” (Norton, “2011”) and much media attention under the general heading “Anonymous�” 460 c hristina m aria k och to online pranks which eventually evolved to the 2008 birth of Anonymous with anti-Scientology activities such as DDoS attacks, still one of the collective’s most broadly used “hacking” techniques� DDoS is short for distributed denial-of-service, an attack by which large numbers of external communication requests result in the collapse of a website’s host, causing the website to be unavailable - no actual “hacking” is involved (Pras et al. 1-2). DDoS attacks can be fired using very simple programs (Mansfield-Devine 5). Hence, these “hacktivist” operations in fact do not require much technical sophistication and are, in fact, not very “anonymous” at all (Pras et al�)� With DDoS attacks, everyone (presupposed basic internet skills and access) can participate, just as everyone can discuss in IRCs, tweet electronic support, and don a Guy Fawkes mask for street protests� This is not to say that internal hierarchies are absent, be it because of more time invested, more sophisticated skills in hacking or communication, or hierarchies along the lines of gender, race, and class� Yet apart from a kind of “meritocratic populism” within the hive mind, the dominant ethos is one of the “effacement of the self” (Coleman, “Weirdness” 92), an idealized collective arising from a network of interconnected individuals much in the same way that the internet exists as a server network� The loose network thrives on its image of collectivity, of being “legion,” and renders the mask’s disguising function a rhetoric rather than a reality: it “manages to achieve spectacular visibility and individual invisibility at once” (Coleman, “Weirdness” 93)� Ruiz’ somewhat similar general assertion is that “the image of the masked face has the potential to make the previously unseen majority visible and is therefore a purposeful form of presence” (264)� Kohns likens this logic to Elias Canetti’s notion of power as impenetrability and convincingly relates this to the anonymously published contemporary revolutionary manifesto The Coming Insurrection, in which clandestine invisibility until the eventual onset of the revolt is prized (94)� Anonymous’ origins on 4chan are significant because they point towards the special kind of hacktivism espoused by the nascent collective, namely, of “doing it for the lulz�” Lulz, derived from the acronym LOL for “laugh(ing) out loud,” is scathing humor, ridicule, schadenfreude (Norton, “Introduction”), and the pursuit thereof sparked the first Anonymous “operations.” Soon, however, more serious objectives arose - e�g� activism against internet censorship and government surveillance - and caused internal dispute “about whether they should protest in earnest or remain faithful to Anonymous’ madcap roots” (Coleman, “Weirdness” 88)� Anonymous (and V, I might add) might be likened to the figure of the trickster, as Coleman proposes and Norton elaborates in rather 4chan-esque terms: The trickster isn’t the good guy or the bad guy, it’s the character that exposes contradictions, initiates change and moves the plot forward� One minute, the loving and heroic trickster is saving civilization� A few minutes later the same trickster is cruel, kicking your ass and eating babies as a snack� (Norton, “Introduction”) Occupying Popular Culture 461 This is an ongoing struggle and an instructive example of the inherent ambivalences of carnivalesque activism� As in the case of charivari, the rogue pursuit of lulz requires at least the illusion of anonymity under a collective guise� Anonymous’ lulzmaking is coupled with strong moral convictions and legitimized as vigilante justice� Here I agree with Anderson’s argument that the mask’s fictional associations “generat[e] a sense of truth in the form of emotional capital” (150), something that I think loses force outside of Anonymous, where V for Vendetta references are scarce� The connection of the hacktivist collective and Occupy Wall Street may not be obvious at first. Yet Anonymous “began acting as a crucial, though informal, public relations wing for Occupy Wall Street in the Fall” of 2011, and masked Anons personally attended the protests (Coleman, “Weirdness” 94; see also Norton, “2011”)� An Anonymous YouTube video (xen0nymous) spread the call for mass protests which had originated from the editors of the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters (Kraushaar)� These and other videos (TheAnonPress; TheAnonMessage) appropriate the V for Vendetta film version’s aesthetics of revolutionary broadcasts “to all people�” Speakers alternatingly present themselves as elite revolutionaries who speak from outside of politics and the law on behalf of the people or cast themselves as the people themselves: “United we stand, divided we fall� We are the people� We are the only system� We are Anonymous” (TheAnonMessage)� These, “the people” in theory, began to assemble publicly in the summer of 2011 and eventually established a squatter camp in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street� Two relatively violent police operations against Occupy demonstrations in New York City sparked media attention and the rapid diffusion of similar actions across the United States and hundreds of cities abroad (Kraushaar; Costanza-Chock)� Soon after the squatters had established themselves, observers of the protests commented on the alleged nebulosity of OWS’s causes (Kraushaar 77; Butler qtd� in Anderson 145) - they were demanding demands, so to speak� Indeed, OWS’s most prolific catchphrase was - and is - not a request for or rejection of something, but a self-referential assertion: “We are the 99%�” This phrase sets off the allegedly powerful 1% of the population from the large majority and, thus, implicitly comments on the U�S� society’s stark inequalities in income and wealth distribution (see Stiglitz)� In connection with the highly symbolic nucleus of the protest movement at “Wall Street,” epitome of global financial capitalism, this is a more sophisticated political statement than the common moralistic condemnation of bankers’ “greed” (Solty 13)� Arguably, the most important political agenda of OWS are “formal” features of the movement: Dissatisfaction with the state of democratic politics led them to experiment with a form of protest without charismatic leaders and with a radically democratic decision-making process. As Slavoj Žižek optimistically wrote in October 2011, the protest’s vigor but unintelligibility was one of its greatest political assets: 462 c hristina m aria k och What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands� Yes, the protests did create a vacuum - a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new� The Occupiers thereby avoided to be “co-opted by existing political parties” or to “recognise the legitimacy of the state as an agent capable of or willing to implement policy” (Pickerill and Krinsky 283)� Both Anonymous and Occupy employ the iconic mask to signal an inclusive collective� Occupy does not follow Anonymous’ rhetoric of secrecy and complete de-individualization, however� Rather, the use of the mask signals the protesters’ association or solidarity with a diverse movement� For a movement without membership, carrying a Guy Fawkes mask can make supporters mutually identifiable (although appearing in the same space with or without mask suffices), and it unifies dispersed protests especially for an audience which perceives the events via news media images� The mask alone makes for a theatrical image. Slavoj Žižek has labeled OWS as a carnival, a commentator has designated one of Anonymous’ street protests a “dress rehearsal revolution” (Norton, “2011”), and demonstrations on the Fifth of November are staged as re-enactments of V for Vendetta� 21 The film character V has accordingly staged “his” revolution, mailing costumes to the mass of intended actors, who then comply with his wishes� As such, the characteristic of masking that Rozik lists as a “main disadvantage” in theater, namely “that it diverts expression from face to body and hinders vocal communication” (214; see also Alström 134), becomes a benefit in protests that stage (bodily and symbolic) presence (see Ruiz) rather than concretely verbalized demands� Let me delve deeper into the political implications of the Guy Fawkes mask as a protest icon for Anonymous and Occupy, starting with a widely transmitted on-site address of Judith Butler to Occupy Wall Street activists� She asserts that “as bodies, we arrive together in public � � � enacting the phrase ‘We the People’” (Butler), and legitimizes the protests’ contentual vagueness or void by shifting the focus from “we demand something” to “we demand�” Regardless of whether or not it holds true empirically, the efforts of OWS are to live up in public perception to their dictum “we are the 99%�” This is similar to Anonymous’ self-presentation “we are legion,” but references more strongly the democratic promise of the demos as sovereign� As Butler’s formulation “enacting ‘We the People’” intimates, the demos is something that on the one hand needs to be performatively constituted, and on the other hand requires representation� The Guy Fawkes mask is iconic for this production of “a shared sense of ‘one-ness’ or ‘we-ness’” (Snow 2213)� Oliver Kohns employs the term “democratic desire” for this wish for a formation of the people as a political subject outside of representation by the state (101)� Yet if we shift our perspective, as Warren and Mansbridge suggest, away from the demos to the significance of kratein as the other central 21 See http: / / www�millionmaskmovement�com/ (30 May 2014)� Occupying Popular Culture 463 element of democracy, we are led to wonder about the potency of Occupy’s democratizing impulse, as furthering “the capacity to act and implement decisions” (87) has not been the movement’s initial focus� It appears that in the cases of V for Vendetta (the film much more strongly than the anarchy vs� fascism-themed graphic novel), Anonymous, and Occupy, we find a popular analysis of the current state of democracy which chimes with Colin Crouch’s topical diagnosis of politics in the “Western” (post-)industrialized world as increasingly post-democratic� Crouch explains that [u]nder this model [of post-democracy], while elections certainly exist and can change governments, public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams� The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them� � � � [P]olitics is really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests� (4) This model, Crouch concedes, is as much an exaggeration as the “maximal ideal” of democracy as a situation in which a great majority of informed citizens participates actively in the processes of agenda-setting and decisionmaking (2-4)� However, he sees the balance tipping strongly in favor of postdemocracy. Crouch’s model, very briefly sketched here, may be a top-down analysis which misconstrues the politicization and resistance of people beside the official channels. 22 Furthermore, we might observe a clash between two models of democracy in parts of the rhetoric of the film version of V for Vendetta and Anonymous: The emphasis on the protection of citizens from a powerful state represents the ideal of negative rights, characteristic for a U�S�- American model of liberal democracy� 23 An amendment of a post-democratic situation might, however, precisely call for the opposite - a focus on positive rights, i�e�, citizens’ participation, in the republican model of democracy (Crouch 13)� This comes closer to the model of Occupy Wall Street, which has “revived the classical image of the nation as res-publica, the nation as a public thing” (Brown, “Return”), albeit without much capacity to act upon it� Nonetheless, relevant here is not so much an empirical reality check of Crouch’s proposition, but rather a more or less prevalent perception of “western” politics as post-democratic� The common ground of both versions of V for Vendetta, Anonymous, and Occupy Wall Street seems to be the stance that “’[t]here is something terribly wrong with this country,’” as the character V states (V for Vendetta), and that ultimately only “the people” can fix it. Masking themselves, political “actors” mirror and simultaneously “unmask” 22 Other theoretical objections may be that a distinction between “staged” public and “real” backdoor politics is simplistic (Warstat 177-78), or that Crouch’s analysis is based on an idealization of democracy during Fordism which neglects the many mechanisms of exclusion, e�g�, of women and minorities� 23 I should note that obviously, V for Vendetta presents us with an authoritarian or even fascist state, not a democracy in whichever shape� The arguments still hold for both if we accept that the graphic novel can very well be read as a commentary on the Thatcher government (as the author and the artist suggest in their preface), and that the film bears obvious parallels to the Bush administration’s policies. 464 c hristina m aria k och the invisibility and anonymity of political, economic, and media elites which appear to manipulate and constrain the actual political sovereign, the demos� In Ruiz’ words, “the refusal to be seen and categorized by the state is empowering in that it exposes, and then unsettles, the power dynamics that structure public space” (264)� Demos, as well as democracy, are floating signifiers in a discourse in which agents perpetually contend for the power to (re)define and represent them (Brown, “Demokraten” 55)� Moreover, if V’s followers, Anons, and Occupy activists voice an “us,” there is an implied “them” - the vague notion of the 1%, for instance, and/ or “the government” in the case of V for Vendetta� They revoke a relationship of political representation with their legislators (Kohns), who can no longer claim this “we” for themselves� 24 With their voicing of dissent, the revocation of hegemonic consensus, the fictional and non-fictional protesters may be perceived as opening up spaces for counterpublics (Fraser; see also Wiegmink 79) or antagonistically bringing forth an accessible public space (Marchart)� This does indeed bear an emancipatory potential, but not without some pitfalls� 25 Occupy Wall Street’s denial of legitimization of the political representatives, undiluted by overt thematic demands, is a forceful statement indeed� However, since it remains unclear how democratic collective action is supposed to emerge, political elites can continue to benefit from their as yet unharmed capacity to act� With their emphasis of “the people” and the consequent “us versus them” accusations against “the elite,” the onset of the Occupy protests can very justifiably be met with the verdict of populism (see Mudde)� I agree that with these rather simplistic tenets the movement or collective has seemed ill-equipped to develop solutions to the pressing political concerns at hand� Yet this particular version of a populist agenda, which comes with the intention to deliberate the state of democratic decision-making, appears to be among the best of its kind, to put it crudely� In the case of Anonymous, to continue the list of pitfalls, what is evoked is not so much the demos but rather an elite network that acts on behalf of “the people�” The rogue lulzmaking and avenging collective has seemed to feel sympathetic towards the filmic figure of V as a tyrannicide, noble avenger, and vigilante hero who indulges in and jokes about his murders (see Jung 29- 33) - and yet, his courtly sophistication and politeness is so successfully set apart from the regime’s crudeness that it suggests righteousness� The trouble 24 See also Ruiz 273 on Occupy’s us/ them negotiations� 25 Anderson does not see a progressive potential here, putting forth that “[i]n hiding their identities under the guise of a character so linked to violence and civil unrest, [the protesters] challenge the professed aims of transparency and nonviolence in the large Occupy movement” (Anderson 145-46)� This negative assertion might stem from the fact that he entirely ignores the role of Anonymous as a mediator between the mask’s origin and its subsequent use in protests, and appears to assume that Occupy protesters are generally aware of the mask’s original implications (150-51)� His assertion that “the mask always exists in conversation with the violence depicted” in graphic novel and film (146) oversimplifies the complex processes in which the significatory potential of cultural icons is broadened and reworked� Occupying Popular Culture 465 with transposing this concept of terrorism and vigilante justice from an authoritarian to a (however deficient) democratic system is, obviously, that both operate “outside the limits of the law, but effecting justice” (Köpping 84), thereby putting efficacy and “output” above democratic decision-making. Paradoxically, the paradigmatic vigilante hero can step outside the constraints of society with - in the case of democracies - its negotiations and interdependencies and employ violence for the creation of a community or society which is then intended to manage peacefully without it, as Köpping explains with a different fictional example (84). This transposition, without providing instead a serious anarchist alternative as does the graphic novel, undermines both constitutionality and majority rule as what may be deemed core principles of democracy� Similarly, the sympathies for a moment of decision in antagonistic confrontation, the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction, which become evident in the film version of V for Vendetta and Anonymous’ rhetoric and actions are haunted by an anti-democratic air, as the aforementioned positions of Kohns and Walsh elucidate� Deliberative democrats’ call for norms “that might guide a people and secure their claim to be fair and not merely powerful, ‘democratic’ and not merely majoritarian” (Honig 1) is scarcely heeded here� Still, this tendency cannot account for the multiplicity of voices springing up in the name of Anonymous, many of which subscribe to civil disobedience without the problematic connotations outlined above� 26 In a different vein, Occupy’s aforementioned affinity with the rhetoric of democracy results in an emphasis to posit egalitarian diversity as unity - an idea that “anybody can don the mask and be with us” rather than “wearing the mask entails a perception of homogeneity, i�e�, unity and strength�” In the case of Anonymous operations, the unifying and integrating icon of the Guy Fawkes mask is often used politically in combination with a rhetoric that idealizes the demos but problematically without advocating a specified relation of demos and kratein� This latter democratic impetus, however, is present in the case of Occupy Wall Street and may persist in other uses of the mask in progressive protests� It is another question how egalitarian and effective this ideal can be in practice� VI Some Reflections on a Less Universalized Reading of the Guy Fawkes Mask The case of the Guy Fawkes mask surely is a complicated affair: a faint reference to a historical iconic figure, fictional sources of differing political agendas, an appropriation by Anons (onand offline), Occupiers (who may or may not wear masks), other protests within and beyond the United States, spin-offs in popular culture� It is tempting to establish a linear chronology of events implying an equally linear concept of a geographically broadening 26 As Hannah Arendt wrote, “‘the law cannot justify the breaking of the law,’” but civil disobedience may nevertheless (particularly in the United States) be used for “the purpose of testing [the law’s] constitutionality” (Arendt 45)� 466 c hristina m aria k och and quantitatively increasing dissemination - first Anonymous, then Occupy Wall Street, now a “global icon�” A simple Google image search reveals many masked demonstrators in non-American contexts, and we can certainly establish a chronology as shown above� Yet, it is simply not all too linear, as Occupy protests have waned and Anonymous collectives seem to have diversified, and the images stemming from gatekeeping news media sources do not inform us about how an individually worn mask in Egypt is anchored in local dissident structures� It is also compelling to posit heuristic distinctions between different settings - “Anonymous,” “the Occupy Movement” - and generalize findings and interpretations within these realms. It is, of course, not my objective, nor that of the scholars I cite (in particular Anderson; Kohns; Ruiz), to carry out an empirical social movement study; and needless to say, analyzing symbolic functions requires a degree of abstraction� Yet, there are some risks of misrepresentations that should be considered� Particularly since Anonymous and Occupy activists act offline as well as dispersed online, and since they are without leaders, a clear set of demands, or a membership structure, we mostly do not know whose voices we privilege over others, and we tend to rely on those that have been successfully mediated� 27 Our desire to know what’s “behind the mask” (the single most frequent collocation in news coverage and comments on the Guy Fawkes mask, I am led to believe 28 ) poses considerable troubles even for in-depth ethnographic study (see Coleman, “Participate”; “Anonymous in Context”), hence a cautionary tone and a focus on one’s own hermeneutic reading of what is “on the mask” may be called for� There is also the risk of neglecting “frame disputes,” that is, internal struggles over “how to represent or articulate a particular version of reality (i�e�, how to frame) to potential supporters, bystanders, media, and targets of change” (Benford 417) or “counterframing” and “reframing” struggles between social movement actors and their opponents (418)� Lastly (but not exhaustively), there is the “reification problem” of viewing movements and their frames as things, followed by frequent anthropomorphizations of these notions (418)� As Benford says, social movements do not act, the people within them do� Social movement studies thus need to be cautious not to neglect “human agency” and “emotions” (418) and not to follow “monolithic tendencies,” meaning to “treat frames in a singular fashion as though there is a single reality” (422)� Movement actors are also, as trivial as it sounds, invested in “their” movement to differing degrees� I think the pitfalls Benford indicates can be adapted to a less empirical cultural studies oriented endeavor as well� I am, to a greater or lesser extent, guilty of all of the mechanisms listed above, and I observe similar tendencies in those scholarly and journalistic analyses of the mask of which I am aware� Consequently, 27 See Benford 421 for the issue of “elite bias” in social movement studies� 28 It makes little sense to rhetorically decouple the mask from the hacktivists’ impact� Without suggesting that a majority of analyses falls prey to this idea, it should be clarified that without unifying icons and an easily recognizable style, there would be no “Anonymous” behind anything, merely dispersed individuals of small groups of hacktivists with an even less clear set of goals� Occupying Popular Culture 467 I will return to three particular questions which I have outlined at the end of my introduction, and which may provide a starting point for a yet more complicated story of the mask� *** Oliver Kohns states that the Guy Fawkes mask “symbolizes an abstinence of political heroes (who have an individual personality and belong to a specific ethnic group and gender)” (102)� I agree with the sentiment of dehierarchization, but is the mask actually unmarked for gender and race? Recent reconfigurations in the context of Anonymous seem to suggest otherwise. I will spotlight the issue of gender by the example of the “Operation Anonymiss” to raise the question if the mask does not in fact suggest a white, middleor upper-class male by default� 29 In her history of Anonymous, Parmy Olson recounts the story of “Kayla,” a young female-presenting hacker involved with the hacktivist collective� In this context Olson comments on the ambivalence of navigating hacking communities as a girl or woman: She maintains that posing as a girl may attract desired attention among the majority of heterosexual male hackers and coders (see also Schell and Martin 187)� However, these communities and particularly online image boards such as Anonymous’ cradle 4chan are notorious for their rampant sexism, often leaving female users with the options to either navigate slurs or pose as default male� While this seems to confirm the stereotype that “there are no girls on the internet,” the actual situation is more complex� Gabriella Coleman, cultural anthropologist with leading expertise on Anonymous as well as hacking and coding in general, cautions that “far more substantial research on the topic [of gender] is needed before qualified and fair judgments as to the complicated dynamics at play can be posed” (Coding Freedom 212n16)� Consequently, she omits almost all mention of gender or other potential structures of discrimination from her analyses� While this is not the place for a thorough study of gender bias within hacker communities (see, for instance, Jordan and Taylor 117), the relatively recent launch of “Anonymiss” makes for an instructive exploration� “Anonymiss” has been initiated as an operation of Anonymous� A text published on one of the central Anonymous news websites calls for “modern girls” who want “freedom,” “power,” and “fun,” and who “love the internet” to join the collective, and urges the “gentlemen” of Anonymous to support this appeal (“Operation Anonymiss”)� Since its appearance around 2011, Anonymiss has appeared in blogs and on Facebook� On the latter social networking site they appear as “Anonymous & Anonymiss” and do not seem to follow a feminist, intersectional, or female-centered agenda, and the same 29 I am indebted to Jessica Ring of Carleton University for helpful comments on Anonymiss and her assessment of the operation as an attempt to increase female and/ or feminist hacktivists’ visibility and provide a safe space for them, the success of which is difficult to evaluate. 468 c hristina m aria k och seems to hold for blog sites� 30 Despite this proximity to the thematic range of Anonymous operations, many commenters on the AnonNews press release for Anonymiss have criticized the operation� Aside from a few casually sexist remarks, the general tendency seemed to be a concern about separatism, as one comment and two replies illustrate (“Operation Anonymiss”): This� When do we get AnonJewmous, or AnoNegromous, and what do we do when the AnoNazimous are founded and start fighting each other. Anonymous is Anonymous� Gender, race, religion, politics have no faces here� (Anonymous commenter on AnonNews, 2011-03-21 10: 46: 22) The problem with this type of thinking is the same problem as calling U�S� culture “colorblind”� By pretending we don’t “see” race or gender, we ignore the issues going on� A “faceless” anonymous becomes a white, male face by default� Freedom is a term that means different things to different people, based on race, class, and gender. In order to fight for freedom from censorship, we have to look at different standpoints� (reply to commenter 2012-09-29 02: 40: 48) and turn it into a white, female face by default now? -1 (reply to above reply, n�d�) I am obviously not implying that these comments are evidence of a widespread debate within the ranks of Anonymous� Rather, I think they are exemplary of two potential opposing paradigms within the collective: the unifying universalist agenda of a hive-mind collective on the one hand and the attentiveness to internal faultlines and structures of discrimination on the other� The second comment raises awareness for the complexities of intersectionality, yet without explicitly pointing out the racist and anti-Semitic undertones of the first. The third statement, if not altogether unsympathetic and anti-separatist, might reveal the practical obstacles on this course, i�e� referring to the fact that Anonymiss still appears to neglect, among others, the factor of race� These tensions do not spare the emblems of Anonymous� The abovementioned press release includes a feminized suit figure instead of the “default” masculine one� In another example, the banner of an Anonymiss “cyberguerrilla” blog reworks both the figure and the mask. Here, the mask’s “face” has feminine features and wears make-up, sports a finely sketched beard reminiscent of female cross-dressing in cabaret - and it loses its prominent smile in exchange for a sincere portrait pose� The face looks young, well-proportioned to Western standards of beauty, and the accompanying hand and arm suggest the wearer of the mask is white (Anonymiss Express Cyberguerrilla)� We tend to not “see” the race and gender of the Guy Fawkes mask, to adapt the second of the comments quoted above - these feminized examples expose the universalization of masculinity in the “usual” mask iconography, 30 The abovementioned Facebook site’s post history for May 2014 reveals an eclectic mixture of open data and anti-surveillance activism, U�S� and world politics, music videos, and conspiracy theories (“Anonymous and Anonymiss”)� A Tumblr site named “Anonymiss Express” seems to be more explicitly left-leaning, quoting Mother Jones or antifascist websites, but states that “[t]his Anonymiss site is committed to the same ideals as some Anonymous” (Anonymiss Express)� Occupying Popular Culture 469 but tend to employ a quite stereotypical visual language of femininity themselves� Beyond this, I am hesitant to hazard guesses on the question whether Anonymiss might not run the risk of becoming a “special interest” branch without changing any general directions within Anonymous, or how active female Anons actually are and want to be in this context� We can, however, juxtapose this example with an Anonymous operation that recently garnered quite a lot of media attention: the Operation RollRedRoll� In this case from Steubenville, Ohio, and in other similar examples, Anons widely disseminated footage of jocular High School rapists assaulting unconscious female classmates, videos the assailants had themselves shared via social media� Threatening to publicize the names of perpetrators and local officials, KnightSec, a derivative of Anonymous dedicated to vigilante justice, condemned the pervasive victim blaming and demanded legal action to be taken (Kushner)� Indeed, this sparked an ongoing national debate about rape culture in the USA (Friedman)� Notwithstanding the due accusation of the authorities’ shameful failures, the operations exhibit a problematic tendency of saviorism (white and male, if we follow Kushner’s account)� As Friedman describes, the publication of these images may help to raise awareness, but override the emotional needs and the agency of the survivor� “KnightSec,” adapted from the internet phenomenon of “white knights” striving to save damsels in distress (see Kushner), thus exemplifies another aspect of the conflictual nature of online vigilantism. As for issues of race and ethnicity, critic Lisa Nakamura puts forth an argument similar to the second above-quoted comment on Anonymiss in that she troubles the lingering notion of the internet as an egalitarian space� She rightly reminds us that “[s]imply put, race and racism don’t disappear when bodies become virtual or electronically mediated” (“Cyberrace” 1677)� When the default, non-racialized user is thought of as white and male (Nakamura, Cybertypes), this challenges what Seb Franklin critically presents as the dominant view of distributed networks “as a politically radical form” thanks to their “nonhierarchical structure” and their systems “allow[ing] groups to flexibly and spontaneously organize” (157). Anonymous’ online activism is not the only example in which a universal white, male face clouds internal hierarchies� The political import of Occupy Wall Street’s strategy of radical democratic deliberation is de facto complicated by observed inequalities and problems of inclusion along the lines of race, class, and gender (Pickerill and Krinsky 282-83; Costanza-Chock 11)� Kraushaar has called the protests an “upheaval of the educated” (my translation)� Ingar Solty, too, convincingly maintains that the onset of Occupy attracted first and foremost the generation of crisis which, despite great effort, good education, and middle-class roots, finds itself threatened by social decline and unable to pay off its overwhelmingly large college debts (12)� Solty calls them a “blocked elite,” a precariat that is not yet excluded and left behind, contrary to those who have felt the erosion of public welfare and increase of social inequality well before the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis (12-13)� 470 c hristina m aria k och Yet, the common adversary, the richest 1% that have emerged unscathed (and richer) from the by now almost permanent condition of crisis, seems to unite the 99% despite their internal differences� Michael Kazin, for instance, eagerly welcomes the inclusive breadth the movement suggests� He tellingly states that “[g]ender equality, multiculturalism, opposition to military intervention, and global warming are all worthy causes,” but that “each represented the passions of discrete groups whose opponents were able to belittle them as ‘special interests’” (69)� The inherent risk he sees now is merely the difficulty of sustaining a broad movement without introducing structures (69-70)� The question is, though, if this “main versus side contradiction” resembling line of thought really is a progressive move for all those with grievances, or if, once again, the bracketing of difference conceals and perpetuates the privileges of a select group� In some respect, the issue has a point of contact with Nancy Fraser’s oftcited instructive critique and revaluation of Habermas’ model of rational deliberation in the public sphere, whose conceptual “bracketing � � � of social inequality” (136) she denounces and instead conceptualizes a “plurality” of publics: “Virtually from the beginning counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech” (116)� Thus, Ruiz argues that masked protesters, who revoke the ideal of transparent deliberation, “draw the public’s attention to the structures that covertly shape political communication within the public sphere” (266; see also Wiegmink 79)� Whether they are also able to address covert movement internal mechanisms of power inhibiting the ideal of democratic deliberation and decision making remains to be seen� *** A second issue that further complicates the story of the Guy Fawkes mask as an icon is the wide variety of meanings it can convey and contexts in which it is appropriated� Not only has the mask been used in protests and online activism around the world, it has also inspired countless spin-offs of which I will name just a few� It is likely that most of these artworks reach a wider audience through remediation, i�e�, in this case the circulation of photographs on the internet� Some of these images are overtly political, others humorously rework the icon with less obvious claims. In the latter category, we find, for instance, a T-shirt print showing a masked meditating figure resembling Buddha along with the slogan “Occupy Yourself” (“Occupy Yourself”)� The print can be read as a witty joke, or at the same time as a more serious recourse to the self as the starting point for social change� Another more straightforwardly playful example is the photograph of a hooded and masked person in front of a supermarket dairy aisle with skim milk, holding up a sign that reads “We are the 2%” (spacelaces)� Finally, on the more serious side is an artwork by Shepard Fairey which combines the aesthetics of President Obama’s campaign images with an image of the mask donned by someone wearing a hoodie� One of Obama’s slogans, “Hope,” is altered to read “We are the 99% Occupying Popular Culture 471 - Mr� President, we hope you’re on our side�” Anderson reads this as a promising democratic gesture (164-65), which it may be� On the other hand, there is a menacing “us versus them” dynamics which leaves unanswered what would happen if the President was considered an adversary, i�e� how much legitimization is attributed to the political system� While these were examples in which the mask appears only as an iconic image, its usage in protests would appear to be quite unambiguous� Yet, the mask can adopt contrary significations even within the same space: A news agency image from demonstrations in Germany against the inequality of wealth distribution, an almost “natural environment” of the Guy Fawkes mask, shows a person wearing the mask restyled as a blood-sucking capitalist vampire (“Demonstranten”)� I am not insinuating that these role reversals (Leach qtd� in Bruner 139) are more than just exceptions from the general rule that protesters use the mask to signal “us,” not “them�” Nevertheless it is instructive and puzzling to see that this twist of meaning is possible (and appears to be coherent)� I believe the smile of the mask’s “face” plays an important role in this oscillation of meanings� To start with, it empowers the activists� Anonymous supporters can entertain the thought of seeing through their opponents while being impenetrable (Kohns 96), and letting them know with a smirk which befits the spirit of carnivalesque lulzmaking. The mask’s figure is so elusive, the smile so self-assured that it seems to suggest that a hacktivist’s failure might just have been a joke� In the case of Occupy and other demonstrations, the usage of the mask may at first glance seem surprising, given that the crisis-related anti-austerity protests of the last years thrive on righteous indignation (epitomized by the “Indignados” of Spain)� Anderson would perhaps not see a contradiction at all, seeing that he maintains the use of the mask “serves as an expression of rage hidden behind a disconcertingly sinister smile” (158)� Even though the smile does not seem particularly grim, there might be some truth to this� The expression of David Lloyd’s original drawing seems to be able to convey lighthearted and violent humor as an end itself as well as the determined and knowing smile of the revolutionary� This first characteristic is connected to another effect of the mask which I outlined above, i�e� the impression that wearing the grinning face of the mask, an activist never loses his or her composure and thus asserts superiority and fearlessness even in precarious situations� From the wide range of pop-cultural adaptations and from the usage of the Guy Fawkes mask for protagonists as well as antagonists, we might conclude that this icon has become a blank space of potential meaning� Lewis Call’s reading comes close to this when he states that the mask “became a truly nomadic, perpetually mutating postmodern symbol” (156), a “free floating signifie[r] . . . liberated from all permanent meaning” (154). I will call this position into question by a recourse to another protest icon, which is more well-known and has been surprisingly persistent: the image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, subject to similar evaluations of being a free floating signifier. 472 c hristina m aria k och The iconic status of Che is a powerful combination of iconic personhood and an iconic image which is largely detached from the biography of its subject� The Guerrillero Heroico, a 1960s photograph of the Cuban revolutionary that is best known as a two-tone image, became the face of the 1968 student revolts in Europe (Cambre 340-41)� 31 Scorer asserts that “Che continues to be one of the world’s most widely-reproduced faces and his multiplication on t-shirts, posters and stencil art has, more often than not, bypassed biography and mythology to spiral into a wry, self-referential postmodern joke” (137)� On top of that, the anti-capitalist icon’s ironical commercial success seems to suggest its complete arbitrariness� Charlton, however, offers another perspective which I find more convincing: The Che face, more than any other icon, can keep accruing new application without relinquishing its essence - a generic and positive version of anti-status quo and liberation from any oppressive force, and a general, romantic, non-specific fantasy about change and revolution� (Charlton qtd� in Scorer 138) I believe that this interpretation can be transferred to the case of the Guy Fawkes mask� Those who use the mask take advantage of its by now iconic status and, in doing so, reinforce it� In order for this reciprocity to function, the mask cannot be the entirely “free floating signifier” as Call (157) suggests. Instead, its status as a political icon hinges on a residuum of systemic critique and resistance with a tinge of outlaw attitude, a vague essence of counterhegemonic struggle� The aforementioned puzzling version of the masked adversary may be reconciled with this when we accredit the role reversal to the enigmatic trickster figure suggested by the mask, and if we concede that this reversal would be unlikely to work without the use of additional signifying props� Still, the tension persists� Much of the mask’s appeal lies in its power to unify and integrate, and yet, the more significations it can purport, the more arbitrary it becomes� This process is complex, as cultural icons develop a momentum of their own, and time and more thorough analyses will be needed to assess the route this icon will take� *** Finally, we are left to wonder about the implications of the Guy Fawkes mask as a transnational phenomenon� Here, I am raising questions rather than offering conclusions, even more so than in the previous two sections. At first appearance the mask does indeed seem to translate astonishingly easily to different cultural and socioeconomic settings� 32 In this simplest sense, the 31 The Guerrillero Heroico maintains its presence in contemporary protests (cf� Cambre 339), but this engagement with an icon differs from that of the Guy Fawkes mask in one significant respect: The face of Che appears on murals, stickers, posters, flags, T-Shirts etc�, but it never “becomes” the face of a protester� It is never as much material artifact as it is an image, and it does not offer the semiotics of the mask and the same complex possibility of performative engagement with it� 32 We could link this more generally to the process of “carnevalization” of cultural production, meaning that “the strict dichotomy between high and low has broken down and that the freedom in combining signs and discourses from different cultural realms has increased” (Fluck, “Emergence or Collapse” 65)� Occupying Popular Culture 473 transnational quality of this icon merely refers to the fact of its constantly re-mediatized dissemination into different nations of the world� It appears to be an example of “globalization from below” (see Voelz 357), in which local actors appropriate and repurpose an icon in an example of the easily accessible transmission of cultural goods from the United States (after an appropriation from Great Britain) to other parts of the world� The mask is available via online stores, and blogs and online image boards provide numerous film stills, logos, or memes of the mask to peruse, digitally alter, and share. However, things get more complicated if one understands the qualifier “transnational” to imply a transcendence of national boundaries in a global flow of cultures. As Donald Pease puts it, “[t]he transnational differs from the international in that it forecloses the possibility that either nation in the transaction will remain self-enclosed and unitary” (“Introduction” 5)� To what extent, then, is the mask anchored in local protest cultures and relations and not merely a visual quote from abroad? How much appropriation, re-fitting it into local contexts is involved? How much significance can we attribute to the origins of the iconic mask in Hollywood and the online selfpresentation of U�S-American-based Anonymous hacktivists? Would such a story of origins risk to misrepresent culture-specific significations for hasty comparisons? If the icon is globalized, how globalized is the reach of its revolutionary impetus? Answering most of these problems would be a methodologically quite challenging endeavor� A look at news reports of protests featuring masked activists, and a consideration of the early agendas of Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street lets me hazard a guess about a general tendency� The counterhegemonic core tenet I observe in the use of the Guy Fawkes mask, the vague idea of “us against the system,” does not necessarily imply that the “people(s) of the world unite” against a however defined global system. There seems to be an acknowledgment that the struggles elsewhere are similar to one’s own at home and a considerable solidarity among hacktivists and Occupy movements spread across many Western and occasionally non-Western countries, but it is arguable to what extent protesters united under the image of the mask strive for a kind of global justice, for instance� Anonymous’ actions in solidarity with WikiLeaks, against ACTA, or generally against the enforcement of copyright law and net neutrality perhaps come closest to a globalized online activism for a global cause� In general, we should remember that “[t]he national context remains of prime importance to movements whose collective actions are tied intimately to the political opportunities provided by reigning governance structures” (Tarrow qtd� in Stein 752)� The mask may travel globally, but the contexts in which it appears, the aims and prospects of those that engage with it are influenced by local structures. In the age of globalization shaped by neoliberal forces, the role of the nation state may fundamentally change but it has not lost its significance (Voelz 364). There is no “transnational democracy” yet (Pease, “Introduction” 15) that could provide a point of reference for a globalized Occupy movement, nor is there a full-fledged globalized public sphere that could act as a discursive 474 c hristina m aria k och arena (Cammaerts and Audenhove; cf� Ruiz 267 for a more optimistic stance)� Although Tarrow observes a “growing importance of transnational networking and mobilization, including mobilization through the Internet” (5), the “major route to the construction of transnational social movements” is “transnational coalition formation,” i�e� solidarity and cooperation of domestic actors beyond their local/ national contexts (255), and this seems to characterize Anonymous and Occupy activists as well� 33 What are we to make of Anonymous’ involvement with the Arab Spring, for instance? Hacktivists had launched “OpTunisia” in January of 2011 along with other operations to support revolts by “digital care packages” and attacks on government websites� At some point, the actions included the following disclaimer: “’This is *your* revolution� It will neither be Twittered nor televised or IRC’ed. You *must* hit the streets or you *will* lose the fight’” (qtd� in Coleman, “Weirdness” 89; see also Coleman, “Anonymous in Context” 16)� 34 Read in a positive light, Anons (at least those who issued the statement) seem to be conscious of the limits their hacktivism presents when it comes to broad-scale social change� Understood more critically, there is a patronizing undertone� A contrasting example, in which the iconic mask seems to have been confidently integrated by local actors into a domestic conflict over an international institution, is the activity of Anonymous Brasil against the FIFA Soccer World Cup of 2014� 35 Searching further for the tensions that might lie in transnational appropriations of the Guy Fawkes mask, let me discuss another example of an artistic reworking of it� Taking a walk in Dresden in July 2012, I came across a piece of street poster art showing Mickey Mouse, one of the quintessential icons of U�S�-American popular culture, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask� The masked Mickey is directly looking at the spectator, arms akimbo� A photograph of the poster has since been disseminated online via the popular Facebook page “StreetArt in Germany�” A host of interpretations is possible here� If the mask is appropriated as a positive icon, this may show that it can “hack” simply anything, similar to the shenanigans of former Anonymous subgroup “LulzSec” (see Norton, “Introduction”)� But the poster may also exhibit a more critical attitude� The transnationalization of this icon might be met with skepticism; this cultural import not seamlessly integrated and welcomed as a tool for counterhegemonic action� If the mash-up with Mickey suggests that this is an exceptionalist U�S�-American invention, this may recall Johannes Voelz’ argument to decouple the idea of (cultural) transnationalism from an implied opposition to the traditional nation state and the 33 There have been instructive analyses of transnational networks of support for the Zapatistas which might lend themselves to an interesting comparison� See Khasnabish; Olesen� 34 This appropriates Gil Scott-Heron’s civil rights poem and song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised�” 35 See the host of activities and numerous examples of the image of the Guy Fawkes mask amalgamated with the Brazilian flag, soccer-themed images etc. on http: / / www. anonymousbrasil�com/ brasil/ or Anonymous Brasil’s Facebook page (last accessed 30 May 2014)� Occupying Popular Culture 475 forces of neoliberal globalization (357)� Consider the ambivalent reception history of Carl Barks’s comics characters: On the one hand, the sharp ideological critiques of Disney stories of the 1970s (Kunzle qtd� in Andrae 48-49) might linger on, on the other hand, Barks repeatedly showed himself critical of imperialism and consumerism (Andrae 52)� The masked face of Mickey Mouse may thus be another example of the role reversal opportunities I described in the previous sections� As such, it might constitute a critique of Americanization or be an ironic statement on the consumerist downside of Anonymous’ and the Occupy movement’s icon� An iconoclastic attitude could signify that anti-surveillance and anti-austerity protests in different parts of the world, while invested in their local discourses and institutions, still view the United States as the “motherland” of government surveillance (cue the recent NSA intelligence affair) and the neoliberal capitalist agenda which sparked the current state of crisis� VII Vista This has been an attempt to uncover the uses and significations of the Guy Fawkes mask as a political icon, one that is notoriously hard to pin down and testifies to the productivity of reinscribed meanings in popular culture. The iconic mask is a transmedial phenomenon and as such partially able to break away from its origins; yet, we have seen how aesthetic-political themes from its narrative source continue to wield an influence especially in online activism� Engendering connotations from a rich cultural history of masks and masking, it lends itself to carnivalesque forms of protests� As an image, it becomes the face of loose networks which articulate dissent and prize collectivity, inclusiveness, and flat hierarchies and effectively draw on dynamics of us versus them and disguise versus display� The mask suggests an elusive trickster figure with a bent towards progressive civil disobedience as well as rogue vigilantism, and the wide range of possible meanings does not stop short of enabling role reversal� Still, a core of insurgent anti-establishment attitude is continuously perpetuated wherever the mask appears� Despite the surrounding rhetoric of inclusiveness and the diversity of activists, the universalization of a “face” suggesting whiteness, maleness, and Western cultural traditions (albeit somewhat alleviated through stylistic exaggeration) raises questions about internal mechanisms of power� Onlookers might dismiss the mask as a piece of plastic, yet another protest fad of digital (near-)natives “in it for the lulz�” Without risking any guesses about the icon’s longevity, I think we should not underestimate said piece of plastic and the images thereof� Winfried Fluck reasons, after all, that “aesthetic experience” may be the route to restore “political solidarity” (“Resistance! ” 22): 476 c hristina m aria k och If the only way in which resistance is still possible is by temporary attachment to a discursive subject position that invites identification, then the aesthetic mode becomes the main and supreme source of resistance - and also of cultural change and cultural transformation� (23) As we have seen, the icon of the mask is about as ambivalent as it gets� Is its quintessence of resistance, of voicing dissent better than nothing, and do masked protesters hope to bring forth democratic politics in “agonistic struggle” (Mouffe)? Can the “pregnant vacuum” (Žižek), the staged absence (Ruiz), thus the revocation of hegemonic consensus and legitimate representation by the state rather be productively used to open up spaces for counterpublics? With a currently debilitated Occupy movement and vastly diversified Anonymous agendas, we will have to see how the image of the Guy Fawkes mask fares in the future and what kind of cultural momentum will propel its significatory potential forward. 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The Guardian, 26 Oct� 2011� Web� 13 Sept� 2012� a aron d e r osa The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 1 It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being� F� Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly … time-y wimey … stuff� Doctor Who, “Blink” In its single season run, ABC’s FlashForward (2009) narrates the consequences of a mysterious event that causes the entire world to black out for two minutes in which they can see themselves six months in the future� The foreknowledge sparks confusion, anger, and terror, as a wife sees herself with a different man, a suicidal cancer patient is alive and happy, and an FBI agent sees absolutely nothing� Of course, the future does not appear to be written in stone: knowing the future impacts one’s decisions� Although not a wholly original concept - Philip K� Dick explored a similar concept in “Minority Report” (1956) - it resonates differently in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks� Where America’s triumphalism of the post-Cold War 1990s “summoned us all to live permanently in the future” (DeLillo 33), the attacks shattered the illusion of a future attained� This collapse has haunted the US in ways not fully understood yet� As American policy shifted from a Cold War “National Security State” to the War on Terror’s “Homeland Security State,” so too did the temporal direction of the exceptionalist project� Where the former sought to secure the future of liberal democracy abroad, from Latin America to the Far East, the latter has been dominated by domestic security and is nostalgic in orientation� This nostalgia has already been registered in countless cultural forms, and literature has specifically responded with texts as diverse as Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and Ronald Sukenick’s Last Fall� 1 The kernel of this idea began with an analysis of Ruskin’s “Law of Ruins” and the Twin Towers in Don DeLillo’s oeuvre, published in the Don DeLillo Society Newsletter� This work spawned an article on “nostalgia for the future” in alternate history and near future fiction in the anthology, Narrating 9/ 11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism� While much different, this article nonetheless bears the genetic code of its primogenitors and deserves acknowledgment. I would like to specifically thank John Duvall, Brooks Hefner, Sean Grattan, Jason Dodge, and the anonymous readers at LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory� 484 a aron d e r osa But there is a unique literary strain that dialectically responds to the temporal shift in American exceptionalism that I have elsewhere called a “nostalgia for the future�” In the aftermath of the attacks, Americans may have lamented the post-lapsarian condition of the nation-state, but they also longed for a future exceptional status that would now never come to be� And a growing number of texts have tapped into this undercurrent� An emergent genre of fiction seems to have arisen out of this concern. Two paradigmatic texts, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012), are both mimetic narratives that begin in the reader’s familiar past (the 1970s) and intersect with the historical record (9/ 11), but end in an imagined future (2021 and 2019, respectively)� Rendered sensible by the preceding narration, these projected futures respond to the US’s sense of futurity in an age where the liberal democratic project seems to have ended before its time, and critique the stalled nostalgia of contemporary American exceptionalism� A Time of Incompletion Groff’s Arcadia paints a vision of the United States in the 1970s as a terrifying place, described in terms of rampant apocalyptic (atomic) anxiety, embroilment in Vietnam, and the increasing conservatism of Cold War political culture� Yet the idealism of the liberal democratic project remains alive, displaced onto a hippie commune in upstate New York� As Abe Stone, the father of the novel’s protagonist, Bit, and one of the founding fathers of the commune, explains, “What we wanted to do was unusual� Pure� Live with the land, not on it� Live outside the evil of commerce and make our own lives from scratch� Let our lives be a beacon to light up the world” (14)� Just as Abe’s presumption of purity echoes John Winthrop’s vision of America as a city on a hill, the commune duplicates many of the problems of the exceptionalist mythos entwined in American history, and the first two sections of the novel demonstrate the rise and fall of this ersatz utopian space� Section 1, which narrates the extensive renovation of a dilapidated mansion where the “free people” of Arcadia might live, articulates how such an exceptionalist project must come into being� As Donald Pease suggests, exceptionalism is less a condition than it is a “process whereby citizens established an exemplary national order” (33)� Arcadia thus eschews a static model of exceptionalism that categorizes communities as “‘distinctive’ (meaning merely different), or ‘unique’ (meaning anomalous), or ‘exemplary’ (meaning a model for other nations to follow), or that it is ‘exempt’ from the laws of historical progress (meaning that it is an ‘exception’ to the laws and rules governing the development of other nations)” (Pease 9)� Rather, the novel depicts exceptionalism as a process of creating, extending, and legitimizing a “state fantasy” of national identity (2)� When the free people arrive at this unkept mansion, whose doorway bears the inscription “Et in Arcadia Ego” (“Even in Arcadia, I [Death] exist”; 29), they construct just such a fantasy� The phrase comes from Virgil and two The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 485 well-known seventeenth-century paintings by Nicolas Poussin� In the latter’s compositions, two shepherds encounter the inscription on a tomb in the idyllic pastoral landscape� The free people of Arcadia respond to the inscription by misreading the Latin “ego” as egotism, eliding the implied subject (Death), and appropriating the idyllic name Arcadia� Notably, they doubly misread the carving, as they fail to acknowledge the line was “hastily chiseled” above the front door (29), implying the house may have already been abandoned or in decline when it was marked� The misreadings demonstrate the free people’s erasure of death and decay, and the commune is founded on an assumption of unbounded futurity� That futurity, David Noble argues, is endemic to exceptionalist fantasies, which he argues are constructed on a “two world” metaphor: one world envisioned as a timeless and immutable natural state to which a nation aspires, the other a realm of culture and imagination in which nations currently exist� Noble’s argument that modern nations believed their cultures had “grown out of the national landscape” privileged a vision of the nation as participating in an exodus from one world into another, from timefulness into timelessness (Death xxvii): “Today we are trapped in the meaningless flux of time. Tomorrow we will be free from history” (Debating 1)� Such a vision of timelessness stands in contrast to the generational world where nations rise and fall, and markets boom and bust� Such timefulness structures Arcadia’s four sections that loosely conform to another of Poussin’s paintings, “A Dance to the Music of Time�” Identified by Groff as part of her inspiration for the novel, “A Dance to the Music of Time” depicts a circle of four dancing figures representing the cycle of poverty, labor, wealth, and pleasure� Groff writes, “The painting itself is lovely, complacent, but the sky is darkening” (“Monsters of Academia”)� The novel not only transcribes the individual’s encounter with finality at the tomb, but also the cyclicality of the “human condition” (“A Dance”)� The ideal toward which the free people of Arcadia strive, however, is envisioned as free from such cyclicality� Theirs is a teleological narrative of progress, an exodus from time that will be realized with the completed renovations to Arcadia House� This triumph will allow the free people to abandon their lean-tos and buses that currently comprise “Ersatz Arcadia,” downhill from the mansion� Literally a hilltop beacon of light, Arcadia House is the metaphorized exceptional state that Bit mistakenly calls a “renovelation,” which his mother in turn interprets as a “re-novelization,” a “Reimagining [of] our story” (18)� But to achieve such a status, exceptions must be made� First the “nonhierarchical society” is amended for the construction process (12), and later, a division of labor is erected that duplicates the broader gender politics of the time� “If we had centralized child care and cooking,” Abe suggests, “we could actually get enough work done to support ourselves and make money� … Maybe even make a profit this year” (32). It may be these exceptions that prompt discomfort from Handy, the spiritual leader of the commune, when the renovations are completed at the end of section 1� While the discomfort is never identified, and could be attributed to his being kept in the dark about the project - Abe secretly marshaled the effort while Handy was away - Handy’s 486 a aron d e r osa disappointment might also be a recognition that the project represents a false idealism� The path to Arcadia House is not the exodus into the timelessness of an exceptional state envisioned by the free people of Arcadia� The construction of Arcadia House speaks to the two world metaphor that undergirds American exceptionalism� Interestingly, the novel is set in a period of dramatic change in how Americans envisioned their exceptionalist goal� Beginning in the 1940s, an increasing internationalism prompted a shift from seeing “nations as expressions of the state of nature to seeing the international marketplace as the state of nature” (Noble, Death xxvii)� This shift from nations to markets as the natural and stable goal of the exceptionalist project makes sense after World War II in which international markets opened on an unprecedented scale� The result was a feeling among the middle classes of a shift from complexity to simplicity; that the “Artful, particular, timeful national economies were about to be replaced by an artless, universal, timeless global economy� … Now we were reaching the end of history” (Debate 16)� However, in order to bring about such a universal marketplace, America, as the “Leader of the Free World” in Harry Truman’s postwar words, needed to expand its scope� To meet the challenge, the US passed the National Security Act of 1947 to expand liberalism on a global scale through direct military intervention (Turkey, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan), covert insurgency (Chile, Nicaragua, Iran), and economic engagements (Cuba on one end of the spectrum, Japan on the other)� 2 The ideological threat posed by the Soviet Union in particular not only challenged the possibility of an exodus into a timeless global economy, but also the teleological narrative of American liberal progress� The National Security State thus sought to bring about the exceptionalist state through the imperialistic expansion of markets and the eradication of the “un-American ‘other’” (Hogan 17)� The collapse of the Soviet Union legitimized American foreign policy in the minds of many Americans and heralded what Tom Engelhardt dubbed American victory culture, and what Francis Fukuyama triumphantly declared as the “end of history�” 3 It is in this context that the 1990s prompted Americans to envision the exceptionalist project as either nearing completion, or already attained� The bifurcation between these two visions - the nearly accomplished and the accomplished - can be understood in terms of what Giorgio Agamben describes as “messianic time�” Like Noble’s (similarly biblical) exodus from time, Agamben’s messianic time is neither chronological (the minute-by-minute of our lives) nor is it eschatological (in which time comes to an end); it encompasses both the retrospection of the past and the 2 It is true that most of these interventions did not so much directly promote liberal democracy as they did undermine communism. Suffice it to say here that the cognitive dissonance Americans felt regarding these operations was more often than not rooted in the fundamental logic of liberation and expansion� 3 For critiques of how Fukuyama’s narrative came under fire, see Simon Cohen, Donald Pease, Mitchum Huehls, and Tom Engelhardt� The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 487 anticipation of the future� 4 “It is the time that contracts itself and begins to finish” (Agamben 2). Messianic time refers to the remembrance of all past moments that prepares us for a future that is in the process of coming into being� Messianic time thus productively identifies the confusing temporality of the exceptionalist exodus from one world into another� This process registers both a sense of incompletion and anticipation, a sense that the future may, at any point, manifest in the present moment� It is this feeling that Arcadia’s five-year-old focalizer, Bit, experiences when he perceives the renovation of Arcadia House in terms of Grimm’s Fairy Tales� Grimm structures Bit’s perceptual field. “Separate drawers emerge in his mind, now, to sort people into” (42): Handy is “a frog king,” while others take on the characteristics of woodsmen, ogres, and queens� In particular, Bit latches on to the story of the “Six Swans” in which a princess’s brothers are turned into swans� The princess is cursed for six years, during which she must remain mute and sew shirts for them. When the curse lifts, the princess has finished all but one arm, resulting in the sixth brother maintaining a single swan wing� It is through this story that Bit makes sense of living in messianic time� The “Six Swans” is a story of anticipated release and the specter of incompletion, and Bit has remained mute through much of the first section in solidarity with his depressed mother, Hannah� Although the completion of Arcadia House promises an exodus into the exceptionalist future, and Hannah along with the rest of the free people are restored, Bit is compelled to remain silent� A momentary lapse, however, yields a stifled laugh, which coincides with Abe falling from the roof whereby he loses the use of his legs� The juxtaposition of the speech act with Abe’s injury suggests the “curse” of timefulness remains active, and the completed House was not the teleological exodus the Arcadians imagined� And yet the house summons the free people to live in the future, and elides the internal fractures within the community� Exceptionalism After The Fall The 2001 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center seemingly brought American futurity to an end, and augured in an anxious uncertainty� 5 One way this manifested was through a profound distortion of the spatial and temporal orientation of the exceptionalist project� Whereas the National Security Act promoted a liberal democratic expansion abroad as the process to achieving a timeless future, the Homeland Security Act affirms national boundaries and is primarily post-lapsarian in sentiment� The Act’s stated objectives are to “guard the nation’s borders, prevent domestic terrorist at- 4 While Noble’s two-world metaphor is not coterminous with Agamben’s messianic/ eschaton, for our purposes they identify the same thing: the coming into being of an exceptional state/ state of being� 5 I consciously limit myself to this site� The Pentagon, as a military location, and United 93, as a site of heroism, do not fit into the cultural victimization narratives promoted over the past dozen years� Similarly, they don’t carry the symbolic weight of the American liberal economic power as the WTC towers do� 488 a aron d e r osa tacks, create a national defense strategy, and reduce damage from natural disasters and terrorist acts” (Harper)� From TSA security to increased immigration restrictions, the temporal direction of the Homeland Security State is primarily nostalgic for a Virgin Land� Contemporary scholars have acknowledged this change in terms of the rhetoric deployed, as when Marc Redfield analyzes “9/ 11” as a pure, numerical, and distinctly American marker (16), or Pease’s argument that “Ground Zero” and “Homeland” replace the Virgin Land metaphor (158)� Referring to the new deployment of the term “homeland,” Amy Kaplan comments that the Bush Administration went “through great lengths to tighten and shore up those borders, legally, politically, and militarily� … The word ‘homeland’ contributes to the cultural work of securing national borders, while it also produces a sense of radical insecurity” (“Homeland” 59)� The risk of creating such a secured space, Kaplan writes elsewhere, is the possibility of “reinstating a teleological linear narrative of historical continuity, of viewing American history, even in its imperial dimensions, as a singular march from Columbus to the Puritans to the Monroe Doctrine to twentieth-century military interventions to the Bush doctrine - and practice - of preemptive strikes” (“Tenacious” 36)� The new discourse of the homeland revivifies an isolationist discourse that elides the imperialist dimensions of drawing such borders� It is these types of discriminations through which Bit is enculturated in Arcadia over the intervening decade between sections 1 and 2� Now 14 in 1982, Bit reflects on the newcomers to the commune: “There are good Newbies who believe in work and poverty and simple food� And there are others, freeloaders, Trippies and Runaways, people hiding out here, diluting the pure beliefs of the Old Arcadians” (101). Bit’s language testifies to the strain placed on a community that ballooned from 50 to 900, bearing with it a set of “layered tensions … the overcrowding, the hunger” (85)� He perceives these tensions against a foundational purity, but neglects the fact that such purity is repeatedly undermined by the public disagreements between the founding fathers, Abe and Handy� Indeed, Abe and his wife, Hannah, have secretly raised a giant pot crop against the commune’s wishes to help fund Arcadia’s growing consumption� And Arcadia House, formerly a marker of Arcadia’s exceptionalist status, now simply duplicates the outside world� As one living in Ersatz Arcadia puts it, “Handy goes on about equality and subverting the hegemony, but Arcadia’s no different from anywhere else� You all are up on your hill� We’re down here in the mud” (104)� And Bit only vaguely recognizes the privilege he holds in the community� Situating himself among the Old Arcadians, Bit perpetuates a minoritizing discourse against the newbies, who stand outside of the exceptionalist Arcadian mythos� Arjun Appadurai notes that such a discourse is endemic to liberal social thought, whose condition is marked by an “anxiety of incompleteness” which arises out of the process of creating categories of majority and minority (8)� In the liberal tradition, minority populations, from the perspective of the majority, always stand as an impediment to a pure community� “They are embarrassments to any state-sponsored image of national The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 489 purity and state fairness� They are thus scapegoats in the classical sense” (42)� One of the characteristics of these majority/ minority categories is that they bear an implicit fear that the categories can be flipped. This fear derives from the association of a small internal minority population with a larger external majority� 6 This is precisely the sentiment Bit expresses when he associates the Newbies with the untrustworthy hordes from the outside world that threaten Arcadia’s purity� This comes to a head when Arcadia’s annual Cockaigne Day celebration promises a massive influx of unwanted visitors. The community must vote on whether to keep true to their ideal of openness, or close the borders and preserve the commune� They choose the former, but with disastrous results� Despite the barbarians at the gate story spun by the “pure” Arcadians, loose border security and naïve idealism are not the cause of the commune’s demise� More precisely, the destruction of Arcadia happens from within, in the minoritizing discourse that separates Newbies from Old Arcadians, Outsiders from Insiders� Anger and violence arise from the “complex interactions between faraway events and proximate fears, between old histories and new provocations, between rewritten borders and unwritten orders” (Appadurai 100)� In the Newbies and Outsiders, the Arcadians duplicate the broader national discourse from which they fled. Despite isolating themselves, the Arcadians still think in terms of nuclear anxiety and peace marches, Reagan’s War on Drugs and the Vietnam draft� They transcribe the faraway events of late-twentieth-century American history into their own proximate fears within Arcadia� And it is from this process that the minoritizing discourse arises within Arcadia - not from the threatening bands of Outsiders looking to participate in the commune’s Cockaigne Day celebration� This discourse is most readily apparent in Bit’s would-be romance with Handy’s daughter, Helle, who returns from the Outside at the beginning of section 2� While she is technically an Old Arcadian, she is not treated as such� Handy all but disowns her, and others describe her as “Acting out since she’s been back” (134)� Even Bit, who is smitten, enacts this communal sentiment� He laments that he “can’t see the old Helle under the new gloss and glamour of the Outside in her” (86)� Bit is drawn to her, but remains distant, and describes his relationship to her in terms of a mission statement: He takes photograph after photograph of Helle, and she vamps for him, blushing under his attention, flaring her fingers like gills, moueing like a model. Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying� This is you� She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along� Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of� (125) 6 Appadurai describes this process at work in the association with minorities of Muslim populations in the West (and in India) that become associated with a larger (more threatening) global Muslim majority� 490 a aron d e r osa The discordance between what must be Helle’s perception of her act (moueing like a model) and Bit’s (flaring fingers like gills) is telling. For Bit, Helle must be purified by purging her of her Outsider status, constructing her Insider identity for her through his photography� Bit’s affection prompts him to take a leap of faith and entrust her with the information of the hidden pot crop� Treated like an insider now, Helle betrays Bit by giving the pot to the newbies, and then sleeping with a pair of Outsiders at the Cockaigne Day celebration� Her egocentrism, however, does not return her to Outsider status, but actually aligns her with the other Arcadians; in the wake of the festival fiasco (a death brings the FBI and the collapse of Arcadia), the free people vulture the communal belongings as they flee the commune. Bit is forced to admit that Helle’s egotism is no different from anyone else’s, a discomfiting reflection of the broader incompleteness of the Arcadian project� Proleptic Nostalgia If the first half of Groff’s novel encodes the dissolving belief in a teleological narrative of exceptionalist futurity, the second half speaks to and against the uncertainty of the post-9/ 11 moment. Section 3 jumps forward thirty-five years to 2008, where Bit resides in New York City� Having just been abandoned by his wife, Helle - with whom he has a child after reconnecting years after Arcadia’s collapse - Bit’s depressive nostalgia mirrors that of the post- 9/ 11 city, which “winces and holds itself more closely” (207)� He describes the communal sentiment in the terms established above: the dissolution of a teleological narrative� The impetus for New York’s holding itself more closely rests in the story they had told about themselves from the moment the Dutch decanted from their ships onto the oyster-strewn island and traded land for guilders: that this place filled with water and wildlife was special, rare, equitable. That it could embrace everyone who came here, that there would be room and a chance to thrive, glamour and beauty� That this equality of purpose would keep them safe� (207-08) Bit is crippled by an overwhelming sense of nostalgia� As a photography professor, his job is “officially to teach the lost art of the darkroom” (176), and assigns his students to go on a “digital fast” for the weekend. His first photo show juxtaposes his friends’ “handsome adult Outside faces” against “their achingly tender and open Arcadia faces” (191)� And the main narrative arc of this section is Bit’s abandonment by Helle and his futile efforts to recover that lost life� The novel does not end on this note� Instead, it jumps forward another decade to the year 2019, where a pandemic forces Bit, along with his daughter and mother, to return to Arcadia� The temporal leap places the reader’s present in the narrator’s past, and prompts a series of questions about the nature of the stories we tell ourselves� The Cold War vision of an exodus into The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 491 timeless futurity, perceived as accomplished in the 1990s, was challenged by the 9/ 11 attacks� And as Groff demonstrates in section 3, the transition from the nation to the homeland represents not only a shift in the spatial dimensions of American exceptionalism, but the temporal direction as well� Kaplan notes, “‘Homeland’ also connotes a changed relation to history, a reliance on a shared mythic past engrained in the land itself� This implies a sense of time, as well as space, different from nineteenth-century notions of America as a ‘Nation of Futurity,’ throwing off the shackles of the past, or President Kennedy’s rhetoric of the New Frontier” (“Homeland” 60)� If 1990s victory culture lived perpetually in the future, then the twenty-first century has seemingly lived in the past, nostalgically returning to a pre-lapsarian innocence� 7 I have argued elsewhere, however, that Americans also seemed to exhibit a nostalgia for the future, “the sense that, after 9/ 11, the future Americans felt was divinely ordained, naturally predetermined, and/ or socially inevitable was no longer possible” (DeRosa)� 8 This nostalgia for the future manifests broadly, from the apocalypticism of contemporary political debates to the alternative history novels that challenge linear temporality and preordained futures� 9 Works like Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country - in which the War on Terror concludes with a sweeping liberal democratic uprising in the Middle East - articulate other historical possibilities, and direct their nostalgia not toward a lost idyllic past, but for a future that will never be� Groff’s Arcadia, as described above, fits within this pattern as well. The dissolution of the exceptionalist narratives of the American city on a hill, Arcadian selflessness, and even the Stone family purity undermine notions of teleological progress� To address this shift, a number of novels project the nation into the nottoo-distant future� Groff’s Arcadia and Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad are paradigmatic texts in this emerging genre that foregrounds America’s nostalgia for the future: an exceptional future that seemed preordained, but now can no longer exist� I call this new genre proleptic nostalgia after Mark Currie’s narratological classifications of prolepsis and Ian Baucom’s analysis 7 This is true not only of Bush’s Homeland Security State that revivifies the domestic as the target of purification, but also Obama’s presidency, which similarly attempts to reestablish the promise of liberal democracy at home� Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign attempted to suture together “three grand themes” that organize American “positionality”: “the American dream, the perfectible Union, the land of promise” (Pease 209)� The positionality this inscribes is a domestic project that promises to restore America’s lost exceptionalism for those left out of the expansive liberal democratic project of the preceding generations� The mantra “Yes We Can” is a nostalgic return to the constitutional promise of a nation created by and for the people, and drops the pretenses of internationalism altogether� And this nostalgia is not limited to the political sphere; it has been recorded across a swath of American cultural productions� Scholars like David Simpson, Kristiaan Versluys, and Richard Gray have all considered the various ways in which Americans made sense of the attacks by returning to some sense of a stable past within the domestic sphere� 8 Amir Eshel similarly notes, “Facing a recent, traumatic past or imminent destruction, [places like post-9/ 11 New York] struggle with the sense of a world deprived of a future” (3)� 9 See DeRosa� 492 a aron d e r osa of architect John Ruskin� These innovative texts structurally foreground America’s concern over its lost futurity in such a way that warrants a unique classification. As the description of Arcadia above demonstrates, the novel is primarily mimetic, set in a fictional past largely familiar to readers, and intersecting with a historically recognizable event, the September 11 attacks� And the same is true for Egan, whose collection of interconnected stories also begins in the 1970s and weaves through a recognizable history� But both novels disrupt this temporality by concluding in the near future: 2019 and 2021, respectively� Such projections are profound, imaginative, odd, insightful, and provocative� And framed as they are in the context of otherwise mimetic narratives, they structurally negotiate the complex nostalgia of the post-9/ 11 moment� Along with a handful of other novels, Groff and Egan represent a hybrid genre that anchor speculative projections of the future within traditional mimetic fiction. The future is a complex concept that denotes, in Baucom’s analysis of Ruskin, “both the pleasure of that which is yet to come and the anticipated pleasure of looking back on the present from afar, from a distance at which the present becomes an absent past that may be nostalgically recuperated” (51)� Pleasure derives, that is, not just from anticipation, but the “anticipation of retrospection” (Currie 30): that the present will be worthy of remembrance in some future� One of the ways this manifests is through the narratological term, prolepsis (“he would regret becoming a New York Mets fan”) that negotiates the distance between some future point (in which the Mets are bad [2013]) and the present (in which the Mets are good [2000])� Annie McClanahan adeptly demonstrates how this narrative technique is used in post-9/ 11 fiction such as David Foster Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel” (more familiar to readers might be Messud’s The Emperor’s Children or Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days), set in the days and months prior to 9/ 11, but situating the reader in a position of suspense and anticipation, as he/ she knows what will happen in the fall of 2001� Doing so, McClanahan states, “compels [readers] to inhabit two opposed modes of historical consciousness at once: the naivety of a ‘pre-9/ 11’ mindset, in which the names and dates are meaningless, and the knowing judgment of a ‘post-9/ 11’ mindset, in which the meaning of the events is inscribed as having been always already present within them” (55). The texts McClanahan identifies fit within a traditional model of prolepsis, narrating from a present understood to be the same as the reader’s� Proleptic nostalgia fiction, however, operates differently. Currie states that prolepsis requires a complex relationship between “three time loci that structure the communication: the time locus of the narrated, the time locus of the narrator, and the time locus of the reader” (31). In mimetic fiction, the time locus of the narrated and the narrator always precedes that of the reader, as the reader always encounters events that have already happened� Currie identifies one form of prolepsis as “rhetorical prolepsis” in which a narrator anticipates a reader’s future objection (“Now, you might say this tale is too unbelievable, but hear me out”)� Rhetorical prolepsis such as the The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 493 strategy we see in Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel” negotiates the space “between the time locus of the narrator and the time locus of the reader” (31) through an implied understanding of what will happen in mid-September 2001� Proleptic nostalgia operates similarly, but here the time locus of the narrated and narrator chronologically follow the time locus of the reader� In doing so, it creates discordance in the dynamic of narrated-narrator-reader� Because the text is primarily mimetic, the idea that the narrator can speak of the reader’s future situates the reader within the text’s past� It reverses the order of awareness from “reader > narrator > narrated” to “narrator > narrated > reader�” It places the reader in the position of a past that, according to Ruskin, will be nostalgically recuperated some day� There is certainly an affinity between what I am calling proleptic nostalgia and the vibrant contemporary discussion about preemption� As David Palumbo-Liu argues, preemption is predicated on an imagined future; specifically, “the Imagination is retooled to serve a pathological purposefulness that exploits the fearsome elements of an obsessive use of Imagination” (161)� Tellingly, the 9/ 11 Commission Report identified “imagination” as one of the failures prior to the attacks (339), and one of the challenges of responding to terrorism is to “think the unthinkable�” One method to meet this challenge was borrowed from corporate strategists in the form of “scenario-thinking,” which involves imagining an outcome and then trying “to develop plausible scenarios to show how these events might occur” (McClanahan 46)� That is, they start with the end result and work backward� This logic undergirds the doctrine of preemption, which “brings the future fully into the present, creating a temporal compression that makes a distant, possible future appear present and certain” (48)� The imagined becomes the actual� The creativity of fiction takes on unprecedented importance in this front in the War on Terror. Alan Nadel recognized this in his analysis of the “novelistic qualities” of the 9/ 11 Commission Report that sought to bring order to the swirl of history (31)� Such re-novelization, to appropriate Bit’s term, of our future is precisely the subject of proleptic nostalgia fiction. Written in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the War on Terror, the global recession, and the post- 2008 partisan stalemate in Washington, the twenty-first century hardly seems worth remembering� Americans live in a nation whose teleological narrative of progress toward an exceptional world has been profoundly distorted, and in need of a reimagined story� It is in this context we might consider the thirteen interwoven chapters of Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad whose title is clarified halfway through the novel: “Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression? ” (127)� Fittingly, the expression is uttered by Bosco, a washedup, overweight musician trying to create a linear narrative that explains his life� His pitch to his publicist: “The album’s called A to B, right? … And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? ” (127)� Bosco proposes a national comeback tour in which he will duplicate his frenetic, all-out performances from the height of his career in the 1970s� But Bosco’s returning to the glory of his past in the present (2004) is implausible and dangerous� While his PR agent 494 a aron d e r osa tactfully avoids saying the tour would probably kill him in his current physical condition, Bosco anticipates her concern and responds, “That’s the whole point� We know the outcome, but we don’t know when, or where, or who will be there when it finally happens. It’s a Suicide Tour” (129). Bosco proposes his last performance be a deathly spectacle, a final artistic act that brings the anticipated future (his inevitable death) into the present� Three years after the September 11 attacks that loom over these stories, Bosco’s rationale echoes the logic of the suicide bomber� 10 But if Bosco’s plan is an act of terrorism, it is also an act of scenario thinking, imagining the future and the steps to summon it� If the album’s title purports to bridge the gap between past (rock star) and present (fat fuck no one cares about), then the tour bridges the gap between the present (fat fuck) and future (the famous-in-death artist)� Bosco’s efforts are indicative of the futile efforts of the novel’s other characters that seek to draw a straight line between “then” and “not yet�” The album title even names the novel’s two sections, “A” and “B�” The question of “what happened between A and B” (101), uttered in the last chapter of section A and the first chapter of section B, structurally extends one of the novel’s overarching thematics: making sense of time� Suspended in a state of ignorance, readers of A Visit from the Goon Squad must anticipate, project, and imaginatively construct the connections between these nonlinear, multiply-focalized stories� As two different characters put it at different times, they feel as if they “were looking back” on themselves from some distant future (65, 336)� And it is this sensibility that drives the novel’s conclusion as Egan pushes past the constraints of historical time into the near future� The narrator gestures toward the type of detective work readers will be asked to perform through traditional proleptic flash forwarding in chapter 4 (1973)� The chapter begins with a nostalgic invocation, as Rolph - the child of a legendary music producer who refuses to grow old - demands his father and the others remember their last family vacation to Hawaii: his first four speech acts begin with the word “remember�” Yet Rolph’s nostalgia for the past is juxtaposed with the heterodiegetic narrator’s nostalgia for the future, as she insistently interjects information from their future� “He [Rolph] thinks, I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life� And he’s right” (63)� Rolph anticipates the present as a future object of nostalgia, and this is confirmed by the narrator� The future blasts through this story, as each character’s life is briefly sketched into the present (2008). The use of narratological prolepsis creates a doubleness in which the reader occupies both a godlike position, having access to the narrative’s future, and the suspension of that knowledge that comes when a reader identifies with a character blissfully unaware of what awaits them (Currie, The Unexpected 14)� Establishing teleological narratives, however, is not the point� The chapters operate like an out-of-order flipbook that draws more attention to the gaps than the images themselves� This is precisely the tension chapter 12 10 The passage also exposes the confluence of art and terrorism that Don DeLillo identified in both Mao II and Falling Man� The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 495 highlights thematically and structurally as the novel moves into the near future of 2021� Structurally, the narrator speaks of future events that have not yet happened in the reader’s world, but have already happened in the storyworld� Having been acclimated to a familiar world through the preceding eleven chapters, the reader is invited to feel comfortable in the revoking of their godlike access and asked to occupy positions similar to Rolph and the other characters of chapter 4 in their blissful unawareness of what awaits them� “Because the future does not exist, thinking about the future exists in a state of suspense, waiting for its arrival, and for the object of thinking to pass from virtuality into actuality” (Currie, The Unexpected 11)� The effect is the generation of a state of anticipation, suspense, and incompletion between A (the present) and B (the future)� Thematically, the chapter narrates the 13-year-old Lincoln’s obsession with “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” the moments of constructed musical gaps like in Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady” and Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle�” A snapshot of Lincoln’s working notes reads: “‘Bernadette,’ by the Four Tops: ‘This is an excellent early pause� The voice tapers off, and then you’ve still got 1�5 seconds of total silence from 2: 38 to 2: 395, before the chorus kicks back in� You think, Hey, the song didn’t end after all - but then, 26�5 seconds later, it does end’” (244)� The notes gesture toward the rationale behind Lincoln’s obsession� As his mother Sasha explains, “The pause makes you think the song will end� And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved� But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT� TIME� THE� END� IS� FOR� REAL” (281)� The messianic temporality described here is offset by Lincoln’s efforts to master the anxiety attendant to such suspense� Working against this project, however, is the harsh reality that the end is not knowable in the moment� As a song unfolds, it is not known whether one is experiencing a pause or an end� And when song pauses can last over a minute, the anticipation is palpable and terrifying� The novel’s concluding chapter operates similarly� Also set in 2021, a sellout music promoter named Alex nostalgically repeats a memory of a onenight stand from fifteen years earlier - an encounter narrated in chapter 1 (2006) and focalized through his sexual partner Sasha (Lincoln’s mother in 2021)� Knowing his current employer, the washed-up producer Bennie, used to work with Sasha, Alex inquires about their relationship, prompting a wave of nostalgia to sweep over Bennie as well� They give in to their shared nostalgia and stop by Sasha’s former apartment and ring the buzzer: “Bennie stood close to Alex, and they waited together, suspended in the same precarious excitement” (339)� Like the great rock pauses of the preceding chapter, and the replacement of the WTC towers only blocks away from their present location, Bennie and Alex hang suspended between knowing the silent response from the apartment is a pause and knowing it is an end� “And in that moment, the longing he’d felt for Sasha at last assumed a clear shape: Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there - his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet� The fantasy imbued him with careening hope� He pushed the buzzer again, and as more 496 a aron d e r osa seconds passed, Alex felt a gradual draining loss” (339)� The draining of such careening hope, what brings Alex from point A in chapter 1 to point B in chapter 13, remains uncertain and unknowable� What Goon Squad provides, then, is an imagined future akin to the corporate scenario permutations McClanahan described� But rather than map out a teleological narrative, Egan foregrounds the instability and anxiety between the reader’s present and future, the gaps in the songs� Prolepsis, Currie tells us, foregrounds the plasticity of the future� The future differs from the present and past not only because it is “non-actual; it is also open, and in being open, it is subject to our efforts, desires and will” (The Unexpected 11)� The novel projects this future from the efforts, desires, and will of the tenuous futurity of the post-9/ 11 moment� Early on, Egan establishes the anxiety attendant to the incomplete skyline� Sasha opines, “It’s incredible � � � how there’s just nothing there� … There should be something, you know? … Like an echo� Or an outline” (36)� For Sasha, speaking in 2006, the absent towers are unrecognizable as a pause or an ending in America’s exodus from time; has the exceptionalist project been stalled or has it come to an ignominious end? Twenty years later, the sentiment remains: The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint� He perceived it as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance� Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their hidden pulse� (331) Juxtaposed against Alex’s failed idealism and his nostalgic pining for his one night with Sasha, the absent towers testify to the loss of an exceptionalist teleology� It is through the unique form of prolepsis that readers can both bear witness to the future and situate their present as an object of nostalgic reflection. Unlike prolepsis in traditional mimetic fiction, proleptic nostalgia treats the reader’s future as if it were already lived� The result is a genre structurally invested in imaginative scenarios� Unlike the logic of preemption that operates as if the imagined future were already present, the projection also distances readers, foregrounding the gap between now and soon� The pairing of such a defamiliarizing projection with the familiar mimetic narrative is what gives proleptic nostalgia its distinctiveness� Fantasies of the Future and Post-9/ 11 Exceptionalism The type of defamiliarizing jump into the future performed in the final chapters of Goon Squad threaten to lapse into the science fiction (SF) sub genre of “near future” fiction. Near future fiction is characterized by its depiction of a world that is “imminently real - one of which we can have no definite knowledge, which exists only imaginatively and hypothetically, but which is nevertheless a world in which (or something like it) we may one day have The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 497 to live, and toward which our present plans and ambitions must be directed” (Stableford). Unlike far future fiction which “tends to be associated with notions of ultimate destiny, and is dominated by metaphors of senescence,” the near future appears more familiar� It also echoes the logic of corporate scenario-thinking and preemption� And it is perhaps for this reason that there has been such a prolific outpouring of near future fiction in the post-9/ 11 period (Fox; Newitz)� Texts like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Brian Slattery’s Lost Everything, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, and Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb envision American surveillance, imperialism, globalization, and ecological destruction in the not-too-distant (20-50 years) future� This trend away from the far future is noted by eminent SF writer, William Gibson, who published his first non-SF novel (Pattern Recognition) after 9/ 11� When asked in an interview about this choice, Gibson remarked that, “contemporary reality is sufficiently science fiction for me” (Kazan). He continues, “I may not be done with the future but I have to figure out what it means to try to write about the future at a time when we are all living in the shadow of at least half a dozen wildly science fiction scenarios.” Certainly other SF writers have responded to this by narrating stories in the vicinity of the present day, but the examples above propose a greater difference than what we see in proleptic nostalgia fiction. One of the classic definitions of SF proposed by Darko Suvin revolves around the concept of the novum, or “fictional device … that focuses the difference between the world the reader inhabits and the fictional world of the SF text” (Roberts 1). These novum generate greater displacement between the reader and the storyworld - warp drive and teleportation, non-gendered or non-corporeal alien races - and prompt ontological interrogations� In proleptic nostalgia fiction, however, the novum is the temporal jump itself� The storyworld is established as coterminous with the reader’s, and the projected future remains familiar. For Groff, whose final section jumps into 2019, Bit and his daughter wait out a pandemic in Arcadia� But the apocalyptic element is undercut by the global death toll maxing out at 750,000, a figure that shouldn’t strain the reader’s credibility in a world familiar with epidemics of AIDS (1�7 million dead in 2012) and malaria (660,000 dead in 2012)� Similarly, Egan’s vision of 2021 involves network technology advances akin to Google Glass, nothing consumers couldn’t find at their local Best Buy. Juxtaposed against more defamiliarizing nova like McCarthy and Slattery’s unidentified apocalypses, Whitehead’s zombie plague, Rogers’ terrorist-engineered virus that kills pregnant women, or Vinge’s avatar-like “overlays,” Egan and Groff are more interested in exploring a future very much like the present� To categorize them as near future SF would undermine the mimetic stakes of their narratives� Of course, erecting rigid classificatory boundaries is counterproductive. Certainly near future SF is interested in making some parts of the world like the present - hence the need for its nearness. And certainly mimetic fiction must take liberties with how closely it matches the real world, or else it lapses 498 a aron d e r osa into biography or history� Rather than thinking of proleptic nostalgia as a rigid category, then, we might more appropriately consider it in terms of a graph, moving horizontally from past to future, and vertically from mimetic to defamiliarized. In this figuration, a novel like McCarthy’s The Road that takes place fifty years in the future and is virtually unrecognizable from the world of the present falls in one corner, and a text like the 9/ 11 Commission Report falls in the other. In the space between we find the proleptic nostalgia of Egan, Groff, and Carolyn See’s There Will Never Be Another You, which lean toward the mimetic and the future. We might also extend the classification to texts like Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story or Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse, that stray toward near future fiction by imaginatively projecting a threatened viral outbreak and the consequences of economic upheaval, but gesture more greatly toward mimesis than a novum like Whitehead’s zombie plague� By familiarizing the future, proleptic nostalgia dialectically responds to the type of “state fantasy” construction Pease identifies as the constitutive element of national identities and exceptionalist narratives� Pease argues that the state is constructed by an affective relationship with - the fantasies of - its citizens� That is, national characteristics are not dictated by the sovereign nor do they predate the nation’s formation; rather, they are generated by a people’s relationship to the nation� Pease goes on to say that traumatic historical events like the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/ 11 are difficult to incorporate “within the normal order of things” and, as a result, “these national traumas demarcated the sites at which alternatives to [the state fantasy] became at once imaginable and desirable” (5)� For Pease, attending to such moments challenges the exceptionalist fantasy, and it is in this space that the proleptic nostalgia’s near future proposes alternatives� These alternatives - in which the world is decaying as a result of a gradual lowering of economic horizons (McIntosh) or increased governmental control (Shteyngart) - are desirable insofar as they respond to and participate in the construction of a national identity� At the same time, this fiction often generates gaps that subvert efforts to establish a normal order of things, much less a teleological narrative of progress� The concluding chapter of A Visit from the Goon Squad narrates the promotion and performance of a concert by Scotty Hausmann, a high school friend of the now-washed up music producer, Bennie� Bennie describes the gig as the culmination of a life-long effort, and Scotty’s music is characterized by its resistance to the future� He performs “ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a headset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure� Untouched” (336)� The triumph of nostalgia that this passage indicates is quickly undermined, though, in that after the concert ends, Alex and Benny walk to Sasha’s former apartment where their nostalgic reveries are held up for critique� Indeed, the narrator indicates that even the nostalgia for Scotty’s music is a mirage to some degree: “And it The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 499 may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock� Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar” (335)� That is, Scotty’s music possesses no intrinsic purity, no timeless exceptionalism toward which the listeners journey (according to the logic of Noble’s two-world metaphor)� Rather, a community constructs its exceptional fantasy in the moment� This is precisely what Bit suggests at the conclusion of Arcadia in 2019� Bit’s narrative cannot be contained within historical time, pushing forward into the reader’s unknown future� The narrator, however, describes Bit’s return to the commune to wait out a pandemic with his daughter and ailing mother� While we might read this return as a nostalgic relapse, Bit does not find resolution in this space� Bit narrates the conclusion with a renewed focus on the present: Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, a rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off� And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering� There’s no use in anticipating the mode� … Pay attention, he thinks, Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath� (289) Even as the novel pushes into an imagined future, the protagonist admits the fruitlessness of such futurity. And in this final moment, readers may finally appreciate why the novel is narrated in the present tense; happiness cannot be found in a nostalgic reliving of the past, nor is it about anticipating some future: it is about living in the present� To this end, Bit concludes the novel by letting “the afternoon sink in� … In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world” (289)� Longing for a future that may or may not be only elides the present that is� For both Groff and Egan, the near future promotes a reconsideration of temporality in an era that has come to see its future as unexceptional� America’s anxiety over its lost future necessitates new scenarios be constructed. While the ethos of an American nostalgia for the future is not confined to this emerging genre of proleptic nostalgia fiction, the important distinction is that the genre structurally embeds the consideration of futurity� As Brian Stableford put it, near future SF grapples with imminent conditions, and such fiction’s cross-pollination with mimetic fiction more acutely demonstrates this imminence� It also reinforces the fact that these temporal points - past, present, and future - are not isolatable moments, but rather exist within a dialectical relationship to one another� The future that Americans envision for themselves inevitably shapes the manner in which they live in the present (as well as how they shape their vision of the past)� Arising out of the Homeland Security State’s reversal of the nation’s temporal direction, proleptic nostalgia fiction should not be assumed to privilege the imperialism of American Cold War politics� As Egan and Groff demonstrate, the quest for purity, whether enacted globally in the National Security State or domestically in the Homeland Security State can lead to “paroxysms 500 a aron d e r osa of violence” (Appadurai 8) directed at those who stand in the way of the exodus from the actual world to the exceptional world� Proleptic nostalgia fiction, then, promotes what might be considered a post-9/ 11 ethic of futurity, the Janus-face to Bush’s doctrine of preemption� Where preemption seeks to anticipate threats and act beforehand, proleptic nostalgia texts pose alternative futures that complicate such actions� If Americans have, since the attacks, attended to the reconstruction of a glorious vision of the future, proleptic nostalgia fiction asks readers to consider not only the goal of that exceptionalist project, but the process by which it is attained� Works Cited The 9/ 11 Commission Report� New York: Norton, 2004� Print� Agamben, Giorgio� “The Time that Is Left�” Epoché 7�1 (2002): 1-14� Print� Appadurai, Arjun� Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger� Durham: Duke UP, 2006� Print� “Blink�” Doctor Who� BBC One� 9 June 2007� Television� Bush, George W� “President Bush Links War in Iraq to War on Terrorism�” PBS.org� MacNeil/ Lehrer Productions, 24 May 2007� Web� 11 Aug� 2013� Ciabattari, Jane� “The Book on Aging Rockers�” The Daily Beast� Newsweek, 29 June 2010� Web� 11 Aug� 2013� Cohen, Samuel� After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s� Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2009� Print� Currie, Mark� About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007� Print� -----� The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013� Print� “A Dance to the Music of Time�” WallaceCollection.org� Wallace Collection, n�d� Web� 30 May 2013� DeLillo, Don� “In the Ruins of the Future�” Harper’s Dec� 2001: 33-40� Print� DeRosa, Aaron� “Nostalgia for the Future: Temporality and Exceptionalism in Twenty-First Century American Fiction�” Narrating 9/ 11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism� Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014� N�p� (forthcoming)� Print� Egan, Jennifer� A Visit from the Goon Squad� New York: Anchor, 2011� Print� Engelhardt, Tom� The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation� Rev� ed� Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2007� Print� Eshel, Amir� Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013� Print� Fitzgerald, F� Scott� This Side of Paradise� New York: Penguin, 1996� Print� FlashForward� ABC� 24 Sept� 2009� Television� Fox, Andrew� “The Absence of 9-11 from Science Fiction�” Fantastical Andrew Fox� Fantastical Andrew Fox, 2011� Web� 21 July 2013� Fukuyma, Francis� The End of History and the Last Man� New York: Free, 1992� Print� Groff, Lauren� Arcadia� New York: Voice, 2012� Print� -----� “The Monsters of Academia�” Message to the author� 20 May 2013� E-mail� Harper, Liz� “The Homeland Security Act�” PBS.org� MacNeil/ Lehrer Productions, 15 May 2003� Web� 11 Aug� 2013� The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror 501 Hogan, Michael J� A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000� Print� Huehls, Mitchum� “Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/ 11’s Timely Traumas�” Literature after 9/ 11� Ed� Anne Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn� New York: Routledge, 2008� 42- 59� Print� Kaplan, Amy� “Homeland Insecurities: Transformations of Language and Space�” September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment� Ed� Mary Dudziak� Durham: Duke UP, 2003� 55-69� Print� -----� “The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism�” Comparative American Studies 2�2 (2004): 153-59� Maney Publishing� Web� 11 Aug� 2013� Kazan, Casey� “Cyberspace Guru William Gibson: Reality has Replaced Science Fiction�” The Daily Galaxy� Daily Galaxy� 9 Aug� 2007� Web� 21 July 2013� Mcclanahan, Annie� “Future’s Shock: Plausibility, Preemption, and the Fiction of 9/ 11�” Symploke 17�1-2 (2009): 41-62� Print� Nadel, Alan� “‘Temperate and Nearly Cloudless’: The 9/ 11 Commission Report as Postmodern Pastiche�” Altre Modernita (Nov� 2011): 29-46� Print� Newitz, Annalee� “Why is Science Fiction Going Back to the Near Future? ” i09� Gawker Media, 10 Jan� 2008� Web� 11 Aug� 2013� Noble, David� Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002� Print� -----� Debating the End of History: The Marketplace, Utopia, and the Fragmentation of Intellectual Life� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012� Print� Palumbo-Liu, David� “Preemption, Perpetual War, and the Future of the Imagination�” boundary 2 33�1 (2006): 151-69� Print� Pease, Donald� The New American Exceptionalism� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009� Print� Redfield, Marc. The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/ 11 and the War on Terror� New York: Fordham, 2009� Print� Roberts, Adam� The History of Science Fiction� Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006� Print� Stableford, Brian� “Near Future�” SF-Encyclopedia.com� The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 18 June 2013� Web� 11 Aug� 2013� Call for Papers Literature and Cultural Change edited by Ingo Berensmeyer, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning REAL invites contributions on the relationship between literature and cultural change. The study of culture has to face the difficulty of not being able to observe its object directly. Its only access is via cultural phenomena as observable products of human activity: artefacts, texts, rites, symbols, forms of conduct. If scholars wish to study cultural change, they need to do so by investigating the changing relationships among these phenomena, the changing connections between social structures, mentalities and the material dimension of texts, artefacts and other objects. While some scholars have rejected the concept of culture because of this indirectness, others - from Malinowski to Luhmann - have attempted to make it theoretically more precise and historically more saturated. Societies change as well as cultures, but they are not the same and they evolve at different speeds. Few scholars in literary studies would contest the notion that literature is a part of culture, or part of a society’s cultural memory, but many are divided over the precise nature of the connection between literature and culture. In recent years, the rise of Cultural Studies has led to a situation in which literature is frequently used as documentary evidence of particular aspects of culture and cultural change. But the aesthetic dimensions of literary texts are often unduly neglected in Cultural Studies, and the connections between literature and cultural change have not been sufficiently examined. That literature is a factor that contributes to cultural change - either internal, due to the dynamics of culture as a system of signification, or external, due to the manifold contacts with other cultures - is hardly in need of additional demonstration. What is less clear and deserves more attention, however, is its particular role in motivating, instigating or hindering cultural change, and the influence of cultural change on the evolution of literature. To what extent - if at all - is literature a self-determining, autonomous subsystem of culture, and what are the historical factors that, at least in the West, have enabled literature to become a form of communication in which, as Jacques Derrida pointed out, it is possible “in principle to say everything” and thus to transgress the limits of culture? To what extent and by which means and strategies can literature, due to this extraordinary licence and empowering, act as an agent of cultural change? American studies, envisioned in the 1930s and institutionalized after World War II, was from its very beginning tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. As recent debates have shown, this American exceptionalism does not merely claim uniqueness and difference for “America”, but asserts a political and moral superiority resulting from specific American visions and virtues. In response, American studies have begun to widen their analytical scope from national to transnational perspectives. Should Transnational studies be the new American studies, then? Recent debates have complicated this happy scenario of transition and insisted on a continuing need to also analyze social and cultural developments within the U.S. itself. How can this be done, however, without falling back into an exceptionalist framework? What can be the contours, themes, and methods of an American studies that is tied, neither to the idea of American exceptionalism, nor to an exclusively transnational perspective? This volume of REAL provides a contribution to the theory and method of a post-exceptionalist form of American studies.