American Tantalus: Horizons, Happiness, and the Impossible Pursuits of US Literature and Culture 9781628927139

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List of Illustrations

I.1 Sean Pavone, A resort swimming pool at twilight (Date unknown) I.2 Ysbrand Cosijn, Pool of a motel at night, California, USA (Date unknown) I.3 Kristina Postnikova, Luxury swimming pool in a Modern Hotel (c. 2007) 1.1 Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Home in the Wilderness (1867) 1.2 Unidentified Artist, The Tortures of Father Knickerbocker-Tantalus. Cover of Puck Magazine (1899) 1.3 Will Crawford, Due Process of Law. Cover of Puck Magazine (1912) 2.1 Alexander Demyanenko, Yosemite National Park, California, USA (Date unknown) 4.1 Tony Ray Jones, Autoshow, Daytona (1965) 4.2 The Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime (1984)

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Acknowledgments

American Tantalus assumed several different incarnations over a long period of time, and in bringing it to completion I have amassed a lot of debts. Originally a probe into US portrayals of tobacco, this work first acquired its present shape as a result of a crucial British Academy grant that allowed me to explore the George Arents Collection at the New York Public Library. Later papers at the Berkeley Symposium on the History of Food, at the American Literature Association’s annual conference, and at the universities of Cambridge and Kent helped reorient this work toward the tantalizing effect. To this end I owe much to the suggestions and conversation of Ned Allen, Warren Belasco, Alfred Bendixen, Bridget Bennett, Kasia Boddy, Hamilton Carroll, John Efron, Elizabeth Engelhardt, David Fairer, Rachel Farebrother, Denis Flannery, Fiona Green, Richard King, Ruth Mackay, Will Norman, Francis O’Gorman, Jay Prosser, Vidya Ravi, Pam Rhodes, David Stirrup, and Daniel Williams. I also benefited greatly from the critical responses and recommendations of Mick Gidley and Anna Woodhouse, while, outside the discipline, close friends on both sides of the Atlantic gave wonderful support. For all sorts of unexpected connections I am also grateful to PhD students and colleagues here at the School of English. As invaluable were the staff at the British Library, the Brotherton Library in Leeds, and the Marx Memorial Library in London. The close attention and constructive criticisms of my anonymous readers, I believe, greatly benefitted the work. A semester of research leave provided by the university’s School of English and a semester of teaching relief provided by its Faculty of Arts were invaluable in helping me get on with the manuscript itself. Laura Murray and Mary Al-Sayed among other Bloomsbury employees were a delight from start to finish. Above all I must thank Sue, Dan, and Robbie Warnes for putting up with me throughout the torturous dark weeks of midwinter in which I finally brought the manuscript to a finish. I can come out to play now.

tantalize vb -ED/-ING/-S . . . [Tantalus, in Greco-Roman mythology the king of Phrygia who for his sins was condemned to stand in Tartarus up to his chin in water that receded whenever he stooped to drink and under some branches of fruit that likewise receded whenever he tried to grasp them (fr. L, fr. Gk Tantalos) E -ize] vt : to tease or torment by presenting something to the view and exciting desire but continually frustrating the expectations by keeping it out of reach. . . . obs: to suffer in a manner resembling Tantalus syn see WORRY

Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1993)

Figure I.1  Sean Pavone, A resort swimming pool at twilight (Date unknown).

Introduction Do Not Touch

This study, and the cultural impulse it brings to our attention, can be illustrated by a simple Internet search. Type “swimming pool” into Google Images, press OK, and the thumbnails that fill your screen will in turn be filled by a succession of smooth blue tiles: perfect sheets of water, shiny and new, just waiting for you to dive in. One or two anomalies might come along to spoil this blue mosaic. You might see some Spring Break jocks, crammed like overplanted leeks into a Miami Beach pool; or your eyes might be drawn to a swimwear model, gazing into the camera, her shoulders rising glossily out of the tranquil water. But such images, if they do appear among your first results, will stand out all the more because they will be surrounded by sheet after sheet of blank and boring blue. Almost all the thumbnails will in fact mirror each other, turning your screen into a grid of vibrant water. Anyone you do see will soon prove the exception rather than the rule. The emptiness of this kind of thumbnail suggests that the commercial photographing of swimming pools is now a rather predictable affair (Figure I.1). Requests for such work might come in from multinational hotel chains or metropolitan realtors, from chalet complexes or tile factories, from exclusive health spas or strip mall gyms. But the combined effect of these thumbnails is to suggest that, whoever commissions it, the job itself remains more or less the same. These images suggest that photographers must, in every case, manufacture newness. They must do what they can to make the swimming pool in their viewfinders look utterly, emphatically, untouched. And all of them, to this end, must follow much the same practical measures. All must turn down or otherwise soften the lighting. All must cultivate a rather geometrical perspective. All must lurk behind steps, see things from head height, and generally view the pool as if through the eyes of a single, isolated consumer. And all must, more than anything else, be patient. They must wait—wait, not just for any stragglers to leave the scene, but for the water to settle back, momentum loss in time ironing it as flat as glass. The pictures that result from these measures might seem too trivial to warrant serious attention. They “just” look inviting, some might say; however confected, their newness “just” looks nice. But such adverbial justs can come to us too easily, too quickly dismissing texts and other phenomena, and on no better grounds than their ubiquity in our culture. To really study these empty pool photos, rather than just glimpsing them as you browse through a website or a brochure, soon reveals that they are far less settled or simple than they might seem. Such prolonged scrutiny would in fact likelier

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reveal that something is amiss: that these images are a little too empty, too tranquil, to seem quite real, or strictly pleasant, and that the water at their heart is a little too still, too thick, to seem entirely the right place for exercise of any kind. Perhaps you will not quite feel that these scenes resemble shrines, or that some kind of religious aura in general pervades them. But the idea of having fun in them—the idea of splashing about or trying to get fit in them—could well get left behind, forgotten, as you gaze on their vision of antihuman exclusivity. A number of questions might then arise. Why, you might wonder, must these images always look so empty? Why does their quest for newness trump all other concerns? What kind of a consumerist heaven do these photos evoke? Why do they isolate us, deprive us of company, and pitch us against humanity? Is it really so horrible to share? Is hell other people after all? It is certainly true to say that some interesting answers to these questions can be fashioned from certain leading ideas arising from humanities scholarship since World War Two. In the field of US socioeconomic history, the mounting “erosion of social capital” that Robert Putnam charts in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) can help explain why these empty pool photos seem so keen to present swimming as an individual rather than a communal activity (Figure I.2).1 Richard Sennett’s sociological classic The Fall of Public Man (1974), meanwhile, can help us to relate these cold, deserted pools to the “intrusion of personality into the public realm” that, happening throughout the western world, Sennett traces back to the first “city of spectacle,” 1880s Paris.2 In the field of anthropology, Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) can help us recognize in the modern United States another culture “richly organised by ideas of contagion,” and to see these pools as acmes of

Figure I.2  Ysbrand Cosijn, Pool of a motel at night, California, USA (Date unknown).

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“purification,” fantasies of a hygienic, dustless land of leisure.3 Even in Marxist theory, were we to venture into another field of enquiry, the analysis Capital (1867) famously delivers of the commodity’s “transcendent” and “mystical character” might help us understand the strange, alien hush of these empty pool photos.4 But it is also true that, if we keep these photos uppermost in mind, a different sort of answer, and in fact the seed of this study, becomes apparent. That is to say, each of the theories that I mentioned above has proven so powerful that it can now seem primed to assimilate these empty pool photos into structures of knowledge it has already established. Each, by extension, often fuels a version of what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have called “symptomatic reading,” whereby critics consider that the meanings of a text lie beneath its surface, and dig into this latent or subtextual layer so as to get at them. And to follow Best and Marcus’s critique of such “symptomatic” analysis—to heed their reminder that “depth” is not in fact “to be found outside the text or beneath its surface,” being instead immanent in that “surface”—can seem a more fruitful way in which to deal with these empty pool photos.5 Something in this kind of image, after all, itself resists easy categorization. Something here seems left over, additional, in excess of knowledge already known. Our analysis should thus seek, not to “pierce,” but to “range . . . over” these photos, as Roland Barthes once put it; it should put into practice that alternative mode of textual analysis that Best and Marcus go on to call “surface reading.”6 The particular surface at stake here would seem to require it. A surface reading of these empty pool photos might, indeed, identify in them nothing less than a quest to perfect the surfaces at their heart: to present us with the sheerest, smoothest, shiniest visions of water possible. This, their pursuit of desirable emptiness, certainly seems our chief priority for now. Rather than assimilate them to this sociological theory or that historical phenomenon, we need, for now, to dwell on their performance of purity: on the purpose behind their harnessing of smooth reflective water. Common sense alone would suggest that there is something not quite right about these images. The typical example at Figure I.3 illuminates their power to disconcert. Nobody needs to read Purity and Danger in order to feel skeptical of the clean and abandoned scene it presents to us. Few tourists today would fall for it. Most of us learnt long ago that these are mirages, fantasies, chimeras no corporation could afford to offer us all. But such ordinary cynicism could soon grow. You might find the emptiness of this scene peculiar; you might wonder at its need to erase humanity altogether. But you might also realize that it is not about to make an exception for you—that this pool is going to respond to your body as it would to any other. You could steal the poolroom keys, you could creep in after it had closed for the night, you could enter the water as quietly as a swan. It would make no difference. You would still obliterate the emptiness that first lent commercial charm to the scene. Its monastic solitude would still vanish upon your arrival. And the water would still follow suit, its gluey stillness likewise disappearing, evaporating, and no matter how gently you stepped into it. This alone tends to confirm that these photos indeed present us with much more than the symptoms of social or cultural forces that we already claim to understand. It confirms that, on the continuum against which Alan Trachtenberg has placed assorted classic American photographs—a continuum that for Trachtenberg ranges from the “reproduction” to the “construction” of reality—these empty pool photos in fact incline

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Figure I.3  Kristina Postnikova, Luxury swimming pool in a Modern Hotel (c. 2007).

toward the latter: they do not just “surrender to the facts” but seek an “active reshaping of them,” treating the “viewfinder” as an “instrument, a tool,” a performative machine now able to reshape its ostensibly unaffected external point of reference.7 And their principal means of summoning this productive capacity is, again, by waiting. Hanging around here becomes purposeful: a passive but radical action that allows tiles to dry, water to grow millpond flat, and a sort of hermetic, invisible film to settle upon the overall scene. By these quiet but powerful means the image pursues its fantasy. Patience works a retroactive illusion: smoothing the surfaces, letting light settle, it somehow returns the scene to a new and untouched state that never really existed. But by these means, too, the image comes to blur consumption and destruction together. Use turns into abuse. For you can no longer touch this scene, no matter how gently, without disturbing it. To engage with it in any way would mar the mythic and regenerated newness that is the main source of its allure. To put it another way, the empty pool photo positions us outside and tempts us into the space that it constructs. Yet its focus at the same time falls on surfaces that seem emphatically (if not factually) untouched. As potent, as alluring, as the scene appears it thus grows fragile, too, hypersensitive to skin. Even the subtlest engagement would shatter it, smear it like grease on glass. Even the gentlest caress would bring about its fall from grace. But this is only to say again that the commercial photographing of swimming pools indeed leaves little room for innovation. Such commissions instead commit photographers to a single, simple aim. Figuratively at least, impressionistically, it requires them to drape a Do Not Touch sign across the swimming pool in their viewfinder. It asks of them that they do all they can to meet the dictionary definition

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cited at the start of this book. The swimming pool, in their hands, must “tease” and “torment” the consumer. It must encourage “desires” only to thwart them. It must, in other words, become an all but perfect specimen of tantalization. It tries to instil in us a desire we can never act out. The yearning it would inspire repulses, necessarily, its object of attraction. Here, then, is a great example of the kind of phenomenon that I want to dwell on throughout this book. American Tantalus is not a cultural history of US consumerism, and nor is it about desire broadly understood. Its focus is instead far narrower, and falls on a variety of images and objects that suppress past touch and evade future desire in much the manner of these empty swimming pools. Soon it will become apparent that these phenomena are all very different from each other. Some are continental in scale while others might sit in your hand; some are epic, steeped in history, while others belong on the plane of everyday life; and often it can feel impossible to explain the affinities that exist, beneath or beyond the text, between them. The mythologies of the untouched wilderness and of the untouched commodity, for example, are profoundly different from each other; symptomatically speaking, they clearly call for far more than a single diagnosis. But their incongruity as myths coexists with the fact that, on the surface of the different cultural forms they take, both enforce much the same aesthetic logic. Both isolate us as observers. Both place us outside and tempt us in. And both then greet our enquiries, our touch, as penetrative: as pioneering, but destructive. A tantalizing operation, in other words, here unites phenomena in other ways unalike. It is these surprising affinities, these surface echoes, that have led this study back to the familiar field of the US literary canon. My intent in doing so is not reactionary: it is not to reinstate exceptionalism by stealth, and nor is it to turn a blind eye to those transnational and postnationalist critiques that have transformed the discipline of American Studies at least since 2000. These critiques do feed analysis throughout American Tantalus, and I will contend with some of them at important junctures ahead. This, however, is far from being the main motive behind the national focus of this book. I here concentrate on US literature, instead, for a far simpler reason: because it broods so obsessively, and foregrounds so persistently, such a rich panoply of tantalizing effects. This is a difference of degree rather than of kind. Several other literary traditions also dwell on modern or ordinary occurrences of the tantalizing effect. The poetry of Robert Browning, for instance, often enlists this effect to evoke his exploration of the dusty arcana of classical and Renaissance sites, likening the object of such expeditions to the “turns of thread the spiders throw | Mocking across our path.”8 The classical subject of these Victorian allusions, moreover, serves only to remind us of what we already know: that the verb has passed to us and Browning alike from Greek mythology, and from Homer’s Odyssey in particular, and that the latter only names (albeit with superb precision) an impulse that people have been experiencing ever since they first reached out to touch the smoothness of smooth snow or for an animal that then wisely ran away. Yet the fact that the experience of tantalization can seem so universal, so pre- and transhistoric, and to the point of ranging beyond human experience, only makes its prominence in US literature seem more striking. For no other literary constellation, as

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I hope American Tantalus will show, so incessantly dwells upon this dynamic as does that of the modern US novel. Nowhere else, I hope to show, does this universal and transhistoric experience get planted so firmly at the heart of major narrative. These narratives certainly do enlist the wilderness and the commodity into a seminal thematic paradigm that in due course also pulls in sundry other enticing yet famously unreachable pursuits: of new swimming pools, of happiness, of suburban contentment, of California, or indeed of the “promise” of a “better future” that Herbert Croly long ago suggested distinguished US life from other modern and industrial cultures.9 Hope’s inevitable desecrations, the disillusionments that tantalization leaves in its slipstream, can even come to seem something of a cliché of this literature, unfolding on the page with a regularity and a predictability one struggles to find in other national traditions. Narrators, protagonists, and writers in this canon certainly seem unusually and peculiarly awake to the kinds of perpetual evasions by which modernity might echo Tantalus’s recurring rise and falls. All seem to have at their fingertips a roster of rhetorical figures and images by which to communicate these perpetual movements from enticement to evasion. Here, after all, to shed a certain childish idealism—to seem surprised to discover, in the words of one of Robert Penn Warren’s more minor characters, that California is just like “the rest of the world, only it is more”—is, in other words, to join, simply, a national chorus of characters for whom hope, time after time, collapses as if into the very curiosity it sparks.10 Indeed, whatever we think of American literature, however arbitrary a constellation of texts it appears to us, perhaps it is, if it is anything, just this. Perhaps it is a baleful symphony of tantalizing falls: a chronicle of what Lauren Berlant has figured as the cruel optimisms that so often thwart “flourishing” in ordinary US life.11 Perhaps it is a study in desires for the things desire itself destroys.

Somewhere different In our cities families rise and burst like bubbles in a vat. For indeed the democratic element operates as a subtile acid among us, forever producing new things by corroding the old, as in the south of France verdigris, the primitive material of one kind of green paint, is produced by grape-vinegar poured upon copper plates. . . . Herein by apt analogy we behold the marked anomalousness of America[.] Herman Melville, Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) Yet tantalize, of course, is just another English word—and often it can seem quite an imprecise one at that. Our keyword, on both sides of the Atlantic, does get used a little loosely, a little haphazardly; people do often just shuffle it, willy-nilly, with lure and tease among a host of other synonyms for desire. One of the first things I aim to do in American Tantalus, then, is turn away from the thesaurus and toward the dictionary—is isolate this verb from its notional synonyms, and restore to it the more pointed meaning that its etymology makes clear. In due course, this simple

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step might in fact come to seem the most important of all those I aim to take over the course of this book. Our constant bowdlerization of this keyword can certainly seem regrettable, a hollowing out of a very pointed, very useful, word. Far removed from the bland synonymizing that reigns over it today, tantalize’s Greek origins, as unearthed by Zygmunt Bauman in Community (2001), direct us to a precise and pitiless ordeal: According to Greek mythology, Tantalus. . . . .was on excellent terms with the gods who frequently invited him to wine and dine in their company at Olympic feasts. His life was, by ordinary folks’ standards, trouble-free, joyful and all together happy—until, that is, he committed a crime which gods would not (could not?) forgive. As for the nature of that crime, various tellers of the story differ. . . . The punishment was swift; it was also as cruel as only offended and vengeful gods could make it. . . . Tantalus was stood up to his neck in a stream—but when he lowered his head wishing to quench his thirst, the water flew away. Over his head hung a luscious bunch of fruit—but whenever he stretched out a hand wishing to satiate his hunger, a sudden gust of wind blew the appetizing titbits away. (Hence, whenever things tend to vanish the moment we seem to have got them, at long last, within our reach—we complain of being “tantalized” by their “tantalizing” nearness.)12

Bauman, captured here in storytelling mode, re-envisions such suffering with a specific analogy in mind. In his sights is the elusive nature of home and belonging under the conditions of what he calls “liquid” modernity. He observes that, given the widening inequality and all but compulsory transience that for him define modern life, contemporary seekers of community are doomed to share Tantalus’ lot. . . . The hope of respite and tranquillity which makes the community of their dreams so enticing will be dashed each time they declare, or are told, that the communal home they have sought has been found.13

The faith in popular culture that has become something of a hallmark of Bauman’s late work here leads him to overlook the bowdlerization that now attends most utterances in English of his singular keyword. At the same time it remains apparent that, even as the demotic he celebrates plays fast and loose with tantalize, repeatedly diluting it into a synonym of taunt or tease, Bauman himself is keeping its “proper” definition at the forefront of his mind. For Community’s analogy only makes sense as long as we remember this original meaning, agreeing that tantalize does not just mean torment per se but the peculiar torment whereby, whenever we try to reach something we want, it withdraws, maddeningly, from touch. Any sense of belonging here, after all, shatters upon contact. Affirming communities of any kind, for Bauman, not only threatens them with overcommercialization, not only opens them up to influx, but also unleashes, from within them, a battery of homogenizing diktats, a call for uniformity, until they can no longer sanction, in Irving Goh’s words, any “disagreement” as to their “practices, codes, and norms.”14 Community in Bauman’s view as such neither taunts nor teases us per se. Much like the food and drink placed before Tantalus, it instead

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withdraws from our every effort to claim it, leading, time after time, to exercises in domination oddly bereft of common feeling. Already, even if we just read it on its own terms, this moment from Community holds terrific resonance for American Tantalus. As we relate it to the larger context of Bauman’s late work, however, this episode, this parable of liquid life, seems more resonant still. For another story that Bauman tells, in Wasted Lives (2004) and elsewhere, is about rubbish, and about how “waste” has become “the dark, shameful secret of all production.”15 In this other sphere of his writing, as he develops his feeling that “the survival of the modern form of life . . . depends on the dexterity and proficiency of garbage removal,” Bauman persistently returns to the figure of the individual consumer, identifying him or her as the chief producer of such waste.16 For Bauman it is us, the consumers of global capital, who everywhere reorganize the world into dirty and clean objects. We, his Consuming Life (2007) suggests, forever “search for individual pleasures articulated by the commodities currently offered,” and while “successive advertising campaigns” constantly update and redefine these “offerings,” our search in itself remains, regardless of such trends, an almost spiritual quest too: for some lost purity, for some unspoilt future, for something (anything) outside of ourselves.17 Our consumerist search, for Bauman, in other words plunges us, once again, into a maddening recursion worthy of Tantalus. Our touch here contaminates, perpetually repelling the untouched surfaces for which we reach, and thereby confronting us, ad infinitum, with our nagging, unfulfillable, desires. But this is just to confirm that tantalization in Bauman’s late work resonates with far more than those evasions of community to which he actually connects it. A more powerful echo, if anything, lies in the creeping dissatisfactions, the endless anticlimaxes, which he feels stalk even the brightest consumer dream. Bauman’s late work, then, invokes our keyword in one context and evokes it in another, and the combination of these allusions, not least since consumerism looms so large in his mind, at length implies that tantalization is somehow definitive, seminal, even inherent to the trials of liquid modernity itself. At the same time, in all of these works, Bauman continues to work on the largest possible canvas. Nothing less than the world itself gets “wrapped” up in the historical process he calls “negative globalisation,” and his ultimate loyalties, as Henry A. Giroux notes, lie with those working peoples “rendered redundant and disposable in the age of neoliberal global capitalism.”18 Some practical challenges, consequently, become clear. Tantalization’s invocation in the opening chapter of Community does seem really useful for this study, its evocation throughout Wasted Lives all the more so. At the same time, however, American Tantalus cannot possibly do justice to all of the diverse and international myths that fall within Bauman’s global frame of reference. Any surface reading of these narratives needs more space, more words, than this planetary approach can afford. Where, then, must our focus lie? Nowhere in these books does Bauman go out of his way to dissuade us from adopting a national focus of some kind. In fact he sometimes seems to reserve greater skepticism for the affirmations of transnational culture that are now such a familiar feature of our academic as well as our cultural conversations. At one point he even

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dismisses the notion of postnational cosmopolitanism altogether, and on the grounds that it only captures the reality of those who articulate it—the “knowledge elite” whom he calls an “extraterritorial class of symbol-makers and symbol-manipulators  .  . . at the forefront of ‘globalization’”—and fails to reflect the lives of those precarians now on the rack of liquid modernity.19 Exploitation often seems very local for Bauman— even when it happens to refugees and other recent arrivants it happens here, now, unseen by the happy smiling faces peering out from the multinational online world. But it is important to remember that, no matter how much transnational affirmation perturbs him, Bauman remains, in the final analysis, a sociologist from a classic and leftist mould. As such nations remain for him, in the first and last instance, objects of social and political power. The United States and other countries are hierarchical structures, and they would only ever call a literary canon into existence if it served their interests. Even as he grows suspicious of its effusive rhetoric, then, Bauman in fact continues to share much of transnationalism’s skepticism about the power of the nation state. He is no convert to the idea that literature is somehow inherently or instinctively nationalistic, and nor does he subscribe to the belief that culture of any sort ever stops, naturally, at the border. Apparent in his work, consequently, is a suggestion that any critic wanting to study a “national” literature can only ever do so out of choice, and is likely to betray, through this undertaking, nothing so much as his own impulses or habits of thought. American Tantalus’s focus on US literature would thus seem to him neither justifiable nor cogent unless I accept that I am adopting it rather as a botanist, in order to gain a better understanding of a given habitat, might set a quadrat down upon it more or less at random. His justification for this work’s frame of reference, in other words, would effectively rest on the belief that US literature is anything but exceptional. Such narratives, for him, would instead constitute a portion of culture as a whole, granting to us a representative view from which to deepen our understanding of a transnational, global ecosystem. The sensible option here is to follow this advice. In recent years the work of Wai Chee Dimock and George Lipsitz among other leading American Studies scholars has grown so transnational in orientation and so scrupulously opposed to US exceptionalism that it would seem wiser, here, to concede the metaphor, and to accept that American Tantalus indeed looks into US narrative only as a botanist might look into a quadrat that she has set down on some woodland in Vermont or arroyo in Nevada. The trouble is that, as soon as you do this, it becomes apparent that this scientific metaphor of mine works better in theory than in practice. It becomes apparent that a great deal of the flora and foliage in our US cultural “quadrat” will not play along. All manner of plant life here instead demonstrates the necessity of Trish Loughran’s qualification: that, however much we might agree with what Dimock calls the “fictiveness” of nationhood, we must remember that these remain “historically meaningful fictions with meaningful consequences.”20 Paintings here, far from lighting out for some transnational territory, emblazon America, mimicking its icons, fetishizing its commodities, and idealizing its land. Some US writers really do try to write the next Great American Novel. Many other artworks, from blockbusters to indie films, from epic poems to confessional lyrics,

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from NBC sitcoms to HSBO miniseries, and from outraged punk chants to cheesy rock anthems, often do sway, inside the quadrat they share, against a recognizably American breeze. Nor is it simply that these plants seem distinctive. As often they insist on this distinction, alternately wearing their US identity as a badge of honour and mark of betrayal, a promise and a commitment, even a promissory note, and otherwise setting it apart from other nationalities. All of these “plants” clearly do stand open to the world. All let their seeds scatter and their rhizomes spread all around the global ecosystem that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri once figured as “global Empire.”21 But plenty of them also exhibit signs of what Michael Yellow Bird has called the country’s lifelong “addiction to patriotic nationalism.”22 Even if their patriotism never gets quite so brazen as those actual Americans who like to go outside and chant “USA!” in the street, many of them do accentuate their nationality, leaving us in little doubt that the soil here is different. The last thing I want to do in American Tantalus, as I say, is somehow reinstate US exceptionalism as if by stealth. Our criticism, however, should try to hold the fullest possible view of the culture it takes as its subject, and ought not simply evacuate from it or label as false consciousness those patriotic gestures and reflections that jar with our current political positions.23 Here, and at the risk of still further overdoing the botanical metaphor, it seems especially important to point out that constant reflections on US identity occur not only in our quadrat’s most popular “plants” but many of its most “refined” varieties too. William James, to be sure, soon wearied of attempts to see pragmatism as an “American movement, . . . excellently fitted for the man on the street, who naturally hates theory and wants cash returns immediately.”24 He himself, however, was partial to the odd rumination on national character, every now and then riffing on the contrast between stuffy overweened Europe and wide-eyed America, and declaring, in Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), that no “Briton or German [can] ever understand the peace of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious nonsense, between him and the common God of all.”25 Nation-thinking clearly played an important role in his intellectual outlook. But this is not all. Just as there is far more to Varieties of Religious Experience than these musings on US identity, so such speculation is far from the only reason why James’s “plants” can seem so much to belong, so much at home, in our particular cultural quadrat. Of all his meditations, one of the most resonant in fact hinges on a dynamic already encountered in this introduction. His discussion, toward the end of Principles of Psychology (1890), of “present time,” or of what we might call the nowness of now, certainly hinges on a perpetual evasion powerfully redolent of Tantalus’s tantalization. The challenge for James is as follows: Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. . . . Reflection leads us to the conclusion that it must exist, but that it does exist can never be a fact of our immediate experience.26

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Earlier we saw, in the quotation from Pierre which began this section, Herman Melville’s wild eccentric novel brood on the “marked anomalousness” of “America.”27 Such speculation in itself confirmed that even Melville, although often hailed as a prophet of a world beyond nationhood, was at the same time another major US writer who delighted in discoursing on national characteristics in general and on the distinction of his homeland in particular. But Pierre also exemplifies the critical difference, illustrating well that his penchant was to grasp America’s as a negative distinction, as an aberration more than an achievement, and to frame it in detached, satirical terms. Much as his work elsewhere resists any kind of integration into what Donald E. Pease calls a “nationalizing telos,” Melville, at this point in particular, lingers long on America’s “anomalousness,” adding his voice to a rich and composite testimony on its obsession with all things new.28 But he also laments, crucially, such novelty’s ceaseless flight, its constant slipping out of reach. Nor is this apprehension of how some “subtile acid among us [is] forever producing new things by corroding the old” the only way in which Pierre’s understanding of the American aberration already ranges far beyond, and by no means only foreshadows, modern and modernist calls to “Make it New!” The novel as a whole instead tends to establish such commands as a kind of psychological problem, helping us to register the faint anxiety, even the neediness, behind the incessant recycling of Ezra Pound’s overquoted and often-decontextualized maxim.29 In consequence, as Principles of Psychology echoes Pierre, their accounts emphasizing our recursive pursuit of nowness and newness respectively, so we might begin to feel we are here in the presence of something of a shared cultural idiom. A sort of paradigm or continuum here certainly seems to lead James and Melville alike to grasp the immediate problem before them according to a common language of curiosity and withdrawal. Many critics now at the forefront of the discipline would likely balk at the idea that James’s meditation on the “‘specious’ present” thus amounts to a very American kind of intellectual discovery.30 Indeed, Giorgio Agamben has extrapolated some similar lessons from Aristotle’s Physics, claiming that the latter, too, posits the “instant in itself ” as “nothing more than the continuity of time. . ., a pure limit which both joins and divides past and future.”31 Alongside these unstated parallels, though, James’s ability here to grasp nowness in tantalizing terms—to suggest, as William H. Gass puts it, that we might always reach out only to find its “edge” is “so fine it.  .  . [has] no size”—begins to draw out its resemblance to other plants to be found in the US quadrat.32 For example, Alexis de Tocqueville, arguably the most influential of all observers of privileged US life, dedicates an entire chapter of Democracy in America (1835–40) to what he posits as its unsettled and curiously unenjoyable attitude to the fruits of wealth. Here he tells of how the white male citizen of the early Republic never quite took pleasure from his privilege—and not because of his moral qualms over slavery, but because he always seemed “so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.”33 Again we find a sort of banal repetition of frontier myth, an everyday, routinized echo of that epic restless pushing out west into what Henry

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Nash Smith characterized as the “constantly receding area of free land. . . beyond the frontier.”34 Again we find, in other words, a cultural idiom of tantalization: another plant in our quadrat, albeit one of foreign rootstock, preoccupied by all that flies from the interest it attracts. This shared cultural idiom, if less flaunted than patriotism per se, can thus seem another hallmark, at least sometimes, of various US artworks. Sometimes this does seem somewhere different, in other words, and not least because somewhere here does sometimes seem different. The first word that Judy Garland sings in her famous performance of “Over the Rainbow” certainly plants a concern with tantalization at the heart of The Wizard of Oz (1939). But her vocals, if readying the film for its impending Technicolor odyssey, also name a quite different desire and a quite different destination. Indeed, if only because it lies “over the rainbow,” this other somewhere would seem at one and the same time harder to reach and nearer to hand than the Oz that it only half anticipates.35 For Dorothy’s song is another important US text that ruminates quite deliberately on the tantalizing effect. If its verses conjure a wonderland noticeably milder and simpler than Oz, and if its chorus reawakens old childhood hopes of getting to the end of the rainbow, then the lyrics as a whole suggest that somewhere lies very much within Dorothy’s own orbit, within the fold of her own life, but retreats, maddeningly, whenever she reaches out for it. Accordingly, as a concept, her somewhere resembles the newness of Pierre or the nowness of Principles of Psychology. It too entices and evades, evades and entices, its allure again being fueled, all the while, by its recurring anticipation of its recurring withdrawal. No road, yellow or otherwise, could lead to it. Cyclones cover too much ground, and catapult her, all too quickly, beyond her immediate horizon. But no matter how close it feels—and Garland does spend much of the song looking around as if half expecting to see it from the indoor Kansas of her Hollywood studio—this other somewhere remains, resolutely, out of reach. For these reasons it hardly torments her per se. It holds her, instead, in a perpetual state of tantalization. Alongside their faux-naïf, saccharine quality, E. Y. Harburg’s famous lyrics, and their deployment of this tantalizing effect in particular, can feel a little arch and knowing. But we must not assume that the kitsch or camp qualities of this introductory song automatically betray any kind of insincerity. Instead, and although it was almost omitted from Victor Fleming’s final edit, this opening song perfectly establishes Dorothy’s somewhat aloof attitude toward the quest to find the wizard which she will herself more or less lead. For The Wizard of Oz’s protagonist often seems stubborn in her homesickness, determined, as Joel Chaston puts it, to “spend. . . her entire time” in the Emerald City “wishing she were back home.”36 No matter how astonishing here becomes, no matter how unearthly its delights, Dorothy always seems more interested in escaping than enjoying it. Constantly she longs to flee the uninhabitable now. Her hope is to return to a nostalgic past or arrive in some better future that, were she ever to reach it, would presently turn into her latest ungraspable here. In this way The Wizard of Oz’s most popular song, not unlike “Somewhere” in West Side Story (1949), recasts its keyword in the mould of tantalization, in the process becoming all the more representative of its cultural quadrat in general. Academics, to be sure, might not

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often draw comparisons between Judy Garland and Herman Melville. But perhaps, sometimes, they should. Suffice it to say that Melville, too, in ways I will now touch upon, often pondered tantalization, likewise brooding, albeit far more fiercely and funnily than The Wizard of Oz, on a miscellany of elusive, untouchable desires.

“The Everlasting Itch” But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period ago—not a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for fortyeight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated. Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) Nonetheless, and as pompous as it sounds, Melville’s oeuvre never quite manages to bring tantalize under control. This most radical of writers instead seems to have remained, throughout his writing life, curiously indifferent (or perhaps resistant) to his own knowledge of that “proper” definition that would lift this verb out of the thesaurus and its fog of synonyms. If only because his writings so often return to the Greek abyss of Tartarus, alluding to its range of sadistic punishments and speculating on

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their modern equivalents, this habit of playing around with tantalize’s classical roots, of remembering them only to forget them, can seem deliberate, even a little artful. A passing moment from Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (1849), for instance, presents us with the statue of an exotic deity whose open mouth overflows with fruit. As Mardi playfully reflects on “how tantalizing” it must feel “to hold so glorious a mouthful without the power of deglutition,” so the simple yoking of this particular foodstuff to this particular verb would seem to confirm that the latter’s Greek etymology remains prominent in Melville’s mind.37 Only a few pages later, however, we find him pressing tantalize into a passing allusion to curiosity per se, using it as just another synonym of tease or tempt.38 Etymological knowledge here does not dissuade him from employing tantalize in other, blander contexts. This, I appreciate, looks unimportant. Melville’s “misuse” of an isolated word certainly pales in comparison to the discourses on “the power of blackness” or the attempt (in Michael Rogin’s words) to “penetrate and symbolically rework the social order” narrated elsewhere in his oeuvre.39 But what interests me here is not Melville’s use and misuse of tantalization in itself, but the strange light that this semantic oscillation casts on those other moments in which he describes objects that invite so as to recede from touch—in which he describes, in other words, “true” tantalizations—but does not name them as such. Of principal interest here is Melville’s habit at times of writing tantalize rightly, at times of writing it vaguely, and at other times of determining not to write it at all. The word seems conspicuous by its absence from Redburn (1849), for example, and nowhere more so than when its eponymous protagonist remembers an “old-fashioned glass ship, about eighteen inches long, and of French manufacture,” which sat in the parlour of his boyhood home. As Wellingborough Redburn recalls his curiosity in this fragile ornament, his memories bring him to the verge of a term over which Melville’s previous novel, Mardi, had twice lingered: It was kept in a square glass case, which was regularly dusted by one of my sisters every morning, and stood on a little claw-footed Dutch tea-table in one corner of the sitting-room. This ship, after being the admiration of my father’s visitors in the capital, became the wonder and delight of all the people of the village where we now resided, many of whom used to call upon my mother, for no other purpose than to see the ship. And well did it repay the long and curious examinations which they were accustomed to give it. In the first place, every bit of it was glass, and that was a great wonder of itself; because the masts, yards, and ropes were made to resemble exactly the corresponding parts of a real vessel that could go to sea. She carried two tiers of black guns all along her two decks; and often I used to try to peep in at the portholes, to see what else was inside; but the holes were so small, and it looked so very dark indoors, that I could discover little or nothing; though, when I was very little, I made no doubt, that if I could but once pry open the hull, and break the glass all to pieces, I would infallibly light upon something wonderful, perhaps some gold guineas, of which I have always been in want, ever since I could remember. And often I used to

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feel a sort of insane desire to be the death of the glass ship, case, and all, in order to come at the plunder; and one day, throwing out some hint of the kind to my sisters, they ran to my mother in a great clamor; and after that, the ship was placed on the mantel-piece for a time, beyond my reach, and until I should recover my reason.40

Pierre, too, steers clear of the term. Over the course of his seventh novel Melville amasses a veritable catalog of “true” tantalizations. He speculates on the corrosions of newness and he leads his protagonist through a “forest” full of “ever-shifting shadowy vistas.”41 He talks to trees and wonders, twice, at “thy secrecies,” the life of hives and nests that would soon fly away if ever he climbed a ladder to look at it.42 An extended passage to which I will return in the next chapter, moreover, echoes de Tocqueville as it avers that there “can be no peace in individualness” before then philosophizing on the unsettled nature of happiness.43 This and other intimations of elusive desire in fact here loom so large that Pierre, after a while, pauses as if to shake a metaphysical fist at what it calls “the relentless law of earthly fleetingness.”44 Yet this remains, from start to finish, another novel that never quite comes out with it and calls any of these tantalizations tantalizing. Suggestive of a major narrative concern, and pondered by Melville elsewhere in his oeuvre, our keyword remains absent from the work. As I say, if compared to the wider legacy of a man C. L. R. James once hailed the greatest of all chroniclers of “industrial civilization,” isolated word choices of this kind will always seem trivial.45 But they do seem a little curious. They suggest that Melville relished tantalize and its etymology, that he liked to evoke its occurrence in everyday life, but that he remained wary, for some reason, of bringing these two elements too firmly in line with each other. Moby-Dick epitomizes this tendency. Toward its end, after one last postponement of its violent climax, Melville turns to name Ahab’s monomania in the following terms: And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across.46

On first reading, our keyword’s appearance amid these culminating moments of Moby-Dick can seem to exemplify Melville’s habit of disregarding his knowledge of its

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etymology and of treating it instead as a simple synonym of desire. Ahab, after all, does not want to reach out or otherwise touch the untouchable whale. He wants to kill it. His aim is for vengeance, death. Indeed his final act, as David Trotter points out, is to “spit at” Moby-Dick.47 As such he would seem no more transfixed by the whale’s beauty, nor vexed by its looming destruction, than his sometime prototype Andrew Jackson, when hurled “upon a war-horse,” was that of the Tennessee wilderness or other old Cherokee lands.48 As unfathomable, earlier on, is Ahab’s own articulation of the word. “‘Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!’” he says, interestingly—and yet the immediate cause for this “wild exclamation,” the sight of a feverish Queequeg lying prone in his self-decorated “coffin,” carries no obvious connection to evasive or intangible desire.49 Local uses of tantalize can thus seem to extend into the heart of Melville’s masterpiece his earlier habit of overlooking his own knowledge of its peculiar Greek roots. But perhaps another possibility exists. Perhaps it is only that tantalize’s Melvillean oscillation—that shuttling from a faithful to a generic definition, which happens over the length of Mardi—here intensifies, accelerates, and to the point of occurring within a single utterance of the word. Furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe. Look once, and tantalize’s peculiar etymology here seems immaterial, adding so little to our understanding of Ahab’s vendetta as to evaporate from view. But look again, and the word’s larger meaning reappears, its Greek roots somehow reaching into Ahab and through his monomania in order to voice the view of the narrative as a whole. For if it is true that Ahab only seeks its annihilation, then other members of the crew as well as the metanarrative that presents them to us here all “train. . . their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale,” being throughout not just aghast but curious, not just terrified but dazzled, by this ultimate tantalizing object.50 Cabin boy Pip apostrophizes Moby-Dick, wondering at “thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness.”51 First mate Starbuck, while something of a “moral coward” who prostrates himself before Ahab, nonetheless proves quick to grasp that they are not in fact hunting the latter’s nemesis all over “the round watery world” so much as it is luring them.52 And yet these different quests only augment a fascination to be found in the narrative as a whole. Moby-Dick in general, as the opening quotation of this section makes clear, calls into existence the possibility of cheating or outwitting frontier melancholia—of finding in the oceans something like that infinite west in “whose sunset suns still rise.” The fantasy Melville scrutinizes here is a massacre of inexhaustible life: a permanent “looming,” perhaps even some unconnecting connection, with these sublime, unknowable beasts.53 No one is more tantalized, or uses the language of tantalization more often, than Ishmael himself. Although he explains his “everlasting itch” for the sea by invoking the myth of Narcissus rather than Tantalus, he does so in decidedly tantalizing terms, fixing on the reflection itself and describing it as the kind of “ungraspable phantom of life” which, he claims, you can also find in “rivers and oceans.”54 Soon enough this “phantom” finds a counterpart in a painting on the wall of the Spouter Inn. Losing himself in it, Ishmael at length spots, among the “unaccountable masses of shades and shadow” of this “besmoked” seascape, a whale’s dark but unmistakeable outline.55 Later this mysterious canvas finds echoes of its own. Soliloquizing on art weeks after setting sail, Ishmael concludes that whales should really “remain unpainted to

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the last,” and not least because “you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.”56 Already Ishmael understands the impossibility at the heart of the Pequod’s hunt. He surpasses Ahab. He realizes that you can kill a whale, cut it apart, turn its blubber into candles and its ambergris into scent, but you can never quite put your hand upon its wondrous whiteness, or capture the sublime Niagara you see gushing from its “unnearable spout.”57 Some renowned passages from “The Whiteness of the Whale” then fix tantalization in place at the heart of Moby-Dick. Here, before associating it with death, Godlessness and other points of metaphysical crisis, Ishmael emphasizes the “elusive quality” of this color, his language echoing his earlier thoughts on narcissism even as it defines whiteness as an entity separate and outside ourselves.58 For Ishmael, indeed, whiteness in the pure form of Moby-Dick signifies a “visible absence of color.”59 It is a proof of inhuman purity: the hallmark of the untouched. But it follows from this that whiteness not only dazzles, not only carries a sublime glow, but tantalizes too. Consecrated in antihuman innocence, even the gentlest contact can only destroy it. Under this brutal philosophy of life any whale lauded for its perfect colorlessness can only ever be hunted and destroyed. For you cannot “catch a fish” like this, as Raymond Carver put it in another context; you must “kill it.”60 The cutting, the try works, indeed all Moby-Dick’s long account of shambolic whale butchery only echo and reinforce the fall from grace that would befall such a creature upon its first human contact.61 Moby-Dick, like other whales, might haunt the dreams and taunt the waking thoughts of all the “mariners, . . . renegades and castaways” who together carry out Ahab’s orders and commit the Pequod to his hunt.62 But many among this crew know something their captain does not: that what entices him is by definition outside them all, ipso facto uncatchable, elusive to even the cleanest or most efficient of hunts. They understand that its beauty, the secret of its metaphysical allure, remains beyond touch. Here, I realize, I risk passing over Moby-Dick and Wizard of Oz a little quickly, and altogether too quickly to spell out the obvious differences between these texts. I also appreciate that, in their sheer brevity, these remarks might seem to stand at a remove from the slow and painstaking nature of surface reading as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus conceive it.63 But as I hope for now to be more suggestive than definitive, I have focused here less on the overall narratives of Wizard of Oz and Moby-Dick than on the tantalizing objects that occupy the heart of both. My aim has been to call attention to the construction of pure and untouchable objects that is a common feature of these canonical texts, and to suggest that this shared preoccupation, in turn, connects them to a host of other masterworks in the US tradition. As the following pages will, I hope, demonstrate, many major works in this national tradition do dwell on the evasions of sublime and wonderful things. Here we find a culture unusually committed to incidences of impossible desire. The empty pool photos by which I have just launched American Tantalus, after all, are only the first in a long line of desirable objects that, as we will presently see, do not just taunt or tempt, do not just flaunt the inaccessible, but invite in order to recede from an enquiring touch precisely as food and drink did from Tantalus. As we assemble this catalog of tantalizing objects, it will become apparent that we are here dealing

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with a national literature that repeatedly seizes hold of some classic and resonant national myths, from the western horizon to the virgin wilderness, from suburban contentment to a sylvan California, and from the future to the alienated newness of pristine commodities, and exposes them, too, as objects that constantly withdraw from the curiosity they court. The main purpose of American Tantalus is to show that this literary tradition, if often quite indifferent to tantalize as a word, delivers a full account of its occurrence in all manner of situations and predicaments in everyday US life. However accidentally, these works depict a host of American objects that, like the western horizons of manifest destiny, perpetually beckon yet perpetually recede from all attempts to reach them. America’s genius for all things new here becomes, as I hope now to show, a cause less of euphoria than doubt.

1

Perpetual Pursuits Happiness, Horizons, and Other Elusive Objects in Modern US Culture

Even at this early stage, then, I hope I have begun to justify American Tantalus’s focus on US literature and culture, and to have shown that the attentions of this cultural field often fall on tantalizing objects of many kinds. In this opening chapter I plan to continue this work, and to do so by considering some significant US artists and writers whose different creations, I aim to show, also turn on the question or image of desire’s perpetual evasion. As important to this chapter, however, is its defence of the literary focus that American Tantalus will soon adopt. The imperial pursuit of a tantalizing horizon looms so large in US cultural history that it might seem that American Tantalus should concentrate in the main on visual art. The foray into the Hudson River Valley School that follows these remarks, one might think, should herald not a literary discussion but an extended visual history that could then trace the influences of this landscape tradition to be found in post-1900 US artworks. Now it so happens that the analysis of Sanford Robinson Gifford’s A Home in the Wilderness (1866) which will presently launch this chapter does continue in some ways to reverberate throughout much of American Tantalus. Nonetheless, during its later passages, I also focus a lot less on visual text and a lot more on writing of different kinds. Narratives often eclipse our view of other artworks. This is no accident. The defence of American Tantalus’s literary focus that I offer later in this chapter is at once theoretical and obvious. I draw on Roland Barthes’s Image-Music-Text (1977), but I do so to get at the simple observation that, if the US art tradition seems every bit as fascinated by tantalizing objects as US literature, then its relationship to these objects is fundamentally different. Leading Hudson River landscapes as well as the most radical works of pop art and abstract expression all simulate tantalization in the sense that they lure gallery visitors toward their priceless surfaces even as they prevent and all but criminalize actual contact. On the other hand, the codification of writing, the abstraction written into literature’s DNA, debars novelists from such mimetic practices. Nowhere can they traffic in simulation. Just as words are arbitrary, and just as reproducibility has purged the aura from the book, so

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the blank page now looms before writers as a realm of detachment in which they can only encode even as they represent the effects of tantalization. Literary form itself keeps them at a distance from this phenomenon in which they so often grow so interested. The abstract and arbitrary nature of words means that they cannot harness, and can only reflect, the kinds of experiences on which Moby-Dick dwells. This is why, after my opening discussion of A Home in the Wilderness, I return to focus on the not unfamiliar subset of postwar US writing that dwells on what James Wolcott has called “the secret vices of suburbanites.”1 Here I explore some of Richard Ford’s writing and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” (1964) among other examinations of what Wolcott also calls “the hidden tooth decay of the American Dream.”2 Before I turn to consider these fictions of privilege, however, I want first to consider for a while longer the visual replication of the tantalizing effect. I want to turn to a point of focus not unlike American Tantalus’s point of departure: another sheet of smooth water, another shimmering surface, which entices and invites yet which would disintegrate, unavoidably, on touch.

The land outside Before us spread the virgin waters which the prow of the sketcher had never curl’d, green woods enfolding them whose venerable masses had never figured in transatlantic annuals, and far away the stern blue mountains whose forms were ne’er beheld . . . or been subjected to the canvass by the innumerable dabblers in paint for all time past. The painter of American scenery has indeed privileges superior to any other; all nature here is new to Art. Thomas Cole, Journal Entry (July 6, 1835) Pueblo potters, creators of petroglyphs and oral narratives, never conceived of removing themselves from the earth and sky. So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. “A portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view” does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and his or her surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory she or he surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on. Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1997) In the summer of 1865, as the weary peace held, Americans responded to the end of the Civil War in many different ways. National reconciliation was no easy prospect, and not least insofar as the victorious North felt obliged to respect what Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary has called the “idealistic expectation . . . that a nation is a voluntary association of free citizens,” and to refrain from contorting the defeated confederacy into positions of humiliating “forced loyalty.”3 Some, faced with this complex and contradictory situation, sought reconciliation on the grounds of a shared democratic

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tradition; other Americans reasserted white supremacy; and others still simply translated old military into new political grievances, resisting the consequences of peace as if defeat itself had affronted history. Emancipation in the meantime “continued to be celebrated by black Americans but failed to be included among the nation’s great traditions.”4 Ordinary black and white Americans did what they could to recover from the terrible onslaught and consequence of the war; only some were successful. Sanford Robinson Gifford’s response to the ceasefire befitted his rising status as a landscapist of note. Having lost two brothers in the conflict, he elected to leave his home in Hudson, New York, and to head North in search of new subjects to paint. Ambition, perhaps, helped shape the plan. Many of the works for which Gifford was already known, from Scene in the Catskills (1850) to Mansfield Mountain (1859), were of scenes that not only lay within easy reach of his childhood home but which had also been subjects of the pioneering work of Thomas Cole. Now 42, and still seeming to some a minor figure, a mere student rather than leader of the Hudson River Valley School, Gifford seemed keen to distinguish himself, to identify new subjects, hone his approach, and generally do all he could to establish himself as an important artist in his own right.5 As he left his old childhood haunts behind, Gifford traveled further into New Hampshire, eventually nearing the northern edge of the White Mountains. Only a few days later, in paintings he would base on sketches he made of this rugged terrain, he would distil still further the play of shadow and haze, the overt manipulation of natural light, for which he was fast becoming best known. This overt manipulation of natural light troubled some contemporary critics. Attacks on his work, while rare, took similar form, and tended to fault Gifford for failing to observe the “truth to nature” that the North American Review, for one, called an “immutable law.”6 His mannerisms, his mistiness, his lack of objectivity, could look artificial, falling short of the total Romantic surrender to and faithful reproduction of nature that many felt Cole’s earliest landscapes incarnated. Gifford’s error, as a New York Daily Tribune contributor complained in 1864, was to “show us Nature” under an aspect of “vaporous obscurity,” while George William Curtis fretted that Gifford’s “dream haze .  .  . may seduce the artist from a healthy sincerity.”7 Important critical arbiters of the modern era have sometimes enlarged upon these rare but nagging doubts. One such authority, Barbara Novak’s American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (1969), set Gifford apart from the “Hudson River men,” adjudging him instead a painter of “luminist landscape.”8 Another, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, as late as 1999 omitted Gifford from a Hudson River collection long composed of Cole’s Sunrise among the Catskills (1826) among other masterworks.9 As such, while a 2004 retrospective would correct this omission in some style, curatorial policy prior to that date chimed with Novak’s work, the gallery and the classic study agreeing, in effect, that Gifford did establish himself as an artist in his own right—but did so by pursuing new techniques, and a new approach to light in particular, that placed him at a remove from the Hudson River tradition. Gifford himself, it is clear, felt differently. His public activities as well as his admiring references to Cole indicate that he did not feel his new painterly techniques distanced

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him from the Englishman’s legacy and that they would in fact improve, and perhaps even perfect, his capacity to honour it. Cole, we should recall, was a pioneer. At minimum, he was the first US landscapist alert to the power and logic of frontier mythology. As a pathfinder, however, his paintings sometimes fell short of their aspirations to complete aesthetic independence, and still brought European mores to bear on new American vistas. Regarding Cole’s work overall, something of a mismatch in fact grows apparent: his wilderness landscapes, sublime and picturesque, sometimes struggle to make the encounter with the new—the touching of the virginal—quite as central as his journals suggest it should seem. And all the while, even as some critics suspected Gifford of lacking Cole’s “truth to nature,” the latter’s pictures tell a different story. Their epic and rather posed appearance, not to mention their attempts to capture what Novak calls the “essential truth hidden behind the . . . vagaries of external nature,” reveal that Cole, too, was no neutral, straight observer.10 Less separated the men than some said. Both landscapists arranged, choreographed, the visions they brought to public view. The real difference was that, whereas Cole reshaped nature according to the mores of the picturesque, creating canvasses in which an alluring American newness appeared alongside more established and European elements, Gifford organized his pictures wholly around such allure, his sunsets, his haziness, and his reflecting pools together turning the horizon into a pivot: a magnet able to draw the eye toward it. Cole’s more excitable journal entries, on falling into Gifford’s hands, thus took on the status of a de facto aesthetic theory. America’s “freshness from the creation,” like Cole’s other outbursts about the New World, became the object, even the raison d’etre, of Gifford’s mature work.11 Directly upon reaching the New Hampshire settlement of Gorham, Gifford left it. Gorham was a small and struggling community, a piddling “township” that The New England Gazetteer (1839) had once called “rough and unproductive.”12 Even if he had he found it flourishing, though, Gifford was never going to linger there long. He had not undertaken his White Mountains tour to visit such fledgling settlements. He was there to capture, or at least rekindle, the formative encounter with the New England wilderness that Frederick Jackson Turner would later call the Old West.13 Three or four miles eastward he followed the Androscoggin, its tumbling course in time leading him to a small lake and a stunningly clear view of Mount Hayes. The location captivated him. Gifford devoted an entire day to it, studying the changing light from morning to sunset, and completing two sketches of Mount Hayes with the lake in the foreground and Cascade and Sugar mountains in the back. But this was just the opening stage in a pursuit of American nature that Gifford would resume back in his Manhattan studio. For the paintings he would go on to produce indoors did not duplicate or retrace these sketches. They would use them, instead, as prompts—as evocations by which he divined still more vividly his underlying idea of American wilderness. The ways in which Gifford’s untitled painting of the scene differs from his sketches, as detailed by Ila Weiss, certainly seem worth pondering: [This first landscape] eliminates the foreground, so that the wood floats among the water lilies, opening the nearer space; and the aerial mountain beyond Hayes is moved and magnified to lure the eye into the deeper space occupied by a

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third peak, almost lost in the luminous air. An arc of salmon cloud puffs further dramatizes the recession. Far right, a single tree has been replaced by a wooded island in the right middle distance. The genre motif of a man by a boat is added on a beach connected to the cabin by a path. The entire image is cast in the ruddy glow of sunset.

Back in the studio, inspired by his sketches, Gifford thus renovated American nature. As he did so, the pond along the Androscoggin that had impressed him enough to warrant an entire day of observation underwent particular improvement. He cleared it of clutter, enhancing nature by removing nature; and, having “eliminated . . . foreground” from the landscape, he set about refilling it, the bare and undisturbed canvas now receiving a “measured” and sustained “application of short strokes of the half-dry brush” by which he built up his trademark haziness.14 Even after these alterations, though, Gifford’s pursuit of essential nature remained unfinished. His improvements led, in a second painting, to others—and to a title, A Home in the Wilderness, whereby he forswore proper nouns altogether to announce his mythic, patriotic intentions (see Figure 1.1). On this second canvas, as Weiss continues: The silhouette of Mount Hayes is streamlined and darkened, along with that of a low hill to the right, in contrast to the lightened, more distant peaks, to form an elegantly undulate, wide shape.  .  .  . The horizontally extended clearing is artificially split, elongated, and doubled in reflection again the darker silhouette. To reinforce this design, the forest border is lengthened . . . and darkened. . . . The pioneer idea is by this device thrice framed and underlined. . . . Nature has been intentionally manipulated to provoke a contemplative mood and heighten emotion.15

Figure 1.1  Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Home in the Wilderness (1867). Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Museum purchase, 1997.

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Gifford, in this second set of modifications, thus continued in the spirit of the first. The decluttering of the lake by which he began now led him, on this second canvas, to streamline the land in similar style. The scene duly grows a little less geographical and a little more geological. As water, land, and sky reassert their elemental character over the scene, wiping away the mess of nature and society alike, so a terrain that Gifford had first encountered as being charted and familiar, littered with Indian as well as English names, and within sight of the town returns to its mythic roots, appearing once more prehuman. Signs of life that Gifford then allows back into the landscape duly come to seem more like exercises in mythmaking than they do concessions to reality. A cabin Gifford first saw on the banks of the Androscoggin now becomes a “genre motif,” even a dabbling in cliché; the hard realities of rural life dissolve into legend; and the struggling woodsman becomes a pioneer pitted against a land again untouched. These, then, are the means by which Gifford practiced what Cole preached. Cole’s journal outbursts—his spoutings about the splendour of new and untouched America—find still fuller expression in the younger artist’s purposeful revisions. Gifford’s decluttering, his erasure of existing detail and his distribution of mist, together reveal a desire to follow Cole to the letter and make a familiar and settled American terrain appear again “never figured, . . . ne’er beheld . . . or subjected to the canvass.”16 Even as it develops the “conscious attention to serenity of mood” and “glowing effects of atmosphere and light” that John Wilmerding associates with luminism, A Home in the Wilderness remains committed, overwhelmingly, to Cole’s mission to capture the newness of the New World in paint.17 Overwhelming A Home in the Wilderness, this attempt to resurrect American newness reshapes every aspect of Gifford’s approach; it even modifies his understanding of the sublime. Originally, that is to say, Enlightenment thought had posited the sublime as “a disorienting or overwhelming confrontation with a natural object,” and landscapists after a sublime effect had sought to inspire “humbling fear and ennobling validation.”18 But A Home in the Wilderness spares us such bewilderment. Gifford takes little interest in making us shudder. The smoothing of surfaces instigated by his early decision to “eliminate” clutter from his foreground instead invites us to glide, to skate, over the shimmering water. His luring of the eye hardly contrives to fling us into Mount Hayes. The landscape, on the contrary, allows us to carry on gliding: the line of the lakeshore and the line of this foremost mountain, as they converge, draw us away from the latter and into what Eric Sandeen has called, in a different but related context, “the untamed middle of open space.”19 The far western horizon thus transpires as A Home in the Wilderness’s final destination; and Gifford enlists the setting sun to ensure that, as our eyes fall upon it, it acquires a particularly luscious, buttery haze. Landscapists, it is true, always invent the land they paint. What Gifford calls into existence here, however, is newness in particular—and he does so to fix our eyes on a western horizon that, of course, will always fly away from us as if on “the gust of wind” that forever blew the “luscious . . . fruit” out of Tantalus’s outstretched hand.20

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Uninhabitable perfection The awkward journey, the entire day of sketching, and the long studio sessions by which Gifford brought A Home in the Wilderness to completion are, of course, a world away from the instant technology that now deposits infinite variations of the empty pool photo onto the worldwide web. Some striking parallels nonetheless connect these images. A Home in the Wilderness and the empty pool photo are both at pains to ensure that their focus falls on smooth and undisturbed water. Both then associate all the other elements in the scene with this untouched and untouchable surface, encapsulating everything in an air of mythic newness. In the process, A Home in the Wilderness and the empty pool photo alike isolate us as observers, presenting a new world to us and us alone. But both, therefore, visit upon us much the same paradox, much the same tantalizing beguilement, wherein our touch can only ruin the scene on which we gaze as if for the first time. Just like the empty pool photo, indeed, Gifford too flatters our eyesight: he places us at the helm of some privileged vanguard, yet in the very act of doing so he also suggests that we can only contaminate what we are so lucky to touch. In fact, because so much connects A Home in the Wilderness’s externalization of nature and the smooth surfaces of the empty pool photos, it can become tempting to recycle some earlier comments. For instance, just as the empty pool photo erases all trace of builders, of tilers and cleaners, not to mention of previous hotel guests, so A Home in the Wilderness, too, “returns” us “to a new and untouched state that never really existed,” scrubbing the landscape clean of native inhabitants and other working Americans. By dint of his pursuit of this false newness, moreover, Gifford too blurs “consumption and destruction together,” presenting such a new landscape to his American audience that any “use” of it they can imagine will tip “into abuse.” Nor is this just a matter of quoting myself; critical insights can be transposed from the photographic to the painterly image and vice versa just as readily. For example, when Stephen Fender spoke of Thomas Cole’s journal entries as a kind of foundation text for what he called the Hudson River tradition’s use of a “figure of anticipation” he was referring to the way in which Gifford and other younger landscapists would go on and try to lure the eye toward the western horizon, inviting us at once to perceive and in a sense to pierce the vaunted “sublimity of the American wilderness.”21 However, if often cited in regard to US westward expansion and its disparate cultural justifications, Fender’s phrase equally evokes the empty pool photo, resonating with its sense of placidity, of contained energy—of its anticipation of privileged yet violent desecration.22 Observations Dick Hebdige offers in the course of a recent essay on the Californian swimming pool travel no less easily in the opposite direction. Of Sunset Boulevard (1950), in terms recalling the proximity of the utopian and melancholic in frontier myth, Hebdige remarks: “The body in the pool as metonym for trouble in paradise is, of course, a recurrent motif bordering on cliché in West Coast sunshine noir.”23 Of swimming pool hygiene, in terms that echo A Home in the Wilderness’s hypersensitivity to touch, he observes: “The swimmer, naturally, is the major pollutant.”24 And when

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discussing the “uninhabitable perfection” of “midcentury California modernism,” Hebdige all but names tantalization, enquiring: The swimming pool has never been a really happy place, has it? Beneath the glittering, beguiling surface, the pool has always been a trap, a sink, a hole-inwaiting.  . . . However hard one tries to model perfection, something untoward, something wrong and unexpected always happens. . . . However hard you try to seal the lid, to stretch the cover tight, stuff keeps floating to the surface [.]25

Again, by finding a vision of “uninhabitable perfection” in these pristine Californian pools, Hebdige’s language also brings to mind the tidied land and untouchable horizon of A Home in the Wilderness. “Something untoward,” after all, seems guaranteed to happen to Gifford’s painting too. Its vision is so immaculate, its decluttering so antihuman, that any movement we might imaginatively make into the canvas or the land it invents would likewise ruin it, infecting its “glittering, beguiling surface” through touch alone. A Home in the Wilderness and the empty pool photos both figure the engagement they invite as a collapse, a plunge into an all-too-human world. But this is to say A Home in the Wilderness and the empty pool photos both follow the same logic. In both tantalization seems almost imperative, inescapable as an aesthetic effect. Both as such require us to delve deeper into our keyword, and to gain a better understanding of its US genealogy in the pages that now follow.

Tantalization: Uses and abuses There Tantalus along the Stygian bounds Pours out deep groans, (with groans all hell resounds); Ev’n in the circling floods refreshment craves; And pines with thirst amidst a sea of waves: When to the water he his lip, applies, Back from his lip the treach’rous water flies. Above, beneath, around his hapless head Trees of all kinds delicious fruitage spread; There figs, sky-dy’d, a purple hue disclose, Green looks the olives, the pom’granate glows, There dangling pears exalted scents unfold, And yellow apples ripen into gold; The fruit he strives to seize: but blasts arise, Toss it on high, and whirl it to the skies. Alexander Pope, Homer’s Odyssey (1725) Dominant figures in US government have long sought to present themselves and their nation as the natural heirs of the ancient world. Presidents of different political persuasions have commissioned a range of monuments, memorials, and offices whose classical allusions have made Washington DC seem a city “of horizontal skyscrapers,”

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as Les Murray once put it, where “security admits people | to . . . colonnaded floors | . . . haunted by ideals.”26 In the long aftermath of 1945 some US policymakers did take a liking for Harold Macmillan’s postimperial aspiration that America play Rome to the world while allowing the British to tell themselves they might yet be its ancient Greeks. Most leading US politicians, however, have always been far happier to entertain both analogies. Insofar as they have placed their capital into a classical comparison, they have been as likely to consider it a new Athens as a new Rome.27 But official Hellenism of one kind or another has at the same time been accompanied by much more everyday forms of classical allusion. Ordinary English on both sides of the Atlantic has long searched Greek legend for inspiration. If the Capitol building is just one of many DC structures whose “colonnaded floors” and proud dome trumpet an Athenian association—and if such overt Hellenism also seems apparent in Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus” (1883), for example, or even in NASA’s decision to call its 1960s moon program Apollo—then debates within Congress itself, as elsewhere in US life, have long conducted a more casual trade in Greek allusion. Achilles heel, Trojan horse, Pandora’s Box. Less formal varieties of American English have also raided the pantheon of Greek gods, plundering the writings of Virgil and Homer in particular, to find new ways of describing everyday life. Of these everyday allusions to Greek gods, tantalize holds special, and even perhaps unique, status. When we talk of having an Achilles heel or about opening Pandora’s Box, for example, we are employing an image that others might or might not recognize as referring to a Greek god. Under such circumstances, however, etymological knowledge remains for many close at hand; these phrases can still provide some with delicious opportunities to put their higher learning on show. Even references to Greek gods now so familiar we no longer capitalize them, such as nemesis or narcissism, can trigger a conversational foray back into the strange extravagant universe of Greek myth. Other allusions work similarly. With its connotations of foot soldiers breaching walls and bursting out in surprise attack, Trojan has some claim to be the most inappropriate brand name for a condom ever. Even this misattribution, though, might seem a little odd in a culture that is actually far from ignorant of how (at least according to Virgil’s The Aeneid) the siege of Troy came to an end. Overall, then, if these everyday references to Greek gods make rather less of the Hellenic analogy than US political rhetoric, they still seem at ease with their etymologies. Their histories as words inform their usage even now. Tantalize is different. Alone among allusions to Greek gods it seems estranged, cut adrift from its Homeric source. No one I know who uses the word does so with anything like the historical feeling they tend to bring to their references to Pandora’s Box, narcissism, or even nemesis. Yet they use it quite a lot, and more often than they do other references to Greek gods. And this seems connected to the fact that, as the Webster’s definition at the start of this book indicates, tantalize in English largely functions as a verb, with little by way of an accompanying noun. Narcissize, that is to say, never really caught on; and almost every other reference to Greek gods in our language occurs as a proper or common noun. Tantalize alone carries the immediate familiarity of a “doing” word. It alone seems to describe what we ourselves experience or feel without, perhaps, quite knowing how to name.

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Tantalize’s lack of an accompanying noun as well as its striking disassociation from its etymology help explain why this verb so often drifts away from its dictionary definition. Commonest of all “abuses” of tantalize is the habit of employing the word to describe remote goals plain and simple. In conversation, when marathon runners speak of finishing lines or scientists of galaxies light years from earth, tantalize is likely to get a mention. But in both instances it refers, effectively, to vast distances per se rather than to objects that shrink from our attempts to reach them.28 Two cover illustrations of the satirical magazine Puck reveal the long history of this semantic confusion. In the first, an unattributed cover from April 1899 (see Figure 1.2), we find Tantalus, in a word, misnamed. Satirically reconfigured as Father

Figure 1.2  Unidentified Artist, The Tortures of Father Knickerbocker-Tantalus. Cover of Puck Magazine (1899). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC.

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Knickerbocker Tantalus, this mythic God is put in chains and forced to grovel as if for all time before Congress. On first impression the cartoon thus seems to capture an apt torture: an ordeal that, in its peculiar blend of crushing tedium and physical pain, grasps in the Washington Mall a fitting new theatre for an old Homeric punishment. On further reflection, however, it becomes apparent that, while “authentically” torturous, Knickerbocker’s ordeal is by no means “literally” tantalizing. The fat ripe grapes, their letters RAPID TRANSIT denoting federal funding for Manhattan’s first subway line, might tease or torment this personification of New York government. But they do not withdraw from him. Unlike the fruit and water that perpetually shrank from Tantalus, they simply remain beyond reach.

Figure 1.3  Will Crawford, Due Process of Law. Cover of Puck Magazine (1912). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC.

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In order to find a “literal” portrayal of tantalization, we must turn to other Puck covers, and even to those that do not mention this keyword by name. In “Due Process of Law” (1912, see Figure 1.3), for example, cartoonist and illustrator Will Crawford launches an attack on the lawyer class, indicting their pedantry and avarice, and accusing them of blocking the course of justice altogether. For this attack Crawford turns to what had already become a staple of caricaturists nationwide, the trope of the unreachable carrot, and he dangles it in front of a donkey or mule he calls Justice. (Law, then, here becomes a literal ass.) As a result, in the drawing Crawford builds around this notion, his subject undergoes a far “truer” experience of frustrating, tantalizing desire than Father Knickerbocker Tantalus. Whipped along by a tophatted lawyer, toting money bags labeled Fees, and all the while straining at a harness marked Red Tape, Technicalities and Delays, this poor creature is doomed never to reach the orange target Crawford calls the Conviction of the Guilty. A particular kind of punishment here thus misses its nominal target. Tantalization in these illustrations exerts a certain fascination even as it eludes conscious understanding. Not unlike in Melville’s oeuvre, it appears potent and suggestive even as it remains subject to casual misattribution. About tantalize’s precise meaning we have long been careless, then, and even indifferent. But a paradox is now beginning to become apparent. For this indifference has taken hold in a culture governed by tantalization “properly” understood. In various manifestations of global capitalist culture, that is, consumption and consumer as terms can today seem so ubiquitous as to pass more or less unnoticed. Yet consumption, as Raymond Williams long ago noted, in fact “unconsciously expresses a really very odd and partial version of the purpose of economic activity (the image is drawn from the furnace or the stomach, yet how many things there are we neither eat nor burn).” Consumption, for Williams, thus stands in the shadow of destruction, and all its bland and corporate utterances today cannot quite deodorize its rising smell of self-hatred: its intimation that we can only destroy everything that falls inside our orbit, biting and chewing and reducing even the loveliest object to a hideous, digestible pulp. Indeed, although Williams is too polite to say so, his critique clearly implies that, as a reigning metaphor of global capitalist culture, consumption not only places all objects onto a paradigm of edibility but also understands our use of them in terms, eventually, of defecation. At the very least, the concept of “consumption, with its crude hand-tomouth patterns,” for Williams calls to mind “the stimulated and controlled absorption of the products of an external and autonomous system,” in the process helping to explain why people often harbor a peculiar vitriol for those objects or commodities that they once enjoyed but that they now consider passé or too popular for their own good.29 Consumption here thus conspires in tantalization, its ubiquity helping explain why the beckoning newness of the latest car, gadget, music genre, novel, ingredient, hip neighborhood, travel destination, and even academic theory can so quickly withdraw from us, losing its lustre via nothing more than our encounter of them. But this is only to recall again Alexander Pope’s Homeric excursions—is only to say again that “blasts arise” and continually disperse “the fruit” we try to seize; or that the freedom from touch that our culture conflates with beauty perpetually gets tossed “on high,” whirled “to the skies,” howsoever it courts desire.

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The paradox emerging here thus runs as follows. Even as we reenact Tantalus’s ordeal, as imagined by Alexander Pope, we wreck the verb this minor Greek god bequeathed to us. We purge it of the meaning we experience all around. But the word itself, because its origin in the name Tantalus remains so clear, keeps letting us correct this obfuscation. And our culture, because of its addiction to all things new remains so entrenched, gives us ample grounds to do just that. The journey leading from Tantalus to tantalize as such presents us with a word puzzle of sorts. In our language, our speech and writing, is where the enigma lies. In itself the linguistic character of this mystery might seem to explain why American Tantalus will from now on focus largely on US literature. This is not to say that fiction dominates the following analysis because I see it as being especially faithful to the origins of our language. Perhaps, as we have seen, Puck magazine illustrators among other visual artists have sometimes led the way in “misusing” tantalize. But US writers have never exactly surpassed themselves in their careful handling of this verb. Nor have they seemed uniformly or unusually alert to its Homeric etymology. Far from idealizing literature, then, American Tantalus’s focus on fiction rests on some quite practical considerations, and is, effectively, rooted in two simple observations that lead straight to a simple conclusion. The fact that the journey from Tantalus to tantalize constitutes a word puzzle of sorts presents us with the first of these observations. The fact that words are the materials that writers work with presents the second. And the simple truth is that these observations, when placed together, make literature seem obvious territory on which to pitch the enquiries now underway. But such a straightforward syllogism, it also seems necessary to note, only restates in a simplified form some of the insights into language and writing that Roland Barthes delivers in the course of Image-Music-Text. The question of how writing might deal with the mythic in the modern, placing both into new and mutable relations, certainly seems uppermost in Barthes’s mind in such passages as the following: Languages are more or less thick; certain amongst them, the most social, the most mythical, present an unshakeable homogeneity (there is a real force of meaning, a war of meanings): woven with habits and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses and key-words, each constitutes an idiolect, or more exactly a sociolect. . . . Myth, indeed, must be included in a general theory of language, of writing.  .  .  . What I mean by this is that the mythical is present everywhere sentences are turned, stories told (in all senses) of the two expressions: from inner speech to conversation, from newspaper article to political sermon, from novel (if there still are any) to advertising image—all utterances which could be brought together under the Lacanian concept of the imaginary.30

Here, as elsewhere in his writings, Barthes seems to grasp the abstract or arbitrary character of language not as a limit upon it but as the precondition of its astonishing richness. Ferdinand de Saussure’s discovery of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign, for Barthes, seems to throw these words back onto their referential subject, forcing them to become absolutely attentive to the culture that saturates them: its myths, its

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stories, its history.31 But as he meditates on language’s arbitrary character, and as he affirms it as the source of writing’s pliable referentiality, Barthes here also makes plain another important fact: that works of literature, unlike paintings, photographs, or films, cannot in themselves mime or simulate tantalization. They might describe, meditate on, and even denounce this curious phenomenon. But they cannot in themselves harness it—cannot manufacture anything like what Barbara Novak called “the erasure of stroke” by which A Home in the Wilderness, to cite just one example, comes to seem untouched. Writing, to be sure, often searches around for various ways of hiding its own compositional processes from view. But unlike Gifford’s landscape and the empty pool photo—and unlike all manner of other nonliterary artworks—it cannot import into its structures the tantalizing effects of the object it depicts. Even in nonfictional genres, even when devoid of narrators or characters, the arbitrary character of writing instead requires it to approach tantalization as a phenomenon external to itself. Literature by definition, then, must concern itself not with tantalizing effects per se but the matter of their wider contextual impact. A view of landscape occurring about halfway through Richard Ford’s short story “Calling” (2000) will help us to develop these comments: [O]n the horizon, illuminated by the morning light, were the visible buildings of the city—the Hibernia Bank where my father’s office had been—nudged just above the earth’s curve. It was strange to feel so outside of civilization, and yet to see it so clearly. Of course at the beginning it was dark . . . We went for a ways down the bayou, then turned and went slowly under a wooden bridge and then out along a wide canal bordered by swamp hummocks where white herons were roosting and the first ducks of those we hoped to shoot went swimming away from the boat out of the light, suddenly springing up into the shadows and disappearing. My father pointed at these startled ducks, made a gun out of his fingers and jerked one-twothree silent shots as the skiff hurtled along through the marsh. Naturally, I was thrilled to be there . . . I believed, though, . . . there would always be something imperfect that would leave you feeling not exactly good. The trick was to get used to that feeling, or risk missing what little happiness there really was.32

A Home in the Wilderness, like the empty pool photos appearing on countless global websites, purports to depict its subject, presenting the new and untouched atmosphere that it achieves as a mere reflection of reality. But this apparent mode of representing newness in fact creates it. Audiences in both cases are meant to accept that the image in question refers to a real and signified object. On closer inspection, though, it becomes apparent that signification in neither runs along such clear and classifiable lines. Signifier and signified instead grow entangled, hard to differentiate, in A Home in the Wilderness and the empty pool photo alike. In both they melt together, coalescing into a looser signifying structure committed above all to the concoction of newness: new water, new land, new space.

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No such maneuvers are possible for Ford. A Multitude of Sins (2006), the story collection in which “Calling” appears, can perhaps extol the natural beauty Ford still glimpses between the gated communities and strip malls of postmodern Louisiana. Ford can even pause life for a while, his narrator McKendall lingering fascinatedly on the “swamp hummocks where white herons were roosting” in the tantalizing moment before “the first ducks of those we hoped to shoot went swimming away.  .  ., suddenly springing up into the shadows and disappearing.” But such description must remain only that, description, aloof from the land it takes as its object. The words of Ford’s story, as of all literature, can only represent and cannot become the tantalizing effect. To be sure, Ford here faced no formal obligation to go on to make McKendall quite so sensitive to the scene and his boat’s disturbance of it. To paraphrase James Wolcott, McKendall here could have just looked upon the natural scene; he could have escaped the perennial Fordian need to “shoot something.”33 Nor did Ford need to have this narrator, on seeing nature flinch away from him, muse on tantalization in general and the elusive nature of perfection and happiness in particular. Some very different ways of approaching this description were in fact available to Ford. His story could have adopted a thirdperson perspective, for example, and exploited this alternative mode to produce a more detached narrative view. Even if Ford had disregarded human activity altogether, though, the land once described would stay described, abstracted by a language external to it. Detachment if not outright objectivity would still condition every detail that it could light up. And the fact is that Ford didn’t write “Calling” in the third person, didn’t present nature in a cold and faceless manner, and—in his approach to the scene—evidently takes more interest in McKendall than anything else. His story seems comfortable in its skin. The arbitrary character of language might stop Ford from following A Home in the Wilderness’s lead, preventing him from bringing his audience face-to-face with an untouched and tantalizing prospect. But his adoption of a first-person narrative mode, and his use of it to explore the evasions of nature and perfection alike, suggest that he is happy with this situation. Drawing tantalization inside the circumference of his own stories, for Ford, would seem a chance to establish it as an ethical, even a political, problem. Ford is one of the great pessimists of American letters. Very little of the excitement that citizens and foreigners alike might feel about American culture survives in his work. Labels many would attach to this excitement, like frontier or California, do get the occasional mention, and especially when Ford’s characters speak. But these labels always appear hollowed out, baleful, and register above all as haunting yet impossible hopes. Such moments lend to Ford’s fictions what John Banville has called an “utterly forlorn” atmosphere that leaves a sort of “weightless silt . . . under the eyelids” of the reader.34 On feeling this “silt,” indeed, reviewers less thoughtful than Banville have said of Ford’s characters that they have lost hope, have become disillusioned, or are now prone to empty nostalgia. Remarks like these can seem quite sweeping, even a little clichéd. But the bigger problem with them is that they describe a crisis and

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a collapse into despair far clearer than anything Ford’s characters in fact undergo. They refer to a kind of death of hope, and in the process they seem not to notice that the problem, not just for McKendall but most of Ford’s protagonists, is that hope remains strong within them even amidst their despair. Time after time Ford inflicts a kind of tantalizing predicament upon his narrators; and time after time, too, he manages to connect their perpetual shuttling from hope to disappointment to the rusting cars, alienated commodities, and receding horizons of a knowingly American landscape. No one could call the difficulties that confront McKendall straightforward. Life for him has never resolved into a single moment of revelation or shocking violence from which he must now recover. His problem is not that he has lost all hope. His hopes instead persist, teasing and tormenting him, luring him only to withdraw from his reach. Such tantalization, for McKendall, takes a very particular cast: “Life can be seen to be about almost nothing else sometimes than our wish for redress. As a lawyer who was the son of a lawyer and the grandson of another, I know this. And I also know not to expect it.”35 On the boat McKendall stares at his father, he watches him drink, he listens to his boorish and embarrassing speech, and even as his disgust builds he dreams of reconciliation—of receiving some gesture, some apology, that might atone for the petty humiliations that have pursued him into manhood. Reasons for hope and reasons to despair thus accumulate in tandem, excruciatingly keeping time together. But this is just to say that McKendall’s own reproaches are worth listening to again. As he puts it, if the “wish for redress” will never leave him, nor will it ever find fulfillment. His inability to steal unseen upon the secret life of the Louisianan swamps, however incidental it might seem, as such provides a perfect analog or metaphor for the tantalizing grip the prospect of “redress” holds over him emotionally. Underpinning his life is the need to reconcile himself to these constant but unachievable desires. Justice functions for him, too, like a carrot suspended from a stick. It always flinches, always withdraws, leaving him nothing to do but find the words to articulate his ordeal.

“A Country of Sunsets” “Once,” he said, . . . “I was flying up to look at some poor man’s hailed-on wheat crop where I held a policy. And I could see all these geese flying down from Canada. They were all in their formations, you know. Big V’s. . . . I was up there among them. And do you know what I did?” . . . “No,” I said. . . “I opened back my window,” he said, “and I turned off the engine.” Warren Miller stared at me. “Four thousand feet up. And I just listened. They were all right up there around me. And they were honking and honking, way up in the sky where no one ever heard them before except God himself. And I thought to myself, this is like seeing an angel. It’s a great privilege.” . . . “Were you afraid?”

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“I was,” Warren Miller said. “I was afraid. I certainly was. Because I didn’t think about anything. I was just up there. I could’ve been one of those geese, just for that minute. I’d lost all humanity, and I had all these people trusting me on the ground. I had my wife and my mother and four businesses. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them. I just didn’t even think about them. And then when I did, that’s when it scared me. Do you understand what I’m talking about, Joe?” Richard Ford, Wildlife (1990) McKendall, however, is far from alone. Sometimes it can seem like most of Ford’s characters feel like him most of the time. In fact, when we turn to the other stories of A Multitude of Sins, “Calling” can start to look like just the smallest in a sequence of Russian Dolls, each enlarging on its fundamental concerns. Simmering away throughout “Charity,” for example, is the belief that Americans spoil America. Tom and Nancy Marshall, the married couple at the heart of this frosty tale, might have grown tired of each other, and their marriage might now seem nothing more than a contractual arrangement too expensive to escape. Both remain united, though, by the still greater contempt they feel for the men and women around them. Their fellow Americans, both believe, possess a kind of collective anti-Midas touch: no sooner do they identify a part of the country as pleasant or appealing than they rush into it, reach out to grope it en masse, and in the process reduce these golden realms to mush. Yet this aloof couple themselves feel bedevilled by the tantalizing oxymoron, wherein any place “exclusive” soon becomes “crowded,” that seems so central to Ford’s story.36 Tom and Nancy cannot escape the constant recurring plummet at which they sneer; they can only comment on it, characteristically realizing, of desire and aspiration, that: “The great mistake would be to try to seize such a feeling and keep it forever.”37 Objects of hope and longing for them as for McKendall, then, seem allergic to touch, as “treacherous” as the water in Pope’s loose translation of The Odyssey. Planning to move somewhere nice, they are resigned to the inevitability of its imminent decline, merely hoping that “‘we won’t live long enough to see everything get fucked up.’”38 All belonging to a nation that Henry James called “a country of sunsets,” they too seem alert to hope’s perpetual rise and fall, and convinced that they can do little but accommodate themselves to it.39 Such ordeals intensify in “Abyss,” A Multitude of Sins’ final story: In the car he wasn’t on the proper side to see the sunset. Interstate 15 to Flagstaff was nothing but arid scrub, with forbidding treeless mountains on the other side of the car, where the sun was setting. Mostly all you saw was new development—big gas stations, shopping malls, half-finished cinema plazas, new franchise restaurant pads, housing sprawled along empty streambeds that had been walled up beside giant golf courses with hundreds of sprinklers turning the dry air to mist. There was nothing interesting or original or wild to see, just more people filling up space where formerly nobody had wanted to be.40

Suburban development here starts to look like just another way of chasing the horizon. Like Gifford’s wilderness, and also like other objects swept up in the dubious grace

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of being desired, the desert outside Phoenix here becomes the subject of another tantalizing sequence. Its peace and quiet, even its continental vastness, has vanished as a result of the mass migration it has attracted. But this second Russian Doll sits just as easily in another—in a third doll we can label Short Fiction. On first glance Rock Springs, the short stories of 1987 that Ford set around Great Falls, Montana, shares little with A Multitude of Sins. The latter volume floats from one metropolitan setting to another even as Rock Springs sticks doggedly to a “postage stamp” that Ford has since outgrown or otherwise despatched.41 Crimes occur with all malice of aforethought in Rock Springs even as, in A Multitude of Sins, they somehow take their perpetrators by surprise. Class differences seem still more important. Trapped inside the open world of the mountain West, Rock Springs’ protagonists belong to another universe, far removed from the airport lounges and hotel bars among the other glass cages that dominate A Multitude of Sins. White trash, perhaps, is the obvious epithet; but interestingly, even as they guzzle their beer and graze on their snacks, all remain articulate, somehow more aware of where they stand in life than the egocentric nihilists of Ford’s later collection. True, Rock Springs’s narrators are all uneducated, and their speech relies heavily, as Wolcott has complained, on cliché. But Wolcott is far too quick to see these frequent retreats into the shopworn and the glib as evidence of Ford’s own artistic shortcomings.42 Such clichés are instead a clear function of characterization. And they work. Even as they thwart they lead, elsewhere, to truth. As in ordinary life they can surprise you. Affects flare, unexpectedly, from their fog of predictability. As the car thief at the start of Rock Springs says: The sunset that day I remember as being the prettiest I’d ever seen. Just as it touched the rim of the horizon, it all at once fired the air into jewels and red sequins the precise likes of which I had never seen before and haven’t seen since.43

Predictability and profundity intertwine. Constantly Ford’s thief falls back on figures of speech too familiar by half. But the very ubiquity of such clichés in itself indicates his failure to bring his language under control. As likely as conformities, and in a sense because of them, are moments of intuitive insight: It felt like a whole new beginning for us, bad memories left behind and a new horizon to build on. I got so worked up, I had a tattoo done on my arm that said FAMOUS TIMES, and . . . we made love on the seat of the car in the Quality Court parking lot just as the sun was burning up on the Snake River, and everything seemed then like the end of the rainbow.44

Happiness in Ford’s novels, too, functions much as it does in his short fiction, brushing against but never quite settling into a life. “‘We are always looking for absolutes and not finding them,’” Joe Brinson’s mother writes to her son in Wildlife (1990).45 Dell Parsons, the narrator of the late novel Canada (2012), meanwhile remembers the neon sign of the hotel where he works as “a strange sight” that seemed to refer “to a world away from where it was, and I was, and yet was there in front of me every day, like a mirage or a dream.”46 Like the Best Kept Secret sign that lures Frank

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Bascombe toward it in Lay of the Land, here too we find what Vidya Ravi has called another moment in which Ford’s “characteristically sophisticated” characters doubt their ability to bring about a satisfying or “rightful consumption” of the objects toward which they move.47 Canada’s Parsons thus voices a recurring Fordian effect as he translates Tantalus’s plight into a modern everyday setting: Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.48

Another riff on tantalization, these sentences now look, I hope, thoroughly Fordian, again returning to his preoccupation with everyday US life and its entangling of hope and disappointment. A more difficult question is what might come next. In the Russian dolls listed so far, the short story “Calling” sits inside A Multitude of Sins, which sits inside Ford’s Short Fiction, which in turn sits inside Ford’s oeuvre. Might a fifth doll exist, containing all four of these inside its larger shell? The movement across class boundaries that is a feature of Ford’s oeuvre has no parallel in regard to racial or gender difference. Ethical qualms or a sense of his own narratorial limitations seem to have dissuaded Ford from trying to breach the color line or sculpt out a female protagonist. But this means that the tantalizing ordeals interlacing every one of his fictions always pertain to one demographic in particular. Tantalization might pervade everything in Ford; but it afflicts white men most of all. And he, of course, is far from alone in this. Moods of Fordian tantalization also shadow On the Road (1957), for example. Even in his most joyous eulogies to the open road Kerouac often struggles to hide his yearning to go home to the suburban comforts that he keeps trying to escape. His alter ego Sal Paradise in fact shares a surprising amount in common with the married squares of A Multitude of Sins. He too seems happier on journeys than at destinations; he too feels the latter grow dull on arrival; and he too tries not to worry that this is, somehow, his fault. Arriving anywhere, for Paradise, at first induces relief. Reunited with civilization, he grabs a shower, meets friends, and washes his clothes. After only a few days, however—and sometimes after only a few hours—he becomes, predictably, restless again. On the Road’s tantalizing roadtrips, Kerouac’s temperamental incapacity to describe arrivals without that they become anticlimactic sometimes gives rise to uncanny, almost Blakean hallucinations. On arriving in New Orleans, for example, Sal Paradise remembers seeing the city through “a mystic wraith of fog over the brown waters”; and, as he lingers on its “orange-bright” glow, his ambivalence, his sadness about his approaching return to responsibility, indeed his customary frustration at running out of road suddenly resolve into a single, vibrant image. His romantic faculties, always overdeveloped, quicken exponentially as he notices a “few dark ships” and seizes the opportunity to turn them into “ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops.” But just as Paradise’s dream of New Orleans will soon dissolve into a dismayingly dull reality, shattering against the forcefield of the real bourgeois city, so a similar ordinariness

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soon returns to this immediate riverside scene. The vessels before Paradise soon lose their mystical aura, turning out, on closer inspection, to be nothing more than “old freighters” that are there to disgorge their commodities for those affluent American consumers whom David M. Potter was then beginning to call “the people of plenty.”49 Arriving from the squarely efficient ports of “Sweden and Panama,” they do not even have the decency to hail from anywhere especially exotic.50 Even more renowned are the reflections on an untouched New World that F. Scott Fitzgerald at first conjured at the start of The Great Gatsby before he transferred them to its final chapter:51 And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.52

Fitzgerald follows A Home in the Wilderness’s lead. Blurring signifier and signified together, he at once invents a pristine untouched wilderness and submits to it as if it existed outside of himself. His untouched frontier—his fantasy of Long Island before Long Island—presents it as not only uninhabited but also, and via this very confection of emptiness, uninhabitable. The difference is that, by harnessing the abstract character of language, Fitzgerald does not just imply but broods on this new realm’s impending withdrawal. His silences of course implement an imperial, not to say racial, logic. But they also tyrannize him. No sooner do they concoct a fantasy of newness than they lament civilization’s destruction of it. Contact here seems at once impossible to achieve and a matter of regret. So it seems that we have found another Russian Doll in which to place Ford’s work. At least since the 1920s a small but significant number of white US writers have found it easy to forget that going to college, living in big suburban houses, and having a mortgage are privileges rather than problems. And at least since the 1940s, writers after a Gatsbyesque mood of doomed affluence have supplied what Catherine Jurca calls a string of “white middle-class protagonists” so “unanchored by the experience of property ownership” that the suburbs themselves “come to represent the erosion of their status.”53 Ford, we have seen, often lingers on a far less privileged demographic. But he is no stranger to these tales of suburban ennui and angst, and nor is their recourse to a tantalizing dynamic unknown in his work. His more affluent protagonists, too, often seem happier striving toward a life of comfort than after they have achieved it. They too stand before their object of desire, living out the ordeal mimed in A Home in the Wilderness and in the empty pool photos alike. And Ford too, his writing another “lost origin,” forswears such mimesis.54 He too holds the predicament of tantalization to the light, examining it as an idea that warrants deep and serious thought.

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Something you might touch I never had much conceptual idea of Canada being better. But whenever I go there, I feel this fierce sense of American exigence just relent. America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people’s rights and their sense of patriotism. So the American’s experience of going to Canada, or at least my experience, is that you throw all that clamour off. Which is a relief sometimes. Richard Ford speaking in The Observer (2012) Throughout “The Swimmer,” his classic New Yorker story of 1964, John Cheever trains his eyes on empty swimming pools. His protagonist Neddy Merrill and his friends live a luxuriant life, taking for granted comforts only available to a lucky few, and their pools declare this fabulous wealth. But they also seem to incarnate how money makes their world more superficial, compelling them to prioritize sight over other senses. Use duly blurs, Gatsby-like, into abuse as Cheever’s characters gather together to gaze upon each other’s pools yet shrink from the prospect from ever getting wet.55 To lounge beside the pool, in this opulent Connecticut realm, is indeed to conform to the role that the new leisure ritual has assigned to you; to dive in is to defy it. But this is to say that these pools are “just an ornament,” as underused as the gleaming soulless photos with which American Tantalus began.56 Poolside cocktail parties in “The Swimmer” possess a similarly uncanny, similarly sacred, quality. Too loud, too gossipy, to evoke monastic solitude, they nevertheless inspire other congregations to gaze in adoration of a new and shimmering surface hypersensitive to touch. Merrill, from the beginning of this story, yearns to shatter these soft smooth surfaces. On paper at least the famous plan by which he contrives to do this not only embraces the transgressive status of swimming but also acquires a kind of propulsive energy of its own: we keep reading, he keeps swimming, and the story drives us all on toward its mysterious destination. Cheever’s protagonist can seem a little lofty and unlikeable, and his planned expedition a little daft—and not least when he boasts that, by identifying, “with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream,” he “had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife.”57 But Cheever’s mock epic presently gets repurified, restored to fullblown epic. As if despite his own instincts Merrill’s pretentious and belletristic language regains meaning, and mythmaking, as an intellectual facility, gets redistributed into the narrative itself. Now the story itself compares its protagonist “to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one,” insisting that Merrill “was not a practical joker nor was he a fool.”58 A tall tale that begins in the arch and aloof mode of the high burlesque now grows increasingly interested in its protagonist’s improvised journey: The water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and seemed to suspend it in midair. The Bunkers’ pool was on a rise and he climbed some stairs to a terrace where twenty-five or thirty men and women were drinking. The only person in the water was Rusty Towers, who floated there on a rubber raft. Oh, how bonny and

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American Tantalus lush were the banks of the Lucinda River! Prosperous men and women gathered by the sapphire-colored waters while caterer’s men in white coats passed them cold gin. Overhead a red de Haviland trainer was circling around and around and around in the sky with something like the glee of a child in a swing. Ned felt a passing affection for the scene, a tenderness for the gathering, as if it was something he might touch. In the distance he heard thunder . . . A smiling bartender he had seen at a hundred parties gave him a gin and tonic and he stood by the bar for a moment, anxious not to get stuck in any conversation that would delay his voyage. When he seemed about to be surrounded he dove in and swam close to the side to avoid colliding with Rusty’s raft.59

One way to explain this fascination is that, not unlike Melville’s yearning for that infinite west “in whose sunset,” impossibly, “suns still rise,” Merrill’s brainwave tries to turn the tables on the tantalizing object. Tantalizing effects, by definition, are cyclical. They can be thought of as a kind of trick certain situations not only play on us, but play on us again, and again, ad nauseam. By some odd magic, however, Merrill’s scheme manages to turn hazy intangible objects into “something he could touch.” Swimming back home via the ornamental pools of his friends somehow harnesses the cyclical functions of tantalization and projects them back onto an object from which they typically emanate. Merrill’s horror of pool ladders—he confesses to “an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools”—accordingly comes to seem something of what Barthes once called a snare, a “deliberate evasion” or disavowal of the truth Cheever’s story reveals.60 Everything else here instead indicates that, in diving headlong into pools, Merrill has stumbled across a simple act that exceeds its immediate context and speaks profoundly to his inner emotional life. On first impression it might seem surprising to say that these figurations bear comparison with A Bigger Splash (1967). David Hockney’s famous painting, after all, is more often seen as an act of queer liberation—an affirmation of Californian sun and sex in which his brushstrokes smuttily proclaim the shattered water a sort of alfresco orgasm. But this dominant view, if not misplaced, cannot explain why Hockney has felt it necessary to remove all human figures from his scene. A Bigger Splash, in Pery Burge’s phrase, is “full of time,” a painting that “capture[s] a fugitive moment with dynamic paint marks that look as if they might change at any second.”61 As such there is no accident in the fact that Hockney has frozen the image he paints at the precise moment in which his diver remains underwater but the impact of his dive on the water itself continues to grow. A Bigger Splash traps time in a loaded moment of transformation. Hockney captures life just after the dive has happened but just before the water has lost all of its smoothness. Spatial manipulations in “The Swimmer” perform a similar function. Here Cheever zooms in on another ritual of shattering, but instead of freezing it he distributes it across disparate locations. His text too thus yearns to inhabit the uninhabitable—to occupy what Hebdige figures as an antihuman perfection. Like A Bigger Splash, it longs to place a finger on water’s smooth surface. It yearns to confound the tantalizing effect that it enacts—to hold in its hand the ungraspable nowness of water’s disruption. Nor, it seems, can either text begin to think about this fantasy without first isolating their subjects from humanity. Swept away by Hockney’s big blocks of color, wiped clean as

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Cheever catapults Merrill into the next party, other people are pushed to the edge and ultimately removed altogether from these texts. A Bigger Splash and “The Swimmer” ultimately long to retreat into the tranquil and bodiless hush underwater. The nearest equivalents of these uncanny moments in Richard Ford lie in his portrayals of duck and geese hunts. On the face of it, admittedly, these portrayals amount to little more than the kinds of “death walks” that have led Wolcott to grow so scornful of the latter’s oeuvre.62 But there also appear moments in which Ford’s characters seek relief from the relentless pursuit of financial security and try, however temporarily, to bring about what Lauren Berlant has figured as a peculiar form of optimism in which they pass to some external object their “fantasy of sovereignty for safekeeping.” Narrative and characters alike here, after all, seem eager to find ways of slowing down the interval between the initial observation of such birds and the moment they scatter or get caught in gunfire. In so doing Ford’s men hope to “become . . . happy in an ordinary . . . way,” and not least as they distribute the “weight of being in the world . . . into space, time, noise, and other beings.” In these so-called death walks, then—in Canada, for example, and in Rock Springs’s final story—hunters secure for themselves a kind of precious and precarious interval from life. Their stories might seem “platitudinous,” their truths glib, and their basic pursuit unethical.63 But they do here discourse on life, as if floating, for a moment, free of it. Limbering up to shoot birds thus becomes in Ford an occasion for introspection and can seem to carry a curious importance akin to diving in Cheever’s story. Maybe it will, in the moment these characters’ “sovereignty is delivered back into their hands,” only seem another mechanism of “cruel optimism,” a brutal fantasy far more than a likely recuperation of a lost good life.64 But in Wildlife, as he watches geese fly from his cockpit’s open window, Warren Miller does at once grow and shrink, does at once seem more spiritual and less arrogant, even as he gets for himself a holiday from adult responsibility. Ecstatically, sacrilegiously, the experience strips “humanity” from Miller; but it also allows him to not “even think about . . . all these people trusting me on the ground  .  .  . my wife and my mother and four businesses.” Suspending tantalization here again becomes connected to intense emotion. But Ford, not only in Wildlife but throughout his oeuvre, comes closer than Cheever or Hockney to putting a name to this predicament. Of tantalization, after all, McKendall in “Calling” insists that you need “to get used to that feeling, or risk missing what little happiness there really was.” Opportunities to postpone tantalization, here as elsewhere in Ford, almost start to ease a kind of spiritual tiredness. Nor are they unconnected to a need for relief from unending competition. The pursuit of happiness that underpins American life grows relentless in Ford’s work, luring almost all of his characters into schemes and situations that court disaster. Hunting ducks or geese at least gives them an hour or two to think about something other than money.

Happiness on the horizon I doubt not there are in your country many persons equal to the task of conducting government: but you should consider that the world has but one Ryttenhouse, & that

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American Tantalus it never had one before. The amazing mechanical representation of the solar system which you conceived & executed, has never been surpassed by any but the work of which it is a copy. Are those powers then, which being intended for the erudition of the world are, like air and light, the world’s common property, to be taken from their proper pursuit to do the commonplace drudgery of governing a single state, a work which may be executed by men of an ordinary stature, such as are always & everywhere to be found? Letter from Thomas Jefferson to David Rittenhouse (June 1778)

I would like to bring this opening chapter to a close by establishing an important distinction. Perhaps it is true, as I have been suggesting, that some very resonant US myths, from the Edenic terminus of California to Wizard of Oz-like rainbows, end up looking a little threadbare, even a little glib, in the stories of Richard Ford. But it does not follow that Ford’s persistent debunking of patriotic or exceptionalist beliefs also leads him to dissent from the idea that we should all have the right to the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary. Rather than joining those who would renounce the thought as well as the life of Thomas Jefferson, his fictions effectively reserve their skepticism toward Ayn Rand among those other rightwing ideologues who, claiming a special kinship with this celebrated phrase, have recast it as a simple procapitalist slogan. More than a little patriotic himself, Ford frequently gestures toward a different way of thinking about US history, often intimating, above all, that there is more to American freedom than free market economics. This grows especially evident when his stories turn to the contrast between aspiration and satisfaction: between the happiness we seek and the happiness that happens to us. The force of this contrast lies in its capacity to remind us that, in standard American English, and from the revolutionary period right up to the present day, pursuit has always possessed two parallel meanings. As a matter of course it has always referred to quests and hunts of various kinds. But in many other contexts, and not least in letters Jefferson himself wrote throughout his life, it has also signaled a range of pleasant or worthwhile occupations far from tantalizing in character.65 Especially when settling into its nounal form, pursuit has also meant all manner of enriching activities or ways to pass the time. As a result it has long encompassed sundry activities, from “feminine” crafts to David Rittenhouse’s remarkable astronomical models, in which results have seemed more attainable, and satisfactions closer to hand. Ford’s protagonists, as we have seen, often resort to the imagery of tantalization when they are attempting to distil or comprehend the meaning of their lives. Some if not all are fully signed up to the rat race, actors in a culture of capitalism that takes happiness as a quarry and so conflates it with the capturing of wealth. But we have also seen that, when they turn to describe their actual feelings of happiness, the same characters almost always talk of an emotion that happened to them in the moments when they put this rat race to one side and forgot about its pressures for a while. Thus they intuit Freud’s apprehension of the “happiness that comes from peace and quiet” and in defiance of “the dreaded external world.” But this is to say that they too understand the ineffability of joy, that they too appreciate that “unhappiness,” reaching

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us via our body, our society and our relations, “is much less difficult to experience” than its more attractive antithesis.66 Happiness as a felt experience, to Ford’s protagonists, indeed appears spontaneous and impossible to control. Even as he emphasizes that it cannot occur unless basic material needs are met, Ford treats happiness as immaterial, ephemeral, understanding it as a self-seeding emotion that can only flourish in the brief moments in life when business cedes to leisure. Hunting, fishing, and other backwoods “pursuits,” for Ford’s characters, thus seem opportunities to enact this epistemological imperative—to light out to the happier territories outside their own ambitions. It is interesting to note that the different ways of thinking about pursuit apparent in Ford’s oeuvre rarely register in US political discourse. Very little today is made of the fact that, whereas the simple phrase to pursue happiness might have justified aggressive individualism, the longer formulation that Jefferson always preferred, the pursuit of Happiness, could just as easily suggest other watchwords, such as fraternité and egalité, which one might have expected from this dedicated Francophile. Perhaps because the declaration itself originally invoked a pursuit of property, still less notice is taken of the fact that nothing in the phrase Jefferson proposed as a replacement necessarily contradicts the more communitarian belief that, as Danielle S. Allen has put it, democracies should provide “open access to happiness for their citizens.”67 Indeed, rather than reflect on Allen’s Talking to Strangers (2004) or Michael Hardt’s vision of Jefferson’s “economic theory of equality” among other academic interventions, most politicians from across the US ideological spectrum instead continue to assume that pursuit of Happiness affirms capitalism and could not conceivably endorse community instead.68 The fact that Jefferson was a slaveholder, and a rather conflicted one at that, has perhaps inclined some on the American left to agree with their political opponents in this regard. The result of this is that even so thoughtful and sceptical an essay on political philosophy as Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) now treats the Declaration of Independence’s third and most original right as if it only referred, and could only ever refer, to some sort of maddening chase: If the pursuit of happiness is augmented as a constitutional right, then happiness becomes “whatever” is pursued and hence achieves its affectivity by not being given or found. . . . Happiness may be preserved as a social promise only through its postponement: so we imagine that the happiness we were promised will eventually come to us, or to those who follow us. Happiness is what makes waiting for something both endurable and desirable—the longer you wait, the more you are promised in return, the greater your expectation of a return.69

By degrees, as its dual meanings have faded from view, pursuit has been tied more firmly to the singularity of the associated verb pursue. This semantic realignment has then been projected back into early Republican culture in such a way as to imply that Jefferson, too, never said pursuit except as a synonym of quest or chase. The discursive twists and turns behind this transformation are too numerous to list in full. Not only Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909) but countless other commentaries on different aspects of US society repeatedly riff on Jefferson’s trope without ever conceding the possibility that it embraced a notion of enjoyable or improving leisure.

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Of the numerous interventions that have worked to reposition Jefferson’s phrase, however, few have been quite so decisive or deliberate as those Ayn Rand attempted during World War Two and its immediate aftermath. Even hostile commentators—even those who feel uninspired by Atlas Shrugged (1957), unpersuaded by Objectivism, and unable to shake off the suspicion that selfishness might be more of a vice than virtue— nevertheless now tend to follow conventions Rand first laid out in what Jennifer Burns has called her “first published discussion of rights,” the 1946 article “Textbook of Americanisms.”70 Many now fall into the typographical convention that this article consolidated, likewise dispersing emphasis across Jefferson’s phrase by granting a capital to its first as well as its second keyword. But even those, like Ahmed, who have not followed this typographical convention often still accept Rand’s accompanying belief that the phrase she thus helped embolden as the Pursuit of Happiness asserts “that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness.”71 Consequently, and even since Tobias Wolff ’s Old School (2003) threw a spotlight on the fascist tendencies in Rand’s thought, her belief that the founding fathers enshrined selfish happiness as a moral value in American law continues to transfix contemporary US politics.72 Such passages as the following, which Rand originally gave as part of a speech before including it in The Virtue of Selfishness (1961), remain, at the subtler level, surprisingly influential: The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose. . . . The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. [Italics in original.]73

This kind of moral defence of selfishness has never attracted widespread support among US readers. Rand’s analysis, for all its measured argot, has fooled few beyond the converted. But what has happened—at least on the evidence of Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness—is that Rand’s more provocative claims have led to such profound disagreement that even those who have done most of this disagreeing have unconsciously imbibed some of her subtler assumptions. The disproportionate energy poured into debating the issues Rand wanted to debate has allowed a soft consensus to develop around her broader Republican legacy. Against this soft consensus we must lodge Ford’s postcards from everyday US life. His work, if in some ways politically quiet, here offers a sharp riposte. More subtly than Wolff, he too enables us to see that Rand’s tributes to the “wisdom” of the founding fathers were more partial than they appeared, always recasting the object of their adoration. His movement between different social classes in contrast presents to us a range of US citizens, rich and poor, almost all of whom have grown tired of capitalism yet remain somewhat patriotic and conventional. Consequently, in a polyvocal performance drenched in US myth, the original ambiguity of Jefferson’s pursuit of Happiness is effectively resurrected,

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reanimated, and translated in a range of modern fictive experiences. One effect of his depiction of these experiences is to urge us to revisit Jefferson’s own writing and to think a little more carefully about the linguistic context in which it occurred. It is to urge us to realize that, just as Jefferson’s ferocious hostility to industrial capitalism in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) reveal he was rather an unlikely figurehead for Rand, so his references elsewhere to the “just pursuits” of learning and “morality” show that the pursuit of Happiness itself is rather more ambiguous than many have supposed.74 Here, then—and not for the first time—American writers have thus provided a helpful and necessary corrective to the distortions and simplifications that have characterized their nation’s dominant modes of political debate.

Individuals without peace WHAT Christendom wants at Christmas time is simply to be happy. It wants the same thing all the rest of the year, but when Christmas comes its habit is to make a special effort and gather, if it can, a special harvest of happiness from the plantings of the year. . . . Honest effort counts for a good deal in any pursuit, and where millions of people try to be happy and to furnish merriment for one another, a very considerable proportion meet with reasonable success. . . .. There was a person once—I dare say it would be nearer the truth to say there were a million people at various times—who, having sought after happiness with earnest and protracted strivings, finally gave up the quest and went about his other business. His conclusion, slowly, and automatically derived from long periods of longing and resulting depression, was that he could not get in this world that [which] seemed indispensable to his satisfaction, and that while it was within his powers to live decently and maintain an honest walk and conversation, happy he could never be, and it would not pay him to try any more. . . . But his mind, continuing to operate more or less independently, presently evolved the reflection that, while it was incumbent on every man to live his life and to live it as handsomely as he knew how, he was under no sort of obligation to enjoy it, since happiness was a mere incident of mundane existence, and not at all a necessary condition or an absolute right. Now, merely to live decently whether you like it or not, is like walking along the street with your hands in your pockets; whereas to feel obliged to gather a complete outfit of happiness that you cannot reach, is like running your legs off after an elusive butterfly. So great was this person’s relief at the conclusion that happiness was not necessary, and that as a human being he was under no ethical bonds to secure it, that a weight left his mind and his spirits presently began to rise; and though now and then he would lose his head and rush off after an impossible felicity, like a half-broken puppy who flushes an unexpected bird, when circumstances had duly thrashed him back into good behavior, he was able to return, not to his original gloom, but to the comparative cheerfulness of the emancipated state. Anonymous, “The Point of View—and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Scribner’s Magazine (December 1892)

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But American Tantalus, of course, is not just a study of a single writer. Just as Ford’s oeuvre sits within a bigger Russian Doll, sharing ethical and stylistic concerns with many other US fictions, so its brooding reflections on the impossibility of claiming happiness finds parallels in many other moments from this national tradition. In an unattributed editorial from late 1892, for example, Scribner’s could already anticipate some of Ford’s concerns, sharing his focus on the evasions of a happiness besought as well as his interest in its corollaries in the natural world: in butterflies and flushed birds among other “impossible” infelicities. Here, indeed, it is almost as though Scribner’s had recognized that a certain innuendo resided in the pursuit of Happiness, and were seizing upon such ambiguity for a study of this unmasterable emotion. Yet, in their preoccupation with different kinds of happiness, Ford’s oeuvre and Scribner’s are neither isolated nor unrepresentative of the American tradition. Much the same exploration of happiness, much the same premonition that it and individualism might prove mutually exclusive, even occurs in Pierre, being placed by Melville into the mouth of his protagonist’s estranged sister Isabel: I say, I cannot identify that thing which is called happiness, that thing whose token is a laugh, or a smile, or a silent serenity on the lip. I may have been happy, but it is not in my conscious memory now. Nor do I feel a longing for it, as though I never had it; my spirit seeks different food from happiness, for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness. I pray for peace—for motionlessness—for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no peace in individualness. Therefore I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things.75

Although he is working in a completely different key—indeed, although he is here putting together a novel quite unlike any other, a novel still more idiosyncratic than Moby-Dick (1851)—Melville, like Scribner’s, still manages to anticipate some of Ford’s observations, yet again equating “individualness” with a lack of “peace,” and to the point where Isabel and Wildlife’s Warren Miller entirely agree, both concurring that happiness can only happen when we altogether abandon our more competitive pursuits. All of these very different commentaries, as they accumulate, as such again reorient our attention back to the indeterminacy of the original pursuit of Happiness. All thus make unmistakable the fact that the political attempt to hide this uncertainty and reduce the phrase to a simple procapitalist slogan has turned the happiness at its heart into yet another tantalizing object. In its original incarnation, after all, Jefferson’s phrase still encompassed and by no means excluded a democratic affirmation: a hope that one day all US citizens might have enough food and money for the higher occupations of happiness. Albeit indirectly, the literary interventions of Melville and Ford among others suggest that US political discourse has progressively rubbed away at this revolutionary hope, clearing space in Jefferson’s phrase that it has then filled with a paradox. For this powerful phrase, after all, now appears a nonsequitur, a tautological dead end. As Melville and Ford reveal, it now suggests little more than that

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Americans are only happy when they are pursuing the things that make them happy. It avers, simply, that the things that make them happy do not make them happy, and in fact make them restless, or worse, because it is precisely in attaining them that the pursuit that makes them happy comes to an end. Or, as yet another of Ford’s riffs on tantalization would have it, Americans are “people . . . whose life always lay somewhere in the offing.”76 Blasts thus again arise, fruits again withdraw, and happiness again functions like other objects of tantalized desire, plummeting down the wrong side of the horizon. One of the key tasks of US fictions, here and elsewhere in the canon, is thus at once to expose the futility of pursuing happiness and to shine a light on those moments when it, by contrast, might take us unawares.

2

The Becoming Blank Fantasies of Invisibility after the Frontier

In this chapter I want to build on these thoughts, and I want to do so by delving deeper into the established US canon. I want to do this, alighting on the proseworks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry James, as a way of turning from the question of tantalization’s literary depiction to the question of its literary negotiation. Much of what follows, as I say, rests on the premise that US literature, if far from the only canon to show interest in cultural and natural varieties of the tantalizing effect, represents it with unusual persistence, and to the point of suggesting that it saturates national myth. This being the case, however, the question becomes not just how US narratives have represented but also how they have responded to this pervasive tantalization. Have the authors of these narratives always lamented this ubiquity, berating tantalizing objects for their constant evasions? Or have they sometimes derived a sense of egoistic reinforcement, even pleasure, from such withdrawals? Have they sought to escape, or at least resist, tantalization? Has it always appeared to them a fait accompli? The pages that follow focus on one way of answering these questions we can glean from the masterworks of Transcendentalism. Major works of Transcendentalism, I am going to suggest, have a habit of dwelling on a variety of devices by which you might creep up on the busy world of undisrupted wildlife. Walden (1854) in many ways exemplifies this tendency. Thoreau, like later US writers more in thrall to Emerson, here takes great interest in the possibility of observing nature undetected, at leisure, and as if through a one-way mirror. This interest, moreover, is as practical as it is philosophical. It instils in Thoreau a fascination for the minutiae of country pursuits, leading him to study hard those activities, from angling to sleeping outdoors, and from canoeing to sauntering through “some retired meadow,” that aim “without a ripple” to approach local wildernesses.1 Such attempts to slip into nature unseen can, to be sure, seem central to transcendence itself. For Emerson and Thoreau alike, walking through woods, or indeed just standing still, are ways of being solitary—are ways of stepping outside society, of forgetting themselves, and of divining again that “man and nature are indissolubly joined,” the “currents of the Universal Being” coursing through all matter.2 But my specific interest

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here lies in the cultural grounds on which these writers not only constitute such work but also constitute it as work. I am interested in how much of Transcendentalism’s vaunted intellectual curiosity involves a search for new and different means by which to achieve forgetfulness, and how this tends to grasp transcendence itself, or what Emerson called the “instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature,” not as an option already open to us, nor as a destiny that might happen of its own accord, but as a mental state that we need to call, through a patient shedding of civility, into existence.3 What fascinates me is the extent to which this attitude establishes the body as a problem, and comes to regard physical immobilization or an apparent vanishing from nature as a necessary first step to becoming one with it. The opening half of this chapter as such focuses on the tributes Thoreau pays to those pastimes that seem to camouflage his body or muffle its impact and so let him survey nature undetected. Tiptoeing over leaves and winning the trust of wild animals are just two examples of these subtle approaches. They, like a host of similar activities, cloak his body in what I will here term a becoming blank. Apparently reducing him to his senses, they let him sink into nature more or less unseen. But only for so long. Becoming blanks in Walden and other works are temporary affairs. They might trick nature in order to exalt it, but this recourse to subterfuge is itself a sign that the natural world remains wary and will still withdraw from any civilized body it manages to detect. In this respect, as I will argue shortly, Thoreau’s work, for all its radical cosmopolitanism, is far more reflective of contemporary US culture than is admitted by those important reappraisals that have lately emphasized Transcendentalism’s international dimension. But the crux of the matter here lies not with Walden, not even with Transcendentalism per se, but with the afterlife of this trope. Later sections of the chapter trace how, soon after his death in 1862, Thoreau’s notion of a becoming blank seems to slip its Transcendentalist moorings and to drift far from the New England woods. In particular, I show how, whenever he turned to write about Venice, Henry James calls upon a host of more or less Thoreauvian tactics in order to creep up on this subject too. Many of the strategies by which Walden delays nature’s tantalizing retreat, from lurking behind corners to sauntering at night, get redeployed as part of James’s all too verifiable surveillance of Venice; and to the canoe that is Thoreau’s preferred mode of transport Italian Hours (1909) offers the gondola in reply, extolling it, too, for its ability to sail silent and low into a scene that would otherwise shrink from a stranger’s approach. The proliferation of this trope, however, does not stop there. Toward the end of this chapter I hope to show that the application of becoming blankness—its practicalities and its possibilities—also features in much more recent US narrative. Not only US nature writing but also many postwar novelists have likewise adopted Thoreauvian tactics, installing bodily abandonment as a condition to their prospects of observing some interesting object, exchange, or scene. They often delight in eavesdropping and walking at night among other living masks. And, almost as often, they too locate moments of narrative disclosure in the blank and becoming moments they snatch before the withdrawals of tantalization recur.

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At the same time, however, the versatility of such becoming blankness also indicates that, in its original formulation in Walden, it reflected underlying cultural assumption at least as much as it did any avowed Transcendentalist truth. Indeed— and if only because they would appear more in keeping with New England’s Unitarian establishment than the Transcendentalist rebellion against it—the anxieties about flesh and the impact of the body that find expression throughout Walden would seem rather less indicative of Thoreau’s philosophical outlook than they are of the culture he could not but imbibe. But this is to say that the trope of the becoming blank surfaces in these different narratives, not because these contexts are all secretly alike or surprisingly Transcendentalist, but because all traffic in a set of cultural codes and conventions that urge them to envision new land, new cities, and new bodies as untouched and untouchable. All in their different ways stand open to the world; but all also reflect, as we will now see, a structure of feeling that has long located beauty beyond touch.

Looking for America There, I thought, in America, lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, almost unconscious, too much by half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night, steeped in dews and rains, which it loves; and on it man seems not able to make much impression. There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany pastures, in the seawide sky-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of English. And, in England, I am quite too sensible of this. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (1856) Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, American Studies has grown so iconoclastic, so determined to unlock the literary canon and so quick to dig up its own disciplinary roots, that its continuing enthusiasm for the classic works of Transcendentalism can come as something of a surprise. Indeed, if the proponents of “post-nationalist” American Studies have sometimes looked a little keen to attack those who established the field after 1945, then this suspicion finds proof of sorts in the fact that none of the latter pioneers ever said anything quite so rawly pro-American as the Transcendentalists who remain a source of unbridled inspiration.4 No one ever made nationalism seem more good, wholesome, or righteous than Walt Whitman. When the mood took him, however, Emerson could echo the enthusiasm of his renowned disciple, painting the United States as the mythic grounds on which “a nation of men will for the first time exist”; and even Thoreau could defend John Brown as a man who, by standing “up . . . for the dignity of human nature,” revealed himself to be “the most American of us all.”5 To be sure, Emerson and Thoreau always made for the unlikeliest of flag wavers, and their lifelong hatred of jingoism can seem to eclipse these patriotic phrases. But it is also

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true that scholarship produced since the “post-nationalist turn” has had very little to say about the latter—about Emerson’s homilies to Lincoln’s true American plainness, for example, or about the mood of betrayal that pervades Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1849)—and has dwelt instead on the global spread of Transcendentalism’s literary and intellectual passions.6 In fact this scholarship sometimes treats these phenomena as if they were mutually exclusive: as if the sheer fact of cosmopolitan reading somehow inoculated Thoreau and Emerson against the inanities of manifest destiny, in itself proving that their exceptionalist utterances were little more than lapses in oeuvres otherwise “woven” not of national stuff but of “continents and millennia.”7 Seemingly the suggestion here is that neither men were quite as proud of being American as they sometimes sounded—and it is one that might lead us to recall Benedict Anderson’s famous remark that humanities scholars, for reasons not altogether clear, often struggle to treat seriously the patriotism of their subjects.8 However that may be, the current emphasis on Transcendentalism’s international influences—and not least Wai Chee Dimock’s eloquent insistence that it is “American only in caricature”—evidently presents us with a recipe for exemption.9 The impression it leaves us with is of Emerson and Thoreau as extraordinary young men who grew alert to the parochialism of US writing early in life and who dedicated their adulthoods to reaching out to discover diverse foreign cultures beyond American shores. Saluting their “Atlantic world perspective,” this transnational view as such credits both men for bringing forth, via a life of constant dissent, the cosmopolitan culture we would hope to inhabit today.10 This criticism hails Thoreau a father of ecocriticism, Emerson a “harbinger of postmodernism,” even as it turns both into magnets for all sorts of flattering verbs, from foresaw to anticipate, that commend their prophetic power.11 This, to some extent, is nothing new. The latest wave of tributes might in fact recall those Stanley Cavell offered when he claimed that the idiosyncrasies of Emerson’s writing style alone prefigure modern philosophies of “ordinary language,” and to the point of making us feel “as if we do not yet know what this man is and what he wants.”12 Yet Cavell’s aggrandizement of Emerson does reveal an interesting shift in emphasis. For what he here names as Emerson’s perpetual futurity—as his ability to call to us as if from our future destination—does seem to yield, in some of the more recent scholarship, to a new focus on his contemporaneity: on his capacity to anticipate positions now orthodox at least among critics.13 This has had the consequence of overlooking Nature and Walden’s pointed circularities, of blunting their radical edge, and of establishing Thoreau and Emerson instead as authorities who would likelier reinforce than reshape existing political thought. A sort of critical rescue mission has now gotten underway. Several leading scholars now seem to take as their first priority the need to prise Thoreau and Emerson away from dominant US culture—to undo its tepid sanctification of them as all-American geniuses, and to restore them instead to the world: to all readers we might find around the globe or across Dimock’s “deep time.”14 Here Thoreau and Emerson are grasped as anything but American, and their brilliance seems best measured by the intellectual distance they traveled from the antebellum New England world that produced them.

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There is a lot to be said for this point of view. For example, while most privileged Americans of this period read far and wide in the European canons—Greek and Latin so dominated life at Harvard as to leave nobody much time to read an American book—Thoreau and Emerson did venture beyond this transnational canon, upsetting Eurocentric assumption, in effect, by delving into the Koran, Confucianism, and Persian poetry.15 And while their exploration of such extracurricular materials might now seem a little limited (throughout his life Emerson was prone to get Hinduism and Buddhism muddled up16), it is also true that to read Nature or Walden, as Dimock says of the latter, is to experience prose in which “other continents seem to be intervening, and other time frames seem to be activated by that intervention.”17 This “post-nationalist” argument unravels a little, however, whenever critics go on to suggest that these international interests were what set Thoreau and Emerson apart from the Massachusetts crowd. For at such junctures another kind of exceptionalist logic, ironically, resurfaces, and the “post-nationalist” approach in effect begins to accept again the Romantic legend that was once so fundamental to Thoreau and Emerson’s prior sanctification as icons of American individualism. As it does so, it revives old complaints. It lends new force to James Russell Lowell’s objection, in 1871, to Thoreau’s claiming in Walden “that there is no one in Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental literature, though the man was living within two miles of his hut who had introduced him to it.”18 And, above all, it underestimates the degree to which he and Emerson were negotiating the intense patriotism of contemporary US culture, sometimes joining and sometimes despairing at its incessant song of America. Here, in order to take a slightly different approach, I would like to proceed from three principles in particular. First, and without lapsing into exceptionalist logic myself, I would like to read Emerson and Thoreau as participants in a national conversation in which such exceptionalism remained more or less compulsory: in which, as Frederick Douglass tired of pointing out, some patriotic display was the price of admission for anyone wanting to be heard.19 The second is that Transcendentalist accounts of American nature accordingly inherited their most important assumptions as well as their most familiar tropes from exceptionalist myths already at large in the culture, and ought to be weighed, in the first instance, by their handling of that legacy. But this also indicates the third and last principle: that Emerson and Thoreau encountered exceptionalism as a cultural field no less than as an imperial ideology—as an overwhelming feature of life, and one that did not require from them simple yeas or nays so much as an ongoing and inescapable dialogue. Their negotiation of American exceptionalism, of its vanities, erasures, and doubts, is of most concern to me here. The quotation at the beginning of this section illustrates these complexities very well. Included toward the end of English Traits (1856), and written, it would seem, from the wrong side of the Atlantic, every word of Emerson’s American vision bespeaks his immersion in national myth in general and in Hudson River conventions in particular. Indeed, and without necessarily casting doubt on the global interests he pursued elsewhere, this particular passage makes little sense unless we place it in its immediate national context. Before anything else, we must recognize it as an anxious meditation

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on assumptions passed down by Thomas Cole among other figureheads of the previous generation. This, after all, is another cultural act burdened by the future. For Emerson here the Anglophobic homesickness he feels in the present, like the blissful homecoming he hopes to feel in the near future, struggle under the weight of the melancholy that apparently lies beyond both. For English Traits, even while steering clear of exceptionalist cliché, cannot bring itself to believe that the divine “slumber” of the western continent will last forever. And so it follows that, for all his urbanity, for all his supple cosmopolitanism, Emerson’s vision of American nature here does place beauty and touch into an opposition every bit as stark and absolute as Sanford Gifford’s A Home in the Wilderness (1866). Only his mystic apostrophes to the lost tantalizing object set his prose apart. That is to say, American nature, from Emerson’s transatlantic viewpoint, comes to seem so vast, its hiding places so varied and widespread, that it does grow, for the time being, strangely able to defend itself, no longer shrinking meekly westward, no longer withdrawing from the slightest brush with civilization, but repulsing “man,” bewildering and overwhelming him, until he “seems not able to make much impression.” But even nature’s languid rebuffs here prove, as I say, only temporary. English Traits more generally broods on the destiny of the Saxon race, and in its final sentence Emerson names his fear that the United States will presently share Britain’s fate, wealth, and mechanization plunging it too into complacent stagnation. His tristesse, hinting as it does at a desire to conquer nature, to assert dominion over it in the face of its indifference, as such amounts to a kind of confession: it is Emerson’s way of implicating himself in the land’s imminent industrialization.20 At the very least, here, a generation before Frederick Jackson Turner presented his famous thesis, the Transcendentalist can already be seen struggling to see how American nature might meaningfully resist a looming destruction that he preemptively regrets. Nor can his mystic wonder hide the worry he feels at the coming moment when the western border stops moving, things settle, and his country becomes that little less exceptional. In this way English Traits explores manifest destiny. In a handful of sentences it reveals some of the tensions of the agrarian tradition that can become apparent in Hudson River landscapes but which remain largely absent from political endorsements of Thomas Jefferson’s tributes to “the industry of the husbandman.”21 English Traits helps illuminate, for example, that upon its transplantation onto American soil agrarianism always jarred in an interesting way with the pervasive suspicion that the land’s purity derived from its inhuman wildness. As such it reveals that Jeffersonian tributes to a preindustrial yeomanry, like the incredibly powerful fantasies of democratic independence inspired by the Homestead Acts, in fact often submerged a hidden conflict, immuring in a romance of cyclical self-sufficiency the worrying thought that the land itself had already witnessed “true” nature’s original desecration. But English Traits also looks ahead to another fall: for the moment American farmers begin to apply the lessons of English industrialization, turning the “prairie” into “pasture,” and the “pasture” into crops, will also be the moment they “leave” still more of “an impression,” a trace at once violent and everlasting. Farming in Emerson’s travelogue becomes more of a threat than a solution. A “sacred” tool to Emerson’s Jeffersonian

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peers, the “plow” here seems liable to do damage, a likely instrument of “mother” nature’s looming expulsion from all her old haunts.22 Emerson was not alone in these deliberations. Hugely overshadowed by agrarianism in the annals of US political thought, his countervailing antipathy toward farming is, however, far from aberrant, let alone unique. Not only English Traits but various writings by Thoreau in fact upset agrarianism’s prevailing conflation of cultivation and virtue, the latter espying, in the jabbing of a hoe, something of the menace Jefferson saw in the “whirling . . . distaff[s]” of Europe’s “work-shops.”23 Much as Thoreau himself gardened, putting food on his own table far more singlehandedly than Jefferson ever could, Walden’s accounts of such labor fail to prompt the kinds of extravagant ruminations that elsewhere prove a hallmark of that work.24 His writings on the matter instead catch fire, typically, only after his beans run riot, “husbandry” forgets its “haste,” or he attaches some other kind of spiritual dimension to his daily gardening jobs. Always happier leaning on his hoe than using it, he brags, characteristically, that “my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural.”25 Nor was this subversion of agrarian orthodoxy the preserve of leading Transcendentalists. Distrust of farming also becomes apparent in some remarks that Nathaniel Hawthorne set down in his journal in July 1844, and which were the subject of the famous opening discussion of Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964). Here Hawthorne begins by describing Sleepy Hollow, “a shallow space scooped out among the woods,” that would seem to provide a welcome relief from Concord life.26 And, indeed, Marx accepts Sleepy Hollow as a straightforward wilderness retreat—as a hallowed clearing in which Hawthorne enjoys a pleasant “withdrawal from the world” right up until he hears, a mile away, a distant train’s “long shriek.”27 Yet the situation as described in Hawthorne’s journal is perhaps a little murkier than Marx’s analysis would suggest. His “garden,” long before the machine intrudes, might already seem not quite restful. Already it might seem to harbor acute tension between the land and human efforts to control it. At first, it is true, Hawthorne does present the hollow as a simple refuge. Half of it fairly swims with the heads of “Indian corn, now in its most perfect growth, and tasselled out,” the sight of which indeed lure the journal toward what The Machine in the Garden calls “American pastoralism.”28 Even as he emphasizes its perfection, however, Hawthorne also begins to treat the shimmering corn as if it were alien, overfresh, a blanket dropped from a height onto a field already “scooped” out of the virgin land. Like “the terraced pathway, broad enough for a wheeltrack,” by which some unknown farmer reaches it, the field’s imposed and alien uniformity duly comes, in time, to seem very different from the wild woodland all around. A set of oppositions become noticeable. Verdant biodiversity here confronts sunlit monoculture; and, in sharp contrast to the sudden corn, raised from seed in a single season, the “sear and brown  .  .  . leaves” that blow in from the surrounding oaks seem ancestral, full of time, bearing as they do the scars of old frosts and blizzards even in midsummer.29 Long before the train shatters the peace, then, this place of retreat already seems something of a battleground. Unreachable remnants of a pure American past here confront its unstoppable future. And, if only because its coming

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harvest looks so promising, this “Sleepy” Hollow, like nature overall in English Traits, seems sure to wake up soon. Having thus evoked a likely setting in which to try and fail to escape civilization, the journal entry sets down what Marx calls a series of “unadorned sense impressions, and especially sounds—sounds made by birds, squirrels, insects and moving leaves.”30 Hawthorne allows these noises to pass with little comment. Any chance to ponder them—any chance to consider that some respond to his body while others occur only when nature seems unbothered by it—disappears as the train bursts upon the restful scene. “Harsh, above all other harshness,” its intrusion briefly returns Hawthorne to nature, reuniting him with all the other creatures that scuttle from it. But this effect is only temporary. As he regains composure Hawthorne recognizes that the story the whistle tells, a story “of busy men, . . . in short of all unquietness,” is not one from which he can realistically divorce himself. The realization leads him to reflect again on his status within the disrupted hollow. Marx suggests: With the train out of earshot and quiet restored, Hawthorne continues his observations. An ant colony catches his eye. . . . Then, “Like a malevolent genius,” he drops a few grains of sand into the entrance of an ant hole and obliterates it. The result is consternation among the inhabitants, their frantic movements displaying their “confusion of mind.” How inexplicable, he writes, must be the agency which has effected this mischief. . . . [T]here is something arresting about the episode: the writer sitting in his green retreat dutifully attaching words to natural facts, trying to tap the subterranean flow of thought and feeling and then, suddenly, the startling shriek of the train whistle bearing in upon him, forcing him to acknowledge the existence of a reality alien to the pastoral dream. What begins as a conventional tribute to the pleasures of withdrawal from the world—a simple pleasure fantasy—is transformed by the interruptions of the machine into a far more complex state of mind.31

Here, then, I want to propose a modest alteration. Even as I try to build on The Machine in the Garden I want to suggest that the “interruptions” of this train do not herald a complete and utter transformation to the scene so much as they bring to the fore tensions already apparent in it. What Marx figures here as Hawthorne’s easy “withdrawal,” in other words, is, from the beginning, fraught. The piercing whistle only shatters an illusion. Upon its intrusion modes of observation by which Hawthorne negotiated his own body in order to record the happenings of nature no longer seem viable. Every action he might make, and certainly every instinctive action, reacquires destructive potential. Against the earlier romantic project of describing natural wonder his interaction with the ant hill grows thoughtless and brutal. His reversion is to a kind of Brobdingnagian vandalism. But his inflating, his metamorphosis into a giant who no sooner notices the ant “village” than he bombs it to oblivion, only makes obvious an identification of the train and his body that he has been generating all along. It only proves that, far from some alien threat, the train amounts to a mechanical projection of his own body. It only manifests destructive propensities astir in him too.

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Here lie the cultural grounds for Emerson’s famous fantasy of becoming a “transparent eyeball.”32 Over the course of Hawthorne’s episode, that is to say, an interesting continuum grows apparent. At one end of it lies nature in its natural state: wild, untouched, sublimely complex. Opposite it lies civilization: an imperial force that effectuates a kind of Midas touch insofar as it cannot but refit for its own interests all it meets. But this continuum is not Hawthorne’s alone. Just as The Machine in the Garden places his journal entry at the head of an American tradition, likening it to the rumbling train of Walden and the “monstrous steamboat” of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), so the continuum it establishes pervades this canon, shaping its underlying commitment to description—to approach nature as a subject not of engagement but observation.33 Right across this literary field the yearning for nature does seem to ask all manner of writers to imagine a path out of their bodies, to offset its disruptions, and to find a way of watching a world that would rather avoid them. Nature’s celebrated gambit, the inconspicuous eyeball that some find the “quintessence of Emersonianism,” is just the most celebrated of these fantasies of invisibility. Its sheer power as an image, its stark disembodiment, cannot hide its similarities with the hope of tearing soul from flesh that Hawthorne conveyed before the train’s whistle brought his daydream to an end.34

Strategies of blankness The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. . . .The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’t is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone; ’t is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836) On first glance, when we place them alongside each other, Hawthorne’s journal and Nature’s dream of a disembodied optic can look like a problem and its solution. Nature and civilization seeming incompatible to both, Hawthorne here enacts a lapse into aggression that betrays the violence of all bodies, while Emerson, as if recoiling from his fellow Massachusettsian’s weird parable, forswears physicality altogether. On closer inspection, however, you cannot ignore the fact that Nature’s optic dream itself remains impossible to achieve. Lawrence Buell detects a certain “bubbliness” in it, a hysteric, “over-the-top ecstasy,” and, while it can make other readers feel queasy, evoking in them ideas of gouging, even of dissection, instead, these contrasting responses hinge on a peculiarity they all discover in the image itself.35 Accordingly all confirm that Nature’s curious phrase stands at something of a remove from the more practical focus by which it later tries to drag readers outdoors, get them to “engage in manual

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labor,” and all the better to “commune with nature.”36 Maybe, then, Emerson’s talk of transparency offers no solution after all, only replaying the original problem in another key. Maybe Nature differs from Hawthorne’s journal only inasmuch as it refuses to admit that the daydream has to end. Transparency, for Emerson, might just name an impossible goal toward which we must nonetheless strive if we are ever to glimpse nature’s innermost truths. Problems to do with this attitude nowhere grew fiercer than in the mind of Thoreau. Few critics today would feel content with Irving Howe’s description of the younger man as “the closest of ” Emerson’s “disciples.”37 Fewer still would accept the reading that led James Lowell, in his 1893 work My Study Windows, to dismiss Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) as mere “strawberries from” the senior Transcendentalist’s “garden.”38 Nonetheless, ever since he read Nature as an undergraduate, Thoreau did spend his short but busy life in constant dialogue with Emerson’s ideas. His original insights all grew out of this intense and uninterrupted conversation. Such dialogue, volatile and fraternal, sometimes inspired Thoreau to gestures of implementation: to attempt to take what sometimes still seemed to Emerson abstract, metaphoric, and turn it into a liveable reality. Nor was this limited to that business of recording nature in which, as Laura Dassow Walls has suggested, “what was metaphor for Emerson was for Thoreau a literal act.”39 Every aspect of the latter’s work can instead seem an extended exercise in literalizing the older Transcendentalist’s dream of “transparent” vision. Walden and other works work to enact Nature’s fantasy, to translate it into a series of practical measures, and all the better to creep up on nature transparently and unseen. Thoreau’s attempt to turn Nature’s optic dream into a kind of manifesto for everyday life neither contradicted nor undermined his important disagreements with Emerson. Although leading him away from the latter’s rhetorical commitment to the sovereignty of the human soul or spirit, Thoreau’s growing antipathy toward “the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter” was also an embrace of new scientific thinking, and especially of Alexander von Humboldt’s insistence on the interconnection, or “reciprocal interaction,” of us and nature in a “living whole, or life itself.”40 Even this embrace of scientific holism, however, only intensified Thoreau’s quest for practical solutions to Nature’s optic dream. Humboldtian science, for him, ushered the soul into nature. It revealed the equality as well as the unity of things. Resultantly, whenever birds flew away from him or nature otherwise withdrew from his approach, these mundane tantalizations no longer just frustrated him, no longer just teased him with the mechanics of evasion, but confounded a scientific system he wanted to uphold. To find ways of preventing this withdrawal—to shed the garb of a menacing civilization and stop nature from forever scuttling away—became, for him, as much a scientific as an emotional project. All his writings Thoreau duly crammed full of episodes that camouflage or leave his body behind in order that he might move more ethereally through nature. Floating or ghostly movements acquire a potent allure in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden alike. In both works Thoreau longs to haunt nature—to abolish ego, leave no footprints, and become as one with “all the elements.” His preferred mode in

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both, indeed, is to describe nature as if he were not there to describe it. He loves the fact that he can hear but not see the “bullfrogs trump to usher in the night,” hoping to leave every place he visits as smooth and untroubled as the “transparent” ponds of Walden itself.41 Thoreau’s hauntings of nature, if too numerous to list in full here, would certainly include the disembodiments that he claims for himself when he sails through water, when he goes fishing or just stands still, and when he falls asleep outside. All of these activities engender a kind of becoming blankness, a curious nullifying of the flesh, that he finds seductive to say the least. The first of these blanknesses—the unobtrusive observations “you may see from a boat,” just so long as only oars or sails power it—appears frequently in Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.42 Early in the latter, for instance, romantic rhapsodies introduce a movement through a watery scene that nonetheless remains busy with all manner of tantalizing withdrawals. We seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts. We glided noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driving a pickerel from the covert of the pads, or a bream from her nest, and the smaller bitterns now and then sailed away on sluggish wings from some recess in the shores, or the larger lifted itself out of the long grass at our approach, and carried its precious legs away to deposit them in a place of safety. The tortoises also rapidly dropped into the water, as our boat ruffled the surface amid the willows, breaking the reflections of the trees.43

The passage, admittedly, might look like just another “strawberry” from Emerson’s Transcendentalist garden. Thoreau’s riverbank scene certainly seems no less tantalizing than the “shows of day” that, for Emerson, “mock us with their unreality,” and especially if we “hunt” them “too eagerly.” Nests, coverts, and recesses hidden inside the Concord’s messy riverbank do all seem likely additions to the elusive prospects that already feature on Nature’s list. Nothing interests Thoreau here more than the “place[s] of safety” to which assorted intriguing creatures flee. Like Cécile Auclair, the protagonist of Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931), he seems to wish that he “could follow” them “into their holes and hide away with them for the winter.”44 Before we concede Lowell’s odd horticultural barb, however, we should consider what makes A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers different. Tantalization in Nature is instant and inevitable. The very notion of a “transparent eyeball” in a sense establishes impossibility as impossibility, enshrining voyeurism in oxymoronic terms. If only because of its connotations of lenses, of a screen that reveals what it shields, Emerson’s vision of transparency brings us closer to nature only to seal us outside it. His allusions to lenses, moreover, lead, later in Nature, to an overt reference to glass. Here he intimates that a part of us will always remain, at least spiritually, indoors, locked up behind “windows of diligence” that we bump into whenever we try to touch rainbows, the “shadows in still water,” or for that matter the “beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October.” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers departs from this view. No longer instant, no longer an implacable fact, tantalization here turns into a kind of process.

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As it slows down it becomes increasingly observable. Yet this remains a difference of emphasis rather than of position. Nature can itself seem unsure whether tantalization is inevitable or not: whether it happens every time we “go forth” into the “shows of day,” or intensifies, instead, if we get too “eager” in our “hunting” of them. Thoreau enlarges on, inhabits, this interesting tension. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers we can see him, casting around for a crack in time. His desire is to freeze, even to rewind, life in order that he might no longer “hunt” or hide from nature but sink into it. The slowness and silence of unpowered boats duly offer him a chance to watch tantalization as it happens: to watch it as if he was not there even though it is only happening because he is there. Silent canoes for this reason seem to him far superior to the “canal boats” that churn mud into the water as they speed to their next destination. The unpowered craft on which he would rather lounge might not always leave “the summer duck . . . undisturbed,” but they do at least let him see it run away.45 Sleep seems similar. Drifting off to sleep, over the course of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, eventually becomes so redolent of drifting off downriver that our use of this single verb to describe both phenomena comes to seem revealing, somehow, less than accidental. To “lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of the brooks,” here becomes, again, becoming in its blankness, another way of experiencing the world “as if unobserved by man.”46 Yet these different kinds of drifting share another quality in common. Neither really ends or “solves” tantalization outright. All they do, instead, is indicate that such a solution might one day fall within reach. Floating downriver, as we have seen, only slows nature’s withdrawals. Accordingly, as a blankness he finds becoming, it evokes for Thoreau not the fact so much as the possibility, however distant, of a total abolition of tantalization that might prove the Humboldtian thesis regarding the unity of all matter. Sleep seems no less provisional. Naps Thoreau takes outdoors can feel, if anything, still more becoming than river journeys, and not least because they not only decelerate tantalization but seem to bring it to a halt. Nature, whenever his body grows still enough for sleep, does seem to regroup, reclaiming its old abandoned territories and resuming its old movements all around him. Halting tantalization, however, carries an obvious obligation. Sooner or later sleep will come. And Thoreau knows only too well that, upon reawakening, he will just have to sit back and watch nature run away from him once again. Awareness of his body’s immobilization in itself will mean it cannot stay still for long. His own sense of pleasure on hearing a “treesparrow” overhead will soon send it flying away.47 Similar complications dog the third kind of becoming blankness that I want to consider here. In order to describe this third blankness, Thoreau switches into novelistic mode, projecting it onto another, older man: I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method. . . . He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man’s life, entrapping silly fish, almost grown to be the sun’s familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years;

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and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died . . . His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.48

Thoreau here presents himself as a young apprentice quite in awe of the “old country method” by which this elderly Englishman once caught his “silly fish.” His tributes linger in particular on the unnamed angler’s ability to become the “sun’s familiar” and otherwise sink as if unnoticed into the natural scene. Fishing, placid and egoless, as such here forms a perfect opposition to farming. In sharp contrast to agricultural attempts to “work” the land, to plough its wild mixtures to tilth and otherwise make it pay, fishing here requires people first to recognize and then to exploit their own potential to be forgotten. But this sedate pastime, our third becoming blankness, remains no less provisional than the other invisibilities Thoreau explores. Angling, by common consent, is very difficult. Thoreau here, however, finds it awkward too. For his tributes cannot mask his growing suspicion that he and the fisherman belong to entirely different social worlds. Writing only widens the gulf between them. The simple fact of Thoreau’s erudition, not to mention his sophomoric foray into Biblical incantation, only draw his portrait further away from its intended subject. At length, indeed, it relinquishes him altogether. This angler we watch as, in a curious rehearsal of his approaching death, he disappears inside a modest dwelling into which the narrative seems unwilling or unable to enter. The low roof and backstreets location of this sanctuary can in fact make it seem rather reminiscent of the recesses and coverts into which Thoreau earlier saw other creatures of the riverbank escape. Each of these becoming blanks can thus seem fleeting, hard to sustain, in itself elusive. Just so long as it remains operative, however, each also affords Thoreau the prospect of bypassing the evasions of nature. Each a practical measure, each makes the impossible seem a little more possible. Not surprisingly, this grows most apparent whenever he finds a way to combine these becoming blanks together. In a classic moment from Walden he pictures himself, floating over the eponymous pond, a fishing rod resting in his hands. His emptiness, his blissful vacancy, intensifies as the scene unfolds: Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a

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Logical processes lead to magical results. The three becoming blanks that I have dwelt on in these pages in fact complement each other so well here that they bring about a full-blown metamorphosis in which Thoreau himself seems to become blank enough and natural enough to sink into wildness and hence prove the Humboldtian thesis of holistic unity. As a result of this mythic transformation the practical measures by which he once cultivated blankness come to feel ever more unnecessary. Camouflage, hiding, even the hard work of standing still all outlive their original function as later sections of Walden unfold. Now animals just walk right up to Thoreau, forget he is there, or otherwise regard him more as friend than foe. And Thoreau, of course, repays the compliment. In “broad daylight,” his feet “cronching the snow,” he strolls up to “a barred owl” and watches as it stays sat “on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine.”50 Openly he looks for the jizz of hares as they loiter “round my door at dusk” or “sit . . . motionless under” the window before his desk.51 Chickadees and sparrows perch on him. Squirrels start to “wake me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house,” nature recolonizing civilized space. One such squirrel really captures Thoreau’s attention: [It] would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snowcrust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were eyed on him—for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl—wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance—I never saw one walk—and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time—for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my woodpile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously

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and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate;—a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;—and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.52

Halfway through this wonderful sequence an interesting incident occurs. Walden’s theatrical squirrel, upon remembering he is being watched, pauses, cogitates, and then foolishly mistakes for his audience the inanimate corn rather than the man he has just looked in the eye. On one level, of course, this is just bravado. Thoreau here is just boasting, stretching credulity, as he claims that some animals now think him so safe that they would feel warier of half-chewed corn. And yet the boast convinces. At such moments, after all, Walden crowds the page with so much insight and knowledge, following the squirrel home with such sustained and imaginative detail, that it can seem to be studying nature as if from within. Here Thoreau can seem to be inhabiting the uninhabitable, touching the untouchable; he can seem to be subverting, if not quite rejecting, that belief in the tantalizing nature of American wildness that we saw expressed not just in Gifford’s A Home in the Wilderness but also in Emerson’s Nature. Melancholic feeling, however, persists. Even amid Walden’s subversions—even as its Doolittle antics reach fever pitch—bleaker thoughts remain. Dead, death, and other gloomy words never seem far from Thoreau’s lips. And the wind that “howls” and “sighs humanely” elsewhere in his masterwork here brings a sudden poignancy as it interrupts the squirrel’s play. Suspicions, premonitions, grow. To become a becoming blank, under such circumstances, can soon seem a sacrifice of life itself. Nullifying the flesh can even seem a frightening prelude to the thought of suicide itself. The choice before Thoreau, certainly, seems stark. His ploys, his patience, his cautious approaches can all seem to allow him to watch nature without disturbing it. They can all seem to leave him transparent, letting him eyeball wildness unperturbed. But he cannot quite settle into this happiness, cannot quite accept it as a given. Something in him cannot quite shake off the suspicion that Emerson’s seminal fantasy, insofar as his book consummates it, consummates it for one reason alone: because he has learnt to act like his own ghost.

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Looking for Venice Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman But who is that on the other side of you?

T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922)

Now I ought to say again that this argument does not concern Transcendentalism alone. Over the rest of this chapter I aim to suggest that many of the tantalizing effects apparent in Thoreau and Emerson’s depictions of pure and pristine nature also become apparent in some very different accounts of some very different frontiers. No less than their illustrious forebears, many later US writers, too, often brood on the belief that desire must stand in the shadow of frustration. They too reflect on the idea that beautiful objects must be pure of touch. They too ask whether the very allure of such things invites their destruction. And they too yearn, because of this, to creep up on these objects of wonder. They too are drawn to camouflage, to silence, indeed to all of invisibility’s sly techniques, finding blankness as becoming as it seems in both Thoreau’s major works. Yet this habit—this tendency to see new prospects as if they were as tantalizing as the wilderness forever crouching behind the western frontier—already gets underway in the writings of Emerson himself. In a number of writings, as we have seen, Emerson grows alert to nature’s withdrawals, and so much so that as early as his Essays: Second Series (1844) he was beginning to suspect it of having “no faith in us,” and accusing it of a “slight treachery and derision.”53 Elsewhere, however—and even when he turns to matters of race, society, and civilization—Emerson maintains a similar attitude.54 An impulse to conflate all things beautiful with all things untouched also motivates much of English Traits, for example. Persistently this late work describes the landmarks he visits, from Salisbury Cathedral to Stonehenge, as if they were enchanted, purified by historic time, and still unaffected by the modernity he cannot but place before them. Millennia alone regenerate the latter, the simple fact of “good preservation” happily granting a “new and recent” impression to the “uncanny stones” of Wiltshire. But the damage that the Victorian “mineralogist’s hammer and chisel” can do to this fresh rock suggests it is as fragile as any wilderness hiding from Emerson on the other side of the Atlantic.55 These structures, he implies, are so ancient that they have become tantalizing, untouched and untouchable, too. A trip to Dundee’s oldest church gives him chance to hone this approach. As he gazes upon it Emerson not only mythologizes but also naturalizes the processes he feels went into its construction. This medieval edifice, he insists, ‘“was built by another and a better race than any that now look on it.’” A geological allusion then presents itself. Emerson likens the work of these unknown artisans to “volcanic basalts” on which you

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might still see “the work of fire which has been extinguished for ages.”56 Such mystical figurations recall Emerson’s habit, elsewhere, of ennobling Amerindian lives and customs even as he consigns them to the distant past. Epitomized by “Musketaquid,” a poem that evokes “winds mindful of sannup and of squaw” even as it unearths examples of “pipe and arrow” seemingly as old as the earth itself, Emerson’s naturalization of indigeneity echoes, surprisingly, across English Traits.57 For Dundee’s medieval ghosts, too, manage to manufacture a sort of natural newness. Into the granite itself they decant what English Traits calls the “freshness” people possessed in the first flowering of Scottish Christianity.58 They too pass through the world as hands pass through tall grass, leaving Emerson with an image of natural but human construction that is also a kind of European reply to what he elsewhere hailed, in a favorite conjunction, as the “Indian wilderness.” These new visions of ancient and classic freshness are, of course, utterly paradoxical. Quite apart from anything else, the transcontinental similarity that they reveal sits oddly alongside the race thinking that led Emerson elsewhere to dismiss the Amerindian as a mystical creature and to salute the Saxon as a gifted architect of English civilization. Perhaps the strangest thing about these paradoxical visions, however, is that, when they unfold in English Traits itself, they do not seem strange at all. Instead they seem preordained, irresistible. It is as though Emerson, for all his horror of American jingoism, could not help but absorb what Donald E. Pease has called “core myths like Virgin Land,” surrendering to “their powers of cultural persuasion,” until the western frontier became for him a crucible for nothing less than a new aesthetics: for a new way of seeing everything he saw.59 It is as though the incessant retreat of this frontier, the incessant dwindling of the wilderness, had proven so seminal, so definitive for the new imperial nation, that it were now determining Emerson’s way of viewing beauty in general, and not least in the heart of civilization. One struggles to think of any other reason why beauty, over the course of English Traits, should come to appear so inherently tantalizing. Emerson’s penchant for calling Britain’s oldest ruins “new” or “fresh” instead seems so odd, so counterintuitive, that you can only explain it as a sign of his growing feeling that beautiful things must be untouched, that untouched things must be beautiful, and that both qualities, in essence, must thus vouchsafe one another. But this is to say that touch here remains in wait, ready to destroy the beauty that it opposes. Even amid this built world, even amid this recognized humanity, it continues to spell crisis. Henry James always wanted to be seen as an international man of letters. Patriotism seemed to him a refuge, if not of the scoundrel, then of bigotry, of cruel dumb conformity, and his narratives always shuttle so freely from country to country, inhabiting such diverse bourgeois and aristocratic identities, that they do seem to issue from some higher, transcultural plane. Yet there is also a sense that the cosmopolitan gestures and settings of his oeuvre sometimes work to distract us from its lingering immersion in US mythology. Indeed, insofar as it betrayed his belief that he could control and even recast his own individual identity, James’s renunciation of US citizenship was far from an un-American thing to do. His transnational aspirations—his desire to confound the kind of reader who needs to know “whether I am . . . an American writing about England

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or an Englishman about America”—can, on the contrary, betray a belief not only in the importance but also the possibility of performative reinvention, of a self-actualization quite free of the determinations of our designated social roles. The contrast with his fellow novelist Joseph Conrad at the very least seems instructive. Happenstance put James’s friend on the path to British subjecthood; a series of accidents, by his own account, first brought him aboard an English ship.60 James himself, by way of contrast, never lost control over the journey he took to this same destination. His late Englishness reflected, however paradoxically, his underlying determination to determine his own identity. And the truth is that James’s works never talk up the contrast between Europe and the United States quite so much as they recognize the influence that this perceived opposition exerts over everyday affairs. Far from boosting the myth of what Roxana Oltean has called Europe and America’s “irresolvable opposition,” his oeuvre holds it up to the light.61 Europe, often a foil, as often seemed to James “the more salient American stage”; and “any particular action on this great lighted and decorated scene,” his New York preface to Daisy Miller suggested, typically relied “for half its sense on one of my outland importations.”62 Later novels, no less than his apprentice work The American (1876–7), continue to invest Europe with “frontier attributes” and to play around with the idea of its “conquest” at the hands of the rising transatlantic class. Even as he got older, settling into Englishness, James’s ability to focus on US national myth remained undiminished.63 This helps to explain why James’s reports of his travels around Italy so often echo both the tropes and the assumptions of English Traits. Schooled in Emersonian philosophy, James’s relationship with the Transcendentalist in time proved personal as well as professional. On paper James delighted in Nature among other writings, lauding Emerson for illuminating “in the landscape of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight effects.”64 But this admiration soon led to friendship too. In 1873, when both were in Paris, James took the chance to spend a memorable morning with Emerson “walking thro’ the Louvre,” fully absorbing, in this delightful setting, the “sovereign amenity” of the older man’s “presence.”65 Little is known about what James and Emerson exchanged on this notable occasion. Whatever they said, though, the influence of English Traits often becomes palpable in James’s work. Nowhere is this more obvious than when his travel writings take the great Renaissance cities of northern Italy for their subject. The stakes here seemed, if anything, higher. Florence, Venice, and Rome were for James repositories, outdoor museums, before they were cities. “Undiffused,” as Tony Tanner notes, the beauty of this Renaissance space could itself “obtrude . . . its present poverty,” and the paintings and the other artifacts held within the limits of these living archives could always seem, for all James’s Anglophilia, far more significant than the scattered British landmarks Emerson alights upon in English Traits.66 Artworks of the Uffizi, Dante’s tomb, and the “mellow mouldering surface” of the riverfront houses beyond the Ponte Santa Trinità: Florence alone seemed to him almost too rich, too open to the world, and too willing to allow “the fond appraiser, the infatuated alien,” to “feast our idle eyes” on its glut of old artwork.67 Nor is this the only moment in which

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Italian Hours plummets from the lofty heights of detached description (“the fond appraiser”) into the depths of identification (“our”). In fact such descents soon seem central to the work. James, if always a little reluctant to laugh at himself, does let us see the lengths he has taken to avoid association with “one’s detested fellow-pilgrim.”68 Italian Hours does come to seem a record of his flight from being seen as just another American tourist. Dust provides James with an interesting way of navigating these difficulties. Stumbling upon dusty artworks can at first perturb him, leading him to fret again about modern Italy’s indifference to its Renaissance heritage. But James is also prone to exaggerate such neglect, and as he does so its physical manifestations, all its layers of dust and smatterings of mould, acquire another, far more positive, connotation. Neglect leads to preservation. Somehow, for certain Renaissance artifacts, “the dust of ages unfingered” now provides a protective film, shielding them from the smears of a menacing modernity even as it adds to, enriches, their aura of authenticity.69 Indeed, if James longs to put his faith in “the perfect separateness,” from the modern day, “of all the great productions of the Renaissance,” then dust performs a useful service.70 It wraps these “great productions” inside a film of time. It makes history tangible, heritage fragile. In so doing it establishes new grounds on which to mirror Nature. It allows Italian Hours to suspect Renaissance heritage, too, of lacking “faith,” indeed of regarding the modern visitor with that “slight treachery and derision” that Emerson first thought he saw deep in the American forest. This peculiar way of appreciating dust soon leads James to grow hostile toward the very concept of restoration. At length he sounds, by his own admission, like a guest contributor to one of “Mr. Ruskin’s little tracts,” complaining, with all of Ruskin’s aloofness and “ill-humour,” that this gallery or that cathedral “smells too strongly of restoration.”71 In fact James can even seem to surpass the English critic. Here we find him deploring, not just botched or shoddy attempts to improve particular artworks, but restoration per se; wherever “the hand of the restorer has been laid,” he declares, “all semblance of beauty has vanished.”72 The very fact that Italian Hours finds room for such a remark in itself confirms that dust and other evidence of neglect is now providing a host of new surfaces for the projection of the tantalizing effect. James’s dismissal, if a little incidental, clearly betrays his belief that the aura of Renaissance artifacts must now include the grime that ages of neglect have laid upon them. And restorers, just as clearly, cannot do anything with such authentic dirt. They can only clean it. They can only vandalize it, destroying it as they endeavor to return such priceless objects to an original, yet now curiously bogus, freshness. For this reason alone James cannot pass himself off as Ruskin’s heir. The hand of the restorer, he seems to realize, looks too much like his own. It only does his bidding, readying the artwork for the consuming eyes of visitors like him. It only confirms the end of that long incubation already heralded by his own arrival in Italy’s outdoor museums. Another example of this doubtful anger, of James’s tendency to protest too much about restoration, occurs in his account of “the case . . . of that beautiful boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto” historically held in the Uffizi. At first, in a Ruskinian voice full of

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woe, James laments this painting’s tragic fate. Its violent restoration, he complains, has left “its honourable duskiness quite peeled off and heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare.” Suddenly, however, James calls time on this Ruskinian diatribe. Speeding out of the Uffizi, all the way out of Florence itself, he carries us into Tuscany’s idyllic countryside. Just a couple of sentences later he is talking about a very different memory. One evening lately, near the same Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll among those encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled with the vaporous olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a wayside shrine, in which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, a little votive lamp glimmered through the evening air. The hour, the atmosphere, the place, the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the observer, the thought that someone had been rescued here from an assassin or from some other peril and had set up a little grateful altar in consequence, against the yellow-plastered wall of a tangled podere; all this led me to approach the shrine with a reverent, an emotional step. I drew near it, but after a few steps I paused. I became aware of an incongruous odour; it seemed to me that the evening air was charged with a perfume which, although to a certain extent familiar, had not hitherto associated itself with rustic frescoes and wayside altars. I wondered, I gently sniffed, and the question so put left me no doubt. The odour was that of petroleum; the votive taper was nourished with the essence of Pennsylvania.73

By now I trust it is clear that, to borrow a phrase Alan Trachtenberg applies to The American Scene (1907), Italian Hours fairly “bristles with self-questioning commentary.”74 But perhaps it is also apparent that, over the course of the above sequence, this constant self-examination gets stronger still. The petrol that here incarnates the very “essence of Pennsylvania” certainly seems to carry a powerful smell of self-doubt. The sudden lurch into anti-American feeling appears an ingenious way for James to admit he cannot really step into Ruskin’s shoes. The concession functions at the symbolic level. Disconnected, ruptured, James’s unexpected foray into Florence’s “encircling hills” becomes legible only insofar as it develops a kind of biochemical allusion. For the bleach that ruins del Sarto’s masterwork and the gas that ruins Tuscany’s ancient perfume do create a powerful symmetry between the figure of the restorer and the visiting American. Consequently the latter constituency—what Edith Wharton called the “agglutinated humanity” gathered all along the Grand Tour’s main routes—stand revealed as another set of corroding agents, of benign vandals, who spell doom for the heritage they seek.75 Like the restorers they help fund, but also like Emerson at Stonehenge, these aspiring connoisseurs can only place ruinous modernity before the objects they adore. Soon after this realization James starts to sound as doubtful about the idea of tourism as he is about restoration. Cynically he observes: There are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may take. Surely they should know by this

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time that he is capable of taking none. He has his own way—he makes it all right. It now becomes just a part of the charming solicitation that it presents precisely a problem—that of giving the particular thing as much as possible without at the same time giving it, as we say, away.76

Although James here keeps his pronouns under control, referring, throughout, to the tourist as him rather than me, his commentary nonetheless remains, almost painfully, empathetic. His own memories loom over the objective and second-hand observations. But James’s attempts to hold his own identity at arm’s length, his reluctance to admit that he is talking about himself, also indicate that he remains hopeful that, with effort, he might yet thwart some of the future withdrawals of these enticing foreign realms. Mere tourists only ever get to see the Europe that Europe wants to show them, is James’s assertion here; their very interest in it as an object leads it to perform itself and thus become artificial. He himself, however, still hopes to escape the American crowd. In Venice these pressures sharpen. If Italian cities generally seem to James encapsulated, encased in a film of time, then all around the Lido and the Lagoon stretches the biggest bubble of all, this strange city’s atmosphere composed “of the quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea.”77 But just as the biggest bubbles tend to pop first, so Venice’s special significance here, for James, in itself leads to a special vulnerability and a need for special protection. On the question of what threatens this vulnerable city most of all, moreover, Italian Hours no longer minces its words. Instead, in a sign that he might yet become a perfect Englishman after all, he reveals that he reserves his greatest snobbery, his most colorful disdain, for the American middle classes. Spitefully he derides the “devouring American,” in private correspondence lamenting that the city has now become little more than the “vomitorium of Boston.”78 Everywhere he looks, all around Venice, he sees only the damage left behind by a transatlantic bourgeoisie he condemns for sharing his curiosity in such foreign realms. In fact this anti-Americanism grows so powerful that Italian Hours soon starts condemning “the awful vaporetto” as if it were a US importation. These waterbuses, James shudders, bring to the Grand Canal the possibility of “rapid transit, in the New York phrase,” enabling “everybody—save indeed those who wouldn’t for the world—to rush about Venice as furiously as people rush about New York.”79 What stuns James here is the discovery of the hustle and bustle of modern city life right in the heart of his favorite outdoor museum. Yet his snobbery also leads him, in effect, to Americanize these vaporetto: to nominate them a kind of foreign importation of those garden-killing machines that Leo Marx suggests “reverberate so endlessly in our literature” as to rank among its leading clichés.80 A comparison with the brutal trains of Hawthorne and Thoreau certainly seems suggestive. In common with the shrieking “locomotive” that rattles Sleepy Hollow yet only echoes the disruptions of Hawthorne’s own body, the “churning” of the “resented” vaporetto here, too, seems, for all his contempt, intriguingly akin to the transformations James himself causes as he encroaches on Italy’s hallowed space.81 And in common with Thoreau’s disgust at the “cattle train” that seems to “carry a valley” to the abattoir in Walden, James’s rejection of the vaporetto seems sharpened by the availability of another kind of watercraft at once

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more rustic and gentle. Indeed, even as his snobbery comes to seem a little emetic, a little calculated to purge Americanness from himself, James describes the gondola in terms that suggest he is here mindful of what he elsewhere called “the cult of the canoe” that proved so pivotal throughout Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River.82 Here seeking a divorce from the American crowd, James praises these Italian boats, too, for the becoming blanknesses they afford: for their ability to drift silent and low into all manner of Venetian scenes free of “solicitation.” [T]he night is the real time. It perhaps even wouldn’t take much to make you award the palm to the nights of winter. This is certainly true for the form of progression that is most characteristic, for every question of departure and arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of this perfect vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don’t see and all the things you do feel—each dim recognition and obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated to our doom, even when the truth is simply and sociably that you are going out to tea. Nowhere else is anything as innocent so mysterious, nor anything as mysterious so pleasantly deterrent to protest. These are the moments when you are most daringly Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other aliens the high light of the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and gold. The splendid day is good enough for them; what is best for you is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among clustered pali and softly-shifting poops and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that play their admirable part in the general effect of a great entrances. . . .. Hold to it fast that there is no other such dignity of arrival as arrival by water. Hold to it that to float and slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low, dark felze and make the few guided movements and find the strong crooked and offered arm, and then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass up the few damp steps on the precautionary carpet—hold to it that these things constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. . . .. The beauty of the matter has been in the absence of all momentum—elsewhere so scientifically applied to us, from behind, by the terrible life of our day—and in the fact that, as the elements of slowness, the felicities of deliberation, doubtless thus all hang together, the last of calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian room with a rush.83

Elsewhere Italian Hours depicts those Italians who occupy traditional roles as if they were themselves artifacts or natural elements within the country’s tantalizing landscape. A “Dominican monk” who escorts James around a small church in Rome, for example, strikes him as “a creature generated from its musty shadows and odours.”84 James’s gondolier, in the long passage above, suffers a similar fate. Here the impersonal passive verb (a classic example of those “mystifications” of the English language by which, Chinua Achebe once observed, the British Empire long went about “guarding the precincts” of its power) here conspires with images of disembodiment to push this skilful inferior to the edge of the unfolding vistas his work generates.85 Impersonally James recalls “your sense of being floated” even as he declines to name the source of “the strong crooked” arm being “offered” to him in

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the dark. Ironic detachment in itself, James’s customary autobiographical mode of dispassionate self-scrutiny, cannot hide the fact that he has forgotten, or never knew, his gondolier’s name. The situation carries obvious echoes of US imperial culture. Anyone who has delved into the colonial archive of frontier exploration is likely to notice its parallels with those countless stories of western pathfinding that rely on the knowledge of Indian guides yet often forget, rhetorically, that they are there. The kindest thing we might say about this sequence from Italian Hours is that it plays around with that heritage, echoing but also upsetting it somewhat in the manner of the medical mission that leads Ernest Hemingway’s protagonist into the wilderness in the early story “Indian Camp.” The harsher truth might be that he has here fallen into the habits of human exploitation. But it is also apparent that his description pushes the gondolier to the edge of his own Venice because it is seeking to achieve something akin to Thoreau’s state of becoming blankness. Practical solutions Thoreau developed in the New England woods here seem reapplied, allowing James again to lurk low and suspend awhile the perpetual tantalizations of the fascinating scene. Indeed the intensifying fusion of blanknesses that we find here, as James not only drifts around but does so at night, seems reminiscent of that seminal moment in Walden in which Thoreau floats around the pond and all but forgets the fishing rod in his hand. Having noticed these phenomena, it can become tempting to read in every single reference US literature makes to spying, eavesdropping, or undisruptive description a kind of deliberate allusion to Transcendentalism in general or Thoreau in particular. Clearly, for all its efforts to present us with what Stephen Fender calls a “foundation myth, an attempt to give America back  .  .  . the image of its mind,” even Walden’s influence does not extend quite so far as this.86 Nonetheless, after having sifted out all more generic or thoughtless instances of voyeurism, we are still left with a large number of US narratives that do echo Walden insofar as they too problematize the body of a narrator and emphasize its likely disruption of the scenes it promises to observe. Nor are these Thoreauvian echoes confined to the specific genre of US nature writing. A Thoreauvian yearning for observant blankness might seem a key feature of Anne Dillard’s work; the language of Walden might find modern echoes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) and its hope that “nature” will “reveal as well as conceal: now-youdon’t-see-it, now-you-do.”87 But the desire to lay a hand on an untouched object before it withdraws from touch is by no means limited to those acclaimed the modern heirs of Transcendentalist tradition. In its final paragraph even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) makes palpable a desire to reach primordial nature in the impossible moment before reaching it: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. 88

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An attitude not dissimilar to Emerson’s sense of nature’s perpetual evasions here breaks away from its original wilderness setting, strays beyond American borders, and steps onto a planetary stage. Nature everywhere now seems already haunted, possessed by a prehuman spirit human contact cannot but annihilate. At the same time McCarthy suggests that, through our touch, our gaze, and even our very presence, we have, if nothing else, destroyed the “maps and mazes” once discernible on the skin of this already spiritful realm. In this way he no sooner rekindles the old Puritanical will to believe that nature is interpretable than he suggests its clues as to our predestination are now blocked from view as a result of our own enquiring gaze. Old Calvinist urges of abasement thus force themselves into a conflation of human consumption and human destruction that on first inspection recalled the milder and more liberal language of English Traits. This primordial imagery, while echoing the tropes and metaphors of such early novels as Child of God (1973) and Suttree (1979), at the same time connect McCarthy’s oeuvre as a whole with those other US bodies of work that pivot, unmistakably, on Emersonian aesthetics. Willa Cather too, for example, often depicts a quest for hallowed realms: for untouched and untouchable spaces outside of the busy circuits of human life. A pursuit of an “extinct civilization, hidden away” in an “inaccessible mesa,” lies at the heart of The Professor’s House (1925), for example.89 As potently, in Shadows on the Rock, Cather’s narrative dreams of the “sealed world” beyond the Canadian colony, hankering after an empty (or emptied) and “uncharted continent choked with interlocking trees, living, dead, half-dead, their roots in bogs and swamps.”90 Presently Cather’s protagonist discovers a congenial example of such uninhabited space, a hollow all her own: When they got up from the table, Pierre announced that he was going fishing, and he did not even suggest taking her along. The little girls were expected to help their mother in the morning, so Cécile got away unobserved into the nearest wood. She went through it, and climbed toward the ridge in the middle of the island. At last she came out on a waving green hayfield with a beautiful harp-shaped elm growing in the middle of it. The grass there was much taller than the daisies, so that they looked like white flowers seen through a driving grey-green rain. Cécile ran across the field to that symmetrical tree and lay down in the dark, cloud-shaped shadow it threw on the waving grass. The tight feeling in her chest relaxed. She felt she had escaped for ever from the Harnois and their way of living. She went to sleep and slept a long while. When she wakened up in the sweet-smelling grass, with the grasshoppers jumping over her white blouse, she felt rested and happy,—though unreal, indeed, as if she were someone else. She was thinking she need not go back to the smith’s house at all that day, but could lunch on wild strawberries, when she heard the little girls’ voices calling her, “Cé-cile, Cé—cile!” rather mournfully, and she remembered that she ought not to cause the family anxiety. She looked for a last time at the elm-tree and the sunny field, and then started back through the wood. She didn’t want the children to come to that place in their search for her. She hoped they had never been there! After dinner she escaped into the fields again, but this time the girls went with her.91

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James and Thoreau both voice misgivings about the kind of escape from or displacement of other people that would seem to fuel this fantasy. All such dreams of deserted space can seem to them too easy, too solipsistic, their appeal itself a measure of our incarceration in a sort of bind of tantalization both would rather outwit. The dyadic modes of address that are a common feature of their very different travel narratives manifestly confirm their desire to think around the easy romance of isolation and include other people within their own literary orbit. Even such resistance, however, soon founders as it becomes apparent that no reader could ever in fact follow these men into the hallowed spaces they have found without furthering their inevitable destruction. Eventually, indeed, dyadic address looks like just another fantasy, another illusion borne of an underlying hope of cheating the tantalizing effect. Illusively it only suspends, and by no means avoids, the crisis of desecrating contact. For such readers must always remain stubbornly, irrefutably, plural. As a mass, as a constituency, they can only really follow the text into the hallowed space it occupies by not following it, by recourse, themselves, to a kind of becoming blankness. Democratic tributes to the reader thus ultimately prove illogical, untrustworthy, less than reliable as modes of address. Still they address us nonetheless. Still they beckon us, drawing us into what can only be our own absence, our own nullification, our own haunting of uninhabitable space. Take, for example, Italian Hours’ attempt to persuade its ideal reader to visit Rome’s St Peter: When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature.  .  .  ., of addled brains and lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, . . . the image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts, seems to rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make you still believe in the heroic will and the heroic act. It’s a relief, in other words, to feel that there’s nothing but a cab-fare between your pessimism and one of the greatest of human achievements.92

Another example confirms James’s hope of exempting himself and his ideal reader from the touristic swarm. Here he recalls his quest for some of Tintoretto’s more inaccessible artworks: [M]any a masterpiece lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many a noble work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a scantily-visited altar; some of them indeed, hidden behind the altar, suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your irritated wish. You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the custode. You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure it’s beautiful. . . . It may be said as a general thing that you never see the Tintoret. You admire him, you adore him, you think him the greatest of painters, but in the great majority of cases your eyes fail to deal with him. This is partly his own fault; so many of his works have turned to blackness and are positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San Rocco, where there are acres of him,

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American Tantalus there is scarcely anything at all adequately visible save the immense “Crucifixion” in the upper story. It is true that in looking at this huge composition you look at many pictures; it has not only a multitude of figures but a wealth of episodes; and you pass from one of these to the other as if you were “doing” a gallery. . . . The interest, the impressiveness, of that whole corner of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a visit to the Scuola. Nothing that all travellers go to see appears to suffer less from the incursions of travellers. It is one of the loneliest booths of the bazaar, and the author of these lines has always had the good fortune, which he wishes to every other traveller, of having it to himself.93

At such moments Italian Hours tries to forget its public—to return to the book its lost aura or recast it, bogusly, as an act of interpersonal communication. Let us go then, you and I, the famous opening of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” provides the obvious comparison. James here too addresses his reader as an isolated individual, takes for granted her good grace, and enlists her into an intimate conspiracy against the mass movements of modern life. Yet both, James and Eliot alike, seem aware that the impression of dyadic intimacy that they conjure is an illusion. It cannot last long. The sheer physicality of books, their manifest duplicability, alone will shatter it. Who is the third who walks always beside you? The third presence in “The Waste Land,” if more often understood as a figure of death, also casts a shadow over the conceit of the interpersonal dyad that Eliot’s modernist masterwork seeks, fleetingly, to enact. Similar shadows fall over Italian Hours. Here James talks of how, “practically,” he “violates . . . the instinct of monopoly.” The simple fact that James’s earlier work hurls its ideal reader into a taxi, forcing her again to smell “the essence of Pennsylvania” on her way to St Peter, only flaunts the weird impossibility of her nontouristic status. Yet the argument that I have developed over the course of this chapter reveals that this peculiar dynamic, so characteristic of literary modernism, also draws long and deep from the Transcendentalist well. For the problem Italian Hours here faces is not so very different from the problem that Emerson faced in Nature. It is, again, about wanting your reader to follow you into a realm that you want to keep for yourself. It is about exclusive desires—about what happens when so many people follow your advice that people can no longer follow your advice. Solitude becomes hard to find, and woods, like the quiet corners of Venice that you could once get lost in, grow clogged with people trying to get lost. Wildernesses overflow, overwhelmed by people who stand around, ignoring each other, trying to become transparent eyeballs. All Italian Hours does is transplant this Emersonian dilemma into shadier and lesser known corners of Venice. Brutally James here enforces frontier logic, exposing the impossible intimacies of modern consumer life.

Haunting Yosemite I would like to bring this chapter to a close by suggesting an internet search similar to the one for empty pool photographs that began American Tantalus. Type “Yosemite”

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into a search engine, press return, and the images that result, of course, will bear little resemblance to the empty blue mosaic I described at the start of this book. No marble tiles will now appear onscreen. No spotlights will appear reflected, cloudlike, upon the gluey water. Instead a world of granite will lie in wait, the realm beyond the tree line, perilous but untouched, inviting exploration. But the clear differences between this new set of results and American Tantalus’s original search can also draw attention to the central feature that they share. After all, ever since Carleton Watkins began photographing its “pure landscape” in the 1860s, the myth of Yosemite, too, has struggled to accommodate humanity.94 Of course, as you survey these digital heirs to Watkins’s work, some anomalies might, again, appear. Human mishaps, hiking accidents, bear sightings, and various amateur or photojournalist images might interrupt the pristine mountain landscapes that will no doubt dominate your first page of results. Models might smile into the camera as they hike, climb, canoe, cycle, or otherwise demonstrate the leisure activities on offer in the park. But these signs of human life will, again, prove the exception to the rule. Also evident in this second internet mosaic will be a desire in a sense to honor Watkins’s legacy by encapsulating Yosemite through a series of new “photographic repositories of space”: through a series of heterotopic representations of “pure,” which is to say empty, land.95 Capturing a terrain that might yet hum “of mystery,” in McCarthy’s phrase, these internet images not only depict Yosemite as pure but will conceive this purity in terms of its freedom from human presence. Human faces, human bodies, will certainly seem to intrude on a mosaic that would rather grasp the park’s epic landscape as an epitome of the primordial and prehuman (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1  Alexander Demyanenko, Yosemite National Park, California, USA (Date unknown).

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If you refine this search, adding to Yosemite the phrase “mirror lake,” such possibilities sharpen. Now our search results seem organized around a geographical feature that is also an apt metaphor for the untouched and untouchable appeal that would appear central to the mythic status of one of America’s earliest national parks. Plenty of good reasons, after all, explain why the photographs of Yosemite on offer via Google Images so often lack human subjects: the park is too large, its High Sierra too remote, and its nearest metropolitan area too far away to draw constant crowds. As it focuses on a smooth pool of water, however, the camera can be seen to be harnessing this emptiness, enlisting it into the story it wants to tell. As it does so this image-making machine again proves itself a little less representative and a little more performative of reality. A smooth and untouched pool of water again becomes central in a simple way and as if to encapsulate the image’s general aim of presenting all that it presents to us as a new and pure frontier. To reach Mirror Lake—to gaze into its sheer surface and wave at yourself waving back—is a remarkable thing to do. But it also involves certain anxieties. Epitomizing the epic encounter with alienated nature promised at every level of the Yosemite “experience,” it also brings to light the problematic presence others assume in the park as a whole. Like the other guests staying in a hotel meant to be “exclusive,” other visitors to these natural realms throw into disarray the solitude of brochure fantasy. Hell even now might not be other people, but here too, just as James discovered in Venice, they do have a nasty habit of getting to heaven first. In hotels they leave ghostly stains in the upholstery, towels at the side of the pool, and telltale hairs in plugholes. On the shores of Mirror Lake, too, other photographers might well gather, waiting for the light to settle, and hoping you will leave before it does. Upon stumbling across such prior traces, however, any sense of disenchantment that a traveler might feel is not just a measure of naivety, nor, even, of an individualistic culture run amok. It also reflects a yearning, still, for a life brokered from one frontier to the next. New and untouched objects here continue to hold value in and of themselves. Earlier, in my opening chapter, I cited Leslie Marmon Silko’s belief that landscape, as an English term, alienates nature, setting us apart from “natural” space. Quite plainly this view flows more from Silko’s own historical perspective than it does from what Mick Gidley has characterized as landscape’s long occupation of “the intersection” between nature and culture or its attendant implication “of human intervention of some kind—if only in the act of representation.”96 Defined exactly against such intervention, landscape, for Silko, indeed becomes a shorthand for the powerful Eurocentric will to believe that a viewer might yet dwell “outside or separate from the territory she or he surveys.” In the light of her insistence on landscape’s power to enforce Eurocentric alienation, it is, perhaps, worth reflecting on some comments that Theodor Adorno made, years after he had spent some of his exile in California and New York, regarding the American landscape and its notional freedom from touch. As he suggested in Minima Moralia (1951): What is missing in the American landscape is not so much the absence of historical memories, as the romantic illusion has it, as the fact that no hand has left a trace in it. This relates not merely to the absence of farm-fields, the stubbly and often tiny

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scrub-like forests, but above all the streets. These are always immediately blasted out of the landscape, and the more successful their smoothness and breadth, the more relationless and violent their shimmering path stands in contrast to its all too wild, overgrown environs. They bear no imprint. Because they know no traces of shoes or wheels, no gentle footpaths along their edge as a transition to the vegetation, no side-paths into the valley below, they lack that which is mild, softened, rounded in things, on which hands or their immediate tools have worked. It is as if no-one had combed the landscape’s hair. It is disconsolate and inconsolable. This corresponds to the manner of its perception. For what the hurrying eye has merely viewed from the car cannot be retained, and the latter sinks as tracklessly, as the traces on such fade away.97

Silko’s insistence on our necessary involvement in the land together with recent critiques of US exceptionalism can lead us to feel doubtful of the rather sweeping judgments on the American land and the American nation Adorno offers to us here. Even if he seems too sure of himself, however, our skepticism should not lead us to place his comments into too stark an opposition with those of Silko, or miss the fact that they emphasize not just emptiness but its manufacture, and focus throughout not on the denial but the removal of human traces. Indeed, if juxtaposed together, Minima Moralia and Yellow Woman and a Spirit of the Beauty can even begin to unearth from English Traits and its fear for the future of the “great sloven continent” a new kind of cultural impulse: to freeze America’s early European construction as a land of epic and inhuman proportions, and to ensure, if possible, that the likes of Silko remain invisible and that their land remains “too much by half for man in the picture.” Encounters with freshness and tantalizing effects become so dominant a feature of Nature and English Traits, not to mention of Hawthorne’s notebooks, that it becomes hard to dismiss Adorno’s account of this powerful cultural impulse. Phenomena of becoming blankness, as they develop throughout Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, have a similar effect. And in the shifting responses that he offers to United States culture and “the hurrying eye” that it passes over Florence and Venice, James, too, surely offers further proof of what Adorno here depicts as a desire to frame landscapes of all kinds as if they were new and beyond all human scale. Insofar as they agree on this, moreover, these very different writers also make it clear that the desire to see landscape as “smooth” and “trackless” is not mere nostalgia: it does not mark the residue of a frontier memory that will in due course diminish. Instead it appears to both a new structure of feeling. Daily it regenerates the newness of hotels, ensuring hands are “blasted out of the landscape” indoors too. Everywhere in this world of privatized experience, in a world of best-kept secrets and personalized advertising, indeed in a world organized around what Adorno called “the contradiction between adjustment and individualism,” the old appeal of Thoreau’s becoming blankness beckons.98

3

Play Things Toys at the Edge of Whiteness

As they remodel frontier logic, then, English Traits and Italian Hours also remodel the roles that other people play. That is to say, most critics would now accept that A Home in the Wilderness and other cultural enactments of manifest destiny by turns sentimentalized or displaced anyone who got in the way of the imperial urge to stage some epic encounter with the “new” territories out west. This being so, though, any traces of US frontier mythology to be found in Italian Hours and English Traits, however arch or lighthearted, also tend to draw attention to the fact that these modern texts, too, sometimes hide local people away. Cosmopolitan irony holds sway here, and such parallels, of course, evoke the stark contrasts far more than they do the underlying similarities between New and Old World life. But this just makes it all the more interesting to note that, in Italian Hours and English Traits alike, an odd yearning for a kind of ancient freshness yields, here and there, to an even odder desire to efface local people or ennoble their ancestors into another kind of mystic “tribe.”1 Yet, even as English Traits and Italian Hours so uncannily inject a yearning for untouched frontiers into Europe too, the sheer inconsistency of this European application of Eurocentric logic itself makes untenable the presumptuous ease that had once attended its emptying gaze. Old effacements recur here. As they do so, though, their newfound irony, their flaunted inconsistencies, indicates neither urbanity nor wit so much as the anxiety such masks would hide. James for one, as Ralph Ellison once remarked, knew “that he was writing during a new period in the life of the nation, when the lyrical belief in . . . the broadness of the land was no longer so meaningful.”2 And he, like Emerson, also seems to have divined that, by redirecting his yearning for fresh vistas onto the ruins of the Old World, he was in a sense embracing inconstancy, throwing himself into uncharted waters in which he could no longer rely, even if he had wanted to, on the old insistent certainties of racial stratification. Gone here now is original frontier mythology’s ability to dismiss Amerindian existence almost thoughtlessly, almost casually, and “whenever,” as Joshua Bellin says, “the white man will[ed] to remember his own deeds.”3 Tantalizing impulses remain; and even to the point of refashioning, at key junctures in English Traits and Italian Hours, European

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ruins after the image of new frontiers. But the human displacement on which this radical revision must rest can no longer be hidden from view. Language itself must now enact it, jokes, caricatures, and paradoxes pushing people into the edges of their own world. English Traits and Italian Hours, indeed, both talk themselves into a position in which they allow that their goal of transforming Europe into a site of ancient and classic freshness is inconsistent even as they continue to pursue it. In this chapter I aim to show that these visions of ancient freshness are neither rare nor idiosyncratic. Traces of English Traits and Italian Hours in fact become apparent in a range of US texts published during the industrial era, and never more so than when the latter hanker again for lost frontiers, fall under the spell of authentic folk culture, or enlist their isolated reader into some untenable conspiracy against the world. Of these accounts of enduring tantalization, many, as I hope to show, go so far as to express their desires amidst metropolises now overflowing with people nobody could conceivably ignore. In such texts, moreover, traces of frontier influence are rarely as faint as one might suppose. The residue of frontier mythology that seems so artful in James and Emerson’s travelogues in fact often becomes, in these more bohemian texts, hard to miss. Even in the clogged heart of the city they enact frontier logic, reanimating its tantalizing allure, its perpetual evasions, its startling effects. Nowhere is this clearer than in literary depictions of 1920s New York. Portraits of what Henry James called “the general queer sauce” of Manhattan produced between the wars often suggest that, for a fortunate few, the luxuries of modern life had already become numbing in effect, and able to induce a kind of nervous longing to escape.4 New electrical innovations as well as the menial labor on which affluent New Yorkers have always depended seem in this literature to plunge the latter into an endless and existential fidget. Willa Cather’s protagonist in “Paul’s Case” (1905) is far too wretched, his life too precarious, to seem truly representative of this state of enervated privilege. But as he discovers that the exclusive New York for which he longed in fact feels uninhabitable—as he finds he cannot walk into a Waldorf Astoria “built and peopled for him alone” without feeling his body spasm and his teeth start to hurt—so a host of others, too, seem disturbed by the comforts of comfortable life.5 They, unlike Paul, do not feel so lost or hounded that they hurl themselves in front of an oncoming train. But they do voyage into other districts of the city. They do travel outside of themselves, hoping that by such journeying they might claim again a lost authenticity or some revived affect. On nightfall, in short, they do go to Harlem. Some urban sociologists would, perhaps, be inclined to see in these nocturnal forays into Harlem a curious and almost counterintuitive reaction to the “mixophobia” that had by this time already begun to shape the routines of a privileged urban class. They might even argue that interwar US literature provides some early indications of a new style of city life in which, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, those who can afford to recoil from the “mind-boggling . . . variety of human types” on the street by retreating into “closely guarded condominiums” among other exclusive spaces and enclosed modes of transport.6 Interestingly, however, “Paul’s Case” and other noted writings of the period no sooner evoke the spontaneous purity and untouched exclusivity of modern privileged space than they insinuate to us its vacancy, its deadening, unnameable dissatisfactions.

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New technologies, new ideas of hygiene and freshness, and the clean geometries of new industrial design: the key coordinates of modern metropolitan life lead these writers to apprehend (as Sinclair Lewis did in 1922) that if “people had ever loved and lived” in these spaces “there were no signs of it,” thus spawning, in the moment of their birth, an impulse for escape.7 Modernity here seems to manufacture lifeless spaces in which other people soon appear as “suave” and “organless” as the mannequins on which William Faulkner lingers as he describes a Chicago department store halfway through Wild Palms (1939). Vitality, life itself, in such pages finds embodiment only in the unspeaking “charwomen” whom the latter novel goes on to spot “on their knees and pushing pails before them as though they were another species just crawled molelike from some tunnel or orifice leading . . . to the subterranean region which they would crawl back to before light.”8 Underground realms seem here to harbor a mystery as well as a lost liveable reality now exiled from the sunlit and literally superficial world of modern privilege. Excitement of all kinds lurks outside the mixophobic fortress. Rich Manhattanites search Harlem for valences no longer available amid the anonymizing opulence of modern lifestyle. Mixophobia, then, only carries us so far. At the very least, if we are to negotiate the tensions of privilege evoked in these texts, the more creative and literary form of sociology that Bauman himself now practices seems essential. Better still, perhaps, are uncanny and unexhausted images from literature already examined in American Tantalus. Even the following allegory from Pierre, in which Isabel tells Melville’s protagonist of an uncanny coincidence lurking inside her “human” guitar, might help unlock this curious urban scene.9 Here Isabel loosens: some ivory screws of the guitar, so as to open a peep lengthwise through its interior . . . . “Now, Pierre, now.” Eagerly Pierre did as he was bid; but somehow felt disappointed, and yet surprised at what he saw. He saw the word Isabel, quite legibly but still fadedly gilded upon a part of one side of the interior, where it made a projecting curve. “A very curious place thou hast chosen, Isabel, wherein to have the ownership of the guitar engraved. How did ever any person get in there to do it, I should like to know?” . . . “I see, my brother, thou dost not comprehend . . . The name was gilded there when I first got the guitar, though then I did not know it. The guitar must have been expressly made for someone by the name of Isabel; because the lettering could only have been put there before the guitar was put together.” “Go on—hurry,” said Pierre. “Yes, one day, after I had owned it a long time, a strange whim came into me. Thou know’st that it is not at all uncommon for children to break their dearest playthings in order to gratify a half-crazy curiosity to find out what is in the hidden heart of them. So it is with children, sometimes. And, Pierre, I have always been, and feel that I must always continue to be a child, though I should grow to three score years and ten. Seized with this sudden whim, I unscrewed the part I showed thee, and peeped in, and saw ‘Isabel.’”10

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Luxurious modern spaces in Wild Palms and other interwar texts, like The Great Gatsby’s iridescent Long Island mansion, of course reacquire their alluring newness as a result of an army of menial laborers who creep in and clean them when their wealthy occupiers are out. Few of these other writings seem as willing to recognize the significance of such cleaners as Wild Palms, and fewer still pursue them so extravagantly into their “subterranean” homes. Indeed, in his efforts to short-circuit what Richard Godden calls “gossip’s very medium,” The Great Gatsby’s hero hires and fires such staff at will.11 But many other texts, like Gatsby itself, also echo Faulkner in apprehending that the latter workers in a sense wipe modernity clean every night, purging from its surfaces all personal modifications and all trace of past experience. Not least as they can feel it usurping a late Victorian attitude in which homes had lavishly ornamentalized personal histories and lives, these writings are all prone to grow hostile toward modern design, apprehending that its pursuit of the impersonal and the pastless—its wiping away of all of yesterday’s tactile acts—threaten its notional beneficiaries with a loss of identity.12 Gatsby is thus far from alone in seeming so “mirrored in wealth,” in Godden’s phrase, that he can no longer “interrupt . . . forgetfulness.”13 Lots of other characters, too, cannot quite dwell in the new spaces of planned modernity they so covet. Within this new and numbing “sensorium,” as Lauren Berlant notes, “space” in fact becomes something characters “could never know and not usually be known in.”14 Their bodies now register only as a disruption some nameless or ignorable cleaner must presently remove once more. Interwar texts, as we will see, often respond to this sense of domestic dislocation by following, after their own fashion, the antics of Pierre’s Isabel. They too turn to music; they too peer into darkness; and they too hope to find in the inner recesses of the latter some sign, some reflection, that might reveal back to them an authentic identity no longer on offer amid their exclusive sunlit homes. But this is to say that Harlem in this literature performs a double function. By day a major source of the cheap labor that restores the appearance of untouched newness to the spaces occupied by the privileged class, by night it becomes for the latter the equivalent of what Pierre calls the “dearest” of all “play things,” inspiring in them “a half-crazy curiosity to find out what is in the hidden heart of ” darkness uptown. So it happens that, as befits the creator of Moby-Dick, this point of comparison turns on another figuration of the tantalizing effect. Just as Isabel here in fact refrains from breaking her guitar, and just as Pierre’s preemptive disappointment reminds us that most toys contain no hidden revelations, so Harlem, as another kind of plaything, likewise shrinks from outside incursions, likewise hiding its secrets from all enquiries that come groping at it from without. Nor does this withdrawal necessarily result from the understandable wariness of Harlemites themselves. As often it seems a sign that, for a host of literary figures, this remains an impossible pursuit inasmuch as it is for something outside of themselves. External white forays into the area here remain in large part a tantalizing flight from whiteness itself. Pierre is nothing if not enigmatic. Isabel’s fantasy of dissecting toys, if a potent harbinger of The Bluest Eye (1970), sits inside a somewhat dilettantish and whimsical story radically unlike Toni Morrison’s most didactic novel. But as interwar texts brood on the enervations of privilege, alternately ogling and fetishizing and breaking Harlem

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apart, reverberations nonetheless reverberate; echoes thrive as if on incongruity itself. Soon our attention will turn wholly to African-American literature and its critiques of the “playful” exploitation of Harlem and other ghettos. Looking ahead, as I enlist Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love (1972) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) as well as The Bluest Eye itself, the chapter turns to consider black US literature’s more general reaction to that twofold subjugation by which affluent modernity has at once denied its reliance on underpaid labor and treated those who carried it out as objects of fun. But these texts, as we will also see, often also enact a kind of double consciousness in which this interlayered exploitation confers on those who endure it fuller knowledge of the hidden circuits of power that produce society itself. In this other literary lineage, even as they are literally or figuratively commanded to remain silent and step aside to let others move smoothly and as if independently through the sleek modern world, menial staff still acquire from this weird subjugation what Ellison called a “total view” of society itself.15 Often forgotten, often hidden in plain sight, they gain new powers of observation that then seem all the more synoptic when set against the inevitable limitations of their employers’ worldviews. Small wonder that, as we turn to these texts, we shall soon encounter a stance on tantalization radically unlike any American Tantalus has considered hitherto.

Harlem Tantalus Lenox Avenue arises in a park, flaunts a brief splendour, dies and is buried in a dump. From 110th Street it marches proudly northward with the broad grandeur of a boulevard. Fatal pride. Within half a dozen blocks comes sudden hopeless calamity—a street-car line slips from a side street, stealthily as from ambush, and with a whir, a rising roar, a crash, deals the highway its death-blow. Splits its spine. Ugly, cheap little shops attack it, cluster like scavenging vermin about it. Trucks crush blindly, brutally over it, subway eats wormily into it. Waste clutters over it, odors fume up from it, sewer-mouths gape like wounds in its back. Swift changes in complexion come—pallor—grayness—lividity. Then, less than a mile, beyond its start, the Avenue turns quite black. So might you feel, coming unwarned into this part of the colony. Rudolph Fisher, “Fire By Night” (1927) Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty of the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) The pioneering Dutch sailors who we encounter at the close of The Great Gatsby, of course, do not just land anywhere. Some quite precise coordinates in fact locate them.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald, as if to counterbalance the obvious fictions of their names, places East and West Egg “twenty miles” from Manhattan, pinpointing them along “that slender riotous island which extends itself eastwards from New York.”16 Sheer geographical proximity as such weaves a connection between The Great Gatsby’s closing hymn to New World encounter and its earlier invocations of the Manhattan sublime. As Nick Carraway gazes on New York, declaring that the “city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time,” his rhetoric, his sense of possibilities already peaking, indeed his basic adoration of freshness, all seem reminiscent of the dream of Long Island discovery that provides a coda to his story.17 Fitzgerald’s decision to turn this coda into a coda—his decision to export his Dutch sailors from the opening chapter of his original manuscript to the closing page of his typescript—is thus a way of salvaging a comparison he enjoyed.18 Its transposition strengthens it through understatement, lets it breathe, allowing his readers to reach it as if by their own lights. However Fitzgerald had handled it, though, the comparison was always likely to remain one of difference as well as similarity. The Great Gatsby, even as it likens the technological and the natural sublime, also indicates Manhattan’s complication of the latter, ever hinting at the infinite dispersal and routinization of that sense of final epistemic collapse which had once conditioned colonial discovery. What shapes Fitzgerald’s novel is not epochal but everyday experience. Perhaps because they feel exiled from history, or perhaps because they live in what Malcolm Cowley called “the least human of all the babylons,” its “life . . . expressed in terms of geometry and mechanics,” all of The Great Gatsby’s characters seem restless, fidgety, and all seem to organize their lives not around any single event but by the endless quest for new tastes, cultures, and thrills.19 It is as though the novel were wanting to take the sense of epic and rupturing desecration enacted in the European landing of America and to reveal its distribution into banal occurrences dispersed across everyday US life. So it seems apt that The Great Gatsby’s chief object of desire is not a rose but a Daisy. A flower of ordinary yet axiomatic freshness, the latter’s scattered, unpredictable reappearances in grass nicely mirror a skyline that undergoes “monthly change,” even today’s tallest tower soon bowing to tomorrow’s.20 Elsewhere The Great Gatsby, like other 1920s representations, finds in New York a “cosmeticized” city, thin and brittle, “a silhouette” or “façade” best “viewed from across the river.”21 Seen from this distance, silent, organized, still, Manhattan incarnates itself in oppositional terms, defining itself by defying itself. If not a “show of nature,” it takes its cues from the epic sights Emerson had once listed, seeming as inhuman in scale as a western mountain—and as difficult to approach. For to cross this bridge in The Great Gatsby is to lose sight of this tranquil city—is to plunge into the shadow of buildings you cannot see, is to feel “roaring noon” overwhelm you, and is to find that your eyes or your camera viewfinder can no longer frame anything quite as it could Manhattan from afar.22 A tantalizing optic thus again holds sway: but what distinguishes this rise and fall is that, at least for Long Island commuters more industrious than Gatsby, it happens every day. This new way of looking at the metropolis created a new way of looking at the ghetto half hidden inside it. Earlier slum visions did find plenty of echoes in 1920s New York. From 1900 onward, as neighborhoods north of Central Park fell into a long period

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of economic decline, easy comparisons were drawn with the East End of London as well as with the original ghetto, the Ghetto Nuovo, into which the great families of Renaissance Venice had once penned that city’s Jewish populace. As Maria Balshaw suggests, however, contemporary views of Harlem departed from earlier slum myths in the degree to which they regarded this ghetto as a kind of “visual spectacle”: as an especially mysterious, almost womb-like, element within modernity’s new Manhattan sublime.23 In the first decades of the sixteenth century, other Venetians often spoke of the ghetto Nuovo as a place apart, a space removed from their city; in the last decades of the nineteenth century, not only Jack London but many native Londoners came to think of East Enders as people of the abyss (1903), occupants of the basest, bottommost layer of their stratified metropolis.24 Such fantasies certainly persisted in 1920s culture—some New Yorkers saw Harlem as an underworld, and others acted like they did not notice it at all—but they also intermingled with a heightened focus on leisure: on a feeling that this new slum might become a playground, a pleasure zone in which you could flout prohibition, escape your own manners, even have a little fun. In this way Harlem, to coin a phrase, came into vogue. Racial injustice and violence remained rife in the city, and the district’s remodeling as a place of leisure in fact arrayed all sorts of new stereotypes, barriers, and traps before black New Yorkers. But in 1926, when Claude McKay wrote of the “contagious fever” that his adopted neighborhood had spread throughout New York, he meant it metaphorically; although his phrase echoed the images of “infection” and “seduction” that the Ghetto Nuovo had once evoked in Venetian minds, it now referred not to leprosy or syphilis but Harlem’s new cultural magnetism.25 In fact, like others, McKay was here describing Harlem as a departure from earlier ghetto districts—a place where secret errands in and out of the nuovo, like moral lapses once indulged in some Wapping rookery or up against some Shoreditch alleyway, were yielding to an altogether softer proposition: of white New Yorkers merrily storming uptown, sampling its Saturday night delights, before settling straight back into their “normal” lives. Pleasures in Harlem perhaps remained a little guilty, and perhaps they still carried an element of risk. But they no longer, quite so often, seemed the stuff of secrecy; and nor did they spell ruin quite so summarily as in the past. An interesting evocation of this new cultural scene appears in the autobiography of the Harlem stride pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith, Music on My Mind: The Memories of an American Pianist (1964): Liquor was not the only draw. Some went uptown to see Florence Mills, “the little black mosquito,” a magnetic personality who was a potent ambassadress for Harlem’s entertainment. The music was becoming more and more impressive. Cotton Club productions had scores written first by the team of Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, and later by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. These were white composers, of course, and the Cotton Club was actually an “ofay” night club uptown. (It later moved downtown.) The entire show became designed for white trade and, in 1927 when Duke Ellington’s band opened, it was for the entertainment of a white audience made up of Park Avenue society and celebrities in all categories. Harlem citizens were not admitted. . . . The publication of [Carl] Van Vechten’s

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American Tantalus novel, Nigger Heaven, in the mid-twenties, which described some of the more exotic activities taking place uptown, stimulated a rush of white trade. . . .. Van Vechten’s Harlem did exist, but it was not open to the public in general. Only a small percentage of the visitors saw Basement Brownie’s after-hour spa, Helen Valentine’s sex circuses on 140th Street, the floor shows featuring the “drag parades” of homosexuals, the marijuana parlors illuminated by blue lights, the small joints where white jazz musicians sat in with six-piece jump bands to jam, or the neighbourly house-rent parties and parlor socials. A special sort of guide or a friend was needed to make these places available to an ofay. Few, if any, tourists journeyed to the Lafayette to hear Bessie Smith shout the blues[.]26

All of it ghost-written, Music on My Mind presents this description as one of a series of “interludes” in which Smith delegates overall control of the work to his collaborator George Hoefer. The switch from Smith’s autobiographical “I” to a more openly hybrid voice then allows Music on My Mind, having built up an intricate portrait of “ofay” Harlem, to bring similar detail to its portrayal of another district more or less closed to such outsiders. Subsequently, as it floats over the scene, crisscrossing its racial divide, Music on My Mind’s narrative not only confirms that other New Yorkers were approaching Harlem as a sort of pleasure zone, but also begins to suggest that, at least for the more inquisitive among them, yet another tantalizing cycle had taken hold. A logic of authenticity here leads white visitors to cast themselves as the agents of a literally repulsive form of cultural tourism in which they no sooner glimpse Harlem’s “real” culture than they send it scurrying further uptown. The effect is not dissimilar to Helga Crane’s withering comment, in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), that “‘everybody, almost, some time sooner or later comes to Harlem.’”27 In Hoefer’s account, genuine Harlem shrinks into geographic Harlem; yet in its withdrawal it also seems to regroup, establishing new lines of defence around an inner core, barricaded from without, to which it gives the potent name of Bessie Smith. Some similar effects occur in Rudolph Fisher’s “The Caucasian Storms Harlem.” This American Mercury essay of 1927, at once a reflection on Harlem’s citywide appeal and a lament for the earlier social scene that this new popularity has replaced, adopts an interesting attitude toward those it blames for the district’s supposed downfall. Fisher’s essay, as it unfolds, in fact pulls away from the trope of invasion invoked in his title, instead bringing a sort of gentle mockery, if not sympathy, to its portrayal of those white New Yorkers who keep voyaging uptown yet who will never land back in the days, “just after the war,” when “cabarets were the thing.” Indeed, as Fisher waxes nostalgic about these golden days—as he reminisces about running with the “swellest Harlem set,” about frolicking in the Lybia, and about witnessing the early performances of Ethel Waters in “a Chinese restaurant in 136th street”—so these new white tourists come to seem a little tragic, the seekers of yesterday’s news, lost souls doomed forever to wander Harlem looking for Harlem.28 Yet the friendly mockery of these white invaders that is a feature of Fisher’s essay eventually extends into the past they cannot reach. Once Fisher remembers that, before the vogue hit town, Harlem already played host

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to occasional white groups “who would huddle and grin and think they were having a wild time,” his sarcasm suggests that even in this vanguard most could not quite reach out to touch the destination they had found. Such pioneering white visitors, in Fisher’s account, seem too insulated by their own voyeurism, too distracted by their own antic “Slumming,” to absorb the revolutionary music they found.29 Their predicament is again to require recourse to a fantasy of disembodied vision. For a thin and invisible screen here envelops them too. They too, it would seem, can only really access the “true” scene they seek by eyeballing it transparently and as if unseen. One effect of these cultural tensions is to present 1910s and 1920s New York as a point of origin for the kind of nocturnal tourism that is such a potent feature of metropolitan leisure today. Becoming audible, amid Fisher and Smith’s portrayals of this still transgressive scene, are the first sounds of the kinds of competitive connoisseurship now so prevalent in cultures of pop music consumption. Indeed, to judge from “The Caucasian Storms Harlem” and Music on My Mind, LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” and other twenty-first-century lampoons of music buffs would have found as many targets in the interwar era as they do today. They suggest that some in Carl Van Vechten’s entourage, for example, were also likely to brag of having “everything before anyone” and of being “there,” without fail, at all of the interwar equivalents of “the beach in Ibiza in 1988” or “the great sound clashes” of 1970s Jamaica.30 The artful sliding from moments of intimate dyadic address to gentle interracial mockery that is a common characteristic of Fisher and Smith’s writings in fact suggests that plenty of New Yorkers back then agreed with a variation on one of Groucho Marx’s better-known bromides. They too knew that the best club of all is the one that will not let you in.31 Of all The Great Gatsby’s sudden bigotries, perhaps the ugliest takes place straight after Nick Carraway has rhapsodized upon the ever fresh beauty of the skyline as seen from the Queensboro Bridge. Looking away from this reborn Manhattan, Nick spots a limousine, “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl.” Upon seeing them he laughs aloud before, implausibly, insisting that “the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us,” and in “haughty rivalry” rather than because of his own intimidating laughter. To no one in particular he then aims a blast of hyperbole so cool and patriotic Dean Moriarty could have said it: “‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge.’”32 By such platitudes The Great Gatsby tries to recover its cool and in a sense to draw a veil across the racism by which it has just sabotaged its own smooth surface. And still, amidst the studied cosmopolitanism, the imbecilic cliché of the Negroid eyeball persists like a bad headache. We know that Nick knows that such chauffeurs lie beyond the means of the vast majority of black New Yorkers; we know, too, that the novel knows that (compared, say, to Wild Palms) it has had relatively little to say about all the other unsung men and women who keep the world running for the people who run the world. The joke is on Nick. Not least because it shows him glowering at them, The Great Gatsby intimates that his reaction to this “uppity” spectacle in fact indicates the opposite of what he intends. All he is saying, when you get down to it, is that white New Yorkers stare at rich blacks too. Nick, here, is not so different from Huck Finn’s dad—is not so different from some Jim Crow thug

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expressing horror at the thought of Bessie Smith pulling up, feather boa and all, on the main street of his Mississippian hometown. The peculiar accomplishment of The Great Gatsby is to pass such abuse off as if it were the last word in bohemian cool. Carraway’s kneejerk apprehension of “rivalry” in fact presents us with a category error of some kind. Immediately preceded by the memorable sight of an “immigrant funeral,” as Mick Gidley has noted, the unexpected chauffeur and his unexpected passengers further cast Carraway and Gatsby as “‘Nordic’” outsiders who do not quite belong in Manhattan’s “beautiful but mysterious” island. But Gidley also points out that such a fear of topsy-turvyism is “patently absurd.”33 No material changes to the city, however subtle or misunderstood, could justify it. Black US political organizations at the time wielded only fragile influence over white opinion and power; even Marcus Garvey hoped to leave, rather than overtake, the American state. Perhaps, in the face of The Great Gatsby’s lapse into racial hysteria, the natural thing to do is turn back to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1996), and identify in these chauffeured New Yorkers Fitzgerald’s version of the Africanist figures who for Morrison amount to a “fabricated presence” that retains a “seductive, elusive, and theatrical” hold over American literature.34 But perhaps it is just as worthwhile, as we continue to digest The Great Gatsby, to place Carraway’s alternately gushing and grubby New York associations alongside the nightlife visions of “The Caucasian Storms Harlem” and Music on My Mind. Returning to Fisher and Hoefer certainly helps to clarify that The Great Gatsby’s eyeballing caricatures are not just racist contrivances, but a specific kind of “fabricated presence” in which Fitzgerald has effectively misrepresented as a rise to command the exhilarating cultural upheavals then gripping Manhattan’s streets. Sundry awkward truths were certainly beginning to confront rich New Yorkers. Cultural talent in the city, it was becoming hard to ignore, did not always follow the flow of money; plenty of geniuses lived uptown. Innovations in jazz alone thus tended to mean that, in 1920s New York, the existential upheavals upsetting cultural elites throughout Europe and the United States involved a particular crisis of Eurocentric assumption—and on this second crisis Fitzgerald, so eloquent about the Lost Generation, said little.35 One difficulty with Playing in the Dark is that, as she suggests that Africanist images “complicate” canonical US literature, allowing it to “register . . . what it cannot bring itself to articulate,” Morrison almost starts to sound as if she is flattering racism, treating it, or at least the literary face it wears, as evidence of an intelligent, if warped, sensibility. As Playing in the Dark progresses, the inhuman black figures of Edgar Allen Poe or Ernest Hemingway in fact come to seem so rich and complex as to lose almost all ideological connection with those other forms of racism, at once less sophisticated and more destructive, occurring in the schools, streets and offices of society itself.36 Literary critics ought perhaps to exercise greater caution in this matter. Always heeding the immediate political context, we ought perhaps to force ourselves to become a little wary of Playing in the Dark, or at least of its recurring intimations to the effect that racial ambivalence enables novels to “strategize omissions,” to create “paradox” and “ambiguity,” and even to develop a “richer, more complex life.”37 Not least because such a brilliant writer raises them, these rather risky, rather positive, possibilities certainly tend to discourage us from recognizing Carraway’s eyeballing

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vision for what it is. They at once veil and flatter the fact that this is just the usual myth of uppitiness, a cliché, mailordered from Jim Crow, that Fitzgerald has for some strange reason dumped into his grand Manhattan vision. Putting Playing in the Dark to one side, on these grounds, seems far from unreasonable. Rather than asking what these caricatures hide, or searching them for some buried emotional truth, it would seem better to ask of them a set of altogether simpler questions. Why, it seems better to ask, does Fitzgerald let these crude cartoon images intrude? Why does The Great Gatsby, a byword for literary urbanity, make space for such crass stupidity? Why let hate spoil the show? In this context it is interesting to note the almost anthropomorphic affinity that Fitzgerald’s verb choices here build up between the car that carries Carraway over the bridge and the eyes of the black passengers who he notices along the way. At a single stroke, as the latter “roll” toward Carraway while his car “slid” on toward Manhattan, these choices evoke the soft modernity, the world of smooth mechanisms and glossy surfaces, that culminates in Gatsby’s sparkling mansion; imply that black New Yorkers are just another ornament in this superficial realm; yet also raise the possibility that they stand aloof from it, unswayed, being neither “enchanted” nor “repelled” by New York’s “inexhaustible variety of life.”38 Some very simple touches as such paint an intriguing picture. You might even say that, for all their apparent wealth, these black passengers now stand over Manhattan’s skyline like servants over some grand banquet. They might watch their superiors gaze on the fantastic prospect, and they might even admire it themselves. But they seem too aware of the work it represents, too conscious of the processes that have evaporated into it, for it to overwhelm them. The city, ultimately, presents a feast for other eyes; these figures seem immune to its tantalizing power. Admittedly, the consideration of such possibilities can seem to lure us back into the territory of Playing in the Dark, granting to these escorted passengers the uncanny insightfulness of “Africanist figures” after all. Yet the distinction remains crucial. No submerged profundity or metaphysical innuendo shadows these black figures. Instead, just as The Great Gatsby continues to “satirize” and “steal” notions of Nordic mastery from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), so, here, it also borrows from Jim Crow, producing little more than an urban replicate of the tedious stereotype of the itinerant black southerner who has strayed into the wrong part of town and who has the temerity to look rich.39 Much as yet we must not simply recoil from such clichés—and not least because it is precisely in their inhuman and mechanical appearance that these black figures most resemble The Great Gatsby’s panoptic overseer Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Pelleted, rolling like pinballs toward the observing Carraway, their eyes certainly seem as hard and metallic as those that loom out of Eckleburg’s cutout visage. Together gazing out on the “solemn dumping ground” of waste and water that encircles the sublime prospect of Manhattan, these more or less inhuman figures all seem defined, over the course of The Great Gatsby, by their talent for watching other New Yorkers watch New York.40 To some extent this just confirms the obvious: that the topsy-turvy prospect that unsettled Carraway on his way into Manhattan is indeed spatial, as opposed to

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political, in origin. Hoefer and Fisher’s more or less contemporary accounts of Harlem’s growing magnetism, if brought alongside The Great Gatsby’s black caricatures, begin to apprehend that the city’s creative energy has fled its old haunts and relocated elsewhere. There is even a suggestion here that, if only culturally, New York’s rich are now becoming themselves embattled, enclaved inside a mixophobic fortification that has itself become a kind of ghetto insofar as it has been sealed off from New York’s new cultural heartlands. Even in the midst of chronic economic injustice, The Great Gatsby’s fleeting glimpses of black New Yorkers seem somehow to cede to them the city. All manner of nocturnal odysseys, all manner of mock epic voyages into the city’s wild side, would seem to lie ahead. Henceforth, it would seem, the challenge will be to find the real thing: the hippest, most happening dance scene that will enthral all “true” connoisseurs right up until they walk into it.

On the Edge The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) But I’m down by law, And I know my way around. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “New York, New York” (1984) This new urban exotic held little interest for Toni Cade Bambara. A New Yorker born and bred, Bambara belonged to a group of black US writers who came of age amidst the Civil Rights struggle, and who were determined to use any freedom they could get to stop worrying so much about white preconceptions, and to channel their energies, instead, into nurturing their more immediate constituencies. In fact the chance to attract a big African-American audience often appeared to them a historic opportunity to consign to the past the old obligations to white readers that had so often constrained their literary forebears. Now they could focus on building what Bambara called “home base,” literary “sanctuaries . . . where black people can stand upright, exhale, and figure out what to do about the latest attack.”41 The fact that Bambara never simply idealized this “home” culture, always turning a sharp eye to any episodes of hypocrisy or egotism occurring within it, if anything made her all the more determined to address it before she did any other audience. Yet Bambara’s prioritization of her own community never escalated into the exclusion of other readers. Whereas negritude among the other revolutionary concepts

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that they borrowed from the anticolonial movement led some of Bambara’s male contemporaries to disdain a white US audience, such provocations often turned out to be just that, provocations, expressions of outrage that on some level continued to address the readers they spurned. Bambara followed a different route. If always willing to speak truth to power, doing so was never the principal goal of her work. Instead, in novels from The Salt Eaters (1980) to the posthumous Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), she sought a new vocabulary: the words people reached for, not only when reacting to the intrusions of racial power, but also in those other moments, precious but precarious, in which they could forget it. By “sanctuaries,” then, Bambara perhaps meant another kind of achievable utopia: an autonomous space so far removed from white authority, so far removed from politics itself, that she could fill it with the seemingly natural and unaffected talk and acts of people rarely before seen in books. What Richard Wright called “our naïve, casual, verbal, fluid folk life” subsequently fills this very different kind of fiction.42 Youthful conversations, gossip sessions Wright might have thought trivial, even girlish, in Bambara duly evoked a new urban viewpoint and a new class consciousness that broke new ground in the US tradition. Anything but inconsequential, the trading of secrets, the hopes and fears of teenage love, and the heated debates about the best teachers and boys and even libraries all instead revealed the life of a community, creating bonds between her characters that could seem, in turn, to exceed the page to forge further bonds with individual readers nationwide. These makeshift sanctuaries invite us to think again about double consciousness. Du Bois’s famous concept, of course, dominated black US intellectual thought throughout the century he defined in terms of “the problem of the color line,” and responses to it during this period were both numerous and mixed.43 Apparent in many of these responses to double consciousness, however, was an understandable tendency to echo, and in a sense amplify, the negations in which The Souls of Black Folk had originally draped it. The Souls of Black Folk’s troubled mood, its baleful anticipation of the Red Summer of 1919 and other white supremacist atrocities, led many, understandably, to accept Du Bois’s apparent intimation that double consciousness was an epic tragedy for which there could be no possible compensation. But Bambara’s stories, interestingly, modify this view. Their focus not only on “home base” but also on the connections between these makeshift sanctuaries and a busy world of public activity draw attention, in particular, to the fact that, despite his all too legitimate despondency, Du Bois’s original vision also reflects new patterns of movement in postbellum US life. Her stories help us to see that de facto as well as de jure segregation, according to the vision of The Souls of Black Folk, not only thwarted and suppressed human potential. It also, in a curious sense, helped create it. Bambara, like her friend and publishing mentor Toni Morrison, grasps that as well as being a state of subjugation double consciousness also amounts to a form of synoptic awareness. It grants to those who endure it new insights, new knowledge, unavailable to those they serve. This is not to deny that, when The Souls of Black Folk first introduces double consciousness to us, it is in terms of psychological devastation. In Du Bois’s original vision all manner of troubles, unnamed, insidious, violent, do beset “the Negro”; The Souls of Black Folk neither overlooks nor lessens the harm race does. But Du Bois does

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also offer an important complication. Oppression here oppresses; but in its operations it also gives to the “Negro” the “gift” of “second-sight in this American world.” Destined to become something of a watchword for the Harlem Renaissance, gift’s appearance in this earlier context can seem odd, and its positive connotations do tend to disappear in the gloom that soon engulfs it. But not completely. Higher knowledge survives in private, in a part of the mind that Du Bois’s black folk must hide from view even as they enter a public stage in which they must act as if they were meek, incurious, and dull. Accordingly the battle raging inside their minds is not between two inimical varieties of consciousness but against their possible mixture into a new and infuriating madness. Racism here creates knowledge it must at once deny and eliminate from view, and the challenge before Du Bois’s black folk is to preserve their rational insights—to keep them safe, for the sake of their own sanity, by preventing their masks from melting into their skin. Bambara’s stories at once enlarge upon and make visible the spatial circumstances on which this psychological drama unfolds. Her sometime sanctuaries are spaces in which the penetrating inner consciousness first conceptualized in The Souls of Black Folk begins to step into the light. Her characters, finding a common black audience, here make “second-sight” articulate, publishable, and as they do so they reveal, increasingly, the extent to which it rests on their spatial if not their social mobility. No longer just the result of witnessing racial injustice, nor even of white hypocrisy, their penetrating consciousness now also seems connected to the fact that they, unlike those who command them, go all around society. To put it another way, as her characters commute back and forth, shuttling from white spaces to sometime sanctuaries only they know, it becomes evident that Bambara is expanding on an interconnection of black mobility and knowledge already present in The Souls of Black Folk itself. Everyday journeys—the unremarked commuting required of African Americans whom modern systems of racial segregation oblige to work in one community but live in another—thus come to seem a prerequisite of double consciousness both as Du Bois theorizes it and as Bambara narrates it. “Secondsight,” for both, sprouts from the secrets and lies you find out as soon as you stop seeing society in fragments and get to look at it overall. The difference is that a dynamic The Souls of Black Folk identifies in the segregated and “decidedly too small” towns of the Jim Crow South unfolds, in Bambara’s work, across the kaleidoscope of New York itself:44 So we heading down the street and she’s boring us silly about what things costs and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain’t divided up right in this country. And then she gets to the part about we all poor and live in the slums, which I don’t feature. And I’m ready to speak on that, but she steps out in the street and hails two cabs just like that. Then she hustles half the crew in with her and hands me a five-dollar bill and tells me to calculate 10 percent tip for the driver. And we’re off. Me and Sugar and Junebug and Flyboy hangin out the window and hollering to everybody, putting lipstick on each other cause Flyboy a faggot anyway, and making farts with our sweaty armpits. . . . Then we check out

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that we on Fifth Avenue and everybody dressed up in stockings. One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White folks crazy. “This is the place,” Miss Moore say, presenting it to us in the voice she uses at the museum. “Let’s look in the windows before we go in.”45

Here, then, I am suggesting that “The Lesson” among the other short stories that Bambara published in the early 1970s bring about a quiet revolution. With little fanfare they establish the autonomy of Harlem, no longer defending or explaining it to outsiders, but presenting it to its own implied readers as well as those of other black US communities. This revolution takes for itself new tools. Not quite rhetorical, it does not consist in prophecy, denunciation, or the demand for a better tomorrow. Instead it happens in front of us, the story parading before our eyes a series of utterances that declare their independence via the gathering together of an ostensible transcription. By being funny, by adjusting only a handful of her spellings rather than the majority of them, and by limiting herself to a single abbreviated gerund, Bambara here not only succeeds in depicting the speech of Harlem but does so without fetishizing it. This discreet approach to speakerly effects—the fact that her characters talk like people in Harlem yet do not seem defined by this function—in itself resists their lingering marginalization. Ensuring they are “streetwise, sensitive and complex,” as Farah Jasmine Griffin has put it, such subtlety also grants to them a new centrality from which they can gaze on the people of Fifth Avenue and name them the strange incomprehensible tribe.46 The narrator of “The Lesson,” Sylvia, duly appears a figure in whom Duboisian “second-sight” becomes articulate. Her name alone, in recalling its most famous restaurant, plants her deep in Harlem. But it seems striking that, even after the story has carried her far from her uptown home, this young girl continues to seem anything but overwhelmed or uncertain of her new surrounds. Plunged onto Fifth Avenue—a road Arnold Bennett once described as “the principal shopping street of the richest community in the world,” a place that soon “intoxicated” him with “the large whiteness of the stores, and the invitation of the signs, and the display of the windows, and the swift sinuousness of the other cars”— Sylvia knows exactly what to do. Far from being cowed by the scene, she seems an outsider with inside information, aware of its secrets and inconstancies, of the falsity of its claims.47 Indeed, Sylvia’s constant comparisons of here to there again indicate that the spatial divisions from which Du Boisian double consciousness first arose are now persisting even among the open tolerances of New York. People here are perhaps too citified to be called black folk, but they continue to live in one community yet work in another. In the process “The Lesson” also makes apparent that, in contrast to its origins in the “decidedly too small” towns of Du Bois’s south, this persisting bisection of social life now requires far greater infrastructural support. Affordable subway trains, accessible public housing and schools now seem essential to support the de facto situating of a ghettoized labor pool just out of sight but just within reach of the world it serves.

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Placed upon a modern urban stage, these new formations of double consciousness also foster new forms of cruel optimism. Now Sylvia can visit the outside world, explore downtown Manhattan, and even believe that the city is there, ready and willing to welcome into it all her smart, signifying, energies. But other stories in Gorilla, My Love leave us in no doubt that such hopefulness might soon evaporate into what Lauren Berlant calls an “atmosphere of belatedness and outrage at not mattering.”48 As fragile as it is charming, Sylvie’s voice, throughout this story, always remains caught in a shadow of anticipated and properly painful nostalgia. Often in her work Bambara seeks to draw attention to processes evaporated in the spectacle of pure or covetable surfaces. Lives and labors hidden from view are among her chief concerns. Repeatedly, throughout The Sea Birds are Still Alive (1984), mundane tantalizing objects are exposed as are new and gleaming architectural feats. For a second Bambara’s narrative stands back to admire her community’s new home, the Lawndale project, the wintry scene leading her to compare it to “a snow-scene paperweight some kid’s been shaking.”49 But it is characteristic that Bambara should soon delve into the living conditions that lie behind this smooth and alienated image of alienated beauty. Resentments follow. “Quite naturally,” our narrator points out, “the designers of Lawndale have not installed a bathroom on the ground floor,” and nor did they have “kids in mind when they put the place together.” New configurations of ghetto space here come to seem, for their mysterious (white) architects, another kind of plaything, all image and no substance, its actual occupation by actual tenants outside the scope of their professionalized imaginations. They “didn’t have people in mind from the jump,” our narrator surmises. She then brings her account of the housing project’s toy-like properties to a close by noting that, ironically enough, “there is no play area for the sixty families averaging three kids apiece.”50 The question of who gets to play, and with what or with whom, often becomes crucial in Bambara’s writing, leading her to expose the hidden lives and realities of all exploited for the pleasure of those in command. In “The Lesson” this focus undergoes a small but significant shift. While The Sea Birds are Still Alive and other narratives concentrate on exposing processes hidden behind clean or tantalizing surfaces, this short story instead lingers on the surface itself, enquiring into its emotional effects. As a result a writer committed to the representation of black US cultural experience begins to harness the “second sight” arising from her spatial mobility. As a result she begins, as I want now to argue, to offer a wider critique: of how US toy design, in the late 1960s, had already come to sacrifice tactile play in its pursuit of new but untouchable surfaces.

The ornamental toy Rounded disks, commonly made from potsherds and pierced with two small holes, have been referred to as “buttons” in most archaeological reports, although their function remain a mystery. These perforated disks were actually simple toys that appeared by the beginning of the second millennium B.C. if not earlier, in Israel

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and the Indus Valley. Their use is attested sporadically to the present among the northwest coast Indians, the Japanese, the Koreans, Indians and Pakistanis, Israelis, and both North and South Americans. They may prove to be a universal toy through time and space. Gus W. Van Beek, “The Buzz: A Simple Toy from Antiquity” (1989) Different experiences of tantalization play a crucial role in childhood development. They are essential not just to our emergence into life but also to our understanding of the relationship between our body and the world around it. Nor, despite tantalize’s etymological roots in Tartarus, are such formative experiences necessarily torturous. As often they are a source of pleasure. Reaching out for untouched snow and spoiling its pristine surface more often makes children smile than it leaves them disappointed. Elsewhere the very enticements of tantalization rest on the possibility that it might be surmounted or otherwise overcome. Teetering towers of stacking bricks might remain standing if a child learns to be careful enough; disturbed sand can be interestingly swept back to the smoothness it acquired from the outgoing tide. As D. M. Winnicott, in his famous investigations into play and childhood development, noted: Patterns set in infancy may persist into childhood, so that the original soft object continues to be absolutely necessary at bedtime or at time of loneliness or when a depressed mood threatens. In health, however, there is a gradual extension of range of interest. . . . [The fate of the transitional object] is to be gradually allowed to be decathected, so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. By this I mean that in health the transitional object does not ‘go inside’ nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over  .  .  .  the whole cultural field. .  .  . At this point my subject widens out into that of play, and of artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, and of dreaming, and also of fetishism, lying and stealing, the origin and loss of affectionate feeling, drug addiction, the talisman of obsessional rituals, etc.51

Learning to outwit tantalization by cultivating greater tactile control might in fact seem in its own way as important to childhood development as the phenomenon of the transitional object itself. Parents and teachers sometimes instinctively and sometimes deliberately encourage young children to distinguish patting from smacking, poking from pointing, and otherwise to recalibrate the ways in which the latter touch the things around them. Ordinarily, at some point in this long and arduous process, they will also offer up for their child a butterfly or flower or some other all-too-breakable object. Now this becomes a test of tactile control, and should he fall short of it the child’s punishment, appallingly, will be to witness the consequences of his failure to control his own power to kill or destroy the object that has allured him. Playthings have long provided children with an invaluable resource on which to prepare themselves for these profound and testing negotiations. Just as older boys and girls around the world have long built in order to play with the buzz toys that Gus Van Beek describes, so all sorts of traditional toys have helped infants and young children learn how to navigate and even

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outwit the potential tantalizations that lie all around. Adjustable dolls, modeling clay, hand puppets, sandpits, drums, and a host of other traditional toys have all long proved invaluable in enabling children to enter into a tactile compact, or perhaps I should say truce, with the world at large. These considerations resurface to interesting effect as “The Lesson” edges closer to the message announced in its name. As Miss Moore’s class break through the forcefield that seemed to shield the famous toyshop from the Avenue itself, they step into its main hall. Soon they are confronted by one of the emporium’s most resplendent objects. “Will you look at this sailboat, please,” say Flyboy, cuttin her off and pointin to the thing like it was his. So once again we tumble all over each other to gaze at this magnificent thing in the toy store which is just big enough to maybe sail two kittens across the pond if you strap them to the posts tight. We all start reciting the price tag like we in assembly. “Handcrafted sailboat of fibreglass at one thousand one hundred ninety-five dollars.” “Unbelievable,” I hear myself say. . . “Who’d pay all that when you can buy a sailboat set for a quarter at Pop’s, a tube of glue for a dime, and a ball of string for eight cents? “It must have a motor and a whole lot else besides,” I say. “My sailboat cost me about fifty cents.” “But will it take water?” say Mercedes with her smart ass. “Took mine to Alley Pond Park once,” say Flyboy. “String broke. Lost it. Pity.” “Sailed mine in Central Park and it keeled over and sank. Had to ask my father for another dollar.” “And you got the strap,” laughed Big Butt. “The jerk didn’t even have a string on it. My old man wailed on his behind.” Little Q.T. was staring hard at the sailboat and you could see he wanted it bad. But too little and somebody’d just take it from him. So what the hell. “That boat for kids, Miss Moore?” “Parents silly to buy something like that just to get all broke up,” say Rosie Giraffe. “That much money it should last forever,” I figure.52

In a handful of sentences Bambara suggests that US cultures of conspicuous consumption have now grown so “crazy” that they fail to provide children with such crucial, traditional toys. “The Lesson,” in other words, turns out to be aimed not at the children who populate the story but for us who read it. The former, to be sure, are a little impressed by Mrs. Moore; but they already know all about the power structures she would expose to them. Their street talk provides the less familiar and more illuminating caveat: that conspicuous consumption—the way rich people try to verify their superiority by acquiring superior things—has now carried traditional toys so far from their proper function that they have come to enact a cruel optimism of their own. Toys here, after all, continue to look like toys and are still identified as such even as those in the know (like Bambara’s children) have come to see that they are actually

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ornaments instead. They dazzle on shelves, they insist on their collectability, yet once out of the box they just sit there, implacable and sadistic, awaiting only their looming destruction. There is no test here, no scope for rehearsing life itself; even the smallest of fingers can only break them. Reneging on their promise of help, these bullying toys only thwart what Winicott would have called “healthy” childhood development. In a sense Bambara’s school friends come to pity overprivileged children insofar as they recognize that the latter are first to fall victim to these cruel and oxymoronic playthings. Literary accounts would seem to suggest that this is a recent development. Even little Flora, the aristocratic girl of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898), can at one point eye “a small flat piece of wood” and consider how she might contrive for it “a mast and make the thing a boat.”53 Simple toys described by Stephen Crane, as Bill Brown suggests, likewise retain a “quiddity” and a “fantastic fungibility” that consumes the child’s imagination in an undistracted session of creative play.54 Sylvia and her friends grasp that the rise of commodity culture now imperils such imaginative playthings. In a flash they recognize that, like the fur coat that the rich heiress wears even on a sticky “swim day” in New York, the boat on display at FAO Schwarz heralds the rise of a new kind of commodity object: one which not only exceeds its function but also contradicts it. No child, after all, could do anything but look at this aspirational object. Certainly, after receiving it, they would struggle to look after it, to preserve its gleaming untouched surface. Still less would they be motivated to create boats for themselves. Anything would look shoddy in the light of its inhuman factory glow. The boat, in other words, heralds in the story the advent of what we might think of as the postergonomic toy. No longer is it meant to be played with, manipulated, transformed by the child’s potent and utterly performative way of playing. No longer is it even intended to receive the touch of young fingers. Instead it just becomes an object of scopophilia that one can, nonetheless, soil through touch. Childish touch threatens the integrity of this object far more than it promises transformation. The problem with these toys is not that, by being unplayable, they infantilize the subject or force her to regress into a state of infancy or babyhood before play. On the contrary, they harness the development of boundaries that is a crucial element in such play, and they overstimulate or exaggerate it to the point where the boundary between the subject and object becomes total and something pure one might violate rather than something negotiable one might use and abuse. In so doing they trap the subject inside her own ego, leaving her able only to communicate with the world by means of violation or vandalism. In his work, like that of a number of other sociologists and humanities scholars, Zygmunt Bauman sometimes suggests that “consumers in a consumer society” fall prone to a kind of inflated or rampant egotism in which, “groomed to enjoy things” and seek “instant satisfaction,” they seem to approach the world as if it were made for the sole purpose of giving them pleasure.55 This critique dovetails well with Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva’s respective notions of pollution taboo and abjection insofar as the latter, too, rest on an understanding that our own bodies might seem to us “clean and proper,” protected entities, central, if under threat of external pollution.56 To read Bambara in tandem with Winnicott is to develop an essential complication of these familiar insights. For, in combination, they help us see that, even as they persist as

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ideals, these leading myths of bodily purity often get put into reverse, and nowhere more than when commodity culture positions us as the agents of the fetishized object’s fall from grace. Even in resplendent emporia offered up as if to us alone abjection soon emanates from within. Bambara’s tantalizing sail boat thus inaugurates a countervailing experience in which every object around us can seem so pure, so untouched, that we ourselves visit desecration upon them. Now we become abject, and our anti-Midas pollution only intensifies as our wealth grows, only strengthens in step with the recurring regeneration of our well-made world. The poignancy of “The Lesson” lies in the fact that Sylvia’s initial optimism, if always anticipating struggle, never seems wholly misplaced. She is right to realize that at least in Harlem, for all its poverty and crime, children sometimes still get to play.

Lorain iconoclast “The idea is to open each bucket and put in ten drops of this stuff,” he said. “Then you stir it ’til it disappears . . . You understand? . . . “Look,” he said, drawing in his breath with an exaggerated show of patience. “Take the dropper and fill it full. . . Go on, do it!” I filled it. . . . “How’s it coming?” he said . . . “All right, sir.” “Let’s see,” he said, selecting a sample and running his thumb across the board. “That’s it, as white as George Washington’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ wig and as sound as the all-mighty dollar! That’s paint!” he said proudly. “That’s paint that’ll cover just about anything! . . . “White! It’s the purest white that can be found. Nobody makes a paint any whiter. This batch right here is heading for a national monument!” “I see,” I said, quite impressed.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

As for the plain rectangular dinner table, it was just a table as it ought to be, taken down from the size it once was, covered for everyday with oil cloth that Nellie had wiped off before she left so that the smell of its dampness still hung in the air along with the scent of glasses scalded and dried, and ranged still warm before the mirror of the sideboard. In the clean still kitchen, the negroid odor of Nellie was spread as evenly as soft butter on a slice of bread. Nellie had scrubbed; the floor was damp and long blond streaks marked the dark boards here and there, where more splinters had given up to the mop. The acrid smell of lye was somewhere about and near the stove was the scent of new wood ashes settling drily down into the old crud of the ashen box. Dan Armstrong went softly.

Elizabeth Spencer, Fire in the Morning (1948)

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Control slips and falters throughout The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison’s first novel in fact occupies an unusual position within her oeuvre; even the strident punning of its name, with its plea that we accept Pecola Breedlove as the bluest “I” of all, contrasts with the economy apparent in all of Morrison’s later titles. The narrative itself, with its periodic lapses into didacticism, likewise struggles to reach the levels of control over “different modes” or to offer the kind of “complex pleasure[s]” that Balshaw and others have found in Jazz (1992) among Morrison’s other mature works.57 Unlike Jazz, the rich vernacular voice of which constantly chronicles the ills of the community as if from within, The Bluest Eye can feel a little intrusive, even voyeuristic; unlike in Sula (1973), Morrison here leaves little unsaid. And yet it is also true that writers of Morrison’s great skill can sometimes grow a little cunning in their symbolism, a little calculating in their intertextual effects. So-called artistic failure can illuminate too. The very inconsistencies of The Bluest Eye arguably reveal critical tensions and contradictions that a more “controlled” or “consummate” narrative would have kept hidden from view. Not just betokening a regrettable failure of technique, the didacticism that intermittently engulfs Morrison’s first novel should also be understood as evidence of its fascinating incapacity to fully dramatize outrage. The Bluest Eye’s resort to intrusive omniscience, not to mention its bursts of sociological critique, confirm that this text is less an end-product than it is a battleground for Morrison’s continuing struggle, in her own words, to “transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black America into a language worthy of the culture.”58 Much of interest certainly lies in the novel’s own reluctance to connect in full its portrayal of the grim aftermaths of racial brutality and its insistence on the need to destroy the concepts of “romantic love” and “physical beauty” outright. The cause and effect of such iconoclasm can seem, somehow, misaligned. What does beauty have to do with the inhuman injustices of Jim Crow? Why should “love” in particular seem implicated in such hateful segregation, and to the point where the novel denounces it as one of “the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought”?59 Insofar as the novel seems too quick to call for beauty’s abolition outright, however, the misalignment provokes great interest. In the early years of her career Morrison was sometimes linked with the various cultural interventions and political activities now often gathered under the catchall name of the Black is Beautiful movement. Indeed, as an event that captured national attention, the publication of Sula in 1973 in its own way crystallized the cause of black feminist empowerment almost as clearly as the trial and eventual acquittal of Angela Y. Davis in the wake of Judge Harold Haley’s murder. In some critical circles, too, at least until Beloved (1987) revolutionized her career anew, Morrison was often thought of first and foremost as a member of the black US feminist literary collective gathered together in Mari Evans’s Black Women Writers (1984) among other influential anthologies. Many of the principal works of the other writers who appeared in these anthologies are rich and fascinating, and some now seem under-read while others are too quickly reduced to their didactic affirmations of black beauty among other important contemporary causes. Nonetheless, and much as she negotiated special terms for her appearance in Black Women Writers, Morrison work has always stood at something of a remove from broader movements within this rich tradition.60 In

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particular her oeuvre seems throughout reluctant to affirm physical beauty to polemical ends. Her novels often linger on sexual pleasure and the erotic power of individual men. Whenever they grant physical beauty to one of their female characters, however, some sort of menace, if not violence itself, soon ensues. Morrison’s persistently anxious and ambivalent treatment of physical beauty distinguishes her work from that of her immediate peers. Our picture of the doubts and misgivings that distinguish Morrison from her peers grows a little clearer if we reflect on the influence of Zora Neale Hurston. For many of Morrison’s contemporaries, and not least for Alice Walker, the rediscovery of Hurston as an inspirational artist went hand-in-hand with an affirmation of beauty: of her own beauty, of that of her female protagonists, and hence of that, potentially, of all black women. The effortless allure of Janie Starks, the protagonist of Hurston’s masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), might place her at the mercy of town gossips and predatory men, but it also remains a kind of grace, an insistent physical charm and presence, that feeds her appeal as an independent hero; and as such it seems to lead directly to some key literary tributes, and above all to Walker’s own characterization of Shug Avery in her The Color Purple (1982). Unlike such an affirmative figure, however, Morrison’s younger female characters, from Jazz’s Dorcas to Tar Baby’s fashion model Jadine, often seem disturbingly implicated in the violence they suffer. Their allure can seem involved in its desecration, a perspective that, if sometimes veering uncomfortably close to the logic of misogyny, also voices profound unease at the construction of feminine beauty in US commodity culture. In her later life, although dogged by poverty and scandal as well as critical neglect, Zora Neale Hurston, as Carla Kaplan has documented, remained surprisingly active as a campaigner and commentator on different aspects of American social life. One of her last causes was Sara Lee Creech’s range of black dolls, the virtues of which Hurston commended, in a series of letters in the early 1950s, to a number of prominent figures in the hope of securing them far wider distribution.61 This campaign, undertaken by Hurston at a time of ill health and emotional crisis, now seems all the more noteworthy given its capacity to anticipate and even perhaps help heal the internalized feelings of inferiority that would be revealed by Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll experiments and their crucial role in the Supreme Court’s Brown versus the Board of Education hearing of 1954. Hurston, in her letters in support of Creech, can indeed be seen not only to have pre-empted the Clarks’ conclusions but also to have laid the first foundations of a future consensus against the unusual and cruel invisibility propagated by the unvarying whiteness of existing US dolls. The Bluest Eye does not quite depart from this new consensus, and nor does it quite object to the idea that American dolls should resemble all of the American children who play with them. But it does long to destroy them all: it does want to register the harm, even beyond race, that all such playthings do. The reasons for this are set out in the course of Claudia’s famous attack on the “big, blue-eyed Baby Doll” that was a “loving gift” she had received, when still very young, one Christmas. Claudia recalls: I was bemused with the thing itself, and the way it looked. What was I supposed to do with it? Pretend I was its mother? . . . Picture books were full of little girls

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sleeping with their dolls. . . . [But] when I took it to bed, its hard unyielding limbs resisted my flesh . . . If, in sleep, I turned, the bone-cold head collided with my own. It was a most uncomfortable, patently aggressive sleeping companion. To hold it was no more rewarding. The starched gauze or lace on the cotton dress irritated any embrace. I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me . . . I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable. Break off the tiny fingers, bend the flat feet, loosen the hair, twist the head around, and the thing made one sound—a sound they said was the sweet and plaintive cry “Mama,” but which sounded to me like the bleat of a dying lamb or, more precisely, our icebox door opening rusty hinges in July. Remove the cold and stupid eyeball, it would bleat still . . . The gauze back would split, and I could see the disk with six holes, the secrets of the sound. A mere metal roundness.62

Not just the episode but also Claudia’s reflections on it invite a number of theoretical possibilities. The mature and reflective knowledge she brings to this memory, for example, creates a powerful resonance with a moment from Minima Moralia (1951) in which Theodor Adorno talks of the “serendipitously sublimated rage” that can take hold of children as they summon “incalculable energies” to bring about “the destruction of intractable objects,” refusing to “be swayed until the squeaking voice was torn from the mishandled toy.”63 The difference is that Claudia’s increasingly synoptic understanding of society leads her to politicize her dismembering of the doll and attribute it to the insidious emotional residue of racial injustice. The resulting politicization creates some subtle echoes of Invisible Man’s famous paint factory episode. Claudia here, too, seems to see in at the labors hidden behind the smooth white surface of this wondrous object. She too recognizes processes evaporated in its production. A sense of ethical, urgent disillusionment pervades the episode. Claudia slows down and intensifies the process of tantalization, examining the object’s collapse as if frame by frame. She dissects the object itself, revealing that the seamless plastic figurine, too, issues from human activities its design effaces. Pervading her critique is her knowledge of what, as a child encountering a Christmas toy, she is supposed to feel. But she also understands that this object is a commodity before it is a plaything, and that, like all other commodities, it thus enshrouds in legend the reality of its own hollow centre, offering up to her a core for which she should yearn even as it vaporizes from her touch. Claudia sees through this myth as well as through the sequence of tantalization that she has here set in train. She understands that the object contains within its structures the ghostly traces of the labor its mythologies displace. She knows that as she destroys the object, deconstructing it grotesquely, she will ultimately end up staring only at the classic symbol of unrecompensed labor activity: her own black hands. But her outrage also leaves room for understanding, even pity. Much as this episode harnesses synoptic consciousness to challenge the vaporization of labor, it also offers a critique of the regimes of aesthetic control that this invisible work has more or less involuntarily supported. No equivocations, let alone jealousy of white privilege, affect Morrison’s critique. If American culture here seems exposed as little more than a sick

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joke, this is because it has not only hidden its exploitation of labor from view but has also directed this exploited work toward the production of inhuman objects that seem liable to frustrate or deride those (un)lucky enough to consume them. Unlike other characters in the novel, Claudia here thus comes close to emulating the reach of the consciousness constantly radiating from the synoptic narrative as a whole, which is to say that she here intuits that her marginalization by this aesthetic disciplinary regime has also allowed her a kind of emotional escape. For it has allowed her to realize that this smooth and hollow doll represents an object of indoctrination far more than a toy. Nobody can really play with it; no one can “manipulate” this “toy” in that productive way by which, as Winnicott suggested, a child as young as Claudia is here might then acquire “a capacity to use fantasy” and “call on inner reality and dream.”64 Its hard and unyielding skin alone reveals that it is not meant to stimulate such creative or productive play. Such hardness, indeed, even reveals that the design of this doll aims not to simulate the appearance of a baby so much as to redefine the latter as an object of chaste worship: as angelic images we might revere, adore, but cannot quite hold. As such it initiates girls into a new aesthetic regime that sacralizes pleasure, teaching them only to look and not to expect to gain any other kind of sensual pleasure. The immediate critique of the passage thus opens up two fronts. It protests the displacement of black labor in a manner akin to Invisible Man’s famous paint factory episode, and it laments the internalization of racial self-loathing that the ensuing commodity then insinuates. But the richness of this racial critique also exists alongside a third and more general set of concerns. For here Morrison also exposes the psychic harm, the heteronormative self-loathing, that arises when beauty is defined in tantalizing terms. These are the grounds of The Bluest Eye’s radical iconoclasm. Morrison’s novel, throughout, remains alert to particular icons or images that have gained currency in national US culture and that beckon all who fall in their orbit in evasive or tantalizing terms. The narrative’s central urge to smash the image of white beauty that Pecola especially carries locked away in her mind is perhaps the most obvious of all these iconoclastic gestures, although Claudia’s dismemberment of the Christmas doll is almost as well-known. Such iconoclasm, however, is scarcely confined to the erotic realm, and in fact becomes the focus of narration more than of polemic when Claudia and Frieda journey to visit Pecola at her mother’s place of work: Right before the entrance to the park was the large white house with the wheelbarrow full of flowers. Short crocus blades sheathed the purple-and-white hearts that so wished to be first they endured the chill and rain of early spring. The walkway was flagged in calculated disorder, hiding the cunning symmetry. Only fear of discovery and the knowledge that we did not belong kept us from loitering. We circled the proud house and went to the back.65

The Bluest Eye here restages Claudia’s opening encounter with the Christmas doll, dispersing the pure white surfaces of its skin all around the “proud” and dazzling lakeside home. These spaces certainly seem a territorial equivalent to Claudia’s doll

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inasmuch as they too cultivate an atmosphere of exclusivity at the expense of offering any opportunity to play. This begins not in the approach to the house itself but as Claudia and Frieda pass the adjacent park on their way to it. Seeming “sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children,” the park has no need for Jim Crow signs to convey to the girls that “Black people were not allowed” to enter it.66 But this de facto ban is no different from its horrendous de jure equivalents: it too, as Elizabeth Abel has noted of the latter, will surely cease to apply as soon as the park closes its gates, its immaculate lawns being maintained by menial workers akin to the department store cleaners whom Wild Palms had hoped to follow into their “subterranean” homes.67 Inconsistent, full of temporal volte faces, the affluent white neighborhood’s peculiar spatial effacement of the black laborers who nonetheless work in every corner of it is confirmed as the girls meet Pecola and her mother Pauline Breedlove immediately sends them round to the back of the house: We stepped into the kitchen, a large spacious room. Mrs. Breedlove’s skin glowed like taffeta in the reflection of white porcelain, white woodwork, polished cabinets, and brilliant copperware. Odors of meat, vegetables, and something freshly baked mixed with a scent of Fels Naphtha. “I’m gone get the wash. You stand stock still and don’t mess up nothing.” She disappeared behind a white swinging door  .  .  . Another door opened, and in walked a little girl, smaller and younger than all of us. She wore a pink sunback dress and pink fluffy bedroom slippers with two bunny ears pointed up from the tips. Her hair was corn yellow and bound in a thick ribbon. When she saw us, fear danced across her face for a second. She looked anxiously around the kitchen. “Where’s Polly?” she asked. The familiar violence rose in me.68

As she views these strongholds of white purity and power Claudia clearly understands that, as Richard Godden has put it, “to be master is also to depend upon the labor that you dismiss.”69 Entering the privileged space, indeed, she understands that she is here trespassing onto the property of one of those families who, in the words of Bobby Womack’s classic “Across 110th Street,” come “from the other side of the town” and would “catch hell without a ghetto around.” Our narrator here thus recognizes in Pauline’s infantilization as Polly something more than a grotesque echo of the Jim Crow system that the people of Lorain had hoped to leave behind. Such infantilization, she also registers, now seems all the more clearly a gesture of containment, even of decontamination. Pauline’s insulting effacement pushes her to the edge of the whiteness, rendering her incidental to the shimmering scene, the throbbing white house, which she has created. Yet the scene also reveals that the process of her vaporizing labor has left the scene a little inhuman, a little uninhabitable, until its owners must tread through it as “softly” as they do in Elizabeth Spencer’s Fire in the Morning. Uninhabitability here becomes itself infectious, contaminating, as if its own susceptibility to tactile pollution had taught it to become viral too. Those who dwell in or “belong” to such spaces undergo another, quite different dehumanization. A kind of siege mentality

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grips them. The purity of the white house and the virginity of the girl who it insulates from reality now seem, even in the heart of this sanctuary, menaced, under constant threat, and not least because they now greet any kind of approach as an act of potential violence. Indeed, for all its overt denunciation of a commercial culture in which playthings grow hard to find and toys become collectable and ornaments rather than things, The Bluest Eye perhaps achieves its fiercest condemnation here, revealing that the encounter of the children of the employee and the child of the employer not as an opportunity for play, new friendships, exchange of any kind, but a frozen and already politicized standoff. In such a situation, in which young girls flinch from the political identities they project onto each other, violence soon seems a fait accompli. As if in an act of unconscious but just punishment Pecola drops the pan of blueberries, badly burning the skin on her own legs. Her mother, however, is more concerned about the fruit that lands elsewhere: In one gallop she was on Pecola, and with the back of her hand knocked her to the floor. . . . Mrs. Breedlove yanked her up by the arm, slapped her again, and in a voice thin with anger, abused Pecola directly and Frieda and me by implicating. “Crazy fool . . . my floor, mess . . . look what you . . . work . . . get on out . . . now that . . . crazy . . . my floor, my floor . . . my floor.” . . . The little girl started to cry. Mrs. Breedlove turned to her. “Hush, baby, hush. Come here. Oh, Lord, look at your dress. Don’t cry no more. Polly will change it.”70

The Bluest Eye presents the spilling of the pie as an act of just and righteous sabotage. The red juice of the pie is surely meant to suggest menstruation: it too seems iconoclastic, vital, forcing all in the scene out of the fantasy of chaste and disembodied purity. Smooth surfaces get smashed here with as much relish as in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”; but the commitment to freedom, the desire to emancipate ourselves from gender idolatry, now stakes a far more revolutionary claim. Although often modest about his work, D. M. Winnicott had no doubt of the wider importance of his ideas about childhood and play. A child’s “healthy” development, for him, could only happen if she had chance to play with things, to grow with them and grow out them; nothing less than “cultural experience” itself, he claimed, “begins with creative living first manifested in play.”71 In one of her last works before her death in 2009 Barbara Johnson endorsed Winnicott’s belief in the crucial importance childhood play holds for all subsequent creative and emotional life. The common accusation of “using people,” the moral objection that no one should ever treat humans as if they were things, for Johnson requires reconsideration. To “use people,” for her, might equally be to “trust” them—to create “a space of play and risk that does not depend on maintaining intactness and separation.” To avoid all such interplay is, she suggests, to embrace a “paralyzing repression” that encases us into our personal space, freezing us as if into an intangible equivalent of glass itself.72 The pity that always leavens the political outrage of The Bluest Eye stems from a similar understanding. Protests against injustice here cannot quite hide Morrison’s insightful critique of the narrow and impoverished life of privilege that will develop when wealthy Americans deny

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themselves these vital formative experiences. Effectively suggesting that US women ought to resist their pictorialization instead of their objectification by the dominant patriarchal order, Morrison’s iconoclasm here aims to shatter the image in order to restore the thing: to insist on the presence of bodies, of physicality, of touch and the tactile. Seeing through tantalization, The Bluest Eye deposes the impending collapse of these objects of adoration by installing a destruction all its own. The connections become all the more powerful as the novel casts its powerful and critical gaze upon sexual relations among the black bourgeoisie. Now focusing on the “thin brown girls who have looked long at hollyhocks in the backyards of Meridian, Mobile, Aiken, and Baton Rouge,” Morrison’s habit of casting a shadow over her portrayals of female beauty here becomes discernible once more. Their knowledge of the dictates of beauty, she suggests, leads to an internalization of those notions of purity and untouchability that elsewhere in the novel give rise to acts of sabotaging violence. Their avoidance of passion, of “the dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature,” becomes for them a lifelong project. For these “brown girls,” The Bluest Eye suggests: never seem to have boyfriends, but they always marry. Certain men watch them, without seeming to, and know that if such a girl is in his house, he will sleep on sheets boiled white, hung out to dry on juniper bushes, and pressed flat with a heavy iron. There will be pretty flowers decorating the picture of his mother, a large Bible in the front room. . . .. What they do not know is that this plain brown girl will build her nest stick by stick, make it her own inviolable world, and stand guard over its every plant, weed, and doily, even against him.  .  .  . Nor do they know that she will give him her body sparingly and partially. He must enter her surreptitiously, lifting the hem of her nightgown only to her navel. He must rest his weight on his elbows when they make love, ostensibly to avoid hurting her breasts but actually to keep her from having to touch or feel too much of him. While he moves inside her, she will wonder why they didn’t put the necessary but private parts of the body in some more convenient place—like the armpit, for example, or the palm of the hand. Someplace one could get to easily, and quickly, without undressing.73

This prudery, interestingly, seems the result neither of black evangelicalism nor of Puritan legacies still at play in US culture as a whole. But for a single reference to the Bible, Morrison here avoids all mention of Christianity, instead seeking to situate sexless sex very much in the heart of a new kind of consumerist household in which notions of hygiene and cleanliness reign supreme. Her bourgeois man and wife are here brought together in mutual adoration of the latter’s pure and dollish beauty. But both seem also to intuit that this beauty is tantalizing in its nature, hypersensitive to touch. Sex for them certainly seems a chaste waltz, an elaborate skirting around the thing itself, in which both try to edge ever closer to purity’s ineffable core yet never so close as to touch it. The surreal image of a migrating vagina, traveling all over her body like an urticarial rash, only confirms that both agree that her skin now presents them with

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a forcefield, a tantalizing screen whose function is to repulse the gestures of intimacy it attracts. Sex here not only seems Puritanical or little more than the consummation of the wife’s contractual obligations. It also seems devoid of pleasure: an encounter between two people who never really learnt to play.

A bigger plaything “And their songs—the spirituals! Aren’t they marvellous?” Bigger saw her turn to him. “Say, Bigger, can you sing?” “I can’t sing,” he said. “Aw, Bigger,” she said, pouting. She tilted her head, closed her eyes and opened her mouth. “Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming fer to carry me home. . . .” Jan joined in and Bigger smiled derisively. Hell, that ain’t the tune, he thought. “Come on, Bigger, and help us sing it,” Jan said. “I can’t sing,” he said again. Richard Wright, Native Son (1940) In earlier examples of US literature, the encounter with virginity often leads male protagonists to resort to the strategies of becoming blankness that I described in the previous chapter. In Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1879) and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911), for example, the arrival of some “‘fresh and beautiful young girl’” characteristically demands close scrutiny.74 Any hopeful suitor cannot just glance at such “graceful objects.”75 The likes of Daisy Miller, as befits James’s subtitle A Study, must instead be “look[ed] . . . at very hard,” their beauty gawped at, committed to memory, and interrogated for flaws.76 Yet the kind of long and lingering look that thus seems so necessary at the same time betrays an erotic interest that, given the heteronormative protocols laid bare in these tales, threatens to compromise the man who issues it and to erode the alluring chastity of its intended target. Indeed, if these voyeuristic looks are detected, the blushing that typically ensues can seem a sort of warning light, a “flaming guard,” by which the woman under scrutiny further protects her alluring femininity.77 Sometimes the imperatives of male admiration lead these texts to stretch credulity. Time expands for some and shrinks for others as male protagonists, photographically noting “the foreshortened tip of her nose and the streak of red in her hair” or romantically comparing her face to a “wheat-field under a summer breeze,” divine unlikely details from the briefest of looks.78 Under such circumstances the practical strategies of becoming blankness begin to seem a useful solution, a way by which these narratives can remain plausible, bringing time back under control, even as they transfer the duties of erotic observation back onto their male protagonists. Realist obligations thus lead Ethan Frome, at home, to edge his seat “sideways,” toward Mattie Silver, until he obtains “a view of her profile and of the lamplight falling on her hands”

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that he can enjoy without having to look her in the eye.79 Daisy Miller’s Winterbourne, similarly, derided as a “girl-watcher” by Millicent Bell, lives up to this sobriquet as he plans a series of happy accidents that enable the narrative and him alike to watch Miller from afar as she visits the Pincian Gardens, the Palace of the Caesars, and (as the story approaches its inevitable tragedy) the Coliseum.80 Albeit for very different reasons, then, the protagonists of these stories resort to ruse and stealth, tiptoeing, lurking, and worrying about the weight of their own footsteps very much as Thoreau does throughout A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. It is as though hideouts were turning into peepholes, ornithologists into voyeurs, the yearning for invisibility uniting both. Daisy Miller and Ethan Frome among other works thus depict the beginnings of relationships in which the visual trounces all other pleasures, and smitten men can only look in adoration at the beautiful women in their midst. Each of these narratives reveal that these men have come to understand sexual love as a passive process of mere reception, of watchful yet frozen scopophilia, and seem quite powerless to conceive of kissing, stroking, caressing, or holding their lovers as lovers, or of receiving such tactile gestures in return. All of these men are devoid of the kind of synoptic consciousness that allows The Bluest Eye’s Claudia to understand her assault on the white doll as a rational way of intervening in an irrational culture. None can grasp that, in a world so governed by tantalization that it grows suspicious of all touch, violence, attack, can soon seem only to enact forms of aggression of which you are already suspected. But the narratives that present these men to us are, perhaps, beginning to think along similar lines to The Bluest Eye; and they certainly share its sense that the disabling of touch, this scopophilic paralysis, has created conditions that must lead, inexorably, to death. Daisy Miller, for example, spends so long depicting its title character as an untouched and everyday flower that her death at the end, if in fact from malaria, also seems inseparable from Winterbourne’s mounting approach to her. The crash of the sleigh into the tree that brings Ethan Frome to its tragic climax can seem likewise to enact a form of violent touch that Frome has hitherto postponed, frustratingly, through the means of a secret observation. Indeed Wharton’s sleigh anticipates the embarrassments of D. H. Lawrence’s heavy-handed phallocentrism: as it quickens over the snow, Mattie clinging on to Ethan as they go, the movement toward climax is, quite explicitly, as erotic as it is narratorial. Yet still this rapid movement through the snow seems to carry with it a fantasy of perpetual or inexhaustible virginity. A familiar and romantic equation of sex and death here still seems haunted by a desire to arrest tantalization or otherwise escape from the body itself. It is easy to misunderstand or understate the influence that Henry James and Edith Wharton had on the literary development of Richard Wright. If Native Son (1940) itself carried obvious and acknowledged debts to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and Theodor Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), then, in interviews conducted after its publication, Wright tended to dwell on his relatively recent discovery of existentialism and to announce his intention of drawing on it in later works. Another influence of obvious importance to Wright’s work stemmed from literary modernism, and not least from the experimental capture of black vernacular

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voices that he found in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” (1909). Together these seminal texts can seem to leave little room to consider the influence that Edith Wharton and Henry James in particular had upon Wright’s literary development. Yet, as he himself attested, these other influences were important to Wright too—and nor, despite his formative immersion in James’s New York prefaces, were they merely formal. After all, Ethan Frome and Daisy Miller are both stories about lustful men who grow so frightened of the impacts their lust might have on its object that they become positively frigid in her presence. Native Son, if not answering to this description, does likewise turn on an equation of sex and death, Bigger in time grasping that although he continues to insist that he killed Mary Dalton “by accident, not once did he feel the need to tell himself that it had been an accident. He was black and he had been alone in the room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her.”81 Experiences of criminalized sexuality and of a patriarchal loveless marriage led James and Wharton respectively to produce narratives of sexual fear that in turn resonated with Wright and seemingly echo through his depiction of Bigger as he carries the drunken Mary across the threshold of her bedroom: Carefully, he freed one hand and turned the knob of the door. He waited; nothing happened. He pushed the door in quietly; the room was dark and silent. He felt along the wall with his fingers for the electric switch and could not find it. He stood, holding her in his arms, fearful, in doubt.82

Wharton and James’s alertness to the ways in which the myth of virginity could cast women as untouchable and men as automatic threats are not only racialized in Native Son but brought to their logical conclusion. The demonization of sexual desire that Wright and other black men endured as a result of the white supremacist system takes the Jamesian notion that a look can threaten to eroticize a woman and elevates it into a prelude for murder. Indeed, one of the most disturbing aspects of this encounter is the sheer tenderness of Bigger’s actions. Soon he will wipe away the memory of his first gentle gestures in the bedroom, and the strength he summons when suffocating Mary will lead to his gruesome disposal of her body and subsequently to his premeditated rape and murder of his girlfriend Bessie. Prior to his descent into brutality, however, Bigger here presents a different figure, his uncanny gentleness all the more striking, given that Wright intended it as an American echo of Raskolnikov’s sudden and shockingly bloody first murder. His restraint, his uncanny gentleness, only becomes understandable to us if we also remember the influences of James and Wharton, and heed that here too we find another meditation on notions of virginity interested in its equation of touch with disturbance. The difference is that, here, no sledge seems necessary, and nor does Bigger need to ogle Mary in the surreptitious manner of Daisy Miller’s Winterborne. All he needs to do, to announce a threatening sexual interest, is be present in the room. Crossing the threshold is itself a crime—is what Robyn Wiegman depicts as Bigger’s most “cathartic trespass.”83 Yet in the final analysis this episode is not just an exposure of racial dehumanization or of the extension of Jim Crow protocols and injustice in the midst of supposedly liberal Chicago. Like The Bluest Eye, Native Son also proves a kind

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of critique of the very myths of “physical beauty” and “romantic love.” It presents, aside from all else, a radical and charged retelling of the virginity myth exposed by Wharton and James. The problem, again, is one of play. Mary, throughout her life in the novel, toys with Bigger. She flirts and she smiles, but even as she uses him as a plaything she also treats him as a metonym and guide to a South Side ghetto she likewise hopes to navigate for her own subaltern pleasures. The result is a far more representative arrangement than the one we saw represented in The Great Gatsby: Bigger drives, Mary and Jan sit, and their chauffeur presently leads them on an odyssey into authenticity that soon proves tantalizing as the ghetto’s denizens register their arrival and adjust their behavior accordingly. Again, in these passages, the combination tends to displace the relations of labor exploitation even as it recasts the exploited laborer himself as a figure of trivial pleasure. The difference here, however, lies in Native Son’s illustration that the figure subjected to this double bind cannot play back. Nobody can play without giving something of themselves away or at least surrendering control in the attempt to achieve the sense of spontaneous and unplanned transformations otherwise known as fun. Historically the paradox has been that, even as improvisation has remained at the heart of so many African-American cultural practices, the dictates of double consciousness have ensured that public life can leave no room for such spontaneity. To wear a mask, after all, is by necessity to maintain control. From the moment he first encounters the Daltons’ mansion Bigger knows that he can never reciprocate any of Mary’s gestures of flirtation or of friendship. He knows that he can play along and that he can play for Mary; but he also knows he can never play with her. He can only submit to the mask of his subjection. A plaything at the edge of whiteness, he cannot react to this world without enacting his and its destruction.

4

Necessary Torments Temptations, Falls, and Bodily Compensations in Modern US Culture

A handful of transatlantic scholars, since about 1970, have fallen for an old and appealing rumor. Here and there, in works focusing on US cinema, postwar French culture and African-American literature, these critics have recollected and upheld the claim that, early in the 1950s, Roland Barthes took the opportunity of Richard Wright’s exile in Paris to interview him for a public radio program.1 In fact the dialogue never took place. By this period Writing Degree Zero (1953) and other successes had already established Barthes as a leading public intellectual, and biographies confirm that his academic duties, and above all his work on the magazine essays that would soon be collected together as Mythologies (1957), left him no time to conduct a series of radio interviews too.2 French literary historian Michel Fabre, a friend of Wright’s and the clear authority on this matter, moreover helps explain the misunderstanding, translating an interview that Wright did give to a certain Raymond Barthes in 1956.3 That the rumour persists in the face of such facts indicates its power to seduce. The idea that the Mississippian novelist and the Bayonne semiologist once faced each other in some smoky Paris recording studio, a wire recorder preserving their conversation for posterity, evidently still holds considerable charm. No doubt this is not unconnected to the belief that these men were so unalike. It is always worth remembering that Barthes lost his father in World War One and that, as a young man, he experienced the Nazi occupation of Paris firsthand. Little in his life, however, could compare with the stunting hunger, the racial violence, and the periods of brutal institutional care that were central to Wright’s boyhood. Only personal bravery and boldness enabled Wright, as the son of sharecroppers and the grandson of slaves, to survive, and indeed escape, the daily ordeals of Jim Crow. The experience of educating himself, of breaking the law in order to borrow library books, and of carving out a literary career in the face of overwhelming odds, evidently left Wright with a bold and passionate political anger as well as a core of inner confidence that served him well throughout all his dealings with the European intelligentsia.4 In contrast, Barthes, and especially in the years before he published the act of literary

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assassination he titled “The Death of the Reader” (1968), was known for a certain political quietism or disengagement that often led him to be compared, unfavorably, with Jean Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault. Common sense thus seems to suggest that the interview between these men, had it ever taken place, would have been a meeting of opposites. I want to begin this chapter by revising, if only slightly, this common sense opinion. I want to suggest, even as I imminently leave this mythic interview behind, that any such encounter between Barthes and Wright could in fact have revealed more common ground than one might, on first impression, have supposed. In particular, I want to suggest, the two held in common a certain political disposition in which they maintained a commitment to democratic freedoms yet sought, not uncourageously, to distance themselves from and contend with the Marxist orthodoxies of their formative intellectual circles. Once again, at least comparatively speaking, Barthes found it far easier than Wright to do this. True, political debate between intellectuals in 1950s Paris was often ferocious, full of grudges, and far likelier to destroy than strengthen friendships. But nothing in this world could compare with the savage bitterness that led “white and black Communists,” according to Ralph Ellison, to waylay Wright for daring to criticize Leninism, brand him a class traitor, and drum him out of Chicago.5 Still, debates among French intellectuals were passionate, and were, throughout Barthes’s adult life, rather effectively policed by what Warren Montag called the “‘vigilance’ of Althusser and Co.,” the “hyper-hyper-critical procedure” of whom strived to uphold “structural” Marxism, and even to the point of denouncing Khruschev’s vaunted liberalizations.6 The sense thus emerges that, despite their radically different backgrounds, Barthes and Wright both collided awkwardly with a powerful Marxist consensus, and that both, thanks to this fractious negotiation, arrived at a political position in which they effectively reasserted the productive power of individual and cultural acts. Socialism, queer liberation, black nationalism, anticolonialism: all of the political causes that they embodied or espoused, if in their own ways as radical as anything ever done in the name of Marxism itself, also rejected the latter’s characteristic skepticism about the efficacy of political reform or everyday resistance. Perhaps surprisingly, the intellectual affinities between these men begin to become apparent in the course of “The New Citroën” (1957), Barthes’s classic reflections on what he was quick to grasp as a new and revolutionary form of car design: It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object. . . . [It] excites interest less by its substance than by the junction of its components. It is well known that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because the opposite reveals a technical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ’s robe was seamless, just as the airships of science fiction are made of unbroken metal. . . . There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are world to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape.  .  .  . There is a return to a certain idea of streamlining: new, however, since it is less bulky, less incisive, more relaxed than that which one found in the first periods of this fashion. . . . This spiritualization can be seen in the extent, the quality and the material of the glass-work.

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The Deesse is obviously the exaltation of glass, and pressed metal is only a support for it.7

Barthes here grows so fluent, his analysis so compelling, that it becomes easy to overlook the importance he has attached to his simple phrase as if. The qualification, however, is crucial. For by these two syllables alone Barthes is here calling attention to the fact that the “superlative” fetishism of the Citroën DS has resulted neither from the economic base nor an outside system of commodification but from complex human processes of production: from advertising, from engineering and design, indeed from the surrounding culture as a whole. Via as if alone, in other words, Barthes has here relaunched his quarrel with Marx, his succinct phrase insisting on a recognition, in the face of an overweening political consensus, of the manufactured nature, the built tantalizations, of this most covetable of objects. This amounts to a departure from Marxism because, whereas the latter insists that such fetishism arises from an underlying economic structure, all else being so much window dressing, Barthes is here recognizing just how sophisticated and just how determining such window dressing can become. Although his decrees on this new Citroën design can seem simply to affirm its sublime aspect (and so much so that the company have now woven portions of the essay onto their customer-facing webpages), on closer inspection his focus really falls on those elements of design that have called this sublimity into existence, actively conjuring it, as if in a rain dance, “from the sky.” At once interpretative and ideological, the disturbance put about in his essay thus fixes attention back onto the innovations that here work to produce a fetishized effect orthodox Marxism would prefer to consider a symptom of the economic base. It is here that we find correspondences with the work of Richard Wright. Barthes’s recognition of the designed nature of the fetishized DS also recognizes labor forms previously hidden from sight. Work defined by the erasure of its own traces here hooves back into view. As it does so, Barthes’s essay begins to reveal an unexpected point of correspondence: the work of the Citroën DS’s talented designers, at least in one respect, seems reminiscent of that done according to what Wright called, in Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), the “code of . . . genial despotism” by which America required “her black maid” and “her black waiter” to remove consumption’s messy aftermaths from view.8 Of course, socially or economically speaking, there is no comparison here at all. Structurally, however, it is interesting to note that the writings of Wright and Barthes both become concerned with those who perform a sort of labor of self-vaporization. Facilitators of tantalization, both these constituencies seem preoccupied, above all, by the removal of their own human traces from the objects they create. But this is not all. In “The New Citroën” and Black Boy alike we can detect a kind of causational amnesia, or disjunction, wherein their apprehension of the human processes evaporated into the tantalizing effect fails to prevent them from experiencing it as if it were “real.” It is as though, over the course of Black Boy, Wright no sooner reveals the gap between this labor and its effect than he himself falls into it. One moment he marvels “at the cleanliness, the quietness of the white world,” exclaiming ambivalently: “How orderly everything was! Yet I felt out of place.”9 The next he tells us how he, and people like him, are the ones who “chopped wood for the cook stove, lugged in scuttles

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of coal for the grates, washed the front porch and swept the back porch, swept the kitchen, helped wait on the table, and washed the dishes” that together create this neat and inhospitable world.10 A similar disjunction opens up as Barthes studies his “purely magical object.”11 Somehow, despite its sharp eye for detail, his investigation of the Citroën’s innovations cannot deter him from standing back and joining the crowd in their adoration of the car. Never quite a critique, his essay urges upon us the Citroën’s sacralization, his prose itself participating in that “tactile phase of discovery” in which the “visual wonder” of the car “receive[s] the reasoned assault of touch.”12 Barthes no sooner illuminates the processes behind the car’s design than he submits to the new tantalizing propensity that they produce. In this chapter I want to suggest that this kind of causational amnesia can also be found in a range of major US narratives. Time after time, as we will see, these representations acknowledge the constructed nature of newness only to succumb to the myth of its immaculate birth. Two spaces very familiar from the landscape of postmodern US society emblematize well tantalization’s apparent capacity to resurge and withstand the exposure of the hidden processes of its creation. In the cars of postwar US writing in general, and in the hotel rooms of Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser (1976) in particular, we discover two kinds of sealable spaces that, locked tight, caught in a hinterland between public and private, owe this liminal identity to their open construction of a new and untouched aura. The differences that exist between these spaces, not only in writings by Stanley Elkin but also by James Agee, Raymond Carver, Hunter S. Thompson, and Robert Penn Warren, here derive from our contrasting sense of the recursive nature of these constructions. The newness of new cars can seem irrevocable, once gone, lost forever, and thus radically unlike our tendency to fall under the spell of the hotel’s regeneration of its new rooms every day. Yet even at its most self-conscious—even when it seems to result as much from the choices of consumers as it does from the illusions of producers—the tantalizing effect again occurs, again positioning the former as agents of desecration. The difference now is that these technologies seem somehow to cater to this anticipated loss of newness. They provide those who bring it about with a rich repertoire of new and superhuman capacities. From electric windows to automatic gearboxes, and from room service to the “people movers” that once escorted Frederic Jameson around the “hyperspace” of the Bonaventure Hotel, such polluting, desecrating customers here enjoy a sort of secondary order of technological compensation.13 In part because it would later feature in a notorious attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, everything about the Citroën DS, including the “new phenomenology” that Barthes saw in its mode of “assembling,” can seem quintessentially, unmistakably, French. As it happens, however, only a handful of the new technological capacities that so captivated Barthes were exclusive to Citroën; and nor did French engineers more generally occupy the vanguard of 1950s new car design. The DS, if thrilling and unique and as French as a pissoir, was also part of what Dick Hebdige has called an international, industrial “movement away from fabricated, geometric forms to pressed or stamped ones.” This movement, Hebdige adds, was often associated with new US engineering innovations as well as the new US nomenclature that designer Harold Van

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Doren invented when he spoke of a shift from “‘rectilinear’ to ‘curvilinear’ forms,” to “‘streamlined’” objects that could “declare . . . in form,” their “very newness.”14 This is all by way of saying that the “giant finned cars” that Robert Lowell once saw swimming “everywhere” around downtown Boston were far from imitations of a French original. “For the Union Dead” (1964) instead patently associates them with the new, and distinctly American, technologies that elsewhere in the poem give rise not only to Hiroshima and the Mosler safe that withstood it but also to the “yellow dinosaur steamshovels” that “grunt” away as they eat the “tons of mush and grass” on which the historic city once stood.15 Tony Ray-Jones’s Autoshow, Daytona (1965) confirms that ceremonies that unveiled streamlined cars before appreciative and adoring audiences were as much an American as a French phenomenon. But as it offers its vision of modern luxury—as it places before us what Mick Gidley has called an “ideal of automobile freedom and well-upholstered ease”—the British photographer’s work also suggests further connections (Figure 4.1).16 His vantage point alone offers a visual reminder that, soon after portraying the DS as a tantalizing object par excellence, Barthes turns his attention to its dashboard and grasps in the “control over motion” that its gadgetry offers a kind of compensation for the driver’s instant despoliation of the car’s pure and unblemished surfaces.17 Erotic invitation remains on the outside, incarnated in the Monroe lookalike whose sunglasses prevent us from knowing whether she is staring at the car or straight into the camera. Inside, however, within the hermetic space of the new car itself, another mirror-like dashboard promises what Barthes called a “relish in driving” as if to offset or even decelerate newness’s looming and anticipated demise.

Figure 4.1  Tony Ray Jones, Autoshow, Daytona (1965). Permission from Tony Ray-Jones/National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library.

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These technological accommodations of the tantalizing effect lead the chapter to a final twist. As we will see, many US writings suggest that by their magical controls such cars offer to us a kind of deferred apology, in a strange way compensating for their conflation of our bodies with infection by granting to them new superhuman powers. But these new technological capacities soon themselves prove, in their own way, tantalizing. Like the fruit that hung before Tantalus, in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral (1983) and John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) and elsewhere, steering wheels stare at commuting motorists and taunt them with the ever-attainable yet ever-unenactable prospect of freedom and escape. Like water churning around our antihero’s feet, too, the gas pedal forever sits and waits, an outlet for aggression, for violence, for speed, that we can never really use. Now the ordeals of commuting by bus, tram or train (all of which are Sisyphan in the sense that they devolve physical agency to a single repetitive task) yield to the more teasing, more tantalizing, ordeal of commuting by car. Moreover, while Jeffrey Gordon has lately saluted Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) for capturing what “have become permanent parts of our postmodern consciousness,” modern US writings do tend to find in Tantalus a more fitting symbol of what they figure as the necessary torments of driving experience.18 Unlike Sisyphus, after all, we are not required to submit our entire body to the supreme power of the gas pedal or steering wheel. These devices, instead, entice. They parade before us graspable capacities of speed and freedom that we must nonetheless (for fear of causing pain or falling into moral error) resist. These technological capacities, in other words, offer to us repeated and seemingly voluntary opportunities to exercise restraint and thus demonstrate to ourselves and others our moral, if not our Puritanical, characters. Like the overstuffed menus of countless US eateries—and perhaps even like the gun stores that exist in so many local communities—gas pedals and steering wheels, too, might strike us as ubiquitous and banal phenomena that nonetheless share in common the curious characteristic that nobody should really use them. Certainly, were we to exploit their capacities to the full, we would soon end up somewhere unpleasant: in hospital, in jail, or on a slab in the local mortuary. Just as guns do indeed kill people, and just as bottomless drinks and supersized meals lead straight to the obesity that Lauren Berlant calls “slow death,” so the mocking needle of the speedometer, if pushed out of its safety zone, would soon expose us anew, proving our immorality if not our mortality to others in the ebb and flow of daily US life.19

Pedal point blues It is the late sixties . . . I am still teaching at Purdue. It is a sunlit late spring day, and I am driving my car past the edge of campus on my way home from work. Suddenly I see approaching me on the sidewalk across the street the figure of Edward Drogo Mork. I immediately turn the wheel and increase my speed, slamming violently over the curb as if I were a stunt driver being filmed, but most fortunately coming to a stop in front of a startled and horrified man who resembles

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Edward Drogo Mork not one whit. I had got that through my head just in time. . . . Withdrawing to the road, I wondered what had come over me. How could I have made such an immense and serious mistake? And where had my hatred come from, to surface so suddenly, on such an innocent afternoon? I’ve never been able to form even a fanciful explanation. William H. Gass, “Afterword” to Omensetter’s Luck (1966) Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men (1946) and James Agee’s A Death in Family (1956) both grasp the car at once as a classic object of tantalizing desire and as a machine that offers new capacities that seem to translate its attendant destructions of touch into new possibilities of superhuman mastery. Our tantalizing effect on these new and gleaming machines, the fact that we cannot sit in them, cannot begin to use them, without upsetting the newness we covet, seems, in these important novels, compensated by the accession of new powers: gear changes, speed, enlarged mechanical strength, but also the ability now to determine routes in such a way as to entrench individualism still further. Yet this negotiation between the destructions of tantalization and its conversion into new and thrilling forms of touch seems, in both these novels, impossible to sustain. Long descriptions of cars in both novels instead suggest a modern equivalent of Chekhov’s famous aphorism about the theatrical use of guns: if one is introduced early on in a story, we can be fairly confident that it will be involved, somewhere near the end, in a crash. Just as William H. Gass pressed his foot to the floor to attack the man he thought had stolen from him the manuscript of Omensetter’s Luck, these texts, too, see the gas pedal as a tantalizing instrument insofar as it always places before their protagonists opportunities to unleash their aggression, drive fast, and thus give way to what Freud called the “destructive” as well as the “death drive.”20 Written within ten years of each other, both James Agee’s A Death in the Family and Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men feature prolonged descriptions of soft, smooth, and luxuriant surfaces. The smooth lawns that open the former novel, and the latter’s long descriptions of swimming, can both seem intrusive in the sense that they tend to suspend the narrative in order to allow for sustained imaginative experiment. Yet by thus intruding, indeed by their very refusal to participate in the narrative tasks of the story, both passages come to seem oddly central to it. In both cases, the sheer lack of explanation accompanying these descriptions in effect implores the reader to inquire into their meaning. As he or she does, she finds that they are connected by a complex system of comparison and contrast to the cars and the car crashes that in time prove pivotal to both. This becomes almost explicit in A Death in the Family. The title ofAgee’s novel itself announces a dramatic commitment to a singular tragedy: a determination to follow, patiently and unflinchingly, the choked conversations by which relatives learn of and deal with the patriarch’s sudden death. This clear statement of novelistic purpose consequently ensures that, as Agee begins to discuss his car in close and careful detail, lingering on its defects and its faults, it indeed appears an omen as obvious as Chekhov’s gun: the likeliest cause of the preannounced tragedy. The greater mystery, compared

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to this open predictability, is why this narrative of painful realist observation should begin with the son Rufus Follett’s poetic vision of a familiar suburban routine: It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them: that of the fathers of families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns. . . .. These sweet pale streamings in the light lift out their pallors and their voices all together, others hushing their children, the hushing unnaturally prolonged, the men gentle and silent and snail-like withdrawn into the quietude of what he singly is doing.21

Through a succession of liquid, watery metaphors Agee here describes the silencing of children and a slowing down of time as the community come together in isolation to adore their patches of immaculate fresh grass. The hose itself is portrayed as a magical instrument in that it enables each father to maintain the perfect lawn without touching it. Not least as it has been placed at the start of a novel called A Death in the Family, the perfection of the scene carries obvious threats, the isolation of each man in his perfect and protected cell anticipating the car and thus the crash that will give the novel its tragedy. Just as these lawns seem too beautiful as to forbid even their owners from stepping onto them, so the world outside—the post-“bulldozer” South of freeways and engines that send cars skating across them—will soon, it seems, lead to annihilation outright.22 Italics here provide a mark and proof of the editorial desire to hold Rufus’s meditation at a distance from the main business of the novel. Likewise, just as Rufus here speaks inconsistently, identifying his father with those in the gardens even as he prays for help in this “time of trouble,” so the floating, unconnected nature of his meditation in general invites us to unify it with A Death in the Family, overwhelmingly, on the symbolic level.23 Accordingly it becomes noticeable that these simple hoses emit some curiously mechanical sounds, “the insane noise of violence in the nozzle, . . . the still irregular sound of adjustment, . . . and the smooth into steadiness” all curiously evoking a car engine’s stuttering to life.24 The fantasy of liquid, immaculate lawns looks ahead to the ease of driving fast down an empty freeway; but the coughing, clogging violence of the hoses even here suggests the unpredictability of the engine that will lead to Jay Follet’s demise. For Jay is an experienced driver, and when his engine cooperates it soon tantalizes him into driving “a little faster than before.”25 But erratic sounds it emits when he first brings it to life (“C utta wawwwk: Craaawwrk? Chiquawkwawh”) already look ahead to the mechanical failure and faulty steering wheel that will soon be named the chief causes of Follet’s death.26 Indeed, Andrew Follet’s description of the accident tends to indict the car itself, blaming it for his brother’s demise, and in such a way as to downplay the large rock in the road that first led to his loss of control: They found that.  . this cotter pin had fallen out, that held the steering wheel together.  .  .  . It’s just something that holds two parts together—in this case, his steer gear—what he guided the auto with. . . . What they think is that he must have hit a loose rock with one of the front wheels, and that gave everything a jolt and a terrific wrench at the same time. Because they found a rock, oh, half the size of

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my head, down in the ditch, very badly scraped and with tire marks on it. They showed me. They think it must have wrenched the wheel right out of his hands and thrown him forward very hard so that he struck his chin, just one sharp blow against the steering wheel. And that must have killed him on the spot. Because he was thrown absolutely clear of the car as it ran off the road—they showed me. . . . That auto threw him out on the ground as it careened down into that sort of flat, wide ditch[.]27

In All the King’s Men we find a similar movement. Often the novel turns away from the political thriller that is its main business. Jack Burden, as the narrating figure who provides Warren’s novel with what his Vanderbilt colleagues Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate were calling the Central Intelligence of the post-Jamesian novel, soon steers the story away from its political melodrama and toward more personal reflections on his teenage years and his thwarted love of Anne Stanton.28 Here the narrative lights out as if for the fluidity of memory itself. Burden now recalls long summer days in which he and Anne would swim: down to the hotel diving tower, late enough for everybody else to be out of the water. We lay on the big float for a while, not doing any talking, not touching each other, just lying on our backs and looking up at the sky. After a while she got up and began to climb the tower. I rolled over on my side to watch her. She went up to the twenty-foot board, poised a moment, and did a swan dive, a nice one. Then she went up to the next board. I don’t know how many dives she made, but it was a lot.29

Reminiscent of Hockney’s A Bigger Splash and Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” the scene also resonates within All the King’s Men itself, and not least as these images of floating and of a youthful control over gravity allow Jack a fleeting freedom from the burden that is registered in his name and that he enacts through his daytime job as Willie Stark’s muckraker-in-chief. Interestingly, however, rather as the choking hoses of A Death in the Family associate the liquid smoothness of the lawns with the lethal car engine, so too, here, the image of seaborne escape finds echoes on the road: Two hours later I was in my car and Burden’s Landing was behind me, and the bay, and the windshield wipers were making their busy little gasp and click like something inside you which had better not stop. For it was raining again. The drops swung and swayed down out of the dark into my headlights like a bead portiere of bright metal beads which the car kept shouldering through. There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. . . . It is a vacation from being you.30

The relief of anonymity here seems akin to the experience of swimming in that it arises not from an escape from the body but from an unburdening of it and a magnification of its power. The car throughout grants to Burden the pleasurable weightlessness of swimming but without that diminution of muscle power one can feel underwater. Instead, the car functions as an extension of Burden’s own physical capabilities,

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a language of personification making explicit that even as it obliterates his identity from the scene he moves through it exaggerates his power. Again as in A Death in the Family, the language weaves together images of smoothness and lightness with a sense of looming annihilation. This is confirmed, of all places, on the first page of the book: To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotise yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slag is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. But you won’t make it, of course.31

The imagined death looks ahead to the later crash that ruins Willie Stark’s son’s fledgling football career; but it also shares with the accident at the heart of A Death in the Family a sense of smooth movement spinning out of control, growing hypnotic, until the modern road itself seems curiously to repulse the hapless driver back into the southern dirt. In the moment of crisis, too, both texts fix attention on the steering wheel and cast it as a sort of vindictive or demonic presence: an instrument that, by promising a mastery over the car’s movement, taunts and teases the driver right up until it spins out of control. Elsewhere in All the King’s Men and in Warren’s later novel Flood (1964) the car’s secondary tantalizations are grasped in terms of the gas pedal instead. In the latter, for example, a desire for human connection leads Warren’s somewhat autobiographical protagonist Brad Tolliver to fantasize about acting “like a great dog leaping from water and shaking off the drops like spray,” and subsequently moving toward a “future” that seemed like “a great fruit hanging in darkness, the skin already burst with the pressure of a ripe inward potential.”32 Yet the yearning to act on desire and thus break out of this classic tantalizing predicament soon turns the car into a theatre for the resumption of restraint. Here speed, again, seems maddeningly limited, the car always a threatening and potentially lethal machine made safe by Tolliver’s ultimate capitulation to bourgeois conformism: He looked down at his right foot lolling by the throttle under the dash, waiting to tap that power. The foot was shod in a tattered huarache. The ankle was bare. . . . He looked at the glittering instrument panel of the Jaguar XK-150, in which, three weeks back, across mountain and desert and swelling prairie and the black soil of Arkansas, he had come rolling from the Coast. He looked up at the blue sky, for on such a day as this the top was down. . . . [He] tried not to feel anything.33

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Warren’s novels thus figure the gas pedal as a different kind of tantalizing instrument. Here it promises, not the satisfaction of thirst or hunger or other basic needs, but a fantasy of anger’s unleashing, a suspension of what Freud called civilization’s constant introjection of “aggressivity.”34 All the King’s Men and Flood alike grasp the gas pedal as a ubiquitous and everyday device that nonetheless, even when released and allowed to rise back to its default state, continues to harbor a latent violence that now tantalizes not the id but the “destructive” and “death drives” of the superego. They suggest that these pedals, so banal and familiar a feature of everyday life, can actively invite all of civilization’s discontents into forms of murderous and suicidal behavior. Warren in fact enfolds these pedals in such a potent atmosphere of ominous temptation that they can seem reminiscent of the commodified gun, another necessary torment, the widespread availability of which in American life likewise turns violence into a constant possibility and enables individuals, through a daily ritual of renunciation, to forswear it. The flaw in this cultural system hardly needs to be stated. The apparent ubiquity of necessary torments in daily life in the United States is a problem for the simple reason that, as in other national cultures, a certain proportion of the population will always fall short of the established protocols or behavioral norms of their society. Some will always seek to avail themselves of the Second Amendment—following in the footsteps of Cormac McCarthy’s characters, they are always liable to travel to one shop for “a twelve gauge Winchester pump gun,” and to another for the tools with which to saw off its end.35 But it is also more or less guaranteed that, on the scale of moral depravity, others will incline toward a gonzo state of mind, salivating over gas pedals after the fashion of Hunter S. Thompson: We were talking about motorcycles. Jackson and I were out there in Ventura fucking around with a 750 Honda and an experimental prototype of the new Vincent—a 1000-cc brute that proved out to be so awesomely fast that I didn’t even have time to get scared of it before I found myself coming up on a highway stoplight at ninety miles an hour and then skidding halfway through the intersection with both wheel-brakes locked. A genuinely hellish bike. Second gear peaks around 65—cruising speed on the freeways—and third winds out somewhere between 95 and 100. I never got to fourth, which takes you up to 120 or so—and after that you shift into fifth. Top speed is 140, more or less, depending on how the thing is tuned—but there is nowhere in Los Angeles County to run a bike like that. I managed to get it back from Ventura to McGovern’s downtown headquarters hotel, staying mainly in second gear, but the vibration almost fused my wrist bones and boiling oil from the breather pipes turned my right foot completely black. Later, when I tried to start it up for another test-run, the backlash from the kick-starter almost broke my leg.36

Thompson’s various references to driving here indicate that the customization of this “hellish” bike has only amplified a general capacity for illegal and dangerous speed latent, tantalizingly, in all modern road vehicles. Even as it only exaggerates ordinary

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Figure 4.2  The Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime (1984). automotive capacities, however, Thompson also casts his modified motorbike as a kind of menacing animal that demands to be “let out,” and even at the risk of killing others or attracting local law enforcers. Thompson here just about manages to stay on the right side of the law, but does so by adopting an interesting mode in which he resists the egotistical tantalizations of the machine itself. Such temptations grow more vulgar still in Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55.” Set in the same Los Angeles traffic system apparently once terrorized by Thompson, this dismal rock anthem of 1984 invokes the local speed restriction in order to recast the gas pedal as a straightforward figure of torment: “When I drive that slow, it’s hard to steer,” Hagar complains, bafflingly, before griping: “What used to be two hours now takes all day.” Hagar thus not only registers but also seeks to escape the necessary torment: he wants to ignore the pedal’s customary tantalizations, grasping it anew as a figure of free movement, and thus of the means of his plunge into a fantasy of selfish criminality. But now the lack of open roads within the Los Angeles network looms back into view. The fact of urban congestion, even more than speed restrictions, stymie Hagar’s hopes of getting his foot down and pushing his speedometer up into its maximum position. Other people in other cars, still more than “fussy” state laws, thwart his fantasy, preventing him from purging tantalization from his gas pedal. In the title as well as the cover of their landmark 1984 album Double Nickels on the Dime (Figure 4.2), the Minutemen provided an eloquent riposte to the mediocre machismo of Hagar’s lyrics. As well as paying tribute to their San Pedro hometown,

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the band’s cover photograph transforms their compliance with the highway limit into an act of counterintuitive, rebellious bravado. As their photographer Dirk Vandenberg later explained: We had to drive all over Los Angeles and whenever we found a San Pedro freeway sign we took a shot. . . There were three elements that Mike [Watt, the Minutemen’s bass guitarist] wanted in the photo: a natural kind of glint in his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror, the speedometer pinned exactly on 55mph, and, of course, the San Pedro sign guiding us home. There were two separate days of shooting with me smashed up in the backseat of his VW. I had to push myself back in the seat as far as possible to get every element needed in the shot. We finally got lucky and nailed it.37

The cover of Double Nickels on the Dime, like all of the 45 songs recorded on the double discs inside, thus amounted to an ensemble piece, the result of patient and painstaking collaboration. Hagar’s “I” in the process gives way to a “we”: to a rejection of stardom or egocentrism in favor of a difficult form of improvisational activity in which each participant must concentrate and persevere in a collective effort to achieve the desired effect. It is very interesting that this abandonment of the kind of individualism that has been a feature of many of the texts explored in American Tantalus should also here lead to a kind of happy transcendence of an effect others found in some way tormenting. For the cover photograph suggests that, instead of lamenting the speed limit as a limitation that imprisons them in a state of tantalization, the Minutemen all but welcome it, greeting it both as a challenge and an opportunity for collaborative and fraternal interaction. Another kind of masculinity is here defined via the repudiation of the clichés of rebellious machismo; and in the process one of the temptations of US everyday life, one of its necessary torments, vanishes as if into thin air.

Having it all We have been looking at cars lately My wife has in mind A 1972 Pontiac Catalina conv Bucket seats power everything But I’ve had my eye on a little Red & white 71 Olds Cutlass A/C R&H wsw tires Low mileage & 500 cheaper But I like convertibles too We’ve never owned a really good car Raymond Carver, “A Summer in Sacramento” in No Heroics, Please (1991)

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In the stories of Raymond Carver we find a similar interest in the car, in its capacities, limitations, and above all in the temptations it puts before drivers. Cars seem overused in Carver, his characters always preferring to drive than walk, if only because of such constant use these machines all long ago lost their newness, their shine, accumulating dirt. Even as the dirt and rubbish builds up in their footwells, however, these cars remain for Carver’s characters, and for his errant men in particular, somewhat comfortable, familiar spaces and not least as they offer a kind of public retreat from the family home. In Carver, indeed, it can seem that cars cease to be a means to an end and become an end in themselves. Except for some fantastical references to Alaska, his characters no longer seem to regard their cars as potential means for roadtrips or other kinds of intercontinental escape. Instead they sit back in them, try to relax in them, and treat them as offering a potential respite from the tedium of their work and the antagonisms of their relationships. In the poem “Movement,” indeed, driving becomes akin to traveling “round inside a kettle.” “Indigence,” Carver’s persona suggests, “is at the root of our lives.”38 At the same time, in another field of interest to Carver, his stories continually depict objects or scenes of incredible beauty, and equate this beauty with purity, positioning touch or engagement as the instrument of a tantalizing despoliation. Beauty in Carver by definition lies outside the quotidian circuits crisscrossed on a daily basis by beaten-up cars. His main characters ferry themselves to and from their places of work and their places of leisure, and all objects of beauty, as soon as they are brought into these circuits, fall from grace. Upsetting as it is to include the victim of “So Much Water so Close to Home” among these objects, her corpse does seem to exert over the men of this story a fascination not unlike that which, in “Nobody Said Anything,” a fish “the color of moss” holds over the boy who cuts it in half.39 Perhaps it might seem odd to add to this list of objects of beauty and desecration the cars in which so many of Carver’s character ferry themselves around. But these vehicles do always seem able to remind their owners of the moment of their acquisition: of the moment in which it shone and dazzled and filled their minds with beauty before it too was inducted into the dirtying circuits of ordinary life. Old ice, new snow. Cats. A monkey. Fishing. Wild buffalo. The sheer poetry in musing on Cadillacs That haven’t been built yet. The chastening effect Of the doctor’s fingers.40

In one area of Carver’s work, then, cars are presented as makeshift and precariously private surrogate homes to which inept and dysfunctional men retreat when responsibilities wear them down or the women in their life get wise to whatever it is they have been up to. But another field of Carver’s work grasps in these seedy and decaying spaces lingering evidence of their original and prelapsarian identity as “really good cars,” the stuff of “sheer poetry,” in the process revealing that this beauty was indeed always vulnerable, tantalizing, powerless before even the gentlest forms of touch. As a result the worn and domestic cars of Carver’s work not only endure slow

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mechanical decline, the rust, the scratches, and the decay of parts familiar to all drivers. This decline also seems to compound, and to conjure tortuously prolonged echoes of, the original and immediate decline that occurred at the ugly moment in which this or that protagonist first turned the key in the ignition. It is as though cars could exist in two dimensions, at once mythic and used, the fall of the latter state seeming all the sharper in its ability to issue a permanent and unignorable reminder of all that it once was: gleaming, untouched, full of tantalizing potential. The fraught relationship between new cars and their long postlapsarian afterlife, although evident in numerous Carver stories, turns into an explicit concern in his sixth story “Are these actual miles?” In this story of financial ruin, a couple, Leo and Toni, have spent all they had and much they did not, and now, having hoped that bankruptcy would postpone the need to settle their outstanding debts, find that it will not. Although their sports car will soon seem an important character in the story, Carver begins by focusing on their past gorging on packaging and smaller goods: Leo and Toni still had furniture. Leo and Toni had furniture and Toni and the kids had clothes. Those things were exempt. . . . What else did they have? This and that, nothing mainly, stuff that wore out or fell to pieces long ago. But there were some big parties back there, some fine travel. To Reno and Tahoe, at eighty with the top down and the radio playing. Food, that was one of the big items. They gorged on food. He figures thousands on luxury items alone. Toni would go to the grocery and put in everything she saw. ‘I had to do without when I was a kid,’ she says. ‘These kids are not going to do without,’ as if he’d been insisting they should. She joins all the book clubs. ‘We never had books around when I was a kid,’ she says as she tears open the heavy packages. They enroll in the record clubs for something to play on the new stereo. They sign up for it all. Even a pedigreed terrier named Ginger. He paid two hundred and found her run over in the street a week later. They buy what they want. If they can’t pay, they charge. They sign up.41

By any standards Leo and Toni have been weak and greedy. Via a free indirect inhabiting of their voices, however, Carver here extends a sense of understanding to them that in turn enables us to see that their mistake has simply been to avail themselves of the opportunities that US consumerist capitalism has placed before them. Just as the specter of actual want hangs over their lives, so these characters also know that they could never afford the things they bought and never needed them. But the passage also begins to offer an explanation for this incessant and unnecessary consumption. In a sense dramatizing Raymond Williams’s insight that the term consumption implies that we can only “eat” or “burn” the objects in which we take interest, Leo and Toni here approach their reckless purchases as if anticipating that they cannot use and can only abuse them.42 Nervously they tiptoe around their library, ordering books to have “around” rather than to read. On similar grounds they “consume” food, buying it in order to waste it; and they even get a dog whose sudden death would seem a judgment on their failure to appreciate all their other easy, casual acquisitions. Insofar as this becomes explicit in the story, however, it reveals that these loaned purchases all amounted, for them, to tantalizing pleasures. Like the gas pedal in All the King’s Men,

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they were opportunities that they faced every day of their life and that they were meant to overcome and resist in order to test and verify their individual moral worth. In this respect the gas pedal, indeed, might even seem reminiscent of the diner menu in the short story “Fat.” As Kasia Boddy has noted, the eponymous character of this story is one of Carver’s “mundane versions of Flannery O’Connor’s grotesques,” and as such he gives the husband figure Rudy a chance to live up to the impudence suggested in his name.43 The thought of him leads Rudy to reminisce: “I knew a fat guy once, a couple of fat guys, really fat guys, when I was a kid. They were tubbies, my God. I don’t remember their names. Fat, that’s the only name this one kid had.”44 But Rudy’s rudeness does not outrage our narrator but strike her as normal; what vexes her is her own unease, her own disquiet, at the callousness of his insults. It is as though she feels she is wrong in noticing the unpleasantness of the label “fat,” and alone in recognizing the humanity of the customer who must wear this epithet. At the same time, though, these emotional negotiations run alongside, and exist in a curious relationship to, an absurd streak in the story whereby the “fat man” persistently refers to himself in the first-person plural: When I serve his soup, I see the bread has disappeared again. He is just putting the last piece of bread into his mouth. Believe me, he say, we don’t eat like this all the time, he says. And puffs. You’ll have to excuse us, he says. Don’t think a thing about it, please, I say. I like to see a man eat and enjoy himself, I say. I don’t know, he says. I guess that’s what you’d call it. And puffs. He arranges the napkin. Then he picks up his spoon. God, he’s fat! says Leander.45

Carver, in other words, is exposing the power of guilt and temptation of the diner menu. Not only is he revealing that the fat man’s transgression has simply been to follow the menu but he also suggests that there is something compulsive, obsessive, about the incessant disparagement he faces as a result. At odds with his own genteel manner, the other characters’ rudeness about him grows so relentless as to seem, eventually, to offer a pleasure of its own, as if they find validation in the horror they express at his gargantuan, grotesque, body. Their disgust at his body, in consequence, finds a limit to personal freedom, indicating that the choices on the menu perform a symbolic more than a practical function. For if, as Maud Ellmann suggests, the “fear of greed has always haunted” American “prosperity,” the fat man in the diner surely provides a welcome object of common disgust, someone onto whose corpulent frame others might project their own propensity for avarice, overconsumption, and excess.46 In “Are these actual miles?” the goods of US commerce seem to invite customers to enter into acts of violence. Leo and Toni rip into, “tear. . . open,” and “gorge” upon the goods that they so recklessly buy. Packaging seems pristine but intentionally fragile, at once privileging consumers and positioning them as its destroyer. Now the story delves

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deeper into this notion of destructive consumption. Leo tries to restore the sports car back to the original state of newness it possessed when they first bought it. Even as Toni, preparing to meet the car’s potential buyer, spends “two hours on her hair and face” Leo empties “the glove compartment of pencils, matchbooks, Blue Chip stamps” and gives it a valet inside and out. Neither of these attempts to turn the clock back is entirely unsuccessful: Leo feels again his attraction to Toni even as the car’s “red hood and fenders shine.”47 Alongside these possibilities of freshness’s regeneration, however, is Leo’s continuing belief that his “consumption” of either will spell ruination. The close of the story finds him reflecting not only on their past but also, less explicitly, on the potential harmfulness of his gentlest touch: Presently he reaches out his hand and touches her hip. She does not move. He turns on his side and puts his hand on her hip. He runs his fingers over her hip and feels the stretch marks there. They are like roads, and he traces them in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. He remembers waking up the morning after they bought the car, seeing it, there in the drive, in the sun, gleaming.48

It is as though Leo seems to feel that his fingers are the cause of Toni’s stretch marks. His apprehension of disturbing touch, his sense that his sexual love cannot help but destroy his lover, leads him back to the shimmering vision of the car, on its first morning, sitting on the drive. Now Leo feels unworthy, not just of his lover Toni, but of the equally fragile objects of commodification with whom he seems to associate her. He seems to have been placed outside of the world that he thought he had built through his acts of consumption. He seems exiled, somehow, no longer able even to disturb the things of his life.

Hotel Tantalus Everything was automatic. I could sit in the red-leather driver’s seat and make every inch of the car jump, by touching the proper buttons. It was a wonderful machine: Ten grand worth of gimmicks and big-priced Special Effects. The rear-windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond. The white canvas top ran up and down like a roller-coaster. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights & dials & meters that I would never understand — but there was no doubt in my mind I was in a superior machine. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) One of many provocations of The Franchiser, Stanley Elkin’s novel of 1976, is to acclaim the hotel room as an epitome of American cultural myth. Elkin places Ben Flesh, his rich but far too talkative protagonist, into a hotel room and has him name his live franchises. The list soon proves long, ranging from Avon to Burger King among a

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host of more fanciful companies, all of which together persuade Flesh to announce himself “Mister Magic Fingers”: an entrepreneur extraordinaire, blessed with a higher conscious of what makes Americans tick.49 Indeed, the list installs Flesh as a sort of Oz-like figure, a man behind the curtains who operates the machinery that makes America what it is. With more fingers in pies than he has on his hands, Flesh seems to have acquired a kind of higher knowledge, and is elsewhere said to be a fluent speaker of the “Esperanto of simple need,” the secret magician who “made America look like America.”50 These insights soon focus on question of touch—on the encounters of commodity and skin: “You know,” he said, “what we’re talking about here is shapes. . . . I think the cereal box, the film envelope, the salad dressing, packs of cigarettes, cartons they come in, all packages really, the mustard jar, the jelly, the bottle of ketchup and the carton of milk, everything, the pack of gum, the stick, the bag of potato chips, yeah, the bag of potato chips, the, what was I going to say? Yeah.  .  . . Tomatoes in their cardboard and cellophane boxes, the bottle of nail polish with the little brush attached to the cap, tins of shoe polish, right? Loaves of white bread? . . . Decks of cards. Huh? Decks of cards. Wristwatches in their boxes. Three or four bananas with a strip of green tape around the middle and, uh, men’s shirts with those little pins always in the same place and lollipops and the ridges on licorice and, my God, automobiles, airplanes, cuts of meat—Kansas City strip, New York, porterhouse, chuck roasts, chops, cutlets—I mean Jesus, Patty (patties, Patty!), the animals aren’t built that way. Those are just arbitrary shapes. Why isn’t gum like a wafer? Why is it always a stick of gum? Why a bag of potato chips? Why wristwatches? . . . Tubes of toothpaste. Why not a jar of the stuff? Tubes of toothpaste but jars of cold cream. It could have been the other way around, you know. . . Jesus, Patty, do you see? Are you with me on this, Insight Lady?” “What?” “We read shapes. The culture is preliterate!” “You think?” “Sure. I think so. It’s tactile, a blind man’s culture.  .  .  . It’s never been taken for granted that anyone can read!”51

Flesh’s insight into American commercial culture leads him into a series of acute but banal observations about the conventions of packaging and presentation. In the process, as the catalog builds toward its almost anthropological conclusion, Flesh indicates this consumer culture possesses a penchant, even a genius, for parading a kind of “freshness” before us. He indicates that this culture no sooner grants us a seeming exclusive access to these fresh things than it positions us as their destroyer. Flesh’s own hands might not work, for reasons I will explore presently; but this only seems to add to his perceptiveness about what they are really meant to do, about how they might rip, tear, chop, cut, untie, mess up, smear, squeeze, or otherwise disturb sundry bright clean surfaces.

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As Flesh’s condition escalates, his “scleroses multiplying,” it increasingly effects his tactile capacity in particular. His “bad hand” begins to feel “as it were housed in a sandpaper glove,” and as his lover Patty helps him: work his fingers into the proper sheaths of the glove, . . . he could feel nothing in his right hand and was unaware. . . that he had jammed his index and forefinger together with all his strength into a single sheath of the wrangler’s borrowed glove, unaware of this till Patty, Insight Lady that she was, saw the wide salami casing of the jammed hand and helped him with it, splaying his paresthetic fingers that burned if they touched something that was merely warm and turned icy if they touched that which was only cool and could not distinguish textures or else confused them, mistaking the blunt for the sharp, the rough for the smooth, but could feel well enough, when it came right down to it, pain but never pleasure[.]52

The immediate reason for this strange experience is medical: the multiple sclerosis (MS) that builds over the course of the novel. Here and elsewhere, however, Elkin imbues this condition with the force of a metaphor about the culture his novel describes. This description comes only a few pages after Flesh’s account of the beauty and freshness of US packaging, after all, and elsewhere further references to the “sensory” nature of the condition give rise to a further analogy in which it seems likened to an ice cream parlor in which flavors (“fifty Day-Glo colors”) sit in discrete units and the consumer can only play “Jackson Pollock,” scooping “the stuff up” just as MS itself “blitzkriegs the nerves, gives your hair a headache,” until you “think there are splinters in yours and the roof of your mouth has sunburn.”53 MS’s cultural dimension elsewhere seems even more prominent: Flesh talks of it as “a stress disease, . . . fear’s black coffee.”54 The subsequent impression that MS is here being granted excess cultural importance grows as Flesh, above, describes his own skin not just as if it were unfeeling, numb, but also as if it were abrasive. As his condition worsens, his sclerosis multiplying still further, it produces another occurrence of the anti-Midas touch. His hands, certainly, now seem to destroy everything they brush against. For “the curious fact of his civilization,” as Flesh later observes: Was that all intimacies save the ultimate were out of the question. You could fuck but not touch. . . . There were no words save those of proposition.55

Skin here becomes problematic, the awkward frontier between ourselves and the new and the fresh goods around us. The Franchiser places its account of fresh merchandize into close association with the deterioration of Flesh’s skin into sandpaper. As such Flesh’s affirmations of America, his proud descriptions of himself as a “ranger in Cadillac of highway this and Interstate that,” seem a little desperate, never quite escaping the suspicion that this national culture holds some responsibility for his illness. Nonetheless Flesh persists, a little overeagerly coming to apprehend, á la Barthes’s “The New Citroën,” that some commodities offer technological compensations for their original conflation of consumerist use and abuse: “It seems to me, Ben, with all this talk of remission, that you want to live like a man with his bladder empty, to travel light and even weaponless, but be protected

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anyway. It’s interesting, for example, that you have always had all that power equipment in your automobiles. Power steering, and power brakes, Ben, power windows. A power aerial that rises from a hole in the front fender. Oh yes,” she said, “you want to live even emptier-handed than the rest of us.”56

If reminiscent of the jumping car of Fear and Loathing in the Las Vegas, the connection that The Franchiser draws here between a burdened body and the superhuman capacities of the car in fact provide fuller echoes of the dreamlike driving sequences of All the King’s Men. The similarity indicates new forms of technological compensation. For long periods of The Franchiser Flesh more or less lives in his car. A safe but somehow unengaged driver, he almost seems to sit and watch America go by, “feeling good” and finding “U.S. 30. . . just the thing.”57 And more often than not, when he does finally step out of his Cadillac’s bubble, he does so in order to step into another: some motel or hotel room somewhere in America, what Hunter S. Thompson called the kind of “symphony in Formica” that came increasingly to dominate the landscape in the decades leading up to The Franchiser’s publication. These basic elements of the modern US landscape are grasped throughout The Franchiser as real objects of a fantasy of perfect hygiene in which one might expel from the air itself all traces of “dirt, the thin, exiguous human clays, divots, ash and soils, dust devils of being.”58 But Flesh also holds forth on the differences between these two spaces, elaborating on the rubbish in his car in such a way as to draw attention to the disorientating absence of dirt in his hotel life. There’s something for you, if you want to know. There’s no garbage in my life. Except what collects in the car. The torn road map and the Fudgicle wrapper, the silver from chewing gum. But by and large I’m garbageless. I miss it, you know? The maid comes in and makes up the room. The Cokes come from machines in the hall and the dirty dishes go to Room Service. Mail’s a problem. I use the phone. I don’t vote. Not even an absentee franchiser disenfranchised. I file my taxes, of course. I use my accountant’s business address as my domicile. This? Is this what you mean? What you want want? I have neurologists in twenty states, internists in a dozen, dentists in four. (One of my suitcases is just medical records.) There’s same-day service, so laundry’s no problem. Dry cleaning isn’t. But my bowels don’t know what time it is and buying clothes can be tough if there have to be alterations.59

On the one hand, then, The Franchiser depicts the car as an object of the technological sublime that not only tantalizes the consumer but also offers to him or her new capacities of touch as if in compensation. In The Franchiser, indeed, the brilliant newness of a new car—its synthetic and antihuman smell, its unblemished pure black tyres, and its smooth and glassy paintwork—all seem doomed by the usage it invites. Even so, and even as the waste gathering at his feet emblematizes his effect on it in general, Flesh seems content to explore the magic, the inhuman and superhuman noises, lights and other mechanical effects, of its dashboard controls. In the process, for The Franchiser, the fantasies of new car technology come to seem somehow human: scalable, reinforcing, and proportionate to the body itself. Even as he experiences the car as a magnification of his own human capacities, driving faster than he can run,

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sounding his horn louder than he can shout, and wiping water away quicker than he can blink, Flesh’s flesh remains reliable and intact. He fills his ashtray, he leaves mud on the pedals, and he spills his drinks on the upholstery: he remains, in other words, very much in place. The hotel room is another matter. Flesh seems to regard such spaces as less human insofar as they tend to regenerate their newness every day through a set of systematic and deliberate acts of forgetting. In The Franchiser’s portrayal of these corporate territories, indeed, hotel rooms almost seem to aspire to the tranquillity of empty swimming pools, harnessing the latter’s regenerative facility, their ability to recover their lost smoothness, as though these rooms too could regain newness through time alone. But the magic here, in The Franchiser at least, ultimately proves dishonest. It is like buying a new car every day. It is, as Flesh begins to suggest, a way of never having to clean your own toilet, of never having to deal with the impact, the waste trails, of your own body. With the remission of his MS Flesh cuts through this fantasy, exposing it, in a process of disenchantment that leads him, inevitably, to notice for the first time those who have to sweat and toil in order to regenerate the room’s smooth surfaces each day: A maid was making up the room across from his. He let himself in with his key and cleared the motel soap off the bathroom shelves and hid it in his suitcase. . . . “Miss? . . . I don’t seem to have been left any soap.” “No yeah? Take from cart what you need.” “Oh.” He had had the idea she would bring it to him. He made a great to-do about selecting the soaps, strolling about the big canvas wagon as if it were a sweet table or a notions counter, looking into the cartons of matchbooks and the sheaves of treated shoeshine clothes like bundles of fresh dollars in a teller’s drawer. He examined the cutlery of ballpoint pens and poked about among the waxy motel postcards and stationery. “Well,” he said, when the Indian woman came out with a roll of dirty bed linen, “there’s certainly a lot of things you have to remember to give out. All these pens and clothes and”—he looked directly into the woman’s face—“sanitary napkin disposal bags.” “Mnh.” “Oh hey,” he said, “look at that, will you? The sheets.” From where he was standing he could not see the sheets. “All crumpled and soiled. . . . A lot goes on in a motel room, I bet.” “What yeah?” “I say, a lot goes on in a motel room that you and I wouldn’t know about. Or that I wouldn’t. You must see it all though. I mean, if you could only talk I bet you could tell some stories.”60

As it echoes Wild Palms’ observations of the “subterranean” charwomen, The Franchiser here begins to offer us a vision of the hotel as a wipe clean surface. Being exposed here are the hidden processes behind its fantasy of recurring tantalization. The Franchiser draws attention to the obsessive and ultimately self-loathing extent to which the

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assumptions of hotel life demand that all trace of residents be removed from the scene of their inhabitation—and even if they themselves are staying there another night. The Franchiser’s sensitivity to and interest in the operations of beauty thus alert it to the invisible processes that, left unseen, present the hotel room as a kind of ultimate space of perpetual and regenerative alienation. But, on the other hand, and in part as a result of a physical deterioration resulting from his MS, Flesh’s economic predicament has now become such that he is under threat of falling onto the other side of this absolute boundary, joining the staff who serve him in their invisibility. Awaiting him, the novel fears, is either the labor of vaporization or redundancy altogether.

Victims of leisure I did not mind the actual work or the kind of work, but it was the dishonesty and the deception, the flattery and cajolery, the unnatural assumption that worker and diner had no common humanity. It was uncanny. It was inherently and fundamentally wrong. I stood staring and thinking, while the other boys hustled about. Then I noticed one fat hog, feeding at a heavily gilded trough, who could not find his waiter. He beckoned me. It was not his voice, for his mouth was too full. It was his way, his air, his assumption. Thus Caesar ordered his legionaries or Cleopatra her slaves. Dogs recognized the gesture. I did not. He may be beckoning yet for all I know, for something froze within me. I did not look his way again. Then and there I disowned menial service for me and my people. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices within the Veil (1920) All of the texts that I have considered in this chapter from time to time draw attention to the servile and immiserated class at the edges of their fields of vision. As it voices an ethos of rebellion amid narrow circumstance, the Minutemen’s slogan We Jam Econo expresses solidarity not only with the working people of their Californian hometown but, beyond that, with a global proletariat and with all those whom Darkwater once described as the “unskilled offal of a millionaire industrial system.”61 The identification is stated most succinctly in “Corona,” D. Boon’s well-known account of encountering a Mexican woman on the beach who begged him for his empty beer bottle. Here the classical Spanish lines of D. Boon’s guitar playing situate the song in a borderland space from which, without quite surrendering his American vantage point, he looks into the encounter with subaltern experience. As Boon sings of “the injustices of our greed,” and of “the dirt, scarcity and the emptiness of our south,” the operative word, it might seem, is “emptiness”: silent and hungry, this subaltern cannot linger on the beach, but must remove herself as well as Boon’s junked bottle, as she performs the “necessary duties and service which” dominant US culture, in Du Bois’s view, assumes “no real human being ought to do.”62 The political position Boon is thus offering to us is akin to that which Wright sought to explore in his transitional novel Savage Holiday; there too, Wright suggested, the narrative seeks to study a protagonist who “proves unable to take

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advantage of his freedom, to even simply bear it,” because the sheer emptiness of leisure time force him to confront “his feeling of guilt through his acquisition of material wealth.”63 In another track on the album, the Gang of Four-influenced satire “Maybe Partying will Help,” D. Boon moreover reveals that he has a particular focus onto whom he can project such guilt. Subaltern staff of the kind Du Bois once represented are, for him, “victims of my leisure,” the formulation leading Boon to question: “why am I able to waste my energy?” All the King’s Men offers another name for such staff, the ugliest in our language. We hear it as Willie Stark mocks Judge Irwin’s laziness, berating him: “You been sitting back here in this room and nigger boys been single-footing in here bringing you toddies and you been guessing right.”64 We hear it, too, as Jack Burden stares at his empty glass and decides not to clear it away: “Some nigger boy would get it in the morning.”65 Even out of sight these caricatures remain, the movement of their hands preserved in the streaks of “the dust on the furniture” or haunting over a nearby “bellpull.”66 As throughout Black Boy, then, the word that was Richard Wright’s customary title in the first years of his working life here looms up, again, to refer to those who perform the labor of vaporization. In the houses and the hotels of the Jim Crow South these figures, as we have seen, carry out what Du Bois called the “hateful badge of slavery and mediaevalism.”67 Yet The Franchiser suggests that, even if this ugly word has been eradicated from many of the clean surfaces of postmodern US culture, the labor role it once denoted remains. It seems clear that a word by which All the King’s Men marks its failures of human recognition has now been expunged (if not quite completely) from polite or privileged American life. Far less certain, however, is the question of what has followed in its wake. Has empathy been heightened, extended, in step with the banishing of this ugly epithet? Or—as the more pessimistic moments of Double Nickels on the Dime tend to intimate—has it instead led to a new “emptiness,” or invisibility, so total it no longer has need even for abuse?

Conclusion Beyond Fetishism

American Tantalus, then, has offered a series of close or surface readings in which I have focused on the portrayal of purity and touch and on their awkward interaction in US literature and culture. Over the course of these interpretations I have tried to remain focused on the text itself and to steer clear of the kind of symptomatic reading that would seek to complete such material by delving into its external context or by dwelling on its mystifications or modes of repression. Even as I have remained focused on these texts, however, it has, I trust, become apparent that all of the writers who I have thus examined have themselves been profoundly interested in the society they represent, in its dreams and desperations, and above all in its failures of recognition. As such, even while US social reality has remained outside American Tantalus’s explicit purview, its myriad representations in these texts do tend to suggest that this canon as a whole is somehow meditating to an unusual degree on various kinds of tantalization. At the very least, whatever their precise relationship to society itself, these literary texts indicate that postmodernist accounts of elusive desire, from what Tony Tanner once called the backward detective story of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to the overphotographed barn of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), are in fact relatively recent contributions to a long tradition that has never quite let go of its foundational pursuit of an untouchable horizon.1 The sheer accumulation of these impressions has perhaps also suggested that tantalization now seems so paradigmatic, so integral, to this canon as to have established around it a familiar trajectory or narrative arc. Something like what Roland Barthes once called “a symbolic field” organized around “the topological transgressions of [the] body” has here given rise to a set of narrative conventions, even clichés, in which US writers, time and again, no sooner encounter some kind of tantalizing object than they register its evasions or emphasize the labor evaporated in its construction.2 Anyone familiar with this literary canon will also be familiar with the conventions by which (to adapt a phrase George Hutchinson uses to describe Carl Van Vechten) these writers become not just “connoisseur[s] of surfaces” but critics too.3 Heroes of American books, after all, often do yearn for something outside of themselves; and, when they find it, owning or marrying or otherwise getting their hands on the thing they desire, it often can seem, all of a sudden, tainted, its appeal evacuated as if overnight. Nor is it hard to find evidence of this narrative tradition’s penchant for a kind of voyeuristic

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voyeurism, a mode of watching protagonists watch others, or for following nature and observing it as if yearning to join it in its flight from humanity. Other features expressive of a tantalizing rise and fall are just as easy to identify. Junkyards and used car lots loom so large for so many different writers, from Maya Angelou to F. Scott Fitzgerald, that what Cormac McCarthy calls their “tottering columns of tires” and air of “grease and tarpaper and filth” tend to cast a long shadow over even the most glowing or gorgeous car on offer elsewhere in this canon.4 And wonderlands, indeed all manner of sanctuaries, here waste little time before turning violent; and roadtrips never really work; and money is just a curse, a passport to no better world but suburban stultification. Insofar as America’s “true” mission, as David M. Potter once suggested, has not been to spread the word of democracy but the gospel of abundance, its literature has likewise occupied the vanguard of expressing the anxieties such overconsumption can prompt.5 Few other national literatures, certainly, express such consistent and instinctive horror at the simple comforts of financial wealth. And yet as it is hard, even risky, to draw direct historical conclusions from the surface readings of American Tantalus, the question becomes where their significance lies instead. The interpretations that I have brought together in these pages might aid our understanding of some seminal US texts. The notion of the becoming blank that I have here developed in dialogue with Walden, for example, might sharpen our sensitivity to the nullification of selfhood and the freezing of nature that seem so interlinked throughout Anne Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) and William W. Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers (1976); it might deepen our sense of the posthuman, postapocalyptic power of Rachel Carson’s central organizing motif in Silent Spring (1962); and it might help us to read N. Scott Momaday’s extraordinary House Made of Dawn (1969) as a critique of nothing less than the alienating logic of Eurocentric aesthetics. But the moment of looking up from these texts, of looking again at the world around us, cannot be postponed forever. Despite the importance of textual analysis, and however much we might agree with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus that it presents “the best way to move past the impasses created by what has become an excessive emphasis on ideological demystification,” even this critical mode must always carry a social aspect insofar as it consists in the texts themselves.6 Surface reading as a practice in itself obliges us not only to ask what literature might mean but also why this might matter. In this conclusion I am going to try to meet this obligation by lighting out for a more theoretical territory. Specifically, I am going to relate the corruptions of touch that grow so paradigmatic in US literature to another theory of purity and consumption: the concept of commodity fetishism that Karl Marx laid out straight after the difficult foundational chapters of Capital (1867). This new direction, to some, might seem to generate little more than a new set of problems. Anyone who has waded through even a fraction of the leftist or poststructuralist reflections on commodity fetishism that have been inflicted on the world since 1945 might struggle to see why we should need another scholarly examination of this noted Marxist concept. I here persist, however, because I believe impressions harvested over the course of American Tantalus can together contend anew with this powerful idea.

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Specifically, I want to suggest here that, even after the spirited cultural reimagining of Capital that Jacques Derrida mounted in Specters of Marx (1993), we have continued to see the fetishized commodity in classic Marxist terms: as a structural symptom of the broader economic forces at work in our global order. A sense of the authority, indeed of the sheer inevitability, of the commodity’s manifold alienations has remained strong, and not only for Occupy and other youth movements but even among the billionaires of Davos. Capital’s opinion still stands: linen and coats would seem to remain, in the “language of commodities,” as “like as two peas.”7 Many on right and left alike, that is, continue to agree with Fredric Jameson’s belief that, under this system, it “does not matter how [a given commodity] was produced, nor even how long its production took,” and for the simple reason that “reification (‘effacement of all the traces of production of the object’) is in fact the norm of all commodity production.”8 Against this odd coalition of right and left, however, major US narratives lodge a critical, liberal counterview. Never for a second do any of these works accept that the origins of commodities are at all irrelevant or that the people who create them have no voices and no prospect of representing themselves. Crucially, instead, they place the fetishized commodity onto an established continuum of tantalization. Naively, perhaps—but perhaps radically too—they liken the commodity to a series of other objects of desire. They call attention to the cultural aspect of all its brutal displacements. This is not unimportant. Even at its most open and imaginative Marxism places the fetishized commodity at the epicentre of life under capitalism, and regards other fantasies of alienated purity as aftershocks of this central rupture. “The socially lauded aesthetic need for nature,” not only in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) but a host of less adventurous Marxist criticism, tends to be framed as the commodification of wildness and attributed, ultimately, to capital’s production of selfish or sovereign notions of bourgeois individuality.9 Pursuits of virginal bodies, patriarchal transformations of sex into desecration, likewise seem, for many, to demand an underlying Marxist explanation.10 US narratives, however, often take another view. Fetishism becomes here—and not least in those moments on which American Tantalus has dwelt—the stuff of storytelling. Grasping it as a human as much as an economic process, US narratives time after time call attention to those practical actions or choices that banish commodities from their point of production and turn them into what Marx called “mere depositories of value.”11 A consequence of this narrative activity is to suggest that, like the imperial myth of virgin lands and the sexual myth of virgin bodies, commodification is not altogether economic. It is to recognize that some commodities are more commodified than others—that by their planning and design some actively intensify the fetishizing effect, harnessing or mimicking natural tantalization even as they hide from view the human activities that produce them. Commodities in this literature, in other words, rarely “just” happen. They rarely just arise, symptomatically and in a manner beyond human control, from the underlying socioeconomic structure. Time after time they are created, brought into existence, by conscious human deed. They are grasped, in other words, much as other US writings grasp the wilderness: as the result of a refusal to acknowledge the humanity before our eyes.

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The electric spark In the whole apartment there is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, with a half inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere. In the middle of the salon there is a large old-fashioned table covered with an oilcloth, and on it there lie manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, the rags and tatters of his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash—in a word, everything topsy-turvy, and all on the same table. A seller of second-hand goods would be ashamed to give away such a remarkable collection of odds and ends. When you enter Marx’s room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so much that for a moment you seem to be groping about in a cavern, but gradually, as you grow accustomed to the fog, you can make out certain objects which distinguish themselves from the surrounding haze. Everything is dirty, and covered with dust, so that to sit down becomes a thoroughly dangerous business. Here is a chair with only three legs, on another chair the children are playing at cooking—this chair happens to have four legs. This is the one which is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away; and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers. Report of Prussian Government Agent (1850) From the summer of 1849, after he and his family gained political refuge in London, Karl Marx seemed to many a classic example of a reclusive intellectual. Portraits penned by foreign agents and fellow revolutionaries alike often placed him in his Soho study and implied that he rarely left it. The picture they painted, once they get through the fog of his beloved cigars, was often of a bookworm and a hermit, “almost a recluse,” a man without outside or cultural interests.12 To many he seemed, simply, someone who would rather spend his time thinking about ideas than talking with other people. It is not hard to see where this impression came from. In his first years in London Marx did work incredibly hard, and throughout his life he did like to cast himself as an isolated bohemian, even as a somewhat poetic figure. Often he complained of the toll that writing Capital took on his health. Of his cigars he claimed, in later life, that all the royalties he saw from his masterpiece did not even cover the cost of those he smoked when writing it.13 But this portrait of a man glued to his desk was, in the end, only half true. Straight after his arrival in London Marx in fact interspersed his long sessions of intellectual work with local relief efforts and with political engagements that carried him far and wide around the city.14 Often he took leave of family responsibility, turned his back on Dean Street, and wandered in and out of the major thoroughfares of his new hometown. Official meetings of the Communist League for many years took place in Great Windmill Street two miles north in Islington, other radical engagements were held anywhere except the city’s most affluent districts, and evening gatherings of “The Synagogue,” the entourage that soon gathered around Marx himself, happened more or less wherever it could.15 By his second summer in London, after a fellow refugee

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had secured for him a pass for entry to the reading room of the British Museum, Marx was walking the city almost as much as his near contemporary Charles Dickens.16 An average “working day” for him, indeed, involved leaving Soho behind, stepping out onto some splendid shop-filled street; from there diving into the squalor of Seven Dials, and coming up for air amidst what George Gissing called “the valley of the shadow of books” of the reading room at Holborn.17 One afternoon in July, only weeks after embarking on his work at the museum, Marx seems to have taken a short detour home, strolling onto neighboring Regent Street, then by far London’s grandest shopping district. It is tempting to picture him—to imagine Marx walking along, mulling over his latest economic formula, his scruffy beard, cigar stains, and twice-pawned overcoat giving him the look of one of Gogol’s sourer clerks. And yet to conjure up such a picture is perhaps to indulge in a little romanticizing of our own. For it soon transpired that Marx fit into neither this mould nor that of Walter Benjamin’s celebrated account of the urban flâneur. The author of Capital, far from seeming lost or alienated from the “atmosphere of complete leisure” in which he found himself, seems instead to have fallen in line with the other window shoppers walking along Regent Street.18 Later accounts instead suggest he let them lead him, lingered where they lingered, and paused, with them, before one window display in particular. As his friend and ally Wilhelm Liebknecht later recollectedː King Steam, who had revolutionized the world in the previous century, was coming to the end of his reign and another incomparably greater revolutionary would take his place, the electric spark. And then Marx related to me, full of fire and enthusiasm, that for the last few days there had been exhibited [sic] in Regent Street the model of an electrical machine which pulled a railway train. “Now the problem has been solved—the consequences are unpredictable. The economic revolution must be followed by a political one, for the latter is only the expression of the former.” In the manner in which Marx discussed this progress of science and mechanics, his conception of the world, and especially what has been termed the materialist conception of history, was so clearly expressed that certain doubts which I had hitherto still maintained melted away like snow in the sunshine of spring. That evening I never came home at all—we spoke and joked and drank until late the next morning, and the sun was already high in the heavens when I went to bed. But for a long time I could not sleep. My head was too full of everything that I had heard. At length, my thoughts, roving hither and thither, drove me out again and I hurried to Regent Street in order to see the model, this modern Trojan Horse, which bourgeois society in suicidal fascination had introduced with rejoicing into their Ilion, as once the Trojan men and women had done with theirs, and which would bring about their certain destruction: the day will come when holy Ilion will be destroyed. A dense crowd indicated the show window behind which the model was exhibited. I pressed my way through and, correctly enough, there was the locomotive and the train—and both of them were running merrily round. It was then the beginning of July 1850.19

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The display that proved so captivating to Marx and his fellow window shoppers was very much a product of the industrial age. Belonging to “the recreational life of London crowds,” it let them indulge in what Andrew H. Miller has characterized as the great contemporary “pleasure of consuming displays.”20 At the same time, however, the object at the centre of this particular “display,” the wonderful train itself, clearly looked beyond the now of its contemporary moment. Victorian ideas of commercial spectatorship, Miller suggests, were culminating in the Crystal Palace then being built, in readiness for the Great Exhibition of 1851, in nearby Hyde Park. But the electric train chasing its tail in Regent Street foretold a more distant future. Not until 1900 and the imperial jamboree known as the Paris Exposition would these kinds of new technologies seem so central to an official international event. Among the latter’s fin de siècle crowds, as Caroline Blyth has noted, “the biggest turn-of-the-century spectacle of all” would prove to be the real-life “phantasmagoria” of electricity itself, and not least when it powered a train that “could ‘magically’ encompass the whole site (277 acres) in just twenty minutes.”21 It was in this exposition’s “great hall of dynamos,” after all, that Henry Adams submitted to “an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith,” absorbing a new technology that he associated not only with the rise of modernity but also its eventual, and doubtless painful, decline.22 The future visions of this hall, indeed, confirmed Adams in what David E. Nye has called a belief in “the universe as a vast machine whose fixed supply of energy would eventually dissipate according to the law of entropy. It seemed probable that the ultimate result of exploiting new energy systems would be the apocalyptic end of history itself.”23 Marx and Liebknecht might have taken a radically different view of the future collapse of bourgeois society. Upon seeing the dazzling window display on Regent Street, however, they evidently anticipated Adams’s feeling, part exhilarated and part anxious, of some future chaos rumbling toward them. Certainly there could be no doubting the newness of this machine. Gone here were the smoke and steam that continued to pour out of the innumerable engines then working away across industrial London. Instead, and before the rise of mechanical toys later in the century, it announced what Bill Brown has called “machine discipline and the atomization of the body.”24 In its (relative) cleanliness, indeed, Marx here hopes to sow another revolution, a dialectical breakthrough that might yet lead the world beyond the reliance on food and fuel that had hitherto chained the proletarian to the industrial machinery that she served. At the least, judging from Liebknecht’s account, this spectacle transported Marx back to the tropes of self-sabotage first found in his and Frederic Engels’s recent Communist Manifesto (1848). For his apparent way of seeing this toy train—his view of it as a Trojan Horse that spelt doom for capitalism, and presumably because it harnessed what Marx elsewhere thought of as the “gratuitous” power of “electricity”—effectively pressed it into the arms of the Manifesto’s leading trope.25 It turned it into further proof that the bourgeoisie keep forging “the weapons that bring death to itself.”26 Clearly, as he delivered such broadsides, Marx was getting carried away. As usable electricity would in time prove another source of what Richard Godden terms corporate criminality, and thus anything but free, so Liebknecht’s report of their

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conversation interweaves optimism and dogmatic hypostases to curious effect.27 Even amidst his excitement, however, Marx could still apparently intuit that this new electric application had also brought to perfection a new commercial aesthetic. Not only is the train running around cleanly and smoothly, and with little apparent need for human supervision. It has also fallen from the sky. Maybe it does not quite herald the movement from “a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape” that Roland Barthes espied in the “superlative object” of the Citroën D-S.28 But removed from the crowd, oblivious as it whirrs “merrily around,” the train remains a sort of miniature portent of that itself portentous car. Handheld but technologically sublime, it seems another object marked by “a perfection and an absence of origin,” the storefront glass as well as its own technological novelty isolating it from the known circuits of Victorian life.29 “Inevitable” as a harbinger of history’s coming stages, it carries in its structures what Theodor Adorno called the “authority of the new.”30 It would seem, in short, a commodity par excellence. Soon afterward, Liebknecht goes on to tell us, Marx delivered a series of Communist lectures in which he “already unfolded completely the basic features of his system as it is to be found in Capital.”31 Biographers confirm that many of the key economic theories that Marx later brought to a definitive form originated in these early years in London. It is hard to say exactly when Marx first conceived Capital’s leading metaphors or wrote its more seminal passages. But a famous example of the latter, his account of commodity fetishism, does seem to have taken shape during the 1850s.32 It bore the traces not only of Marx’s long library sessions but also of the excursions around the city that were another important feature of this period of his life. A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for example, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “tableturning” ever was.33

Famously, as he began his account of commodity fetishism, Marx turned to just about the simplest thing he could think of. Capital focuses on a rudimentary table, and perhaps it does so because, unlike a rudimentary pen, say, or even a rudimentary chair, this universal object has undergone no significant material adjustment as a result of capitalism’s global ascent. The drama of this table’s “metaphysical” transformation

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certainly seems heightened by its lack of any visible or physical corollary. The simple fact that these objects remain unchanged—the simple fact that Marx’s tables are like our tables and that our tables are like the tables of antiquity itself—makes their modern transformation into commodities seem all the more striking, all the more epochal, in effect. The fetishism that would flatten them, leaving them as identical to “linen and coats” as “linen and coats” are to each other, in turn seems all the more removed from everyday life, an effect of neither culture nor design. Here such transformations occur economically, in the deeper structures that for Marx also generate individualism itself. Social structures force even the most timeless of objects into the commodity’s single mold. Yet the table, in the throes of its transformation, acquires a life of its own. As if from no earthly source it starts to move of its own accord. In turn, and for all the simplicity of its design, Capital’s table becomes another of the inanimate objects on which Marx can indulge his lifelong fondness for personifying rhetoric. The resulting imagery brings Frankenstein (1818) to mind. The scientific interest in galvanism and the enlivening powers of electricity as well as the central Gothic conceit of Mary Shelley’s novel find echoes as Marx has his table, too, “step. . . forth” and turn into “something transcendent.”34 Even as “grotesque ideas” continue to grow out of its wooden mind, however, the awakening, or galvanic electrification, of the table, as a process, still stands apart from the premodern and nonconducting material on which it unfolds. Commodification can move inanimate objects, but only insofar as it takes possession of them. It remains something done to the table even as the table does it. These tables hide little from us. They neither cultivate the “neomania” that Barthes discovered in the Citroën D-S nor conceal their stages of composition.35 Aesthetic appraisals of such objects, as Matthew Crawford and Richard Sennett have attested, in fact often latch onto the quality of their dovetail joints among those other features that declare their manner of construction; indeed the “rapt, dynamic immobility” of Cash’s carpentry work, at key moments of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), can seem itself a bulwark against the plastic inhuman commodities on offer in modern Jefferson.36 Capital, though, exploits the transparently human fabrication of such tables in order to exacerbate the incongruity between them and their facility for thinking “grotesque” thoughts. All of the malign aspects of the commodity as a form—its deracination, its apparent falling from the sky, its sham immaculacy, its makeshift tantalizations—here seem diametrically opposed to the crafted skin it happens for now to wear. Inasmuch as it evokes Frankenstein, the table’s galvanic coming to life absolves it of all responsibility for its metamorphosis. The undeclared electrocution of Capital’s table only fixes fetishism more firmly in the socioeconomic plane. Marx’s simple table, then, seems all that the electric train is not. It is simple and universal, and it seems somehow to transcend that surging force of historical progress that first made the railway possible and then produced electrified versions of it. Even as he focuses on an object so radically unlike such toy trains, however, other aspects of the “consuming display” that Marx came across down Regent Street still seem to

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shape his famous account of commodity fetishism. This is especially so as Capital considers how: products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.37

Leaving the table behind, Capital plunders another metaphoric field. As it explores a new optic territory, it suggests that the commodity upsets the way in which we ordinarily see the world around us. The effects of fetishism bring about a silent but insurmountable interruption. All we can see, under its subtle alienations, remains “perceptible” but becomes “imperceptible,” at once, and almost synesthesiatically, available and unavailable. Now Marx links this paradox to primitive irrationality, and likens fetishism to what he called the “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.” His very coinage fetishism, as W. J. T. Mitchell has suggested, in fact connoted the “savage” idolatry most Europeans then associated with the indigenous peoples fallen under imperial rule.38 A far better metaphor, however, lay close at hand. Many of the talismans and charms that James Cook had brought back from the South Seas might have remained under glass display only a few doors down from Marx’s daily place of study. But what Catherine Waters has described as “the ambiguous function” of such glass had found a more natural home, outside the British Museum’s neoclassical walls, amid the busy life of London itself.39 Out there, in street after street, countless screens were shielding and revealing countless goods, making them by turns “perceptible” and “imperceptible,” and otherwise enacting the fetishizing paradox whereby, as Anna Woodhouse suggests, glass at once “figures. . . separation” and “enacts. . . connection.”40 In The Secret Agent (1907), a novel he set during the 1880s in the vicinity of Marx’s old Dean Street home, Joseph Conrad enlarges on these inconsistencies. Glass here acts as a “fragile film” stretched against the “cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable” world

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outside.41 But it also, in the commercial context, figures consumerism itself as spectral defilement: The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong—rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake or for the sake of the customers. These customers were either very young men, who hung about the window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more mature age, but looking generally as if they were not in funds. . .. With their hands plunged deep in the side pockets of their coats, they dodged in sideways, one shoulder first, as if afraid to start the bell going.42

Literary and firsthand reports thus suggest that on Regent Street itself, or down sidestreets leading off from its clean and opulent delights, crowds in contemporary London often gathered together, pausing to gaze through glass and in wonder upon a variety of magical and isolated objects. Marx despite himself, as we have seen, was liable to join such crowds, and the final pages of Capital’s third chapter, quite apart from anything else, amount to a kind of quest, or investigation, into his own experiences of such commodifying idolatry. And yet it is a quest hampered by the fact that it is a translation too. For, throughout “The Fetishism of Commodities,” Marx remains reluctant to come out with it and name any of the social details or paraphernalia that had attended his own notable encounters with fetishized commodities. Although he shows us, in Richard Godden’s words, that “fetishes are affective because formed through an intense disavowal of that which they displace,” he also wants to think away such intensity, converting such disavowal’s enactment into a symptomatic and structural aftereffect.43 So he locks himself in a field of abstraction and refuses to leave it. He generalizes and he allegorizes, and his analysis settles down only after it has found counterparts for these details from the Gothic, from the primitive exotic, and from other generic realms. Trains become tables, floating toward us as if out some timeless ether. Electrification reverts to its former demonic reputation and seems again a sort of conjuring trick. Even window glass here comes to seem conspicuous by its absence. Eventually it even becomes unmentionable, and not least because, as a metaphor for the commodity’s “perceptible” imperceptibility, it seems so much more exact and fitting than Marx’s own rather predictable “recourse” to his perennial bugbear of religious irrationality. All of these translations are a measure of Marx’s determination to fix our attention on the economic field. Outstripping every other consideration here is his desire to preempt those liberal or bourgeois readers who would agree commodity fetishism is a “problem” but who might want to put it down to the gullibility of individual consumers, to the Pecksniffian cunning of individual capitalists, or to some other human failure

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you might yet legislate against or reform. Sympathy and sentimentality as such look to Marx here like something of a trap. To avoid them he makes no mention of glass, of oil lamps, of shopfitting’s growth as a profession in the Victorian age, or of the clean unused surfaces, the technological leaps forward, or any of the other cultural catalysts of fetishism that he saw for himself on Regent Street. On no account can he reflect on how at twilight you can see “lights springing up brilliantly in the shop windows,” as Pip does down Cheapside in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860).44 The human planning suggested in the “brilliantly-lighted toy-shop window” that make Jenny’s dolls so “dazzling” in Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) likewise threaten his ideological project.45 Such examples of conscious commodification, like “the two gas jets” that are their pitiful echo in Conrad’s sordid shop, belong to another jigsaw; nowhere will they fit Capital’s materialist view of history. And so they melt into air, providing us with another example of what Stuart Hall once called “the resounding silences, . . . the great evasions of Marxism.” Even here, however, a caveat might seem necessary. For as Hall continues, adding that culture as a whole was something “that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand,” perhaps we might feel this further criticism is in fact unfair.46 No one can doubt that by living in London, and by devoting so much intellectual energy to the window displays of its modern shops, Marx arrived at a unique understanding of the commodity in cultural terms. His real limitation, the struggle he never won, lay in his failure to assimilate this new knowledge fully into his economic programme.

The Design of Tartarus Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy vail of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood spell-bound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes—there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica. Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1856) We have to forge consanguinity. . .. I got involved in cultural studies because I didn’t think life was purely economically determined. I took all this up as an argument

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with economic determinism. I lived my life as an argument with Marxism, and with neoliberalism. Their point is that, in the last instance, the economy will determine it. But when is the last instance? If you’re analysing the present conjuncture, you can’t start and end at the economy. It is necessary, but insufficient. Stuart Hall in interview, The Guardian, February 11, 2012

Marxist criticism since 1867 has very much upheld the intellectual assumptions that led Capital to launch its theory of fetishism by focusing on such a simple and preindustrial object. In fact the latter’s determination to attribute fetishism wholly to the economy and only incidentally or symptomatically to cultural forces has since remained a cornerstone of Marxism in general. This ideological tradition has always required its followers to subscribe to the belief that the economic base created our world and that religion, culture, and everything else in our superstructure are only echoes of its supreme and primary power. But it is also apparent that, at key junctures in the life of this tradition, a number of leading Marxist critics have grown uneasy with Capital’s economic prioritization. Characteristically their work upholds Marxism, but does so by trying to finesse or otherwise offset its foundational demotion of cultural matters. Fredric Jameson’s Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), for example, suggests that the cleaving of the economic base and the cultural superstructure long associated with orthodox Marxism in large part results from faulty translation. “Überbau and Basis, . . . which so often suggest to people a house and its foundations, seem in fact to have been railroad terminology and to have designated the rolling stock and the rails respectively, something that suddenly jolts us into a rather different picture of ideology and its effects.”47 Rather as he elsewhere speaks up for Louis Althusser by insisting on his feeling for the complex and ungovernable power of culture, so Jameson here offers a defence of his beloved Capital, insisting that its analysis, too, is neither as rigid nor programmatic as its opponents claim.48 Others have been quicker to accept that Marx himself initiated Marxism’s long-standing denigration of culture. They have felt that, notwithstanding the rights and wrongs of their translation into English, basis and überbau do dichotomize human life too sharply, too disproportionately; and they have consequently identified in these keywords a point of weakness in the Marxist system that they have sought to fix. Many would argue that, of all these accommodations, the most important remains the concept of hegemony that Antonio Gramsci developed while in prison on charges of political subversion in fascist Italy. Certainly, the Prison Notebooks (1929–35) that in time emerged from this incarceration have inspired much later criticism, including a Raymond Williams essay that would in turn be saluted by Edward Said among a host of other younger scholars.49 As Williams reflected: It is Gramsci’s great contribution to have emphasized hegemony, and also to have understood it at a depth which is, I think, rare. For hegemony supposes the existence of something which is truly total, which is not merely secondary or superstructural, like the weak sense of ideology, but which is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway, that it corresponds to the reality of social experience very much more clearly than any

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notions derived from the formula of base and superstructure. For if ideology were merely some abstract, imposed set of notions, if our social and political and cultural ideas and assumptions were merely the result of specific manipulation, of a kind of overt training which might be simply ended or withdrawn, then the society would be very much easier to move and to change than in practice it has ever been or is. This notion of hegemony as deeply saturating the consciousness of a society seems to me to be fundamental. And hegemony has the advantage over general notions of totality, that it at the same time emphasizes the facts of domination.50

Through his concept of hegemony, as Williams suggests, Gramsci sought to underscore the critical and complex nature of cultural forms as well as their saturation in “the facts of domination.” The result, for many, was a kind of cultural reconfiguration of the Marxist project, and one that permitted a fuller acknowledgment of those deliberate acts of commodification, from the strategic use of glass in shops to the exclusive access long promised by advertising spiels, that seem so absent in Capital itself. In this respect at least Gramsci’s work looks ahead to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Another cultural defence of Marxism, Derrida’s work of 1993 in fact tries to excavate from Capital’s economic critiques all manner of hidden or covert profundities. Appalled by the neoliberal triumphalism of the post-Cold War moment, Specters of Marx’s belated defence of Marxism relies heavily on Capital’s illumination of a commodity fetishism now on the cusp of growing stronger still. As Derrida suggests: The commodity table, the headstrong dog, the wooden head faces up, we recall, to all other commodities. The market is a front, a front among fronts, a confrontation. Commodities have business with other commodities, these hardheaded specters have commerce among themselves. . .. That is what makes them dance. So it appears. But if the “mystical character” of the commodity, if the “enigmatic character” of the product of labor as commodity is born of “the social form” of labor, one must still analyse what is mysterious or secret about this process, and what the secret of the commodity form is.51

Many critics working today are too reverential of Derrida. Keen to flaunt their own theoretical credentials, some are too quick to forgive him his political vacillations, too ready to see in the opacity of his prose automatic proof of its seriousness and depth.52 The idea that someone so open and thoughtful as Edward Said might once have considered him “a quietist Heideggerian type” now seems difficult to recall.53 For all that we must remember to critique Derrida, however, it remains hard not to warm to Specters of Marx’s gleeful anachronisms, harder still to deny that its excursions into Capital break new ground. No doubt this is not unconnected to the fact that Derrida’s heresies soon start to run both ways. Sharply Specters of Marx departs from the new neoliberal settlement; but it also dwells on cultural processes Capital keeps hidden from view, Derrida’s curiosity latching, increasingly, onto commodification as a felt operation. In a powerful appraisal published shortly after Specters of Marx’s publication Jameson went so far as to praise its “remarkable excursus” on fetishism for allowing “the table” to “dance. . . again” for us “as it did for the first readers of Marx.”54 But the truth of the matter is that Derrida’s “excursus” accomplishes far more than breathe

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new life into an old book. Although it ultimately defers to Capital, it radically enlarges on the cultural catalysts of commodity fetishism that Marx perceived but never quite wove into his economic program. Subsequently a paradox becomes apparent. To some Derrida can now seem something of a pioneer of surface reading, a critic surpassing all others in his fidelity to the texts that captured his attention. But as Specters of Marx lingers over what Hall called Marx’s “resounding silences,” exploring his unplanned allusions, Shakespearean echoes and Freudian slips, so Derrida would seem to be practising a little psychoanalysis of his own; pondering symptoms more than surfaces, he here verges on the fantasy of consummating Capital solo, of turning it into the kind of book he wants it to be, and of doing so by exhuming ideas he claims to have found buried in it. In the “excursus” on commodity fetishism that Jameson singled out for praise, for example, Derrida no sooner discovers the gap between this economic process and its occurrence as a cultural event than he forces it apart, treating it as if it were a space that Marx had left in his original text precisely so that Specters of Marx could fill it. In consequence he insists that there was never anything idle or incidental about Capital’s allusions to phantasmagoria or mist. Such literary and religious references, for him, instead reveal the primary importance that culture always assumed in Marx’s understanding of the fetishism effect. All only confirm that the autonomous “dance” of commodities has never resulted from economic forces alone. Subsequent theatrical images, and allusions to stage lighting in particular, only draw out a perspective Derrida believes he has unlocked from Capital itself. It takes us back once again to some theatrical intrigue: mechanical ruse. . . or mistaking a person, petition upon the perverse intervention of a prompter. . .; substitution of actors or characters. Here the theatrical quid pro quo stems from an abnormal play of mirrors. There is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role, since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find themselves in it. Men no longer recognize in it the social character of their own labor.55

Thus Specters of Marx edges closer to the anecdotal or idiomatic accounts of tantalizing operations that seem so important to the US canon. Like his later observation that such a “stage. . . withdraws from our blind eyes at the moment we open them,” Derrida here adopts an almost Melvillean language, his phrasing recalling those many moments in which Moby-Dick or Pierre anticipate desire’s imminent evasions.56 But Specters of Marx’s overall design ensures that this remains an awkward echo. Sometimes, to be sure, Derrida seems far more open than Marx to the idea that commodity fetishism belongs on the same continuum as other tantalizing effects. Nowhere does Specters of Marx resist the possibility that some of the latter, from the misogynistic pursuit of virginity to the imperial fantasy of new uninhabited land, have at times seemed to fade from our culture, and not as a result of revolution or violence, but because of new awakenings, enfranchisements secured in the name of socialist or democratic progress.57 But Specters of Marx’s overriding objective, its desire to show that the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism remains pivotal to a

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globalizing neoliberalism now “arrived at the plenitude of its ideal,” soon puts paid to these promising possibilities.58 Locking himself in an explicatory mode, Derrida’s ultimate aim is to intensify positions he says exist in Capital itself. Even after his work has strayed into a Melvillean realm, Derrida ultimately confines himself to Capital’s original suite of abstractions. Later on in his memoirs, long after his account of the electric train whirring away in the window of a Regent Street shop, Liebknecht recalls another incident of note. This one was a little less unexpected. With others he and Marx hatched a plan to spend an evening taking a drink in every saloon on the long route from Oxford Street to the Hampstead Road. Although “a very difficult task, . . . considering the enormous number of saloons in that part of the city,” the group of political exiles rose to the challenge, presently finding their way into a busy establishment at the end of the Tottenham Court Road. Liebknecht recalls that, after one of their drinking friends made a disparaging reference to “English cant, . . . fists were brandished in the air.” He and his friends chose “the better part of valour and managed to effect, not wholly without difficulty, a passably dignified retreat.” Evidently, however, the fresh air in which they then found themselves failed to sober them up: We started on a double quick march, until Edgar Bauer stumbled over a heap of paving stones. “Harrah, an idea!” And in memory of mad student’s pranks he picked up a stone, and Clash! Clatter! a gas lantern went flying into splinters. Nonsense is contagious—Marx and I did not stay behind, and we broke four or five street lamps—it was, perhaps, 2 o’clock in the morning and the streets were deserted in consequence. But the noise nevertheless attracted the attention of a policeman who with quick resolution gave the signal to his colleagues on the same beat. And immediately counter-signals were given. The position became critical. Happily we took in the situation at a glance; and happily we knew the locality. We raced ahead, three or four policemen some distance behind us. . .. After the wild chase had lasted some minutes, we succeeded in turning into a side street and there running through an alley—a back yard between two streets—whence we came behind the policemen who lost the trail. We were safe.59

Marx was neither a demagogue nor a thug. His writings remain indispensable to anyone hoping to gain an understanding of the insidious effects of the commodity fetishism that remains so potent in our culture. Earlier experiences as well as Capital’s early chapters, moreover, strongly indicate Marx himself would have had more than an inkling as to why, after they had found themselves in the heartlands of commodity fetishism at the dead of night, he and his friends reacted to the lambent glow of these street lamps by smashing them apart. Literary genres that Marx chose to inhabit, however, made it more or less impossible for him to explore such personal knowledge or otherwise voyage into his own consumerist life. Maybe he could already anticipate Anna Woodhouse’s insight that, because it invites touch only to prevent touch, “the glass-filtered gaze” often leads to ideas of “violence and potential criminality.”60 Even if he had wanted to explore such personal experiences, however, the public aims of his writing left him with precious little room in which to do so.

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The US literature that I have surveyed over the course of American Tantalus suffers no such restriction. Full of tantalizing effects, it dwells at considerable length on incidents in which people either struggle to come to terms with pure and smooth objects, or elect, all of a sudden, to break them to pieces. Such violent acts, furthermore, often lead to revelations or reminders that the object itself was never quite so pure as it seemed. On the threshold of Mary Dalton’s bedroom, for example, Bigger intuits (and Native Son emphasizes) that he cannot cross it without desecrating it; a toxic blend of sexist and racist logic ensures that even his most tender touch now carries brutal force. In many of Richard Ford’s stories, likewise, characters lament their exclusion from sublime scenes of nature, again seizing on an epistemological bind in which beauty and touch are mutually exclusive and even the lightest enactments of the latter carry all the power of gunfire. Even Thoreau and James, as we have seen, ponder a cultural epistemology in which not just commodities but coveted objects of all kinds are cherished precisely for their notional freedom from a touch thus understood in terms of automatic ruination. Vandalizing a few lamps up west late at night might seem quite unseemly, and indeed a little silly, in comparison with these literary reflections. On the morning after the night before, however, Marx lacked any comparable forum in which to ponder such drunken desecrations of touch. Postwar US literature and culture has played a significant role in the ongoing repudiation of the displacements and denigrations of humanity that once accompanied the mythologizing of the American wilderness. High levels of poverty and relatively low rates of life expectancy among Native Americans confirm that such repudiation remains of limited scope and has resulted in little material improvement for those whose ancestors were once caught in the path of this devastating imperial fantasy. But perhaps it is fair to say that, even while Marilynne Robinson urges us to “surrender the idea of wilderness,” and to begin to “accept the fact that the consequences of human presence in the world are universal and ineluctable,” many today have already done just this.61 Many, at least since Roderick Nash published his influential critique Wilderness and the American Mind in 1967, have recognized that manifest destiny overall and Hudson River landscapes in particular constructed far more than they ever represented the emptiness of the US continent. Still more of us, by the time Robinson penned her essay, had come to accept that the colossal pollution event otherwise known as the industrial revolution had heralded the earth’s descent into the Anthropocene.62 Over the same period in which the old wilderness myth has lost its former intellectual respectability and credibility, however, its close relative, the myth of the commodity, has clearly moved in the opposite direction. The year 2014, to global commodity culture, just means business as usual. The poor factory hands who (in Capital’s words) once died from “over-work” as they toiled over “gorgeous dresses for. . . noble ladies” find clear and unmistakeable counterparts in all of those tablet, TV, and smartphone factories in which antisuicide netting, rationed water, and compulsory overtime are now essential disciplinary tools.63 The global credit crisis and the subsequent squeeze that multinational corporations have placed on labor costs at all levels below that of the executive has ensured that conditions in the commodity factories of the world have recently deteriorated still further. Now, as before the crash, “metropolitan wealth

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depends not simply on flexibility and innovation but on the superexploitation of 2 or 3 billion who are at least temporarily unable to defend themselves.”64 The stunningly sophisticated capacities of the technological products that these laborers produce stand in sharp contrast to their endurance of pay and working conditions that are so poor that they would seem distinguished from the satanic mills of the Victorian age only insofar as they are no longer deemed newsworthy. Xenophobia, opaque corporate structures, and the online dislocation of place now “turn answerability into a bewildering transnational maze,” as Rob Nixon puts it.65 The “slow violence” encoded into the DNA of new commodities is now effaced on the surface of their “streamline aesthetic” and “curvilinear” design.66 Never mind the table on which I type these words. The keyboard, the angle poise lamp, the smartphone, the pen, the mouse, and all the other handheld objects that now rest upon this wooden surface all actively cultivate what Barthes in 1957 called a “new phenomenology of assembling.” Like so many miniature offspring of his Godly Citroën they too hold together as if by “virtue of their wondrous shape.”67 Like that magical car, indeed, they too vaporize the history of their construction, neither displacing it nor embracing its extant invisibility but redefining its processes in the very name of displacement itself. Precepts foundational to Marxism ultimately prove complicit with the production of such fetishized commodities in the sense that they too hide these cultural activities from view. But US literature and culture, not unlike Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) or some of Stuart Hall’s socialist essays, bring them back to the light. As a whole they revisit and animate again the purpose of Melville’s 1856 short story: to remind us that our soft “paradise,” too, relies on Devil’s Dungeons we keep carefully hidden from sight. But Melville’s lesson remains more applicable now than ever. Our touchscreen world, the US canon tells us, connects us as much now as it ever did to the miseries of Tartarus itself.

Notes Introduction 1 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 367. Putnam elsewhere observes: “Americans no longer spend much time in community organizations—we’ve stopped doing committee work, stopped serving as officers, and stopped going to meetings. And all this despite rapid increases in education that have given more of us than ever before the skills, the resources, and the interests that once fostered civic engagement. In short, Americans have been dropping out in droves, not merely from political life, but from organized community life more generally.” See Bowling Alone, pp. 63–4. 2 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 125, 174. 3 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 6. 4 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress, 1887), p. 24. 5 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations, 108:1 (2009), 11. 6 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 147. 7 Alan Trachtenberg, “Preface” in Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), p. xiv. 8 Robert Browning, “Two in the Campagna,” in Dramatic Lyrics (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1889), p. 150. 9 Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Capricorn, 1964), p. 3. 10 Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 472. 11 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 1. 12 Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2001), pp. 7–8. 13 Bauman, Community, p. 17. 14 Irving Goh, “The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I): AntiCommunity,” Symploke, 14:1–2 (2006), 218. 15 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2004), p. 27. Wasted Lives represents a moment of culmination in Bauman’s career, a literary distillation of a view of consumerism he also explores in Society under Siege (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2002), pp. 182–7, and Liquid Life (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2005), pp. 22–4, among other earlier works. 16 Bauman, Wasted Lives, p. 27. 17 Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2007), p. 121. 18 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2007), p. 98; Henry A. Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature, 33:3 (2006), 188. 19 Bauman, Liquid Life, p. 144. I owe the neologism precarian, from precariat, to Guy Standing’s crucial recent scholarly activism.

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20 Trish Loughran, “Transcendental Islam: The Worlding of Our America: A Response to Wai Chee Dimock,” American Literary History, 21:1 (2009), p. 64. Loughran cites for support Eric Lott’s similar observation, that in “attempting to think beyond the nation, Dimock forgets the state.” Eric Lott, “National Treasure, Global Value, and American Literary History,” American Literary History, 20:1–2 (2008), 118. 21 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin: London, 2005), p. 7. 22 Michael Yellow Bird, “What is the Highest Form of Patriotism?: I say Acknowledging our Addiction to Patriotism,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 39:3 (2009), 357. 23 As Eric Lott suggests, “US culture’s global citings must be thought in and through the balance of power—the conflictual relations of gain, reversal, exploitation, wars of position—that defines them.” Lott, “National Treasure, Global Value, and American Literary History,” 117. 24 William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 90. 25 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, 1902), p. 325. 26 William James, “The Sense of Time,” in Gertrude Stein, Three Lives and Q. E. D. (New York and London: Norton, 2006), ed. Marianne DeKoven, p. 240. 27 Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 9. 28 Donal E. Pease, “C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and the World We Live in,” in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live in (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2001), ed. C. L. R James, p. xxvii. 29 In his New Yorker review of Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, Louis Menand urges us to reconsider Pound’s rallying cry as an affirmation of tradition and continuity: “The ‘It’ in ‘Make It New,’” he suggests, “is the Old—what is valuable in the culture of the past. . . . He is trying to breathe life into a line of artistic and intellectual accomplishment.” At the risk of outing myself as just another “average underprepared reader” who for Menand always “get Pound wrong,” I would counter that the emphasis in this slogan in fact falls heavily on the aggressive verb and the solid noun, and in consequence insists on the need for constant and radical transformation in a manner commensurate with the impatience with Walt Whitman Pound famously exhibits in “A Pact.” See Louis Menand, “The Pound Error: The Elusive Master of Allusion,” New Yorker June 9, 2008. Accessed on Thursday, December 19, 2013 at http://www. newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/09/080609crbo_books_menand. 30 James, “The Sense of Time,” p. 240. 31 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (London and New York: Verso, 2007), p. 101. 32 William H. Gass, “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense,” in Finding a Form: Essays (Champaign, IL: Dalkey, 2009), p. 16. 33 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Why the Americans are so Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity,” in Democracy in America. Accessed on January 10, 2014 at http://xroads. virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/ch2_13.htm. 34 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978). Online version accessed on January 27, 2014 at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/home.htm. 35 I thus here depart slightly from the interpretation that Richard Maltby brings to a boil with his memorable claim that, simply, “Oz is Kansas, but in Technicolour.” See Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 4.

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36 Joel D. Chaston, “The ‘Ozification’ of American Children’s Fantasy Films: The Blue Bird, Alice in Wonderland, and Jumanji,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 22:1 (1997), 14. Lauren Berlant enlarges on this sense of Dorothy’s detached and disillusioned character, via her reading of Geoff Ryman’s Was (1992), in her Cruel Optimism (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 47. 37 Herman Melville, Mardi: And a Voyage Hither (Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1970), p. 172. 38 Melville, Mardi, p. 319. 39 Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1985), p. 22. 40 Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 49. 41 Melville, Pierre, p. 139. 42 Melville, Pierre, p. 41. 43 Melville, Pierre, p. 119. 44 Melville, Pierre, p. 140. 45 James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, p. 89. 46 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 485–6. 47 David Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 61. 48 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 103. 49 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 429. 50 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 506. 51 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 158. 52 James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, p. 17; Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 150. 53 Tony Tanner explores Moby-Dick’s multiple references to loom, and in terms that indicates its kinship with tantalize, in his “Introduction,” in Moby-Dick (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), ed. Tony Tanner, p. xi. 54 Melville, Moby-Dick, pp. 3–5. 55 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 9. 56 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 240. 57 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 210. 58 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 169. 59 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 175. 60 Raymond Carver, “Big Fish, Mythical Fish,” in Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose (London: Harvill, 2000), ed. William L. Stull, p. 235. 61 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 366. 62 Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 148. 63 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” p. 13.

Chapter 1 1 James Wolcott, Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 413. 2 Wolcott, Critical Mass, p. 407. 3 Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die for: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 111.

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4 O’Leary, To Die for, p. 148. 5 On Gifford’s war experiences, see Barbara Novak, Voyages of the Self: Pairs, Parallels, and Patterns in American Art and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 174. 6 Quoted in Novak, Voyages of the Self, pp. 70–1. 7 Franklin Kelly, “Nature Distilled,” in Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), ed. Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly, p. 16. 8 Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 240. 9 Phillipe de Montebello and Earl A. Powell, “Directors’ Foreword,” in Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), ed. Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly, p. vii. 10 Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 70–1. 11 Quoted in Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” in Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994), ed. William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, p. 51. 12 John Hayward, The New England Gazetteer; Containing Descriptions of All the States, Counties and Towns in New England: Also Descriptions of the Principal Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, Capes, Bays, Harbors, Islands, and Fashionable Resorts within that Territory (Boston: Israel S. Boyd and William White, 1839), p. 13. 13 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), p. 67. 14 Wilton, “The Sublime in the Old World and the New,” in American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820–1880 (Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 26. 15 Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware, 1987), pp. 256–7. 16 Quoted in Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” p. 51. 17 John Wilmerding, American Views; Essays on American Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 123. 18 Christopher Hitt, “Towards an Ecological Sublime,” New Literary History, 30:3 (1999), 605–6. 19 Eric Sandeen, “Picturing Colorado: Robert Adams and the Myth of the Frontier,” in Writing with Light: Words and Photographs in American Texts (Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt, New York, and Wien: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 126. 20 Bauman, Community, pp. 7–8. 21 Stephen Fender, “American Landscape and the Figure of Anticipation,” in Views of American Landscapes (Cambridge, MA and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ed. Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles, p. 57. 22 For example, Laurence Buell cites Fender’s term in his essay “Ecoglobal Affects: the Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), ed. Laurence Buell and Wai Chee Dimock, p. 235. 23 Dick Hebdige, “Hole: Swimming. . . Floating. . . Sinking. . . Drowning,” in Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography 1945–1982 (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2012), ed. Daniell Cornell, p. 195.

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24 Hebdige, “Hole,” p. 193. In Wasted Lives Bauman makes some similar points, noting, for example, that in much modern design “waste is human beings.” See Wasted Lives, p. 30. 25 Hebdige, “Hole,” pp. 197–8. 26 Les Murray, “D.C.,” in New Collected Poems (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2003), p. 542. 27 Alistair Horne, Macmillan, 1894–1956 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 160. If music to the ears of many Washington politicians, Macmillan’s likening of the United States’ postwar supremacy to that of the Roman Empire must be set against a countervailing, and roughly contemporary, Hollywood trend in which “Romans in Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), and Ben-Hur (1959), for example, become analogues for Nazis.” See Margaret Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell, 2009), p. 209. 28 This tendency is perhaps so widespread as to need no textual documentation, but just one of countless examples of this habit among scientists in the modern era occurs in Fanning’s description of Mars in Planets, Stars and Galaxies (1966) as “a most tantalising object for the observer,” p. 99. 29 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), pp. 322–3. 30 Barthes, “Change the Object,” in Image-Music-Text, pp. 168–9. 31 Ferdinand de Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York and London: Norton, 2010), 2nd edn, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al., p. 854. 32 Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), pp. 49–50. 33 Wolcott, Critical Mass, p. 311. 34 John Banville, “Canada by Richard Ford: Review,” in The Guardian, May 25, 2012. Accessed on June 5, 2014 at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/25/ canada-richard-ford-review. 35 Ford, A Multitude of Sins, p. 62. 36 Ford, A Multitude of Sins, p. 188. 37 Ford, A Multitude of Sins, p. 205. 38 Ford, A Multitude of Sins, p. 211. 39 Henry James, The Europeans (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), p. 157. 40 Ford, A Multitude of Sins, p. 241. 41 Recalling his realization that “the whole output or sum of an artist’s work had to have a design,” William Faulkner uses his famous phrase “postage stamp” to describe his recurring setting of Yoknatapawtha County at the end of his 1956 interview with the Paris Review. See William Faulkner, “William Faulkner,” in The Paris Review Interviews, II (Edinburgh, London, New York and Melbourne: Canongate, 2007), p. 57. 42 Wolcott, Critical Mass, p. 311. 43 Richard Ford, Rock Springs (New York: Grove Press, 1987), p. 5. 44 Ford, Rock Springs, p. 3. 45 Ford, Wildlife (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 156 46 Ford, Canada (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 242. 47 Ford, The Lay of the Land (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 11; Vidya Ravi, From Virgin Land to Hinterland: Place and Dwelling in American Fiction, 1951–1995. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Cambridge, 2013, p. 188. 48 Ford, Canada, p. 239.

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49 David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 7. 50 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 133–4. 51 Kenneth Eble, “The Craft of Revision: The Great Gatsby,” American Literature, 36:3 (1964), 316. See also Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2000), p. 62. 52 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 171. 53 Andrew Hoberek, John Burt, David Kadlec, Jamie Owen Daniel, Shelly Eversley, Catherine Jurca, Aparajita Sagar and Michel Bérubé, “Twentieth-Century Literature in the New Century: A Symposium,” College English, 64:1 (2001), 9–33. 54 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), trans. Richard Miller, p. 74. 55 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 47. 56 Tyler Stallings, “From Beefcake to Skatecake,” in Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography 1945–1982 (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2012), ed. Daniell Cornell, p. 128. 57 John Cheever, “The Swimmer,” in The Stories of John Cheever (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), p. 603. 58 Cheever, “The Swimmer,” p. 603. 59 Cheever, “The Swimmer,” p. 605. 60 Cheever, “The Swimmer,” p. 604. Barthes, S/Z, p. 75. 61 Pery Burge, “Looking Beneath the Surface,” Leonardo, 40:5 (2007), 487. 62 Wolcott, Critical Mass, p. 311. 63 Wolcott, Critical Mass, p. 311. 64 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 43. 65 Jefferson’s letter extolling scientific pursuits to David Rittenhouse from July 19, 1778 is by no means an isolated example. Although Jefferson did sometimes speak of pursuit in the sense of quest, his writing more often invokes it in the sense of pastime; this is certainly the case in letters he wrote to John Trumbull in May 1789, George Washington in January 1793, William Short in April 1793, and Samuel Morse in February 1802. Variously, in these instances, pursuit refers to the occupations of business, the bar, science, and diplomacy. 66 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 15. 67 Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 28. 68 Michael Hardt, “Jefferson and Democracy,” American Quarterly, 59:1 (2007), 74. 69 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 32–3. 70 Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 118. 71 Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason (New York: New American Library, 1989), ed. Leonard Peikoff, p. 129. 72 Tobias Wolff, Old School (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), pp. 84–5. 73 Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1964), ed. Nathaniel Branden. Online version accessed on January 20, 2014, at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=d1GqjIhRejMC&printsec= frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

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74 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 273. 75 Melville, Pierre, p. 119. 76 Ford, Canada, p. 277.

Chapter 2 1 Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Walden and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 663. 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, pp. 6–25. 3 Emerson, “Nature,” p. 25. 4 In “A Call for a Truce,” for instance, Amy Kaplan comes close to conceding that the painful convulsions of the postnationalist turn in American Studies owed more than a little to a simple desire to attack the established and the senior. “I wonder whether it’s time to declare a truce, a cessation of hostilities, among generations of American studies scholars. The need to attack the founding fathers of the field to clear space for new work seems outworn and unproductive (though I admit I’ve participated in this battle with gusto).” Kaplan provides a telling example of what I would call purgative scholarship, a critical mode, structured by a model of tantalization or destructive consumption, in which the idea to be rejected most powerfully is the one you yourself once articulated. See “A Call for a Truce,” American Literary History, 17:1 (Spring 2005), 141. 5 One exploration of the authoritarianism that inflects Whitman’s commands to the American reader is David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America (New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 325–6. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 59. Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Walden and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 730. 6 Throughout “Civil Disobedience,” like so many other disillusioned American patriots, Thoreau repeatedly invokes Jefferson and Franklin as icons of Republican virtues lost; in a single breath he also weds together the Bible and the Constitution; see “Civil Disobedience,” in Walden and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 692. Emerson praises Lincoln for being “thoroughly American, . . . a quite native, aboriginal man,” in “Abraham Lincoln,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 829; but during his famous funeral address he praised Thoreau too in similar terms, as a man who always “wished to go to Oregon, not to London”; see p. 813. 7 During an analysis of English Traits Lawrence Buell emphasizes Emerson’s “cosmopolitan detachment,” and in such a way as to disassociate him from his own patriotism; see Emerson, (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 50–1. The concluding quotation is from Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 22.

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8 The seminal discussion of the academic struggle to make sense of nationalism remains Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006), pp.1–12. 9 Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” American Literary History, 13:4 (Winter 2001), 770. 10 Buell, Emerson, p. 253. 11 Thoreau’s standing as a father not only to the ecological movements of the 1960s but also to the ecocriticism of today functions as a point of departure for the essays assembled in the significant collection Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2013); see, for example, Kristen Case’s “Thoreau’s Radical Empiricism: The Kalendar, Pragmatism, and Science,” in Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2013), pp. 187–99. Lawrence Buell provides an overview of the scholarship that identifies Emerson as a harbinger of postmodernism in Emerson, p. 253, although Laura Dassow Walls grants Thoreau a similar status in Seeing New Worlds, p. 14. The complimentary verbs I mention here are certainly a feature of The Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003). Bill Brown’s influential monograph salutes the fact that “Emerson foresaw. . . the new protomass production of objects” that marked US industrialization even as it elsewhere commends Thoreau as a man who “significantly anticipated” today’s “scholarly recognition” of Indian craftwork. 12 By philosophies of “ordinary language” Cavell here refers specifically to J. L. Austin’s classic notion of performativity as well as to “the later Wittgenstein”; see Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 34. His tribute to Emerson’s futurity occurs later in this work; Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, p. 54. 13 Indeed this accentuation of Thoreau’s capacities to see into our present lies at the heart of Thoreauvian Modernities, the editors of which are determined to remain “faithful to the spirit of Thoreau’s intellectual search” and thus to work in a spirit of homage to this “American icon.” Thoreauvian Modernities, pp. 1–17. 14 Dimock, Through Other Continents, p. 3. 15 In correspondence of October 2, 1814, for example, Emerson’s brother William Emerson describes a day at Harvard that, beginning with his recital of a “lesson in Grotius,” featured lessons in mathematics and rhetoric before concluding with an entire afternoon dedicated to Livy’s Roman history,” which he called “the hardest piece of latin [I] ever met with”; see Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 45. Twenty years later Thoreau’s experiences were similar, his classes likewise dominated by works of antiquity, and Harvard’s low rating of contemporary and American works might seem revealed by the fact that his first encounter of Emerson’s Nature came, not from its library holdings, but those of an independent debating society he had joined; see Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 5. Another indication of this classical focus appears as Lawrence Buell records that George Bancroft found it necessary to resign his “lowly tutorship in Greek” at Harvard and find alternative income in order to pursue his historical interests; New England

Notes

16 17 18 19

20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 38. Buell, Emerson, p. 172. Dimock, Through Other Continents, p. 9. James Lowell, My Study Windows (London: Walter Scott, 1893), p. 144. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Douglass’s noted Independence Day address of 1852, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” which not unlike “Civil Disobedience” disowns Americans but stops well short of denouncing its founding father. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York and London: Norton, 2004), ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr and Nellie Y. McKay, pp. 462–4. By all accounts decades later, in speeches he delivered at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition in 1893, Douglass was remaining careful to preface his political critiques with similar appeals to this culture of compulsory patriotism in. See Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 26. Much celebrated, English Traits’ concluding sentence reads: “If it be not so, if the courage of England goes with the chances of a commercial crisis, I will go back to the capes of Massachusetts and my own Indian stream, and say to my countrymen, the old race are all gone, and the elasticity and hope of mankind must henceforth remain on the Alleghany ranges, or nowhere.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 617. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 291. Henry Nash Smith records that agrarian feeling grew so strong among other Americans that two, Samuel Aughey and Charles Dana Wilber, “used a passel of pseudoscientific notions to conclude that ‘Rain Follows the Plough.’” See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978). Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 292. As Buell notes, Thoreau “prods readers to consider how wide is the gap between scrabbling actuality and Jeffersonian ideal,” The Environmental Imagination, p. 41. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in Walden and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 346. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1972), ed. Claude M. Simpson, p. 245. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 14. Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, p. 248. Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, p. 245. Marx, Machine in the Garden, p. 7. Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, p. 245. Marx, Machine in the Garden, p. 14. Marx, Machine in the Garden, pp. 14–15. Emerson, Nature, p. 92. Marx, Machine in the Garden, p. 15. Buell, Emerson, p. 92. Buell, Emerson, p. 94.

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36 Buell, Emerson, p. 94. 37 Irving Howe, The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 33. 38 Lowell, My Study Windows, p. 142. 39 Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and NineteenthCentury Natural Science (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 213. 40 Walls, Seeing New Worlds, p. 83. 41 Henry David Thoreau, Walden in Walden and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 122. 42 Thoreau, Walden, p. 177. 43 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, pp. 326–7. 44 Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 183. 45 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, pp. 414. 46 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, pp. 420–2. 47 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 422. 48 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 331. 49 Thoreau, Walden, pp. 165–6. 50 Thoreau, Walden, p. 250. 51 Thoreau, Walden, pp. 263–4. 52 Thoreau, Walden, pp. 257–8. 53 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), ed. Brooks Atkinson, p. 376. 54 Recent scholarship on English Traits has tended to dwell on the racial position it adopts. Susan Castillo has navigated the inconsistencies and contradictions of Emerson’s racial politics, tracing how English Traits affirms “the Atlantic as the centre of the world,” in “‘The Best of Nations?’: Race and Imperial Destinies in Emerson’s English Traits,” 8. Neil Irvin Painter, meanwhile, has emphasized the ways in which English Traits repositions its vision of ancient racial past, emphasizing its Saxon roots while understating the Celtic legacy; see “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons.” Such racial questions are not the immediate concern of this chapter, although the analysis I provide does tend to suggest that even the ancestral connections Emerson discovers during his travels around Britain can seem screened off from him and in some sense untouchable. 55 Emerson, English Traits, p. 600. 56 Emerson, English Traits, p. 570. 57 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Musketaquid,” in Poems. Online text accessed on January 27, 2014 at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12843/pg12843.html. 58 Emerson, English Traits, p. 570. 59 Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 156. 60 Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record. Accessed on January 27, 2014 at http://www. gutenberg.org/files/687/687-h/687-h.htm. 61 Roxana Oltean, “From Romance to Redemption: James and the Ethics of Globalization,” Henry James’s Europe: Heritage and Transfer (Cambridge, MA: Open Book, 2011), ed. Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray, and Adrian Harding, p. 21. 62 Henry James, “Daisy Miller: A Study” in Tales of Henry James (New York and London: Norton, 2004), ed. Christof Wegelin and Henry B. Wonham, p. 403.

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63 Oltean, “From Romance to Redemption,” p. 22. 64 Henry James, Hawthorne (Nottingham, UK: Trent, 1999), ed. Kate Fullbrook, pp. 66–7. 65 Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, November 19, 1872, in James, A Life in Letters (London: Penguin, 1999), ed. Philip Horne, p. 51. 66 Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 171. 67 Henry James, Italian Hours (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 241. 68 James, Italian Hours, p. 110. 69 James, Italian Hours, p. 218. 70 James, Italian Hours, p. 113. 71 James, Italian Hours, p.114. 72 James, Italian Hours, p. 13. 73 James, Italian Hours, p. 104. 74 Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans 1880– 1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), p. 103. 75 Edith Wharton, The Reef (New York, London, and Toronto: Everyman, 1996), p. 11. 76 James, Italian Hours, p. 61. 77 James, Italian Hours, p. 13. 78 James, Italian Hours, p. 43. 79 Thoreau, Walden, p. 115. James, Italian Hours, p. 48. 80 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 16. 81 James, Italian Hours, p. 47. 82 Henry James, The American Scene (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), ed. Leon Edel, p. 18. 83 James, Italian Hours, p. 62–3. 84 James, Italian Hours, pp. 178–9. 85 Chinua Achebe, “Language and the Destiny of Man,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day (New York: Anchor Press, 1976), p. 45. 86 Stephen Fender, Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 190. 87 Anne Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007), p. 21. 88 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2006), p. 241. 89 Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (London: Virago, 2011), p. 164. 90 Cather, Shadows on the Rock, p. 5. 91 Cather, Shadows on the Rock, p. 156. 92 James, Italian Hours, pp. 135–6. 93 James, Italian Hours, p. 23. 94 Douglas R. Nickel, “An Art of Perception,” in Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), ed. Douglas R. Nickel, p. 27. 95 Nickel, “An Art of Perception,” p. 30. 96 Mick Gidley, “Introduction,” in Modern American Landscapes (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), p. 1. 97 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 48. 98 Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), ed. Stephen Crook, p. 129.

164

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Chapter 3 1 One of many examples of Emerson’s curious application of the loaded term tribe to English history occurs in English Traits, p. 503. Alan Trachtenberg explores contemporary connotations of the term tribe in Shades of Hiawatha, pp. 44–5. 2 Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage, 1986), p. 313. 3 Joshua David Bellin, The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 99. 4 James, The American Scene, p. 117. 5 Cather, The Troll Garden and Selected Stories (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1905), p. 116. 6 Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2007), pp. 87–91. 7 Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1991), pp. 15–16. The definitive cultural history on the rise of modern notions of hygiene and freshness is Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2009). 8 William Faulkner, Wild Palms (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 102. 9 Melville, Pierre, p. 150. 10 Melville, Pierre, p. 148. 11 Richard Godden, “‘The Great Gatsby’: Glamour on the Turn,” Journal of American Studies 16:3 (1982), 349. 12 Bill Brown, “The Tyranny of Things,” Critical Inquiry, 28:2 (2002), 448. 13 Godden, “‘The Great Gatsby’: Glamour on the Turn,” 352. 14 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 68. 15 Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage, 1986), p. 319. 16 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 10. 17 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 67. 18 Matthew J. Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference, (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2000), p. 62. 19 Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1994), ed. Donald W. Faulkner, p. 201. 20 Douglas Tallack, New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New York (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), p. 144. 21 Tallack, New York Sights, p. 151; William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 34. 22 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 67. Such is the “size and heterogeneity” of this city, as Tallack notes, that even New Yorkers born and bred can struggle to “envisage a relationship between one view of part of the city and the larger picture.” New York Sights, p. 17. The phenomenon takes narrative form in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. At a key moment in this corny, unpleasant study of architectural monomania, Rand’s leading woman, Dominique Francon, takes herself off, after midnight, on the Staten Island ferry, and watches “the city moving away from her. In the vast emptiness of sky and ocean, the city was only a small, jagged solid. It seemed condensed, pressed tight together, not a place of streets and separate buildings, but a single sculptured form. . . . But it went on mounting—toward a few points, toward the triumphant masts of skyscrapers raised out of the struggle.” Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 317.

Notes

165

23 Maria Balshaw, Looking for Harlem: Urban Aesthetics in African-American Literature (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2000), p. 61. Horace R. Cayton and St Clair Drake use the metaphor of the “womb” to describe Chicago’s “growing” African-American community in Black Metropolis: A Study of Life in a Northern City (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 80. 24 As Richard Sennett suggests, thanks to the “conception of segregation built into” the civic planning of the ghetto Nuovo, Venice’s Jews were “imprisoned inside” and “left to themselves” as “an abandoned people.” See Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 234. Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (London: Macmillan, 1903), meanwhile, subjects London’s class structure to a vertical, and all but Dantean, reconfiguration. 25 Claude McKay quote in Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), p. 233. 26 George Hoefer, “Harlem during the twenties” in Willie “the Lion” Smith and George Hoefer, Music on My Mind: The Memories of an American Pianist (New York: Da Capo, 1978), pp. 135–7. 27 Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York: Penguin, 2002), ed. Thadious M. Davis, p. 101. 28 Rudolph Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York and London: Norton, 2004), ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr and Nellie Y. McKay, pp. 1236–7. 29 Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” p. 1238. 30 LCD Soundsystem, “Losing My Edge,” on LCD Soundsystem (Parlophone, 2005). 31 Groucho Marx, The Groucho Letters, (London: Sphere, 1969), p. 10. 32 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 67. 33 Mick Gidley, “Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Passing of the Great Race,” Journal of American Studies, 7:2 (1973), 179–80. 34 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 84. 35 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, p. 90. 36 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, p. 66. 37 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, p. 66. 38 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 37. 39 Gidley, “Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald,” 173. 40 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 37. 41 Toni Cade Bambara, “Deep Sight and Rescue Missions,” in Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fictions, Essays and Conversations (New York: Pantheon, 1996), ed. Toni Morrison, p. 158. For Bambara’s account of the visits Hughes paid to her and others in the children’s section of her local library, see “How She Came by her Name: An Interview with Louis Massiah,” in Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fictions, Essays and Conversations (New York: Pantheon, 1996), ed. Toni Morrison, p. 211. 42 Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1995), p. 127. 43 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989), p. xxxi. 44 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 80. 45 Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love (London: The Women’s Press, 1984), p. 89. 46 Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Toni Cade Bambara: Free to be anywhere in the Universe,” Callaloo, 19:2 (1996), 229. 47 Arnold Bennett, Those United States (London: Martin Secker, 1912), pp. 33–5.

166

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48 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 261. 49 Toni Cade Bambara, The Sea Birds are Still Alive (London: The Women’s Press, 1984), p. 44 50 Bambara, The Sea Birds are Still Alive, p. 45. 51 D. M. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005), p. 7. 52 Bambara, Gorilla, My Love, p. 89. 53 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and the Aspern Papers (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 181. 54 Bill Brown, “American Childhood and Stephen Crane’s Toys,” American Literary History, 7:3 (1995), 443. 55 Bauman, Wasted Lives, p. 58. 56 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 71–2. 57 Balshaw, Looking for Harlem, p. 135. 58 Morrison, “Afterword” in The Bluest Eye “Afterword,” in The Bluest Eye (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 212. 59 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, p. 97. 60 As Evans recalled, “Morrison agreed only to an interview by one of two friends, Nikki Giovanni or Eleanor Traylor,” and only deft editorial handling enabled the anthology to include “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Mari Evans, “Preface” in Black Women Writers (London and Sydney: Pluto, 1985), ed. Mari Evans, p. xviii 61 Zora Neale Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York and London: Doubleday, 2002), pp. 629–30. 62 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, pp. 13–14. 63 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 72. 64 D. M. Winnicott, “The Child in the Family Group,” in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (London: Penguin, 1986), ed. D. M. Winnicott, p. 134. 65 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, p. 82. 66 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, pp. 81–2. 67 Elizabeth Abel, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 67–9. 68 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, pp. 83–4. 69 Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 63. 70 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, pp. 84–5. 71 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 135. 72 Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 105. 73 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, pp. 65–6. 74 James, “Daisy Miller,” p. 20. 75 James, “Daisy Miller,” p. 4. 76 James, “Daisy Miller,” p. 22. 77 Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome and Summer (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), ed. Denise D. Knight, p. 51. 78 Wharton, Ethan Frome, pp. 49–50. 79 Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 49. 80 Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 132.

Notes

167

81 Richard Wright, Native Son (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 142. 82 Wright, Native Son, p. 115. 83 Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 103.

Chapter 4 1 See, for example, Emine Lâle Demitürk, How Black Writers Deal with Whiteness. Characterization through Deconstructing Color (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2008) and Thy Phu in “Bigger at the Movies: Sangre Negra and the Cinematic Projection of Native Son,” Black Cinema, 2:1 (2010), 46. 2 Andy Stafford makes no mention of this work, for example, in Roland Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). 3 Conversations with Richard Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre, p. 166. 4 Perhaps the most famous illustration of this intellectual self-confidence occurs in a conversation, reported by C. L. R. James, in which Wright told the Trinidadian that “everything in Kierkegaard I knew before I read him”; plenty of other examples, however, exist. C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” in At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), (pp. 195–6. 5 Ellison, Going to the Territory, p. 202. 6 Warren Montag, “Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London and New York: Verso, 2008), ed. Michael Sprinker, p. 72. 7 Roland Barthes, “The New Citroën,” in Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 88–90 8 Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices, p. 18. 9 Richard Wright, Black Boy (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 67. 10 Wright, Black Boy, p. 147. 11 Barthes, “The New Citroën,” p. 8. 12 Barthes, “The New Citroën,” p. 90. 13 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 43. 14 Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 63. 15 Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 70. 16 Mick Gidley, Photography and the USA (London: Reaktion, 2011), p.83. 17 Barthes, “The New Citroën,” p. 90. 18 Jeffrey Gordon, “The Triumph of Sisyphus,” Philosophy and Literature, 32:1 (2008), 183. 19 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, pp. 95–7. 20 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 75. 21 James Agee, A Death in the Family (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 4–5. 22 C. Vann Woodward introduced his phrase “bulldozer revolution,” to describe the industrialization of the new South, in The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, LA and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), p. 6.

168 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Notes Agee, A Death in the Family, p. 7. Agee, A Death in the Family, p. 4. Agee, A Death in the Family, p. 46. Agee, A Death in the Family, p. 39. Agee, A Death in the Family, pp. 147–8. A helpful discussion of Gordon and Tate’s work is Peter Rawlings, Theory of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling and Wayne C. Booth (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 77. Warren, All the King’s Men, p. 433. Warren, All the King’s Men, p. 192. Warren, All the King’s Men, p. 3. Robert Penn Warren, Flood (London: Collins, 1964), p. 72. Warren, Flood, p. 16. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 60. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (London: Picador, 2005), p. 87. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 212. Michael T. Fournier, Double Nickels on the Dime (New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 11. Raymond Carver, “Movement” in All of Us: Collected Poems (London: Harvill, 2003), p. 57. Raymond Carver, “Nobody Said Anything” in Stories (London: Picador, 1985), p. 47. Raymond Carver, “Cadillacs and Poetry” in All of Us: Collected Poems (London: Harvill, 2003), p. 215. Raymond Carver, “What is it?” in Stories (London: Picador, 1985), p. 154–5. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), pp. 322–3. Kasia Boddy, The American Short Story Since 1950 (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 95. Raymond Carver, “Fat,” in Stories (London: Picador, 1985), p. 16. Carver, “Fat,” in Stories, p. 14. Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (London: Virago, 1993), p. 8. Carver, “What is it?” in Stories, pp. 153–4. Carver, “What is it?” in Stories, pp. 158–9. Stanley Elkin, The Franchiser (Chicago, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2001), pp. 192–3. Elkin, The Franchiser, p. 262. Elkin, The Franchiser, pp. 194–5. Elkin, The Franchiser, pp. 207–8. Elkin, The Franchiser, pp. 276–7. Elkin, The Franchiser, p. 238. Elkin, The Franchiser, pp. 227–8. Elkin, The Franchiser, p. 210. Elkin, The Franchiser, p. 147. Elkin, The Franchiser, p. 112. Elkin, The Franchiser, p. 250. Elkin, The Franchiser, pp. 225–6. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), p. 67.

Notes 62 63 64 65 66 67

169

Du Bois, Darkwater, p. 69. Conversations with Richard Wright, p. 168. Warren, All the King’s Men, p. 70. Warren, All the King’s Men, p. 72. Warren, All the King’s Men, p. 249. Du Bois, Darkwater, p. 66.

Conclusion 1 Tony Tanner, Thomas Pynchon (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 56. 2 Barthes, S/Z, p. 215. 3 George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 194. 4 Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (London: Picador, 1989), p. 269. 5 Potter, People of Plenty, p. 134. 6 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” 18. 7 Marx, Capital, p. 27. 8 Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London and New York: Verso, 2011), p. 96. 9 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), trans. Robert HullotKentor, p. 85. 10 See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York and London: Norton, 2010), 2nd edn, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, p. 2409. 11 Marx, Capital, p. 22. 12 Robert Payne, The Unknown Karl Marx: Documents Concerning Karl Marx (London: University of London Press, 1972), p. 22. 13 Quoted in Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York and London: Norton, 1999), p. 294. 14 Asa Briggs and John Callow, Marx in London (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2008), p. 44. 15 Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, p. 252. 16 Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, p. 253. 17 George Gissing, New Grub Street (London, Sydney, and Toronto: The Bodley Head, 1969), p. 46. 18 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, p. 169. 19 Wilhelm Liebknecht and Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx 1818–1883 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1941), p. 15–16. The leading Marx biographer of the present day, Francis Wheen, seems to misrepresent this episode; while he suggests that Marx regaled the Regent Street crowd with these prophecies of electricity (“Now the problem has been solved—the consequences are unpredictable. . .”), Liebknecht makes it clear that he said these things in a private, if beery, conversation with himself. . See Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, p. 151. 20 Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge, MA and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 88.

170

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21 Caroline Blyth, “Introduction,” in Decadent Verse: An Anthology of Late-Victorian Poetry (London: Anthem, 2011), ed. Caroline Blyth, p. 34. 22 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. Accessed on November 30, 2013 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2044/2044-h/2044-h.htm. Arnold Bennett, for example, suggest that the dynamos in Manhattan’s power stations were the true “heart of New York,” suggesting they were “essentially the most poetical achievements of the United States.” Those United States, pp. 104–5. 23 David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997), p.143. 24 Brown, “American Childhood and Stephen Crane’s Toys,” 455. 25 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress, 1887), p. 419. 26 Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, The Communist Manifesto in Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ed. David McLellan, p. 250. 27 Godden, “‘The Great Gatsby’: Glamour on the Turn,” 350. 28 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 88–9. 29 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 88. 30 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 27. 31 Liebknecht and Lafargue, Karl Marx 1818–1883, p. 16. 32 Of Capital David McLellan remarks that the first section of Volume One “is a rewriting of the Critique of Political Economy of 1859 and analyzes commodities, in the sense of external objects that satisfy human needs, and their value.” See Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London and Basingstoke, MA: Macmillan, 1973), p. 344. 33 Marx, Capital, p. 42. 34 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin, 1992), ed. Maurice Hindle, p. 40. 35 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 89. 36 Matthew Crawford, The Case for Working with your Hands: Or, Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 21–2; Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 128; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 69. 37 Marx, Capital, p. 43. 38 W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago, 2005), p. 160. 39 Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’ Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2008), p. 128. 40 Anna Woodhouse, Looking through Glass: Representations of Windows, Lenses and Spectacles in Modern American Literature and Culture. PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2011, p. 234. 41 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 51. 42 Conrad, The Secret Agent, pp. 1–2. 43 Richard Godden, “A Diamond Bigger than the Ritz: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Gold Standard,” ELH 77:3 (2010), 592. 44 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (London: Penguin, 1985), ed. Angus Calder, p. 401. 45 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Penguin, 1997), ed. Adrian Poole, p. 430. 46 Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York and London: Norton, 2010), 2nd edn, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, p. 1786.

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47 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 2007), p. 46. 48 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 415. 49 Raymond Williams and Edward Said, “Media, Margins and Modernity,” in Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 2007), p. 192. 50 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 2005), p. 37. 51 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994), trans. Peggy Famuf, pp. 194–5. 52 Terry Eagleton’s brief response to Specters of Marx provides a welcome exception to this hero worship, rightly objecting to its “high humourlessness,” and nothing that Derrida “has never been at his impressive when at his most politically explicit.” Even Eagleton, however, at length pays tribute to what he figures as the book’s “magnificent” denunciations. Terry Eagleton, “Marxism without Marxism,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London and New York: Verso, 2008) ed. Michael Sprinkler, pp. 85–6. 53 Edward Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 78. 54 Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London and New York: Verso, 2008), ed. Michael Sprinkler, p. 56. 55 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 195. 56 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 186. 57 Late on in Specters of Marx, for example, Derrida wonders aloud whether what he calls the “co-extensivity” of the fetishism effect is quite so exclusive to the world of commodity production as Capital seems to think. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 209. 58 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 70. 59 Liebknecht and Lafargue, Karl Marx 1818–1883, p. 149. 60 Anna Woodhouse, “The Woolrichian Window and the Democratization of the Detective in ‘Rear Window,’” Comparative American Studies, 11:4 (2013), 401. 61 Marilynne Robinson, “Wilderness,” in Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: First Mariner, 1998, p. 254. 62 Andrew C. Revkin, “Confronting the Anthropocene,” New York Times, May 11, 2011. Accessed on November 25, 2013 at http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/ confronting-the-anthropocene/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0. 63 Marx, Capital (section 3 of TWD); Gethin Chamberlain, “Apple’s Chinese workers treated ‘inhumanely, like machines,’” in The Observer, 30 April 2011. Accessed on January 30, 2014 at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/30/applechinese-workers-treated-inhumanely. 64 Christopher Newfield, “Can American Studies do Economics?” American Quarterly, 60:4 (December 2008), 1127. 65 Rob Nixon, “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence and the Environmental Picaresuqe,” Modern Fiction Studies, 55:3 (2009), 444. 66 Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, p. 63. 67 Barthes, “The New Citroën,” pp. 88–9.

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Filmography The Wizard of Oz (Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1939), dir. Victor Fleming.

Index

abundance  136 see also overconsumption Achebe, Chinua  70 Adorno, Theodor  76, 141 Aesthetic Theory  137 Minima Moralia  76–7, 101 Agamben, Giorgio  11 Agee, James  117, 118 A Death in the Family  114, 117–20 Ahmed, Sara  43–4 Allen, Danielle  43 Althusser, Louis  112, 156 America  see United States American exceptionalism  see nationalism American Studies,  classic phase of  12, 55–7, 65, 159n. 4 postnational phase of  9, 51–3, 154n. 20 Angelou, Maya  136 Aristotle  11 Bambara, Toni Cade  83 Gorilla, My Love  90–8 Banville, John  33 Barthes, Roland  3, 19, 40, 111–16, 136 Image-Music-Text  31–2 Mythologies  112–16, 129, 141–2, 151 Bauman, Zygmunt  7–9, 97–8 Community  7–8 Consuming Life  8 and mixophobia  80–1 Wasted Lives  8 Benjamin, Walter  139 Berlant, Lauren  82, 116 Cruel Optimism  6, 41, 94, 155n. 36 Best, Stephen  3, 17, 136 Boon, D.  132–3 British Museum, the  139, 143 Brown, Bill  97, 140 Browning, Robert  5 Buell, Laurence  57, 156n. 22, 159n. 7, 160nn. 11, 15

California  6, 18, 40–1 and Los Angeles traffic system  121–4 and swimming pools  25–6 cars  34, 83–7, 104–7, 112–16, 117–28 Carson, Rachel  136 Silent Spring  136 Carver, Raymond  17, 114, 116, 124–5 “Are these Actual Miles?”  125–7 “Fat”  126 “Nobody Said Anything”  124 “So Much Water So Close to Home”  124 “A Summer in Sacramento”  123 Cather, Willa  59, 72, 80 “Paul’s Case”  80 The Professor’s House  72 Shadows on the Rock  59, 72 Cavell, Stanley  52 Cheever, John  20 “The Swimmer”  39–41, 104, 119 cleaning  3, 8, 25, 67, 82, 94, 98–103, 113–14, 127–33 Cole, Thomas  20–5, 54 commodity fetishism  3, 5, 97–8, 128 and female beauty  100–2 as process of design  136–45, 148 commuting, Sisyphan and tantalizing forms of  116 Conrad, Joseph  66, 143–5 consumption  113, 136, 137, 143, 150–1 conspicuous  96–7 and destruction  4, 25, 72 and Raymond Williams  30–1, 126–7 Cook, James  144 Cowley, Malcolm  84 Crane, Stephen  97 Crawford, Matthew  142 Crawford, Will  30–1 Croly, Herbert, The Promise of American Life  6, 44 cruel optimism  6, 41, 94, 155n. 35 curvilinear design  115, 151

190

Index

Davis, Angela  99 Delillo, Don  135 Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx  136, 147–9 Dickens, Charles  139, 145 Dillard, Anne  71, 136 Dimock, Wai Chee  9, 51–3, 154n. 20 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  107–8 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger  2, 3, 97–8 Douglass, Frederick  53, 161n. 16 Dreiser, Theodor  107 Du Bois, W. E. B.  83 Darkwater  132–3 Souls of Black Folk  90–3, 132 dust,  as guarantor of historic authenticity  5, 67 Eliot, T. S.  64, 74 Elkin, Stanley  114 The Franchiser  127–32 Ellison, Ralph  79, 83, 98, 112 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  49–50, 57, 59, 159n. 6, 160–1n. 15 English Traits  51–5, 56, 64–6, 79–80 “Musketaquid”  65 Nature  57–8, 59, 60, 63, 85 Engels, Frederic  140 Eurocentrism  53, 76–7, 79, 88, 136 exceptionalism  see nationalism Faulkner, William  157n. 41 As I Lay Dying  142 Wild Palms  81–2, 87, 103, 131 Fender, Stephen  25, 71 fetishism  see commodity fetishism Fisher, Rudolph  83, 86 “The Caucasian Storms Harlem”  86–8 “Fire by Night”  83 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  136 The Great Gatsby  38, 82, 84–90, 109 Fleming, Victor  12 Florence  66–8, 77 Ford, Richard  20, 38, 39, 41–4, 46–7, 150 Canada  36–7, 41 Lay of the Land  36–7 A Multitude of Sins  32–7 Rock Springs  36–7, 41 Wildlife  34–5, 41 Foucault, Michel  112

France  see Paris Freud, Sigmund  42, 117, 121, 148 frontier  11, 19, 25, 55, 65, 83–4 see also wilderness Garland, Judy  12–13 Gass, William H.  11 Omensetter’s Luck  117 Gidley, Mick  76, 88, 115 Gifford, Sanford Robinson  19–20 A Home in the Wilderness  21–6, 32, 33, 38, 54, 63, 79 Gissing, George  139 Godden, Richard  82, 140, 144 Gogol, Nikolai  139 Gordon, Caroline  119 Gramsci, Antonio  146–7 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five  90 Hagar, Sammy  122–3 Hall, Stuart  145–6, 151 Harburg, E. Y.  12 Hardt, Michael  43 Harlem  see New York Hawthorne, Nathaniel  55–8, 69, 77 Hebdige, Dick  25–6, 40, 114 hegemony  146–7 Hockney, David, A Bigger Splash  40–1, 119 Hoefer, George  86 Homer, The Odyssey  5, 26–7, 29, 30 hotels  1–5, 25, 36, 37, 76–7, 80, 114, 128–33 Hudson River Valley School  19, 21, 25, 53, 54, 55, 150 Humboldt, Alexander von, idea of unity with nature  58, 60, 62 Hurston, Zora Neale  100 indigeneity  see native American presence Italy  50, 67–74, 79, 80 see also Florence; Rome; Venice James, C. L. R.  15, 167n. 4 James, Henry  35, 49–50, 64–6, 80, 119, 150 The American Scene  68 Daisy Miller  66, 106–8 Italian Hours  50, 67–74, 79, 80 The Turn of the Screw  97

Index

191

James, William  10–11 Principles of Psychology  10–11 Varieties of Religious Experience  10 Jameson, Fredric  114, 137, 146, 147, 148 Jefferson, Thomas  42–7, 54 Johnson, Barbara  105

Morrison, Toni  82, 88, 99, 100, 102, 105 The Bluest Eye  82, 98–106, 107 Jazz  99 Playing in the Dark  88–9 Sula  99 Murray, Les  27

Kerouac, Jack  37, 87 Kristeva, Julia  97

Narcissus, myth of  16, 27 nationalism  9, 52 American  5, 9, 10, 42–4, 53–4, 65, 77, 87, 159n. 6 native American presence  13, 65, 150 displacement of  24–5, 71, 80 nature, defined against humanity  19–26, 49–69, 76–7 New York  29, 69, 80–3 and Harlem  83–98 newness  1–2, 4, 6, 11–12, 15, 18, 20–2, 25, 32, 64–5 and “neomania”  142–7 nowness  10–11, 12, 40

landscape, concepts of  19–20, 21–5, 54, 76–8, 150 Larsen, Nella  86 Lazarus, Emma  27 LCD Soundsystem  87 Lewis, Sinclair  81 Liebknechet, Wilhelm  139, 140, 149 Lipstiz, George  9 literature  see writing London  85, 138–45 and East End  85 and Karl Marx  138–45 London, Jack  85 Lowell, James  53, 58–9 Lowell, Robert  115 McCarthy, Cormac  71–2, 75, 121, 136 McKay, Claude  85 Marcus, Sharon  3, 17, 136 Marx, Grouch  87 Marx, Karl  136, 138–45 Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden  55–7 Marxism  112–13 base and superstructure in  137, 145–51 see also commodity fetishism Melville, Herman  30, 40, 145, 148 Mardi and a Voyage Thither  14, 16 Moby-Dick  13–17, 20 Pierre  6, 11, 14–15, 46–7, 81–2 Redburn  14 Minutemen, the  122–3, 132–3 Mitchell, W. J. T.  143 modernism  11, 26, 107 and intimate address  74–6 modernity  6, 81–3 and European tradition  64–8 “liquid”  7–9 Momaday, N. Scott  136

obesity  117, 126 optimism  see cruel optimism overconsumption  97–8, 126, 136 see also obesity Paris  2, 66, 111–12 Paris Exposition  150 patriotism  see nationalism Pease, Donald E.  11, 65 photography  1–5, 17, 25, 32, 74–7, 131 Pope, Alexander  26, 30–1, 35 postmodernism  135 and Emerson  52, 160n. 11 and Jameson  114 postmodernity  33, 114, 116, 133 production  8, 101, 113, 137, 143, 150–1 see also consumption Puck magazine  28–30 purity  2–3 defined against the human  17, 24, 25–6, 32, 40, 54, 65, 75–8 Putnam, Robert  2 Pynchon, Thomas  135 Rand, Ayn  42, 44–5, 164n. 22 Ray-Jones, Tony  115 rectilinear design  115

192

Index

Rome  66, 71, 73 Ruskin, John  67, 68 Said, Edward  146, 147 Sennett, Richard  2, 142 Silko, Leslie Marmon  20, 76–7 Sisyphus  116 Smith, Bessie  86, 88 Smith, Henry Nash  12, 65 Smith, Willie “the Lion”  85–7 Spencer, Elizabeth  98, 103 the sublime,  and Hudson River aesthetics  22, 24 Manhattan  84–90 in Moby-Dick  16–17 natural and technological  84 technological  113, 131 suburbs, the  6, 18, 20, 35, 37, 38, 39–41, 118, 136 sunsets  13, 16, 22, 34–6, 40 surface reading  3, 8, 17, 135 swimming pools,  and A Bigger Splash  40–1 and California  25–6 photographs of  1–5, 17, 25, 32, 131 and “The Swimmer”  39–41 Tanner, Tony  66, 135 tantalization  5, 12, 14, 16, 26–34, 155n. 53 deceleration as a process  59–60 definitions of  6–8, 13–15 and driving  119–26 and pleasure  95 tantalizing objects,  California  6, 18, 25–6, 33 commodity  3, 5, 97–8, 128, 136–45, 148 frontier  11, 19, 25, 55, 65, 83–4 gas pedal  116–24 gun stores  116–17, 121 Harlem  83–90 menus  116–26 nature  19–26, 49–69, 76–7 Oz  12–13 rainbows  12, 37, 42, 57, 59 shadows  57–9 steering wheel  116–20

virgin land  55, 65 virginity  100–2, 104, 106–9 wilderness  18, 22–4, 25, 38, 55, 63–5 Tantalus, myth of  7, 10–12, 17, 24, 27–9, 116 Tartarus  13, 95, 145, 151 Thompson, Hunter S.  114, 121–2, 140 Thoreau, Henry David  49, 51, 150 “Civil Disobedience”  52, 159n. 6, 161n. 19 “A Plea for Captain John Brown”  70 Walden  49, 50, 55–6, 58–69 A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers  58–60, 70, 77, 107 Tintoretto  74 Tocqueville, Alexis de  11, 15 touch,  and destruction  1–5, 9, 22, 25–6, 36, 38–40, 57, 63, 65, 80, 87, 95, 97 Trachtenberg, Alan  3, 68 transcendence  49, 58–60 Transcendentalism  49–72 transnational  5, 9, 52–3, 151 see also American Studies Turner, Frederick Jackson  22, 54 Twain, Mark,  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  57, 87 Updike, John  116 Van Vechten, Carl  85–7, 135 Venice  50, 64–71, 73–4, 76–7 ghetto in  85 Virgil  27 Warner, William T.  136 Warren, Robert Penn  6, 114 All the King’s Men  117–20, 126, 130 Washington D.C.  21, 26, 29, 157n. 27, 158n. 65 Watkins, Carleton  75 Watt, Mike  123 West Side Story  12 Wharton, Edith  68 Ethan Frome  106–8 Whitman, Walt  51

Index wilderness, myth of  18, 22–4, 25, 38, 55, 63–5, 137, 150 Williams, Raymond  146–7 The Long Revolution  30, 125 Winnicott, D. M.  95–104 Wizard of Oz, The  12, 16–17, 42, 128 Wolff, Tobias  44

193

Woodhouse, Anna  143, 148 Wright, Richard  83, 91, 111–17, 132–3 Native Son  106–9, 150 writing,  defined in terms of tantalization  20, 31–3 Yosemite  74–7