The Power of Negative Thinking : Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature 9780813928203, 9780813928128

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The Power of Negative Thinking

The Power of Negative Thinking Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature

benjamin schreier

University of Virginia Press charlottesville and london

University of Virginia Press © 2009 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2009 9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Schreier, Benjamin.   The power of negative thinking : cynicism and the history of modern American literature / Benjamin Schreier.    p.  cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8139-2812-8 (cloth : acid-free paper)   1.  American literature—20th century—History and criticism.  2.  Cynicism in literature.  I.  Title. PS228.C96S37  2009 810.9’353—dc22

2008054359

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

For Sarah, Ava, and Reuben

The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ political will; it is, through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions and on the basis of this reproblematization (in which he carries out his specific task as an intellectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play). —michel foucault, “the concern for truth”

In this our life there are no beginnings but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed in the formal emotions thought to be appropriate and often forced. Darkly rises each moment from the life which has been lived and which does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself. —delmore schwartz, “the world is a wedding”

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

xv

1 America and Its Discontents

1

2 Cynicism and the Criticism of Competence

32

3 Henry Adams and the Failure of Usefulness

54

4 Willa Cather’s Illegible Historicism

85

5 The Great Gatsby’s Betrayed Americanism

116

6 Miss Lonelyhearts’ Insincere Theodicy

145

Afterword: Invisible Literature

179

Notes

185

Bibliography

205

Index

213

Acknowledgments

An earlier and differently focused version of chapter 5, “The Great Gatsby’s Betrayed Americanism,” has been previously published, appearing as “Desire’s Second Act: ‘Race’ and The Great Gatsby’s Cynical Americanism,” Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 153–81. This book is the outcome of long, lonely work. But if I often labored in solitude, many people were indispensable to the book’s completion. Primarily, I must thank Cathie Brettschneider at the University of Virginia Press, who was so dedicated to this book. I would like also to acknowledge Dan O’Hara and Donald Pease for their enthusiastic— and piercing—comments and Susan Murray for so carefully reading the manuscript and clarifying my vaguish flights. Many years before Cathie got her mitts on the project, it was a dissertation, and John Burt, my advisor, offered me what I needed—often through wonderfully circuitous paths—to germinate the ideas here. Caren Irr adopted my thesis from negligent hands fairly late in the game and enhanced it beyond my ability to estimate. And Wai Chee Dimock nurtured my scholarship for years during graduate school and after, and her contributions to this project are substantial. A postdoctoral fellowship in the Jewish Studies Program at Penn State University offered me the time necessary to complete the transformation from dissertation to book, and I must thank Brian Hesse there for his dedication to me and my work. Paul Bové, Michael Gilmore (who, I’ll never forget, once implied I was a Real

xii  /  acknowledgments

Man), Eugene Goodheart, Tom King, Marcia Landy, and Paul Morrison have been mentors. David Greven and Alex Beecroft presumably know how dear they are to me, but I acknowledge their scholarly fellowship and love nonetheless. Aaron Worth is an intellectual brother, frustratingly honest and refreshingly perverse. Nathaniel Deutsch has for years worked with me to hone my ideas. Jonathan Eburne at Penn State, the very type of the academic bon vivant, helped me through a reader’s comment about teleology, and Hester Blum let him. Michael Booth, Candace Gibson, Katie Owens, Zoe Trodd, and Jarrod Whitaker helped me get my points across more intelligently in places. Several friends have been dependable companions. Greg Bolton, Kelso Cratsley, Dean Franco, Jeff Gore, Zack Kramer, Jonathan Marks, Jim McNeill, Matt Reichek, Charles and Kim Sligh, Damon Smith, and Lisa Sternlieb each, in his or her own way, managed to keep me sane while I worked, even if some of them may not know it. Rona Sheramy suffered me through a couple of this book’s crucial early years. Mike Murphy tried to save me from a career in academia, and even succeeded for a while; with hindsight, I can admit that his actions are probably partly responsible for my finishing. Legion are those who helped me chart the affective contours of cynicism, but there’s little to be gained (and indeed, probably much to be lost) from registering them here. My mother and father, Arlene Richman and Ethan Schreier, were untiringly encouraging, if they rarely had much idea what I was writing about (when I spoke at all about my work). To my stepmother, Janet Levine, for the unending supply of support she offered, I am grateful. And I of course enthusiastically acknowledge my indomitable, and indomitably cheering, mother-in-law, Maria Matthiessen, who, with her husband, Peter Matthiessen, has so often offered refuge from an ever-encroaching threat of being overwhelmed. Julian Koenig, my father-in-law, has often applauded me, even if he occasionally (and for no good reason that I can detect) busts my chops. My stepfather, Geoff Taylor, brooking no cynicism, always insisted (despite me) that there would be rewards for this labor. And on my prizewinning brother, Josh Schreier, and his wife, Lise, I have from time to time depended for spiritual survival (one time in particular I can recall was the period between entering and leaving graduate school). Incidentally, I think Josh came up with the title, at a moment when Nathaniel Deutsch may have been close by. Finally, my wife, Sarah Koenig, and children, Ava and Reuben, whom

acknowledgments  /  xiii

I love more than anything, were all too often neglected while I worked, even as they gave me reason to finish; to them I dedicate this book. *  *  * I apologize to anyone I’m forgetting here. And regardless of everything I’ve written above, it should go without saying that the imperfections of my work persist quite independently of the support and encouragement I’ve received. New York City, Summer 2008

Introduction

I’d like to begin with a disclaimer: though its title might be read to suggest that this book makes claims about cynicism or American literary modernism, this is not wholly the case. Cynicism, which poses such a problem because of its curious combination of allegiance to recognizable normative ideals and skepticism about these norms’ actual relevance to the practices and institutions that demarcate and evaluate social experience, ends up being a fantastically rich lens through which to study democratic culture—indeed, arguably too rich. Authorizing this book is not just the fact that cynicism has essentially always been a factor in “Western” or European civilizations (I use this term as widely—and anachronistically—as I will be permitted, to include at least those civilizations that antedated the idea of Europe but that current European societies claim as ancestors), nor that cynicism’s difficulty with sincerity is an important current in modern American literature, though my discussions in this book do certainly address themselves to plumbing the significance of cynicism’s role in modern American culture. More precisely, I find that cynicism, because of its double-edgedness, its dedication to the normative project and its zealous disbelief in that project’s efficacy, offers in addition an occasion to make claims about how criticism can approach the literature it takes up, and specifically about how the statist model of literary criticism currently in academic ascendance may only illegitimately or peremptorily do what we expect of it. My aim has always been to detach analytical claims—about literature, about culture—from an easy instrumental blindness. Insofar as my methodology in this book

xvi  /  introduction

is (broadly) to pursue arguments about normative habits through close readings of texts, I certainly do not exempt myself from the charge of tendentious abstraction for instrumental ends. But this book is motivated by a belief that the humanities should be defined—and judged— not only by the scope of the instruments and practices in which they consist—and through which they provide descriptions of culture—but more importantly by the questions we ask in the wake of this instrumentalization. In this way, critical instrumentalism, which I imagine is ultimately unavoidable, can stay contentious. I don’t dwell in my discussions here too much on a categorical link between modernism and cynicism. I’ll be honest at the outset: I don’t know how to define modernism. Michael Szalay has written of modernism’s critical overdetermination: We are deluged with works looking to codify yet once more this still somehow elusive period of literary history. Depending on the critic, modernism is historically explosive, containing within itself all the chaotic energies of the new, or an evasion, a project of autonomy struggling to awake from the nightmare of history; given to the streamlined and technocratic, or to myth and the archaic; a subversion of the semiotic codes of bourgeois society or a sequence of master narratives that are the very embodiment of hegemony; awash in a stream of middle-class consciousness or a shaft into the primal imagination of the primitive unconscious; committed to the transcendent powers of the lone genius, or impersonal, steeped in the objectifying mechanisms of modern science and sociology; acutely self-conscious and metadiscursive or the very dream of a self-identical logos; pure and sanitized of generic confusion or the polyglot vanguard of multimedia society. Depending on one’s perspective or what one wants (or needs) to see, modernism can indeed be many things. Szalay understandably “does not set out to reconcile these definitions.” Instead, employing “no acid test, no checklist of aesthetic distinction,” he continues, “I use the term ‘modernism’ in an unabashedly general sense, to designate the literature of the first half of [the twentieth] century.”1 Suggesting an explanation for this confusing proliferation of accounts, Henri Lefebvre has written, “for a long time the modern world and modernism have been submitted to, accepted or rejected, but never thought”;2 the account of modernism has been too much the victim of the enticements of recognition, of the urge to describe the emergence of phenomena by means of what we already

introduction  /  xvii

know how to see. Backed by Szalay’s “unabashedly general” claim—and thereby hoping to avoid failing to define the nature of modernism—but also trying to be responsible to what Lefebvre’s term “thinking” might mean (which at the very least has to mean not assuming that the direction and significance of historical change are perspicuous), I do not want to use literary history to say that the novels I examine here are simply and finally about cynicism or to take the extra and unjustified step and say that cynicism belongs to modern American literature or that modern American literature belongs to cynicism. In part, the examination of cynicism leads me to conclude that I cannot make such dogmatic claims. But, on the other hand, I also find that such claims in fact preclude an analysis of the ways in which the cynicism of the modernist texts I analyze here functions, how it becomes visible, what can or should be done with it, and indeed how it has been handled; cynics and cynicism are often subjected to a domestication, dispossessed of their troubling insincerity in a teleological narrativization that almost always serves the goal of making normative claims about America and its culture that assume this labor to be more or less self-evident. This book is not in favor of cynicism insofar as it does not argue that cynicism will serve us or save us, or that it will get us from where we are to a place we know to be better. But, in trying to listen to cynicism, I suppose I am sympathetic to it (and insofar as I have not dwelled on definitively unattractive aspects of cynicism, I suppose also that I have limited the scope of the book). I do not think I have erred in presenting cynicism as something more complex and ambivalent than the quietism, apathy, nihilism, hypocrisy, or selfishness for which it is often (and willfully) mistaken. As an intellectual mode that cannot take for granted the satisfaction of normative desires inscribed in a society’s regular3 practices, procedures, and expectations, cynicism questions how knowledge is habitually put to use. A romance with “history” threatens to make literary criticism subordinate to a potentially undertheorized conception of historiography backed up by an undertheorized ideal of competence, whereby the study of literary texts becomes little more than recognizing a functional ideological context—one, that is, that has already been established or taken for granted as a legitimate object of knowledge—in the lines and spaces of those texts. As Christopher Lane has recently argued, “In this dominant paradigm, which includes various forms of new historicism, cultural materialism, and cultural studies, the principle determinant, historical context, is chosen in advance”;4 taken for granted is the assumption that literature expresses this context in ways a critic can read,

xviii  /  introduction

understand, and put to acceptable use. Appropriately, a bit of history here may be informative: In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks condemned prevailing academic criticism for having rendered the American literary past “sterile for the living mind,” and he called on American critics to “invent a useable past,” which is what, after all, “a vital criticism always does.” The critical infecundity that dismayed Brooks, a result of our having “no cultural economy, no abiding sense of spiritual values, no body of critical understanding,”5 can be traced back further and more fundamentally, Brooks argued, to the sad fact that “the present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.” Thus Brooks’s “useable past” will map important tendencies and ideological tools, recognizable in “the present,” back to “how they first manifested themselves.”6 Brooks criticized a dominant mode of literary scholarship that was historicist of a decidedly old variety for insufficiently attending to the value of cultural history in the present life of “national culture.” But it looks like historicist criticism in its current, “new” formation has overreached in responding to Brooks’s call, subjecting cultural history to the increasingly unquestioned requirement that it be useful or recognizable. Thus now, literature is more often than not approached as a way of laying political claim to history by producing “historical” accounts of social or political formations via literary or cultural formations on the assumption that literary-cultural formations and social-political formations similarly and in parallel encode the same historical forces.7 Brooks is right to imply that there is little real difference between knowledge and the uses to which it is put, that knowledge is always already useful. But in the wake of his unabashed instrumentalism, I’d like to suggest that literary studies has to remain ever vigilant about the probably unavoidable elevation of recognition (that is, of the already legible) over criticism (that is, of the terms that administer legibility). When read for their cynicism, which cannot be sincere about the expectations underlying the instrumentality of normative competence, literary texts undermine the seductions of self-evidence. Whether or not the book itself is cynical I leave to the reader to determine, but in my attempt to take cynicism seriously, I have started with a few assumptions. One of these is that language is primarily subsidiary to neither its representational object nor its representational subject; as Wlad Godzich has written: “We all know, after Derrida, that writing  .  .  .  does not work instrumentally as a different mode of expressing the unity and the integrity of a thought that can be expressed in

introduction  /  xix

a variety of ways without being affected by any of these ways. On the contrary, writing designates a work space; it delimits and affects regions of knowledge and their political effects.”8 The willingness—and ability— to dismiss cynicism as a form of dysfunction (as it is so often dismissed) rests, unsurprisingly, on a presumption of the recognizability of the categories and modes of normalized individual and social functionality. In fact, a strikingly similar presumption underlies the historicist desire to read cultural texts thematically for ideological formations: what we’re really doing when we engage in new historicist criticism is indexing a particular interpretation of culture to a particular interpretation of social or political formations and assuming to boot that the recognizable coherence of such interpretations is testimony to their self-evident truth. But Godzich’s “designat[ion]s,” “delimit[ation]s,” and “effects” render this re-cognitive presumption problematic, to say the least.9 We should thus avoid the tendency to “historicize” the cynicism of literary texts: if, as I will argue, cynicism upsets the hegemonic construction of normative self-evidence by rendering conspicuous the historical, national, economic, psychological, and ethical boundaries that regulate social practices, then it must be admitted that cynicism might upset too the normative capacities of the epistemological procedures that presume to fix, know, and articulate its significance. Thus in addition to examining irruptions of cynicism in modern American literature, this book takes cynicism as an opportunity to question the expectation that criticism can illuminate a culture and history that await analysis and expression in preparation for a recognizably beneficent civic participation. More than saying something purely or simply about these texts—such, after all, is an instrumental possibility that Godzich reminds us is no longer available—I try here to examine how we, as literary critics, think about the literature we think about. This book questions whether our understanding of culture and history is what we want it to be. A second supposition of this book—I wonder if I even need to state this—is that critical responsibility to texts by necessity rests on a methodological assumption that texts exist in some way as things. At least for now, at least until I am provided with some alternative account, I have no choice but to assume that a text has some kind of “inside”—manifested in the pattern and texture of its language, in its mechanisms and operators, and in its themes and plots, for example—and therefore, as a consequence, some kind of “outside”—manifested, I suppose, in everything else. This is, at least in the sense I intend, a New Critical assumption, but it is also shared by new historicism. Few critical innovations of the

xx  /  introduction

last thirty or forty years would be possible without New Criticism’s understanding of a text’s “structure,” which takes for granted concepts of a text’s inside and outside. John Crowe Ransom declared that what “the new criticism” really calls for is an “ontological critic” able to account for the differential structure of poetic discourse. If new historicism has tried to collapse Ransom’s distinction between the “order” and “kind” of content—Ransom argued that it is not that poetry treats a different “kind” of content than does prose, but that poetry is distinguished by its different “order” of content—it nonetheless still takes for granted, and has in some cases imperially expanded, New Critical assumptions about the work itself, about the knowledge it provides (a kind of knowledge that Allen Tate famously defined in opposition to the kind of knowledge offered by scientific positivism), and about cultural continuity (that is, both across the moment of a text’s production and between the moment of the text’s production and the moment of its reception by the critic).10 However, though I cannot but share this assumption about the distinction between a text’s inside and outside, I see no justification for further assuming that a text’s “inside” provides a reliable key to the contexts of its production—i.e., what is presumably external to it. In the absence of any self-evident relationship between the inside and the outside of a text, the critic must maintain a not-so-self-evident responsibility to the text— a responsibility that, for lack of a better term, I’m happy to call close reading. But as I show here, this process of close reading, this responsibility to the text—which is, after all, the means through which new historicism as much as New Criticism achieves its results—undermines precisely that imperial, categorical recognition upon which new historicism’s expectations of visibility and knowledge depend. And, lastly, a third assumption: in writing this book I have maintained a suspicion that an engagement with modernist American literary texts shouldn’t presume the conceptual self-evidence, coherence, or literary historical relevance of America. What’s so delightfully challenging about writing about “America” is that there are so many incredibly fertile ways in which it denies our positivistic expectations (and our positivistic knowledge)—certainly, for example, all the clichés about the political, cultural, and social divergence of the United States from European states; all the intriguingly insistent patriotism of so much American studies work; and all the maneuverings about the more problematic status of American modernism with respect to European or “high” modernism in literary studies indicate something, at least, about the curious anxiety scholars of American culture feel about the field of their study. I say fertile

introduction  /  xxi

because, far from occasioning an analytical impasse, America’s peculiar existential problem provides (and has provided) an opportunity to examine how we—and by that I suppose I mean both intellectuals who can somehow claim America as well as those whom America can somehow claim—prefer (or at least tend) to look at and construct the objects of our study. I am very suspicious of positivism in the study of literature, of the tendency to concentrate more on the things texts supposedly represent and therefore less on the manner in which texts do their representing. This tendency is part of a replacement of thinking with recognition, but it is a competence that is forestalled by the analysis of cynicism. Thus in this study, I am less interested in making a set of representative claims about America, modernism, or American modernism and more interested in looking at how a set of textual relations and strategies in fact disrupts our ability (though perhaps not our compulsion) to say something representative about them. Finally, I should say a few words about sincerity, as it is often found lurking around references to cynicism. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling insisted that, despite the New Critical assertion that literature has nothing to do with morality (in The New Criticism, we remember, Ransom claimed that “moralism” does not differentiate poetry from prose), literature is both a social and a moral act. For Trilling (as for so many of us), sincerity means “congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” and thus it operates as much for society’s sake as for the individual’s; historically, it appeared as an ideal in societies in which dissonance between individual and social demands was not or could not be articulated. Authenticity, on the other hand, arises when society and its values are called into question; it’s a more rigorous kind of sincerity that tends to devalue or discredit the public good. It is no surprise that Trilling prefers the ideal of sincerity to that of authenticity, at least partly because when the ideal of authenticity reigns, social order degenerates further; he favors sincerity over authenticity because of the normative force he imagines each ideal potentially marshals. He objects to authenticity (famously invoking the specter of R. D. Lang) because the only social possibility it can project is a kind of “upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ—but with none of the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished.”11 That is, Trilling’s argument in favor of sincerity and against authenticity is grounded in an assumption that,

xxii  /  introduction

like sincerity, authenticity claims to be prescriptive but, unlike sincerity, cannot actually manage to be prescriptive. He challenges it because it promises a revelation but lacks the means to normatively deliver the practical program implicit in revelation. It’s the assumption underlying this argument that is important: the relationship between avowal and action is worth paying attention to because literature reveals valuable knowledge about society to a responsible analysis. Trilling’s differentiation of sincerity and authenticity is not as important to my purposes as is its polemical foundation, which takes for granted significant and linked relationships between individual and group and between literature and society. Whether one is a partisan of what Trilling labels “sincerity” or “authenticity,” one takes for granted these terms’ ability to provide a kind of analytical anchor, to level nihilism’s slippery slope and thus prevent a theoretical-ethical landslide from burying the possibility of normative judgments about society and culture. This presumption is remarkably widespread and persistent in the humanities. As I will show, however, cynicism deconstructs precisely the assumption of self-evidence underlying this normative teleology—whether it is asserted in the social realm of government or the cultural realm of literature. Though each of the chapters that follow can undoubtedly be read meaningfully on its own, this book has been organized progressively. Chapter 1 pursues a phenomenological account of cynicism, taking as a starting point the ways in which the term circulates in current political discourse; as this analysis demonstrates, cynicism arises in the failure of the self-evidence through which hegemonic culture reproduces itself, the effect of a displacement of normalization. Chapter 2 takes its leave from this phenomenological analysis to chart the morphology of cynicism, including its classical history and the challenge it poses to the statism of currently ascendant literary critical habits. From there, I take each of the books I discuss as an opportunity to examine a successive moment in the cynical disruption of normalized sincerity. In Henry Adams’s increasing conviction of the impossibility of articulating the historical relevance of knowledge is a picture of the failure to index the self to obvious narratives of social development; thus The Education of Henry Adams voices a suspicion that recognizable knowledge may not necessarily be useful to the desire to produce normative accounts of history. Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, by showing Godfrey St. Peter drawn to a promise of legible historical value he no longer believes is self-evidently commensurate with experience, illustrates a fear that the desire to produce normative accounts, necessary for the historical explanation of social experience,

introduction  /  xxiii

may lack justification. Nick Carraway’s ambivalent hope to identify with Jay Gatsby’s American desire, which Nick knows falls inevitably into monstrous defiance of the instrumental transparency he expects from it in the first place, reveals the normative legibility of national identity to run aground in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on the failure to provide a self-evident national narrative. And in Miss Lonelyhearts’ attraction to a simulated therapeutic promise of redemption that is humiliating precisely to the extent that he wants it to answer his desire, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts stages a fear that sincere concern for the future may itself by unachievable. I conclude this work with an afterword in which I show how the cynical critique of normalization undermines the instrumental assumption that culture’s primary function and significance is its representativity. If the cynicism of each of these cynical texts is described by—and produced in—an expectation of competence at the level of individual characters that is born with the normalized self-evidence in which instrumentality inheres, the norms whose becoming-conspicuous is so disarming in these books define too the critical project that aims to articulate the historical significance of its literary objects. Less concerned with identifying the cynicism of particular characters—a method that could do little more than disregard the normative problem of cynicism by diagnostically containing it—this is a book that, in resisting the urge to reject cynicism as just another form of false consciousness, focuses instead on examining the expectations authorized by and made of social processes and formations, both inside and around literary texts, and asks questions about the relationship between language, literary history, and the ideal of critical competence. An analysis of cynicism in American literature, that is, occasions also an interrogation— a making conspicuous, not a resolution—of the possibility of literary criticism.

The Power of Negative Thinking

1  /

America and Its Discontents Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision. —ambrose bierce, the devil’s dictionary

The Phenomenology of Cynicism These days it’s nearly impossible to think about politics in the United States without thinking about cynicism. Here are four dispatches from the front lines, as it were: Rahm Emmanuel, an architect of the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006, closing a talk before the Brookings Institution in late April 2007: “The saddest legacy of the Bush Administration’s six-year trail of cronyism and corruption is that it contributes to the public’s already cynical view of government. This makes it even more difficult for those of us who believe that the purpose of government is to secure a better future for our country and all of its people. Repairing this sorry legacy is the first challenge our next President will face.”1 A 12 January 2007 column by Rosa Brooks in the Los Angeles Times, entitled “Surge—The ‘Decent Interval’ Redux,” which opens: “If you think the growing similarity between Iraq and Vietnam is tragic but inadvertent, you’re not being cynical enough.” An article in the New York Times of 24 April 2007 by David Stout and Carl Hulse (“Reid and Cheney Trade Attacks over Iraq Bill”): “The battle of words over an Iraq war–spending bill intensified this afternoon as Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, was indulging in cynical political calculation. . . . ‘It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage. Leaders should make decisions based on the security interests of our country, not on the interests of their political party.’ ”And

2  /  the power of negative thinking

finally, as if anticipating these dire post-election proclamations, Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson in an article on political and media cynicism from ten years earlier: “Healthy skepticism about politics has become pervasive cynicism. The presumption of trust and cooperation has been replaced by that of mistrust and exploitation.”2 Notably, our current problem with cynicism seems rooted in how we perceive the role of knowledge in democratic culture—especially what people know about how other people can be insincere. In Emmanuel’s Brookings Institution speech, a “cynical view of government” finds justification for eschewing political participation in knowing that our representatives, those actors we invest with the authority to uphold our common interests in the political sphere, are corrupt; what we know validates our withdrawal from public institutions. In Brooks’s Los Angeles Times column, cynicism is a mode of perception—a way of knowing—attuned to seeing through professed motivations to the actual motivations disguised therein. In the New York Times article, Reid is acting cynically, Cheney suggests, because he really knows that he shouldn’t parry for political advantage, because, as he knows, it is in fact far more important to support our troops, as they say, than to play the crowd for electoral gain. And, as Cappella and Jamieson describe it, accumulating evidence transforms “healthy skepticism” into intractable “cynicism”: the public has now seen enough to know that they should trust the proclamations of neither politicians nor the press that reports on them. Cynicism appears today as an apocalypse of enlightenment, threatening through its challenge to sincerity, earnest belief, and engaged concern about the future the institutions and norms through which democratic society functions. What is common to all these cases is that in cynicism knowledge subverts the proper normative functioning of civic institutions. In threatening journalism, science, business, and education, a creeping cynicism more fundamentally imperils the very possibility of democracy. We have come now to fear an eviscerated public sphere, the victim of an infectious cynicism that undercuts the means by which civil society can be pursued at all. Prone to suspect our fellows rather than listen to them, to dismiss challenges to what we take for granted rather than engage them, to withdraw from social problems rather than try to solve them, Americans now stand in danger of losing their participatory democratic culture. And cynicism is at its most pernicious in the fact that we can almost universally decry its effects while still feeling under no real compulsion to do anything about it. I start from the suspicion that if cynics are inclined to be mistrustful

america and its discontents  /  3

of language, to disbelieve the sincerity of public pronouncements or suspect that public institutions serve something other or less than the common good, to doubt the adequacy of conventional political wisdom to political realities, or even to be wary of traditional democratic practices, something more complex than moral defeatism is at work. A cynic does not merely avow one thing and do another, as characterizes the hypocrite, nor has the cynic lost his belief in the continuity between norms and action, as the nihilist has. Least of all does the cynic simply not care about ethical prerogatives, as one who is apathetic might not. On the contrary, as I will show, the cynic doubts the normalized self-evidence of a situated ideal of knowledge tied necessarily to competence; and this conceptual link between knowledge and competence is as essential to how we think about democracy—that is, as a normalized system for understanding and managing social reality—as it is to how we think about literary and cultural criticism—that is, as a normalized system for understanding and managing the significance of cultural production. Rather than signaling an evacuation of normative concern, cynicism attests to the persuasiveness retained by norms even when they prove discontinuous with our attempts to navigate experience. This is a work primarily of literary criticism, and as such I am more interested in analyzing a mode of thinking from the perspectives of both its relation to a set of texts (all American, from the first third of the twentieth century) and its relation to an institutional way of thinking about culture currently ascendant in the humanities than I am in producing an account of American history, sociology, or politics. In the interest of honesty and disclosure, I should state that I make no attempt to produce a coherent genealogy of the term “cynicism.”3 And I prefer to avoid delimiting a taxonomy of cynics, the only real purpose of which could be to diminish the significance of the phenomenon of cynicism by normalizing—by pathologizing—the social or political function of particular kinds of cynics; though cynicism surely exhibits a different operative mode at the levers of political or economic power than it does among the politically disenfranchised and economically downtrodden, for example, I’m more concerned with paying attention to the normative anxiety common to its various manifestations. Least of all do I feel it appropriate to provide policy prescriptions, which I leave to others more apposite to those pursuits. Instead, I want to expose as I can the operation of a set of reactionary forces, detectable in an array of cultural activities, from politics to the human sciences, served not least by facile characterizations of cynicism as quietism, indifference, or hypocrisy. My aim in

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this book is not to claim that cynicism is “right,” but only that it may not be necessarily “wrong”; I hope to take it seriously by way of interrogating where and how it appears and the manner in which it is discussed. As it is understood today, cynicism is portrayed in one of two ways. For the most part, it is characterized as a pathology, a kind of false consciousness preventing citizens from acting in the interest of a robust democratic culture. Cynicism in this account is dangerous because it leads to civic disengagement and an elevation of narrowly conceived and ultimately destructive shortsighted ends over broadly conceived collective and considered ones; depending on the orientation of the observer, it either threatens the norms of an essentially just social arrangement or it threatens to buttress a social arrangement to which injustice is endemic. Cynicism’s expanding hold on the citizenry, leading people to look inward rather than outward, endangers cohesive social values and our ability to resist domination and abuses of power. Less frequently, cynicism is defended, to a limited extent, as capable of reinvigorating the enervated institutions and practices that constitute democratic culture. Cynicism in this account is helpful because its skepticism can cut through the crap that hardens into habit in democratic societies, but it can become dangerous if it itself hardens into habit and thereby sanctions the withdrawal and disenchantment pathologized in the first characterization. Both of these accounts, however, tend to disregard the actual phenomenology of cynicism in the name of normalized recognition; this is perhaps especially so when we find the two accounts working in concert. On the one hand, associating cynicism with falsity and pathology too simply reduces it as something to be solved or cured. On the other hand, the defense of cynicism as reconstructive implies that cynicism is only provisionally justified, and is so at that only under the auspices of an authoritative teleology; cynicism wears out its welcome as soon as belief has been restored in democratic institutions, at which point its skeptical disbelief becomes irritating or, worse, deleterious.4 Both approaches to cynicism, that is, comprehend it instrumentally, in terms of currently recognizable social norms. Rather than similarly dismissing cynicism, however, my goal here is to look at what it reveals—primarily about the shape thinking takes, the demands made on it, the accommodations we make to those demands, and the habits that often supplant it. If we keep ourselves from engaging in political practices because we cynically see politics as a corrupted enterprise, for example, it is hard to avoid seeing that cynicism is anchored in an abused understanding of what politics should be and how politicians should behave. But it is also important to

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note that the emergence of cynicism depends on an inability to recognize a way to address the problem of our corrupted democratic institutions. Cynicism, in other words, has everything to do with the authoritative hold and persuasiveness of the recognizable, with what is sanctioned and what is not, with what people feel they can do, what people feel they are compelled to do, and what people feel they have a right to do: as a result, we should seek it out in the failure of competence. In drawing attention to what David Mazella describes as “the gap between official representations and the public’s experience of reality,”5 cynicism thus illuminates the important relationship between recognition and normative teleology, but it arises when the ability to recognize a way forward or articulate a justification falters. Instead of taking for granted cynicism’s simplicity— as uncomplicated pathology or means to an end—this study will instead remain open to cynicism’s complex possibility. At times cynicism seems like a moving target. It’s not just that we without too much difficulty use the term inconsistently, with the polemical vilification militated by such über-semes as “political cynicism,” “cynical politicians,” and “the cynical press,” for example, or with sympathy for an often justified challenge to corrupt insincerity. Indeed, we can speak of the cynic in power, who abuses his office or the public trust (this cynic’s cynicism is often disparaged), but also of the cynicism of the abused citizen, who responds to the insincerity of the powerful with an encompassing suspicion (a cynicism that can be easily justified, at least in aspects). And these discordances say nothing of the fact that the cynics of today seem on the surface to have little in common with Diogenes the Cynic, who was universally celebrated for living in a tub, railing against prominent citizens, and masturbating in public. The term’s instability is partly explained by the fact that cynical realism inhabits the boundaries between criticism and prescription and between skepticism and hope; what distinguishes cynicism from simple nihilism, self-interest, apathy, or hypocrisy, after all, is its Biercian appeal to the way things should be that irresolvably supplements understanding of the way things are. Bierce’s irony, whereby socially sanctioned blindness corrects the “faulty vision” of the cynic, suggests that the cynic, in fact, “sees things as they are” only because he also sees things “as they ought to be”: the Scythians’ problem—their blindness—results from the fact that their reactionary vision of the way things “ought to be” lacks the perspective granted by “see[ing] things as they are.”6 If cynicism is familiarly recognized for its quietist disregard for the normative protocols of popularly held values— for example, in Emmanuel’s cynical politician who doesn’t feel bound by

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the charge of public trust and who thereby contributes to the “public’s already cynical view of government”—lingering under this appearance is a serious regard for hegemonic norms, an albeit unsettled attention to them and the practices they inscribe—for example, in Emmanuel’s “public,” which is cynical to the extent that it shares with corrupt politicians whose cronyism mocks it an understanding of “the purpose of government.” Cynicism illuminates the presumption of normalized competence at the heart of how practices and desires are functionally encoded. More radically, in doing this it hints at the displacement by the recognizable rewards of competence of the ability to critically think about how the possibility of competence is encoded in the first place. Cynicism’s often contradictory trajectories are borne out in recent analyses of cynicism, which, as David Mazella points out, almost universally take “its harmfulness for granted.”7 Three pathological elements of cynicism are commonly described. First, cynicism is often portrayed as manifesting itself in a conviction that people, especially those with power to abuse (or more generally with something to lose), are insincere; cynicism thus potentially undermines the public sphere by breeding social atomization and further insincerity. Second, this conviction in fact arises because cynics remain motivated by democratic norms, but suspect that abuse and corruption have made them irrelevant. Third, this suspicion threatens to fuel a quietism that makes cynicism a particularly dangerous threat to democracy insofar as it does not concern itself with the future—and in particular the regeneration—of democracy. As Mazella puts it: “Cynics are feared because they threaten the public with a genuinely worrying prospect, a future without hope of meaningful change. At the very least, cynics foresee a future in which individuals have little chance of fixing their problems or improving their conditions in life or at work.” Jeffrey C. Goldfarb describes “widespread public cynicism” as “the single most pressing challenge facing American democracy today.” Operating as a “form of legitimation through disbelief,” cynicism buttresses rhetorics—that is, ways of talking and thinking, and therefore of doing—in which neither leaders nor constituents necessarily believe, but which both unreflectively use. By suppressing the impulse to challenge such rhetorics, cynicism suppresses too the possibility of reforming the social arrangement. Importantly, however, Goldfarb insists that while a “fog of cynicism surrounds American politics,” people who act cynically “are still animated by fully institutionalized democratic norms and traditions”; though the cynic continues to believe that the role of democracies is to enable the “necessary balancing act between individual

america and its discontents  /  7

interests and the common good,” for example, she no longer believes this balancing act to be an achievable goal because she has come to suspect all proclamations of public good of masking individual, private interests. By illuminating the distance between professed norms and actual practices (a function that is, Goldfarb admits, not unique to cynicism), cynicism eviscerates the potential saving power of norms (like the public good) precisely in affirming their desirability. Ultimately, in what turns out to be a common move, Goldfarb indicts cynicism for failing to illuminate a way out of this problem. Cynicism’s most acute threat to a democratic polity is its totalitarian tendency to cripple the drive to dissent and therefore its promotion of acceptance of the existing order: “The substitution of cynicism for critical reason supports the mass-society underside of democracy.” That is, cynicism’s danger arises from its great strength, which is allied to knowledge: cynicism describes forms of domination (e.g., noting that a politician may talk about the public good, but he walks, carrying public institutions and bodies with him, far more in step with his private interests), but because it fails to radically engage problems under the auspices of their future solution, it undermines democratic social forces and strengthens totalitarian ones. Cynicism, Goldfarb acknowledges, “can be understood as a kind of modern realism,” but “to do no more than identify the manipulation and the agent doing the manipulating, as the cynic does . . . is to remain within the limitations of mass structures. Cynicism makes mass society a self-fulfilling prophecy.” That said, just as they can breed cynicism, so democratic norms—which “constitute our lives”—also retain a saving power: cynicism, like the forms of manipulation it serves, can be challenged “if we recognize, support, and utilize embedded societal values”8—by, one imagines, actively using them to overturn “rhetorics” that foster insincerity. Donald L. Kanter and Philip H. Mirvis share with Goldfarb an appreciation of cynicism’s link to norms: cynicism in their view is a reaction to and barrier against “unrealistically high expectations” that have been dashed (these expectations are, specifically, of oneself and of others, but they generalize to expectations of society, institutions, authority, and the future). Again as for Goldfarb, Kanter and Mirvis find cynicism to be at root a problem of engagement: “the cynic attributes organizational outcomes to [what the authors describe as “dark”] forces inside individuals” and remains “almost blind to the social milieu surrounding people in organizations”; mistakenly believing human conduct to be motivated solely by self-interest, cynics are “doubting Thomases who have lost their

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faith in people and institutions” and so withdraw.9 Cynicism is an “immature mode of adaptation and, in many respects, an unhealthy one.” Signaled in their phrase “unrealistically high expectations,” the Kanter and Mirvis cure for cynical pathology comprises a reorientation of goals around benchmarks whose recognizable value can untangle the cynical trap. Ronald Arnett and Pat Arneson similarly locate cynicism’s chief danger in its habitualized inability to see historical realities behind the fictive intractabilities in which it finds comfort. For Arnett and Arneson, “routine” cynicism—as an automatic faultfinding without consideration of the situation in which fault is found—is the problem, insofar as it lays the ground on which “the reality of the historic moment is less important than the cynic’s preconceived assumptions.”10 Unable to trust others, cynics project their disappointment and disillusionment onto social relations and see few payoffs for virtuous actions and ideals, and so they detach themselves from others. As it is for Goldfarb, cynicism is rebuked by Kanter and Mirvis and by Arnett and Arneson not for its social criticism—which remains a vital element of any democracy—but for its unwillingness to engage in society and to believe that, rather than reified results, it is motivations, the real source of norms’ productive and administrative energy, that matter. Not so sympathetic, Timothy Bewes claims that the modern cynic “is the typical ‘postmodern’ character, a figure alienated both from society and his or her own subjectivity.” For Bewes, the cynical postmodern ironist’s passive observations amount to a “defeatist accommodation” to hegemonic representations of “mundane reality.” Bewes traces this alienation to the fact that postmodernity is currently misunderstood as an ontological declaration about the state of objective reality—that is, as a set of hypotheses and doctrines about the dissolution of metanarratives (i.e., those accounts that encode reality as accessible and relevant)—and may thus serve as a “rationale for retreating from politics itself,” instead of as what it really is, which is a strategy of conceptual interrogation toward objective reality—that is, as a set of hypotheses and doctrines manifesting incredulity toward metanarratives—and thus the very essence of politics. Modern cynicism breeds a loss of political investment— the cynic believes objective reality is no longer available—because of its pathological false consciousness. After modernity, so Bewes argues, cynicism denotes a refusal to engage with the world more than a disposition of antagonism toward it (that is, as Cynicism had primarily been in classical Greece), a flight into solitude and interiority and an abnegation of politics on the basis of its inauthenticity.11

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Similarly pathologizing cynicism for recoiling from responsibility to the real, Richard Stivers diagnoses our current cynical culture as the result of an enervated collective ability to think in ethical terms. Stivers argues against what he sees as too much emphasis on “aesthetics” (at least since the nineteenth century) as “the dominant if not exclusive dimension of culture,” an emphasis that eschews a “shared,” “practical” grasp of reality. By reemphasizing ethical action, Stivers hopes to increase our understanding of reality: first, an ethical criterion submits our concepts to “the test of reality,” and second, ethical action can “provide the wherewithal to resist cynicism and idealism, both of which conceal reality,” cynicism by making reality “worse than it is” and idealism by making it “better than it is.” Only “realism” begins with the hope of making reality “yield meaning.”12 This idea that cynicism constitutes a flight from reality recurs repeatedly in the literature on cynicism. Writing about social attitudes toward science, Susan Haack claims that a “New Cynicism” has taken the insight that “observation and theory are independent, that scientific vocabulary shifts and changes meaning, and that science is a deeply social enterprise” too far; “succumbing to . . . factitious despair,” this attitude is incapable of imagining that understanding can arise from such a state of affairs;13 and Bill Martin, like Bewes and others, writes that the material basis of cynicism is a loss of interest in “the future of humanity,” and that cynicism effects a “long-run shift” from “don’t know” to “can’t know.”14 Worry about the threat embodied in cynical disengagement is widely shared. David R. Hiley warns that cynicism’s “generalized distrust” threatens our ability to act within participatory democratic institutions: “Indifference, nihilism, and cynicism are simply different manifestations of the same cultural phenomena—disengagement and alienation.” More perniciously, because of the curious way in which a “culture of individualism” and a “pedagogy of tolerance” have become imbricated in the United States, cynicism results “in a culture of indifference and disengagement when the moral and political going get tough.” Instead of productive synthesis or even dialogue, the diversity of values and perspectives in America leads to atomization; “Indifference is as much the enemy of democracy as intolerance. . . . The true danger of cynicism, and the indifference that attends it, is that it undermines our sense of personal power to bring about change, reinforcing the status quo through our disengagement. The generality of cynicism—as contrasted with distrust of this or that politician or political process—is its total disengagement.”15 Henry Giroux also locates the danger of cynicism in its authorization

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of withdrawal from consideration of the common good. His target is what he describes as a “growing sense in American life that politics has become corrupt,” that “the traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape conditions that structured their everyday lives” have little importance. What suffers is the possibility of socially relevant criticism: democracy is imperiled by individuals’ inability to translate their privately suffered misery into a language of “public concerns” and therefore into “collective action.” “Civic engagement now appears impotent.” For Giroux, the problem is one of education: if civic education is supposed to bridge the gap between ideas and everyday life, we no longer think that our ideas matter. “We need a new vocabulary for connecting how we read critically to how we engage in movements for social change.” Accordingly, Giroux finds that “the growth of cynicism in American society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace than it does about the bankruptcy of the old political languages and about the need for a new language and vision for clarifying our intellectual, ethical, and political projects.”16 We need not new prescriptions that continue to express their legitimacy in currently intelligible languages, but a new language for social commitment that refuses to let politics degenerate into narcissism. The national teleology underlying these claims—America has lost the ability and will to critically describe itself in terms of a salubrious future— is common to analyses of cynicism. The cynical society cannot move beyond its impasse: the cynic is immune to persuasion by others because she already doubts the sincerity of others’ speech. Wilber Caldwell recapitulates many of these themes when he writes that our “national mood” has run a “course all the way from idealism through realism and skepticism to cynicism. Idealism is fostered by hope. Realism is fostered by experience. Skepticism is fostered by uncertainty. And cynicism is fostered by disappointment. . . . [A]t the root of all disappointments lie tangled remains of hope.” Like many before him, Caldwell finds that cynicism in America has become “reflexive” and therefore “blind”: “It is difficult to refute, because it eschews all reason. Worst of all, it is sedentary, unable to act except for an occasional mocking critique of tradition or innovation. All solutions are rejected as naïve. The result is gridlock. Cynicism clings to the status quo.” In charting our “national journey from hope to despair” in order to “cure” the “epidemic” of cynicism, Caldwell, like Giroux, insists that the problem is one of language and framing: America has to find a way to have faith in—indeed, to articulate—the relevance of hope once again. Only a new, more “prudent” and “realistic” method

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of defining success and framing belief will defeat cynicism: “What is needed is a new American Dream.”17 And so we often find that the dismissal of cynicism is not total; rather than being jettisoned out of hand, cynical skepticism is retrieved in a teleological instrumentalization administered by the very democratic norms that cynicism presumably threatens. Thus when skepticism is merely “reflexive,” when it directs itself not outward toward a future but only inward into an ethical bunker, it deserves rebuke, but when the cynical disposition shows itself capable of illuminating injustice and oppression, of deploying itself as a form of social criticism in the interests of democratic self-definition, it earns far more sympathetic attention. William Chaloupka makes the argument forthrightly. Helpfully steering clear of the tendency to define it in terms of its perceived threat, Chaloupka observes that cynicism arises with the realization that social practices are not necessarily commensurate with popularly affirmed social ideology. If institutions are imbricated with beliefs, then cynics, “having escaped belief,” provide a critical eye on the outside of those institutions. Chaloupka locates a problem in the reproduction of ideology: “Cynicism is the condition of living after belief has been abused.” Thus cynicism points the way toward the restoration of belief and therefore of public institutions. In the same vein, Dick Keyes, writing from a Christian theological perspective, opens his book Seeing Through Cynicism by declaring that “cynicism need[s] to be taken more seriously.” Keyes admits that “I had always felt a strong attraction to cynicism but had leaned against it, being suspicious of its cleverness and wary of its consequences”; now reckoning with his suspicion and wariness, he rescues cynicism as an “attitude” directed toward penetrating appearances. Cynicism is in fact a “narrower pessimism” than it is often given credit for, one that is “focused on the motivations and purposes of others,” which are often unapparent to “the uninitiated and naïve.” Hoping to save this perception from a larger dismissal, Keyes describes cynicism as “a specific attitude of ‘seeing through others’ rather than [as] any specific behavior.” But it matters to Keyes what happens in the wake of this “seeing through”; thus, defending the classical avatar of cynicism, Keyes writes that Diogenes “was not just biting his friends, he was biting them for their salvation.”18A recognizable future, an end in mind, anchored Diogenes’ cynicism and justified it, and it is for lacking this teleological inscription that we now rebuke the cynic for disengaging from the democratic heart of society. Our current problem is not that we labor under something different from Diogenes’ dog philosophy, but that we

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lack that bedrock commitment that organizes cynical critique. This line of argument appeals as well to David Mazella, who writes: “For all the troubling political implications of cynicism, I believe nonetheless that its persistence in our political discourse makes it an invaluable critical concept, largely because it complicates some of modernity’s most cherished self-images, its myths of rationality, dynamism, and progress. For this reason, cynicism, for all its affinities with conservative thought, has genuine critical potential, revealing the extent to which our key concepts of collective action and planning rely on unexamined assumptions about progress, modernity, and modernization.” He hopes that the genealogy of cynicism’s “lengthy semantic history” he pursues will “generate new and more effective political directions.”19 If cynical disengagement is seen to be continuous with the normative inability to recognize the future, then a recognizable future always redeems, by normalizing, cynicism. The key conclusion to be drawn from current writing about cynicism, therefore, is that cynicism is taken for granted insofar as it is invariably approached through its solution. If cynics are denounced, those who denounce them also want to fix them, most often by regenerating the possibility of sincerely bridging a presumed gap between political action and political language.20 My purpose, by contrast, is to try to discover how cynicism works rather than rushing to dismiss it in the name of a recognizable social trajectory. In fact, cynical negation often looks a lot like what Hegel calls skepticism in the Phenomenology, and Hegel offers something to an analysis of the mechanics of cynicism. In Hegel’s dialectic of self-consciousness, skepticism names the point at which the determinate content of thought, all knowledge of objects outside the subject, is indicted as inessential to thought, is excised in the wake of abstract self-relation. Thought then becomes the simple thought of itself—i.e., insofar as such self-relation is the only thing that can be confirmed to be essential to thought. Skepticism responds to stoicism, in which the slave asserts the only freedom it has, the freedom of thought: stoicism’s epistemology asserts the independence of consciousness’s rational powers, but it can only proclaim this autonomy in isolation from—by ignoring—the world it ultimately wants to know. Skeptic epistemology thus emerges from this “but”: skepticism arises in awareness that the stoic declaration of independence as isolation in fact precludes any possibility of identity between consciousness and its object, and so it declares in stoicism’s stead that the self only deals with itself, that all knowledge proclaiming an object outside consciousness can be doubted.21 This movement is similar to cynicism’s displacement of norms: Hegel shows that insofar

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as the skeptic assumes that everything can be doubted, she is really declaring that thought is powerless to grasp anything outside itself. At the same time, however, by holding that all knowledge is only appearance, the skeptic implicitly holds on to the idea that if thought could move beyond the sensual realm of appearances it might attain some higher order of knowledge. Thus Hegel finds that skepticism’s abstract turn inward leads to a despair (in our terms, a cynicism) as the skeptic decides that rational (in our terms, normative) satisfaction is impossible. But for Hegel, this apparent impasse is actually not a dead end, as skepticism’s endless displacement of certainty is ultimately resolved in the unhappy consciousness’s elevation of this duality to consciousness: on the one hand, the subject believes that she cannot transcend the inessential world of appearances, but, on the other hand, she insists that she will attain happiness only if she does so. The solution lies in the fact that for the unhappy consciousness both the knowing (cynical) subject who can negate any determinate content in doubt and the known object that is (cynically) negated in doubt are in fact part of the same self, but a self that is opaque to itself. Thus the unhappy consciousness vacillates between the nihilistic irony of endlessly negated determinacy and dogmatic submission to the “mediator” or priest—i.e., in renouncing will and alienating all agency into the hands of the priest via whom the subject is brought into a relation with the object it cannot establish or have faith in on its own.22 Importantly, however, the unhappy consciousness is in a position to recognize that both the representational content it feels compelled to negate and the will that does the negating are internal to it: that is, in surrendering its will to the mediator, the self can understand that both this renunciation and the mediator’s will in whom it seeks to have faith are in fact moments of a universal will. Thus the unhappy consciousness ends in the conclusion that in knowing the other it in fact knows itself—and that in being recognized as the reality of the self, the reality of the object is found. The process that passes through skepticism in fact ends in knowledge of our times. For Hegel, that is, negation—whether in skepticism, cynicism, or anywhere else—is the motor of critical thought: but only precisely insofar as negation negates itself in the subject’s knowledge of itself and how it thinks. To look at how negation operates is in fact to see where negation ends—which, for Hegel, is greater knowledge of our world. Now, obviously, cynicism does not end up negating itself in a normatively positive epistemological system, resolving into secure belief. But it does provide knowledge about the constructedness of normative systems,

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about knowledge-production—about, that is, the ability to normalize (by narrativizing) potentially errant negation. The problem with taking established social norms for granted in the study of cynicism is that the phenomenology of cynicism itself is thereby lost. Hegel offers us a chance to see how starting from the mechanics of cynical displacement (rather than from the perspective of the regeneration of these or those social norms displaced by cynicism) provides knowledge about the role of recognition in the normalization of knowledge. If analysts of cynicism often find cynicism to be related to the persuasive power of norms, and specifically to a crisis in that persuasion, they tend to look past it to the reestablishment of normativity. Goldfarb, for example, indicts cynicism for only pointing out manipulation and injustice; doing nothing to address that manipulation, cynicism remains within the limitations of what he calls totalitarian mass structures. Cynicism’s criticism of is insufficient; criticism is only worthy of the name if it is in fact a criticism in the name of. But this ignores how norms function as such precisely by delimiting the realm of the visible, a process drawing on what Michel Foucault has described as the “interplay between a ‘code’ which rules ways of doing things (how people are to be graded and examined, things and signs classified, individuals trained, etc.) and a production of true discourses which serve to found, justify and provide reasons and principles for these ways of doing things.”23 Thus alternatives to manipulation, which are often taken for granted, may in fact not be visible at all—at least as such—from within the exercise of hegemonic codes. Goldfarb, we recall, will call the objects of such justification “legitimate.” But his “embedded societal values” like critical democracy (embodied, he later explains, in “autonomous authentic voices,” social possibilities whose unmanipulated multiplicity “constitute[s] a pluralistic democracy”),24 or Giroux’s “language and vision for clarifying our intellectual, ethical, and political projects,” or Caldwell’s “new American dream,” possibilities relied on as various engines of redemption, in fact may be precisely unrecognizable as such when it comes to challenging cynicism’s “legitimation” of social domination and manipulation. And so the frequent criticism that cynicism fails to point toward a solution to the injustice it declares is more than simply shortsighted; it also participates in what is itself a reactionary challenge to the very possibility of criticism. Indicting cynicism for failing to show the way, for rendering alternatives invisible, the dismissal of cynicism in fact functions as an occlusion, displacing real criticism of the practices and institutions that perpetuate injustice. As Mazella writes, “The real interest of cynicism

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lies not in any individual cynic’s distance from conventional beliefs but in the process by which . . . [the cynic] often becomes the scapegoat for a system driven by the self-seeking of the powerful.”25 So long as it is taken seriously, however, which means at the very least not dismissing it in the name of a recognizable social trajectory, cynicism can make conspicuous the operations by which norms legitimate, by rendering recognizable, certain desires, practices, and courses of action; it can make conspicuous, that is, norms’ inconspicuousness. Thus Stivers’s focus on realism and ethics, like Arnett and Arneson’s “reality of the historic moment,” ultimately depends on an epistemological test, faith in an experiential bedrock that, were its existence revealed, would restrain cynicism. And Bewes’s representation of social reality as individual consciousness lays the groundwork for dismissing the cynical reaction to dysfunction as illegitimate pathology. Similarly, Caldwell’s teleology ultimately turns on the self-evidence of “experience,” which fosters the “realism” of his fourstaged history of American epistemology. Realism, we must assume, is the mode Caldwell favors, as when he argues that only realists can confront cynicism; it is in this context that he can argue at the close of his book that the “cure” for cynicism lies in the “success” to be found when we dream a new, more realistic American dream, a “prudent” dream with a “reasonable chance for success.”26 Thus the frequent criticism that cynicism is particularly pernicious when it is reflexive is really a claim that cynicism fails to normatively recognize “reality,” which is in turn really a claim that cynicism is simply false consciousness and therefore not really a problem at all. Even writers who avoid the argument that cynicism surrenders in the face of realism tend to reduce it to being a means to the end of restored normativity, and thus reinscribe it in a secure and normalized conception of competence. Thus Keyes’s defense of cynicism’s ability to “see through” social domination is limited to that species of seeing through interested in—and authorized by—“salvation.” If not pursued in the name of redemption, cynical criticism is indeed worthy of dismissal; I suspect that what he means by “salvation” has some significant affinity with what others mean by “reality.” And Chaloupka’s investigation of cynicism is ultimately utopian in much the same way: because cynicism is a result of the institutional degradation of belief, his “propos[al] to analyze American politics as if cynicism mattered” in fact instrumentalizes cynicism as a means to refresh the normative persuasion of institutions, a means to reinvigorate their support of the beliefs they house. Such a restoration thereby vitiates the ground of cynicism. Chaloupka

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values cynical skepticism only to the extent that it is provisional, only to the extent that it ultimately has “something to teach us.”27 In fact, in order to save cynicism from being simply wrong, Chaloupka ends up reducing it to the state of being simply right: the cynic is not fooled by an institutional corruption that infects already coherent beliefs. Something very akin to a “reality” that self-evidently exists outside the ideological figuration of institutions reduces cynicism to a simple stage in the progression of right thinking, one, importantly, that is overcome. Cynicism as a phenomenon in its own right is always lost in these accounts.

A History of Normalization In fact, the terms “cynical,” “cynic,” and “cynicism” cannot be taken for granted as referring to a set of self-evident things; they also perform a set of operations. To analyze how these terms behave in the four examples with which I began is to realize that these terms are actually doing a fair amount of non-neutral labor in the act of claiming referents. In each case, at the very least, the terms are implicated in the establishment of a normative structure in which some behaviors are recognized as proper or preferable and others, either by virtue of being named or by virtue of remaining unmarked, are devalued. Moreover, the terms also work to position the speaker and others in relation to this normative operation. What these words mean, strictly speaking, is only half the story; it is necessary, too, to ask what they do. Explaining the impulse behind his book Keywords, Raymond Williams suggests that his goal was not so much a “dictionary or glossary” or “series of footnotes” as it was “the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society. Every word which I have included has at some time, in the course of some argument, virtually forced itself on my attention because the problems of its meanings seemed to be inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss.” Williams explains that the “problem of vocabulary” is his focus “in two senses: the available and developing meanings of known words, which needed to be set down; and the explicit but as often implicit connections which people were making, in what seemed to me, again and again, particular formations of meaning—ways not only of discussing but of seeing many of our central experiences.” Focusing merely on the lexical function of these keywords ignores, that is, the constitutive role—in practices, habits, and institutions—they play in actually establishing and

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delimiting the conceptual coherence of what they describe, in setting up the contexts in which their indicative relationships can be thought in the first place. Such “keywords” are thus worthy of special consideration because of the labor they perform in prescribing, assigning, and validating a space whereby what they indicate can be recognized, a process that also includes making visible the position of a speaker of them. These words “are significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation,” and “they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought. Certain uses bound together certain ways of seeing culture and society.”28 Hence my attention to recognition. “Cynicism” operates in networks that determine not simply what it means, but how it means, and it should be analyzed not as the name of something self-evident but as a decisive element in the complex machine that normalizes meaning. This “constitutive” function can be seen in two popular accounts of cynicism from the occasion of the presidency of Bill Clinton. Michael Lerner begins what became Clinton’s self-avowed manifesto with the now-familiar account of cynicism: “Most Americans hunger for meaning and purpose in life. Yet we are caught within a web of cynicism that makes us question whether there could be any higher purpose besides material self-interest and looking out for number one. We see around us the destructive consequences of the dominant ethos of selfishness and materialism.” One reason for this, Lerner suggests, is that we have lost sight of our real values: “People treat one another as objects to be manipulated rather than as beings who have a fundamental worth that ought to be respected and even cherished. Many of our cultural and economic institutions teach us to look at the world from a narrow, results-oriented, materialist perspective.” The result is our spiritual deformation: “In the process we lose touch with the awe and wonder we experienced as children at the grandeur of the universe. We get rewarded for the degree to which we have been able to put our own interests above those of our neighbors and friends, but then find ourselves in a world filled with mutual distrust and loneliness.” Though Lerner never quite defines “cynicism,” he is unequivocal about its preventing us from realizing a “higher purpose,” from activating an energizing modality cognate with youthful “awe and wonder,” and this frustration in turn prevents us from recognizing and therefore acting on the basis of “meaning.” Skepticism and mistrust leave us unable to think beyond narrowly defined “self-interest,” itself constrained by an impoverished emphasis of shortsighted, restrictively tangible results. Lerner describes a sentimental prisoner’s dilemma: our ethical vision, clouded by “materialism,” renders us further skeptical of

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others and their intentions. Cynicism is manifested not in a refusal of “meaning and purpose” as justification of our actions, but in our appealing to illegitimate standards in that labor of justification—we are fooled into appealing to principles as “meaning[ful]” and “purpose[ful]” that in the long run really aren’t. In imperfect conditions, in the absence of complete information, we deceive ourselves into thinking our social environment is much narrower than it actually is (or at least should be).29 For Lerner, cynicism has the trappings of tragedy: because we are deluded, and because we are compelled to desire in the wake of these delusions, we fall into the cynical trap. Locating enlightenment as the solution to cynicism, Lerner reduces to “cynicism” a failure of normalization. William Bennett, apparatchik in the pursuit of Clinton in the White House oral-sex fracas, focuses on the particular cynical transgressions of Clinton’s presidency in his book The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals (note to potential readers: the outrage Bennett polemically eulogizes in the title is, not surprisingly, alive and well in this book, a fact that even the final four or five words of the subtitle will suggest). Instead of focusing on cynicism as part of a general American condition we all share, as Lerner does, Bennett indicts cynicism as a specific problem with specific causes and very deleterious effects, most notably an increasing unwillingness, which will soon become an increasing inability if we continue to ignore it, to make judgments. Bennett’s chief concern is to “affirm public standards,” insofar as such standards are where morality inheres; Bennett closes his introduction polemically: “In the end this book rests on the venerable idea that moral good and moral harm are very real things.”30 The real problem with the Clinton scandal is not sexual or fiduciary malfeasance but Clinton’s attempt to get away with that malfeasance and American citizens’ willingness to think that, at the end of the day, such malfeasance doesn’t matter. In Bennett’s view, once we start arguing—even implicitly—that private character has no bearing on governing character, that the economic health of the nation trumps all other concerns, that the moral authority of a president is relevant only in matters of public policy, that lies about sex (under oath, he reminds us) don’t really matter, and that we shouldn’t be “overly ‘judgmental’ ” (the scare quotes are Bennett’s), we cynically “validate” these views, making them “the coin of the public realm.” As he insists, “These arguments define us down; they assume a lower common denominator of behavior and leadership than we Americans ought to accept.” In turn, our willingness to sacrifice the moral “high ground” evacuates our ability to make decisions: “American

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self-government  .  .  .  demands active participation in, and finally, reasoned judgments on, important civic matters. ‘Judgment’ is a word that is out of favor these days, but it remains a cornerstone of democratic self-government. It is what enables us to hold ourselves, and our leaders, to high standards. It is how we distinguish right from wrong, noble and base, honor and dishonor.” According to Amazon.com’s “Search Inside!” feature, Bennett mentions “cynical” four times and “cynicism” seven times, almost always— as in references to the “cynical media,” “political cynicism,” or “cynical generalization[s] about politicians”—indicating a failure of discernment or a refusal to believe that real distinctions exist between political alternatives. In fact, the meaning of the terms undergoes a notable shift in the course of the polemic: whereas most of the book suggests that “cynicism” names our (that is, citizens’) inability to take responsibility for distinguishing moral alternatives, toward the end of the book he begins using “cynical” and “cynicism” to describe the particularly malicious moral disregard exhibited by individuals in power. In criticizing those who wanted to sanction Clinton in order to protect their own political backs but who stopped short of seeking his removal from office (Democratic legislators like Senator Joseph Lieberman are the target now), Bennett writes in the afterword to his new edition, “merely scolding the president for his acts of lawlessness was a cynical (and ultimately unsuccessful) ploy.” And, on his final page (all that remains is a fifteen-page appendix comparing the Nixon and Clinton impeachment sagas, which has the double effect of nose-thumbing those Democrats who insist that there is no comparison between the two scandals and in fact implying that there is no comparison, insofar as Nixon resigned and thereby affirmed American standards), Bennett worries: “We have set some bad precedents, and taught many wrong lessons, on law, truth, public morality, fidelity, and political ethics. The majority of the American public accepted in their president—and in accepting, validated—some pernicious arguments, sordid acts, cynical lies, and criminal conduct. In ways we cannot now fully anticipate, we will pay a price for the deal that we made with William Jefferson Clinton.”31 Thus cynicism is not simply a pathological inability to make decisions but also a destructive disregard for “standards,” as manifested in the “cynical ploys” and “cynical lies” that mislead the citizenry. If cynicism afflicts contemporary American culture, Bennett also wants to blame it on specific people doing specific things. Though for Lerner cynicism is something we all share and for Bennett

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it is ultimately an individual problem traceable to a failure of personal responsibility, for both the analysis of cynicism functions normatively and heuristically, as at once the diagnosis of a disease and the prescription for its cure; definition of the problem is administered by a regulated picture of its future resolution. Obviously, cynicism as they describe it is worthy of reproach, but it is the structure of the reproach itself, rather than the phenomenon they indict, that is significant. Both arguments can assume that proper judgment is identifiable (and improper judgment impugnable) because they anchor that assumption in recognition of a normative narrative of culture. The assertion that too many of us are deluded by a narrow-minded materialism, like the assertion that cynicism is an unjustified or cowardly failure of decisiveness or disregard for standards, depends for its validity on the assumption of a transparency of social conditions and of a competence of interpretation that belongs, as Bierce might put it, to a vision in which “things as they are” are “as they ought to be,” in which the future is inscribed by present recognizability. Such a position is grounded in an instrumental understanding of culture that views culture as reducible to competence. Cynicism is almost always defined such that it points unequivocally to a solution; as such, it in fact isn’t a problem at all. The charge of “cynicism,” for whatever else it does, illuminates the processes by which norms render legible—and what’s more, self-evident—a set of social practices that prescribe what does and does not make sense or is deemed to be practical or not, what is expected of citizens of a self-conscious and reflective democratic society, what such citizens should expect of themselves. In fact, by exposing the operation of normative persuasion, cynicism serves as an index of the critical role of recognition in hegemonic thinking. Hegemony, which Gramsci characterizes as “ ‘spontaneous’ consent” as opposed to consent effected through the exercise of visible force (the latter objectified in the “apparatus of state coercive power”), works precisely because it does not appear coercive; it exercises domination, but it is experienced by individuals as unconstrained consensus.32 As Paul Bové has written, “ ‘Hegemony’ means, among other things, setting the terms of debate”; to attempt criticism in those terms is therefore to reinforce the very definitions and constructions that one purports to criticize. What we see in the analysis of cynicism, then, is a picture of how these “terms” operate on the basis of the logic of recognition. Failing to earnestly reproduce normalized practices, cynicism is teleologically reinscribed as either a correctable pathology or, as in the case of people like Chaloupka or Keyes, a provisional agency of renewal. In any case, it

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is described wholly in legible, hegemonic terms. However, subjected to the demands of recognition, defined only by terms and in contexts from which it in fact turns away, cynicism is in these accounts written off. What emerges from investigating the current use of the word is that the charge of “cynicism” is often mobilized by the re-cognitive machinery of legitimation, making thought subservient to society’s ideological selfimage. Bové offers a way to describe what is at stake here: rather than proceeding on terrain the establishment, significance, and validity of which are no longer subject to interrogation, criticism worthy of its name must aim away from the essentially recognizable: as Bové puts it, “resistance— alterity—must take the form of struggle in the form of displacement.”33 This is what cynicism does, by rendering conspicuous the otherwise inconspicuous expectation that particular values be recognized in words and deeds as natural or proper to a recognizable historical moment. While the hegemonic reproduction of culture can obviously survive direct challenges—pace Goldfarb, Caldwell, Lerner, Bennett, et al.— cynicism in fact does not directly challenge norms. Rather, it accepts the normative terms in which society reproduces itself but rejects the expectation of self-evidence through which this reproduction is effected. Indeed, as so many diagnosticians of the cynic point out, cynicism is activated precisely in moments of discerning. For Goldfarb and Hiley, belief in democratic ideals fuels conviction that current American politics aren’t worthy of participation, whereas in Kanter and Mirvis, Arnett and Arneson, Giroux, and Caldwell, such belief short-circuits our ability to trust others and realize common interests. For Lerner, the cynic, blinded by materialism, believes he is acting as justly as conditions demand and allow, while for Bennett, the not-yet-disabused cynical victim of Clinton’s prevarications actually believes, as part of a positive ethical worldview, that standards can survive being ignored. If they are too quick to dismiss this problem as provisional, correctable, and/or unambiguous, these writers nonetheless usefully point to a significant counterhegemonic vector through which cynicism challenges the normative self-evidence of normative values. The cynical troubling of norms intimates the unrecognizable in disclosing the controvertibility of narratives of culture and the patterns of inquiry through which they are read. So much contemporary discussion of cynicism assumes—instrumentally and teleologically—that the problem is the narrative: what we need in order to defeat cynicism is a better narrative, one that more accurately inscribes a recognizably desirable

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future through the legitimation of functional, redemptive social practices. Thus, if the ideal of an accountable government of, by, and for the people, representing the collective interests of the actual citizenry, manages to do little more than breed disappointment when juxtaposed with how government actually operates in the United States today, the proffered solutions largely resolve into one of two alternatives: either invent new democratic practices that are more in line with contemporary life than are the atavistic eighteenth-century clichés that lead so many of us to twenty-first-century disenchantment; or revise the discursive strategies by which we integrate our practices and public ideals. In both cases, the problem is one, essentially, of perception: cynicism is the result of not recognizing the way through our current impasse to normative functionality, so the solution—the availability and ultimate legibility of which are taken for granted—relies on reconnecting the present with a recognizable future, whose self-evident merits will overwhelm cynical intransigence. There is no reason to doubt that such a method might provide a way out of doubt and mistrust; I really don’t know. But I do know that cynicism as a phenomenon to be analyzed is thereby lost, surrendered to the presumption that history has a felicitous outcome. And there is reason to question such an escape, as it reduces the possibility of legitimacy to the recognizably instrumental. It holds the future hostage to the hegemonic imagination of the present. Irreducible to simple apathy, pessimism, hypocrisy, or nihilism, cynicism is no longer convinced of the recognizability by which things “as they ought to be” underwrite “things as they are.” The cynical inability to envision a redemptive future poses a challenge to the imperium of recognition in thought, and therefore to the foundational assumption of transparency that authorizes so many cultural practices—namely, that experience is transparently interpretable, that this interpretation has a kind of essential link to actual, indisputable historical conditions of existence, that the narratives that encode it manifest a narrow understanding of their etymological ties to the Latin gnarus, knowing, and therefore that the task of thinking is best conceptualized as an unimpeachable form of instrumental competence activated in a field of essentially useful knowledge. Naming the becoming-conspicuous of this presuppositional ground, the loss of its self-evidence, cynicism therefore endangers the legibility of the future. Insofar as the problem of cynicism involves procedures that govern how knowledge is put to use and our expectations about that utility, we should avoid analyzing cynicism under the auspices of pathology, which, looking for cynicism only where

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it appears dysfunctional, irregular, or invalid, renders cynicism under the administration of what is already recognizable and normative, as essentially correctable. Instead, we should analyze it under the auspices of competence: we should look for cynicism where it arises rather than where it makes itself felt.34 Wlad Godzich’s account in The Culture of Literacy of the relationship between literacy and competence, with his discussion of the coincident post-Vietnam growth of the theory and composition movements, illuminates cynicism’s challenge to the normative presumptions of transparency and self-evidence. Godzich’s explanation that theory and literacy programs are related phenomena despite their seeming mutual exclusivity—composition has, since its origins in the late 1960s and 1970s, presented itself as a “populist, anti-elitist educational and cultural policy,” while theory has, since its arrival, seemed speculative and effete, the furthest thing from the utilitarian goals of the new literacy35—turns precisely on a critique of competence. If the response that gathered steam in the 1980s to what was routinely called a crisis in literacy—manifested in declining nationally standardized test scores and fears of declining U.S. competitiveness in the world market—took the form of an “ongoing process of redistribution of money and personnel away from the teaching of literature and criticism and toward the teaching of writing and composition,” one might have expected a wide-ranging and self-critical interrogation of the complex relationship between literacy and citizenship;36 instead, Godzich argues, what took hold is a restricted literacy: it provides for competence in a specific code, with little, if any but the most rudimentary, awareness of the general problematics of codes and codification in language. To put it even more bluntly: whereas one would have expected that a crisis of literacy would have called for a greater appreciation of the multiplicity of functions that language performs, the foremost of which is the ability to code and transcode experience and to provide cultural direction for its interpretation, handling, and elaboration, one finds a further instrumentalization of language, where the latter is shattered into a multiplicity of autonomous, unrelated languages, with the competence to be acquired restricted to just one of them. The result of the new emphasis on writing programs has therefore not been to solve a “crisis of literacy” but “to promote a new differentiated culture in which the student is trained to use language for the reception and conveyance of information in only one sphere of human activity, that

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of his or her future field of employment,” a move toward what Godzich calls a “New Vocationalism.”37 By steering away from consideration of interpretation and uncertainty in the social function of language, the new institutional emphasis on literacy substitutes a collection of instrumental assumptions about the capacity of a set of transparent languages to express a social totality for real questions about the relationship of language to society and experience. Godzich’s argument that “the remedies offered by the new writing programs are nothing but a blind groping with the nature of this problem” (that is, of the “crisis of literacy”)38 provides a revealing lens through which to examine the problem of cynicism. The “new literacy,” in Godzich’s account, “has put forward a notion of linguistic competence consonant with a state of affairs where the concerns of a democratic state, that is, a state still concerned with its own direction, purpose, and the adequation of its means and its goals, are superseded by an all-encompassing concern with efficiency and competence that takes the form of exclusive specialized practice and rejects as inefficient any broader concerns.” Thus, evincing “a profound distrust of interpretation and other critical functions in relation to language,” and proclaiming “mastery and competence as their goals,” writing programs, answering the calls of persuasive principals, have eschewed questions about what Godzich called “the general problematics of codes and codification in language . . . of [the] functions that language performs, the foremost of which is the ability to code and transcode experience and to provide cultural direction for its interpretation, handling, and elaboration,” and instead focus on reducing literacy to a means to the particular, instrumental ends of discrete, historically defined, and taken-for-granted pieces of a fragmenting society. In fact, this linguistic and institutional fragmentation belies an unquestioned instrumentalist hegemony grounded in the elevation of recognition as the intellectual operation par excellence. But if the cultural logic of the emergent “new literacy” conceptualizes language as the transparent apparatus of a pervasive instrumentalism, Godzich wants to rescue “theory,” whose spread across the academy was coincident with the spread of the “new literacy,” as, at its best (which is very good), a critical, self-questioning reflection on the price we pay for our reliance on language as an instrumental medium, insofar as it proceeds from the idea that society is not a unified totality that language simply reveals through particular practices.39 Thus, rather than “submit[ting] events to the evidence of meaning,” which of course always means the evidence of their recognized, useful meaning, to their

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recognizability by a “rational itinerary,” theory “takes difference to be irreducible to the interplay of analysis and synthesis and to the operations of power.”40 Theory insists that language is not transparent, and that the meaning of social practices is not reducible to—and recognizable by— the demands of linguistic competence. Theory’s “thought of difference tries to make audible all discourses rendered inaudible” where a particular narrative becomes hegemonic; “It attempts to render visible all the language that has been erased by the imperatives of transparency, thus becoming a labor of opacification, of restoring opacity where it has been glossed over.” Godzich’s emphasis on opacity suggests that “visib[ility]” is the farthest thing from “transparency”; language that has been rendered “visible” is by no means language that has been rendered “transparent.” “It [theory] has not been a matter of bringing into light that which had remained in pools of shadows at the edges of the system. The primary concern of theory has been more with the well-lit and dangerous zones where absolute knowledge is at its strongest under the species of unity and transparency. To this extent, theory has been radically opposed to the central metaphor of enlightenment . . . for it sees in the very claim of enlightening, of shedding light . . . the imposition of domination.”41 The work of critical theory, therefore, constitutes a challenge to the ideal of competency, with its attendant ideals of transparency, recognition, and normalization. It does not reveal truth per se, but rather works to “discern any enterprise of normalization that presents itself under the auspices of truth while serving the various regimes of coercion, be they linguistic, political, social, or aesthetic.” Theory exposes how hegemony’s imposition of order produces a region whereby some meaning is recognizable and some is not; it does not uncover an extrahegemonic meaning that is hidden by the arts and exercise of domination.42 The critic “does not give lessons or dispense advice, and even less does s/he issue directives, for s/he is not in the business of universalizing his or her position but in that of figuring out how to echo the cry in the fissures of a system of which s/he is very much a part.” This is crucial for understanding the challenge Godzich’s “theory” poses to the hegemonic ideal of competence manifested in composition’s vocational “populism”: “Theory as a practice of dissidence and of echoing the cry thus situates itself at the intersection of the cry and of the System, and its practice consists in inventing gestures that are, at one and the same time, dedicated to the cry and a demand for an accounting from the System. This uncomfortable position is that of theory marginalizing itself, for such a practice of theory could not seek to occupy the center.”43 Theory, therefore, exposes the

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force and artifice underlying the self-evidence of the twinned dominions of competence and a unified social totality. In fact, cynicism has always performed just this operation. Given that cynicism reveals an alliance with what and how people know, it is no surprise that many of cynicism’s recent critics draw on ideology criticism to demarcate it. Slavoj Žižek points out that the classical Marxist definition of ideology is that people know not what they do, and that they are therefore marked by a sort of “basic, constitutive naïveté.” Cynicism, however, undermines this definition of ideology, which is itself naïve: “The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask.” Žižek therefore revises the formula of ideological consciousness: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.”44 Cynicism, then, is the form Enlightenment takes when it is no longer naïve, and, therefore, the traditional critique of ideology can no longer work; indeed, it is through cynicism, not simple lack of knowledge, that ideology maintains itself.45 Peter Sloterdijk similarly argues that cynicism, built on the foundation of a superabundant realism, impedes traditional ideology critique: The discontent of our culture has assumed a new quality: It appears as a universal, diffuse cynicism. The traditional critique of ideology stands at a loss before this cynicism. It does not know what button to push in this cynically keen consciousness to get enlightenment going. Modern cynicism presents itself as that state of consciousness that follows after naïve ideologies and their enlightenment. In it, the obvious exhaustion of ideology critique has its real ground. This critique has remained more naïve than the consciousness it wanted to expose; in its well-mannered rationality, it did not keep up with the twists and turns of modern consciousness to a cunning multiple realism. The formal sequence of false consciousness up to now—lies, errors, ideology—is incomplete; the current mentality requires the addition of a fourth structure: the phenomenon of cynicism. . . . Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. . . . Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.46 Like Žižek, Sloterdijk sees cynicism as the means by which ideology is consolidated; for both, cynicism is so devious because it is “enlightened

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false consciousness,” the condition of enlightenment working against itself. If modern consciousness is marked by a foundational inconsistency, so Sloterdijk explicitly and Žižek implicitly argue, then the critique of ideology must henceforth necessarily be a critique of cynicism, a critique that will reinvigorate the enlightenment project. Indeed, conspicuously, enlightenment is what will overcome the cynical trap. Cynicism is characterized by a kind of double-consciousness that is for Sloterdijk—as it appears to be as well for Žižek and so many recent analysts for whom the cynic reinforces ideological domination by withdrawing his hope from the social world because he has been disappointed so often—a product of a mistaken doubling or reflection, whereby the misery of the ideological subject is projected onto the world. Thus if cynicism can easily withstand traditional ideology critique, in these accounts it is still essentially an ideological effect, still part of the machine by which an ultimately mistaken false consciousness is consolidated, and still administered by the cannons of accuracy, realism, transparency, and competence. The echo of Freud with which Sloterdijk begins (“the discontent of our culture”) underscores the therapeutic subtext of his argument, suggesting the possibility of escaping discontent through the agency of knowledge. What makes cynicism a problem for these commentators for whom the cynic essentially gets it wrong is precisely that the cynic does nothing about a domination that he nonetheless acknowledges. This is a fascinating turn: what the cynic is wrong about therefore is not the location or operation of domination—this the cynic has already successfully identified—but about the possibility of release from that domination. As in Emmanuel’s implication that the public is essentially right to be cynically distrustful of politicians, in Brooks’s suggestion that political savvy is equivalent to cynically distrusting what one is told by one’s leaders, and in Cheney’s charge that Reid is cynical precisely to the extent that he is doing what he knows he shouldn’t do, knowing the truth of injustice—indeed, being right about the what, where, and why of injustice—is precisely what makes a cynic a cynic. By contrast, the falseness of the cynic’s false consciousness is found elsewhere: cynicism becomes the consolidation of ideological domination—and thus deserves correction—precisely because, and indeed only because, the cynic cannot sincerely envision a solution. To cast the problem of cynicism as at root a problem of ideology and false consciousness in fact resolves nothing of the cynical problem. By revealing the persistence of a redemptive wish-formation rooted in the presumed power of truth, Sloterdijk, who is often the most rigorous of

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the recent analysts of cynicism, holds out a moment of ultimate awakening—if only negatively—as a potential salvation: “Without insight into the reflective constitution of the cynical structure, a concept of truth for these kinds of situations [i.e., in which one can “cynically” act in dishonest defiance of one’s principles, represented typically, as it was implicitly for Žižek, by the functionary in a repressive state system who criticizes that system while serving it] can no longer be defined.”47 Sloterdijk’s “concept of truth,” the possibility of which is taken for granted, precisely insofar as it promises an inviolate “outside” to ideological manipulation, establishes the ground of the teleological criticism of cynicism: that is, this “concept” instantiates the claim that ideological manipulation is false, that a nonhegemonic truth is accessible, and that cynical insincerity about this claim, in refusing a way out, is false consciousness. But it is also open to the same doubt that dooms the ideological consciousness in the first place. By casting cynicism as error, an ideological interpretation of cynicism remains vulnerable to the same problem it purportedly diagnoses—and in danger of falling back into the same epistemological trap it purportedly escapes. The insistence on ideological explanation— with its constitutive oppositions of inside/outside and truth/falsity—at once eschews the phenomenology of cynical consciousness and explodes from the forces of its own critique. This kind of argument suggests that the noncynical insight’s putative promise of relief from cynicism might more accurately be acknowledged as the cynic’s bad faith desire for certainty: a reflexive defense against ever evading the cynical paradox. As Bové reminds us, hegemony operates most effectively by collapsing the inside-outside opposition and by domesticating and containing (and even enabling) dissidence rather than by censoring it. Sloterdijk is certainly on the right track in arguing that the cynic’s problem is not that she is “wrong,” but that she is “too right”; cynicism renders hegemony “opaque,” in Godzich’s terms, and so illuminates its waning authority, but in doing so it insists on the unrecognizability of any possible alternative. Diogenes may be many things, but representative of a recognizably viable social program he is not: the alienation of his scandalous discontent is constitutive. False consciousness, whether “enlightened” (as Sloterdijk would have it) or not, is not the decisive element in cynicism. If it is integral to cynicism, it is so only if it is understood as an alter-consciousness: its “falsity” should be opposed not to the nonideological truth of some potential “true consciousness,” but rather only to the fortuitously legitimating habits of recognition that articulate the self-evidence of socially

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and culturally competent intelligence at a particular moment in time, habits that are already faced, at the sites of their normative exercise, with an always potential, if as yet illegible, counterhegemonic consciousness whose only reality is that it constitutes the untruth of the hegemonic organization of consciousness. For Gramsci, counterhegemony is the crucible of an alternative, where something else gestates; it is itself not yet self-evidently compelling. This unarticulable alternative suggests the indeterminacy of Raymond Williams’s notion of the emergent, of cultural elements that are not yet “defined” and that dominant vocabularies “cannot recognize.”48 Bové’s formulation, we recall, was that hegemony means “setting the terms of debate”; it establishes the way by which meaning is recognized. Indeed, hegemony also means not recognizing some possibilities. A counterhegemonic formation, then, does not mean a legitimate or viable position from which to resist the dominant; it is only the fecund possibility, which cannot yet be recognized, of changing the parameters of recognition. Cynicism, as represented first in the tradition by Diogenes but as carried through modernity not least by the texts studied here, is a contextualized criticism of hegemonic thought, one, importantly, that cannot imagine an alternative precisely insofar as it is still implicated in the realm of hegemony’s authoritative exercise.49 Thus is the dismissal of cynicism based in an equation of legitimacy with a recognized teleology of normative competence. *  *  * It is as a counterhegemonic vector, a name for the disruptiveness of the unrecognizable, rather than as a pathological reinforcement of patterns of domination or as a skeptically enlightening means to social regeneration, that cynicism, which always already marginalizes itself, provides an interpretive paradigm in this book. The texts investigated here hold hegemonic legitimacy in contention, defying its primacy, coherence, and recognizability—but they also defy the intention of containing that challenge and thereby reclaiming recognition as a critical tool. Thus the focus in the discussions that follow is less on cynical characters—a focus that would too easily reduce literary criticism to a kind of cultural diagnosis, describing the conditions under which the cynical syndrome arises, explaining the nature of its irregularity, and illuminating paths to its correction—than on the textual and epistemological strategies that render normative narratives recognizable and legitimate. The Education of Henry Adams, The Professor’s House, The Great Gatsby, and Miss

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Lonelyhearts are relevant to a discussion of cynicism, that is, not primarily because they simply represent cynical characters or situations conducive to the growth of cynicism, but because they narrate the disruption of normative processes that legitimate the specific criteria by which knowledge is recognized as relevant and useful, and therefore by which such diagnostic judgment is possible at all. And due both to their indisputable canonicity and to their having, to a significant degree, become lynchpins in recent critical revisionings of American literary modernism and indeed of American literary history more broadly, these four cynical works constitute an occasion to disclose how normative Americanism operates. In contrast to how it might appear in a more restricted character study, the cynical displacement of normalization cannot be claimed to be contained by the borders of the texts (whatever those might be); though Henry Adams, Godfrey St. Peter, Nick Carraway, and Miss Lonelyhearts can each justifiably be labeled a cynic, I’m not primarily interested in offering a historical explanation of why they are cynical. Each, in their own way, anchors the narrative of their respective texts, but they aren’t the only victims of the cynical challenge to the presumption that narrative produces useful knowledge; recognition itself is a victim, and I have tried not to shy away from the challenge of cynicism’s violation of normalizing standards, which makes cynicism so difficult to evaluate. I began by saying that I am not interested in providing an account of U.S. history, a coherent genealogy of the term “cynical,” a taxonomy of cynics, or policy prescriptions for addressing the problem of cynicism. I should now say more explicitly that I don’t want to “historicize” cynicism, which I take to be the opposite of taking cynicism seriously. My goal is not to place The Education of Henry Adams, The Professor’s House, The Great Gatsby, or Miss Lonelyhearts in contemporary context in order to illuminate historical phenomena, ideologies, or structures that underlie and determine the irruption of cynicism or to claim that cynicism otherwise belongs to an accounting of those phenomena, ideologies, or structures. Rather, I aim to illuminate, through sustained close readings, how these texts undermine the logic of recognition that, among other things, underlies not only the ability to use the terms “cynic,” “cynical,” or “cynicism” diagnostically and prescriptively, but also the ability— and the desire—to index literary texts to a narrative of historical change whose chief virtue is its legible coherence. If cynicism marks the failure of utility as a warrant for legitimacy, then relying on that warrant in a literary critical examination of cynicism is likely unjustified. Though I am

america and its discontents  /  31

not opposed to using historical contextualization as a tool of interpretation, and though each of the four discussions of literary texts engages recent historicist interpretations, I try here to retrieve these texts—and the possibility of literary criticism—from a dominant historicist vocabulary that would prescribe what may be said about them. In doing this, I don’t shy away from acknowledging my own reliance on certain critical terms. It is not my goal in this book to return to some kind of critical hermeticism that would erect fences around texts, nor do I believe my methodology performs such a return; rather, I aim to reconsider new historicism’s twinned operative assumptions of textual transparency and critical competence. I want only to revivify a suspicion that texts may be more opaque than we want them to be.

2  /

Cynicism and the Criticism of Competence

The word “cynicism” would appear to have suffered a 2,500-year-long reversal of fortune. Whereas the classical Cynics were—and remain— respected as virtuous and courageous critics of society and culture (at least in their capacities as Cynics), modern cynics are often abhorred as inimical and stubborn critics of society and culture (at least in their capacities as cynics).1 While we are told that Alexander the Great claimed that if he were to have been born anyone other than the conqueror of the world he would have liked to have been Diogenes the Cynic, the labels “cynic” and “cynical” are now almost always used as polemical terms of reproach.2 Absent from the reception of modern cynics and cynicism is precisely the intellectual and moral legitimacy that characterize the reception of the classical Cynics. While the modern cynic is admonished for his lack of earnest and engaged civic commitment in, for example, not voting despite criticizing the management of government, Diogenes is celebrated precisely for his earnest and engaged civic commitment when he, for example, raises his leg to urinate on some rude diners (incidentally, along with some of Diogenes’ other habits, the proclivity in evidence here explains the derivation of the word “cynic” from kyon, dog). Classical Cynicism was exalted for inhabiting the boundary between description and prescription, between the is and the should be, while modern cynicism is rebuked for paying any serious attention to the distinction at all. A careful analysis shows that then as now cynical description of the is as refracted through the should be short-circuits the normalizing, often statist trajectory of thought.

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Kunikos Tropos: Intelligence, Doggie-Style Diogenes held a mirror to Athenian society to expose the artifice, hypocrisy, and arbitrariness of customs and norms. He aggressively opposed convention; more fundamentally, he opposed the habituated, normalized functioning of communities, conventionality’s inscription of intentions and desires. As Diogenes Laertius describes him, he praised those who were about to be married and did not, those who intended to go into politics and did not, those who intended to go on a voyage and did not, those who purported to raise a family and did not, and those who made ready to associate with rulers and did not. In the anecdotes through which we know him, Diogenes disrespects self-assurance as such. We are told that once when walking in the marketplace he called out “Holloa, men”; when a small crowd gathered around him in consequence, he drove them away with his staff, saying, “I called men, not dregs.” Seen walking through the city in the middle of the day with a lit lantern and asked to explain himself, he answered that he was looking for an honest man. And once when no one came to listen to him discoursing on a serious topic, he began to whistle, and when people then flocked around him, he reproached them for coming with eagerness to folly, but being lazy and indifferent about virtuous things. Diogenes was a thorn in the side of conventional wisdom, or more specifically in the side of the hegemonic naiveté that would hold what is conventional as true and what is recognized as necessary.3 The anecdotal record of his life is not that varied in effect: he acted to undercut the self-evidence of Athenian civic life. Donald Dudley writes that “the mission of Diogenes thus became a thoroughgoing onslaught on convention, custom, and tradition in all aspects. He endeavored to convert men to a truer way of life, not, like Socrates, by dialectic, nor by allegory, as did Antisthenes, but by the practical example of his daily life.”4 William Chaloupka argues that Diogenes “played his outsider role to the hilt. Rather than arguing by careful and precise dialectic, which is the true Socratic method, Diogenes intervened with outrageous and challenging criticism, favoring lived example and counterexample.”5 David Mazella writes that “his extraordinary capacity to embody his philosophical principles, fully and without remainder, made him both a legendary figure and a philosopher whose manner of living constituted the greatest expression of, and justification for, his philosophy. . . . Diogenes publicly, even joyfully performed his independence and self-sufficiency in front of the large urban crowds he wished to educate.” Diogenes’ way

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of life “required those professing Cynic philosophy to have the courage to communicate it to the widest possible audience, in order to shock them out of their false conventional values.”6 Diogenes did not simply live in a tub; when once he saw a man purifying himself by washing, he said, “Oh, wretched man, do not you know that as you cannot wash away blunders in grammar by purification, so, too, you can no more efface the errors of life in the same manner?” He would upbraid those who were alarmed by their dreams for not worrying about what they do when awake, but for making a great fuss about what they fancy when asleep. He criticized people as irresponsible for relying on customs and habits instead of thinking about their actions, for reducing morality to set of prescriptions to be obeyed instead of understanding it as the result of a dynamic and self-critical investment in an examined life. Asked the proper time for supper, Diogenes responded, “If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if you are a poor man, whenever you can.” Diogenes’ critique is directed at a state of affairs in which historically and socially bound codes appear self-evident; thus “natural” activities like eating prove rich objects of Cynical abuse. Told of the happiness of Calisthenes, the result of the splendid treatment he received from Alexander, Diogenes responded, “The man then is wretched, for he is forced to breakfast and dine whenever Alexander chooses.” Diogenes fought against luxury that had been taken for granted, and he preached simplicity. When he saw a man clad in a lion’s skin putting on airs, Diogenes said to him, “Do not go on disgracing the garb of nature.” He once saw a child drinking out of its hands, so he threw away the cup from his wallet, saying that the child had beaten him in simplicity. Likewise, he threw away his spoon after seeing a boy, having broken his vessel, take up his lentils with a crust of bread. But importantly, Diogenes was greatly loved by the Athenians; Diogenes Laertius tells us that when a youth broke Diogenes’ tub, the Athenians beat him and gave Diogenes another. Perhaps the most celebrated anecdote concerning Diogenes is also the one that best characterizes his active criticism. Diogenes was originally from Sinope, and only came to Athens after being exiled for “defacing the currency,” a charge that later became his motto. Diogenes Laertius relates various versions of the tale. Diogenes’ father was a money changer in Sinope and kept the public bank there but adulterated the coinage and was forced to flee with his son. Alternatively, it was Diogenes himself who committed the crime, and he was banished along with his father. Indeed, Diogenes Laertius asserts that Diogenes admitted doing so. It is also possible that Diogenes was a curator of his father’s bank and that

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one of the artisans employed there tried to convince him to deface the currency; Diogenes then went to the oracle of either Delphi or Delos, and asked Apollo whether he ought to do what he was being asked to do. The god apparently gave him permission to do so, and so Diogenes went ahead and defaced the currency, was detected, and was either banished or decided to flee to avoid punishment, but only because of a linguistic ambiguity: the word used in both Diogenes’ question and the oracular response, nomisma, can mean both “coin” or “coinage” and “custom.” A final, not wholly understandable account has it that Diogenes defaced currency that he had received from his father, that his father was put into prison and died there, that Diogenes escaped and went to Delphi, but that he asked the oracle not whether he might tamper with the currency, but what he might do to become celebrated, and that he received the aforementioned, but now belated, sanction to deface the coinage/ customs.7 The significance of this story is in plain sight: Diogenes was known in Athens for disrespecting not so much the currency qua currency, but currency as representative of custom, establishedness, convention, etc. Diogenes defaced not simply coinage, but more generally norms, and he was not usually criticized for it.8 If he defaced the currency for his own reasons, we must conclude that he held little respect for institutions and customs in themselves, and exposed their arbitrary nature in his actions. If, on the other hand, he carried out his transgression to defend the legitimacy of Sinope’s institutions, we are still led to essentially the same conclusion: namely that Diogenes appreciated the irrefutable contingency of institutional values, and that customs are only as real as people make them. In this suspicion, Diogenes is little different from modern cynics. The story of defacement defends the possibility of value against custom’s corrupt alliance with recognizability; Diogenes protects virtue from its own hegemonic status, its teleological inscription. Offering no alternative on its own part, cynical critique aims directly at the sovereignty enjoyed by hegemonic forms of thought so buffered by the teleology of conventionality that they appear necessary, intuitive, or natural even as they govern and compel. Indeed, it aims at this sovereignty precisely insofar as it is manifested in the self-evident recognizability of normal behavior and thinking. Rather than reproduce this normalizing force, Diogenes sought to bring dominant habits of thinking into contact not with clearly demarcated alternatives, but with the very possibility of alterity denied in order that they can appear normal, in an attempt to disclose the operation of this normalization. “Diogenes” became in

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the tradition an exposer of artifice hardened through habit into self-evidence, of the ways in which recognizability is taken for justification or necessity. Cynical critique was never launched from a platform of independent legitimacy or validity, but was instead always implicated in that which it sought to undercut. The story of Diogenes’ banishment has synecdochic importance in emphasizing the close relationship in Cynicism between alienation and aberrancy on the one hand and active critical thought on the other. Diogenes Laertius tells us that a man once reproached Diogenes with his banishment, to which Diogenes responded, “You wretched man, that is what made me a philosopher.” Reminded in another account that “the people of Sinope condemned you to banishment,” Diogenes replied, “And I condemned them to remain where they were.” Diogenes insists that his cynical distance from convention—a distance that is not quite an escape from, but more an inhabitation of the boundary between convention’s normalization and its defamiliarization—is what enables thinking. This tarrying with the boundary—between inside and outside, between legible and illegible, between what is prescribed and what is occluded, between what is recognized and what is dismissed—is the essence of cynicism. Indeed, cynical critique doesn’t transgress convention, but instead illuminates the limits of convention—both its extent and its boundaries—in order to denaturalize it and therefore inhibit its ability to administer the difference between legitimate and illegitimate. Foucault argues that on a boundary line the limit and its contravention, dependent on each other, are held in a kind of strong, unstable tension with each other. The limitation of the limit—like the delimiting legitimizing operation of a norm—and unboundedness are not related “as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust.” Foucault describes this relationship as a “contestation,” as a “nonpositive affirmation”: breaking the dialectical, teleological circuit (such as that in which the narrative of emancipation inheres), “contestation does not imply a generalized negation, but an affirmation that affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity. Rather than being a process of thought for denying existences or values, contestation is the act which carries them all to their limits”: [I]t is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses. . . . But can the limit have a life of its own outside of the

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act that gloriously passes through it and negates it? What becomes of it after this act and what might it have been before? For its part, does transgression not exhaust its nature when it crosses the limit, knowing no other life beyond this point in time? And this point, this curious intersection of beings that have no other life beyond this moment where they totally exchange their beings, is it not also everything which overflows from it on all sides? It serves as a glorification of the nature it excludes: the limit opens violently onto the limitless, finds itself suddenly carried away by the content it had rejected and fulfilled by this alien plenitude which invades it to the core of its being. Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps, to be more exact, to recognize itself for the first time), to experience its positive truth in its downward fall. And yet, toward what is transgression unleashed in its movement of pure violence, if not that which imprisons it, toward the limit and those elements it contains? What bears the brunt of its aggression and to what void does it owe the unrestrained fullness of its being, if not that which it crosses in its violent act and which, as its destiny, it crosses out in the line it effaces?. . . . Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being.9 Cynical exposure of social conventions, of the legitimate, of the recognized—which displaces self-evidence by doing nothing other than revealing the possibility of possibility—is not available from a standpoint outside those conventions. To deface the currency is both to disrupt conventional modes of being and to register the value of those conventional modes; but it also relinquishes a recognizably legitimate alternative. Hence the importance of Diogenes’ exile to cynicism. Edward Said writes of the persuasive associational affects of culture, feelings covering a range of nuances, “principally of reassurance, fitness, belonging, association, and community.” Culture suggests for him “an environment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded, as well as overseen at the top by a superstructure and at the base by a whole series of methodological attitudes. It is in culture that we can seek out the range of meanings and ideas conveyed by the phrases belonging to or in a place, being at home in a place.” In addition to encoding the multivalent interaction between belonging to and possession of, a procedure that establishes a

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framework in which to recognize oneself, culture for Said importantly has another dimension: “And that is the power of culture by virtue of its elevated or superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate: in short, the power of culture to be an agent of, and perhaps an agency for, powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it too.”10 Diogenes’ cynical exile-in-place can be seen as the nontelelogical, nonproductive inverse of this relation. As Foucault puts it, contestation only allows the limit to “recognize itself,” “to find itself in what it excludes”; without negating anything, it only “affirms limited being.” Cynicism doesn’t leave normalized habit behind, and so doesn’t reproduce it. Allowing Diogenes to see something of the hegemonic production of legitimacy without losing his familiarity with it, cynicism upsets the self-evidence commanded by the ostensibly necessary precisely by validating and indeed reinscribing the possibility of cultural authority—but outside its sovereign ability to recognize itself as self-evident and without teleologically locating an alternative site of such authority. Diogenes never forfeits contact with the persuasive force of cultural authority, as indicated by the proximity of his critique to the sites of authority’s exercise, but that authority does lose something of its claim to necessary or self-evident sovereignty. Cynical “exile” is importantly an assertion of hegemonic authority as such—if only as inescapable—that denaturalizes the self-evident authority it claims: for the cynic, the cultural authority retained by conventions, if still unavoidable and undeniable, appears more dominant than spontaneous. This counterteleological operation is well served by the anecdotal tradition in which Diogenes is disclosed. Dudley points out that few materials exist for unequivocally tracing Diogenes’ life; rather, he is traditionally presented as a constant, known for his disrespect of establishedness, recognizability, reputation, and normalization as such, but not for his personal history. Diogenes appears more as function than actual man; he’s not described biographically, but socially and ethically. The significance of the traditional constancy of Diogenes’ attack on conventional values should not be underestimated, nor should the manner in which his critique was carried out. Diogenes did not convince his discussants of his position so much as he acted on them, even if by words and thoughts rather than by hands and tools. Cynicism emerges as a force, and “Diogenes” as most importantly a figure or mask, in the sense of a name attached to an event. In fact, the content of the anecdotes about Diogenes’ life may be no more telling than the anecdotal form itself. Our knowledge of the Cynics is anecdotal because the Cynics’ actual writings

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are not extant—indeed, there is some debate about whether Diogenes ever wrote anything—but the Cynics’ significance has far more to do with their reputation and reception than with anything else. Diogenes is, in a sense, the most important Cynic because he was written about far more extensively than any of his followers, and he became a character in myriad dialogues, dramas, and poems throughout antiquity, in both Greece and Rome, even into the sixth century c.e. As R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé put it, the absence of the kind of “extensive contemporary evidence for him that we have, for example, for Socrates in Plato and Xenophon” ends up contributing to Diogenes’ persistent power: While Diogenes was a historical figure, he quickly became a literary character—probably in his own lost works; certainly in those of others. Hence, his life, lost writings, and oral teachings are intertwined in a tradition of at least two strands: a biographical strand, transmitted by Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Famous Philosophers, that is itself a collage of literary and oral traditions about the Cynic, the historicity of which is always problematic; and the more overtly literary representation of Diogenes by writers of the empire such as Lucian and Dio Crysostom. “Diogenes” is, therefore, always already in the process of reception.11 In their gestural literariness, in their being “always already in the process of reception,” the anecdotes end up being active, biting, pedagogical performances that, before anything else, shock and upset, exposing habit as an insufficient response to experience. Diogenes’ acerbic jabs at convention draw their legitimacy more from their contingent circumstances than from a self-sufficient philosophical system. No Cynical treatise has been discovered, and there is no record of a systematization of Cynical thought. And just as no attempt was made by the Cynics to ground Cynical thought—largely because such thought was antithetical to such a program—there’s little to be gained from mapping the boundaries of that thought from the “outside” now. The cynical critique of convention does not deny conventions in order to acknowledge substitutes, and it affirms itself from within the very institutions whose claims to legitimacy it challenges. A champion of criticism rather than recognizing, Diogenes assailed conventions because they were conventional; the alternative was—as it continues to be—the reactionary reification of habit as necessity. Thus in its critique of normalization, ancient Cynicism does not

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substantively diverge from modern cynicism: we should resist the recurring argument that classical Cynicism and modern cynicism are different phenomena. Jeffrey Goldfarb, for example, claims that “when we observe that a ubiquitous cynicism is in a certain sense rational and understandable, we are perceiving the positive and ancient philosophic roots of the term,” but also that “modern cynicism in general is a much more complex phenomenon than the cynicism of antiquity.”12 Donald Kanter and Philip Mirvis hold that while ancient cynics held to “virtuous ideals,” the modern cynic “argues that idealism and involvement have few payoffs.”13 Wilber Caldwell differentiates the “antics” of the classical Cynic, who uses cynicism as a “sword,” from the “despair” of the modern cynic, who uses cynicism as a “shield.”14 And David Mazella writes of “the enormous ethical, political, and historical disparities between ancient and modern cynicisms,” though to his credit he uses the difference to produce a genealogy of “how and when these changes occurred” rather than primarily to adjudicate positivistically between distinct thought-systems.15 Indeed, many others try to legitimize an ancient, virtuous phenomenon at the expense of a modern, selfish one by recovering a philosophical-ethical program in Diogenes’ thought. Dudley claims that classical Cynicism presented itself in three fundamental aspects: (1) a vagrant ascetic life; (2) an assault on all established values; and (3) a body of literary genres that were particularly well adapted to satire and popular philosophical propaganda.16 Branham and Goulet-Cazé similarly claim five tenets of Diogenes’ Cynicism: (1) nature provides an ethical standard observable in animals and inferable by cross-cultural comparisons; (2) since contemporary society (and by implication any society) is at odds with nature, society’s most fundamental values (manifested in the spheres of politics, religion, ethics, etc.) are at odds with achieving an ethical life; (3) humans can realize their nature and hence their happiness only by engaging in a rigorous discipline (askesis) of corporeal training and exemplary acts meant to prepare them for actual, which is to say natural, conditions of life; (4) the goal of askesis is to promote a happy life, freedom, and self-sufficiency (autarkeia); and (5) Cynic freedom is both situated and active, as expressed in the metaphor of “defacing” tradition by parody and satire and in provocative acts of free speech meant to subvert established authorities17 (we recall stories of a sunbathing Diogenes telling Alexander the Great to “get out of my sun!” when the emperor approached to grant him one wish; or of Diogenes, hearing Plato being praised for his definition of man as “a two-footed, featherless animal,” plucking a cock, bringing it to Plato’s school, and announcing, “this is

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Plato’s man,” thereby forcing “with broad flat nails” to be added to the definition). After outlining Cynical individualism, freedom, and autarkeia, Dudley argues that while, as a movement, Cynicism didn’t really die with the sixth century c.e. (the end point for his History of Cynicism), and that the spirit of Cynicism arises whenever the rights of the individual need upholding against the political, moral, or economic constraints of society, “in modern times the movement most akin to Cynicism is Anarchism.” While he insists that in the ancient world Cynic “anarchy” was not organized along strictly speaking “political” lines, his identification of Cynicism with the liberatory project of nineteenth-century humanistic anarchism highlights his conspicuous neglect of the modern—putatively apathetic and apolitical—conception of cynicism.18 Similarly, Luis Navia argues that whereas the classical Cynics expressed an “honest” reaction to cultural decadence, and that their consciousness was clear of “deceptiveness and inauthenticity,” for the modern cynic all human behavior is ultimately motivated by egoism and is therefore suspect and untrustworthy. Convinced of ubiquitous hypocrisy, deceit, materialism, and ruthlessness, and unhindered by any reformist inclinations, Navia’s modern cynic does not believe in ideals or lofty aspirations because he is confident that they are only “linguistic and behavioral games promoted for the purpose of manipulating and duping people, or ways to hide the enormous state of confusion that permeates the average human consciousness.” Hence, while Navia argues that there is a “weak” relationship between classical and modern cynicism, he insists that this relationship is more the result of “a curious historical situation” and a “peculiarity of language” than anything else, and he goes so far as to claim that the “ethical nihilism” of modern cynicism is in reality the “antithesis” of classical cynicism.” “The Cynics were not cynical, nor are modern cynics authentic Cynics.”19 Peter Sloterdijk admits that classical Cynicism (what his native German differentiates as kynicism) and modern cynicism both articulate a kind of challenge to the arbitrariness and domination inherent in idealized, normalized conventionality. But he nonetheless splits the cynic/ kynic phenomenon into two conflicting moments, with cynicism, based in an imprisoning logic of denial and self-domination, standing as the reactive obverse of kynicism, which is grounded in an active logic of embodied self-assertion. Thus Diogenes’ kynicism inaugurates a “dialectic of disinhibition” as “a first reply” to the “master-thinkers” of Athenian hegemonic idealism. If Plato and Aristotle sever “the threads of material

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embodiment in order instead to draw the threads of argumentation all the more tightly together into a logical fabric,” Diogenes “the kynic farts, shits, pisses, masturbates on the street, before the eyes of the Athenian market. . . . Kynicism . . . does not speak against idealism, it lives against it. In idealism, which justifies social and world orders, the ideas stand at the top and gleam in the light of attentiveness, matter is below, a mere reflection of the idea, a shadow, an impurity.” But in kynicism, “the material, the alert body, begins to actively demonstrate its sovereignty. The excluded lower element goes to the marketplace and demonstratively challenges the higher element. Feces, Urine, Sperm!” Thus in kynicism a radicalized body attacks, in the name of liberation, the abstractions of “a culture in which hardened idealisms makes lies into a form of living.” Kynicism’s “dog philosophy,” its “ ‘dirty materialism[,]’ is an answer not only to an exaggerated idealism of power that undervalues the rights of the concrete. The animalities are for the kynic part of his way of presenting himself, as well as a form of argumentation. Its core is existentialism. The kynic, as a dialectical materialist, has to challenge the public sphere because it is the only space in which the overcoming of idealist arrogance can be meaningful demonstrated.” For Sloterdijk, it is this lived challenge to hegemony, this embodied assertion, that is missing from modern cynicism. “Ancient kynicism, primary and pugnacious kynicism, was a plebian antithesis to idealism. Modern cynicism, by contrast, is the masters’ antithesis to their own idealism as ideology and masquerade. The cynical master lifts the mask, smiles at his weak adversary, and suppresses him. . . . In its cynicisms, hegemonic power airs its secrets a little, indulges in semi-enlightenment, and tells all.” But if no effective—and recognizable—alternative or oppositional power presents itself, as none does now, Sloterdijk warns, there is no longer a legitimate position for outrage at these hegemonic cynicisms. “The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical.”20 In a move seen also in Goldfarb, Caldwell, Lerner, and others, Sloterdijk outlines a process whereby increasing knowledge does not simply undermine illegitimate authority or efface ideology, and therefore becomes intractable instead of emancipatory. Recalling Weber’s description of modernity’s disenchanting rationalism, Sloterdijk argues that the enlightenment ideal has failed: “Enlightenment does not penetrate into social consciousness simply as an unproblematic bringer of light. Where it has an effect, a twilight arises, a deep ambivalence.”21 Rather than freeing us from the false consciousness of ideological forms, modern, bureaucratically contextualized enlightenment now only exposes

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their provisionality without leading us to unassailable truth, which for Sloterdijk leads us ultimately to accept our domination. The result is now familiar: to distinguish classical and modern cynicism is also to put that distinction in the service of a paradigm that stresses responsibility toward the recognizable goals of a hegemonic future, and thereby to distance the delegitimized phenomenon of contemporary cynicism, which does not take for granted a salvific teleology of society and its institutions, from the legitimized thought of the classical Cynics, for which such teleology is self-evident. It is the ideal of competence that renders the juxtaposition of the tradition of Diogenes with our own culture of cynicism intelligible; properly contextualized and motivated, a spirit of enlightened criticism—available to the ancient Greeks but unavailable to us for now—is assumed capable of bridging the gap between the is and the should be. Far from representing a fundamental break with classical Cynicism, however, I would like to argue that modern cynicism continues in the mold of irreverent criticism of normalized patterns of thinking and acting that the Cynics embodied in ancient Greece. Precisely in its embedded attack on hegemony is cynicism’s contestation of sincerity identified with Cynicism; it is as a kind of operation, rather than as a programmatic position, that cynicism should be examined.

History Against Itself Born where truth, language, and practice are mutually encoded, cynicism exposes the reduction of knowledge to recognizable functionality, Godzich’s “enterprise of normalization that presents itself under the auspices of truth,” which always underlies hegemony. But for literary criticism to take seriously cynicism’s destabilization of the “enterprise of normalization” is for it also to question the ease with which categorical assertions can be made about what texts themselves mean. Insofar as the cynicism of Adams’s, Cather’s, Fitzgerald’s, and West’s texts is such precisely in upsetting the regulative historical, national, psychological, and ethical boundaries by which it might be contained or accounted for, cynicism upsets too the normative capacities of the literary historical practices that would presume to fix, know, and articulate its significance. If Diogenes remained in Athens and within its persuasive field as he criticized its pretensions to rational democracy—it would be difficult, to say the least, to account for the virulence of his critique of the conventionality of Athenian morality were its ideals and principles not in some

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significant way still quite dominant for him and those who applauded him—so the cynicism of these books undercuts the competence claimed by historicist interpretive practice by rendering conspicuous its presumption of self-evidence precisely from within the sphere of its authority and influence, incapable of escaping it. These cynical books—far more problematic and unstable than books simply about cynics—relentlessly question the presumption of transparency that new historicist critical habits bring to literature. Indeed, the critical bankruptcy of the new historicist approach in American studies, in dismissing any displacement of selfevidence in the name of normalization, allegorizes the failure of politics before the reactionary ascendancy of the linked ideals of recognition and competence. Historicist criticism’s elevation of competence takes for granted literature’s representativity, reducing literature to an index of an ideological social totality, to a window onto legible narratives of “history.” This mode of literary study reimagines criticism as a potent historiography. In articulating the critic vis-à-vis an always-proliferating fabric of intertwined and interdependent historical documents, historicism’s instrumentalist organizing principle of “cultural poetics” assumes as a correlative of the infinite potential competence of the critic the infinite potential significance (that is, signifying-ness) of the culture and ideology s/he addresses; thus are the authority of the critic and the transparency of cultural body mutually reinforced and maintained. Legible thematic similarity, authorized by a coherent signifier and anchored in the competent historical subject, supplants what Godzich called an “appreciation of the multiplicity of functions that language performs, the foremost of which is the ability to code and transcode experience and to provide cultural direction for its interpretation, handling, and elaboration,” in the name of the imperial triumph of pure methodology. Despite claims to the contrary, as Kiernan Ryan points out, cultural poetics, which “exchanges a stress on the historicity of texts for a concern with the textuality of culture,” is far more interested in the potency of its cultural reading than in criticizing the contextualization and implication of its interpretive practice: “the poststructuralist price of the return to history is the evaporation of the world that produced these words.”22 And D. G. Myers writes (albeit in the house journal of the rightist National Association of Scholars) that new historicism’s cultural poetical approach “is not an effort to discover what it means for a literary work to be historical; it is really little more than an attempt to get literary works to conform to a particular vision of history.”23 Ryan explains that “cultural

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poetics . . . perceives literature as only one element of the whole cultural configuration whose distinctive rhetoric it undertakes to read. Instead of elevating one cultural practice above the rest, and either sealing off its texts for special scrutiny or explaining them as products of some fundamental process, the new historicist mounts an interdisciplinary campaign to track the culture’s chief tropes as they move back and forth between its various discursive domains.”24 That is, it understands culture as a unified arrangement whose “distinctive rhetoric” can be read across the variety of its discursive-objective modes (even if it cannot itself be represented in its unified totality). Preeminent practitioners are fond of insisting that new historicist cultural poetics lacks a coherent “set of theoretical propositions,” that it “resist[s] systematization,” that it is neither “field” nor “school,” even that it is “something” that doesn’t “really exist” and that it cannot fairly be called a “methodology”—insistences belied to no small extent by the dependability with which they are repeated, for relatively recent and notable example in such a textbook as Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt’s Practicing New Historicism.25 But the interpretive practices now generally recognized as new historicism (when, that is, they are not recognized even more generally simply as the way academic literary interpretation is now conducted—Ryan points out that new historicism’s “assumptions and procedures have been so completely absorbed into mainstream critical practice as to have become virtually invisible”26) have achieved their dominance precisely because new historicism is only methodology, because it represents the triumph of methodological agency, of competence over criticism. True to new historicism’s suppression of anxiety about interpretive opacity, new historicists have developed a fondness for ignoring challenges to their celebration of productive theoretical bricolage precisely in alluding to them. As Jean E. Howard puts it in a consideration of the method’s academic career: “New historicism’s lasting impact is apparent everywhere. . . . At the same time, as a critical practice new historicism has limitations, and these have been detailed at exceeding length—a sure sign that new historicism has been important.” She admits that “questions have been raised about the status of the anecdote in new historical practice, the relationship posited between historical particulars and general claims, the new practice’s early commitment to the binaries of subversion and containment, its predominant interest in texts by and about men and social elites, its possible status as a new formalism, and, conversely, its insufficient attention to the formal properties of texts.”27 But she says little else on the subject. New historicism’s defenders—like Howard, who

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is mostly sympathetic—seem content to acknowledge criticism, as if a methodology purified of theoretical foundation has been freed also of the demand for theoretical justification. Indeed, Gallagher and Greenblatt (hereafter denoted as “GG”) admit the criticism, too. “One of the recurrent criticisms of new historicism is that it is insufficiently theorized. The criticism is certainly just, and yet it seems curiously out of touch with the simultaneous fascination with theory and resistance to it that has shaped from the start our whole attempt to rethink the practice of literary and cultural studies. We speculated about first principles . . . but both of us were and remain deeply skeptical of the notion that we should formulate an abstract system and then apply it to literary works.”28 This defense is notable for two reasons. First, what they disparagingly imply would pass muster with their critics as sufficient theorization—the “appl[ication]” of “an abstract system . . . to literary works”—sounds more like obtuse orthodoxy than theoretical rigor, which on the contrary amounts, as Godzich suggests, to a constant questioning of what GG might call the “principles” one in fact cannot avoid “apply[ing]” in the practice of literary interpretation. GG do not simply construct an illegitimate straw man of theoretical rigor to knock down; they defend against the admittedly “just” charge by shifting the debate from the merits of their practice to the motivation out of which it arises. Rather than justifying new historical practice in the face of just criticism, GG complain that alleging that it is misbegotten is “out of touch” with the curious combination of attraction to and evasion of theory that inspires so many of its practitioners. Indeed, GG’s insistence that cultural materialism is neither methodology nor system looks to be more coy than courageous, as it seems in fact to amount to a refusal to confront their three bedrock assumptions: (1) that culture legibly encodes the ideological history of society and that its meanings are (at least potentially) transparently available (albeit often less so to those determined by a culture’s contemporary contexts than to those outside the sphere of their persuasion, such as current literary critics historically and/or nationally removed from that culture); (2) that the literary critic possesses, more than anything else, a competence to read that transparent significance; and (3) that the fact of this significance and the fact of this competence are self-evident. Though GG claim that new historicism differs from its precursors by refusing the seductions of unidirectional historical accounts of cultural and social phenomena, their refusal is ultimately not coherent. “There is no longer a unitary story, a supreme model of human perfection, that can be securely located in a particular site,” they explain, yet they

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continue by admitting that “the mutual embeddedness of art and history underlies our fascination with the possibility of treating all of the written and visual traces of a particular culture as a mutually intelligible network of signs,” a suggestion informed by their belief, for example, that “poetry . . . is not the path to a transhistorical truth . . . but the key to particular historically embedded social and psychological formations.”29 Thus “poetry”/“art” and “history” emerge in GG’s explanation as discourses whose generic differences from one another recede before the assumption that they similarly express, in Ryan’s phrases, the “distinctive rhetoric” and “chief tropes” of the culture that they differently encode, an encoding whose only legitimacy and legibility seems to derive from the interpreting agent out to make a claim. If GG want to replace the systematic “dogmas” of “ideology critique,” whose “key concepts” make too many demands on the interpreter, with “discourse analysis,”30 their justification seems to have far less to do with a coherent account of the relation of discourse to truth than with their own “fascination with the possibility of treating all of the written and visual traces of a particular culture as a mutually intelligible network of signs,” that is, with their desire for interpretive competence. Thus the history that concerns new historicists seems little more than the handmaiden of the desire to write history. Writes Christopher Lane, specifically attentive to new historicism’s simultaneous faltering step on, and lack of concern with, proving the influence of ideological contexts on the literary texts through which they are supposed expressed, “The difficulty of verifying influence— centrally important to traditional historians—proves secondary, for new historicists, to what the comparison enables.”31 As Myers puts it: “The error of the New Historicism lies . . . in the logic of its method. . . . The essential categories of New Historicist thought make the necessary facts appear.”32 Sure enough, GG are sensitive to this charge, too, but their response again suggests that, as with the allegation of theoretical torpor, they expect to evade it on pragmatic rather than critical grounds. They putatively express concern when they ask about the “consequences of treating all of the traces of an era, even if its boundaries could be successfully demarcated, as a single cultural formation,” but their response, a curious combination of sheepish grin and hubris, is unsatisfying. They admit that they got the “notion” of “conceiving cultures as texts” from “Geertz and the structuralists,” but all they offer as a justification for applying this presumptive “notion” is that “the linguistic turn in the social and humanistic disciplines has heightened its appeal.”33 In fact, each of the

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three explanations they offer of their method of reading cultures as texts in fact explains why they find this method attractive rather than why they believe it is justified. Their defense of new historicism is referred solely to their own desire as historical interpreters, suggesting that GG have an interesting notion of what constitutes historiographic responsibility: 1. The first defense is that new historicism, despite (or perhaps because of) its “hermeneutical aggression,” is a potent analytical tool: “It carries the core hermeneutical presumption that one can occupy a position from which one can discover meanings that those who left traces of themselves could not have articulated. Explication and paraphrase are not enough; we seek something more, something that the authors we study would not have had sufficient distance upon themselves and their own era to grasp.” 2. The second justification GG offer for new historicism—more self-congratulatory than the first—is that, offering a “broader vision of the field of cultural interpretation,” it opens sizeable regions of culture to historical examination: “it vastly expands the range of objects available to be read and interpreted. Major works of art remain centrally important, but they are jostled now by an array of other texts and images. . . . There has been in effect a social rebellion in the study of culture, so that figures hitherto kept outside the proper circles of interests [here follows a long list of the erstwhile ignored] . . . have now forced their way in, or rather have been invited in by our generation of critics.” 3. Finally, GG’s third defense of “treating cultures as texts” is that doing so represents “the triumph of an expressivist and creative notion of language, and with it a fascination with the entire range of diverse expressions by which a culture makes itself manifest.”34 Thus new historicism offers the benefit of the assumption that, despite the variety of cultural production a critic associates with a given examined culture, all these various “expressions,” even in their diversity, are in fact the manifestations of a unitary culture. The many “expressions” or “discourses”—like diplomatic briefs, closet dramas, religious edicts, pornography, and children’s cautionary tales35—may not be absolutely transcodable, but they are at once equally expressive of a unified ideological “structure” and equally potentially transparent to the critic. Again, their ultimate standard is their own presumed competence. In the context of this replacement of substantiation with presumption, GG

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claim that, because of its “lack of a given set of objects, new historicism becomes a history of possibilities.” But they can say that new historicism produces “possibilities” only because new historical claims have far more to do with what the critic wants to claim of his or her object than with the object’s claim on the critic. Indeed: GG admit that the “characteristically double vision of the art of the past—at once immersed in its time and place and yet somehow pulling out and away [presumably toward the latter-day reader]—is deeply related to our understanding of our own aesthetic experience.”36 Given everything else GG have argued, the only way this claim can be intelligible is if it is understood to mean that historical statements draw their sanction not simply from the historical and cultural material that they describe, explain, or represent but from the mouth of the critic who speaks about that material, and in particular from that critic’s capacity to recognize what he or she wants to find. This is a compelling claim, to be sure, but it demands more theorization than GG provide. GG close their introduction with a revealing claim: “Writing the book has convinced us that new historicism is not a repeatable methodology or a literary critical program. Each time we approached that moment in the writing when it might have been appropriate to draw the ‘theoretical’ lesson, to scold another school of criticism, or to point the way toward the paths of virtue, we stopped, not because we’re shy of controversy, but because we cannot bear to see the long chains of close analysis go up in a puff of abstraction. So we sincerely hope you will not be able to say what it all adds up to; if you could, we would have failed.”37 Mapped by the coquettish posturing in the third sentence and the prophylactic barrier erected against anticipated attacks in the second, this passage illustrates an agenda. While they may not want to endanger their close readings, GG surely must admit that there is a difference between “a puff of abstraction” and critical commitment to questioning one’s assumptions (i.e., not the dogmatic fealty GG want it to mean). And if new historicism really wants to claim that it does not rely on a “repeatable methodology,” so be it, but it certainly does rely on “repeatable” assumptions about culture and interpretation and the instrumental relationship of the critic to the culture he or she interprets. I have little invested in protesting that cultural materialists should be criticized for lacking unswerving allegiance to a particular school of criticism, or that their interdisciplinary voraciousness is anachronistic in bringing one era’s preoccupations to bear on another’s texts, or even that, as Howard ventriloquizes a complaint, “new historicism isn’t historical enough.”38 My position is merely

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one of modesty. I want only to suggest that new historicism’s fundamental assumptions—including the ideas that culture is “textualized” to the extent that it expresses an ideological rhetoric that is shared by, as it structures, all of the varied expressions that supposedly belong (in whatever way) to that culture; that this rhetoric is recognizable as such across time, distance, and difference by academic literary critics today; that, despite protestations to the contrary, a culture bears a potentially recognizable unity; and finally that literary criticism is at its most relevant when it historicizes texts by pegging them to this recognizable cultural unity in the name of an imperial competence predicated on the ultimate transparency of all cultural production—represent a consolidation of the hegemony of recognition in their normalization of “evidence,” and that criticism demands that a lot more attention be paid to the procedures that constitute this normalization than to the supposedly self-evident benefits of the competence that normalization claims to underwrite. In an essay whose first version appeared in 1978, Edward Said suggests that interpretation is a far-reaching operation. In pointing out similarities between various kind of literary critical work—his examples are the linguistic reconstruction of the rules of a dead language and “speculations about the character of Dickens as a Victorian middle-class writer”—Said writes in both cases of “the inevitable contamination of what is supposedly solid positive knowledge by human interpretation, vagaries, willfulness, biases, grounding in personality, radically human circumstantiality, wordliness.” Not nearly so innocent an insight as its being now commonplace might imply, Said claims here that, itself the result of a number of procedures, knowledge answers a number of functional needs and therefore cannot be considered as positivistically neutral as it might appear to be—or as we might expect or want it to be. “It appeared to Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud each in his own way that such apparently safe steps in the production of knowledge as the collecting and disposing of evidence, or the reading and understanding of a text, all involve a very high degree of interpretive leeway, subject not so much to rationality and scientific control as to the assertion of will, arbitrary speculation, repressive (and repressing) judgment.” Thus, “in order to specify the possibilities for genuine knowledge in a field,” Said claims that a whole host of other questions need to be raised, including (but not limited to) not simply “what that knowledge is or might be,” but also “where it might be inscribed,” how it refers to “everything that preceded it” and “what is contemporary with it,” how it relates to other fields and what might follow it, and “how institutions will accept or reject it.” But

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the “immediate question,” he insists, is “slightly different”: What is the role of the “critical consciousness” or “criticism” (terms he admits to using interchangeably) in these matters? Is [it] . . . principally to deliver insights about writers and texts, to describe writers and texts . . . to teach and disseminate information about the monuments of culture? Or—and this is what I believe to be the task—is it to occupy itself with the intrinsic conditions on which knowledge is made possible? For in order to see what it is that we can know as students of texts, we must be able to understand the units of knowledge as functions of textuality, which itself must be describable in terms dealing with not only the agencies of culture in their ideological, political, institutional, and historical forms but also with requirements of intelligible method and the material form of knowledge which, if it is not of divine or supernatural provenance, is produced in the secular world. Thus critical responsibility does not inhere simply in revising the content of critical reflection (as Said might put it, revising or expanding “information about the monuments of culture”)—such as, for famous example, recognizing the relevance of New World colonial history to consideration of English Renaissance literary texts, or, closer to the focus of this book, articulating connections between works like The Professor’s House and The Great Gatsby and the rhetoric of nativism. More fundamentally, but less definitively, criticism demands constantly questioning the ways in which we actually carry out this recognition and articulation. Essential to criticism, therefore, is not the problem of what evidence can be recognized, but rather “the problem of knowledge, of how we know what we know.”39 If literary criticism wants to claim that the texts it examines represent some sort of reality and therefore bear some sort of relevance to the representational practices and norms that implicate and persuade us, it has got to do more than attend positivistically to the subjects, objects, milieux, and practices that those texts indicate and that the literary critic wants to examine. New historicism sites its sanction in its own pragmatic power, its ability to exploit the interpretive potential it can recognize in texts, a category that, to its credit, it understands expansively. Its assumption of competence is grounded in legibility, in extracting significance from possibilities that are already visible. This is why cynicism, in its elemental challenge to the primary act of takingfor-granted, offers a way to criticize the instrumentalism of the cultural

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poetic method. Criticism demands far more sustained attention to the role of and guarantee supposedly supplied by positive knowledge than is offered by—or even comprehensible to—the pragmatic approach underlying new historicism and cultural materialism, an approach to which taking for granted the category of positive knowledge is fundamental. I have no interest in arguing that literature cannot be read historically, in “materialist” readings. My goal has rather been to indicate how the cynical critique of normalization extends beyond the texts at hand to implicate as well the practice of interpretation that would claim to recognize their relevance or historical significance. The habits that regulate social practices, normalizing some and not others, some expectations about social experience and not others, are the same as those that support the historicist’s interpretive practices and expectations: they are grounded in a competence sanctioned by the hegemonic logic of recognition. The instrumental means by which literature is reduced to historical evidence for claims about culture proper to such readings need at least to be admitted insofar as those means are caught up in structures that reproduce the hegemony of recognition. Cynicism’s challenge to competence is a thinking that effects precisely this problematization. Cynicism destabilizes the assumption of self-evidence on the basis of which this normative methodology functions. Cynicism, as illuminated by Foucault’s idea of “contestation,” Said’s idea of “interpretation,” and Godzich’s idea of “theory” with its “labor of opacification,” points to a fissure in hegemony that, while not recognizably opening up into a larger, decisive rupture of—and alternative to—that dominion, nonetheless, in its never-quite-definitive vector of escape, indicates counterhegemonic possibility; but in pointing away from positivism’s clampdown on criticism, it attenuates the pragmatic elevation of instrumentality. The readings of The Education of Henry Adams, The Professor’s House, The Great Gatsby, and Miss Lonelyhearts that follow do not define the historically contextualized meaning of these texts; rather, they take the opportunity occasioned by historicist desire to show how literary texts defy the attempt to recognize them. To poach Henry Adams’s terminology, cynicism tropes entropy: it figures sincerity’s decreasing normative availability. Cynicism is co-optative only if hegemonic legitimacy’s only alternative is envisioned to be outside: i.e., only if its displacement is conceived teleologically and dialectically as resistance. In fact, cynicism presents a challenge to this orthodoxy by dismissing the notion of an outside and hence of the possibility of a utopian

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trajectory. Legitimacy’s conceptual unity is grounded in a prospective, messianic normativity that meets its match in cynicism’s entropic normativity. In contesting the self-grounded validity of authority, cynicism points to legitimacy’s waning self-evidence precisely in its—cynicism’s— knowledge of its—authority’s—inescapability.

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Henry Adams and the Failure of Usefulness Being of a timid and pessimist nature, I see always the worst, and find it always worse than I see. —henry adams to charles milnes gaskell, 13 november 1907 [W]e shall never learn enough to feel our incapacity to understand. True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do. —henry adams, mont saint michel and chartres

The Education of Cynicism Henry Adams is doubtless one of the most entertaining cynics in American letters. Late in his life he averred to Harvard English professor and former student Barrett Wendell that in America intelligence has lost everything but the hermetic capacity to mark its own shortcomings and lacks, importantly, an aptitude for productive self-criticism: [W]e are smothered in this American vacuum, and gasp for intelligent attack. Poison is better than pure void. . . . We all roll on the ground and sprinkle dust on our heads in consciousness of our miserable state, but we can get no help. The disease has reached a point where we are obliged to compose our music for ourselves alone, and of course this sort of composition means that we go on repeating our faults. No echo whatever comes back. My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.1 Refreshing, undoubtedly, to his U.S. readers, Adams’s vitriol found purchase on the other side of the Atlantic, too. During a week in January 1892, traveling between Paris and London seventeen years earlier, he penned a furious screed against the morbidity of European society in a letter to his good friend John Hay, which closes on this decisive worldhistorical note: “This is the end! If nothing more has been done in these

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last thirty years, that have produced our Atlantic steamers and our railway system in America, nothing more need be expected from Europe. The people are stupid. They grow stupider and worse as their aristocracies disappear. They have no longer even the refinement of manners and tastes of their old society. . . . The end is here, and I have seen all there will be to show. One can’t mistake a drift of thirty years. I am furious and astonished, like a bull that has butted a brick wall, and reflects.”2 European “stupid[ity]”—ignorance of the state of society—is linked specifically to an inability to historicize experience, to inscribe oneself in a normative social teleology. If Americans may not strictly speaking be “stupid,” their “consciousness of [their] miserable state” lands them, also, in a “void,” an “American vacuum” from which, “alone,” they can neither describe their condition nor imagine an escape. Modern America and Europe alike suffer from a failure of historical thinking. This normative failure is decisive. Soon after unloading on Hay, and back in America, Adams wrote a letter to his British friend Charles Milnes Gaskell in late February 1892 in which he insists that “Everything points to a Euthanasia.”3 And of course, as any reader of the The Education of Henry Adams knows, his Herculean spleen is hardly limited to others; in describing the 1892 Columbian Exposition, he allows that “education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they were ignorant.”4 Adams’s brand of irony is particularly well adapted to the cynical formula: he is positively elegant, and frequently downright funny, in denunciations launched from the bitter ground of an indignant disappointment. On the surface humorously dismissive, Adams’s cynicism is in fact directed at the decayed self-evidence with which thought is presumed to be historically relevant. Experience, deracinated from an obvious narrative of progressive social change, fuels not expanding self-knowledge, not a legible integration of individual and society, but a growing failure to normalize perception, a failure in fact of the means to recognize oneself. If “retarded” paradigms fall before the ineffable incontrovertibility of “ignoran[ce]” in “concrete form,” the Education suggests that this is the occasion of thought. “Education” names this failure. Neither the glumness nor the sarcasm of Adams’s tone is often disputed, but they have been tendentiously contextualized in a lot of writing about Adams. In his important collection of Adams’s letters, Harold Dean Cater, for example, refers to Adams’s “curious prejudices” and writes that Adams “purposely gave a false, incomplete, even unpleasant impression of himself in what some people call his autobiography: The

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Education of Henry Adams.”5 He resolutely claims that “it cannot be denied that Henry flaunted pessimism. There is a good deal of it in many of his letters and in the Education.” Notably, Cater lays stress on the “flaunt[ing],” suggesting that Adams “indulged” in his negativity with “engaging humor”: “Henry summoned this mood at will. . . . He wrote with his tongue in his cheek. Pessimism was largely a pose.”6 He quotes from a characteristic letter signed 7 May 1901: “All we can say is that, at the rate of increase of speed and momentum, as calculated on the last fifty years, the present society must break its damn neck in a definite, but remote, time, not exceeding fifty years more. . . . Either our society must stop or bust, as Malthus would say. I do not myself care which it does. That is the affair of those who are to run it.”7 Cater implies, that is, that the penultimate sentence should not be taken at face value, as it belies a very real “care.” While it would be hard to argue that Adams’s tongue is not in cheek when he disclaims care, to maintain that Adams’s unenthusiastic “I do not care” is simply a “pose” is an evasion. The ironic stance—the simultaneous expression of concern for how things should turn out and lack of concern for how they do turn out— is familiar to anyone who has read Adams, and it is everywhere in the widely read Education, perhaps most insistently in the repeated theme of the failed convergence of the possibility of education with Adams’s ability to recognize something worthy of being called education. Thus, on the one hand, for example, we have his 1870 comment in the face of Grant’s irrelevance to the historical and epistemological occasion America seemed to have chosen him to address—“Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not guess” (281)—and on the other, we have his claim after the book’s twenty-one-year ellipsis following his wife Marian’s suicide that “nothing attracted him less than the idea of beginning a new education. The old one had been poor enough; any new one could only add to its faults. Life had been cut in halves, and the old half had passed away, education and all, leaving no stock to graft on. . . . He felt nothing in common with the world as it promised to be” (316–17); indeed, as he writes a few pages later, “society seemed hardly more at home than he,” and, facing a return home to Washington from Europe, an alternative to which he cannot, despite himself, imagine, he writes, “In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead” (320). The Education may lack some of the unconcealed comedy so frequent in the letters, but its style is defined by a severe irony that, even when used to quite grave purpose, is permeated by undeniable wit.

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In fact, Adams’s cynicism is difficult to evaluate because it marks a disruption of normalizing standards on which the possibility of recognition and legitimation depend. The term “cynicism” (with its variants) is not uncommon in discussions of Adams, but it is often taken for granted as part of his posturing.8 It is wrong, however, to suggest that Adams’s sarcastic humor is the mode in which he ironically distances himself from a potentially destructive cynicism. Cater writes, for example, “If Adams’s studies caused him to warn people of doom and disaster ahead, his resurgent humor pointed up the fact that he was by no means certain about such a conclusion.” And he cites a 1910 letter to niece Mabel Hooper La Farge in support: “The world is an ass—but that you knew before! I too am an ass, to talk about it; but the subject will not let me alone.”9 To focus on Adams’s disparaging doubt as humorous and, more significantly, a pose is effectively to dismiss the real problem of cynicism—namely that normative concern, quite apart from self-deception, hypocrisy, or ideological error, becomes inseparable from its own unraveling. To circumvent this dismissal is to appreciate that Adams’s cynicism resists a normative teleology that legitimizes only that thought recognizable from within habitual practices. The difficulty in Adams’s cynicism arises from a reinscription of responsibility, which is at the center of the Education’s interest in and anxiety about the possibility of useful historical knowledge. Challenged from the past in that book both by his family’s inherited eighteenth-century ideal of social management and the Virgin’s medieval ethic of faith, forms of intelligence that accommodated individual and social needs and mutually encoded them in the name of participation, Adams finds thinking to be an alienation machine. Neither of these historical formations, that is, offers Adams an indication of how he might recognize something useful in the thought of them. This concern with the intimacy between thinking and responsibility was also the ground out of which his History of the United States grew; indeed, it is possible to see it as the chief concern of Adams’s historiography. As he writes at the opening of that earlier work, America at the dawn of the nineteenth century could not submit its experience to the jury of functional historical knowledge: “If the physical task which lay before the American people had advanced but a short way toward completion, little more change could be seen in the economical conditions of American life. The man who in the year 1800 ventured to hope for a new era in the coming century, could lay his hand on no statistics that silenced doubt.” The problem was neither that the agricultural methods, productive technology, domestic comforts, and

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literacy levels of young America were little improved over what they had been in Europe a millennium earlier, nor that “no civilized country had yet been required to deal with physical difficulties so serious” as those facing the country: “If the Puritans and the Dutch needed a century to reach the Mohawk, when would they reach the Mississippi? The distance from New York to the Mississippi was about one thousand miles; from Washington to the extreme southwestern military post, below Natchez, was about twelve hundred. Scarcely a portion of western Europe was three hundred miles distant from some sea, but a width of three hundred miles was hardly more than an outskirt of the United States.”10 The problem facing the nascent United States was rather that it was impossible to chart a path from Americans’ nonviable knowledge to a functional modus operandi. “At the close of the eighteenth century nothing had occurred which warranted the belief that even the material difficulties of America could be removed.” This is a problem of recognition: Radicals as extreme as Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin were contented with avowing no higher aim than that America should reproduce the simpler forms of European republican society without European vices; and even this their opponents thought visionary. The United States had thus far made a single great step in advance of the Old World,—they had agreed to try the experiment of embracing half a continent in one republican system; but so little were they disposed to feel confidence in their success, that Jefferson himself did not look on this American idea as vital; he would not stake the future on so new an invention. “Whether we remain in one confederacy,” he wrote in 1804, “or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederations, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part.”11 Adams links this problem of thinking beyond the compelling “inertia” of obsolete economic practices and authoritative institutions to “novelty,” which is opposed to the recognizability of “old habit of mind”: The task of overcoming popular inertia in a democratic society was new, and seemed to offer peculiar difficulties. Without a scientific class to lead the way, and without a wealthy class to provide the means of experiment, the people of the United States were still required, by the nature of their problems, to become a speculating and scientific nation. They could do little without changing their old habit of mind, and without learning to love novelty for novelty’s

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sake. . . . In the colonial state they had naturally accepted old processes as the best, and European experience as final authority. As an independent people, with half a continent to civilize, they could not afford to waste time in following European examples, but must devise new processes of their own.12 Far from claiming an American exception, which would assume a selfevident “American” alternative, Adams here is sensitive precisely to the need to think outside the recognizable confines of statist and historicist teleologies: thought needs to be responsible to its occasion rather than to established habits and prejudices whose virtue is recognized legitimacy. Just as Foucault would later warn against “writing a history of the past in terms of the present,”13 Adams suggests that responsibility to the unrecognizable is the central axis of historiography. This challenge to the dictates of recognition is at the heart of the Education. The confluence of war in Europe, his sister’s death, the political-evolutionary mystery of Grant’s administrative idiocy, and the choice between being a journalist in Washington and a teacher at Harvard render 1870 a “Chaos” for the intrepid student who, like Adams, seeks a politically relevant interpretation of experience, to find in it the basis of competence. His initial hope that he might allow what he called in the History “popular inertia” to decide for him between Washington and Harvard (to say nothing of organizing the historiographic disorder) pales before his ignorance. “At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles, wanted to throw off responsibility on the American people, whose bare and toiling shoulders had to carry the load of every social or political stupidity; but the American people had no more to do with it than with the customs of Peking. American character might perhaps account for it, but what accounted for American character?” If habit-bound America cannot think beyond its capacity to recognize itself, Adams does not share the liberty of inertia: “The American character showed singular limitations which sometimes drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by his own ignorance—lost in the darkness of his own gropings—the scholar finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men who seem to him ignorant that there is such a thing called ignorance; who have forgotten how to amuse themselves; who cannot even understand that they are bored” (Education, 295–97). “Habit of mind,” Adams’s phrase from the History, marks something closely associated with what Adams here suggests is the second-order ignorance of one’s own ignorance; “habit” names the terms in which Americans “carry the

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load of [their] every social or political stupidity,” but this “crowd,” which can only recognize what it already knows, does not, Adams here suggests, negate the responsibility to “devise new processes.” Adams writes in the History of Jefferson, “Even over his liberal mind history cast a spell so strong, that he thought the solitary American experiment of political confederation ‘not very important’ beyond the Alleghenies.”14 In Adams’s concern with “history,” thinking is at war with established narratives; if “old habit” inscribes experience according to a principle of utility, the responsibility of thinking inhabits a “new” space outside the recognizably useful, pursuing knowledge under the banner of the “novel.” It is precisely this failure of normalized recognition that Adams cynically gestures toward in his letters in describing the “American vacuum,” European “stupid[ity],” and the attraction of “Euthanasia.” Adams’s desire to “throw off” responsibility in just those situations where he cannot is coincident with the cynical challenge to the normative logic of recognizability that lies at the heart of the ideal of competence. Thinking, as opposed to habit, endangers the functional link between past knowledge and future action. “Responsibility” as a name for competence or knowing what to do is nothing other than meeting expectations born of “habit.” But “responsibility” as a name for acknowledging one’s own ignorance, like cynicism’s ostensible disavowal of the future, is in fact a reinscription of the possibility of novel thought. Cynicism is one with thinking for Adams, and it subverts the teleology of the normative instrumentalism by which knowledge is habitually recognized. In a 9 December 1907 letter to William James accompanying a belated text of the privately printed Education (which James resentfully demanded as “reparation” after “seeing a copy last summer in Molly Warner’s house”), Adams stages an opposition that illustrates the cynical critique of teleological historicism in his “Autobiography.” Despite the ostensible reason that Adams first delivered copies of the book only to those people he mentioned in the book in order to register and address complaints prior to a wider publication, some critics, including J. C. Levenson and, more recently, Paul Bové, find significance in Adams’s failure to include James in his first distribution of the book; Levenson suggests that “James’s hearty philosophic optimism always brought out the most sardonic aspect of his old friend Adams,” and Bové sharpens this claim in arguing that James is “precisely . . . not the sort of intellectual Adams admires.”15 Toward the end of his letter, Adams admits that he “feared your judgment,” not least because “I knew your views better

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than my own.”16 As Bové points out, the charge of this last sentiment is strikingly at odds with Adams’s declaration in the previous paragraph that he had written the Education “to clean my own mind,” as it is also with his explanation yet one paragraph earlier of his aim in writing, three years previously, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: “Weary of my own imbecility, I tried to clean off a bit of the surface of my own mind, in 1904, by printing a volume on the twelfth century, where I could hide, in the last hundred pages, a sort of anchor in history.” Bové argues that Adams implies a contrast between his own dedication to the unpredictable in thought—any reader of the Education will verify Adams’s fascination with unanticipated ruptures, what Bové, following Adams, calls “novelty”—and James’s dedication to pragmatic continuity between past and future mediated through what for Bové is an “unthought category, experience,” with present habit serving as ultimate measure of both the true and the new. As for Adams’s claim that he knew James’s views better than his own, Bové writes, “Of course, this is just the point: James’s views were and could be well known, all too well known, thoroughly predicted, counted on with certainty, and so on.”17 As Bové clarifies elsewhere, “Specifically, while the Education insists that the intelligence, and hence the intellectual, is not restricted to the reductive categorical oppositions between fact and reason, it implies forcefully that the mediation between these, namely pragmatism, is nothing more than an erroneous solution to a false problem.”18 Adams’s search for education founders on a failure of instrumentalism. Shifting the focus of education away from recognition’s capacity to accommodate new thinking to established habits forces a reconsideration of education’s presumed aim of assimilating individuals to hegemonic national-economic narratives. In essence, Adams’s point is that an education worth the name is one that discounts much of what society asks of it. This is what makes pragmatic recognition dangerously unfit as an intellectual paradigm: as Bové writes, its sanction of habit in the place of thought amounts to a formula for “refusing to see, deciding to ignore, failing to understand,” “errors” that persistently characterize the American mind “despite that mind’s proximity to the new relations of force that redirect production and seize the continent.”19 The source of this inability to grasp change is, as Bové argues, James’s interest in the “cash-value” of knowledge, which he explains famously in Pragmatism: “But if you follow the pragmatic method . . . You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.”20 By contrast, Adams is centrally concerned precisely with

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providing an accounting of “America,” a society undergoing radical technological, economic, intellectual, and institutional transformation. To submit such changes to the “cash-value” test, as pragmatic recognition demands, will tend, as Bové sees it, to ignore their existence. “Ignoring what is original or different until its cash value becomes obvious is a formula for normalization, for adapting to the already established market. One can imagine defending such a conception in a rare moment of apparent societal equilibrium (when would that be?) or as an ideological expression, based on interest, for the perpetuation of a specific phase of powers.” But in “a time of obvious transition,” such normalization is neither “tolerable” nor “intellectually defensible.”21 Thus the particular problem of the American consolidation of capitalism during the late nineteenth century, a change elucidated by Gramsci’s notion of the interregnum, a moment when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” illuminates the general problem that education falls behind itself in looking for a functionality it already recognizes.22 The crisis of the interregnum, centrally important as a figure in the Education, is that obsolescence and failed authority have not yet been replaced by new, justified, and useful paradigms. It thus provides a key to interpreting Adams’s argument with James. Loren Glass takes issue with Bové’s reading of Adams, particularly in what he takes as its unfair dismissal of James. In fact, Glass declares that it is James who is the champion of novelty, and he finds “Adams’s deterministic theory of history” to leave “no room” for it; “Adams’s restless literary and intellectual experimentation were all in the service of uncovering some fundamental historical ‘law,’ which would once and for all eliminate the future as a zone of possibility.”23 No custodian of radical “novelty,” Glass’s Adams is a typical modernist, characteristically caught in a dialectic between nostalgia and innovation: “In fact, it seems to me that if there is anything we learned from the literary modernism that Adams helped inaugurate, it is that the concept of the totally new is always a misrecognition of our appropriation of what Bové calls ‘models of the past.’ But this does not mean that radical change is impossible or that intellectuals don’t have a place in it. Rather, it is precisely in a dialectical engagement with such past models that intellectuals, I would argue, have their place.” Adams is compelling for Glass because of a troubled backward glance that Glass feels Bové neglects: “My point is that Adams’s fascination with modernity was intimately entangled with his nostalgia for republicanism, and his literary modernism was in many ways an attempt at reformulating the eighteenth-century concept of the public sphere.” As Glass ends a

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little later, “Bové only identifies with Adams’s thrust toward innovation, essentially ignoring the nostalgia that always accompanies it, even though the very choice of Adams bespeaks such an affect. If we still need to identify with the modernist call to ‘make it new,’ we must complement our efforts with the equally modernist search for ‘a usable past.’ ”24 Adams’s mournfulness is certainly a striking feature of the Education, and Glass makes a case for attending to it (even if it’s not at all obvious that Bové’s reading precludes such attention; though it is true that Bové does not make it an explicit focus, his reading strikes me as going to the very heart of such anxiety about the past). Where Glass misses the mark, however, is also where this dispute is most instructive; it is in his final fourteen words, and in particular in the last three of them. It is precisely the concept of “a usable past,” perhaps especially one inscribed by a concept of nostalgia, that the Education most adamantly opposes; though the usability of historical knowledge is obviously the object of a great cathexis on Adams’s part—its trace is everywhere in the book—Adams insists that knowledge expected to be “usable” to the present is the product of a reactionary reduction of experience to already-validated habits. As Bové argues in response to Glass, Adams suggests that identifying “the distinction between thinking and forms of recognition” is the intellectual’s primary challenge.25 Education does not name obedience to past models; Adams’s return throughout the Education to the inadequacy of either his eighteenthcentury republican inheritance or the Virgin’s medieval authority to the epistemological challenges of the dawning twentieth century never nostalgically longs for these earlier formations. In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams admits that the Virgin looks “down from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith,”26 while the Education is nothing less than a condemnation of nostalgia, its incessant refrain that past models fall short of current problems. While Adams frequently notes the world spinning down from moments of articulation between thought and experience, it would be wrong to construe this perception as wistful. The difference between the Virgin and the Dynamo, for famous example, does not name historical or dialectical social movement so much as it marks a more basic displacement between two ways of knowing. Bové suggests that “it would be  .  .  .  wrong to see the differences between ‘The Virgin’ and ‘The Dynamo’ as conflict or struggle; they are merely names, if you will, for successive forms of intelligence, force, order, and consciousness.”27 The problem that compels Adams is less how the world got from the Virgin’s medieval imperium to the

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Dynamo’s modern one than it is how someone looking for historical education—that is, expecting historical continuity to be revealed though the exercise of his historiographic competence—can conceive of these two divergent modes of thinking in uniform terms and therefore render them historically significant and mutually relevant. Though Adams understands the dynamo to be a modern expressive symbol of infinity, “a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross,” his epistemological anxiety is born of an inability to establish a connection between the “forty-foot dynamos” and the “Cross” despite this structure of replacement. “No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith” (380–81). Reduced to ignorance by the lack of an obvious historical context that might establish their self-evidence, Adams finds that their “common value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his own mind. He must treat them as they had been felt; as convertible, reversible, interchangeable attractions on thought.” This refusal of positivism demands a special kind of historiography. Historicist habits of mind that look for uniformity fail in the face of discontinuity. As Bové writes, Adams’s “analysis of capital results in no grand story of history transformed by agents called ‘classes,’ nor in any dialectical battle between abstractions such as necessity and freedom. . . . [H]e sees no reason to believe that capitalism alone is responsible for the existence of anonymous forces that sweep humans along. Capitalism comes into being, as it were, as a result of a transformation of forces, power, and form with no guiding agency, no directive human will, no sufficient intelligence to guide or understand it.”28 As if to ironically underscore this displacement of the possibility of locating (to say nothing of asserting) self-evident historical coordinates, Adams frequently juxtaposes his own personal epistemological crises with what he never fails to claim are more significant national and institutional ones. Thus Adams can write a week or so after his mother’s passing: “My mother’s death severs, I think, the last tie that binds me to my old life, and probably another year will find me fairly at the end. One learns to regard death and life as much the same thing when one lives more in the past than in the present. Indeed, when the present becomes positively repulsive, and the past alone seems real, I am not sure but that death is the livelier reality of the two.”29 And in his anxiety that the history he teaches at Harvard not be “wholly useless” (Education, 302), as in his portrayal of a “scholar” of history “jostled,” “Crushed by his own ignorance—lost in the darkness

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of his own gropings,” we discover historicism foundering precisely on its expectation of relevance. While historicism seeks out avenues by which past, present, and future can recognize themselves in each other, and in which historical continuity can be detected (precisely despite apparent ruptures and differences, that is), Adams cynically focuses on interregnal failures of normative continuity to expose such moments of recognition as little more than effects of the normative desire to bridge serial zones of intelligibility. And it is therefore under the auspices of an examination of Adams’s cynicism that the gap between Bové’s presentation of Adams’s concern with the interregnum and Glass’s presentation of Adams’s anxiety about his own belatedness is illuminating. If Adams’s letter to James suggests that “the task of history is to make possible new thought, to clear the mind,” then history may become “useful,” but only for those not interested, as James is, in the “cash-value” of knowledge; and it is moreover a dubious utility—as Bové asks, “how does thinking relate to the past? More narrowly, we might ask how pasts are made useful.”30 Adams may hold up the usefulness of knowledge as the paradigmatic goal of education, but this paradigm compels only in its failure. The Education’s cynical interrogation of education is really a critique of the individual’s relationship to historical thinking, which in turn questions assumptions about the normative relevance of knowledge.

The Failure of Failure If Adams’s critique of the normalizing force of recognition is suppressed by reducing his cynicism to a curmudgeonly mask donned with a wink, this reduction functions in part by imposing on Adams an assumption that alienation, summed up in the sentimental trope of his tragic “failure,” constitutes the condition of his greatness. A page after claiming that Adams’s “pessimism was largely a pose” and that he “summoned this mood at will,” for example, Cater writes that even as “only . . . a story of how a man . . . was possessed with an idea and searched to the last to find it, like Diogenes,” the Education “is important for the lesson it teaches.” But the book is, of course, “more than that. . . . If he did not find unity and order anywhere on this hurried, wondering planet, he achieved it for himself by encompassing in a single artistic construction such diversities as literature, architecture, politics, law, history, religion, art, and science—all knowledge and philosophy within the confines of the word ‘education.’ ” In this, Cater continues, the book “is a revealing document of American life and manners—a

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kaleidoscope of a generation.”31 A project of recovery is apparent, one that is equally conspicuous, for example, in Glass’s emphasis on the usefulness of knowledge: once Adams’s anxiety about failure—intellectual, social, economic, or national—is dismissed as a simple pose, the ideological productivity of that concern can be claimed. Thus the sincerity of Adams’s attempt to represent modernity vindicates his failure to do so because the failure is not his. Recasting failure in these terms accomplishes two goals. First, it emphasizes the hopeful end to which the failed attempt aims—that is, formal imaginative articulation of meaningful and “usable” history. Second, by appealing to tropes like tragic anachrony, such a move tends to minimize the normative failure of an intelligence unable to recognize the presumed self-evidence of what is hoped to be its own historicist competence. Alienation in these terms is always provisional because the end of education is never in doubt. I would suggest, however, that Adams’s isolation and alienation are a function not of a disconnection between his historical occasion and his desire to articulate “in a single artistic construction” the “kaleidoscope of [his] generation,” both taken for granted, but of his cynicism, which rather than a pose is an irreversible after-product of an education that, if justified, is so not by virtue of a self-evident normative teleology but because it pictures the furthest extent, the final limit, of competence forced to confront its own normative expectations. Bové writes that in the Education, Adams “studies science, but learns from it what it does not know. He studies government to show it does not work, or is not allowed to work by the men placed by productive forces to assure its failure.”32 Far from ultimately fitting agents to a functional national teleology, education suggests only that such alignment is impossible, the habit-bound dream of recognizant hubris. Rather than casting Adams’s problem as primarily about the positive content of knowledge, R. P. Blackmur describes it as a problem of the possibility of historical knowledge itself as it reveals its inaptness: “the pupil was left with a terrible and weary apprehension of ignorance.” Thus Blackmur turns to Adams’s interest in thermodynamics, especially in the Education, as integral to understanding Adams’s unconquerable disaffection. Bové describes Adams’s interest in entropy as marking the oppositional emergence of chaos everywhere an attempt to control, organize, or economize force is made.33 Anticipating Bové, Blackmur summarizes the second law of thermodynamics as Adams himself might make use of it—“the law which sees infinite energy becoming infinitely unavailable”34—and finds it central to what he sees as Adams’s primary

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observation that the “failure of education was the failure of the unity which it grasped.” What makes Adams appealing to Blackmur is his attempt not merely to give experience form, to organize it, but to remain responsible to it, to find “through imagination . . . the meaning or source of unity aside from the experience which it unites.”35 Refusing the positivism that would take significant unity for granted and reduce Adams’s concern with failure to simple nostalgia, however, Blackmur nonetheless suppresses Adams’s conclusions about discontinuity and remains tied to a normative reading of the Education, a work in which failure is far more indeterminate than provisional. Blackmur writes that through Adams’s “conversion of metaphysics into a branch of physics, history becomes the science of human degradation,” and he suggests that failure is “integral to [the] attempt” to imagine the meaning and source of historical unity, but, rehearsing the fundamental move we see in Glass, for example, he ultimately finds the trope of thermodynamic decay to focus a sympathetically reciprocal relationship between imagination and unity; thought offers Blackmur’s Adams a “loophole,” an “escape from the barriers of physics and biology.” Blackmur’s effort here is courageous: the “escape” offered by thought is only its struggle against human powerlessness, as in Blackmur’s explanation that “thought is man’s struggle with the helplessness of the enfeebled will,” or in his earlier claim that Adams accepts “ignorance as the humbled form of knowledge.”36 But he can say this only by reading Adams’s interregnal impasse through a dialectical lens that redeems failure—and that Adams categorically rejects. He claims that Adams holds that imagination confers unity—”a discontinuous multiplicity cannot be transformed into unity except by emotional vision”37—but while Adams suggests as much when he writes in the Education that unity is a result of vision (398), Adams in fact says this in the context of a larger claim that such vision fails in moments of transition—in other words, the only occasions in which it might be needed. Misconstruing Adams’s interest in entropic decline, Blackmur wants to redeem Adams’s hopelessness as a normative standard (albeit a negative one) by which to measure the ethical value of cultural work. But for Adams, thermodynamic decay is the irreversible counterprinciple to the possibility of useful historical teleology; it is not itself a positive ideal capable of unifying experience. Rather than progressing through failure toward historical meaning by power of a self-evident dialectic of mind and matter, experience defies competence’s expectation of unity precisely by exposing it as such. Adams’s attempt, in Blackmur’s words, to “justify” modern experience38 convinces him not

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of a normative teleology, such as that by which Glass’s intellectual might be able to normalize “radical change” through the anchor of “a useable past,” but that the normative will by which history yields teleological meaning is groundless. A focus on Adams’s failure circumscribed by a positivism that expects self-evidence casts Adams’s concern with the past (notably the twelfth and eighteenth centuries) as an attraction that frames the significance of his work. A normative reading of history, pivoting on the self-evident recognizability of value, thereby functions to vouchsafe an ethic of participatory agency. But this tragic reading of Adams’s failure relies on precisely the kind of teleological assumptions about the world the denial of which runs through the Education and underlies Adams’s cynicism.39 The knowledge that presumably redeems Adams’s failure is precisely the kind of knowledge that Adams rejects: it is the know-how of instrumental competence, inscribed by habit, that claims self-evidence as its justification, not thought facing its own failure to recognize validity. History, if serving for Bové’s Adams to clear the mind, does so by rendering not just the past, but the present, too—indeed, the unity of historicist knowledge itself—useless. Adams is attracted by an ideal of social and cultural participation that his experience does not support, but even if such an ethical modality had been justified at previous moments (most conspicuously in the societies that created Chartres and the U.S. Constitution), the important point of Adams’s interregnal experience is not historical devolution or social degradation so much as intellectual inaccessibility: the residuality of such formations renders their very possibility toxic to the present. At the close of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams characterizes the atavism with which medieval unity appears to modern observers: “If we like, we can go on to study, inch by inch, the slow decline of the art [i.e., of building cathedrals as materially representative of the Scholastic worldview]. The essence of it,—the despotic central idea—was that of organic unity both in the thought and the building.” But Adams’s historical anchor ironically reveals for the modern observer only a “universe” that, with seeming “obstinacy,” has “steadily become more complex and less reducible to a central control” and “has evaded the attempt to impose on it a single will.” Adams’s point of departure, that is, is “thought” that, lacking a “despotic central idea,” is incapable of taking for granted what it grasps. Though we might hope to recover unity from our experience, that hope today is largely unsatisfied: “Some of the mediaeval habit of mind survives, but even that is said to be yielding before the daily evidence

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of increasing and extending complexity.” Adams’s attention here is on neither the “universe” nor “thought” exclusively, but on what he called in the History “habit of mind” increasingly out of step with experience. “All experience, human and divine, assured man in the thirteenth century that the lines of the universe converged”; rather than mistake this for a positivistic claim about “the lines of the universe,” we should see this “assur[ance]”—and indeed the “experience” to which it is pegged—as the product of an ensemble of what Bové called “forms of intelligence, force, order, and consciousness.” In contrast to his Virgin-adoring predecessor, Adams asks about his own modern education-seeking double, “How was he to know that these lines ran in every conceivable and inconceivable direction, and that at least half of them seemed to diverge from any imaginable centre of unity!” Adams’s modern American, who, habit-bound, knows how—and indeed only knows how—to recognize unity, cannot. “The trouble was not in the art or the method or the structure, but in the universe itself which presented different aspects as man moved.”40 This cannot be mistaken for a positivism: Adams’s conclusion, in which he is right to discover a great deal of “trouble,” is that there is no self-evident basis on which to link these “successive forms of intelligence, force, order, and consciousness” through which the “universe” appears. The interregnum establishes not the possibility of an imaginative redemption, but the impossibility of sincere judgment. Toward the end of the Education, Adams claims that education at once arises out of and can go no further than the interregnum: asserting that “The old formulas had failed,” Adams admits that “every man . . . has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. There, whether finished or not, education stopped. The formula, once made, could be but verified.” This sounds a lot like what Adams thinks about how he might teach history at Harvard: “One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.”41 If thinking about history illuminates a desire for uniformity betrayed by the breakdown of “formulas,” it also offers evidence that it is indeed only a desire—a bankrupt one. Among the “possible orbits” that might be “account[ed] . . . for” in such formulas, Adams suggests that one in particular he “sought” was that of “Henry Adams” (472). If the interregnum cripples historicism by insisting on the uselessness of the past to the present, it also defies even as it stokes demand for such an accounting of the “runaway star,” the “jostled” “student,” caught up in it. The education of Henry Adams is cynical because education is possible

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in and only in those occasions when the normative “formulas” on which it is predicated break down. Education’s condition of possibility is in fact its own impossibility. It “stop[s]” where cynicism starts. Asking “troubl[ing]” questions about the meaning and role of history, the Education’s cynical interrogation of education—Adams’s inability to “invent a formula of his own for his universe,” like the coordinating formulas represented in the book by the Virgin and Adams’s own filial forebears—undermines normative expectations about knowledge. Haunted by the promise of a normative competence whose only actuality is obsolescence, education in fact declares its own irrelevance. This cynical mechanism is reflected in the structure of the Education, which proceeds by discontinuities. Conspicuously, the book has two halves, separated by chapter 21, “Twenty Years After.” The first half of the book stages scene after scene of potential participation, wherein a young Henry Adams tries to find the educational path that will best accommodate his prodigious historical heritage to a changing world. The second half, on the other hand, positions Adams as an anxious observer of a world increasingly beyond his control. If the older Adams looks upon a world that no longer holds out the promise of sincere accommodation, his unhappiness is structurally dependant on the younger Adams’s sincere desire for such practical knowledge. Adams begins with the intractability of history, born already too late, but already bearing the burden of the past and its unrealized promise. The first words of the book—“Under the shadow of the Boston State House”—render dubious (or at the very least turbulent) presumptions of participation and enfranchisement. Even at the outset, history neither moves continuously from past to future nor does it offer itself as selfevidently useful: “yet the mere accident of starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so colonial—so troglodytic—as the First Church, the Boston State House, Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long after he had witnessed the solution” (3–4). The “solution” to this “accident” reveals itself 502 pages later to be hardly a solution in any acceptable sense. This first paragraph’s catalog of significant historical attractions, lineages in which his forebears were such a consenting and content part, fails to provide Adams security. The overbearing insistence on particulars in this passage—“on the summit of Beacon Hill,” “the third house below Mount Vernon Place,” on “February 16, 1838,” “christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church

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after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism”—especially at the opening of a story of education, of universalization, instigates a suspicion that these carefully crafted influences (by his family, by Boston, by the nation) will fail to do their job of paving the way for Adams in the world (3). Adams’s heritage is useless in an unresolvable tangle of simultaneity: the eighteenth century, forced to struggle with the twentieth on the twentieth’s terms, fails to be preparatory, and loses out. Education’s teleological promise of competence appears hopeless. Soon after chapter 21’s twenty-year ellipsis—Adams ignores the years between 1871 and 1892, which saw him meet, marry, and suffer the suicide of Marian Hooper and publish most of his major works, including The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), Democracy, An American Novel (1880), John Randolph (1882), a volume in John T. Morse Jr.’s American Statesmen Series, Esther, A Novel (1884), and the nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889–91)—Adams expresses near total confusion about “the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siècle.” Education “had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care for,” and Adams worries that if it is to “try to find out what the mass of mankind did care for, and why,” then the disorder of “chance images stored away . . . in the memory” may render “the task . . . futile.” The failure to understand is decisive for Adams, at once outlining his interregnal occasion and declaring the inscrutability to which Adams is so drawn: “No one seemed very much concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present. Adams disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest in future society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by irritation at finding his life so thin and fruitless” (352– 53). The inextricability of concern and dissatisfaction here is Adams’s ambivalent focus. What begins in the first sentence as worry about an increasingly shallow America becomes in the second a characterization of Adams’s own “dislike,” the anomie of national interregnum reflecting Adams’s failure of sincere judgment. Vital for an understanding of cynicism, his “irritation” can be the only marker of Adams’s engagement; but insofar as his concern with the present has no other identifiable referent than his dissatisfaction with it, it is intimate with the possibility of an unrecognizable something new. This contrasts with the anarchist concern of the first sentence, which we already know is a position that cannot be Adams’s own (Adams writes under the shadow of McKinley’s assassination; surely the assassination of presidents cannot appear to Adams, compelled as he is by the problems of statesmanship and his presidential

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forebears, as an attractive form of political expression). Unlike his own, which arises where normalization breaks down, anarchist dissatisfaction is conceptually supported by a secure normalized vision of an idealized future: a little later on, Adams will fault the doctrines of “amiable” nineteenth-century anarchists like Kropotkin and Reclus, whose criticisms of society are “inherited from the priestly class to which their minds obviously belonged.” Their impoverished beliefs are merely a disguise for either “their innocence” or “a bourgeois’ dream of order and inertia” (407). Their “amiable” dissatisfaction derives from a hollow ideal image of the future that, far from breaking with the “habit of mind” of an unjust present, is manufactured by it.42 But Adams’s concern is grounded in his dissatisfaction with the present’s failure to envision itself and its future. Adams indeed calls himself an anarchist (405), but his brand of ontological anarchism, born in the breakdown of normative recognition and sincerity, has little in common with this narrowly conceived “bourgeois” reactionism. If “anarchist” dissatisfaction depends on the recognizant habits of “what the world had ceased to care for,” Adams has been “kept alive” by his own indeterminate dissatisfaction: “Meanwhile he watched mankind march on, like a train of pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling from one morass to another, and at short intervals, for no reason but temper, falling to butchery, like Cain” (352). This is ostensibly a response to a world revealing itself to be increasingly out of accord with what he will call on the book’s last page “sensitive and timid natures” (505): wars and massacres in Armenia, South Africa, Cuba, and Manchuria, violence that any “impartial judge” thought “not merely unnecessary, but foolish,” combined with the irrational meanderings of domestic American civilization—“society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its tail” [237]—convince Adams that no recognizable principle any longer explains much less directs human movement; “The old formulas had failed” indeed in the revelation of historical discontinuity. Unable to recognize an order that might define the demands made on modern intelligence, Adams is left with only “thin and fruitless” as anchors for individual thought. Adams suggests that the “irritation” of his frustrated search for sincere, intelligent action offers his only guide. As characterizations of his life, “thin” and “fruitless” can only be understood in the context of absent recognizable formulas that might articulate plenitude and fruition, and might therefore serve to

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differentiate normative social contexts from the insentient earthworm’s unthought universe: “Not an act, or an expression, or an image, showed depth of faith or hope” (352). “Meanwhile,” he tells us, “he watched”: the erstwhile promise of education erodes in the face of the unredeemable failure of unrecognizable historical movement. After sixty years of what Adams calls false starts and failed attempts, Adams finds a promise of education only where it fails. Tracing cynicism’s peculiar relationship with normalization, Adams’s text renders education an impossible object.

Negative Dialectic of Education Rendering conspicuous the obligation of new thought, and in so doing rehearsing what Edward Said will call, three-quarters of a century later, “the problem of knowledge, of how we know what we know,”43 Adams begins the book by not taking for granted the path to education. As a child, he claims, Adams had been given all the educational tools anybody might ask for: “he could not refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the usual plea of irresponsibility.” Though he implies that an assertion of responsibility must be the starting point of education, the assertion ultimately challenges the normative assurances he had assumed to be his birthright. “To his life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting party and partner from the moment he was born to the moment he died. Only with that understanding—as a consciously assenting member in full partnership with the society of his age—had his education an interest to himself or to others.” In a preview of his objection to William James, Adams already suggests in the preface that the object of education, at its most general, is to establish “economy” of a young man’s force and energy, “clearing away” the “obstacles” of ignorance and obsolescence—i.e., the “habit” he defined in the History—so that he can attain “mastery” of his native aptitudes (Education, xxx). But if this is a formulation of obligation, Adams quickly enough asserts its worthlessness as methodology, insofar as “clearing away” interrupts the ability to recognize value. “As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise has no moral and little incident.” The “practical value” of his “story of education,” he laments, “remains to the end in doubt” (4), but this normative indeterminacy—the failure in his “never [having] got to the point of

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playing the game at all—“is the only interest in the story.” If there is little utility in this formulation, it is the instrumental logic of recognition that “remains to the end in doubt”; this is education in full flower. Duty to early influences having left him incapable of recognizing relevant knowledge, Adams finds that foreblindness suggests itself as an educational virtue: “Europe and America were too busy with their own affairs to give much attention to his. Accidental education had every chance in its favor, especially because nothing came amiss” (83). If the problem of responsibility reveals that educational “economy” cannot be defined or described beforehand, then a doctrine of “accidental education” presents a way around an impasse by offering a de facto means of examining how “he was a consenting, contracting party and partner” in “his life.”44 But accidental education obviously cannot be a method: “It had but one defect—that of attainment.” Accidental education could not be “a means of pursuing life, but [was] one of the ends attained” (85–86). Always reactive, accidental education announces a knowledge in the wake of failed criteria of the already legitimate. Destabilizing education’s normative promise of competence, the doctrine of accidental education threatens not only the ideal of rational management proper to the social order into which Adams was born. Reacting to the shock of family friend Senator Charles Sumner’s break with the moderate Republicans (and, what is perhaps worse, with the Adamses) during the secession crisis in early 1861, Adams comments that “the profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are the sudden strains that warp the mind.” One of a series of educational jolts occasioned by what would soon erupt in the Civil War, Sumner’s unanticipated break was a “shock” that “opened a chasm in life that never closed.” This “shock” threatens as well the continuity by which to recognize connection between past and present. As he says on the previous page, he himself, unlike Sumner, “had necessarily followed Seward and his own father, Charles Francis Adams; he took for granted that his business was obedience, discipline, and silence” (107); habits like “obedience, discipline, and silence” act to contravene novelty’s threat to recognition. Thus Sumner’s break opens a “chasm” as well in Adams’s ability to recognize himself. Education, which made “an enormous stride” (108) as a result of this rupture, is intimate with novelty’s “shock” to Adams’s “full partnership with the society of his age.” Pursued to its end, the doctrine of accidental education inevitably underwrites the destruction of those structures of accounting by which the new is domesticated and

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recognized to be continuous with past knowledge, of the terms by which one can be a “consenting, contracting party and partner” with one’s life. The “beginning” of education is necessarily a discrediting of the past: “He had to learn—the sooner the better—that his ideas were the reverse of truth” (114). If education is a “clearing away” of “habit,” the student is unable to understand catastrophic, if educational, events. Soon after Sumner’s novel challenge to Adams’s re-cognitive habits, England’s acknowledgment of the belligerency of the Confederacy renders obsolete a worldview to which an alternative was impossible for earlier Adamses to envision. Serving as his father’s personal secretary in England, Adams is aware only of a “dullness of comprehension,” “a sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow” (115). Thus “a sort of irregular education . . . seemed to be the only sort of education the young man was ever to get” (145). Accidental education is “irregular” because it deconstructs the expectation of competence shouldered by normalized habits. In the wake of novelty’s “irregular” counternormative disruption, the evolutionary theory of Lyell and Darwin offers Adams a new hope for education, namely that the exercise of intellectual will may be enough to suture together a universally relevant doctrine. “The ideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere—to some great generalization which would finish one’s clamor to be educated” (224). The emergent social hope Adams here addresses is that evolution might offer a replacement for the increasingly embattled narratives of Christianity and Republicanism. A theory of evolution, that is, would be a theory, too, of continuity, of “natural uniformity” (225), and “unity and uniformity were the whole motive of philosophy” (226). But evolution’s grant of comprehensibility ultimately falls short of its own promise of meaningful order. As shown in the example of Pteraspis—an early vertebrate, a fishlike animal that presented a problem for Adams insofar as it appeared in the fossil record with little trace of morphological ancestry—the theory of evolution proves to Adams none of the self-evident certainty he expects from it. “Nothing suggested sequence” (228); while Adams desires order, a system, evolution does not actually prove anything, but it cannot because it addresses itself to the irruption of novelty. As William Jordy explains, Adams finds science incapable of probing the origins of any new species, so cataclysmic and discontinuous is the event; evolution therefore leaves the hope for a solution to the problem of evolutionary leaps nothing more than a hope.45 “To an American in search of a father, it mattered nothing whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on fins,

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or on feet. . . . Ponder over it as he might, Adams could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles [Lyell] but pure inference. . . . All he could prove was change” (229–30). Adams can prove “only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not uniform; and Selection that did not select . . . it was a form of religious hope; a promise of ultimate perfection” (231).46 Adams concedes that system, order, and unity are forms of faith, like the will to perfection he sought in evolution, but “he felt that he had no Faith.” He can depend only on the unstable discontinuity of novelty’s irregular threat to habits of recognition: “what he valued most was Motion, and . . . what attracted his mind was Change.” The interregnum’s attenuation of self-evidence, having already claimed the erstwhile authority of the “Church” (now “gone”) and “Duty” (now “dim”), extends even to the possibility that intelligence might take the form of “Will” in the name of social perfection (232). Evolution is not ubiquitously legible: Pteraspis and the Ludlow Shale are not alone in challenging uniformitarianism for Adams, as America, too, in deciding for President Grant, overwhelms any normative concept of evolution. “The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant’s own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin” (266). Rather than guaranteeing a cogent instrumentalism, education, this time in the form of the inscriptive will of theoretical narratives like evolution, ends up revealing only a desire for intellectual competence. “Struggling to shape himself to his time” (269), Adams watches the confidence with which he expected to be able easily “to play his excellent hand,” to define what competence consists in, resolve into education’s defiance of his ability to recognize himself. In the Gould gold conspiracy, Adams “feared finding out too much. . . . Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance, and a brief time to seize it” (271–73). The parallel here between social and individual mortality is made with only half his tongue in his cheek; “He himself stared helplessly into the future” (280) as America becomes something, if as yet ineffable, new, something Adams does not know how to represent, but his

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claim that he has very little leeway in translating danger into education (279) is not flip. As with evolution, all one can articulate is the discontinuous fact of change: “The political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970. The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given it up. Grant’s administration marked the avowal. Ninetenths of men’s political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out—to patch—or, in vulgar language, to tinker—the political machine as often as it broke down. . . . Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not guess” (280–81). Bové emphasizes Adams’s understanding that such transitions are not easily thought or described; importantly, Adams does not “succumb to the temptation to account for the dominant in its own terms.” Adams “notes the rise of the economic and of economic thinking as facts not yet understood even by those who create them. . . . Being in America, in modernity, poses the intellectual problem, namely, to find a theory or perspective not itself part of the new order or its time.”47 Thus what Bové defines as intellectual obligation Adams implies is the source of his cynical inability to acknowledge meaning in a normative vocabulary. In education’s inscription of the interregnum’s subversion of historiographic competence—a purely negative delegitimation that resists determination—is a threat to the standards by which normative valuation is possible. The doctrine of accidental education resolves into a doctrine of negative education: “Experience ceased to educate” (284) because, as Bové suggests, experience can no longer be described by re-cognitive habits. Upending the standard of “cash-value,” Adams’s acknowledgment of discontinuity engages the category of normativity, but can anticipate only its failure. “With this result Henry Adams’s education, at his entry into life, stopped, and his life began.” The melancholy chapter 21, “Twenty Years After (1892),” like Sumner’s betrayal of Adams’s expectations, marks another “chasm” in this book that “never closed”: Adams begins the second half of his book without describing his wife’s suicide and his most productive years, claiming that they have no educational value. “The moral is stentorian.  .  .  .  Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his education in 1871, and began to apply it for practical uses, like his neighbors. At the end of twenty years, he found he had finished” (314). It is not exactly clear what he means by “finished” here, but “practical uses” seem to suggest ignoring education’s challenge to normativity, and there are two hundred pages left in the book despite his reference to himself at the end of the chapter as a “dead man” (330). Echoing the language of his 1889

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letter about his mother’s death, Adams’s statement that “life had been cut in halves, and the old half had passed away, education and all, leaving no stock to graft on. . . . He felt nothing in common with the world as it promised to be” (317) is far from a simple apathetic or selfish withdrawal: it figures normative breakdown. Though he is able to reinscribe this failure biographically (by retreating behind “practical uses” and what he has called a “personal matter” [314]), this reinscription really claims little more than its own illegitimacy. Just as the disruptive charge of thought countersigns the doctrine of negative education, so it is also the fundamental intellectual maneuver of Adams’s cynicism. He feels “nothing in common with the world” because he no longer has access to a normative vocabulary to describe the value of experience. Adams reformulates this illegitimacy as an advantage in the next chapter, when the panic of 1893 (and its destabilization of the site of national influence) upsets many people not accustomed to being upset. “If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a lesson than that of being struck on the head by it; and yet he was himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had struck him” (337). In the postwar interregnum’s challenge to recognition is educational opportunity: “Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. . . . Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly old, haggard, and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for at last he had got hold of his world and could finish his education, interrupted for twenty years [that is, while he pursued “personal matter(s)”]. . . . [F]or the first time since 1870, he seemed . . . to feel that something new and curious was about to happen to the world” (338). Just as America ran blindly from Grant’s administration to the Panic of 1893, so Adams blindly did not question the “practical uses” he pursued from 1871 to 1892. But if his “personal” reinscription of experience “interrupt[s]” education, then “being struck on the head” represents a chance to “finish his education”; it names novelty that forces a “clearing away” of habit-bound legitimacy. Adams writes of the “millions” at the Chicago Columbian Exposition who feel “helplessness” in the face of the dizzying force unleashed by the dynamo (just as they are blind to the economic changes wracking America), but they are not “seeking education,” so “to them helplessness seemed natural and normal” (342). “Natural and normal” oppose education insofar as they function as categories that suppress the charge of novelty by looking only for what is already expected; through them the logic of recognition tries to guar-

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antee instrumentalist competence. Education is the subversion of these categories’ legitimizing gravity.48 Being slow to understand a blow to the head draws on a vocabulary that defies the re-cognitive logic of “cash-value.” Novelty is education, but novelty undermines the ability to anticipate experience; education is facing that for which, failing to have been preparatory, education cannot provide an explanation. “If he had known enough to state his problem, his education would have been complete at once” (343). The coincidence of the Panic of 1893, the Chicago World’s Fair, and the decision to rest on the single gold standard offers Adams remarkably cogent evidence of vast changes in America, and of a statist consolidation of capitalism. The nation itself hasn’t known how to state the problem deriving from this transformation, and cannot figure out what has been repeatedly striking it on its head; it awoke in 1893, so Adams claims, to the knowledge that, while it still hasn’t articulated its problem, as a state it has addressed it. The matter was settled at last by the people. For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery. All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass. . . . A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods. (344) Adams plays here with the meaning of “settled.” That something was established is the most one can say; Adams decisively resists, however, any suggestion of a coherent agent of history. “There, education in domestic politics stopped. The rest was question of gear; of running machinery; of economy; and involved no disputed principle.” The statist consolidation of capital “stamped out the life of the class into which Adams was born” (345), and it represents the “form” of society that Adams “liked least, but his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the rebel doctrine of State rights.” Categorically obsolete, Adams claims that the re-cognitive logic of individual agency and desire are irrelevant to education. “Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders of a misdirected

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education” (344–45). The discontinuous transformation represented by state capitalism is cannily characterized by Adams’s own unrecognizable irrelevance. But just as the individual trope of education points toward the epistemological-political trope of the interregnum, so education’s normative threat to the coherence of the individual reflects a threat to the normalizing coherence of historical continuity. Adams makes a disturbing but “serious” discovery watching the confluence of the Boer War, Germany’s construction of a navy, and the Spanish-American War effect “in twenty years  .  .  .  what Adamses had tried for two hundred years in vain” to effect—namely, driving “England into America’s arms”: “For the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible purpose working itself out in history. . . . Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it, for chaos cannot be taught; but he thought he had a personal property by inheritance in this proof of sequence and intelligence in the affairs of man—a property which no one else had right to dispute” (363). Adams’s irony here is almost maudlin: the “possible purpose,” the “law in history” in which “he had a personal property by inheritance” and which he is now “able to discern” is no more than accident. Though Secretary of State and close friend John Hay managed with “harmony” this integration of English and American foreign policy, though he saw the “necessary stages that led to it,” and though “his work set [it] off with artistic skill,” it was “by pure chance” that this work “suddenly” came to Hay. If Adams “could see that the family work of a hundred and fifty years fell at once into the grand perspective of true empire-building,” this narrative certainly was not legitimate or visible as such 150 years earlier. Historical “purpose” and political teleology, grounded in what cannot be proven to be more than concurrence, can be nothing more than the recognized products of habit, but this sabotages the normalizing power of any such continuist law. “History had no use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything must be made to move together” (377–78). Unable to think events historically—locating continuities between, for example, the force exerted by the Cross in medieval metaphysics and the force of the dynamo or atom in fin de siècle physics, to say nothing of those between a diplomatic desire and a political fact separated by 150 years—Adams gives up on the attempt to “reduce all these forces to a common value” other than “their attraction to his own mind” (383). “Life at last managed of its own accord

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to settle itself into a working arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one’s drift, the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with a steady progress oceanwards.” Adams’s ironic pose of resignation masks a complex anxiety. Rational agency is pulled toward a metaphoric attenuation of the desire and ability to understand and control. “The process is possible only for men who have exhausted auto-motion. Adams . . . began to . . . [see] lines of force all about him, where he had always seen lines of will. . . . By this path, the mind stepped into the mechanical theory of the universe before knowing it, and entered a distinct new phase of education” (426–27). Historical discontinuity repeats individual unrecognizability. The problem is one of habit: we know only how to see unity—“Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see” (398)— and what refuses recognition resists vision. “Thought alone was Form. Mind and Unity flourished or perished together.  .  .  .  [T]he only honest alternative to affirming unity was to deny it; and the denial would require a new education. At sixty-five years old a new education promised hardly more than the old” (429–30). Emphasizing Adams’s cynical dilemma, the paratactic connection between the final two sentences syntactically denies any structure of dependence: that a new education is required is structurally equivalent—and causally inscrutable—to that education’s lack of promise. Blackmur’s redemptive hope is certainly figured here, but it has undeniably had the rug pulled out from underneath it. The “student of force” (468) is no longer able to exercise the historical vision and agency of which his forebears believed themselves by right capable. If earlier education “stopped” before a compelling biographical inscription of experience, Adams now claims that education can go no farther than such self-evidence. Competence has no deeper foundation than the habitual ability to recognize the object of desire. Accounting to oneself for oneself is a new form of education, just as looking for “a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it” leads to Adams’s dynamic theory of history, which attempts to imagine the mode in which historical thinking might be valid. It is a phenomenological explanation of how history is experienced, which is where the possibility of knowledge necessarily “stops.” By avoiding the tendency to measure experience in terms of its positivistic self-evidence, the dynamic theory offers a new possibility: “it was profoundly unmoral. . . . If it was not itself education, it pointed out the economies necessary for the education of the new American. There duty stopped.”49 If Adams throughout points to

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critical ruptures before which education stops, we are now in a position to understand, by contrast, that education begins, as does responsibility, in the refusal of recognition as the anchor of history. But Adams’s perverse declaration of responsibility does not erase the promise of normative habits, and Adams follows it with a disturbing codicil: “There, too, life stopped” (501). While in Paris, Adams hears that John Hay has died, the second to die of the triumvirate including also Clarence King and Adams that represents in this book the generation that fell into the gap between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. It was not even the suddenness of the shock, or the sense of the void, that threw Adams into the depths of Hamlet’s Shakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity in its favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile climax in human history; it was only the quiet summons to follow—the assent to dismissal. It was time to go. The three friends had begun life together; and the last of the three had no motive—no attraction—to carry it on after the others had gone. Education had ended for all three, and only beyond some remoter horizon could its values be fixed or renewed. Perhaps some day—say 1938, their centenary50—they might be allowed to return together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder. (504–5) Eschewing the dialectical force of categories like contrast and struggle, Adams reads now in historical change—indeed, in the possibility of historical significance—only an occasion to give up, “only the quiet summons to follow—the assent to dismissal.” As it was for Hamlet, Adams seems able to suggest only that “the rest is silence.” If Adams invests this passage with an ironic superfluity of pathos, the very egregiousness of its description, the suggestion of Adams’s overinvestment in (and overstatement of) the “full flare” of “frivolity” and “vanity,” especially despite their “futil[ity],” marks the failure of experience’s inscription as normative, and hence of the individual’s inscription in history, but it is Adams’s being held in the attractive orbit of the possibility of normative evaluation that underwrites his surrender. “It was time to go,” despite his investments, because these investments, these habits, ultimately did little to fashion what they always promised, namely “a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.” Despite his abiding

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desire, Adams remains unable to historicize experience. Cynicism is the memory of this frustration. Education reveals the normative failure to think oneself into a teleological narrative of history. The discredited possibility of a world he can “regard without a shudder” frames his inability to recognize one. Far from being the redemptive “loophole” that Blackmur envisions, this categorical discord is the ground of cynicism. The cynical irritation that provides Adams his only motivation is the coincidence of ineffable historical incontrovertibility and the normative failure to describe change in a narrative that makes it relevant. This is the dilemma Adams describes in the comparison of the Virgin and the Dynamo at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Discovering the impossibility of self-evidence in the discontinuous simultaneity of the Virgin and the Dynamo (as he did also, in his flawed understanding of evolution, in the revelation of Pteraspis), Adams discovers too the failure of historicist competence: “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist” (385). Education’s obligation to wipe the mind clean, repeating competence’s failure before historical discontinuity, therefore outlines the demands recognition makes on experience. “As history unveiled itself in the new order, man’s mind had behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit its conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that embodied all its notions of the perfect. Man knew it was true because he made it, and he loved it for the same reason” (458). If the logic of recognition administers the suppression of the crisis of the new in habit’s expectation of the “natural and normal,” cynicism’s disruption of this “perfect” circuit offers no prescription for action: “Neither man nor woman ever wanted to quit this Eden of their own invention, and could no more have done it of their own accord than the pearl oyster could quit its shell; but although the oyster might perhaps assimilate or embalm a grain of sand forced into its aperture, it could only perish in face of the cyclonic hurricane or the volcanic upheaval of its bed” (459).51 Thought is coincident with cynicism for Adams, and “education” names the thinking occasioned by the breakdown of competence in the wake of failing normative habits. Attempting to account for himself, Adams finds that knowing endorses its own outmoding and irrelevance; the retreat into loneliness he ironically stages in the Education, therefore, rehearses a more fundamental and complex anxiety. In fact, he seeks neither selfish withdrawal nor apathetic nostalgia. On the contrary, it is precisely his search for a world he “could regard without a shudder” that renders experience so poisonous. Echoing others, I have suggested that

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the Education is not easily categorized as belonging to a readily identifiable genre. While it is usually called an autobiography, it is not this, nor is it solely a novel, history, memoir, or philosophical meditation, even as it comprises elements of all of these at once. Autobiography is built upon a set of generic assumptions: an autobiography is the narrative of a self as it becomes increasingly aware of what—who—it is, charting those events and obstacles that, in hindsight, are essential and definitive. If the Education is the writing of a self, however, it is the record of a consciousness as it becomes increasingly aware of what it is not overlaid on a narrative of the revelation of the uselessness of knowledge. It is conspicuous that Adams subtitles his chapters with dates, rather than with his age, as if attesting to an inability to produce a narrative of his own life, an inability to produce something other than a record of threatening ideas that confront him from an externality defiant of normative competence. In this sense Adams’s reliance on the third person throughout the book and his characteristic use of passive constructions suggest an ironic divestiture of autobiography’s presumption that the self is the origin of coherence. The Education is the “autobiography” only of the increasing persuasiveness of a threat to the very possibility that an individual might inscribe himself relevantly and instrumentally in relation to historical formations. Instead of establishing the ground of coherence, thinking— more than simple recognition—dismantles normalizing interpretive structures. This is the reason the Education is so hard to classify and theorize; it is also the source of its cynicism. Far from a reactionary false consciousness, cynicism in Adams reveals itself in an inability to imagine a correct narrative of human agency. Cynicism is intellect’s knowledge of its own inability to historicize itself as a competent agent.

4  /

Willa Cather’s Illegible Historicism

The Justification of History Read together, two passages from the second section of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House frame the novel’s primary anxiety—and its cynicism. Deceptively entitled “Tom Outland’s Story,” this central section, narrated out of the past by the orphaned student Tom Outland, originally from the Midwest but raised in New Mexico, with whom the novel’s titular professor, the historian Godfrey St. Peter, felt such a deep imaginative bond and whose absence since his death in World War I now seems so irremediable, reveals far more about St. Peter than about Tom, whom no one in the novel seems able to ignore. Relating his discovery in the shadow of a large, blue-hued mesa of “an old irrigation main, unmistakable,  .  .  .  with sluices where the water had been let out into trenches,” scattered with “some pieces of pottery, all of it broken, and arrow-heads, and a very neat, well-finished pick-ax,” Tom describes his realization that “there must have been a colony of pueblo Indians here in ancient times: fixed residents, like the Taos Indians and the Hopis, not wanderers like the Navajos.” He explains the importance of this discovery of permanent (presumably Anasazi) culture to itinerants like him and his partner, Roddy Blake: “To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labor and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.”1 Tom’s description of recognizing a sign of “human labor and care” as a “message” that

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can transform perception, much like the “labor and care” themselves transformed “the soil of an empty country” into “something stirring,” contributes to a potent but disturbing metaphor in this book. Twenty pages later, recounting the reaction of Father Duchene, the missionary priest whom Tom and Roddy bring to inspect the long-abandoned Cliff City they discover in what they come to call the Blue Mesa, Tom again appeals to a transfiguring recognition. Duchene explains (so Tom relates): “Like you, I feel a reverence for this place. Wherever humanity has made the hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot. Your people were cut off here without the influence of example or emulation, with no incentive but some natural yearning for order and security. They built themselves into this mesa and humanized it” (199). The “message” Tom read in the evidence of agriculture now demands “reverence,” and the “human labor and care” of the first passage are now born of a “natural yearning for order and security” that links Tom to an American genesis through uncorrupted “natural” aspirations. But as such it also functions in this novel as a powerful negative principle for St. Peter, whose inability to recognize a lucid “order and security” authorizes the unconquerable indifference with which he is beset as the novel opens. The engine of Tom’s ability to write himself into a coherent historical narrative, recognition normalizes experience; but St. Peter cannot recognize precisely the self-evidence in history that he feels should be his confident prerogative. This normative juxtaposition of recognition and its failure—repeated in the irresolvable transit between the ideal spaces of “Tom Outland’s Story” and the novel’s other two sections, which frame it by narrating St. Peter’s present disappointment in the college town of Hamilton about ten years after Tom’s death in France—indicates St. Peter’s cynical equivocation about the illegibility of historical value. Intimated in his claim about the Cliff City Indians being “fixed residents,” Tom reads legible “order” as the genetic principle of a “secur[e]” American genealogy. When Tom first arrives at St. Peter’s door in Hamilton (sent to study with St. Peter, we later find, by Father Duchene, who had read the professor’s acclaimed multivolume The Spanish Adventurers in North America and directed Tom to some of his articles) in a flashback in the novel’s first section, “The Family,” Tom reacts vituperatively to St. Peter’s wife Lillian’s suggestion that the Cliff City jar he presents her should be put in a museum: “ ‘Museums,’ he said bitterly, ‘they don’t care about our things, they want something that came from Crete or Egypt. I’d break my jars sooner than they should get them. But

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I’d like this one to have a good home, among your nice things’ ” (102).2 The nationalist fantasy of self-evidently pure American origins implicit in this response, whose “our” links the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the continent to modern citizens of the United States (and their wellappointed living rooms), but not to corrupted public institutions of dubious patriotism, is reinforced when Tom describes, in “Tom Outland’s Story,” rebuking Blake for selling the artifacts they dug up from the Cliff City to the German collector Fechtig while Tom was in Washington, D.C. Tom had gone, at Roddy and Duchene’s suggestion, to try to get the federal government interested in their find, but learns that the officers of the Indian Commission and Smithsonian are more interested in their sinecures than the national value of the Blue Mesa relics, which remains for Tom obvious and unimpeachable. Tom judges Blake treasonous: “I admitted I’d hoped we’d be paid for our work, and maybe get a bonus of some kind, for our discovery. ‘But I never thought of selling them, because they weren’t mine to sell—nor yours! They belonged to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from. You’ve gone and sold them to a country that’s got plenty of relics of its own. You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets, like Dreyfus. . . . ‘ I’m not so poor that I have to sell the pots and pans that belonged to my poor grandmothers a thousand years ago” (219). Notably, this nationalist fantasy is severely compromised by the book. The first time he sees the ruins of the Cliff City, and a good time before Tom lashes out here, Father Duchene surmises to Tom and Roddy that the Indians of the Cliff City “were probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving Indian tribe without culture or domestic virtues” long before Columbus (198), and so remain discontinuous with any nationalist accounting of United States history. And just two paragraphs before he responds with such asperity to Lillian’s demure comment, Tom has instructed, in pointing out the “coating of black” on the bottom of the pot: “That’s not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off. It’s soot, from when it was on the cook-fire last—and that was before Columbus landed, I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old pots, with the fire-black on them.” In fact, in keeping with the extent to which his nationalism is discredited, Tom seems later to repent for his hysterical assault on Blake. As St. Peter’s younger daughter, Kathleen, recalls, Tom, who “came often to the house that summer [i.e., when he first arrived in Hamilton], to play with the little girls . . . in the garden, making Hopi villages with sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert

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and the Rio Grande country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend Roddy,” always implied his contrition in the stories he would tell to her and her older sister, Rosamond: “Anyhow, he was noble. He was always noble, noble Roddy!” (102–6). And at the close of his “Story,” Tom Outland confesses the cruelty with which he repudiated Blake: “But the older I grow, the more I understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it” (229).3 And yet, his outburst to Lillian suggests that the nationalist fantasy by which he hopes to inscribe himself into a “real” history has survived his atonement. Tom’s “message” of “order and security” has relatively little to do with the civilization of the Cliff City Indians and quite a bit to do with his desire to recognize a statist history with the power to normalize (not least by nationalizing) his experience. But Tom is not the only one to write over the historical specificity of the Cliff City Indians in the interest of normative teleology. Father Duchene recognizes theirs as a civilized culture, but mostly in the interest of marking Christian culture as the ur-text of civilization. And St. Peter couldn’t care less about the erstwhile inhabitants of the Cliff City, remaining far more attracted to the instrumental potency of Tom’s interest in them.4 In fact, this instrumental interest plays a crucial role in the novel. Though the book offers nothing incontrovertible to suggest that St. Peter shares Tom’s reactionary nationalism, he seems very much to share—or rather to want to share—Tom’s confidence that experience is recognizably normative; but through St. Peter’s attraction to Tom’s easy expectation of self-evident teleology, the novel is unequivocally ironic about the presumption of legibility underlying it. While Tom is guilty of a confident fantasy tying the pre-Columbian past to the U.S. present, St. Peter, through the figure of Tom Outland, is guilty of an unsuccessful fantasy that, aiming to protect an uncompromised past promising self-evident value from his present dissatisfaction with the equivocal illegibility of history, renders him cynically incapable of justifying any desire at all. If Tom assertively overdetermines the existence of the Cliff City residents, making them irreproachable signs of his own Americanness, St. Peter, too, is guilty of an overdetermination—but a failed one—in trying to read in Tom Outland a symbol of self-evident value. This failed fantasy exposes historicism’s imperial re-cognitive expectation. Read through St. Peter’s cynicism, The Professor’s House provides an opportunity to render contentious the confidence at the core of

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historicism. The story of a professor of history who, facing the newly importunate claims of success and his family, finds omnivorous disapproval, withdrawal from most forms of social contact, and immersion in his memories of his late student, Tom Outland, a scholarly edition of whose diary he is preparing for publication, increasingly attractive, The Professor’s House seems on one level to be a narrative of nostalgia. Facing a move into a new house purchased with the prize money for his award-winning History (completed, it is suggested, at least in part because of the intellectual and imaginative kick in the pants provided by Tom’s presence), St. Peter realizes he prefers his recollection of Tom Outland—and his old house, where he wrote his multivolume work and in whose walled garden he and Outland spent so much time together— to the company of his family and colleagues. And after he suggests to Lillian, in a seeming shared admission that their relationship is more bitter memory of sacrifice and scar than present and fresh desire, that it was a mistake to have a family and become “middle-aged”—“We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young”— St. Peter reflects on what he might have hoped to preserve. In casting about for “the particular occasion he would have chosen for a finale,” he discovers “his wife was not in it.” Instead, he sees himself planning and organizing his History (78–79, 89).5 The novel opens on Professor St. Peter unable to enjoy himself, which seems more than simply stubborn given his admission of his relative success in the book’s first chapter: “he had got what he wanted” (19). No longer finding his family and professional life self-evidently valuable, he abandons them in favor of his time with Outland, whose undaunted enthusiasm reminded him of his own early career. “Through Outland’s studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull with use. The boy’s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light” (234). More important than the “transform[ative]” effect on St. Peter of Tom’s “rich germination,” Tom supplied St. Peter with an immediacy missing from the first volumes of his History: If the last four volumes of “The Spanish Adventurers” were more simple and inevitable than those that went before, it was largely because of Outland. When St. Peter first began his work, he realized that his great drawback was the lack of early association, the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west

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country which was the scene of his explorers’ adventures. By the time he had got as far as the third volume, into his house walked a boy who had grown up there, a boy with imagination, with the training and insight resulting from a very curious experience; who had in his pocket the secrets which old trails and stones and watercourses tell only to adolescence. (234–35) Tom’s “early association” offers St. Peter contact with the “order and security” afforded only by self-evident value. The volumes of his History written after Tom’s arrival are therefore “simple and inevitable” because, benefiting from Tom’s unequivocal “experience,” they could be nothing else. But if St. Peter is indifferent to Tom’s nostalgic nationalism, neither is his attraction to Tom simply born of a desire to preserve his own youthful enthusiasm against the compromises of maturity and social participation. Two years after Tom’s graduation from the university (probably during the summer of 1912), St. Peter and Outland travel to the Southwest with a “copy of Fray Garces’ manuscript that St. Peter had made from the original in Spain” and trace his travels: “Tom could take a sentence from Garces’ diary and find the exact spot at which the missionary crossed the Rio Colorado on a certain Sunday in 1775. Given one pueblo, he could always find the route by which the priest had reached the next” (235). What is irretrievably mediated, and therefore dubious, for St. Peter is granted a certainty and reality—like the reality of Lillian’s fire-blackened jar—by Tom’s presence. “It was on that trip that they went to Tom’s Blue Mesa, climbed the ladder of spliced pine-trees to the Cliff City, and up to the Eagle’s Nest [i.e., “a little group of houses stuck up in a high arch”]. There they took Tom’s diary from the stone cupboard where he had sealed it up years ago, before he set out for Washington on his fruitless errand.” The diary figures St. Peter’s crisis; he is outmatched by the task of producing a scholarly edition: It was his plan to give part of this summer [while Lillian is in Europe] to Tom Outland’s diary—to edit and annotate it for publication. The bother was that he must write an introduction. The diary covered only about six months of the boy’s life, a summer he spent on the Blue Mesa, and in it there was almost nothing about Tom himself. To mean anything, it must be prefaced by a sketch of Outland, and some account of his later life and achievements. To write of his scientific work would be comparatively easy. But that

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was not all the story; his was a many-sided mind, though a simple and straightforward personality. (150) St. Peter cannot describe what is important about the diary because Tom’s bestowal of self-evidence articulates nothing so unequivocally as it does St. Peter’s inability to mark such self-evident value. Though St. Peter finds the diary’s stylistic “austerity” “almost beautiful” (238), trying to retrieve Tom from it is as “fruitless” as convincing bureaucrats of patriotic obligation: “There was a minute description of each tool they found, of every piece of cloth and pottery, frequently accompanied by a very suggestive pencil sketch of the object and a surmise as to its use and the kind of life in which it had played a part. . . . The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s emotions.” If St. Peter wants to find the diary, like Tom’s pencil sketches, “suggestive”—in the diary, St. Peter reflects, “one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy”—he remains incapable of describing either Tom’s “imagination” or its “ardour and excitement.” What St. Peter wants from “a sketch of Outland” is to communicate Tom’s expectation of legible, self-evident teleology from experience, but it is precisely this he is incapable of communicating. It is not specifically Tom’s nostalgic nationalism that St. Peter wants, but Tom’s untroubled ability to locate such an identity. St. Peter’s predisposition to recollection, that is, is not really nostalgia; it is an expectation of self-evident value reinscribed by his equivocal inability to recognize it; he no longer knows how to justify his desire. He has always been characterized by decisive tastes, and if Lillian’s disapproval of St. Peter’s conduct with Louie Marsellus, their son-in-law by way of Rosamond, is any indication, St. Peter has little difficulty criticizing (even publicly) what annoys him. Yet, as his disaffection becomes unavoidably obvious, St. Peter finds himself critical of what pleases him, too. “[W]hat he had wanted”—his job, his family, his professional achievements—now fails to satisfy him. Lillian offers an easy explanation of his discontent when she asks, “Is it merely that you know too much, I wonder? Too much to be happy?” But St. Peter refuses this excuse, responding, without exactly challenging her, “It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it again—and I don’t really wish to go back” (142). If Lillian attempts through therapeutic resolve to pathologize St. Peter’s cynicism, St. Peter resists this

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move by displacing knowledge with desire. Professor St. Peter’s indifference in The Professor’s House—often looking a lot like nostalgia—in fact tropes an anxiety about the historicist expectation of legibility. Having everything to do with his instrumental reckoning with the memory of his late student with his teleological nationalism, St. Peter’s backward orientation is handled ironically by the text: he cannot be confident of what Tom has always figured for him. St. Peter himself diagnoses his retreat into his past with Tom as born of his rising conviction that he has lost the ability to read unequivocal significance in his life and career. As he admits to Lillian quite early on, “My forbearance is overstrained, it’s gone flat. That’s what’s the matter with me” (25). It is not that St. Peter wants to withdraw into the past, but that he is no longer confident that his desire is an adequate warrant to participate in the present. If the great event of St. Peter’s life was his association with Tom Outland, who represents the “simple and inevitable” recognition of self-evident value, a keynote of his memory of this relationship is the irrelevance of Tom’s recognition to his own life; like Tom’s errand in Washington, St. Peter finds his own desire “fruitless.” And indeed, faced in the book’s final section with a fatal eventuality for which the book prepares the reader from the very first chapter—namely, St. Peter’s falling asleep before the suffocating coincidence of his study’s old gas stove going out and the window shutting: “If the stove were turned down, and the window left open a little way, a sudden gust of wind would blow the wretched thing out altogether, and a deeply absorbed man might be asphyxiated before he knew it” (16)—St. Peter dismisses responsibility for saving himself in an apocalypse of indifference, to himself as much as to any ostensible reading of history, and is rescued only by the chance appearance of Augusta, the St. Peters’ housekeeper and sometime seamstress. Guilty of overwriting history with a desire he associates with Tom Outland, St. Peter’s demand for recognition renders history illegible. The farthest thing from apathy, the book’s cynicism prevents St. Peter, despite his desire, from taking history for granted.

The Irony of Tom Outland The novel’s critique of nostalgia’s instrumental historicism is grounded in the explicit link drawn between St. Peter’s imagination of “Tom Outland” and his confidence in his own desire. As he reflects toward the end of the book, “St. Peter thought he had fared well with fate. He wouldn’t choose to live his life over—he might not have such good luck

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again. He had had two romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many years, and a second of the mind—of the imagination. Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came Outland and brought him a kind of second youth” (234). If Tom offered St. Peter a “romance . . . of the mind—of the imagination,” the ability to “experience afresh things that had grown dull with use,” which allows him to think his desire is relevant, in doing so he indicates the professor’s emergent ability to question what he has always taken for granted. The arrival of the orphan from New Mexico provides St. Peter a name for a growing malaise even as it marks a decreasingly available renascence; overdetermined when the young man first arrived and overdetermined now as St. Peter looks back, “Tom Outland” is the occasion of St. Peter’s conviction that desire is no longer instrumental, that, though “he had fared well with fate,” experience has again grown “dull.” Tom’s onomatology should not be minimized; if St. Peter reflects that Tom’s name “seemed to suit the boy exactly” (97), its egregious appropriateness to the novel’s imaginative matrix parodies the earnest desire with which St. Peter most insistently invests his presence. Tom Outland does not exist wholly in his own right: unlike the blackened jars in his nationalist fantasy, and unlike the landscape of St. Peter’s Spanish Adventurers after Tom guides him through it, Tom himself lacks indubitability in this novel, is always revisable, seems only to exist as put into use for some purpose. Thus most of the world sees him as the inventor of the famous Outland vacuum “that is revolutionizing aviation” but knows nothing of him himself; Louie Marsellus, a relatively new arrival in Hamilton (an engineer, he initially came to build the power plant but eventually met and married Rosamond), Jewish to boot,6 who has become quite rich as a result of Tom’s leaving the rights to his invention to Rosamond (who, Louie admits, “is virtually his [Tom’s] widow” [30]), tries to parlay respect for Tom’s memory (in what by all appearances seems like good taste) into standing in the family and town; Kathleen and her husband, Scott McGregor, a newspaperman, use him to measure the transgressions against Tom’s legacy of Louie and Rosamond, whom they understand to be “ruined” by money (71); Lillian uses him to mark St. Peter’s betrayal; Robert Crane, the professor of physics with whom Tom worked on the gas for the patented vacuum, and his wife use him to measure their abuse at the hands of Marsellus, from whom they have received nothing of what they think they deserve in remuneration for the aid given to Tom; and St. Peter uses him to situate his disappointments. As the reader is made aware of him in the novel’s first section,

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Tom exists only as taken up, an overdetermination that St. Peter reads fairly selfishly, as Tom’s having fallen into hands other than St. Peter’s own. This degradation is emphasized fairly early on, when Sir Edgar Spilling, an English historian of Spain who has come to Hamilton to consult the professor’s papers and is dining with the St. Peters, admits that, having served as an airman in the war, he is quite familiar with the Outland vacuum, but knows nothing of the man, and is surprised by the “extraordinary” coincidence. The signifier “Outland” plays a forceful role in this scene, at a point in the novel by which the reader does not yet know who Tom is. At dinner, after inviting Spilling to see the summer house they are building a half hour out of town on the shore of Lake Michigan, Marsellus turns with dramatic effect to Rosamond and intones, “No, Rosamond, I won’t keep our little secret any longer. It will please your father, as well as your mother. We will call our place ‘Outland,’ Sir Edgar” (29). Before this point, with barely a tenth of the novel behind us, Tom Outland has been mentioned only obliquely, in scenes of St. Peter’s recollections. The first instance is in the context of the walled garden: “And it was there he and Tom Outland used to sit and talk half through the warm, soft nights.” If “Tom Outland” lacks a secure referent here, we are obviously asked to think him significant. The next sentence heralds a disturbing transition: “On this September morning, however, St. Peter knew that he could not evade the unpleasant effects of change by tarrying among his autumn flowers. He must plunge in like a man, and get used to the feeling that under his workroom there was a dead, empty house” (7). The “this” of the second passage and the “there” of the first highlight each other, a transit supplemented by “the unpleasant effects of change.” The displacement of “there” recalls past satisfaction and companionship, whereas the immediacy of “this” indicates a lonely, wanting present. “Outland” in its first mention suggests a better, but departed, time. The second reference to Outland comes on the heels of St. Peter’s reflecting on his past confidence in getting “what he wanted. . . . A man can do anything if he wishes to enough.” St. Peter considers that “Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He had been able to measure it, roughly, just once, in his student Tom Outland,—and he had foretold” (19–20). Here we learn that Tom was St. Peter’s student but still get very little positive information about him. Again, the sign “Outland” is associated with a better but inaccessible

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past, and again St. Peter’s thought of him insists on distance; desire’s articulation with satisfied achievement is identified not with himself, but with Tom. By the time of the St. Peters’ dinner party with Spilling, the allusions to Tom are vague but suggestive. After Marsellus divulges the “secret” of the house, “he dropped the announcement and drew back. His motherin-law rose to it—Spilling could scarcely be expected to understand” (29). But can the reader? Even the information provided about Outland’s invention afterwards, in Louie’s gracious attempt to explain to Spilling what he’s talking about, which admittedly offers Spilling some guidance, fails to provide the reader with the ability to understand Tom’s real importance in this story; we will have to wait quite a while for that. The novel allows the signifier “Tom Outland” to circulate for an awfully long time while it accrues value, suggesting only that he is important but without providing any explanation of that importance. This suggests the great affective value “he” has for so many of the novel’s characters, and especially for St. Peter. The overdetermination of Tom Outland repeatedly offers St. Peter an opportunity not merely to compare the happiness he associates with Tom’s past presence with the anomie he now experiences, but more pointedly to measure how other people’s memories threaten the imaginative preserve where he maintains “Tom Outland.” And indeed, the Marselluses’ construction of their summer house brutalizes St. Peter’s image of Tom. As St. Peter argues to his wife: “I admit that I can’t bear it when he [Marsellus] talks about Outland as his affair. (I mean Tom, of course, and not their confounded place!) This calling it after him passes my comprehension. And Rosamond’s standing for it! It’s brazen impudence” (36). He perceives a threat to the legitimacy of his Tom Outland. Similarly, St. Peter rejects Rosamond’s offer of a stipend derived from the substantial income from Tom’s patent because that money “would somehow damage my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything else. And that would be a great loss to me. . . . My friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue” (50). Even if he tries to avoid it, St. Peter recognizes in the proliferation of claims on Outland—by Louie, Lillian, his daughters, Dr. and Mrs. Crane, the university, and the rest of the world, to say nothing of his own not insignificant ones—that “Tom Outland” is not self-evident: as John Hilgart has noted, Tom is instead “the object of disputes.  .  .  .  A vacuum, money, and a house: these are

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the forms Tom Outland takes in the novel’s first book.”7 “Tom Outland” is available fundamentally as a signifier, but it is one whose referent St. Peter can no longer take for granted as unequivocal. “Tom Outland” exists to the text only in the context of a thick mediation. The record we have of Tom’s speech—namely, St. Peter’s recollection of Tom’s arrival in Hamilton in chapter 10 of section 1, “The Family,” and all of section 2, “Tom Outland’s Story”—comes to the reader only from some remove, seeming ancillary to the use to which St. Peter puts him. St. Peter’s thirteen-page-long memory of Tom’s initial appearance, an idyll of vitality, freshness, and enthusiasm, is initiated by Scott’s remark, following a lunch for visiting engineers hosted by Marsellus: “We had poor Tom served up again. It was all right, of course—the scientific men were interested, didn’t know much about him. Louie called on me for personal recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn’t express myself very well. I’m not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be talking uphill.” Scott’s fears about his linguistic inadequacy contrast with what we learn of Tom’s “manly, mature voice—low, calm, experienced, very different from the thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus,” a voice that is, above all, “confident.” And yet, for all the substantiality of Tom’s voice, St. Peter’s difficulty in writing a sketch of Outland for his scholarly introduction suggests that the diary does not transparently offer access to anything securely legible. Scott concludes by admitting, “You know, Tom isn’t very real to me any more. Sometimes I think he was just a—a glittering idea” (94). Disturbed by the implication of Scott’s remark, St. Peter ascends to his “crypt”—the attic study of the old house, which threatens at the end of the novel to look a lot more like an actual crypt—and dutifully “began recalling as clearly and definitely as he could” his first meeting with Tom. St. Peter’s picture of Tom, too, might be losing definition, and he is forced to contend with the possibility that Tom may in fact never have been more than “a glittering idea.” “Sitting thus in his study, long afterward” (107), St. Peter’s melancholy marks his distance from the self-evidence he seeks from that “idea.” Scott’s “Outland, outlandish!” (33), uttered as he and Kathleen leave the dinner party at which Louie reveals the name of the Marselluses’ new estate, if on the surface indignant about what he—like St. Peter—regards as Marsellus’s garish seizure of Outland’s memory and invention, about the ubiquitous license with which Tom’s memory is everywhere handled, also implies that Outland’s name itself has indeed been taken too far, by St. Peter perhaps most of all in expecting

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the imaginative “order and security” he took for granted in Tom to be anything other than the overdetermined sign of his own desire. Thus Tom Outland is not the positivistic alternative St. Peter wants him to be. In the chapter following his first sustained recollection of Tom, St. Peter suggests to Kathleen that Tom always carried with him “something in his voice, in his eyes,” that set him apart “from the other college boys. . . . One seemed to catch glimpses of an unusual background behind his shoulders when he came into the room” (112). The remark is framed on one side by St. Peter’s admission to Kathleen that “I almost never see anyone who remembers that side of Tom anymore” (an admission that probably indicates some of St. Peter’s dismay with Lillian’s jealous maintenance of distance from Outland’s memory and Rosamond’s remunerative faithlessness to it) and on the other by Kathleen’s plaintive response, “Yes, and now he’s all turned out chemicals and dollars and cents, hasn’t he?” If St. Peter laments the revision to which Tom’s memory is now vulnerable, he also seems fairly close to admitting that the signifier “Tom Outland” does not really exist at all outside this overdetermination. Cather of course famously spoke of Tom’s structural effect on the novel in a letter of December 1938. Describing The Professor’s House, Cather wrote of her attempt at “two experiments in form.” The first, “often used by the early French and Spanish novelists,” was “that of inserting the Nouvelle into the Roman,” a justification of the role of “Tom Outland’s Story” in the novel. The second experiment, more subtle and profound, is often seen in Dutch paintings. “In many of them the scene presented was a living-room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers. But in most of the interiors, whether drawing room or kitchen, there was a square window, open, through which one saw the masts of ships, or a stretch of gray sea. The feeling of the sea that one got through those square windows was remarkable.” Thus, in Cather’s own book, “I tried to make Professor St. Peter’s house rather overcrowded and stuffy with new things; American proprieties, clothes, furs, petty ambitions, quivering jealousies—until one got rather stifled. Then I wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa.” The open window of Tom Outland and his “Story” would put a “stifled” life in relief.8 The Professor’s House plays with this metaphor, not least by introducing Tom and his relics in the context of the “nice things” in the St. Peters’ living room. But the description of St. Peter’s stifling study on “the third floor” of the old house is eye-catching:

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The low ceiling sloped down on three sides, the slant being interrupted on the east by a single square window, swinging outward on hinges and held ajar by a hook in the sill. This was the sole opening for light and air. Walls and ceiling alike were covered with a yellow paper which had once been very ugly, but had faded into inoffensive neutrality. The matting on the floor was worn and scratchy. Against the wall stood an old walnut table, with one leaf up, holding piles of orderly papers. Before it was a cane-backed office chair that turned on a screw. This dark den had for many years been the Professor’s study. (7–8) Unfortunate though it might be, “There was one fine thing about this room that had been the scene of so many defeats and triumphs. From the window he could see, far away, just on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy smear—Lake Michigan. . . . Whenever he was tired and dull, when the white pages before him remained blank or were full of scratched out sentences, then he left his desk, took the train to a little station twelve miles away, and spent a day on the lake.” Remembering his childhood spent near the lake, he recalls that “it was like an open door that nobody could shut” and “You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free” (20). But its very conspicuousness belies by destabilizing the apparent self-evidence of Cather’s opposition between freedom and constriction. If Tom appears to function as an “open window” to “let in fresh air” to St. Peter’s “overcrowded and stuffy” room—the passage about the window’s view on the lake immediately follows the passage about Tom foretelling achievement, linking Tom to the window—then, at least for St. Peter, this “feeling of the sea,” this apprehension of something uncontained by the restricted universe of individual lives, lacks any positivistic existence at all. That he makes these admissions only a few pages after praising his study’s gift of “isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life” (16), and after speaking of the “perilous journey down through the human house” from which the study shields him (18), suggests that St. Peter’s emancipatory window, like Tom, operates deconstructively, embodying a normative ideal only in insisting on its unavailability; it is, after all, the literal, actual window that almost kills him. The role of “Tom Outland” suggests that St. Peter is in fact incapable of imagining a normative emancipation.9 The second, central section of the novel, the more fundamental window, heightens the destabilizing effect of Cather’s “experiment in form.” Sarah Wilson has written of the indeterminate relationship of “Tom

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Outland’s Story” to the rest of the book: The Professor’s House “stops short of fully incorporating [Tom’s] story into the narrative.” As she explains, “ ‘Tom Outland’s Story’ stands apart: it receives little in the way of introduction or conclusion; it is a first-person narration, unlike the third-person narration in the rest of the novel; and its diction is simple and direct, unlike the more complex and fussy sentences of the surrounding portions.” Wilson also points out that though, “After the first day, when he had walked into the garden and introduced himself, Tom never took up the story of his own life again, either with the professor or Mrs. St. Peter” (106), what “little” we do get by way of introduction to “Tom Outland’s Story” is a brief paragraph in which we learn that, during one of the many summer evenings shared by the professor and Tom, “Tom at last told the story he had always kept back,”10 suggesting that he in fact did take up “the story of his own life again.” These “formal rifts,” in Wilson’s words, “enact a kind of decontextualization”11 that renders dubious Tom’s status. Indeed, several cues in the train of Tom’s story itself render him even more conspicuous. First, Tom repeats to the letter (or at least in quotation marks), Father Duchene’s report on the Cliff City, a long speech that would be difficult to repeat verbatim, especially after several years. Second, Tom’s description of his excruciating experiences in Washington, D.C., have an absurd cast to them—his waiting to see the Indian commissioner and the director of the Smithsonian, peppered with visits to his congressman to get letters of introduction, a period of twenty-two days, worthy of Kafka, that ends with Tom’s taking the director’s secretary out to a lunch whose ineffectualness is matched only by its expense; the benign intervention of the remarkably named Virginia Ward from Virginia, who takes on Tom as her ward; the exceptionally petty Bixbys, from whom Tom rents a room. Third, Tom’s claim that, after scolding Roddy for selling the relics, he “went to sleep that night hoping I would never awaken” (224) suspiciously foreshadows St. Peter’s own frustrated demise. Finally, Tom’s admission that, as a result of reading Virgil that summer on the mesa, “When I look at the Aeneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage—behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring” (228) is strikingly suggestive of St. Peter’s description to Kathleen of Tom’s “unusual background.” If St. Peter takes Tom for granted as the representation of a kind of alternative to or escape from his dissatisfaction—his feelings of isolation,

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his sense of the materialism of others, the social decline he sees in evidence around him, his experience of familial letdowns—the book demands that Tom in fact not be taken for granted, that his function in the text be held in contention. The constructedness of Tom—Tom’s existence as a locus or register of St. Peter’s imagination more than as a positive entity in his own right—overturns the nostalgic fantasy in which St. Peter seems to position him, where he guarantees the self-evidence of value. If giving voice to Tom’s nativist nationalism is the price St. Peter pays for this fantasy of legibility, the text, by insisting on the irony of Tom Outland, refuses it. Destabilizing the fantasy of legibility with which St. Peter, state-historian of the colonization of America, handles Tom Outland, state-historian of nativist nationalism, the text renders dubious the possibility of recognizing the meaning of American history.

A Historicism of Withdrawal When Tom and Roddy have their final argument on the mesa, Tom insists that his indignation is justified, even as it finds its source in a forceful nationalism that unjustifiably inscribes the Indians of the mesa into a history of modern U.S. civilization by marking them as protoAmericans. Allowing him to compare Roddy to Dreyfus, this nationalism tropes the persuasive nativism of Cather’s United States.12 But if Tom’s nationalist resentment in this final scene with Roddy is severe, it is thoroughly conditioned by Tom’s treading a landscape contained almost exclusively within St. Peter’s imagination. Thus, like everything having to do with Tom in this novel, Tom’s nationalism needs to be approached not as an ideological possibility in its own regard, an objective fact like the pleasure Lillian takes in her sons-in-law or the bitterness of Mrs. Crane’s claim to some of the Outland fortune, but only as part of the complex constellation of St. Peter’s imagination. St. Peter links Tom’s nationalism to his interpretation of Tom’s vivid description of the night he returned to the mesa after his argument with Roddy: “I remember these things because, in a sense, that was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all—the first night that all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one” (226–27).13

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Tom’s nationalism is significant in the book—and for St. Peter— primarily as a symptom of the integration and systematicity Tom identifies here. His Americanism is so compelling to St. Peter because it manifests a normative coordination that grounds an ability to recognize experience “as a whole.” Tom feels “possessed” by a “process,” a teleological movement that underwrites “happiness” in proportion to which it underwrites his conviction that he knows where he is “leading,” because to him it is self-evident. Notably, this is a movement much more significant than the despairing teleology St. Peter identifies in his inability to justify his own desire. Tom’s feeling at the end of “Tom Outland’s Story,” after he returns to the mesa in penance for sending Roddy away, that he “had found everything, instead of having lost everything” (227) undergoes an irreversible cynical translation into the first sentence of the novel’s third section, “The Professor”: “All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance” (233). St. Peter interprets Tom’s “possession” through the historicist logic of recognition, wherein a historical narrative inscribes evidence as signifying the structures underlying a whole process. St. Peter’s inability to recognize such a “whole” in his own experience, which is “leading” him nowhere he can recognize, but away from something he took for granted, is precisely what makes him so receptive to Tom’s account of “possession.” The “excitement of my first discovery,” of simply (and catachrestically) recognizing evidence of American endeavor, “pales” in comparison to this deeper (and more egregiously catachrestic) recognition that it is in fact a “message” directed at him, that his recognizant present is redeemed in its continuity with that recognized past, a “discovery” that present and past recognize each other as part of a “whole” “process” in which his recognition plays such a decisive part. If Tom is able to admit that “something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify,” St. Peter can “co-ordinate” only by marking the illegibility of history. Tom is so compelling to St. Peter because his historicism is; by reading the past in terms of the present, Tom teleologically anchors the necessity of his own desire—precisely what St. Peter now finds himself incapable of doing.14 Tom’s discovery on the mesa of an ability to “co-ordinate and simplify” repeats for St. Peter Tom’s recognition of the original inhabitants’ “humaniz[ing]” “yearning for order and security.” Tom himself becomes for St. Peter the complement of Tom’s rendering of the mesa’s pre-Columbian residents: “secur[ely]” cut off from the corruptions of modern America—the “American proprieties, clothes, furs, petty

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ambitions, quivering jealousies” that “stifle” St. Peter—they signify, in St. Peter’s imagination of Tom, St. Peter’s historicist desire to recognize self-evidence. Initially serving an end for the professor—Tom is so attractive because in supplying the “early association” missing from St. Peter’s research, the legible immediacy of the Southwest missing from his work on the Spanish adventurers, he allowed St. Peter to discover again the “morning brightness of the world” that was then “wearing off for him” and “experience afresh things that had grown dull with use,” so that after Tom’s arrival, writing the History became “more simple and inevitable”—Tom in fact figures self-evident value. Tom’s “imagination,” with the access it grants to “the secrets which old trails and stones and water-courses tell only to adolescence,” is the machine that lays bare the originary “secrets” of America’s history; there could be no question that St. Peter’s work would be “simple and inevitable” after Tom’s arrival. St. Peter’s appeal to inevitability indicates how The Professor’s House figures self-evidence as design: in Tom’s desire for an American origin, manifested in the transfiguring power of a legible “natural yearning for order and security,” and in St. Peter’s desire for inexorability, manifested in the idealized figure of “Tom Outland,” which, albeit negatively, marks the indisputability of recognized value. In her preface to a volume of Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories (probably as well known—and cited—as her letter about The Professor’s House), Cather writes that “design” is the essential element in discerning the meaning of a story: “The design [of Jewett’s stories] is, indeed, so happy, so right, that it seems inevitable; the design is the story, and the story is the design.” Design grants inevitability because it is the agency of writing’s “inherent, individual beauty,” it is the medium through which the artist “giv[es] himself absolutely to his material.”15 Design, therefore, expresses—by objectifying, being the shape of—what is necessary and sufficient; it is the patent unequivocality of meaning. The Professor’s House pays a great deal of attention to design, and the novel’s two most explicit appeals to design are linked. The first is St. Peter’s epiphany, while sailing from Marseilles to Algeciras, where he will begin his research on the Spanish explorers, which reveals the structure that his History would—indeed, must—have: On the voyage everything seemed to feed the plan of the work that was forming in St. Peter’s mind; the skipper, the old Catalan second mate, the sea itself. One day stood out above the others. All day long they were skirting the south coast of Spain; from the rose of dawn to the gold of sunset the ranges of the Sierra Nevadas towered

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on their right, snow peak after snow peak, high beyond the flight of fancy, gleaming like crystal and topaz. St. Peter lay looking up at them from a little boat riding low in the purple water, and the design of his book unfolded in the air above him, just as definitely as the mountain ranges themselves. And the design was sound. He had accepted it as inevitable, had never meddled with it, and it had seen him through. (89) This passage rehearses the language in which Tom will describe to St. Peter “the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all.  .  .  .  the first time I ever saw it as a whole.” Just as, for Tom, “It all came together in my understanding,” so St. Peter’s book “unfold[s]” before him, “definite” and “sound.” And if Tom’s “process” allows him to “co-ordinate and simplify,” so St. Peter’s book, after this epiphany, but even more so after Tom arrives, is “simple and inevitable.”16 The second key site of design in the book is the Cliff City, evinced both in Tom’s original experience of it and in Father Duchene’s explanation of its unusual attraction. Tom describes his initial reaction to St. Peter: “I had been to Acoma and the Hopi villages, but I’d never seen a tower like that one. It seemed to me to mark a difference. I felt that only a strong and aspiring people would have built it, and a people with a feeling for design” (182). Duchene reiterates Tom’s sentiment in an account which he ends by tying design to his assertion about a “natural yearning for order and security”: I am inclined to think that your tribe were a superior people. Perhaps they were not so when they first came upon this mesa, but in an orderly and secure life they developed considerably the arts of peace. There is evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than food and shelter. They had an appreciation of comfort, and went even further than that. Their life, compared to that of our roving Navajos, must have been quite complex. There is unquestionably a distinct feeling for design in what you call the Cliff City. Buildings are not grouped like that by pure accident,. . . . I see them here, isolated, cut off from other tribes, working out their destiny, making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man. (198–99) Here, “design” names precisely what Tom ten pages earlier calls the “message” he reads in the trace of agriculture: it is the self-evidence of intelligence and purpose, of civilization—value, in the keywords of this

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text, that is “simple,” “inevitable,” and “definite.” While St. Peter emphasizes design’s indubitability and unequivocality and Tom and Duchene emphasize design’s marking the “difference” inscribed by “human” “aspiration,” both St. Peter’s History and the Cliff City evince what this book names “order,” something other than “accident,” than the “chance” that has ruled St. Peter’s life.17 Design is the self-evidence of value. As such, design operates as a normative principle. As Tom put it, design makes itself felt in seeing a process or arrangement “as a whole.” In thinking back over his cramped office’s role in the fifteen-year history of his History, St. Peter reflects: “But the notes and the records and the ideas always came back to this room. It was here they were digested and sorted, and woven into their proper place in his history” (16). Design reveals the “proper place,” just as his study in the old house is St. Peter’s proper place: as he admits to Scott McGregor, he “didn’t belong” in the new house (247). Similarly, Tom says of the Cliff City that “it all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition.  .  .  .  It was more like sculpture than anything else” (179–80). In St. Peter’s “proper place” and Tom’s “composition,” design normalizes by producing legible coherence.18 The vocabulary of Cather’s thoughts about design in Jewett’s fiction is so similar to that of Tom’s experience of the Cliff City and St. Peter’s recollection of writing his History as to suggest that for St. Peter Tom’s experience of the Cliff City serves as the very avatar of design, the principle of value’s self-evident inevitability. Tom articulated his relationship to the Cliff City and its “relics” as one of obligation. Tom describes his experience on the mesa as “a religious emotion,” which he links to “devotion” and the “filial piety in the Latin poets,” establishing a firm teleology as “inevitable” as St. Peter’s personal history now appears accidental. When he left for Washington, he explains to St. Peter, he had tried to indemnify himself from the charge of abandoning the mesa by convincing himself he would be serving its interests: “When I saw it again, I told myself, I would have done my duty by it; I would bring back with me men who would understand it, who appreciate it and dig out all its secrets” (202). In the figure of Tom, design can clarify duty and recover the self-evidence of right practices. Incoherent nationalism though the ideological foundation of this claim of responsibility may be, it comes very easily to Tom and proves extraordinarily difficult for St. Peter, who now finds himself increasingly indifferent, incapable of precisely this articulation of obligation. Thus the ideal perfection of “Tom Outland,” along with its synecdoche, the epistemological and ethical legibility of the mesa, stands in a structural opposition to St. Peter’s

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late failure to recognize self-evidence in history. St. Peter’s disenchanted knowledge is dysfunctional but persistent: it insists precisely on the absence of the unequivocality he associates with Tom Outland. If design names for Tom the inevitability granted by self-evidence, it marks, in St. Peter’s appropriation of Tom’s memory, a catachrestic self-evidence whose only relevance to his own experience is its notable absence. St. Peter’s thinking about design lays bare the reactionary intellectual machinery by which conspicuousness is overwritten by perspicuousness.

The Overdetermination of Expectation In the figure of Tom Outland, St. Peter does not envision a real past to which he hopes, albeit imaginatively, to return, and the reinscription of Tom in his fantasy of recognition always insists on Tom’s inaccessibility. As he tells Lillian in response to her asking whether he regrets spending as they did the money he received with the Oxford prize for his History, and whether he would have preferred something else besides the new house that occasions so much disaffection; “Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have brought back the fun I had writing my history, you’d never have got your house. But one couldn’t get that for twenty thousand dollars. The great pleasures don’t come so cheap. There is nothing else, thank you” (23). When St. Peter returns to the Blue Mesa with Tom, though Tom is able to “take a sentence from Garces’ diary and find the exact spot at which the missionary crossed the Rio Colorado on a certain Sunday in 1775,” and, “Given one pueblo, he could always find the route by which the priest had reached the next,” these achievements are solely Tom’s, and as such they belong to St. Peter’s idealization of Tom, not to any nostalgic fancy of his own. Thus when he turns to edit Tom’s diary for publication, St. Peter finds none of the self-evidence he associates with Tom. By using design as a trope to link himself to his revision of Tom, St. Peter attempts to overwrite history according to an expectation of legibility that would, on the contrary, find in the past a reflection of present desire. Though they go together to “Tom’s Blue Mesa” and “took Tom’s diary from the stone cupboard where he had sealed it up years ago, before he set out for Washington on his fruitless errand,” St. Peter conspicuously does not experience the feeling of “possession” that Tom did (marked not least by Tom’s repetition of possessives); indeed, the narrative ties the diary, which stands as the sole material mark of Tom’s wonder, to Tom’s “fruitless errand,” to the manifest failure of Tom’s nostalgic nationalism, so compelling for Tom, to convince anyone.

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St. Peter’s attempt to link himself to Tom through self-evident design, too, seems “fruitless.” St. Peter’s consciousness of loss, administered by the concept of design and its dependant, the legitimacy of self-evidence, is represented by the lost possibility of achievement. Early in the book, reflecting on the steady dependability of Augusta, whose attic workroom is also St. Peter’s attic study, St. Peter admits—he is here thinking especially of her dress forms that were his constant companions as he worked—“How much she reminded him of, to be sure!” The scenes to which he returns are of prospective accomplishment: “the days when his daughters were little girls” promise an extended family, and his memories of France, Spain, the Southwest, and “Old Mexico” promise his History and professional success. “It was in those years that he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it and the difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind  .  .  .  when he had the courage to say to himself: ‘I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing!’ ” (16). Augusta recalls for him the uncorrupted productive futurity of desire. But his family and his scholarship converge in the shadow of Tom: if St. Peter envisions here the unmitigated creativity of his expectations, the figure of Tom Outland tacitly names his desire to secure and hold on to that creativity. In fact, like the juxtaposition of the “overcrowded and stuffy” interior of St. Peter’s house in sections 1 and 3 and the open “window” that “let in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa” in “Tom Outland’s Story,” St. Peter’s early meditation—one of Tom’s first appearances in the text—that Tom completes a circuit between desire and achievement rehearses St. Peter’s fantasy, invested in the figure of Tom, about self-evidence: just as “Tom Outland,” already a fantasy essentially under the imaginative control of St. Peter, writes himself into a pure American identity through his fantasy of self-evident national origins, so St. Peter imagines that Tom is capable of such self-inscription because he can take for granted the path from desire to its object. If Tom had merely to desire in order to recognize the object of that desire, St. Peter finds desire’s instrumentality and justification to be no longer inevitable. Responding to Rosamond’s offer to build him a study at the newly constructed “Outland,” St. Peter responds, “It’s most awfully nice of you to think of it. But keep it an idea—it’s better so. Lots of things are” (47). St. Peter’s uncertainty about the present value of Tom Outland is a reminder of the degradation of the self-evident circuit of Tom’s potent desire. The book locates in St. Peter’s thinking about Tom not a positivistic guarantee, but a desire for

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one that cannot justify the sincerity it demands. When Lillian cannily questions why he won’t go with the family to Europe on Louie’s dime—“I wonder what it is that makes you draw away from your family. Or who it is”—St. Peter concedes, “It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it again—and I don’t really wish to go back” (141–42), a claim buttressed later when he admits that “he now wanted to run away from everything he had intensely cared for” (251). St. Peter no longer has confidence in desire’s ability, which he’d like to take for granted, to map one’s own achievements. Kathleen’s regret about Tom (really a criticism of Rosamond and Louie) that “now he’s all turned out chemicals and dollars and cents, hasn’t he?” leaves St. Peter standing “motionless, as if he were listening intently, or trying to fasten upon some fugitive idea” (113) because it illuminates the demonstrable disruption of the productive desire that “Tom Outland” names: for Tom, marker of self-evidence, there simply are no fugitive ideas because ideas are as accessible as they are transpicuous. Outside of this imaginative preserve, achievements always fail to answer desires: Outland’s experiments result in a commercial patent and an ostentatious house; St. Peter’s scholarship issues in another house that alienates him before he can inhabit it; Professor Crane’s researches produce a bitter invalid with an anti-Semitic spouse; and the university itself, platform of scientific research, suffers from a crass, commercialist myopia.19 Desire—which in St. Peter’s Tom operates as the very principle of legibility—is no longer instrumentally self-evident. Witnessing Rosamond’s haughtiness and Kathleen’s jealousy, St. Peter wonders, “Was it for this the light in Outland’s laboratory used to burn so far into the night!” (74). St. Peter’s disappointment, mapped by the function of “Tom Outland,” that the circuit between desire and achievement has been broken—a disappointment that could be resolved were it contained by a narrative of nostalgia—actually signals an anxiety about the self-evidence of value, an anxiety that remains unresolved in this novel. The price of St. Peter’s questioning the instrumentality of desire, precisely insofar as he has “fared well with fate,” is realizing that his life has been largely accidental: “All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance. His education in France had been an accident. His married life had been happy largely through a circumstance with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do [i.e., she inherited a small income that kept them comfortable]. . . . His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do

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with the person he was in the beginning” (233, 240). Even Tom Outland, the machine that renders visible this failure of historical narrativization, lacks a necessary relationship to St. Peter: “Tom Outland had been a stroke of chance he couldn’t possibly have imagined; his strange coming, his strange story, his devotion, his early death and posthumous fame— it was all fantastic. Fantastic, too, that this tramp boy should amass a fortune for someone whose name he had never heard” (233). Seeing little more than a passive accrual of experiences where he had expected a narrative answering his desire, St. Peter finds himself returning to a version of his childhood that, by devaluing his own history, compels him to question the machinery of recognition underlying any attempt to read evidence into a legible historical narrative. “He was cultivating a novel mental dissipation—and enjoying a new friendship. Tom Outland had not come back again through the garden door (as he had so often done in dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the Professor had long ago left behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon Valley—the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter” (239). Like “Tom Outland,” this “original” St. Peter, while “the realest of his lives” (240), refuses to be positivized as an enactment of return. Embracing his new morbid state of mind, St. Peter reflects that, albeit at the age of fifty-two, he might be “near the end of his road” (242) (indeed, Lillian has earlier protested, “You are not old enough for the pose you take” [142]). Rather than focusing the redemptive energies of nostalgia, this original paradoxically serves as a benchmark by which St. Peter marks the indeterminacy of history. In fact, the novel indicates St. Peter’s childhood at two different moments: as a young boy on Lake Michigan, and as an adolescent in Kansas. The younger child of Lake Michigan, who does not return, values the lake above all else. This young child associates the lake more than anything with freedom; it is from this freedom that his parents “dragged” him to Kansas. The lake and its freedom “ran through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part of consciousness itself.” This child “didn’t . . . know what it was that made him happy; but now, fifty years later, he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his eyes were merely open wide” (20–21). The youth who returns, however, the boy of Kansas, has access to a faculty of reflection—and of self-reflection—that the Lake Michigan boy lacked. Though “he was a primitive” and was “only interested in earth and woods and water,” focusing on nature rather than “escape”—“wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him”—St. Peter recalls that “he was terribly wise. He seemed to be at

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the root of the matter; Desire under all desires, Truth under all truths. He seemed to know, among other things, that he was solitary and must always be so; he had never married, never been a father. He was earth, and would return to earth” (241). If the earlier Lake Michigan boy is unreflective freedom in-itself, the later Kansas boy is self-conscious freedom for-itself, able to appreciate the “Desire under all desires” that is the ultimate “Truth.” Though this boy “was not nearly so cultivated as Tom’s old cliff-dwellers must have been,” his intimacy with nature (“interested” as he is only “in earth and woods and water”) affiliates him with their (and Tom’s) “natural yearning for order and security”; the boy of Kansas signifies the possibility of legible value. Freedom for-itself, in St. Peter’s imagination, is “solitary,” without family. If young St. Peter is “wise,” he is so because he has evaded the “chain of events which had happened to him.” The professor now feels “that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside.” But it is desire itself, the only motive force he wants to recognize, that is the agent of compromise. The catalyst of the transfer of power from boy to “this secondary social man” was an encroachment that began “during adolescence, during the years when he was consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb ‘to love’—in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets.” This process reached its “maturity” when St. Peter met Lillian, and “from that time to this, existence had been a catching at handholds. One thing led to another and one development brought on another” (240). The narrative and value of his life became the work of this secondary social man. Far from signaling a therapeutic vector, therefore, this recollection represents for St. Peter a sentimentalized, paradoxically ahistorical version of what Tom feels on the mesa, sign of its own absence. “The Professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature into the original one, and that the complexion of a man’s life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together.” What disturbs him is that the actuality of the social self proclaims the loss of this original’s promised potentiality. “What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits and passions and experiences of his life” (242). If St. Peter finds himself cut off from youth’s pure potential of desire, trapped by the affiliations of a fate for which he is completely responsible, then the crisis figured by this child’s return, an equivocation fatally disruptive to the self-evidence he wants

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so badly from life now, is the absurd extension of his historicist desire to recognize the past on the present’s terms. He does not wish his life had taken other paths than the one it took, but rather fears that Tom’s powerful metaphor of a “series of experiments .  .  .  when you begin to see where they are leading” underwrites history’s resistance to the teleological experience of historicist possession. There is little doubt that the Cliff City, the novel’s powerful instrumental metaphor for necessity, but ineluctably inaccessible, is cut off from “leading” to St. Peter’s present. The Cliff City’s association with the formal possibility of legible design, more so than with any particular historical content, emphasizes for St. Peter the unconquerable accidental in his present. This alienation is the opposite of what Tom experienced on the mesa, and it leads for St. Peter to the opposite reaction: “He did not regret his life, but he was indifferent to it. It seemed to him like the life of another person” (243). As the semester begins with Lillian still in Europe with Rosamond and Louie, St. Peter, responding to Scott’s joke that he will soon have to decide which house he is willing to call home, claims in a vocabulary conspicuously allusive to Tom’s mesa-top ode that he doesn’t think he will ever be able to live in the new house: “He really didn’t see what he was going to do about the matter of domicile. He couldn’t make himself believe that he was ever going to live in the new house again. He didn’t belong there” (247). If Tom felt “possession” on the mesa, St. Peter’s lack of what he earlier called a “proper place” in fact marks his inability to recognize value. “He could remember a time when the loneliness of death had terrified him, when the idea of it was insupportable. . . . But now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth” (248). This marks a significant transformation: if “Truth” in childhood was future possibility inscribed by desire’s freedom for-itself, now “Truth” is purely negative, a “solitary,” “indifferent” freedom from obligation. The only example of the perfect “whole,” of alignment of intention and realization, of design, proclaims just as insistently its impossibility as it does its possibility. While Tom’s sense of responsibility to the mesa, born of a kind of re-cognitive hubris, underwrites an ideal existential inhabitation, St. Peter now seeks only a passive evasion of responsibility to the equivocal. It is out of St. Peter’s desire for securely legible value that he now doubts the self-evidence of any value whatsoever. “Achievement” and “order and security” alike, together with the product of their inflection through the figure of Tom Outland, “design,” ironically trope the historicist logic of recognition underlying St. Peter’s

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desire. Unlike Tom’s idealization of the Cliff City, which proceeds nostalgically, St. Peter knows his idealized projection of Tom as already compromised: And suppose Tom had been more prudent, and had not gone away with his old teacher [i.e., Duchene, to fight the Germans in Europe]? St. Peter sometimes wondered what would have happened to him, once the trap of worldly success had been sprung on him. He couldn’t see Tom building “Outland,” or becoming a publicspirited citizen of Hamilton. What change would have come in his blue eye, in his fine long hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas? A hand like that, had he lived, must have been put to other uses. His fellow scientists, his wife, the town and State, would have required many duties of it. It would have had to write thousands of useless letters, frame thousands of false excuses. It would have had to ‘manage’ a great deal of money, to be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting. He had escaped all that. He had made something new in the world—and the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he had left to others. (236–37) Chip Rhodes calls this an “extraordinary insight,” insofar as the “professor sees the absolute autonomy of the sign ‘Tom Outland’ from the person to whom it refers.”20 But this autonomy is in fact not absolute. If “Tom Outland” has dodged “change” and “the meaningless conventional gestures,” this sign is by no means free of St. Peter’s demand that history be read in one’s expectations of it. If making something new is a function of desire, then abandoning it to others frees one from seeing that thing circulate through and accrue “accidental” meanings. Tom Outland’s good fortune was to have died before the sign “Tom Outland” could betray St. Peter’s expectations of it—and of his fantasy of an anchored, legible teleology; if he tried to situate the genesis of American civilization in his Spanish Adventurers in North America, so he now seeks, by reinscribing “Tom Outland” as a dehistoricized ideal, indemnification against illegible implications over which no control can be exercised. Conspicuously, this is exactly what Tom tried to do in locating the Cliff City Indians as the pure origin of America—indeed, as his own filial ancestors. The same fantasy-structure subtends both Tom’s and St. Peter’s desires; rather than simply claiming the relevance of a history that was not in fact relevant,21 this fantasy betrays a fraudulent historicism that expects recognizability more fundamentally as the only warrant of truth. If Tom

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seeks to write—and write himself into—a purified History of the United States, St. Peter, whose own History, we can only imagine, disputes Tom’s presumptive nostalgia, similarly seeks purification: an impossible rescue from compromise. But while Tom’s fantasy depends on the legibility of self-evident historical value, St. Peter’s produces an uncertainty that value can be recognized at all. Morphologically equivalent to Tom’s nationalism, St. Peter’s overdetermination of desire reinscribes the possibility of legible “order and security” in the experience of design. But St. Peter, recognizing it as improper—unlike Tom—cynically disowns the catachrestic labor of historicist recognition.

On Solid Ground With the “long-anticipated coincidence” of the gas heater in his study blowing out and the window—the same window that had earlier signaled emancipation—threatening him with asphyxiation by shutting while he sleeps, St. Peter contemplates his obligation: “But suppose he did not get up—? How far was a man required to exert himself against accident? . . . He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself—was he required to lift it for himself?” (252). If Tom’s sense of obligation to the mesa— which took him all the way to Washington, D.C., and sustained him even through the abject failures he experienced there—grew from his recognition of value in the mesa, of a nationalist teleology self-evident to an American orphan, St. Peter, unable to rely on self-evidence, takes himself to be freed of responsibility, abjuring obligation not merely to values that cannot be recognized, but to experience itself, which resists the legible “order and security” troped by design. Shortly before what John Hilgart has called his “ambivalent brush with suicide,”22 St. Peter “sat at his desk with bent head, reviewing his life, trying to see where he had made his mistake, to account for the fact that he now wanted to run away from everything he had intensely cared for” (251). Still “intensely car[ing] for” the expectation of self-evident value, St. Peter can articulate responsibility only as refusing to overwrite experience with questionable desires, in cynically “run[ning] away” from Tom’s “devotion” by abandoning desire. Describing to St. Peter how she happened to save him—yet another chance occurrence in the long “chain of events which had happened to him”—Augusta explains that she came over to the old house to pick up the keys to the new one: “When I opened the front door I smelled gas,

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and I knew that stove had been up to its old tricks. I supposed you’d gone out and forgot to turn it off. When I got to the second floor I heard a fall overhead, and it flashed across me that you were up here and had been overcome. I ran up and opened the two windows at the head of the stairs and dragged you out into the wind. You were lying on the floor” (253–54). Augusta reads the “fall overhead” as evidence that despite the train of his own thought, St. Peter actually did struggle to save his own life: “You were stupefied, but you must have got up and tried to get to the door before you were overcome” (254). But I think we are also asked to wonder whether she could entertain the alternative. Telling of finding him on the floor, Augusta has a hard time articulating something so indecorous: “She lowered her voice. ‘It was perfectly frightful in here. . . . after I’d turned off the stove and opened everything up, I went next door and telephoned for Doctor Dudley. I thought I’d better not say what the trouble was, but I asked him to come at once, as you’d been taken ill. . . . ’ Augusta hurried over her recital. She was evidently embarrassed by the behaviour of the stove and the condition in which she had found him. It was an ugly accident, and she didn’t want the neighbours to know of it.” St. Peter himself may even wonder whether he tried to struggle against his fate, at least after the fact—but the novel leaves it ambiguous. The most we get out of Cather is dubious: “He did not remember springing up from the couch, though he did remember a crisis, a moment of acute, agonized strangulation” (258). After the accident, St. Peter feels beholden to Augusta, but “he didn’t, on being quite honest with himself, feel any obligations toward his family”: they had enjoyed the best years of his life, but those years “were gone.” A significant change has taken place that St. Peter remains incapable of describing even as it alters his relations with others. “It occurred to St. Peter, as he lay warm and relaxed but undesirous of sleep, that he would rather have Augusta with him just now than anyone he could think of. Seasoned and sound and on the solid earth she surely was, and, for all her matter-of-factness and hard-handedness, kind and loyal. He even felt a sense of obligation toward her, instinctive, escaping definition, but real. And when you admitted that a thing was real, that was enough— now” (256–57). Augusta is a creature of decorum; she represents a conservative solidity because she reads habit as self-evidence, and she values what exists because it exists.23 St. Peter seems surprised by Augusta’s helpfulness and, to a greater extent, by his gratitude to her. But his new “sense of obligation,” born in an “admi[ssion] that something was real,”

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is a bittersweet achievement. Indeed, there is a difference between reality and self-evidence, and St. Peter here seems to be trying to convince himself of a reality that might overwrite his anxiety about the degradation of self-evidence. Though St. Peter feels obligation to her “solid[ity]” and “sound[ness],” it is really her “kind[ness]” and “loyal[ty]”—her own sense of obligation—that he feels most unequivocally; and it is unequivocal and “real” only because it is “instinctual.” He wants to extend the protective reach of the “real” from her “obligation” to everything else— which his skepticism has undermined—but this guardianship is held in abeyance by the conditionality of the “when” with which he “admit[s]” such “real[ity].” The important things in this novel are not “real”—or, rather, “real” is a predicate, as in Tom’s explanation to Lillian of his fireblackened pot, completely at the service of the historicist demand for recognition, but is not itself at all self-evident: “Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old pots, with the fire-black on them.” Anchoring his claim to national identity back before Columbus, the “real” invoked here is determinate only in Tom’s nationalist fantasy; the jar is “real” only because Tom wants it to link him to “those people.” “Real[ity]” is no more than an effect of historicism’s expectation of recognition: an overdetermined catachresis, it cannot command the authority St. Peter here wants to take for granted. Augusta’s “sound,” “instinctive” nature provides a sense of “solid[ity],” but it is “real” only to the extent that he wants it to be. Augusta’s “solid” ground, it turns out, is decidedly shaky. The novel’s final lines, in which St. Peter anticipates his family’s return from Europe, suggest that he has relocated himself, but only on the shoulders of a destabilized vocabulary: “At least, he felt the ground under his feet. He thought he knew where he was, and that he could face with fortitude the Berengaria and the future” (258). This solid ground, like Augusta’s, cannot be persuasive. Conspicuously, St. Peter understands his reattachment as a revaluation of desire: “Augusta was like the taste of bitter herbs; she was the bloomless side of life that he had always run away from. . . . Perhaps the mistake was merely in an attitude of mind. He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to” (256–57). While St. Peter had always thought of suicide as “a grave social misdemeanour[,] . . . when he was confronted by accidental extinction, he had felt no will to resist, but had let chance take its way, as it had done with him so often” (258). Feeling the solid ground, therefore, becomes for St. Peter equivalent to disclaiming his desire. Through the prism of

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the book’s cynicism, Tom’s Blue Mesa—the very principle of escape from what is “stifled” and desire for what is “real”—cannot produce, even as it determines, the re-cognitive foundation St. Peter seeks in it. Instead of an option or an otherwise, The Professor’s House insists on a world that, if invested with desire, becomes uninhabitable.

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The Great Gatsby’s Betrayed Americanism I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives. —fitzgerald, “my lost city”

Against Americanism It’s impossible to read The Great Gatsby for Jay Gatsby without also reading it for America. In fact, Jay Gatsby’s manifold instrumentalization in the text that bears his name suggests the manner of The Great Gatsby’s cynical unease with the statist presumption that experience can (and, for that matter, should) be read as representative of national identity. Almost everybody in this novel presumes to understand Gatsby by reading him through their expectations, but the novel insists upon the fundamental— and irresolvable—error involved in this misreading. Nick Carraway’s confidence in his own ability to read people, seemingly secure at the outset, comes to be compromised in the figure of Gatsby—but not before he behaves like just about everybody else in the face of Gatsby’s mysterious grandeur. “Wander[ing] around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know” at the first of Gatsby’s parties to which he is invited, Nick finds himself privy to a celebration of rumor and conjecture about his mysterious neighbor. Purchaser of “a new evening gown” from “Croirier’s” as a replacement for a dress torn at an earlier party, “a German spy during the war,” and possibly a killer, Gatsby from the beginning of the novel “inspire[s]” a “romantic speculation”—especially about his beginnings—that blinds Nick to the extent that, despite Jordan Baker’s avowal that she will take him to Gatsby, despite the Owl-Eyed guest’s insistence that Gatsby’s whole intricate performance is “absolutely real,” and despite Gatsby’s own sympathetic smile—“It was one of those

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rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it”—Nick does not realize, so busy is he focusing on his expectations, that the “man of about my age” next to whom he is sitting is in fact his host. We can suspect at this point—we’ll know for certain at the novel’s close—that the “eternal reassurance” Nick reassures himself he can detect in Gatsby’s smile has no other referent than Nick’s own dazzling desire to find it there. Nick’s blindness does not remain complete indefinitely, however, as it soon attenuates enough to allow him to inquire about Gatsby’s overdetermination. Despite “snobbishly repeat[ing]” on the novel’s second page his admission that he has a tendency to “reserve . . . judgments” on account of his claim to a disproportionate share in, and a disproportionately acute sense of, “the fundamental decencies . . . parceled out unequally at birth,” Nick is far less unusual than he might imagine himself—and is in fact eager to know about Gatsby no less than are all those guests who “were not invited,” who “got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow  . . . ended up at Gatsby’s door  . . . [and] conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks.” In fact, Nick “had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years,” and he is not too proud to reveal to Jordan his impatient zeal: “ ‘Who is he?’ I demanded. ‘Do you know?’ . . . ‘Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?’ ” Jordan’s detached disinclination to believe Gatsby’s avowal that he “was an Oxford man” has nonetheless reminded Nick—now, despite himself, or at least despite his protestations, quite involved—of the prurience of “the other girl’s ‘I think he killed a man,’ and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity.” If Jordan seems indifferent to the problem of Gatsby’s history, her nonchalance serves to emphasize Nick’s growing demand for such an account. What most frustrates Nick, and where he parts company with the other guests, therefore, is not the simple pornography of the “romantic speculation he [Gatsby] inspired,” but more disturbingly the possibility that that romantic speculation may not refer to an actual history. “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.”1 If the regionally and ethnically inflected references to Louisiana and New York City seem to go against the grain of his later identification with Gatsby on the basis of their shared midwestern upbringing, we should not be misled into

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regarding as self-evident the deployment of regional or ethnic difference: the simple fact is that Nick cannot recognize Gatsby and so wants to submit him to paradigms he does recognize. Nick desperately wants Gatsby’s history, and the nature of his desire seems to set him apart from the novel’s other regarders of Gatsby even as it initially seems to ally him with them. Whereas for the other guests the indeterminacy of Gatsby’s origins occasions a productive speculation, Nick is hobbled by it. Rather than taking Gatsby’s mystery as an opportunity to create, Nick, bound by an expectation (inherited, if we are to believe him) that he know rather than merely conjecture, simply cannot accept Gatsby’s springing up from nowhere. At least for the first few chapters, Nick shares the prurient interest in Gatsby’s past that circulates through this text, insofar as he needs to know that Gatsby at any rate has a past, but he cannot get past it: for Nick, desire lacks the ability to find in experience the self-evidence it expects. The desire for legibility is extremely important in this novel, as indicated by the fact that the expectation of legibility is even more pronounced. Thus, for example, the car ride over the Queensboro Bridge into the city that Nick and Gatsby share, on which Nick cycles through thinking Gatsby “was a person of some undefined consequence,” to believing him “simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door,” to, in the wake of Gatsby’s producing the medal from Montenegro and the photo showing him at Oxford, again being convinced of all his elaborate deceptions. In this scene Nick seems to be at war with himself: he wants both to believe Gatsby and to doubt him. When Gatsby says, “My family all died and I came into a good deal of money” immediately after informing Nick that the part of “the Middle West” he came from was “San Francisco,” Nick initially doubts him but then thinks better of it: “For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.” It’s unclear what Nick sees that “convince[s him] otherwise,” but Gatsby’s next prevarication leads Nick to suspect him again: “ ‘After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.’ With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne” (69–70). Nick distrusts Gatsby to the extent that he is able to mark Gatsby’s performance as performance;2 it is his story of

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the war—which, in addition to probably being at least partly true, is also a story that Nick, also having been in the war, can recognize as reflecting his own experience—and then his presentation of the medal and the photograph that reassure Nick. But the novel’s use of the photograph undercuts any attempt to rely on it as a benchmark of accuracy, and Nick’s justification in understanding it as proof that Gatsby is telling the truth is certainly limited. The photograph is of “half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger—with a cricket bat in his hand” (71). The ridiculousness of Nick’s response to the photo is telling: “Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.” If the absurdity of this description sarcastically suggests that Nick, like Gatsby’s guests, is falling prey to the “romantic speculation he [Gatsby] inspired” (48) even as he knows himself to be, Nick permits credulity to follow his desire to know Gatsby’s history. And this desire vis-à-vis Gatsby, moreover, seems to be something of which Gatsby is very much aware, as he has arguably arrived at his current station in life precisely by answering and manipulating that same desire in everyone he meets: “ ‘I thought you ought to know something about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody’ ” (71). As Gatsby himself fully understands, it is precisely the threat that he is indeed “just some nobody” that seems to be so dangerous in this book, and it is by sharing in the conviction that it is a threat that Nick allies himself, at least initially, with the likes of Tom, for whom, as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (137), Gatsby represents at once the grave epistemological threat of a complete failure of knowledge and the grave national threat of race war. Tom, of course, has already been established as earnestly fearing the collapse of civilization as the white race is “submerged” by tidal forces of racial difference, and it bears remembering that his fear is “scientific” (17), having everything to do with knowing: the romance with knowing that Gatsby anchors is associated in this novel with, to the extent that it is inseparable from, a threat to the possibility of knowing.3 But if Nick at the outset associates himself with this anxiety, he eventually distances himself from it, and in doing so points to how the book, rather than reactively fearing the collapse of a “scientific” possibility of knowing a self-evident identity—a scientific possibility that through Tom’s racist attractions gets irreversibly allied with the statist possibility of guaranteeing national identity—in fact proclaims the bankruptcy of

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the pretension to recognize identity, especially American identity, in the first place. Nick, after all, who is thoroughly invested in a legible and normative American identity, also comes to appreciate, however sarcastically, “the truth . . . that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end” (104). Nick’s cynical disdain—his most notable and charming feature—ultimately depends on his inability to take for granted a normalizing national identity, and it is this irresolvability that allows him to emerge from the novel’s “foul dust” (7). Tom, on the other hand, intellectually incapable of abandoning his reactionary expectation of origins, is discredited, as is his disquiet about Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, which, filtered through the “stale ideas” (25) at whose edges he nibbles in latching on to the hate-mongering nativism of “this man Goddard” (17), proves to be insupportable except in an unthinking obedience to recognition. Indeed, with its erotics of the origin, nativism in this book figures reactionary fealty to recognition, the presumption that knowingas-competence has full access to a self-evidently determinative history. Tom and his anxiety are not “submerged” alone; insofar as he functions as the cruel standard-bearer of the genetic desire for determinative origins in this novel, his delegitimization marks also a failure of the desire to read “America” as the key to understanding the novel’s negotiation of identity.

“Some Unmistakable Sign” Fitzgerald’s novel rejects the presumption that identity can be securely recognized, with its ending image of Nick’s desire for a self-evident national identity overwhelmed by uninscribable indeterminacy serving as an emblem. Indeed, desire for recognition is so frequently met in this novel by indistinctness. Typographically, the text often turns to a conspicuous dash that points to a failure of signification, to an indomitable inability to say anything: we see it in Daisy’s early response to Tom’s excitement about racial admixture that Tom cuts off: “Tom’s getting very profound. . . . He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—” (17); in the cuckolded mechanic Wilson’s attempt to appease Tom about the car he hopes to buy from him: “I don’t mean

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that  .  .  .  I just meant—” (29); in Gatsby’s blundering attempt to bribe Nick into arranging a meeting with Daisy: “ ‘Oh, it isn’t about that. At least—’ He fumbled with a series of beginnings. ‘Why, I thought—why, look here, old sport, you don’t make much money, do you? . . . I thought you didn’t, if you’ll pardon my—you see, I carry on a little business on the side, a sort of sideline, you understand. And I thought that if you don’t make very much—You’re selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?’ ” (87); in Gatsby’s admission to Nick of his pained revaluation of himself in the presence of Daisy: “It’s the funniest thing, old sport. . . . I can’t—when I try to—” (97); in Gatsby’s Owl-Eyed guest’s drunken amazement at the legitimacy of the books in Gatsby’s library, an admission that conspicuously aligns the “real” with inexpressibility: “Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re——” (50); and of course in the novel’s penultimate paragraph, even as Nick presumes to encapsulate Gatsby’s significance: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter— tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—” (189). The frustrated desire for determinate recognition is frequently associated with Gatsby: thus the novel also manifests indeterminacy diegetically in Gatsby’s recurrent disappearance and association with disappearance, a vanishing that is particularly telling given that so much of the presumption to know in the novel orbits around Gatsby: we see this disappearance at the close of the first chapter, when Nick looks back to Gatsby’s yard from trying to determine the object of Gatsby’s “stretched out” arms: “When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness” (26); in Gatsby’s smile of “eternal reassurance” at his party that seems to insist—at least as Nick reads it—that it understands “you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey,” but “precisely at that point it vanished—” (52–53); in the restaurant where Nick tries to introduce Tom to Gatsby: “I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there” (79); in Nick’s reaction to Gatsby’s story of meeting Daisy: “Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost

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remembered was uncommunicable forever” (118); and in Nick’s attempt to recall Gatsby at the funeral: “I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already too far away,” a distance that is unbridgeable in Nick’s realization, “without resentment, that Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower” and in Owl-Eyes’ final, frustrated apostrophe, “The poor son-of-a-bitch” (183).4 The breakdown of signification figured by Gatsby in his disappearance is a failure of recognition; it is the vocabularies of perception and interpretation that cannot, finally, fix Gatsby. Immediately following the funeral, Nick tries to take Gatsby’s death as an opportunity to resolve his neighbor’s indeterminacy in an invocation of an imperial American identity, but he finds that he lacks the terms to do so. Nick recalls: “One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. . . . When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again” (183–84). If Gatsby’s significance is done justice by neither Owl-Eyes’ “poor sonof-a-bitch” nor Daisy’s disregard, Nick here hopes to recognize him—as he hopes, too, to recognize himself—as an American. Nick has always felt himself able to assert an uncorrupted and unimpeachable American identity while traveling back to “my Middle West,” where (perhaps free of the need to contend with the racial tide, so imminent in coastal America, that so unnerves Tom) he can be “a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life” (184). Unlike Tom, whose narrowminded and slack-witted nativism recognizes American identity only in the monochromatic purity of the Midwest, Nick does not limit America to the Midwest. The Midwest has on the very first pages been labeled the “ragged edge of the universe” (7), and Nick acknowledges the “complacen[cy]” bred from growing up where families are still fixed by ancestral sites. In the following paragraphs, he even admits the East’s “superiority” to the West. On the contrary, this later passage presents

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American identity as “return”: Nick wants to find America in a secure way of perceiving, as when he imagines himself “returning . . . melting indistinguishably into it again.” But it is also something, he now fears, that he has taken for granted; American identity is also “unutterable”— unutterable not because Nick has not yet learned the language that can articulate it, but because, as he discovers at the novel’s close, “America” exists only beyond the asymptotic limit of his own desire. If Nick wants to sum up Gatsby as an American, an identity whose self-evidence he has always been “a little complacent” about, he now suspects it has only been his desire that has upheld the legibility of this fiction. The American identification Nick desires in this scene is an identification that the novel undermines. Thus focusing the book through the lens afforded by Nick yields a starkly different result than is available by concentrating on Gatsby. To presume that the novel is before anything else about the meaning of Gatsby is to preclude critical focus on the expectation that Gatsby should mean something. To read the book through Gatsby is to take legibility for granted. In fact, Gatsby’s romance with American possibility stands in for a more fundamental interpretive romance with recognition—but Fitzgerald’s novel resists the seductions of recognition: the contaminating effect of recognition on thought is a central theme of the novel, as characters are repeatedly undermined by their shared assumption that earnest desire is a sufficient criterion for knowledge, that, as Nick puts it on the novel’s first page, knowledge necessarily reveals itself through “some unmistakable sign” (5). Thus Tom, for example, is shown to be worthy of derisive laughter—“Angry as I was,” Nick “was tempted to laugh whenever he [Tom] opened his mouth”—because his rebuke of Gatsby during their confrontation over Daisy at the Plaza absurdly rests on his sincere belief that “sneering at family life and family institutions,” as Gatsby has done in his affair with Daisy, will lead necessarily to miscegenation: “next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white” (137). But Gatsby, of course, is also guilty of a blinding sincerity—grandly so: when two pages later he tells Daisy that her past with Tom is “all over now. . . . It doesn’t matter anymore,” he does so “earnestly” (139), presumably with the same earnestness with which he pursued for so long the “dream” that in Daisy “must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it” (189). And even more manifestly, the entire arc of the novel offers indubitable evidence that Nick’s sincere “inclin[ation] to reserve all judgments” (5) is foolish. While Tom’s hateful calculus is never tempered by critical self-regard,

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functioning as a ridiculous illustration of the dangers of earnest faith, and while Gatsby never loses his sincerity, his forthright and heartfelt belief that his desire can be translated into fact, Nick claims in the first few pages, in his “admission” that “my tolerance . . . has a limit” (6), to have done just that. If with his narrative Nick suggests that sincerity is not enough, that simply desiring something is not a sufficient warrant for confidence in its self-evidence, then we are led to question the status of Nick’s relatively sincere defense of Gatsby, a defense that, in contravention of everything Nick seems to want to argue, is tied to a notion of American identity that, even as Nick professes to share it with Gatsby, has no evident existence. Nick’s attempt to read Gatsby by means of a sentimental image of American identity after the funeral attests to his desire to resolve Gatsby’s indeterminacy—the failure, repeatedly represented in this book, to fix Gatsby’s meaning—by reinscribing him in an interpretive system in which he hopes he can have faith. But as the end of the book will show, Nick makes this attempt despite his conviction that “America” lacks precisely the anchoring self-evidence he wants from of it. To be sure, The Great Gatsby is intimately engaged with the alluring tropics of American identity. But the narrative structure of this engagement, ever suspicious of the sentimental enticements of recognition, precludes the possibility of taking “American” identity for granted. The irreducible complexity of the novel’s attention to identity—its narrativization of a longing for precisely the kind of stable identity that Nick’s Americanism wants to find in it—in fact challenges his instrumentalist desire to find an anchor in the recognizability of “America.” Notably, the novel is deeply troubled about the positivism underlying what Nick calls Gatsby’s “appalling sentimentality” (118), remaining ambivalent about both what Gatsby has done with the sentimental category of “America” and how Nick responds to this work, and illustrating a longing for the imaginative and ideological matrix out of which what it rejects arises. This book enacts a deeply problematical drama of identification, whereby the representational capacity of identity—indeed, ultimately American identity—is an object alternatively of desire and skepticism. Interpreted through Nick’s disabused skepticism rather than through Gatsby’s deluded optimism— and therefore through doubt about identity’s ability to signify rather than through faith in its representational promise—the novel reveals a cynicism about identity, ultimately lacking faith in the symbolic orders in which it is nonetheless committed to understanding the significance and place of identity. Flipping the interpretive paradigm that authorizes

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the ability to take identity for granted, Fitzgerald’s novel presents identity as a failed compensation for indeterminacy rather than as a positive locus that could, given an adequate vocabulary, be revealed. This compensatory machinery of identification is illustrated, remarkably, in recent criticism that draws attention to Gatsby’s interest in nativist languages for describing race and ethnicity—to how Fitzgerald’s book engages discourses that render racial and ethnic difference recognizable, including how certain characters are made to bear distinguishing racial or ethnic markers. In relying on languages of the body to fix the novel’s indeterminacy, this work takes for granted a logic of recognition that the novel clearly undermines. Most of this work begins with the assumption that some behaviors are already recognizably racially differentiated. Carlyle Van Thompson notably argues that Gatsby is a lightskinned African American, citing repeated descriptions of Gatsby as “pale” that render his racial identity ambiguous, the novel’s many associations of Gatsby with colors that associate him with minstrel imagery, and Nick’s description of Gatsby’s estate as having “forty acres of lawn and a garden” that allies Gatsby with the history of African America. Fitzgerald in Thompson’s estimation makes passing a kind of impossible metaphor for achieving the American Dream, and Thompson casts The Great Gatsby as a product of Fitzgerald’s anxiety about the racial other transposed onto the established American narrative of class aspiration; as Tom makes clear, it is his “desire for whiteness” that makes Thompson’s Gatsby threatening to the text’s worldview. Thus the novel’s “subversive subject is the paradoxical phenomenon of racial passing, the racial masquerade implicit to many black people’s desire for enduring inclusion in the American Dream. By appropriating the symbolism, diction, and associations of racial passing, Fitzgerald illuminates the miscegenation core of the American Dream.”5 Finding them to work to opposite effect, Meredith Goldsmith similarly locates reified ideological constructions of race at the center of Fitzgerald’s book. The scandal of Gatsby’s performance, according to Goldsmith, is his suppression of his “ambiguously ethnic, white, working-class origins” in a relatively successful “imitation of African-American and ethnic modes of self-definition,” his adopting modes of self-fashioning proper to African American passing narratives and ethnic (frequently Jewish) Americanization narratives, in both of which “racial and national identities become objects of imitation . . . through the apparatus of speech, costume, and manners.” Gatsby’s negotiation with non-WASP brands of performativity underlies an “explosion of the dialectic between imitation and authenticity” by

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which “Fitzgerald refutes the possibility of any identity, whether racial, class, or ethnic, as ‘the real thing.’ ”6 Both of these arguments depend on the self-evidence of racial identity: the visibility and ideological coherence of racial difference, that is, is assumed. This is particularly striking in Goldsmith’s argument purportedly about the explosion of essential racial differences: she celebrates Fitzgerald for destroying the category of race because, in her account, a white character adopts behaviors that are the province of nonwhite people. A similar operation is found in work that tends to reduce the perspective of the book to that of its nativist characters. Walter Benn Michaels, who with Our America is probably the most visible recent critic to attend to the book’s representation of racialism, is also most conspicuous in falling prey to this fallacy. Arguing generally that Jazz Age texts display a “structural intimacy between nativism and modernism,” Michaels claims that Gatsby functions in the book as a figure of the threat of racial admixture. Gatsby’s real problem in Michaels’s account is not his nouveau-riche challenge to economic barriers but that he is “without a past”: he does not have an acceptable pedigree, and winning Daisy (in the nativist imaginary) requires that he have one. As Michaels points out, she herself indicates this requirement at the Plaza, when she responds to Gatsby’s demand that she admit to never having loved Tom: “Oh, you want too much. . . . I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past” (139–40). Only rewriting the [racialized] past—precisely what Gatsby cannot do through the [economically] transformative agency of the future—could “retroactively make him someone who could be ‘married’ to Daisy.”7 Bryan Washington, too, claims that The Great Gatsby is “preoccupied with and intolerant of the racial and social hybridization of America” and that Gatsby is a threat to the “family,” the “Middle West,” and to “the white cultural center” precisely because he (as Fitzgerald puts it) “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” because he (as Washington puts it) lacks the right kind of origin in a novel where all origins are racial and hence is “the worst kind of outsider.”8 Unlike the future, the past cannot be changed; indeed, in Michaels’s modernity, the “meaning” of an American’s past “has been rendered genealogical,”9 has been racialized, suggesting that no amount of class mobility can make Gatsby into something he is not (which is to say, in the crucial instance for Michaels, a [white] American). “Insofar as the desire for a different future is the desire to belong to a different class, the desire for a different past that replaces it should be understood as the desire to belong to a different race.”10 But neither Michaels nor Washington, despite

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demonstrating how certain nativist characters recognize a racial threat, explain on what grounds they equate what characters think about Gatsby with what the book thinks about him. Racist characters do not make a racist book; though “race” almost certainly operates for Tom and others as a self-evident category, it doesn’t necessarily do so for the text. Such arguments treat the book like Tom treats Gatsby and are underwritten much as “this man Goddard” underwrites Tom’s reading of Gatsby. By falling into this simple habit of instrumentalist recognition, they fail to appreciate the text’s complex ambivalence about identity. Missing from them is precisely the examination of how racial and ethnic differences become visible in the first place. Thus by relying on the legibility of self-evidently racial practices, this scholarship repeats the fundamental error that trips up Nick for most of the summer he tells us about, but which Nick cynically understands at the end: that of expecting identity to be self-evident, a mistake that the book traces to the more primary error of relying on recognition as a warrant of legitimacy. Arguing that Fitzgerald’s text, by worrying about the diminishing “physicality” of identity, focuses attention on the mechanisms by which race and ethnicity become legible as facts, Betsy Nies helps to illustrate this problem. In her reading, anxiety about Gatsby “seems based on the idea that Gatsby has created an identity, thus rendering the whole concept of identity as physically based unclear. Gatsby, of course, is the ultimate text, fabricating an identity in a unique imitation of the real.” Nies finds Nick’s reaction to Gatsby’s prevarication about his past on the car ride to the city pregnant with her argument: “Nick, while not concerned with racial purity per se, is still concerned with a certain type of eugenic logic when he tries to find out Gatsby’s background. He looks desperately for a referent for Gatsby’s sign, something to undergird and back up the image of the man Gatsby proposes to be.” As Nies reads the scene, Nick distrusts Gatsby for as long as Gatsby sounds like a textual mélange, like discontinuous “bits and pieces of collected phrases” (“worn . . . threadbare,” in Fitzgerald’s words) and “misplaced textuality removed from any defining anchoring physicality.” But Gatsby’s presentation of the photograph from Oxford quiets Nick’s doubts and establishes, in Nies’s words, “physical proof of his identity.” Thus her Gatsby is a nostalgic text, longing “for a time when identities were tied firmly to fixed bodies.” But if Nies wants to expose in Fitzgerald an anxious desire to hold on to the physical body as “an anchor for the meaning of identity,”11 this move seems to be where her argument is most vulnerable, and it indicates the error in many of Gatsby’s recent critics who try

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to anchor the text’s significance in a body unequivocally encoded by an already-legible American history through the agency of a racialist logic that can be taken for granted. Bodies can only be critically examined as sites of racialized discourse if they are already raced; Nies, like Michaels, Washington, Thompson, Goldsmith, and others who share an interest in the text’s putative racism, begins by assuming a historically self-evident body. In this context, Nies’s citation of Gatsby’s photograph from Oxford as the “physical proof” (my emphasis of Nies’s term) Nick needs to believe Gatsby’s mostly fallacious story is telling, insofar as it betrays the positivist equation of representation and thing in her interrogation of the book’s concern with physicality. Finding nativism and racism in the text because it is looking for nativism and racism, this criticism hopes to make Gatsby—and Gatsby— recognizable by assuming that bodies bear meaning self-evidently. Taking for granted that racial difference is already legible, such a perspective can no more fix the significance of Jay Gatsby than it can offer an explanation of how race becomes legible. A suspiciously prescribed discovery of “America” in American literature though it may be, however, this recent criticism of Gatsby’s racialization quite helpfully illustrates the machinery of Americanism. In fact, while these readings are grounded in a faith in the stability and national significance of identity, The Great Gatsby lacks precisely this faith in identity’s representativity and representability. This book does not simply illustrate patterns of identity and thereby invest them with particular meanings that remain—at least insofar as they always already are—recognizable and valid within a larger, essentially statist inquiry into American literature and culture. Fitzgerald’s novel is far more anxious about how and whether identity can be legible than it is anxious simply about the typical or representative traits of its particular characters. Nick’s Americanism is ultimately little different from Tom’s nativism: both reveal a desire that a legible identity, selfevidently indexed to a larger conceptual system, can securely normalize thought and action. But it is precisely this normative paradigm that fails in The Great Gatsby. Focusing on the techniques of the text’s narrative management of identity—rather, that is, than on locating the validity of particular images of identity in the text—reveals this machinery at work in Fitzgerald’s American novel. It also indicates a way to examine how recognition serves to compensate for the novel’s problematic and errant thinking of identity.

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Narrating Nick’s Gatsby: The Form of Cynicism The Great Gatsby is cynical about the legibility of identity: rehearsing the desire that identity serve as an interpretive key to America, the book nonetheless insists on that desire’s inconsequence. Through its administration of longing, Fitzgerald’s text resists the attempt to recognize identity as nationally representative. Analysis not of what identities the book represents, but of how it narrates identity—including the emotional and epistemological network identity occupies, the desire, intention, and imagination it constitutes—helps us avoid reducing Fitzgerald’s novel to an instrumental accessory of Americanist pieties and ideology. The principal forum in which the text carries out this narration is Nick’s conflicted assessment of his experiences, and the structure of this assessment is established fairly early on. A scene in the second chapter articulates a model of intelligence—one always in contention with an impulse to reify, insofar as it at once holds on to the fetish it makes of experience and exposes it as such—that will underlie Gatsby’s significance to Nick and the novel’s cynical approach to American identity. Dragged by Tom to meet Myrtle Wilson, the mistress about whom everybody but Nick seems to know, Nick spends a drunken and ambivalent evening in the Washington Heights apartment Tom keeps for Myrtle. While he is as straightforward as he gets in describing his dissatisfaction, Nick also admits to being captivated. Both eyewitness and participant, at once attracted and disdainful, Nick feels at the same time wonder and an urge to escape: “I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (40). Repeated throughout the novel, this sense of being both inside and outside indicates Nick’s alienation—an alienation that is by turns compelling and cowardly—but it also discloses the structure of Nick’s ambivalent skepticism, a form of intelligence traversed by a conviction of its own impertinence. As the tension between estrangement and participation mounts, desire and disaffection butt heads over the same object. The Great Gatsby never resolves these two equally persuasive positions: announced by Nick in his brief prologue, where he admits to contemning the world Gatsby “gorgeous[ly]”

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represented but also to admiring Gatsby’s existential magnanimity, a narratively constituted ambivalence underlies the book’s cynicism. This narrative production of cynicism is in part dependent on Nick’s skepticism, and in particular our ability to identify with it. Nick has to this point associated himself with a kind of autonomy. The novel’s opening attempts to establish his confident narrative hold on the events it records. Indeed, the first seven words negate themselves: “In my younger and more vulnerable years” implies a superseding maturity. Nick seems to know what he wants. He claims that he returned from Europe “restless”; in fact, he returns coolly aloof, but neither apathetic nor bitter. Though his description of the war as “a delayed Teutonic migration” (7) evinces sarcasm, he still seeks order. That the war left him apprehensive that the “Middle West” of his youth, that erstwhile “warm center of the world,” is in fact the “ragged edge of the universe” intimates a potent independence. Once on Long Island, he delights in the proud residential “freedom” a tourist’s request for information confers upon him. Nick’s attempt to end his “rumored” engagement and his disdain toward Daisy and Tom after dinner—“I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away” (24–25)—also ask to be read into a narrative of sovereignty. He displays just enough contempt that we want to trust him.12 This skeptical sovereignty helps explain why Nick does not want to be in Myrtle’s apartment. For one, he has been introduced to her against his will; Tom’s determination to bring him to meet her “bordered on violence” (28), figuring Nick’s failed resistance. From their time at Yale, Nick already knows Tom to be arrogant; his evening at the Buchanans’ house in East Egg only emphasized Tom’s brutality. Furthermore, Nick has already affirmed a lack of interest in other people’s affairs, an “inclin[ation] to reserve all judgments” that he offers as a kind of opprobrious counterpoint to the practiced gossip that characterizes the Buchanans and Jordan Baker and envelops Gatsby. And Nick’s midwestern distaste—what he will a little later call his “provincial inexperience” (54) and much later his “provincial squeamishness” (188)—is probably piqued by Tom’s keeping a mistress, especially at the expense of Nick’s own once-removed second cousin. Finally, Nick is used to exercising control over experience, and the day’s events, his aberrant drunkenness not least among them, have wrested a fair amount of that control from him. But it is notable that notwithstanding this constellation of negative predisposition, Nick finds simple disapproval insufficient. Indeed, despite his skeptical self-sufficiency, we suspect that his autonomy may not be inviolate. We know at the outset, for example, that

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Nick eventually gives up on the East, presumably defeated by the “foul dust” that circulated around Gatsby (7). And his insecure independence is certainly embattled in Washington Heights, where his desired reclusion is challenged by his “entangle[ment].” The apartment is claustrophobic: it “was on the top floor—a small living-room, a small dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles” (33). Spatial restrictions and aesthetic limitations repeat Nick’s disdain. Though containing at its fullest only six people— Nick, Tom, Myrtle, Catherine, and Chester and Lucille McKee—the apartment overflows. Myrtle’s proclamation that “I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ve got to get. . . . I got to write down a list so I won’t forget all the things I got to do” (41) aggravates this anxious overpopulation. Even the photograph on the wall (later revealed to be of Myrtle and Catherine’s mother) is “over-enlarged” (33). And Myrtle herself, her ego fed by Tom, is monstrously uncontained: “Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air” (35). But the tension here is not simple; the apartment’s congested closeness is not merely opposed to the expansive “soft twilight” outside. While Nick’s restraint is linked in particular to his liberatory desire—“each time I tried to go I became entangled . . . as if with ropes”—this restriction is overcome (to a degree) in the oppositional “Yet,” and Nick is also outside, looking up in wonder at the mysteries lying behind that “line of yellow windows.” Provincial Nick is now drawn toward the spectacle. Still inside—“I was him [“the casual watcher on the darkening streets”] too” (my emphasis)—“wonder” supplements “entangle[ment].” Nick is at once critical and inside the apartment, annoyed by its tacky pretension, and compelled and outside, spellbound by its promise. Alienation and fascination are simultaneous for irresolute Nick. If he bristles at the “inexhaustible” degeneracy of the scene, the “variety of life” he glimpses challenges his self-assurance. Neither enchantment nor scorn alone is an adequate response. This scene characterizes the way in which Nick experiences and knows in this novel, and it points to the manner of the text’s disposition of sentimental attraction. Simultaneously of his encounters and outside them, both “within and without,” Nick construes experience as both affective and analytical, at once earnest and ironic. This theme of imaginative doubling is well established in Fitzgerald

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scholarship, even if its full implications have not been pursued. John Aldridge, a whipping boy of recent “lost generation” criticism, calls attention to an opposition between a “spectatorial role” and a “role of active participation” common to Fitzgerald and his peers: “The two together—the sentimental and essentially immature longing of the observer . . . and the premature disillusion of the participant who saw too much too soon—seem to me to account for the duality of so much of the literature that generation produced.”13 Quoting Fitzgerald’s friend John Peale Bishop (from an October 1921 article in Vanity Fair), Arthur Mizener similarly writes that Fitzgerald had “the rare faculty of being able to experience romantic and ingenuous emotions and half an hour later regard them with satiric detachment.” As Mizener himself elaborates, “At his best, his mind apprehended things simultaneously with a participant’s vividness of feeling and an intelligent stranger’s acuteness of observation.” In fact, Mizener elaborates this apperceptive fissure in two ways. In this first formulation, Fitzgerald is particularly good at describing both the sincere inside of a feeling and its analytical outside. But Mizener later articulates this characteristic aptitude differently. He cites Malcolm Cowley: “It was as if  .  .  .  all his novels described a big dance to which he had taken  . . . the prettiest girl . .  .  and as if at the same time he stood outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.”14 Here, Fitzgerald is both knowingly immersed and ingenuously excluded; the affiliations of inside and outside are reversed. In not ruling decisively for either option, Mizener helpfully characterizes Fitzgerald’s “double vision” as a tension alternatively between earnestness and irony and between participation and naiveté. Experience is both earnest and urbane, while self-consciousness is at once critically ironic and fatefully ingenuous. Even as desire sustains him, dissatisfaction bars his participation. Identification in Fitzgerald shuttles between dispossession and involvement, governed by neither a simple opposition of inside and outside nor a narrative of corruption. Nick’s double vision in the apartment is a disillusioning pull between ingenuous desire and disenchanted knowledge; his adventure with Myrtle and Tom reveals a desire for identification that, split from itself, is ultimately incapable of justifying the emotional investment it demands. Cynicism makes its first appearance in The Great Gatsby as desire’s proleptic knowledge of its own shortcomings. As we find out, this cynicism will govern Nick’s final, decidedly nontragic judgment of Gatsby, his simultaneous craving and unwillingness

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to identify with him; but it also points to our final inability to read this novel in any unproblematic way as the Americanist roman à clef it has so often been presumed to be. Gatsby, for whom, to quote Fitzgerald late in his life (and not necessarily in relation to Gatsby), “the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment,”15 and Nick, whose skepticism precludes any such rapturous indulgence, narratively short-circuit each other. If Gatsby is attractive in his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” (6) and his uncommon sincerity, then Nick, in declaring also that Gatsby “represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn,” marks disenchantment as the register in which that sensitivity and sincerity are proven to be incommensurate with the welter of clichés to which they were directed. The important fact of this novel is neither Gatsby nor his sentimental dream of fetishized identity (nor even the racialized discourses he activates), but Nick’s attempt to keep something sympathetically in mind despite a persuasive knowledge that renders it intolerable. Gatsby’s naïvely romantic sincerity, of course, is not the center of this text; its impertinence is, and while Nick remains skeptically incapable of identifying with this desire, he also wants to disown the conditions that undermine it. Nick reads Gatsby’s fate through his own ambivalence, caught between acknowledging Gatsby’s effort to maintain ignorance on the one hand and the benign productivity enabled by such ignorance on the other. As we do, Nick sees through Gatsby long before he starts liking him. But Nick does start liking him, and the end of the book is nothing if not an attempted defense of him. Fitzgerald’s text puts its reader in the position of wanting to sanction both poles of Nick’s ambivalence, rendering Nick—precisely in his skepticism—the reader’s potential proxy. Indeed, the one thing Nick does that the reader really cannot sanction is retreating back to the Midwest, racially pure or not. This is decisive: just as Nick can’t quite identify with Gatsby, so the reader can’t quite apologize for Nick. But if this novel is obviously not really about Gatsby, Nick, who certainly attracts more empathetic interest from readers than Gatsby ever can, validates Gatsby’s failure, not the dream it followed: Gatsby mistakenly believed he was justified in shaping his world, while Nick correctly knows he is unjustified in valuing Gatsby’s imaginative labor. The Great Gatsby can be construed as a tragedy only if it is misconstrued as a story about Gatsby and therefore about the failed convergence of knowledge and desire. But if the novel is more fundamentally the story of Nick Carraway’s disillusionment than it is of Jimmy Gatz’s tragic rise and fall, it is about Nick precisely to the extent of his

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miscarried identification with Gatsby. Through Nick, Fitzgerald’s novel dramatizes a naïve longing for interpretive security that is paradoxically valued—and value-able—precisely in its undesirability. If it emerges in desire’s canny bad conscience before Nick even meets Gatsby, the novel’s cynicism coalesces around the representation of Nick’s disenchanted and unsustainable identification with Gatsby’s failure. Staging an identification that ultimately cannot be consummated even as it is repeated for the reader, this book renders representativity itself untenable. Nick never discovers something in Gatsby that survives outside Gatsby’s sentimental delusion. The discomfiture of Gatsby’s naïve imaginative project and the banality by which it is framed—surely its potency is worthy of more intriguing material than a slack-witted corruption of Benjamin Franklin’s American teleology,16 pushups and mechanics, Dan Cody, tailored shirts, and a spoiled southern belle—articulates for Nick Gatsby’s inevitable trajectory: Gatsby is a cliché searching, via Nick, for substance. He expends himself in his vigorous, futile faith, and Nick is left alienated from this faith because he knows it transcends nothing of its contemptible field of exercise. The pathos of Nick’s “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together,” coming on the heels of “They’re a rotten crowd,” is of course that Gatsby may stand out from his milieu, but it is a milieu for which he remains largely responsible. “I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. . . . His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by” (162). Critics interested in exposing the lineaments of racialist discourse in the novel might want to seek here the text’s implication of Gatsby in practices of concealment and passing (pace Thompson) or its ironic foreclosure of Gatsby’s impossible claim to ancestry (pace Michaels), but such an attempt would ignore the cynical negotiation of pathos through which the text narrates Nick’s appraisal of Gatsby. The opposition of Gatsby’s meretricious but rumored “corruption” and his actual but pedestrian “incorruptible dream” is transfigured in Nick’s ambivalent transit between admiration and scorn. Refusing to wise up, Gatsby is never really deceived by the failure of his vision. Nick, however, is another story, insofar as he tries to draw meaning from the “foul dust [that] floated in the wake of [Gatsby’s] dreams” (7). Nick’s Gatsby stands out like Gatsby’s suit against the steps,

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like his “complete isolation” at the first party (60), because he has to, because this is now Nick rescues Gatsby’s imagination from its prurient setting. Despite the best efforts of its titular character, The Great Gatsby is about knowing better: Nick’s disenchanted knowledge at the novel’s end of the perversity of Gatsby’s naïve desire is framed by that desire’s optimistic trajectory.17 This tension between the propulsive energy of the imagination and skepticism about its experiential investment is heralded in the interrogation of hope in the novel’s initial pages, an interrogation (and a tension) that forges an alliance between Nick and Gatsby. Nick first claims, in discussing his own behavior, that “[r]eserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope” (6). If he in fact finds it difficult to reserve judgment, his narrative nonetheless offers a kind of testimony to a “hope” that Gatsby would, indeed, repay his investment of attention. Nick soon invokes hope once more, this time in the context of introducing Gatsby’s “gorgeous” sincerity, a “responsiveness” that was also “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” Through the linking term of a hope that he has not quite embraced, Nick reveals how hard he tries to disown his skepticism, insofar as it is a skepticism that—as the ensuing narrative will reveal—short-circuits identification and therefore the possibility of forging useful knowledge from experience. At the end of the book (and at the very beginning), only Nick is incapable of finding such significance; like Tom and Daisy and every other contemptible character in the novel’s rogues’ gallery of loathsome individuals, Gatsby has absolute faith in experience’s significance, believes experience to be an affair of signs that bear the straightforward representations of desire. If Tom and Daisy provide Nick arrogant evidence that he is right to presume that experience cannot be affirmatively significant, Gatsby offers impossible confirmation of imagination’s productive output. Nick returns from the East finding solace in moral uniformity—he now finds “riotous excursions” distracting. But they are distracting because hope’s “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” can never guarantee those promises. The “extraordinary gift” bestowed by Gatsby’s hope survives in—but only in—its degradation: “No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it was what preyed on Gatsby . . . that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men” (7). Nick’s “temporarily” underscores his frustrated withdrawal more than it implies resumption of a suspended engagement. Remaining

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intact in Gatsby, this “incorruptible” desire is adulterated in Nick. Nick tempers Gatsby’s idealistic desire with the fatal experiential knowledge Gatsby avoided. He finds value in Gatsby’s dream precisely in its naiveté, but this discovery also marks that desire as unavailable. Gatsby’s naiveté is his expectation that he will find what he longs for—below success, riches, and grace, it is true that he seeks Daisy, but it was already Jay Gatsby who met Daisy in Louisville, James Gatz having sacrificed himself years before when Jay Gatsby met Dan Cody. Gatsby’s naiveté is located primordially in his fundamental faith that experience selfevidently follows desire; indeed, his naiveté figures its own imaginative potential.18 Yet despite this potential, the text narrates hope’s ultimate failure in Nick’s commentary: Gatsby’s idealism is continuous with Nick’s skepticism. Cynicism in the novel hardens in the simultaneity of the imaginative investment of experience according to an ideal image of agency and the unassailable conviction that such an investment, and such an ideal image, are irrelevant and empty. Nick neither can nor, it turns out, does he necessarily desire to look at the world except through the broken prism of Gatsby’s shattered dream of self-evidence; Gatsby’s hope survives, but only in Nick’s rejection, only at the inaccessible limit of the text’s cynical production of reality. This ambivalence becomes obvious in Nick’s reconstruction of Gatsby’s final moments before Wilson murders him, a reconstruction that instantiates the broken identification underlying the novel’s cynicism: “I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it [i.e., Daisy’s call] would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass” (169). Gatsby’s disillusionment is a possibility only for Nick. If Gatsby dies after what should otherwise be the disappointing revelation of Daisy’s return to Tom, he manages to evade both revelation and disappointment. Nick’s repetition of “must have” tries to ascribe this disillusionment to Gatsby, but Nick, not Gatsby, imagines it. Nick questions whether Gatsby “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream,” and Nick wonders if Gatsby “must have felt that he had lost the old warm world,” and whether Gatsby saw a “new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.” Nick, not Gatsby, must live with the memory of a broken dream. Such an ascription is the only way he can understand

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his impossible appropriation of Gatsby. Desire and knowledge intersect without reaching a tenable equilibrium; they merely insist on each other’s inadequacy. The scene is entirely Nick’s: as he writes, “my rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any one” (169, my emphasis). In control of the scene, Nick is also paradoxically undone by it. Identification necessarily fails, precisely in the imagination in which it is desired. Gatsby represents absolutely nothing other than the desire that he be representative.

Cynicism, Longing, and America The disruption of Nick’s ability to imagine hope, an ability linked to the desire to identify individuals with nationalist discourses, figures the book’s larger cynical failure to satisfy Americanism’s instrumentalist desire. A notable irony of the novel (to judge from the frequency with which it has been noted) is Gatsby’s difference from so many assumptions about him. To look from the perspective of, say, Tom, Gatsby appears practiced and awkward, a dangerous and morally dubious accretion of an ascendant nouveau-riche culture; but if Tom’s “little investigation” (141) into Gatsby’s past essentially confirms his suspicions, Tom comes off looking bad because this confirmation comprehends little that the novel thinks is important about Gatsby. When Nick meets him, Gatsby looks like a faker with stiff speech and transparent stories; again, while strictly speaking this is true, it also is unsatisfying as a description of Gatsby. In Louisville, Daisy never offers herself an opportunity to question her assumption that he is a wealthy WASP (or, for Michaels, her assumption that he is “someone who could be ‘married’ to [her]”). Gatsby is conspicuous for so frequently providing an opportunity for others to make shoddy assumptions. With the possible exceptions of Jordan, who seems simply not to care, and Wolfsheim, who may be alone in initially recognizing Gatsby’s pluck, everybody reads Gatsby through flawed assumptions about him. Nick’s early misinterpretation of Gatsby is particularly indicative. Just returned from his “confus[ing]” dinner at the Buchanans, Nick sights Gatsby in his backyard, “standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens” (25). This passage establishes the trope of longing with which Nick will associate Gatsby, but it is conspicuous because Nick is of course wrong. In fact, Gatsby is there not in a proprietary capacity,

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but out of desire for the one thing he is not able to obtain. As we come to learn, Gatsby is often embarrassingly ungainly and awkward when Daisy is concerned, only occasionally “leisurely” and unaccountably “secure.” Gatsby’s gestures compel Nick to the extent that Nick assumes they signify, but these gestures will in fact demonstrate how Nick’s desire to read Gatsby through his own expectations subverts itself. An aspect of the apparatus of self, gesture is important in this book, in large part, perhaps, because our attention is drawn to it from the outset, when Nick asserts that a key to understanding personality is its apprehension as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.” We will more fully appreciate what Nick hopes he means a little later: Nick’s first introduction to Gatsby would have been embarrassing for Nick had Gatsby not been so magnanimous. Radiating “eternal reassurance,” Gatsby’s smile at Nick’s confusion exemplifies Gatsby at his finest: “It faced—or seemed to face— the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”19 It is just this gesture’s success that is at stake here, however. All Gatsby does is smile; he tactfully responds to Nick’s tactless complaint, and he shares war stories with Nick. But he ultimately appears too self-aware for Nick’s comfort: “Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.” Nick “got the strong impression that he [Gatsby] was picking his words with care” (53). Compelled by the subjectivity promised in Gatsby’s gestures, Nick catastrophically pierces their surface. In Gatsby’s car on the way to the city, Nick allows, “I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door” who “leav[es] his elegant sentences unfinished and slap[s] himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored suit” (69). But of course this isn’t quite right, either, as neither Nick nor his book believes with any conviction that Gatsby is “simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house.” However perversely, Gatsby never completely fails to make available for Nick a kind of untenable agency. Nick’s interpretive error as he watches Gatsby reach out across the bay therefore ends up being as alienating as it is doubly misleading: precisely

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to the extent that he reads Gatsby according to his own preconceptions, he projects onto Gatsby an ideal form of subjectivity that ends up doing little more than destabilizing his own faith in agency and, more fundamentally, representation. In fact, despite his “trembling” (26) unease, Gatsby is not at all uncertain of his quest; he does not question his ability to regain Daisy, as Nick, of course, does. If Gatsby is the occasion of so many mistaken identifications, the reason is that, just as Gatsby himself assumes experience is self-evidently available to his desire, so many others assume he should accede to their preconceptions (Jordan and Wolfsheim are perhaps inoculated by their indifference to Gatsby as irrelevant to their own labors of identificatory self-relation). In this sense, it is telling from the standpoint of the literary critical history of this book that Nick identifies Gatsby with a kind of longing on first seeing him. Longing operates in two modes in this book, and Nick, because of the kind of person he is at this point in the story, here incorrectly categorizes Gatsby’s. First, there is the kind of longing whose satisfaction is assumed; this is the kind that characterizes most of the book’s characters, including Nick when he initially comes East and, most conspicuously, Gatsby in his desire for Daisy. This kind of longing is never anxious because it is never assailed by doubt. Just as Gatsby cannot question Daisy’s devotion, so Nick never doubts himself, and so Tom and Daisy do not worry about the ability to fit life to their demands that allows them to be “careless” (187). But then there is the kind of longing, privileged insofar as it frames the narrative, that underlies Nick’s wanting “the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever” that he intimates at the novel’s opening (6) and that, frustrated, leaves the East “haunted” and “distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction” at the novel’s close (185). This kind of longing is fundamentally insecure, and it is ironically this kind of longing that Nick misreads in Gatsby after dinner at the Buchanans, though it takes him the better part of the novel to discover his mistake. In fact, longing for significance—for representation—always undercuts understanding of Gatsby. It’s not just that the signifier “Gatsby” shuttles between several interpretations and therefore has an indeterminate meaning; more primarily the text undermines this sign’s interpretation in general, challenges the claim that it means. By depicting the association of longing with understanding—specifically, the alignment, on the one hand, of a simple desire for recognizability and an understanding that accedes to expectations that are taken for granted, and the alignment, on the other hand, of an anxious and insecure longing and a revelatory understanding that defies expectations but only too late—this

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book destabilizes the expectation of discovery that underwrites so much inquiry both in and around this book: whether it is Tom’s a priori doubt that Gatsby is who he says he is, a doubt that leads to an accurate if insignificant revelation; Nick’s hereditary assumption that he is an excellent judge of character, an assumption whose failure essentially constitutes The Great Gatsby’s dramatic arc; or, finally, the long postwar literary critical history of this novel that always already expects to find America in it, a history that includes the recent presumption that the novel offers a window onto the dynamics of U.S. racialization. Gatsby may be “the ultimate text,” as Betsy Nies contends, but the presumption that this text means something specific and stable poisons interpretation of this great American novel’s great American. Indeed, this textual Gatsby is always presumed to represent the meaning of “America”: just as nativist Tom, aroused by “this man Goddard,” worries that Gatsby represents the approaching degeneration of a miscegenated America; and Nick, finally enchanted by Gatsby’s unfailing belief in the “orgastic future” even as it bears him “back ceaselessly into the past,” hopes Gatsby represents the confident American optimism with which they grew up, “where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night” (189); so postwar criticism cannot help, it seems, but read him as the historical key to understanding American society. But Gatsby always resists these readings. Looking back on the enthusiasm of the 1920s from the postcrash perspective of 1931, Fitzgerald wrote, “it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel so intensely about our surroundings any more.”20 This final sentiment sums up Nick’s sense of lost possibility, but the lost “rosy and romantic” eagerness was Gatsby’s; the book enforces a frustrating—indeed, a subversive—separation between experience and meaning. Chip Rhodes has written that American literary history has largely conceptualized the 1920s through the era’s own partial understanding of itself: “The clichés about the period we alternatively embrace and debunk were clichés to the participants themselves.”21 This is no doubt true, but it also sounds a little easy; The Great Gatsby, at least in light of Fitzgerald’s later piece (and even if, ironically, it created some of them), pierces the period’s clichés enough—but only enough—to annul the recognizant pleasure they grant. Cynicism is this sad knowledge. This book dramatizes meaning’s escape from the desire to fit it into recognizable patterns that render it representative. While a character like Tom—and recent critics like Michaels et al.—may

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flee from this indeterminacy to the compensating racial decisiveness of nativism, the novel does not take for granted a sign system—racial or otherwise—as sociological bedrock or as critical methodology.22 If Gatsby sought to recognize the image of his desire in experience, Nick, initially presuming his own ability to read experience as a set of relatively uncomplicated and “unmistakable” signs, eventually reinscribes that experience as evidence of desire’s frustration. In this way Fitzgerald’s novel surprisingly articulates literary criticism’s long history of taking it—in particular its “aboutness”—for granted. Through Nick’s contradictory representations of Gatsby, at once positioning Gatsby’s idealism as an object of desire and exposing it as ridiculously sentimental, this novel leaves some troubling implications in its narrative wake, suggesting that the recognizable interpretations we want to retrieve from it, admittedly intimated in the text, ultimately remain inaccessibly equivocal. The elegiac final pages of the book, in which Nick attempts to recover Gatsby, are radically ambivalent; their backward glance, while pervaded with longing, is also shot through with foreclosure: “Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine” (188). The house can no longer signify anything without also signifying that Gatsby is no longer in it, no longer available. Nick’s success in avoiding the taxi driver who “never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside” suggests only a miscarried triumph; the driver really only underscores Nick’s more fundamental inability to evade the grip of Gatsby’s irretrievability, an irretrievability underscored when “[o]ne night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.” The materiality of this last guest manqué underscores Gatsby’s inaccessible immateriality. Gatsby’s catastrophe, in Nick’s disappointed appropriation of it, exposes in a darkly fraught image the catachresis subtending America’s emblematic representationality. Just as Nick can value Gatsby’s magisterial if naïve confidence in agency only by recognizing what he calls its “appalling sentimentality,” so the imagination adequate to America’s new world endures only in its ephemeral emergence from the vast landscape of its shortcomings: 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

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new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had 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 with his capacity for wonder. (189) Nick’s “inessential houses” that “melt away” recall Gatsby’s early Lake Superior “reveries,” which offered “an outlet for his imagination  .  .  .  a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded on a fairy’s wing” (105); just as at the outset he forged an alliance with Gatsby via hope, here in closing Nick links himself formally to Gatsby. Once the accidental burden of “reality” is lifted, Nick sees what Gatsby must have seen, “a fresh, green breast of the new world,” the “wonder” of imperial creativity formally nourishing Gatsby’s “first pick[ing] out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.” But it is Gatsby who is associated with “America,” not Nick. It is Gatsby’s “wonder” that is of record here, not Nick’s, and Gatsby is the one who faced “something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” What belongs to Nick, on the contrary, is the transitoriness of this “enchanted moment.” Indeed, Nick recourses to his familiar “must have” construction—a form of presumption to which he appeals whenever his attempted identification with Gatsby threatens the judgment from which, despite his opening protestations, Nick derives so much confident self-recognition—in describing the “transitory enchanted moment” of America’s ideal genesis. Nick has America on his mind in this closing passage, as he has throughout the novel, and this transitory enchanted moment, the principle of irreversibility, maps the novel’s Americanism. Gatsby did not know, as Nick now does know, that his dream is “already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night” (189), and not, in fact, “so close.” If Nick wants to associate Gatsby with America, he also knows such an association is impossible—not because Gatsby never achieved his tawdry dream, but because the only justification this dream ever had, the one Nick articulates for it, lies in an inaccessibly fictional national past. America is an idea inextricable from the absurdity of its realization: this book cannot separate the epistemological majesty of the imperial enterprise from its articulation in Gatsby’s “roadhouse.” But that doesn’t simply—and nostalgically—mean that American history is

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a tale of corruption. In this book, the pure ideality of “America” is not betrayed by experience; on the contrary, experience is betrayed by the ideal fiction called “America.” On the final page, Nick seems to move to associate himself with Gatsby’s imaginative strivings: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year receded before us” (189). In his shift from the third person to the first, Nick makes a kind of common cause with Gatsby: the “orgastic future  .  .  .  receded before us.” And yet this identification is ultimately only provisional: Nick breaks with Gatsby on this very point. If Nick wants to believe in the orgastic future, the subordinating comma introducing the announcement of that desire suspects the independence with which only “Gatsby believed in the green light.” The “inessential” landscape of suburban Long Island was all there ever was to the epistemological productivity of “America,” but it only becomes inessential in comparison to its toxic ideal image. This is the remnant of Gatsby’s powerful desire, and it is the knowledge Nick can neither dismiss nor embrace. If Gatsby’s tragedy was born in his mistaken reification of a fetish of possibility, then Nick’s cynical elegy for Gatsby marks the inevitable irretrievability of an always fetishized “American” identity; while it may be tempting for criticism to try to recuperate the origin of current articulations of “American” meaning from the literary past, Nick’s narrative of Gatsby suggests something far less optimistically statist. The novel closes with the frustrating coincidence of Gatsby’s earnest desire and Nick’s skeptical knowledge; its concluding image of identification is actually one of dispossession, as Nick is left haunted by what Gatsby couldn’t achieve even as he tries to hide this irreparable failure behind an idealized national image. In exposing the idealism underlying sentimental desire, The Great Gatsby more gravely exposes the sentimentalism underlying idealistic desire. Possibly in spite of itself, much of the historicist criticism that seeks national images of America’s racialized identity in The Great Gatsby’s literary past remains in thrall to the Americanist myth of Gatsby’s romance of self-fashioning, the romance of ideality’s promise to actuality as the mechanism by which self and nation are metaphorically bound to each other. But this romance relies on an instrumentalization of recognition, an assumption that identity is something existentially stable and epistemologically secure—an assumption, essentially, that it is at root indicative and representative. In fact, this novel stages a cynical dramatization of an impossible identification, splitting identity into a desire and a knowledge that can never

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be coincident. This novel is not about American identity; instead, it offers disappointed testimony to America’s inability to mean anything one wants it to mean. Race becomes, then, another attempt to displace, by reinscribing, this fundamental challenge to statist thinking. The cynical American, Nick, looks back from the moment of frustrated imperfection to the receding ground of perfection, as “America,” the ideal anchor of American literary criticism, dissolves in the inessential sentimentality of naïve desire.

6  /

Miss Lonelyhearts’ Insincere Theodicy

“I Dont Know What to Do” In the late spring of 1939, six years after the publication of Miss Lonelyhearts in book form (and seven after chapters began to appear in the resuscitated Contact magazine, which he coedited with William Carlos Williams), Nathanael West wrote a letter to Malcolm Cowley from Hollywood that, putatively about The Day of the Locust (just then coming out), illuminates the cynicism in his earlier short novel about a desperate advice columnist: “Lately, I have been feeling even more discouraged than usual.  .  .  .  I have no particular message for a troubled world (except possibly ‘beware’) and the old standby of ‘pity and irony’ seems like nothing but personal vanity.” He tells Cowley that while he tried representing the “activities” of California’s “strong progressive movement” in “this new novel . . . about Hollywood,” he found that doing so was “impossible.  .  .  .  I made a desperate attempt before giving up. I tried to describe a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League, but it didn’t fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film.” Repudiating the expectation—or rather the presumed competence that attends the expectation—that one should “write out of hope and for a new and better world,” West admits he is incapable of translating his “honestly” held political beliefs into writing. “The terrible sincere struggle of the League came out comic when I touched it and even libelous. . . . When not writing a novel—say at a meeting of a committee we have out here to help the migratory worker—I do believe it and try to act on that belief. But at the

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typewriter by myself I can’t . . . certainly not by an act of will alone.” If he wants to understand writing as a normalized—and sincere—translation of a political agenda, he finds the expectation underlying that desire—a point of faith for many of West’s radical literary friends publishing in places like the New Masses—to be feckless: as he writes of the just-released Grapes of Wrath, “Take the ‘mother’ in Steinbeck’s swell novel—I want to believe in her and yet inside myself I honestly can’t.” Neglecting writing in favor of sincere, nonliterary political participation resolves little, however, despite his “try[ing] to act on . . . belief”: “I hope all this doesn’t seem too silly to you—to me it is an ever-present worry and what, in a way, is worse—an enormous temptation to forget the bitter, tedious novels and to spend that time on committees which act on hope and faith without a smile. (It was even a struggle this time for me to leave off the quotation marks.)” Announced in the terrible irresolvability of the last, parenthetical, remark, the only option available to West is the cynicism of “comic” writing: “I’m a comic writer and it seems impossible for me to handle any of the ‘big things’ without seeming to laugh or at least smile. Is it possible to contrive a right–about face with one’s writing because of a conviction based on a theory? I doubt it.”1 Attracted by the possibility of a “sincer[ity]” that eludes him, and incapable of rendering “conviction” except with a winking “laugh or at least smile,” West has, in a literature that actively resists the expectation that it be legibly relevant to legitimized sociopolitical protocols, cynically inscribed the possibility of a “message” in his “discouraged” inability to “write out of hope for a new and better world.” Miss Lonelyhearts’ humiliating surplus of suffering certainly presents itself as an appropriate object of the sincere political conviction West addresses in his letter to Cowley. But if this suffering is inescapable, the novel makes it impossible to respond earnestly to it.2 Wickedly sarcastic from its very title, the first chapter, “Miss Lonelyhearts, Help Me, Help Me,” announces the tenacity of suffering in the repetition in the letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives of the plea to be relieved from it. “Sick-ofit-all,” in an obscene lampoon of domestic virtue, writes abjectly of the debilitating pain caused by pregnancy and childbirth: “I am in such pain I dont know what to do sometimes I think I will kill myself my kidneys hurt so much. My husband thinks no woman can be a good catholic and not have children irregardless of the pain. . . . I cry all the time it hurts so much and I dont know what to do” (59–60). Noseless “Desperate,” despairing of the possibility of romantic love, politely seeks perverse advice: “I am sixteen years old and I dont know what to do and would

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appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. . . . I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terrible fate? . . . Ought I commit suicide?” (60). Fifteen-year-old “Harold S.,” with a wretched plea for empathy, writes of his thirteen-year-old sister: “Gracie is deaf and dumb and biger than me but not very smart on account of being deaf and dumb. . . . Mother makes her play on the roof because we dont want her to get run over as she aint very smart. Last week a man came on the roof and did something dirty to her. She told me about it and I dont know what to do. . . . If I tell mother she will beat Gracie up awfull because I am the only one who loves her and last time when she tore her dress they loked her in the closet 2 days. . . . So please what would you do if the same hapened in your family” (61). Supplications all, these letters, in which physical and emotional deformities blur, are so comically pathetic as to render sincere response impossible. Each of the letter writers expects from Miss Lonelyhearts an explanation, and if their conditions seem irresolvable, suffering’s persistence is inseparable from the presumption that suffering can be relieved. The letters are so hopeless in part because they are framed by the betrayed expectation of a moral economy: no advice at all will ever be able to answer the implicit entreaty in the repeated claim “I dont know what to do.” On the other hand, Miss Lonelyhearts, errant newspaper advice columnist, is himself betrayed by the opposite problem: if the letter writers expect sympathy, Miss Lonelyhearts, standard-bearer of the commercialized assumption that there’s a cure for what ails, is incapable of granting it. The suffering revealed in the letters is repeated in his own agonized inability to answer them. This failure—in the novel’s second paragraph, we read that “although the deadline was less than a quarter of an hour away, he was still working on his leader. . . . he found it impossible to continue”(59)—reflects the complaint not quite articulated in the letters, clichéd, imprecise, and vague pleas for help, yet also unequivocal. But Miss Lonelyhearts stumbles on this expectation; he quite simply cannot write despite an irrepressible desire to answer the suffering. If he longs for a sincerity with which to explain suffering equal to the pathetic sincerity of Sick-of-it-all’s “I cry all the time it hurts so much and I don’t know what to do,” Desperate’s “what did I do to deserve such a terrible fate,” and Harold S.’s “I am the only one who loves her. . . . So please what would you do if the same hapened in your family,” Miss Lonelyhearts’

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melodramatic sentimentality—oscillating between the perversely morbid (and plagiarized) aestheticism of his unfinished leader (“Life is worth while, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy, and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar” [59]) and a failed Christian redemption narrative to which the letters always turn him in desperation, which is in any case far more ably navigated by his unrepentantly sarcastic editor Shrike (“He stopped reading. Christ was the answer, but, if he did not want to get sick, he had to stay away from the Christ business. Besides, Christ was Shrike’s particular joke” [61])—falls far short, and he knows it. Shrike has been too persuasive in showing how Christ is no different from any of the other cures and escapes marketed in a hegemonic mass culture in this novel. By characterizing identifiable salvation narratives like “the soil,” “the South Seas,” “Hedonism,” “Art! Be an artist or writer” (an escape “that should suit you so much better,” he tells Miss Lonelyhearts), “suicide,” “drugs,” and finally God “worshiped as Preventer of Decay” (95–97), Shrike has “accelerated his [Miss Lonelyhearts’] sickness by teaching him to handle his one escape, Christ, with a thick glove of words” that cannot deliver the consumer good they render visible (95). In contrast to Miss Lonelyhearts, faltering and maladroit before the typewriter in the opening scene, Shrike lithely dictates a letter for Miss Lonelyhearts to “Christ, the Miss Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts,” a diety-become-commodified cliché, to whom he can aver, “I read your column and like it very much,” and signs it “A Regular Subscriber” (98). Mordant to the antic core, Shrike couldn’t care less about the normative trajectory of suffering; but as such he also helps establish the problematic centrality of the regulation of suffering in this book. Apparent in the desperation with which Miss Lonelyhearts tries to encode suffering in recognizable terms—terms capable of normalizing it—West’s novel represents cynicism in a desire for sincerity that, never achieved, shortcircuits the self-evidence of normativity. Though it may be tempting to say that the cynicism of Miss Lonelyhearts is the cynical attitude of a specific character, to recognize in either Miss Lonelyhearts or Shrike the indicative focus of the book’s representation of cynicism would suppress the book’s important critique of the relationship between sincerity and normativity. It is precisely the failure of recognition—the inability to account for suffering in terms that might fix its historical meaning, as the structural effect of some economic, national, institutional, or psychological force, for example—that underlies the book’s cynicism. To claim simply that Miss Lonelyhearts or Shrike is

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a cynic (and therefore that the novel names and accuses him as such) is to reinscribe recognition’s normative self-evidence, whose absence is in fact attested by every character: thus, paradoxically, to label either character a cynic would be in fact to accuse him simply of being wrong, but not cynical. Read for the failure of recognition, however, this book administers suffering as a trope. The physical and emotional pain marked alike by Miss Lonelyhearts and his correspondents (and ignored by Shrike) is really a representational pain: they lack the normative language to describe their suffering. Thus the letters are so often accompanied by a demand to know: their repetition of the primordial plea to “know what to do” reiterates a more basic linguistic incompetence that Miss Lonelyhearts himself encounters in his unsatisfying shuffle between discredited sentimental attractions. But the novel, as well, lacks a self-evidently etiological discourse. In so often failing to be referential, language illuminates the normativity at stake in the novel’s therapeutic-redemptive leitmotif. The realist desire for reference and the historicist desire to explain have the same normative foundation; once this foundation is discredited, discredited too is the ability to sincerely “act on hope and faith without a smile.”

The Mass Production of Experience Parody beats sincere indicative description to the punch in the opening pages of Miss Lonelyhearts. In the first sentence, Miss Lonelyhearts is already caricatured as “the Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are-you-in-trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-toMiss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you)” (59). He is more type than individual—we know the questions he is asked and can anticipate the answers (at least those he should be able to provide)—but the type has failed: incapable of the commonplaces expected of him, he is sitting at his desk, reading a perverse prayer written in acerbic jest by Shrike. If mass culture’s “Christ business” can reduce redemption to the mawkish “Help me, Miss L, help me, help me. In Saecula saeculorum” with which Shrike pokes fun at Miss Lonelyhearts (59), Shrike’s indifference to the seriousness of the letters’ pleas glosses Miss Lonelyhearts’ own inability to answer them. Shrike’s satiric supplication (which asks variously of Miss Lonelyhearts, whom a few pages later he describes along with his agony-column ilk as “the priests of twentieth-century America,” to “glorify,” “nourish,” “intoxicate,” and “wash me,” and to “hide me in your heart”) marks the letters’ transfiguration from expectations of relief to

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inarticulate but undeniable evidence of suffering; it is impossible to respond to the letters despite their being encoded—which is to say readable and writable in the first place—precisely by the expectation of response. Repetition has rendered Miss Lonelyhearts professionally impotent. After achieving only a tawdry paraphrase of Pater in his macabre yet stillborn appeal to a “faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark alter,” Miss Lonelyhearts “found it impossible to continue. The letters were no longer funny. He could not go on finding the same joke funny thirty times a day for months on end. And on most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of human suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife” (59). Unsuccessful reproductions all, his column as much as the letters fails to break free of vulgar cliché. (Even his response to his predicament is iterated, as he articulates it in the same terms—as a failed joke—to his girlfriend Betty halfway through the book [94].) Miss Lonelyhearts is incompetent before the typewriter, rereading the cookie-dough letters, legible because reproducibly mass-produced. Thomas Strychacz has written that “iteration is the predominant rhetorical and psychological mode of West’s mass culture.” In response to the letters, “all of them alike,” Miss Lonelyhearts’ “columns are all alike in their rhetoric and in their repeated failure to conclude. Constant iteration is made to replace the equilibrium of unquestioned structures of belief, papering over an inevitable slippage of confidence even as the iterative mode draws attention to its artifice.” The formal reproducibility of utterance itself marks the failure to respond to the plea for significance. “By way of demonstrating the hegemony of the mass media, all speech in the novel tends toward the characteristic linguistic strategies of the mass media. . . . West constantly demonstrates his mastery of the cliché, which invests the speech of his characters so thoroughly that many of them have no linguistic life beyond the repertoire of formulaic expressions produced by mass culture.”3 Miss Lonelyhearts lacks a relevant response to the letters because explanation can go no further than cliché. He mechanically turns to his typewriter, apparently with nothing to say: “He bent over the typewriter and began pounding the keys” (61–62). Indeed, we read very little of Miss Lonelyhearts’ columns over the course of the novel. With few exceptions, which are acknowledged by both the novel and Miss Lonelyhearts himself to be inadequate, his writing is inaccessible to the reader. Language in this book is rarely usefully meaningful. If misery can at best be indicated by repeatable clichés that lack

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the normalized self-evidence projected by their ready legibility, Miss Lonelyhearts, like West himself in his letter to Cowley, lacks a vocabulary to articulate an earnest response to the multiplying letters. “On his desk were piled those he had received this morning. He started through them again, searching for some clew to a sincere answer” (59). Later, returning to New York with Betty, the “Good Girl”4 who attempts to cure him of his distress with a trip to the country (“Whenever he mentioned the letters or Christ, she changed the subject to tell long stories about life on a farm” [99]), “Miss Lonelyhearts knew that Betty had failed to cure him and that he had been right when he had said that he could never forget the letters. He felt better knowing this, because he had begun to think himself a faker and a fool” (103). Miss Lonelyhearts wants to help the “crowds of people” he sees “mov[ing] through the street with a dreamlike violence,” but he knows he cannot. “He saw a man who appeared to be on the verge of death stagger into a movie theater that was showing a picture called Blonde Beauty. He saw a ragged woman with an enormous goiter pick a love story magazine out of a garbage can and seem very excited by her find” (103). Strychacz writes that mass culture operates in part “by making dreams into commodities,”5 and it is indeed difficult, at least by this point in the reception history of West, to read this novel without this fact in mind. In its encoding of legible desire, language renders Miss Lonelyhearts incapable of sincerity even as it produces the normative expectation that satisfaction is recognizable. The replaceability of individual dream-commodities for the “crowds of people”—a crowd indistinguishable from the replaceable people who “cry for help” to Miss Lonelyhearts under the assumed and replaceable names “Desperate, Harold S., Catholic-mother, Broken-hearted, Broad-shoulders, Sick-ofit-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband” (126)—is itself repeated in Miss Lonelyhearts’ iterated gaze—“He saw. . . . He saw . . . ”; neither those who “cry for help” nor Miss Lonelyhearts himself can normalize either the “cry” or what it responds to. Thus Miss Lonelyhearts’ failed sincerity has everything to do with Strychacz’s “iteration” insofar as mass production is the linking term between language’s ability to represent and a pervasive therapeutic expectation. The persistence of the letters’ claim on Miss Lonelyhearts is reflected in the powerful valences retained by consumer capitalism to encode reality and desire in the book. Indeed, as Miss Lonelyhearts realizes during an evening out with Shrike’s wife, Mary, at “a place called El Gaucho” (an arrangement fully if sarcastically sanctioned by Shrike

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himself), reality is better seen as a normative concept, a machine that administers the relationship between words and things, rather than itself a referent: Guitars, bright shawls, exotic foods, outlandish costumes—all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust. He should therefore realize that the people who came to El Gaucho were the same as those who wanted to write and live the life of an artist, wanted to be an engineer and wear leather puttees, wanted to develop a grip that would impress the boss, wanted to cushion Raoul’s head on their swollen breasts. They were the same people as those who wrote to Miss Lonelyhearts for help. (83) By indicating the paradigmatic alliance—in the explanatory promise to redeem “want”—between the “Christ business” and “the business of dreams,” El Gaucho demonstrates the imperial jurisdiction of a commodified recognition. When the couple enter, “the orchestra was playing a Cuban rhumba. A waiter dressed as a South-American cowboy led them to a table. Mary immediately went Spanish.” Appealing to an uncertain if somehow familiar referent, El Gaucho fuels a desire it presumes to answer. Professing to “like this place,” Mary admits, “It’s a little fakey, I know, but it’s gay and I so want to be gay.” Desire for the recognizable rather than accuracy or authenticity is the ultimate warrant here; prescriptively legible, experience follows the iterable scripts of a mass-produced, urban modernity. Mary “offere[ed] herself in a series of formal, impersonal gestures. She was wearing a tight, shiny dress that was like glass-covered steel and there was something cleanly mechanical in her pantomime.” Asking why she wants “to be gay,” however, Miss Lonelyhearts remains unsure of how he should relate to this monstrous desire-machine that encompasses El Gaucho’s consumerist fantasy, the letters, and his own infelicitous sentimentality. “In a great cold wave, the readers of his column crashed over the music, over the bright shawls and picturesque waiters, over her shining body” (83–84). He tries to plunge himself into Mary’s bosom “to save himself”—she conveniently “wear[s] a medal low down on her chest” (80) and “leaned over for him to look into the neck of her dress” (84)6—but a waiter approaching the table frustrates even this dubious displacement. Miss Lonelyhearts has learned not to laugh at the advertisements for the same reason that the letters he receives more than thirty times each day are no longer a joke, and it’s

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for this same reason that West admitted to Cowley to not being able to represent sincere “hope” and “faith” without “a smile”: competence cannot survive the challenge to self-evidence in the exposure of normativity as a fantasy. Demonstrating how Miss Lonelyhearts is “saturated with the language of commercial hype,” Rita Barnard indexes the novel to the Depression’s transformational political economy, in which the production of commodities was far less primary than their circulation; the “strategic problem” of the Depression was in fact “a problem concerning the production of needs.”7 Thus language legitimates desires by already recognizing them, by encoding the very process of commodification in its syntax. Warren Susman makes a similar claim about the Depression, arguing that the much-touted “culture of abundance” of the American 1930s is figured in the period’s language as a surfeit of signification. Language becomes saturated with meanings; it is meaning, always potentially normalizable, but not yet a particular normative truth, that is produced in and derived from the use of language.8 Shrike is right to respond as he does to his girlfriend Miss Farkis’s expression of interest in the “new thomistic synthesis” of Christ and commodity culture: “If you need a synthesis, here is the kind of material to use,” he avers as he produces a wire-service clipping (from the AP) about the “Liberal Church of America,” a “Western” religious group whose “Supreme Pontiff,” “despite objection to his program by a Cardinal of the sect,” will use an adding machine and a goat in a “sack cloth and ashes” ritual for a man condemned for slaying “an aged recluse . . . over a small amount of money”: “Prayers for the condemned man’s soul will be offered on an adding machine” because “numbers . . . constitute the only universal language” (65). Ready-made, mass-producible values and significations, already legible and in circulation, overdetermine the recognition of legitimate meaning—and of therapeutic redress. Thus, Barnard argues, “it is fair to say that the entire thrust of the novel is to demolish all of society’s received ideas of redemption.”9 It is too simple to claim that West’s novel aims to demystify a far-reaching prescriptive consumerist ideology: “Miss Lonelyhearts is at least equally concerned with a process of remystification, with the culture industry’s tendency to recirculate traditional forms of meaning—often the very meanings that it has undermined and replaced. . . . The world West evokes in Miss Lonelyhearts, in short, is not simply a world of fragmented narratives and lost meanings, but one of proliferating images, pseudotruths, and slogans. It is a world replete with clichéd solutions evoked in a wide range of rhetorics, equivalent only in

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their optimistic and rather fatuous affirmation.”10 The logic of the commodity recovers experience in recognizable, exchangeable trajectories of desire, but, saturated by this “fragmentary, machine-like experience,” which the narratives proliferating through the novel promise to answer, this world challenges normalized self-evidence.11 Drawing a critical vocabulary from Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”—whose focus is “the decay of the subjective significance of life, the resulting loss of the ability to tell stories, and therefore also the ability to give advice”—Barnard claims that the “very situation Miss Lonelyhearts depicts” illustrates these problems: “the agonies of the agony columnist who has no counsel for his confused readers, or even for himself.” The problem for Barnard is not a lack of material for narrative (far from it), but that, as figured in Miss Lonelyhearts, Americans now find themselves incapable of writing one. If Benjamin’s storyteller “is ‘a man who has counsel for his readers,’ the man whose ability to articulate the unity of his own life imbues experience with unique meaning and authenticity and gives it a public usefulness and relevance,” then “the storyteller is everything that West’s confused advice columnist tries, and fails, to be.” The dynamic public forum in which Benjamin’s storyteller speaks is absent in the novel: Miss Lonelyhearts’ correspondents produce “letters, written in isolation and confusion, already signif[ying] the disappearance of the kind of community of tellers and interpreters in which advice is possible.”12 This focus on “an emerging consumer economy,” in place of scrutinizing an already legible “production-oriented economy for signs of its imminent collapse,” offers West, in Jonathan Veitch’s estimation, a view of how “for many Americans the causes of the Depression defied representation. . . . Among the many deleterious effects of the Depression (hunger, joblessness, degradation), this vertiginous loss of the capacity to represent social reality was among the worst.” The Depression’s “maddening surrealism . . . seemed to meet all efforts to explain its causes with the laughter of a jeering clown,” a laughter that mocked also an American’s “sense of control over his fate.” West responded with a stylistic “superrealism” that “caricatures-burlesques-deconstructs the mimetic codes and conventions upon which more traditional forms of realism rely.”13 But West’s burlesque also deconstructs the normative conventions inscribed in realistic ones. Though West was by no means immune to the pull of the proletarian aesthetic principles advocated by the Communist Party, Veitch continues, “his decision to explore an entirely different subject matter not only represented a self-conscious break from the fiction of the left, it constituted a subtle criticism of its interpretation of

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American society as well.”14 As West himself put it in a well-known letter to Edmund Wilson (dated 6 April 1939, a little more than a month before his letter to Cowley), “Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the ‘schools.’ My books meet no needs except my own.” Unlike his radical peers, West aimed his critique at a region not yet prescribed in recognizable terms: “I forget the broad sweep, the big canvas, the shotgun adjectives, the important people, the significant ideas, the lessons to be taught, the epic Thomas Wolfe, the realistic James Farrell,—and go on making what one critic called ‘private and unfunny jokes.’ The radical press, although I consider myself on their side, doesn’t like it, and thinks it fascist sometimes, and the literature boys, whom I detest, detest me in turn. The highbrow press finds that I avoid the important things and the lending library touts in the daily press think me shocking.” If, in the terms of his letter to Cowley, West has political “conviction,” his critique of recognition in the letter to Wilson nonetheless ensures that it remains unrecognizable and untranscribable, and he can admit of “no particular message for a troubled world.” “The proof of all this,” West writes in his letter to Wilson, “is that I’ve never had the same publisher twice . . . because there is nothing to root for in my books and what is even worse, no rooters” (793). Though the commodity form reigns in West’s world through the agency of a repeatable and recognizable redemption narrative, this persuasive sovereignty belies West’s uneasy attention to the Depression’s disruption of empirical security. If Mary Shrike can confidently insist that “I so want to be gay,” her ease is unreferred to a secure regulative concept of the real. Veitch cites the many forms of mediation in Miss Lonelyhearts: West is interested in hearing “the people talk,” but they always do so in a negotiated way—we see where they talk, how they talk, what clichés they use, how they misspeak. By drawing on such conventions as the deadpan and the comic strip, both born of the emerging mass media, West implicates the mass-cultural capacity of mechanical reproduction in structuring the way people perceive the world. West chose to explore how experience is inscribed by the mechanisms of representation.15 Thus, as Veitch puts it, the “letters are structured in advance with an ideology of healthy-mindedness that both formulates suffering and burlesques it in ways that exceed the sufferers’ understanding. Despite its incurable nature, suffering is construed as a definable lack that can somehow be filled by an expert who presumably ‘no’s.” Veitch takes the advice column as a model of 1930s public discourse, but if his point is that the advice column has as much “documentary” validity as going “directly to the

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people themselves” because “all such contact is necessarily mediated by a variety of discursive and ideological structures,”16 West’s more cynical point seems to be that sincerity cannot survive the threat to self-evidence embodied in that mediation. Promising reprieve only in the form of cliché, language resists the normative mode of explanation. This assault on the normative infrastructure of realism underwrites the novel’s cynical challenge to sincerity. Girlfriend Betty, whose characteristic response to Miss Lonelyhearts is always, “Are you sick?” (72), and who suggests later that Miss Lonelyhearts “give up” his agony column and “work in an advertising agency or something” (94), articulates the ultimate—and ultimately unsatisfied—promise of consumerism: that all discontent can be cured. While Betty ignores Miss Lonelyhearts’ problem by acknowledging but discounting the ideological homology between the letter writers and the consumers of advertisements, Shrike, who fully appreciates this homology’s importance but does not care, refuses to take Miss Lonelyhearts’ problem seriously, at once suggesting that “America has her own religions” whose potency emerges from a synthesis of redemptive and consumerist vocabularies and claiming to be himself “a great saint  .  .  .  I can walk on my own water. Haven’t you heart of Shrike’s Passion in the Luncheonette, or the Agony in the Soda Fountain?” (65–66). Equating the banal promises of Christ and consumer culture, Shrike dismisses Miss Lonelyhearts by preaching, “God alone is our escape. The Church is our only hope, the First Church of Christ Dentist, where He is worshiped as Preventer of Decay” (97). Shrike’s parody of the “Christ business” and Betty’s therapeutic clinicism are both prescribed by a relentless logic of consumerism that endlessly reinscribes desire and suffering through marketable “cures,” compelling West’s miserable characters to account for their miseries in terms of this inscription. Thus, in a dream, Miss Lonelyhearts—a magician onstage in a crowded theater—tries to lead the audience in a prayer, “but no matter how hard he struggled, this prayer was one Shrike had taught him”: “Oh, Lord, we are not of those who wash in wine, water, urine, vinegar, fire, oil, bay rum, milk, brandy, or boric acid. Oh, Lord, we are of those who wash solely in the Blood of the Lamb” (68). Miss Lonelyhearts cannot be sincere because his longing to answer the letters’ “cry for help” has lost its self-evidence in the same mass-cultural mediation that has encoded the letters—as it has the very possibility of desire. If Miss Lonelyhearts seeks to avoid Shrike’s sarcastic disregard, not knowing how to respond, Betty’s earnest faith in medical regulation rarely fails to elicit hostility from the agony columnist, who by making

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sincerity conspicuous offers the book an opportunity to pierce the selfevidence of the commodity-form: “What a kind bitch you are. As soon as any one acts viciously, you say he’s sick. Wife-torturers, rapers of small children, according to you they’re all sick. No morality, only medicine. Well, I’m not sick. I don’t need any of your damned aspirin. I’ve got a Christ complex. Humanity . . . I’m a humanity lover. All the broken bastards . . . ” (72, ellipses in original). His linguistic difficulty, by focusing Betty’s facility with language, her competent expectation that an administered life answers proper desires, as well as the Shrikes’ nihilistic and unconcerned ability to find pleasure where Miss Lonelyhearts finds only frustration, points to the machinery of recognition underlying both the “business of dreams” and the letter writers’ iterated “I dont know what to do.” Explicit in this imperial expectation of legibility is a link between recognition and competence, which fail together along with an undermined self-evidence—only obliquely indicated in the unequivocality with which the “bastards” of consumer capitalism have been “broken.”

Linguistic Failure Encoded to be legible in the same process by which an emergent consumer system encodes desire, the letters lack an unequivocal referent for their articulations of pain; able neither to dismiss the suffering as ridiculous, as Shrike can, nor take for granted its cure, as Betty can, Miss Lonelyhearts reads as insincere his inability to address suffering except through the clichés that render it legible. Thus he understands his “desire to help” these people with “their broken hands and torn mouths” as a compulsion to abstract from their particular sufferings, which particularity cannot but be, in Veitch’s term, inauthentically “mediated”: “Prodded by his conscience, he began to generalize” (103). What he “generalize[s]” about is the pernicious effect of mass culture, what he calls at El Gaucho “the business of dreams,” which has completely contained the salutary effect of imagination: “Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst.” Though he “was happy” because his “desire” to help “all the broken bastards” “was sincere,” his happiness persists “despite the feeling of guilt which accompanied it” (103). The reason for his guilt, “the thing that made his share in it particularly bad,” is “that he was capable of dreaming the Christ dream. He felt that he had failed at it, not so much because of Shrike’s jokes or his own self-

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doubt, but because of his lack of humility.” Diagnosing himself as being inadequately sincere, “before falling asleep, he vowed to make a sincere attempt to be humble” (103). What’s “bad,” what causes his “guilt,” therefore, is the persistence of the discredited “Christ dream.” His hope that by reasserting his “humility” he will be able to revivify this “dream” functions rather to indicate the Christ dream’s lack of self-evidence. The next day, feeling sick after opening “about a dozen” letters, he “decided to do his column for that day without reading any of them. . . . ‘Christ died for you. He died nailed to a tree for you. His gift to you is suffering and it is only through suffering that you can know Him. Cherish this gift, for. . . . ’ ” Suspecting that even Christ is now a “vanity”—like the “vanity” that West himself would suspect, in his letter to Cowley, “pity and irony” had become in his own attempt to address a “troubled world” in his writing—he “looked out the window. A slow spring rain was changing the dusty tar roofs below him to shiny patent leather. The water made everything slippery and he could find no support for either his eyes or his feelings” (104). In the metaphorical slippage of his insincerity, Christ dream and reality alike slip into referential ambiguity. In fact, Miss Lonelyhearts’ compulsion to help is always attended by linguistic failure. At the opening, while he is paralyzed before the letters and can write no more than “a dozen words” of “the same old stuff,” Shrike can “dictate” a facile paean to instrumentality worthy of a newspaper circular: “Art is a way out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering” (62). The burden promised in Shrike’s mocking “Go on from there,” conspicuously closing the chapter, is that Miss Lonelyhearts cannot. Betraying the commodified overdetermination of reality, language in Miss Lonelyhearts is rarely depictive in any obvious way. The novel’s second chapter opens with the problematic role of language: “When Miss Lonelyhearts quit work, he found that the weather had turned warm and that the air smelt as though it had been artificially heated. He decided to walk to Delehanty’s speakeasy for a drink. In order to get there, it was necessary to cross a little park” (63). Language in fact bars access to the reality it renders; “to get there” is not so easy. Language defies expectations: warmth, what might in other contexts serve as a sign of spring and a promise of fertility or rebirth, here implies nothing of the sort, and instead is recognizably manufactured. And warmth “smel[ls].” A park, in other contexts a site of rest and reprieve, becomes an obstacle. This confusion accumulates when he “swallowed mouthfuls of shade” on entering the park, and when

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“he walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear.” Metaphor seems fatally loosed from any self-evident or secure relationship to experience, as natural cycles break down and soil only soils: despite multivalent signification, legibility itself is challenged. Notwithstanding the weather, “there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt” (63). The park’s obelisk unexpectedly and uncannily blurs the boundary between metaphoric and literal when its later tumescence portends an unwelcome orgasm. Referential dispossession threatens to paralyze Miss Lonelyhearts; advised by Shrike to give his readers “stones” instead of the Church’s “crackers” and the State’s “cake,” Miss Lonelyhearts scans the sky for a target for the stone that has formed in his gut since he took the job: “The grey sky looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser. It held no angels, flaming crosses, olive-bearing doves, wheels within wheels. Only a newspaper struggled in the air like a kite with a broken spine. He got up and started again for the speakeasy” (63–64). In the wake of representational equivocation, repeated across infertile ground and denatured sky, now administered by a sovereign mass culture, Miss Lonelyhearts hopes in vain to make the suffering of the letters—his one incontrovertibility— productive. But, subject to a disorderly and unmanageable signification, even they are of uncertain meaning. “To-morrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-withtubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet” (63). Miss Lonelyhearts’ fantasy of redemption— “the Christ dream”—is insincere to the extent that it is the same kind of response to the failure of reference as is the letters’ suffering. Miss Lonelyhearts returns home in the next chapter, “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lamb,” from Delehanty’s, where Shrike punctuates a “sermon” to Miss Farkis in which he “compared the wounds in Christ’s body to the mouths of a miraculous purse in which we deposit the small change of our sins. . . . But now let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into what these congenital wounds open”—a sermon that Miss Lonelyhearts “understood . . . [to be] a seduction speech”—by “bur[ying] his triangular face like the blade of a hatchet in her neck” (66). Miss Lonelyhearts “lived by himself in a room that was as full of shadows as an old steel engraving. It held a bed, a table and two chairs. .

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The walls were bare except for an ivory Christ that hung opposite the foot of the bed. He had removed the figure from the cross to which it had been fastened and had nailed it to the wall with large spikes. But the desired effect had not been obtained. Instead of writhing, the Christ remained calmly decorative” (67). Miss Lonelyhearts is inspired by the metaphoric promises of a compelling symbolism, but he desires from it a self-evidence that its mass-reproduction does not provide. By driving stakes through the uncrucified Christ figure, Miss Lonelyhearts attempts to revivify the symbol denatured in its commodification, but the redemption he seeks in the Christ’s suffering, like every other commodity, can be no more than a “puerile” “dream.” He fails even at blasphemy, in the end only making an obscenity out of a mass-produced consumer good. The recrucified Christ’s frustrating placidity denies the pervasive desire for normative legibility. Indeed, Miss Lonelyhearts recalls that “as a boy in his father’s church, he had discovered that something stirred in him when he shouted the name of Christ, something secret and enormously powerful.” The power of religious promise frightened the youthful Miss Lonelyhearts: “He had played with this thing, but he had never allowed it to come alive.” Now he hopes to give it a name: “hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is. . . . He wondered if hysteria were really too steep a price to pay for bringing it to life” (67–68). He looks at the decorative Christ on his wall and, in a kind of desperate echo of the sarcastic prayer with which Shrike opens the book (“Soul of Miss L . . . Body of Miss L . . . Blood of Miss L . . . Tears of Miss L . . . Oh good Miss L, excuse my plea . . . Help me, Miss L, help me, help me” [59]), begins to chant “Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ. Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ.” The Christ dream, a hysterical overwriting of the lack of self-evident value in the wake of pervasive, overdetermining commodification, exposes the normative failure at its core. As when he was a child, he again cowers before this bad faith and closes his eyes. He dreams he is a vaudevillian priest, performing magic tricks on the stage of a crowded theater: “After his act was finished, he tried to lead his audience in prayer. But no matter how hard he struggled, his prayer was one Shrike had taught him and his voice was that of a conductor calling stations” (68). The scene of his dream then shifts, and he is with two college friends. They get drunk and decide to barbecue a lamb, but Miss Lonelyhearts insists that they sacrifice it first. They parade the lamb through the market in an obscene ritual before killing it. His attempt to

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consecrate the scene is carried out in perversely earnest bad faith; their chant of “Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ,” repeated to a state of “frenzy” (69), recalls at once the snakelike “hysteria” that Christ invoked in him as a child and his current desperate frenzy to normalize the letters. Miss Lonelyhearts’ sacrificial attempt is botched: “The blow was inaccurate and made a flesh wound. He raised the knife again and this time the lamb’s violent struggles made him miss altogether. The knife broke on the altar  .  .  .  and the lamb slipped free. It crawled off into the underbrush.” Miss Lonelyhearts returns later to euthanize the lamb, just as he cannot expiate his insatiable desire for self-evident normativity. West’s own oft-cited account of Miss Lonelyhearts, published in Contempo in May 1933, suggests this critique of normalization. Famously, West claimed stylistic inspiration in the comic strip and maintains that he considered “A novel in the form of a comic strip” as a subtitle. In the short essay, West insists on the importance of style and method: “The chapters to be squares in which many things happen through one action. The speeches contained in the conventional balloons. I abandoned this idea, but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture. Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events. Violent acts are left almost bald” (401). In challenging the expectation that narration behave in prescribed ways, West claims this style disrupts the normal regulation of narrative fiction. “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lamb” illustrates how this technique plays out. The prose proceeds more associationally and metonymically than temporally; while a chronological framework does exist in the chapter (as in the novel as a whole), it is underemphasized. More structurally fundamental in this scene is the obsession with normativity underlying Miss Lonelyhearts’ attraction to the anchor of Christian imagery or, as West describes it in “Some Notes on Miss L.,” “the need for taking symbols literally” (402). The scene moves from the initial description of Christ nailed to the wall to Shrike’s insane version of “this Christ business” to Miss Lonelyhearts’ hysterical relationship to Christ as a child to the nature of hysteria to Miss Lonelyhearts’ dream that is itself structured according to an associational logic: from vaudeville magic show to precocious undergraduate posturing to decadent religious imitation gone wrong. Far more substantially than chronology, this metonymic spatial logic, administered by the conspicuous absence of normalized legibility—allowing the referential wall between Christ-as-Lamb and grilled lamb to topple—manages

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representation as it does Miss Lonelyhearts’ desire. Mass-produced to answer desire, language paradoxically resists the desire that invests it with expectation. Fay and Peter Doyle, who separately seek out Miss Lonelyhearts in letters, jointly articulate this foreclosed intersection of language and expectation. Fay is the first to reach out—for sexual satisfaction—writing; “I don’t feel so bad about asking to see you personal because I feel almost like I knew you. So please call me up at Burgess 7–7323 which is my number as I need your advice bad about my married life” (87). A few chapters later, Peter comes looking for a theodicean answer to capitalism, writing: “I am a cripple 41 yrs of age which I have been all my life and I never let myself get blue until lately when I have been feeling lousy all the time on account of not getting anywhere and asking myself what is it all for. You have a education so I figured may be you no.  .  .  .  It aint the job that I am complaining about but what I want to no is what is the whole stinking business for” (111). Fay Doyle, who admits the influence of mass culture—“too much movies, I guess” (91)—expects to be satisfied. A perverse echo of the salvific Christian mottoes—“The life out of which she spoke was even heavier than her body. It was as if a gigantic, living Miss Lonelyhearts letter in the shape of a paper weight had been placed on his brain” (90–91)—this word made flesh, with “legs like Indian clubs, breasts like balloons,” and arms like “thigh[s],” whose “massive hams” operate “like two enormous grindstones” and who “needs good advice bad but cant state my case in a letter” (86), seems to rely, faced with the failure of reference that so discomfits Miss Lonelyhearts, almost exclusively on an instrumentalization of her sex: she had been “one of the most popular girls on the block” (90), and just as she seduces Miss Lonelyhearts (“He had always been the pursuer, but now found a strange pleasure in having the rôles reversed” [89]), so getting pregnant after “trusting a dirty dago” led her to the neighbor, Peter Doyle, to whom she had always been “kind . . . because he was a cripple. . . . But he didn’t have the money [for an abortion], so we got married instead” (90). But her monstrous sexuality also seems to challenge the expectations on which competency rests, leaving only a precarious and destabilizing “it” in place of unequivocal reference to something the reader can understand: “He drew back when she reached for a kiss. She caught his head and kissed him on his mouth. At first it ticked like a watch, then the tick softened and thickened into a heart throb. It beat louder and more rapidly each second, until he thought that it was going to explode and pulled away with a rude jerk” (89). Peter Doyle, on the other hand, whose crippled body conspicuously

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lacks the obscene potency of his wife’s, expresses the doubt and frustration that accompany instrumental hope in this novel: “Please write me an answer not in the paper because my wife reads your stuff and I dont want her to no I wrote to you because I always said the papers is crap but I figured maybe you no something about it because you have read a lot of books and I never even finished high” (111). If Fay Doyle sublimates her desire for linguistic aptitude into her body, Peter Doyle lacks even this competence, remaining incapable of finishing even his own handicapped sentences; for both, normal communication is a farce. When, after his tryst with Fay, he first meets Peter Doyle, at Delehanty’s speakeasy, Miss Lonelyhearts “listened hard for a few minutes and realized that Doyle was making no attempt to be understood. He was giving birth to groups of words that lived inside of him as things, a jumble of retorts he had meant to make when insulted and the private curses against fate that experience had taught him to swallow” (110). As speech proves a deficient mode of communication, Miss Lonelyhearts turns to the cripple’s hands: “At first they conveyed nothing but excitement, then gradually they became pictorial.” Hopelessly asynchronous with his speech, however, Doyle’s gesticulations, too, prove faulty lexical guides. Finally, separated even further from not simply the intention to be understood, but also from Miss Lonelyhearts’ intention to understand him, Doyle’s hands dart inside his coat and emerge with a letter he has written to Miss Lonelyhearts. With uncontained meanings destabilizing semantic control, failed speech gives way to fragmentary gestures, which in turn give way to illiterate writing. If Fay “cant state [her] case in a letter,” Peter Doyle can’t seem to ask “what is it all for,” however ineffectually, in any other way. Communication seems too difficult. Once with the Doyles, Miss Lonelyhearts tries to sidestep the destructive violence into which their linguistic incompetence before semantic proliferation leads them. Fay, “furious [at Peter,] . . . rolled a newspaper into a club and struck her husband on the mouth with it. He surprised her by playing the fool. He growled like a dog and caught the paper in his teeth. When she let go of her end, he dropped to his hands and knees and continued the imitation on the floor. . . . His wife kicked him and turned away with a snort of contempt” (114). Become a weapon, the newspaper conspicuously signals the mass-cultural threat to regulated communication: the Doyles are as destructive of normalized expectations as much as of each other. Hoping to reassert the normative basis of sincerity, Miss Lonelyhearts “refused to pay any attention”: “He was busy trying to find a message. When he did speak it would have to be in the form of

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a message” (114). But “with the first few words Miss Lonelyhearts had known he would be ridiculous”: he speaks in sentimental clichés of Fay’s “big, strong body,” with which she can hold “your husband in your arms, you can warm him and give him life. . . . You can substitute a dream of yourself for” the load he carries on his job, “a buoyant dream that will be like a dynamo in him. You can do this by letting him conquer you in your bed. He will repay you by flowering and becoming ardent over you” (115). In response to this, Fay “is too astonished to laugh, and the cripple turned his face away as through embarrassed.” Miss Lonelyhearts thinks he misses, “had merely written a column for his paper,” because he failed to mention God; so he tries again by “scream[ing] at them” about Christ and love, but “failed still more miserably” because the Christ dream is as compromised as any other therapeutic desire. “He had substituted the rhetoric of Shrike for that of Miss Lonelyhearts.” And anyway, Fay informs him that his zipper is down: “ ‘You were a scream with your fly open,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d die laughing’ ” (116). Where normalized reality is unrecoverable from the clichés in which it is recognized, sincerity cannot but be overwhelmed by the comic. While Shrike, who effortlessly escapes Miss Lonelyhearts’ affliction on the wings of jokes; Miss Farkis, who “works in a book store and writes on the side”; and Mary Shrike, who “always talked in headlines” (81) and in fact “can’t stop talking” (85), for example, have little trouble with language but also little interest in communication, Miss Lonelyhearts can rarely say what he means, and no letter writer can avoid malapropisms, mixed metaphors, and grammatical lapses. In fact, language is an obstacle to the extent of the normative expectation its users bring to its exercise. Rather than an instrumental medium, language is itself the opaque sign of expressive illegitimacy; West’s book performs what Wlad Godzich has called a “labor of opacification”17 in revealing what gets erased by the imperial expectation of functional transparency: in the problematization of language is a more basic—and threateningly precarious—irregularity of experience. Thus the competence denied by language is echoed in an impossible existential administration: “Miss Lonelyhearts found himself developing an almost insane sensitiveness to order. Everything had to form a pattern: the shoes under the bed, the ties in the holder, the pencils on the table. When he looked out a window, he composed the skyline by balancing one building against another. If a bird flew across this arrangement, he closed his eyes angrily until it was gone.” Though “he seemed to hold his own” for “a little while,” he soon “found himself with his back to the wall. On that day all the inanimate

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things over which he had tried to obtain control took the field against him.” Unable to successfully fight back, “he fled to the street, but there chaos was multiple” (70). Incapable of sustaining the fantasy of reference, he is incapable of attaining an aptitude for normative competence. Fragmentary, mass-produced experience means unmanageably too much: “Broken groups of people hurried past, forming neither stars nor squares. The lamp-posts were badly spaced and the flagging was of different sizes. Nor could he do anything with the harsh clanging sound of street cars and the raw shouts of hucksters. No repeated groups of words would fit their rhythm and no scale could give them meaning.” Miss Lonelyhearts cynically exposes the normativity machine underlying the possibility of legible experience.

Recognizing Competence Amidst a disorientingly multivalent assault on self-evidence, the demand is always put on meaning in Miss Lonelyhearts to be both recognizable and binding. About to embark on his “field trip” with Fay Doyle, Miss Lonelyhearts searches for a “moral reason for not calling” her: “If he could only believe in Christ,” he insists, “then everything would be simple and the letters extremely easy to answer” (88). Miss Lonelyhearts’ desire for Christ to be impervious to the challenge to which all other emancipatory discourse is subject articulates the relationship between normativity and futurity at the heart of recognition. Miss Lonelyhearts hopes for a normalized legibility in his desire to generalize away from the clichés that grip all discourse, whether jabbed in derisive jest from Shrike’s glib tongue, proclaimed persuasively from an advertisement, or bled painfully from the tortured pen of Sick-of-it-all, Disillusionedwith-tubercular-husband, or Broad Shoulders, even as she counsels Miss Lonelyhearts, not even trusting her own hackneyed syntax, “dont think I am broad shouldered but that is the way I feel about life and me I mean” (107). But recognition fails as an adequate standard when everything already multiply signifies. The novel never quite manages to present reality in a satisfying way. Peter Doyle’s multivalent ineptitude in the inscrutable moments before he hands Miss Lonelyhearts his letter suggests he is not in control of the “words that lived inside of him as things.” When Doyle “hobbled” over to Shrike and Miss Lonelyhearts in the speakeasy, “he made many waste motions, like those of a partially destroyed insect.” Doyle’s face, too, is suggestive: “His eyes failed to balance, his mouth was not under his nose; his forehead was square and bony; and his round chin

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was like a forehead in miniature. He looked like one of those composite photographs used by screen magazines in guessing contests” (109–10). Already answering diverse commodified desires, and no longer normatively managed, an overdetermined reality can be no better than equivocally referred to. The shared assumption about expediency underlying Miss Lonelyhearts’ Christ dream, Betty’s medicine, Doyle’s “what is it all for [?],” and an advertisement for a strong handshake to impress the boss is that if language is normalized and regulated, then it is possible to be sincere. But this normative assumption about the recognized, like Christ and like West’s own politically “progressive” “hope” and “faith,” is ultimately a “vanity,” verifiably nothing more than a commodity put into circulation by the “business of dreams.” The insincerity with which Miss Lonelyhearts gropes for an expedient self-evidence marks the normative legibility indomitably absent in the novel’s scenes of desire. Curiously, despite this crippling doubt cast on expectations about a recognizable reality, sympathetic criticism of West’s novel since its publication consistently asserts West’s relevance by means of a defense of the very expediency questioned by his work. Two early traditions agreed that West’s work poses an emancipatory challenge to the culture industry’s threat to freedom. In the 1930s, William Carlos Williams tried to rescue West from the clutches of a genteel tradition that could understand neither West nor the cultural crisis he addressed. Williams claimed West as a demystifier of corrupted language who proceeded under the motto “Don’t be deceived,” asserting that West’s material in Miss Lonelyhearts “is writing itself”: twentieth-century Americans have been “seduced and corrupted” by a debased “writing”—manifested in the ubiquity of the newspaper in the novel—“so that they may be better exploited.” But West performs a linguistic exorcism: “Since the newspapers are the principal corruptors of all that has value in language, it is with the use of this very journalistic ‘aspect’ and everyday speech that language must be regenerated.” Conveying “the real, incredibly dead life of the people,” West’s style allows us to “understand what scoundrels we’ve become in this century.”18 Later Cold War critics, by contrast, hoped to rescue West from programmatic—some might say Stalinist—fealty to a massproduced “reality” that could too easily serve a corruptible party line (this even despite Mike Gold’s having indicted West’s writing of the “supreme crime” of being too “symbolic” and insufficiently “realistic,” however “fundamentally on the side of the people” West himself was, in Gold’s estimation).19 Thus twenty-five years after Williams, Norman Podhoretz argued that the “one ineluctable reality” of the world of Miss

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Lonelyhearts is the “terrifyingly authentic expression of misery” in the letters, a misery “that can be neither cured nor explained away,” and that West’s style has “profoundly unpolitical implications; it is a way of saying that the universe is always rigged against us and that our efforts to contend with it invariably lead to absurdity.”20 Leslie Fiedler similarly suggests of West that, “Despite his own left-wing political sympathies and the pressures of friends more committed than he, he refused to subscribe to the program for proletarian fiction laid down by the official theoreticians and critics of the Communist movement.” Fiedler’s West “turned unassumedly to the business of rendering the naked anguish he felt, rather than projecting the commitment to action and faith it was assumed he should feel. . . . [H]e rejected the concept of realism-naturalism, refused to play the game . . . of pretending to create documents rather than poetry . . . [and refused] to replace the imagination with sociology, the symbol with the case report, [returning] to the instinctive realization of the classic American fictionalists that literary truth is not synonymous with fact.”21 Standing against the antifascist functionalism of Williams’s argument, Podhoretz’s “unpolitical” and Fiedler’s “naked” are terms that respond to a narrow, party-based idea of what “political” means—what could easily appear to postwar liberalism’s denatured leftism as cognate to the totalitarian imperative to support the state.22 The Cold War Nathanael West in essence frees representation to be true by satirizing its enslavement to “political” demands. This labor of justification continues in recent work since the 1990s that seeks in turn to rescue West from the clutches of a liberal orthodoxy that, in hoping to insulate him from the banal fascism of mass culture, tended to insulate him too from historical relevance. Caren Irr, for example, takes issue with the foundational proposition of the Cold War position, arguing that West’s avant-garde “parodies of mass culture demonstrate his engagement with the American left. . . . West is not a writer whose serious literary achievement rests on the suppression of his left-wing political sympathies, but, on the contrary, a writer whose singular encoding of his sympathy with ‘the program’ of ‘his age’ is at the heart of his literary production.”23 Thomas Strychacz argues that though Cold War intellectuals read Miss Lonelyhearts for its distance from the mass culture that pervades it, such a reading occludes the ways in which West “pushes the avant-garde as far as it will go—that is until it meets and begins to blend with the focus, materials, and authority of mass culture.” For Strychacz, “the formal strategies of modernism were conceived dialogically; modernism and mass culture, the authentic and

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the inauthentic, must be theorized together and situated within the authoritative discursive structures of American society.” Thus while Cold War critics sought to protect West from the totalitarian impulses of mass-cultural representation, Strychacz, by focusing on “larger relations of power within which the products and forms of mass culture are vital to the shaping of modernist discourse,” tries to reclaim West from the apolitical dangers of liberal orthodoxy. Bearing witness to mass culture in order to lay bare the “authoritative discursive structures of American society,” a text like Miss Lonelyhearts is “relevant to a struggle for hegemony repeated across the terrain of modernist culture.”24 This recognition of expediency in Miss Lonelyhearts produces a normative reading of West that can administer judgments about how mass culture interpellates modern Americans and thus render visible escapes from this hegemonic structure, but it can do this only by unjustifiably ignoring the novel’s cynicism. Like Strychacz, Barnard and Veitch each try to rescue a “relevant” West. Though each argues that reality in West’s novel is overdetermined by the multiplying desires of an emerging consumerist national system, they both ultimately retreat from the challenge to self-evidence latent in this argument by seeking the security granted by fixing West’s resistant efficaciousness. Both suggest that belying the ease with which a fictional “Great Divide” between high and mass culture produced a sympathetic reading of West in the Cold War was the suppression of the work’s notable atriumphalism—the fact that the ubiquitous mass-cultural inscription of experience precludes Miss Lonelyhearts’ confidence that there is an answer to the letters. Thus, there initially seems to be no way around Barnard’s argument that “the text is certainly saturated with the language of commercial hype. . . . [I]t is fair to say that the entire thrust of the novel is to demolish all of society’s received ideas of redemption” or Veitch’s claim that Miss Lonelyhearts presents experienced reality as “mediated,” already encoded by the “discursive and ideological structures” of the mass-cultural “apparatus” that “supported” an “emerging consumer economy” to answer the “utopian promises” granted by the “ideology of therapeutic culture.” And yet, in a mass-cultural context in which advertising seems to hold a monopoly on hope—indeed, in which not just hope, but the linked possibility of legibility and futurity themselves are encoded by a pervasive consumerism—both Barnard and Veitch read an instrumentally expedient West. Barnard suggests that in West a new, “historically determined” form of narrative might save us from the false messianism of consumerism. Faced with the “culture of simulations evoked in Miss Lonelyhearts,”

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in which the “utopian promises of literature, religion, and mass culture are . . . sinisterly intertwined,” and of which West “seems set to discourage any effort at affirmative reading,” Barnard suggests that “West was grappling with the disconcerting sense that the only untainted, ‘unsimulated’ possibility left open for a writer was not the creation but the critique of culture.”25 Barnard ends the book sanguine about the salvific potential of a critical narrative positioned to encode the possibility of an uncorrupted, authentic community: I would propose, in conclusion, the following formula: if the novel traditionally problematizes and explores the meaning of life, West’s “novel in the form of a comic strip” problematizes and explores the meaning of the novel. . . . West’s work still seems to challenge the postwar rigidities of the Great Divide. It refuses to celebrate high culture as a repository of value and recognizes that a critique of the times must take its cue from the commercial language of the times. It is bold enough to hold that disorder and negation might offer the only hope for significance and to confront the possibility that outdated artistic pieties might be inadequate—just as inadequate as the good country life advocated by Miss Lonelyhearts’s sentimental fiancée, or the pleasures of 3 B pipe, or salvation by Mother’s Lifebuoy, or even the magic of Lux.26 The one “piety” Barnard considers neither “outdated” nor “inadequate,” therefore (and oddly), is that “hope”—which her own reading of the novel rightly exposes as hopelessly overdetermined—constitutes a legitimate interpretive tool. Miss Lonelyhearts cannot tell the story of his relevance because belief in the possibility of historical agency is now itself impossible, but Barnard seems to expect to steer clear of this fact by suppressing the book’s cynical challenge to sincerity. Likewise—indeed, arguably illustrating what Barnard’s critical narrative might look like—while Veitch argues that all public discourse is “mediated,” he does not want to suggest that authentic communication— or authentic community—is not possible; on the contrary, he claims that through his stylistically innovative use in Miss Lonelyhearts of the “highly charged discursive space” of the advice column, West shows how even the most “hegemonic discourse” is “shot through with hesitations, confusions, ambiguities, and evasions of every sort, and hence, open to contestation.” The advice column therefore “becomes the scene of a rhetorical struggle in which the ideology of therapeutic culture contends with the symbolic resistance of the column’s readers.” Veitch locates

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promise—Barnard’s term “hope” offers a roadmap here—in the “static” that results when individuals attempt to recognize, by describing, their experience in hegemonic narratives. As Miss Lonelyhearts doesn’t quite want to realize, the pain marked in the letters can be neither alleviated nor fully encoded by the impoverished social explanations available for a response: Peter Doyle’s “What I want to no is what is the whole stinking business for” can never be answered. Pain therefore exposes the “polite locutions, the stilted language and . . . maxims that characterize these letters” as just that, an inauthentic discourse. By resisting social inscription, this unrepresentability “inaugurates a potent form of symbolic resistance. . . . [P]ain holds out the utopian promise of release from a suffocating social structure that interpellates a rich and varied humanity within a series of radically impoverished subject positions: i.e., Desperate, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband.” Thus the letters “possess a monstrous power” to “access . . . a ‘discourse of the low’ that retained a degree of integrity, a discourse that was not already thoroughly appropriated by the official doxa of American culture.”27 The hopeful teleology subtending these recent historicist arguments— their expedient expectation that by providing a legible key to the functionality of historical structures, texts illuminate potential transformations or displacements of those ideological configurations—is revealed in the curiously predictable matrix of their assumptions. The “culture of simulation” Barnard exposes in her interpretation of the novel, like the “ideology of therapeutic culture” Veitch diagnoses—a culture governing at once the letter writers’ hopes and Miss Lonelyhearts’ bad conscience— is regulated by consumer capitalism’s hegemonic organization of mass culture. But West’s “critique of culture” (Barnard’s term) cannot so easily be reduced to the messianism promised by the dialectic of base and superstructure; instead, West suggests that the “utopian promise” (Veitch’s term) of mass-produced consumer goods and services and the desperate but indomitable hopes of the letter writers are alike manifestations of a far less legibly determinative hegemonic desire that encodes the very futurity of possibility. Conspicuously, both Barnard and Veitch remain within the “hegemonic” structure from which they purport to point to an exit. They merely discount particular ideological aims while reinforcing the larger, less transparent ideological structure that presupposes aims in the first place—that is, which is the real object of West’s irresolvable critique. Exposing how a reflexive habit comes to take the place of thinking, West’s novel renders contentious the normative mode in which representation is recognized. But the dominant critical approach

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to West derives from a hope that, in addition to desire, representation encodes too an ability to “transform” experienced reality, a hope, that is, anchored precisely in the recognition inscribed in the dreamworld West denaturalizes and about which Miss Lonelyhearts is so frustratingly unable to be sincere. What is so conspicuous is that West’s novel has already undermined this hope, revealing it as nothing more than a prescribed vanity.

The Fantasy of History In an unpublished story he wrote while working on Miss Lonelyhearts entitled “The Adventurer,” West rehearses the “comic” cynicism of a life oversaturated with preexistent meanings and mass-produced narratives. Echoing the novella’s theme of an overabundance of produced desires, the story’s narrator wants “something else” than what he has become, and he has a “reoccurring dream” of an empty meadow in which, stripped of inauthentic determinations, he feels he is granted a “dignity” he cannot attain in waking life. Suspecting that he has missed being “heroic” because “I have always taken the comic view” (445–46), West’s speaker stages a now familiar troubled inability to be sincere. In the second paragraph, the narrator begins to explain: Out of little scraps a life, a character. Buttons, string, bits of leather, a great deal of soiled paper, a few shouts, a way of clasping together the hands, of going up steps, of smoothing a lapel, some prejudices, a reoccurring dream, a distaste of bananas, a few key words repeated endlessly. With time the neck thickens, a vein appears on the edge of the forehead, a few gray hairs, some fat accumulates and innumerable scars. More buttons, more string, more soiled paper, a few more gestures appear and a few more prejudices, figs are added to bananas and the number of key words increases. Memories pile up, hindering action, covering everything, making everything second-hand, rubbed, frayed, soiled. The gestures and the prejudices, the dislikes, all become one and that one not itself but once removed, a dull echo. The trail becomes hard to follow, not grown over, but circular, winding back into itself, without direction, without goal. Moving not in space, but only in time. The neck grows still thicker, another vein swells, more fat, the scars lose even the memory of the original wound. It is only later. Never further, never nearer. (445)

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Character and identity here are the result of desire taking hold of a contingent process of sedimentation, of things and manners and features that carry supplemental meaning. Indeed, it is a full three pages into the story (which is only ten pages long) that its narrator identifies himself, and this only after being addressed by others: “I am Joe Rucker” (447). Joe Rucker used to be a messenger boy and is now “an order boy in a wholesale grocery house” (447); surrounded by the circulations of consumer desires, he is a daydreamer, imagining and reimagining himself out of the ruck of mass culture, which threatens to submerge the self. He seeks already-legitimate identities that carry recognizable currency. “Twenty years ago, when I was seventeen,” Joe Rucker explains, he “spent a great deal of time in the public libraries” and in Central Park creating fantasies for himself and those people on whom he tried to eavesdrop; the “gesture” then was “bright and clean and new,” and he was able to “fool his enemies.” Now, however, “they have found me out.” He now hopes people will see him reading Aristotle or Gibbon on the subway and think him a “superior man,” but knows this is “undignified,” “unreal,” “soiled and second-hand” (447). He spends stolen time at the public library (he now “rarely” goes to the park because it’s “so hard to breathe there with everyone you see gasping so avidly for breath” [452]), where “I hide among the books, burrowing under them, stuffing my eyes, ears and mouth with them. . . . A hundred million words, one after another, put down at great expense, at the cost of much suffering, gathered in ten thousand deliriums” (448). Joe Rucker takes after his father, who worked as a “janitor in an old apartment house on Lexington Avenue” (which recalls West’s own father) and spent his free time rummaging through the tenants’ trash (which may or may not recall West’s own father). Another kind of desire, not hunger or physical need, animated this practice: But he didn’t pick over the refuse to find something to eat. What he searched for were mementos of pleasure. Fans, perfume bottles, an embroidered slipper, a gilt dance card, theatre programs, elaborate menus, things of that sort. He collected them in barrels. . . . Did he imagine the owner of this or that fan flirting with him? Did he back up the vague scent still left in an old bottle with a mental picture of a beautiful woman at her toilet? I doubt it. He was far too humble. His emotions were much more generalized. Those things were symbols of pleasure, impersonal, abstract, in some strange, perverted way, pure. (446)

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If Miss Lonelyhearts, starting with the facts of suffering, seeks the generalization that will explain suffering by establishing its capture by historicality, its relevance, so Joe Rucker’s father seeks the purity of possibility: mementos not of a fixed, specific pleasure, but mementos that promise the occasion of pleasure, pleasure’s simple and absolute potential to be experienced, and thus the potential for its historicity, for historical facts. Miss Lonelyhearts wants to escape from historical circumstances with which he cannot contend by explaining them away, while Joe Rucker’s father wants to live historical circumstances that he has been denied. Both processes ground relevance in a historicism that contains particularity, reducing facts as significant to the historical fantasy that expects and desires them rather than to the putative historical context that provides them. Jay Martin, West’s primary biographer, argues that “The Adventurer” is about fantasies, about “the psychological fact that once a fantasy is perfected, it may be lived over and over in further fantasies precisely as if it had been a real experience.” This strikes me as only half true; while it would be easy to argue that this is the case with Joe Rucker’s father (or at least Joe Rucker’s reading of his father), it is not really the case with Joe Rucker himself. If Joe Rucker lived out fantasies in his youth, and continues to live out fantasies in his private life, there pervades the story—and its character’s consciousness—a sense of compromise, of dreams and fantasies adulterated. Joe sees the library now as a “monstrous place” (448); if the library with its books used to be “a storehouse of high adventure” promising “science,” “comradeship, or country, or fortune”—promising the fantasy of recognized, legitimate value—he sees it now as populated by “monomaniacs,” “reflections of myself,” seeking out secondhand desires because there is no other kind of desire. The pure fantasy of the word is now perverted, corrupted by the abject desperation with which a consumerist hegemony invests it: “Sometimes it seems to me that I can smell the books. They have a terrible odor. They smell like the breaths of their readers. They smell like a closet full of old shoes through which a steam pipe passes. The smell of decay and death” (449). As Martin points out: “The library is filled with grotesques who search books for pornography or facts about strange diseases, innumerable spiritual cripples with ‘rubbed, soiled faces,’ pursuing ‘ten thousand deliriums.’ The library, as he now sees, is his ‘father’s barrels multiplied by ten million!’ ”28 Joe Rucker is concerned not primarily with how fantasies are produced, but with what happens after those fantasies are inhabited and invested. He registers how fantasy is “soiled” by its “secondhand” material; he

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laments “The apocalypse of the Second Hand!” (448). The most we are ever told of either Miss Lonelyhearts’ childhood or that of Joe Rucker is derived from dreams or memories that themselves are so overdetermined by present exigencies as to undermine the search for an origin of personality that is anything other than fiction. “The Adventurer” is about fantasy, as Martin asserts, but only insofar as fantasy always falls short of the desire it enables. In fact, the theme of Joe Rucker’s alienation from fantasy is not fully developed in “The Adventurer.” But the alienation of the secondhand is grandly enacted in Miss Lonelyhearts. Sitting in the city room on the morning after his date with Mary Shrike, his column (as usual) failing him, Miss Lonelyhearts thinks about the landscape of suffering that motivates the letters: “A desert, he was thinking, not of sand, but of rust and body dirt, surrounded by a back-yard fence on which are posters describing the events of the day. Mother slays five with ax, slays seven, slays nine. . . . Babe slams two, slams three. . . . Inside the fence Desperate, Broken-hearted, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest were gravely forming the letters miss lonelyhearts out of white-washed clam shells, as if decorating the lawn of a rural depot” (86, ellipses in original). Instead of “mementos of pleasure,” the building blocks on which imagination condenses in Miss Lonelyhearts are cultural refuse and detritus, “rust and body dirt,” traces of extremity and catastrophe differentiable only by quantitative degree, difference reduced to a vulgar algebra of brutality. These are not pure “symbols of pleasure,” the abstractions of historicity that Joe Rucker’s father sought; they are rather well-worn signs of the absence of pleasure, illegible exclamations of a failure to recognize one’s own historical relevance to which no response is available. If the secondhand objects of “The Adventurer” attested to a past, real pleasure enervated in all but its echo, then the secondhand desires of Miss Lonelyhearts, while painfully present-at-hand, recall no actuality. The fantasies of consumer culture testify only to dispossession. After meeting Fay Doyle, Miss Lonelyhearts has a defining waking dream: “He found himself in the window of a pawnshop full of fur coats, diamond rings, watches, shotguns, fishing tackle, mandolins. All these things were the paraphernalia of suffering. A tortured high light twisted on the blade of a gift knife, a battered horn grunted with pain” (93). No “mementos of pleasure” here, these “paraphernalia of suffering” are the discarded promises of consumer culture, left in a pawnshop to recall only the failed

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promise of a virtual pleasure that cannot be. Dreams have currency only in the pawnshop, the desperate asymptotic limit of consumer capitalism. Meanwhile, Miss Lonelyhearts’ dream continues ironically: “He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.” Despite the unyielding march of purposelessness, Miss Lonelyhearts insists that the effort itself, despite the knowledge of its inevitable failure, is “worth while.” Fantasy renders experience recognizable, but the persistence of already signifying, secondhand meanings short-circuits normative expectations about legibility. Fantasy’s futurity is undoubtedly part of the reason Miss Lonelyhearts stays with Betty for so long: she takes for granted the administrative promise of fantasy. Miss Lonelyhearts himself is incapable of such organization; though he “develop[s] an almost insane sensitiveness to order,” he realizes that “the inanimate things over which he had tried to obtain control took the field against him.” Thus “when he touched something, it spilled or rolled to the floor. The collar buttons disappeared under the bed, the point of the pencil broke, the handle of the razor fell off, the window shade refused to stay down. He fought back, but with too much violence, and was decisively defeated by the spring of the alarm clock.” But if her ability to disregard this violence is the source of his hostility toward her, Miss Lonelyhearts grasps the powerful competence in Betty’s reliance on—and assumption of—order: “Then he remembered Betty. She had often made him feel that when she straightened his tie, she straightened much more. And he had once thought that if her world were larger, were the world, she might order it as finally as the objects on her dressing table” (70). For Betty, the dream of satisfaction, the instrumental fantasy of the consumer system, manifests an unshakable faith in recognition. As easily as she can properly arrange the false necessity of her toilet, the self-evidence with which “she straightened much more” is her competent expectation. Of course, “her world was not the world and could never include the readers of his column. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, while her order was not” (71). But Miss Lonelyhearts nevertheless cannot answer her: he “discovered that his tongue had become a

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fat thumb.” His linguistic and phantasmic incompetence stands out conspicuously against the normalizing self-evidence in which Betty finds her satisfaction. Back at the pawnshop window, Miss Lonelyhearts cannot give up on the fantasy of normative legibility despite his inability sincerely to take it for granted: “A trumpet, marked to sell for $2.49, gave a call to battle and Miss Lonelyhearts plunged into the fray. First he formed a phallus of old watches and rubber boots, then a heart of umbrellas and trout flies, then a diamond of musical instruments and derby hats, after these a circle, triangle, square, swastika. But nothing proved definitive and he began to make a gigantic cross.” Miss Lonelyhearts tries a series of organizing symbols (much as West himself described “the need for taking symbols literally”), but none proves “definitive” in its authority. Sexuality, Love, Wealth, Geometric Abstraction, even Fascist Nationalism: all fail to be persuasive in their organization of the discontinuous experience of consumer society. In fact, this failure is preordained; it is promised in the very attempt. A “phallus of old watches and rubber boots” is displaced by watches and rubber boots, just as “a heart of umbrellas and trout flies” will itself supplant Love. Like Joe Rucker’s books that already smell of the worn-out desires of their readers, Miss Lonelyhearts’ fantasy of normalized recognition stumbles on consumerism’s apocalypse of the secondhand. Only the cross has sufficient staying power for Miss Lonelyhearts. In the absence of a “definitive” orchestrating symbol, the Christian redemption fantasy survives because it aims to describe the apocalypse of the secondhand. It feeds off the very “paraphernalia of suffering,” the ideological failures, that scuttle the other fantasies. Already the pawnshop, Christianity is sustained by dreams broken by contingency, and frustrated fantasy is its condition of possibility. Indeed, the “gigantic cross” becomes monstrous in its accretive appetite: “When the cross became too large for the pawnshop, he moved it to the shore of the ocean. There every wave added to his stock faster than he could lengthen its arms. His labors were enormous. He staggered from the last wave to his work, loaded down with marine refuse—bottles, shells, chunks of cork, fish heads, pieces of net.” The cross is like his childhood hysteria, the “snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life.” Yet the logic that subverted the other, secular, symbols of authority has not been conquered: even as the cross takes on a prodigious proportion, its constituents continue to be trash, the fish heads, bottles, and torn nets, the oceanic threat to self-evidence manifested in

miss lonelyhearts’ insincere theodicy  /  177

the unvanquished record of failed desire. Once fantasy’s hysterical mirrors reveal themselves, cynicism can be the only effect: “But the moment the snake started to uncoil in his brain, he became frightened and closed his eyes.” In Miss Lonelyhearts, the self-evident affirmative dialectic of fantasy and wish fulfillment has given way to the entropic trajectory of “the paraphernalia of suffering.” If pleasure promises itself as the arena in which fantasy is invested with desire and historical relevance is recognized, Miss Lonelyhearts’ inexorable insincerity demonstrates that this normative guarantee endures only in the void left by fantasies broken by their own failed self-evidence. Everything in this world signifies: every object carries with it instrumental meanings, dreams of competence, instructions for use. Culture is so saturated with signification that language itself short-circuits on precisely the expectation of recognition by which it has been guaranteed. The letters do more than communicate an irrepressible suffering; they attest to the normative demands that a habit of recognition, naturalized as thinking, places on individuals. This is why Miss Lonelyhearts’ neurotic demand for a sententious, unifying “message” is indeed, in the language of the novel, “hysterical.” Revelation should be counted among Barnard’s “outdated pieties.” A large part of the letters’ pathos derives from their writers’ struggles with communicating their suffering. In his April 1939 letter to Edmund Wilson, while speaking more generally of all his writing and, like Joe Rucker, able to appreciate his own “comic view,” West identifies the particular difficulty of Miss Lonelyhearts: it lacks the sincere message Miss Lonelyhearts sought so desperately. “There must be something wrong with my kind of comic writing—no warm chuckles and no hearty guffaws, maybe, and distinctly ‘bad hat.’ The wrong tone” (792). What is “wrong” is that in the absence of an authoritative norm, he cannot be certain of the relevance of his work. He writes in the letter that he has been told by the studio for which he was working that his “writing lacks significance and sweep.” Or, as his producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, put it: “Why, tell me why, I dare you, we should spend half a million dollars on it, what fresh ideas have we got to sell—it isn’t funny enough to make them piss their seats—it isn’t sad enough to make them snuffle, and there’s no message for them to carry away. Go back and put a message in it” (793–94).29 In the end, literary history seems to want of West something very similar to what Zanuck expected of him and what West himself showed Miss Lonelyhearts to so impossibly expect of an insufficiently self-evident, incoherent mass culture. The history of his work

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reveals a reiterated search for the literary critical equivalent of having an audience “piss their seats” or “snuffle”: a “message” answering to the normative protocols of historicist recognition. But the “message” Miss Lonelyhearts is after is only a bad reproduction of what he wants it to be, and it reflects that desire back at him hollowly: the sky above him is “canvas-colored and ill-stretched. He examined it like a stupid detective who is searching for a clew to his own exhaustion.” Finding nothing, he looks around him at the skyscrapers ringing the park, hoping to discover in “their tons of forced rock and tortured steel” a clue to sincere intention made manifest. “Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians. And they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost if they knew that the stones would some day break them” (88–89). West’s famous explanation to Wilson for his books’ inability to generate sales (and his inability to retain the “same publisher twice”)—that “there is nothing to root for in my books and what is even worse, no rooters”—offers good evidence that if we must claim that West has “put a message” in Miss Lonelyhearts, it is a radically equivocal one that cannot be put to use. In his letter to Malcolm Cowley, sent a month later, West’s admission to being “discouraged” that “I have no particular message for a troubled world (except possibly ‘beware’)” is also an admission that “the typewriter” undermines the legibility of politically coherent “hope and faith”; to recognize such political competence in his work, regardless, demands a conspicuously Pollyannaish labor. With nothing secure to root for, Miss Lonelyhearts offers two options: the hysteria of needing language to say something useful for those who do not know enough to recognize the fruitlessness of incompetence, and cynicism for those who know enough to be alienated from their own sincerity.

Afterword: Invisible Literature

I have shown in the preceding pages that cynicism is best examined not as a specific, positive phenomenon—whether an attitude or outlook, an intellectual mode, a tendency or preference, a failing—that can be diagnosed and pathologized but as an interdiction of the ability to make sincere judgments that arises in the operation of judgment itself. The critique of cynicism turns on an interrogation of the normative apparatus of analysis that does not spare the narratives that house analysis and provide it the self-evidence of its rationale, its direction and meaning. In fact, cynicism has been so overdetermined, so reified, that all we can really do is pursue a kind of phenomenological account and try to uncover what it does, what variously draws and escapes notice, in the ascription of cynicism.1 Thus I have taken as my objects figures who or situations that might uncontroversially be labeled “cynical” and approached them as occasions to find out what sorts of normative thoughts, desires, and expectations are at play in them and consideration of them—in, that is, this ascription. My goal has always been to avoid further objectification by inquiring not into some positivistic literary-critical canard like the “nature of cynicism”—a reactionary process that probably could not avoid inscribing cynicism in an undertheorized anthropological narrative—but instead investigating the literary-critical procedures that attempt to account for the challenge posed by cynicism to historicity and relevance. Thus my examination of cynicism in modern American literature is ultimately an examination of the instrumental assumptions about transparency and competence that literary criticism brings to its

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objects and analyses. If I have concentrated in this book on historicist criticism, this is because historicist criticism in its current form seems particularly guilty of taking for granted normative accounts of historical change, of taking the past self-evidently on the present’s terms, and therefore of taking for granted its own methodological competence—we should remember Foucault’s admonition against “writing a history of the past in terms of the present”2—and cynicism is nothing if not a challenge to precisely the presumption that significance can be expediently recognized. In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narratorprotagonist speaks of the “peculiar disposition” of the Americans to whom he is invisible. He is invisible, we recall, “simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”3 Invisibility is a function of a “disposition” not of an observed object, but of an observing subject, which, if it prevails over the invisible man, exercises also a kind of supervisory power over those who fail to see him in seeing only their “surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination.” For whatever else it is—at the very least I hope it has presented persuasive readings of some particularly compelling pieces of literature—this book has attempted, in pairing a critique of cynicism with a critique of critical habits, to challenge literature’s historicist invisibility. Despite its polemical posture, this book does not presume to correct this invisibility, just as Ellison’s invisible man, even having “overstayed my hibernation” at the end of the novel, knows that he’s still invisible; instead, like Ellison’s narrator, who knows that “there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play,”4 this book represents a belief that, rescued from dismissal and taken seriously, cynicism can render literature—precisely in its invisibility—more conspicuous and therefore more controversial. Ellison’s invisibility is germane to the analysis of cynicism insofar as both make the operation of recognition apparent. Disabused in the wake of Tod Clifton’s murder, the invisible man thinks about the habits of thought that have produced his invisibility: “For history records the patterns of men’s lives, they say: who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards. All things, it is said, are duly recorded—all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard

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and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by.” If history is always of the recognized, Ellison’s narrator inevitably asks, What of those who escape recognition, who cannot even recognize themselves? “What did they ever think of us transitory ones? Ones such as I had been before I found Brotherhood—birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents? We who write no novels, histories or other books. What about us, I thought.” Ellison’s book does not have a sanguine answer to this question, though the invisible man’s decision to leave his basement suggests that this “uncomfortable” indeterminacy does not preclude an answer. We can say with some certainty, however, on the merits of the book’s explicit critique of recognition, that one position Ellison’s book does not support is the identitarian practice of bringing illumination to the historically excluded and blackballed. If joining the CP-stand-in Brotherhood offered the narrator an assured way to recognize himself, it is precisely this security that underscores for him what he might call his “transitoriness”; the invisible man shifts across and between multiple external determinations. Though he cannot accept the roles given him, though he refuses to be recognized (which is also to recognize himself) by those of whom history is written, he also knows that “men of transition” are not stably so: transition is not an existential state that can be illuminated or represented in “novels, histories or other books.”5 Once literature’s invisibility is acknowledged, the long-running feud between the (largely conservative) position that language is indicative and the (largely liberal) position that language is optative—both of which come burdened with instrumentally presumptive, value-laden narratives that explain what language can and should and should not be used for—is superseded in an affirmation that language is a region of possibility about which it makes little sense to be encouraged or despondent, and about which one can certainly not be confident. We can again turn to Ellison’s narrator: “like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being ‘for’ society and then ‘against’ it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. . . . Until some gang succeeds in putting the world

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in a straight jacket, its definition is possibility. Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos.”6 Contrasted here to optimism is not pessimism but possibility; indeed, the indeterminacy of possibility impugns optimism and pessimism alike, impugns the presumptuous confidence that imagines that “reality” can be ascertained to be this or that—that is, with the normative, adjudicative power that we all insistently assume such a revelation would carry with it. Though Ellison’s black narrator suggests that on some level he may be speaking to and for us all despite the specific circumstances—social, cultural, racial, etc.—of his utterance, the historical indeterminacy of the terms of this representational relationship undermine precisely its determinate normative potential. Cynicism, in defying the category of the self-evident, in defying our indicative and optative expectations alike, the implied is and should be that define the reach of our linguistic practices, may spell chaos for our ability to arbitrate the value and significance of culture, the very representational function that we expect from it when we consider it, but in this chaos is a possibility, albeit unrecognizable, that value and significance are not perspicuous. This possibility, it should be noted, is not a hope, subtended as that term is with normative futurity. In resisting the attempt to do something institutionally expedient with them even as they variously represent failures of expediency, the books analyzed here, affirming what Foucault called “the intransitivity of literature,”7 illuminate a cynicism that, in its broadest outlines, presents a challenge not simply to the hegemony of a perniciously utilitarian conception of appositeness, but more specifically to the assumed equation between such expediency on the one hand and the necessary, natural, or normal on the other. In discussing Ellison’s novel, Jonathan Arac points to “important differences between what it means to read a text and what it means to stage a figure,”8 and my book’s analysis of cynicism suggests that this is a difference that should be emphasized more frequently than it currently is. Cynicism should remind us that, as Michael Berubé has written (echoing Godzich), there may be “something necessarily indeterminate” about work in the humanities, and that what he calls “advanced literacy” should be directed to “the training of students in the possibilities and varieties of interpretation,”9 rather than, in Arac’s terms, to the staging of figures (or, in Godzich’s, vocationalism). This is the responsibility of thinking, which, unlike staging figures, it behooves us to keep in mind, is often equivocal. In arguing for criticism’s proximity to other forms of human activity, Edward Said wrote that if “all knowledge is contentious,

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then criticism, as activity and knowledge, ought to be openly contentious, too. My interest is to reinvest critical discourse with something more than contemplative effort or an appreciative technical reading method for texts as undecidable objects.”10 While I think Berubé may be more confident about reclaiming a tradition and modality of social justice from the practices in which advanced literacy is invested—in a word, perhaps, is less cynical—than I am, an investigation of cynicism occasions a realization that the significance of literary texts is not dependent on—is not determined by—the ability of a critic to recognize it.

Notes

Introduction 1.  Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 4–5. 2.  Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959– May 1961, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1995), 2. 3.  I aim here to draw on the word’s etymological meaning of living under or according to rule. 4.  Christopher Lane, “The Poverty of Context: Historicism and Nonmimetic Fiction,” PMLA 118, no. 3 (2003): 451–52. While Lane is more strictly interested in the difficulty of asserting historical sequence through literature, and doesn’t take up so much the more general problem of new historicism’s reliance on an expectation of recognition that interests me, his essay is a welcome addition to the critique of historicism. 5.  One suspects that some things never change. 6.  Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years: A Selection from His Works, 1908–1921, ed. Claire Sprague (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 220–26. Foucault will later impugn this project as “writing a history of the past in terms of the present” (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage, 1979], 31). 7.  Szalay, for example, in his book New Deal Modernism, claims neither that modernism is somehow the result of New Deal risk management nor that New Deal risk management is somehow the result of modernism. He accounts for the compelling homologies between interwar cultural and social formations by taking a different tack: “the most constitutive issues in modernist form had to do with a work’s perceived relation to its audience, a concern that seemed at one and the same time a concern with a work’s relation to markets and to the state’s regulation of those markets.” Szalay can talk of “New Deal modernism” because he can produce morphologically similar

186  /  notes to introduction accounts of modernism and the New Deal. The New Deal was always more, he argues, than a collection of institutional responses to economic disruption, as it attempted to refashion the way a society governs itself given changing economic and social conditions: “The concept of social security was as valuable as it was to the welfare state because it addressed more than simply financial dislocation. . . . In its ‘ideal’ form, social security has as much to do with modernist alienation as it did with financial uncertainty; it was the New Deal’s answer not simply to unemployment and other economic exigencies, but far more broadly, to the displacing conditions of modern life in a rapidly evolving capitalist society.” Thus, “if social security could be an ideal as much as a group of institutions, then so could government itself. . . . And in fact, much of what follows [i.e., in his book] is an effort to trace the emergence of government not simply in the marbled corridors of Washington but in the byways of twentiethcentury popular culture, as well.” Szalay therefore traces this developing conception of governance across both sociopolitical and cultural spheres: “Faced with the predominant displacement of the state and its security-providing functions, this study [i.e., Szalay’s book] locates the New Deal not only (literally) in its policies and not only (allegorically) in insurance companies, but also in newly available discourses and structures of thought that redefined the individual’s relation to the social. New Deal Modernism identifies as governmental often disparate forms of social organization concerned with risk management, broadly actuarial patterns of thought and practice that restructured both literary and governmental responses to instability occasioned by the Great Depression” (Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 6–13). 8.  Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26–27. 9.  Frankly, Hume’s critique of rationalism—i.e., recognized conjunction of phenomena (even repeatedly recognized conjunction of phenomena) proves nothing— offers a way to criticize historicist assumptions, too. 10.  John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Ct.: New Directions, 1941), 275–81; Allen Tate, “Literature as Knowledge,” in Reason in Madness: Critical Essays by Allen Tate (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 60–61. 11.  Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 171–72.

Chapter 1 1.  TPM Café Election Central, http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/apr/25/heres_rahms_full_speech. 2.  Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “News Frames, Political Cynicism, and Media Cynicism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 546 (July 1996): 84. 3.  For one, I am not qualified or particularly interested in doing this. Also, a fine book has just come out that does precisely this, albeit while focusing on English rather than U.S. literary history (see David Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007]). While I have made some efforts to address Mazella’s arguments and draw from his accounts here, I have not yet had enough time to comprehensively examine his book. 4.  We might say that, though conditionally justified, cynicism in this account does not survive the test of the eternal return.

notes to chapter 1  /  187 5.  Mazella, Making of Modern Cynicism, 224. 6.  Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (New York: Dover, 1993), 21. We can similarly read popular epigrams attributed to Lillian Hellman (“Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth”) and George Bernard Shaw (“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it”). 7.  Mazella, Making of Modern Cynicism, 4. 8.  Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, The Cynical Society: The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–2, 7, 18, 20, 30, 152. 9.  Donald L. Kanter and Philip H. Mirvis, The Cynical Americans: Living and Working in an Age of Discontent and Disillusion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989), 3, 302, 2, 26. 10.  Ronald C. Arnett and Pat Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 12, 20. 11.  Timothy Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1997), 1–2, 37. 12.  Richard Stivers, The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), viii–13. 13.  Susan Haack, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2003), 22–23. 14.  Bill Martin, Politics in the Impasse: Explorations in Post-Secular Social Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 32–37. 15.  David R. Hiley, Doubt and the Demands of Democratic Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–30. 16.  Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), xi, xiv, 17.  Wilber W. Caldwell, Cynicism and the Evolution of the American Dream (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books., 2006), x, 12, 140, 18.  Dick Keyes, Seeing Through Cynicism: A Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Books, 2006), 9–13, 20. 19.  Mazella, Making of Modern Cynicism, 7, 12. 20.  Quite rightly, David Mazella terms this presumed gap “an untenable distinction” (ibid., 224). 21.  See John Russon, Reading Hegel’s “Phenomenology” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 101. 22.  See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 136. 23.  Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 79. 24.  Goldfarb, Cynical Society, 182. 25.  Mazella, Making of Modern Cynicism, 222. 26.  Caldwell, Cynicism and the Evolution of the American Dream, 153–54, 164–66. 27.  William Chaloupka, Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 53, 11, 209, 14. 28.  Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 13.

188  /  notes to chapter 1 29.  Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 3–10. 30.  William Bennett, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, new ed. (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 8–11. 31.  Ibid., 155. 32.  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 12. 33.  Paul Bové, In the Wake of Theory (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), xi, xix. 34.  I should point out that I’m not trying to suggest that the analysis of cynicism elevates incompetence as a positive ideal. After all, cynicism’s most marked effect is a destabilization of the ground on which such easy habits of adjudication, regulation, and normalization rest. Though incompetence often does a good job of illuminating injustices, inequalities, idiocies, and other forces hostile to a democratic culture (see, for notable example, President’s Bush’s “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” affirmed five days into the Hurricane Katrina disaster), it would be a significant error to instrumentalize it on those grounds. 35.  Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, 2. Godzich’s history of how these two phenomena are related to each other and how their respective academic careers respond to radical changes in what he calls the “culture of literacy” is worth a read, but (despite a few attempts to fit it in here) beyond the scope of my discussion. 36.  Ibid., 1. 37.  Ibid., 4–5. 38.  Ibid., 10–11. 39.  Ibid., 18, 24. 40.  Ibid., 24, 26. 41.  Ibid., 26. 42.  If I will be allowed to riff on James C. Scott’s titular phrase, in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 43.  Godzich, Culture of Literacy, 31. Godzich’s “cry,” which is “beyond absorption,” is the unrepresentable remainder, the difference resulting from any imposition of order. If “writing designates a work space” by establishing criteria by which truth and meaning can emerge as useful standards (i.e., via the operation of recognition), then the cry is the cry of exclusion from that work space, the cry of what lacks the means to recognize itself, which “cannot do more than cry it [i.e., this exclusion] out,” and therefore is never, and indeed cannot be, represented—that is, transparently—in the system. The cry clearly should not be understood as the cry of a particular victim, but rather as that of victimization as the “figure of irreversible difference,” as that which stands outside any competency capable of recognition (ibid., 27–28). 44.  This definition seems apposite given a familiarity with Yugoslav functionaries in a duplicitous totalitarian bureaucracy. 45.  Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 28–30. 46.  Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–5. 47.  Ibid., 479. 48.  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 123.

notes to chapter 2  /  189 49.  Donald Pease’s concept of the “field-Imaginary,” which he uses to describe the constitution of disciplinary identity, is associationally relevant here: “By the term field-Imaginary I mean to designate a location for the disciplinary consciousness. . . . Here abides the field’s fundamental syntax—its tacit assumptions, convictions, primal words, and the charged relations binding them together. A field specialist depends upon this field-Imaginary for the construction of her primal identity within the field. Once constructed out of this syntax, the primal identity can neither reflect upon its terms nor subject them to critical scrutiny. The syntactic elements of the field-Imaginary subsist instead as self-evident principles” (Pease, “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon,” in Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon, ed. Pease [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994], 11–12).

Chapter 2 1.  Henceforth, following fairly common usage, and where practicable, “Cynic” and “Cynicism” (capitalized) will refer to the ancient philosophers and their practices, while “cynic” and “cynicism” (in lowercase) will refer to the modern context. 2.  Unless otherwise noted, anecdotes about Diogenes and the ancient Cynics are from book 6 of Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C. D. Yonge (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909). 3.  In these descriptions we see a good illustration of the Cynic parrhesia—free, open, or bald speech—that so interested Foucault in his 1983 Berkeley seminar “Discourse and Truth.” Cynic parrhesia as Foucault sees it is always “a public activity,” and therefore always dangerous, insofar as it is always necessarily activated within sight of the dominant power it speaks out against. Foucault insists on the relationship between parrhesia and truth: “My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity” (seminar published as Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson [Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001]; see 118, 169). 4.  Donald Dudley, A History of Cynicism: From Diogenes to the 6th Century a.d. (London: Methuen, 1937), 27, 28. Incidentally, Diogenes Laertius, writing in the third century c.e., maintains that Antisthenes was the founder of the Cynic movement, while Dudley argues that Antisthenes was not directly connected with Diogenes or any other Cynics, that the two were probably not even contemporaries in Athens, and that the tradition holding Antisthenes as the original Cynic probably originated with the Stoics, themselves influenced by Diogenes, who had a lot to gain from showing their direct lineage to Socrates: through Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates; Diogenes; Crates, a pupil of Diogenes; and from him to Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and a pupil of Crates. Contrary to this succession making the Stoics the inheritors of the respected Socratic tradition, Dudley argues that while Antisthenes was more of a traditional Socratic philosopher, concerned with the possibilities of knowledge and the conflict between labor and pleasure, Diogenes and the Cynics concentrated narrowly on ethics to the exclusion of other aspects of philosophy (ibid., 1–14). Diogenes isn’t really characterized by Antisthenes’ kind of metaphysical reflection; he was more invested in a gestural form of philosophy, in acting without articulating the theoretical foundations of his action, leaving the burden of interpretation to those on whom he acted. Regardless, Diogenes is today considered the archetypal Cynic (and he’s also a

190  /  notes to chapter 2 lot more fun to talk about: while Antisthenes discussed philosophical concepts with the likes of Socrates, Diogenes wore a bear costume and barked at passersby). 5.  Chaloupka, Everybody Knows, 4. 6.  Mazella, Making of Modern Cynicism, 26. 7.  R. Bracht Branham offers an explanation for the defacement: Diogenes and his father were trying to defend the credit of Sinope by taking counterfeit coins out of circulation. Branham claims the root story here is probably true and is, at least partly, grounded in numismatic evidence, although it is unclear whether Diogenes or his father did the actual defacing. But the supplement about the oracle is, according to Branham, probably apocryphal, “a legendary encrustation on the historical kernel of Diogenes’ exile . . . clearly modeled on the oracle Plato’s Socrates claims in the Apology to have received at Delphi and . . . [it] may well be a parody of it” (“Defacing the Currency: Diogenes’ Rhetoric and the Invention of Cynicism,” in The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed. Branham and Marie-Odile GouletCazé [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996], 90). 8.  Call me cynical, but it probably pays to consider the possibility that his Athenian popularity may well owe something to the fact that the coins he defaced were not Athenian. 9.  Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 33–36. 10.  Edward Said, “Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 8–9. 11.  R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, introduction to The Cynics, ed. Branham and Goulet-Cazé, 7. 12.  Goldfarb, The Cynical Society, 14, 17. 13.  Kanter and Mirvis, The Cynical Americans, 19. 14.  Caldwell, Cynicism and the Evolution of the American Dream, 21. 15.  Mazella, Making of Modern Cynicism, 14. 16.  Dudley, A History of Cynicism, xi–xii. 17.  Branham and Goulet-Cazé, introduction to The Cynics, ed. Branham and Goulet-Cazé, 8–9. 18.  Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 209–11, xi. 19.  Luis E. Navia, Classical Cynicism: A Critical Study (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1996), viii–7. Another way of putting this argument is to say that we don’t use “cynic” these days to refer to people who have a responsible critical aim. Thus the difference between ancient Cynicism and modern cynicism may be that modern cynics derive not from Diogenes but from Thrasymachus, and that an accident is to blame for the homology. For Lerner and many others, we recall, the problem of cynicism is too little knowledge. This concern can be traced back to the argument presented by Thrasymachus, who contends in book 1 of The Republic that given our inability to theorize justice, the only possible practical definition we can offer is that justice is “the advantage of the stronger”—essentially that might makes right (Plato’s Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974], 13). Plato’s too-hasty dismissal of his argument notwithstanding, Thrasymachus is probably too arrogant and certainly too confident to be a cynic. The nihilistic argument that morality is the prerogative of those who are strong enough to create laws, especially when extended to the sphere of

notes to chapter 2  /  191 individual action, has none of the ambivalence of the cynical condition: for example, what makes cynicism cynicism is a belief that norms should be binding (or at least that a norm has at least potential normative value). Incidentally, Machiavelli is often understood as an updated Thrasymachus, and is denounced for promoting a kind of devious self-interest that parades as virtue. This understanding, however, is the result of a bad reading. At the very least, to read The Prince in this way is to confuse a description of the state of Italian society at the time—essentially an anarchy of disagreeing (if not disagreeable) city-states—with a prescription for human action. If Machiavelli delimits action that, on the surface, contradicts a moral worldview, this is because he is more interested in describing the world as he sees it than in describing how he feels it ought to be. We must not forget that Machiavelli’s aim is to lay the political and intellectual foundation for the unification of Italy as a modern nation-state (Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Luigi Ricci [New York: New American Library, 1952]). In this sense, he defends less than virtuous means provided they are employed to secure virtuous ends. We could summarize the Machiavellian argument by saying that good guys usually finish last, so if virtuous ends—like the national-popular unification of Italy—are desired, a leader must be prepared to do all he can to defend against the vagaries of fortune. (By importing a phrase like “national-popular,” I of course draw from Gramsci, who was, among other things, a defender of Machiavelli (see “The Modern Prince,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 123–205, and especially 130–33, for Gramsci’s use of the phrase applied to Machiavelli’s concerns. Similarly, Gramsci will update Machiavelli’s “leader” with “party” [125–30]). The prince is guided by principles he believes can be practically implemented. Neither Thrasymachusian nihilism nor Machiavellian politics is concerned with describing cynical ambivalence. 20.  Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 102–11. 21.  Ibid., 22. 22.  Kiernan Ryan, introduction to New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader, ed. Ryan (London: Arnold, 1996), xiv. In this sense, Ryan suggests, new historicism’s self-proclaimed break with New Criticism is not so decisive as some might hope: “insofar as new historicism turns history itself into a text and treats all texts as literary texts susceptible to the same interpretive techniques, its divorce from the new criticism may not be as absolute as it seems. . . . [T]he debt new historicism owes to deconstruction allows it to seem . . . the culmination rather than the termination of the new critical enterprise.” 23.  D. G. Myers, “The New Historicism in Literary Studies,” Academic Questions 2, no. 1 (Winter 1988-89): 36. 24.  Ryan, New Historicism, ix. 25.  Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–2. These are claims, by the way, seconded by Ryan, who, despite his laudable attempt to, in his words, “keep [new historicism] controversial,” seems fairly, and not unhappily, resigned to it: “It is impossible to discern beneath the diversity of new historicist or cultural materialist practice a single, unifying theory or consistent critical method. Whereas Marxist, psychoanalytic or deconstructive readings all too often secrete a doctrine which governs their transactions, the sort of criticism explored in these pages [as its title suggests, his book is a sourcebook of new historicist and cultural materialist writings and precursors] defies reduction to a school or creed, and might more profitably be regarded as a flexible

192  /  notes to chapter 2 repertoire of strategies and techniques. In fact, it may be that this elusive, protean quality of new historicism and cultural materialism, their capacity to incorporate, adapt and improvise instead of hardening into dogma, is their greatest strength and the secret of their rampant appeal” (Ryan, New Historicism, x). 26.  Ryan, New Historicism, ix. 27.  Jean E. Howard, “Afterword: Producing New Knowledge,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 309–10. 28.  Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 2. 29.  Ibid., 5–7. 30.  Ibid., 9. 31.  Lane, “The Poverty of Context,” 453. 32.  Myers, “New Historicism in Literary Studies,” 27–36. 33.  Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 7–8. 34.  Ibid., 13. 35.  I should admit to both coming up with this list and assuming that the items on it would be sanctioned by Gallagher and Greenblatt and other new historicists as examples of what they mean by “discourses.” 36.  Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 16–7. 37.  Ibid., 19. 38.  Howard, “Afterword,” 310. 39.  Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 178–82.

Chapter 3 1.  Adams to Barrett Wendell, 12 March 1909, in Harold Dean Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 644–45. Incidentally, Adams’s American “void” looks a lot like Van Wyck Brooks’s American “void,” which Brooks used to describe our national lack of a collective historical consciousness: “the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.” 2.  Adams to John Hay, 9, 11, and 13 January 1892, in Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, 263–64. 3.  Adams to Charles Milnes Gaskell, 26 February 1892, in Letters of Henry Adams, 1892–1918, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 6. 4.  Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 342. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 5.  Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, vii–ix. According to Cater, it was Henry Cabot Lodge, to whom Adams entrusted the publication of the Education as the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, who took the liberty of replacing Adams’s subtitle, “A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity,” with his own, “An Autobiography,” when, only after Adams’s death, the book was published by the Historical Society in 1918 (xci). This catachresis has substantially inflected readings of the book, as when Vern Wagner writes that the Education is “much more than an autobiography. . . . Great works baffle and above all beguile because they break new paths” (The Suspension of Henry Adams [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969], 9). Paul Bové discusses disciplinary reasons for why the book’s generic instability has been ignored: “The Education often appears as a major autobiography in American

notes to chapter 3  /  193 literature, albeit a very troubling example of the genre. To discuss this book as an autobiography seems to me patently silly. There are, I think, reasons why it appears as an example of this genre: It can be more easily psychologized in the form of old pragmatic or existentialist clichés. Treating the text as autobiography allows critics to acknowledge its aesthetic accomplishments and to avoid its implications by absorbing Adams’ work into one of three categories: psychological study of person; positivist corrections of the supposed ‘facts’; or theoretical discussions of the nature and limits of the genre autobiography itself, particularly around the tiresome question: What’s unique about American autobiography. More important, however, U.S. critics could not satisfy their task as hegemonic intellectuals were they to take seriously Adams’ devastating criticisms of Americanism, capitalism, and the forms of knowledge associated with them—and so the forms of knowledge identical to or underlying those practiced by the critics themselves. The ‘autobiography’ category—no matter how argued—is an avoidance of these issues” (“Anarchy and Perfection: Henry Adams, Intelligence, and America,” in America’s Modernisms: Revaluing the Canon: Essays in Honor of Joseph N. Riddel, ed. Kathryne V. Lindberg and Joseph G. Kronick [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996], 41). 6.  Cater, preface to Henry Adams and his Friends, lxxxiii–lxxxiv. 7.  Ibid., lxxxv. 8.  Cater uses the term, but (as far as I can tell) only once, leaving it fairly untheorized: “There is reason to believe that Adams’s cynicism was good medicine for the buoyant Hay” (ibid., lxix). 9.  Ibid., lxxxv. 10.  Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Library of America, 1986), 14–15. 11.  Ibid., 52. 12.  Ibid., 52–53 13.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31. 14.  Adams, History, 52. 15.  J. C. Levenson, The Mind and Art of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 356; Paul Bové, “Giving Thought to America: Intellect and The Education of Henry Adams,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Autumn 1996): 87; see also Bové, “Policing Thought: On Learning How to Read Henry Adams” Critical Inquiry 23 (Summer 1997): 940. 16.  Letters, 485. 17.  Bové, “Policing Thought,” 940. 18.  Bove, “Giving Thought to America,” 89. 19.  Ibid., 90. 20.  William James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975, 1978), 31–32. 21.  Bové, “Giving Thought to America,” 90. 22.  Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 276. See Bové, “Giving Thought to America,” 82. 23.  Loren Glass, “Giving Thought to the Audience: A Response to Paul Bové,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Summer 1997): 937. 24.  Ibid., 937–38. 25.  Bové, “Policing Thought,” 941–42.

194  /  notes to chapter 3 26.  Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (New York: Penguin, 1986), 186. 27.  Bové, “Anarchy and Perfection,” 48–49. 28.  Ibid. 29.  “To Mrs. Eliza Webb Gilman Lippitt,” 16 June 1889, in Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, 184 30.  Bové, “Policing Thought,” 942; see also Bové, “Giving Thought to America,” 88. Rather than James’s pragmatist, who tests hypotheses according to how recognizable they are to current accounts of experience, Bové looks to Peirce’s notion of abduction to explain how Adams is “an endless tester of hypotheses in thought and language,” using hypotheses, in Peirce’s term, as an “interrogation” of the habits by which experience is recognized (see Bové, “Policing Thought,” 946, 944–45; and Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler [New York: Dover, 1955], 154). 31.  Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, lxxxviii. Most of Adams’s major critics repeat this tendency. See also, for example, Ernest Samuels’s three-volume work published by Harvard University Press, The Young Henry Adams (1948), Henry Adams: The Middle Years (1958), and Henry Adams: The Major Phase (1964); William H. Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952); R. P. Blackmur, Henry Adams, ed. Veronica A. Makowski (New York: De Capo Press, 1980); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); and John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976). 32.  Bové, “Anarchy and Perfection,” 42. 33.  Ibid. 34.  Judy Davis’s character in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives offers another, similarly apropos, gloss: “Sooner or later everything turns to shit.” 35.  Blackmur, Henry Adams, 16–18. 36.  Ibid., 268, 18. 37.  Ibid., 17, 264–68. 38.  Ibid., 18. 39.  The Education does not easily fit into the teleological structure promised by tragedy’s restricted moral economy. Tragedy operates via clarification: tragic experience illuminates human capacities and limitations. Spanning this empirical knowledge is a more fundamental ethical knowledge, and what is terrible in tragedy tends to attenuate in the face of secure knowledge. Indeed, it is knowledge, at once existential and moral, that redeems tragic action. 40.  Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, 357–59. 41.  T. S. Eliot will phrase it differently: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (“The Waste Land,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963], 69). 42.  Following Julika Griem, who seeks sites of Nietzsche’s probable influence on Adams (“The Poetics of History and Science in Nietzsche and Henry Adams,” in Nietzsche in American Literature and Thought, ed. Manfred Pütz [Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995]), we can say that Adams’s assertion about the ethical mandate

notes to chapter 3  /  195 of mental habits is remarkably Nietzschean. See most notably Nietzsche’s account of resentment and slave morality in On the Genealogy of Morals, one of the best commentaries on which remains Gilles Deleuze’s account of active and reactive forces. Whereas active forces have themselves as their object (and therefore survive the test of the eternal return), reactive forces are essentially negative in as much as they negate something other than themselves; they therefore tend to negate themselves to the extent that they are directed toward the negation of that on which they depend (and therefore do not survive the eternal return): “When a reactive force develops to its ultimate consequences it does this in relation to negation, to the will to nothingness which serves as its motive force. Becoming active, on the contrary, presupposes the affinity of action and affirmation; in order to become active it is not sufficient for a force to go to the limit of what it can do, it must make what it can do an object of affirmation” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 68). Despite the many conceptual and thematic parallels between Nietzsche and Adams, Griem notes the curious neglect of the German philosopher (at least in explicit citation) in Adams’s writings. By Griem’s count, Adams mentions Nietzsche only twice—once in a “rather general remark” in the Education and once “in a letter from 1911, although the German philosopher had by then become an important influence in American letters.” Interestingly, Griem does not cite the critique of resentment as a point of correspondence. 43.  Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 182. 44.  It also offers a de facto biographical ground on which to speak about identity. Recall Adams’s later comments about the burgeoning field of psychology: “To his mind, the compound yuch took at once the form of a bicycle-rider, mechanically balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior personalities, and sure to fall into the sub-conscious chaos below, if one of his inferior personalities got on top. The only absolute truth was the sub-conscious chaos below, which everyone could feel when he sought it.” This leads Adams to wonder whether mental order or chaos, orientation of the forces attracting the mind or their dispersion, is the normal state, and decides that normativity can be considered nothing more than “unstable artifice”: “His artificial balance was acquired habit” (433–34). 45.  Jordy, Henry Adams, 192. 46.  It should probably be noted (though it may be clear by now) that Adams demands more of evolutionary theory than Darwin ever suggested or promised, and that he is essentially reacting to a kind of social evolution or a theory of social or environmental perfectibility more than to anything Darwin or Lyell themselves proposed. 47.  Bové, “Giving Thought to America,” 87. 48.  Deleuze and Guattari speak of the “gravity” that a sovereign thought lends to particular acts of thinking: such an image gives to thinking a center and a sanction, a rationale. Thus here, “natural” and “normal” are part of what Deleuze and Guattari might call an “imperium” that alone can confer legitimacy (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 2:375–76). 49.  Note that education eschews ought-to-be in its various manifestations. Ambrose Bierce’s definition of the cynic is, appropriately, relevant here: “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom

196  /  notes to chapter 3 among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision” (Devil’s Dictionary, 21). 50.  Though Adams and Hay were both born in 1838, King was born in 1842; perhaps in the grand scheme of things four years is not so significant. 51.  Thus he can ironically add: “Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on the generation born after 1900. For this theory, Adams felt himself in no way responsible. . . . [H]e had submitted to force all his life, and he meant to accept it for the future as for the past. All his efforts had been turned only to the search for its channel” (459).

Chapter 4 1.  Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (New York: Vintage, 1990), 172–73. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2.  We learn later that Tom has been granted his references from others. In praising the craftsmanship of the “water jars and food bowls” Tom and Roddy found in the Cliff City, Father Duchene compares it to that of “early pottery from the island of Crete,” to whose “geometrical decorations” the designs “on these jars are not only similar, but, if my memory is trustworthy, identical” (197). And in agreeing to accompany Tom and Roddy for the winter as they explore the Cliff City, Henry Atkins, their charmingly drunk and wizened cook, says, “I’d ask nothing better than to share your fortunes. In me youth it was me ambition to go to Egypt and see the tombs of the Pharaohs” (183). 3.  In a sense, this is precisely what happens: if duty is the origin of his social infraction (duty to the “relics” and nationalist purity), it is also his sense of duty that is the agent of his requital (duty to repay Father Duchene by protecting the priest’s native Belgium from the Germans; Tom’s sense of obligation here is reinforced by Cather’s naming the boat on which he sails the Rochambeau [236], which recalls the French sailor and marshal who helped Washington’s armies defeat the British in the Revolution, suggesting that Tom is repaying the favor). Outland is the novelistic character who gets his. 4.  David Harrell points out that Cather was never that sympathetic to living Indians, even as the ancient ones grabbed her imagination (From Mesa Verde to “The Professor’s House” [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992], 32). 5.  Interestingly, even as it relegates her to the margins of narrative attention, Cather’s novel suggests Mrs. St. Peter may be unjustly treated. Reflecting that although Lillian would not forgive Tom for even slight breaches of etiquette, she would overlook improprieties in their daughter’s husband, Louis Marsellus, St. Peter thinks to himself: “Yes, with her sons-in-law she had begun the game of being a woman all over again. She dressed for them, planned for them, schemed in their interests. She had begun to entertain more than for years past—the new house made a plausible pretext—and to use her influence and charm in the little anxious social world of Hamilton” (64–65). While the first and third sections of the novel are ostensibly written in the third person, their perspective is undeniably St. Peter’s. Nevertheless, Cather has inserted an outlook not St. Peter’s own. St. Peter sometimes acknowledges his wife’s jealousy of Tom (Tom, after all, was invited into St. Peter’s study, a right of access never accorded Lillian, and one initiatory of her jealousy [151]), but he never quite accounts for her reaction. Similarly, at the opera in Chicago, while St. Peter reflects how the music, “an expression of youth” (and therefore linked to St. Peter’s imagination of Tom), “seemed

notes to chapter 4  /  197 extraordinarily fresh and genuine still,” Lillian, with a “melancholy smile,” suggests that Tom interfered with St. Peter’s relationship with her: “ ‘One must go on living, Godfrey. But it wasn’t the children who came between us’ ”; an air in her voice “spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless” (76–78). Lillian, too, feels a sense of loss—of her husband rather than of an ideal, perhaps—but St. Peter might be too self-obsessed to notice. 6.  While the anti-Semitic vectors in the novel are not, strictly speaking, my concern here, they offer a good example of Cather’s multitiered irony. Tom’s comparison of Roddy to Dreyfus is alarming, to say the least, not least because Cather was convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence. As Hermione Lee argues, “Roddy, like Dreyfus, is being wrongly accused”: she cites “a stirring tribute to Zola’s defense of Dreyfus”—in a review of Germinal—in which Cather extols “the courage of the hand that penned ‘J’Accuse’ ” (Willa Cather: Double Lives [New York: Pantheon, 1989], 251). Cather’s words, in “Zola’s Germinal,” were actually “the courage of the hand that penned the ‘J’Accuse’ letter” (The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893– 1902, ed. William M. Curtin [Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1970], 2:724). In reference to Zola’s planned twenty volumes of Rougon-Macquart, Cather went on in the review, “Certainly it took much less courage to attack the French army in behalf of justice than to challenge the whole world in behalf of a theory of art.” It is hard to avoid seeing a touch of the ridiculous in Outland’s indignation, and equally difficult to avoid the fact that the irony is Cather’s. More complexly, Marsellus’s Judaism and the novel’s possible anti-Semitism are a real problem, and they are not easily explained. On the one hand, several characters give unprotested, if metonymic, anti-Semitic assessments of Louie. Early on, St. Peter finds him ostentatious or, as he lays it out to Lillian in his characteristic Manichaeanism, “It all comes down to this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn’t” (36). Kathleen feels that Louie, whom she has just characterized as “a Jew,” has corrupted Rosamond: “He and all his money have ruined her” (70–71). And Mrs. Crane disparages Marsellus for his “smooth” manner and “salesman’s ability” (117–18). In first physically describing him, the novel (perhaps acting as a proxy for St. Peter’s own prejudices, but perhaps not) is less than flattering and more than a little reliant on familiar conventions: “he was a rather mackerel-tinted man. . . . There was nothing Semitic about his countenance except his nose—that took the lead. It was not at all an unpleasing feature, but it grew out of his face with masterful strength, well-rooted, like a vigorous oak-tree growing out of a hill-side” (32). However, Louie is given the novel’s epigraph, and, besides his appropriation of Tom’s memory—which appears to be fully sanctioned by Rosamond—he seems likeable enough. St. Peter even finds himself liking the Jew—and doubting his previous dismissiveness—when Marsellus treats the St. Peters to a weekend in Chicago, and St. Peter’s estimation of Louie only improves from there. The novel’s pervasive irony cannot be dismissed, especially when it comes to the beliefs of the characters, and it undercuts (to an extent) these characters’ judgments. In bold defense of Cather, Lee claims the novel’s anti-Semitism is under full ironic control of its author, and that through it Cather attempted (to an extent) to compensate for her own distaste for Jews. Citing the fact of the novel’s epigraph, Lee suggests that “Scott’s anti-Semitic hostility to Louie” is actually Cather’s own anti-Semitism “put off onto” McGregor in an attempt to distance herself from it (Willa Cather, 227). 7.  John Hilgart, “Death Comes for the Aesthete: Commodity Culture and the

198  /  notes to chapter 4 Artifact in Cather’s The Professor’s House,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 3 (1998): 396–97. 8.  Willa Cather, “On The Professor’s House,” in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (New York: Knopf, 1949), 30–32. One sees these windows in many of Cather’s novels. 9.  This also suggests a significant difference between St. Peter and Death Comes for the Archbishop’s Latour or even the latter’s vicar, Joseph Vaillant, both of whom are dependent on the influential relationship of hope on knowledge (or idealism on experience). 10.  Sarah Wilson, “ ‘Fragmentary and Inconclusive’ Violence: National History and Literary Form in The Professor’s House,” American Literature 75, no. 3 (September 2003): 576–77, 595 nn. 26, 27. 11.  Wilson, “National History and Literary Form,” 576–77. 12.  This is attested in a lot of recent scholarship, which approaches the role of nativism in The Professor’s House through the representation of Native American culture, which was indeed appropriated by nativist doctrine (mostly because, close to extermination by the turn of the twentieth century, it could be appropriated fairly effortlessly). Walter Benn Michaels argues that in Tom’s assertion of descent from the Cliff City Indians—implying that they are, in his words, his “grandmothers”— and comparison of Roddy to Dreyfus, a move that, in Michaels’s words, transforms “political disloyalty” into “racial betrayal,” Cather’s novel manifests a new cultural logic whereby “identity is a function of inheritance, but what gets inherited is not just a biology, it’s a culture.” Michaels reads both St. Peter and Cather as sympathetic to Tom’s claim of pure American origin: both aim to protect the possibility of pure American identity from the “foreign” threat of contamination posed by the Jewish Louis Marsellus, who provides the agency whereby St. Peter’s daughter Rosamond, at once almost a sister to Tom and his fiancée, can, in becoming pregnant (as she does at the end of the novel), give birth to a decidedly un-American Marsellus; through Tom, St. Peter is able to imagine this threat away in a fantasy of nonaffiliation (Our America: Nativism, Modernism, Pluralism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995], 32, 37–38, 51). It seems that St. Peter is a nativist in Michaels’s account because his instrumentalization of Tom has the same structure as Tom’s instrumentalization of the Indians (I must admit to not being able to figure out why he believes that Cather, too, is nativist). Sarah Wilson, by contrast, while reading Tom much as Michaels does, finds The Professor’s House to be critical of Tom’s nativism. If Tom appropriates Native American history for a reactionary national self-conception that protects American identity from the impure tide of immigrant cultures crashing on its shores, then Cather’s book, by not fully integrating Tom’s “Story” into the rest of the novel, suggests that Tom, by charging his erstwhile friend with treason in selling [Native] American artifacts to a foreigner, is ultimately “practicing bad history. Like those aligned against Dreyfus, Tom relies on a false narrative generated by nationalist desires.” Cather’s ambivalence about Tom’s—and nativist America’s—appropriation is shown, for Wilson, in “her formal unwillingness to naturalize” the “unbalanced relations of interior and window” (Wilson, “National History and Literary Form,” 574, 576, 573). 13.  Incidentally, Cather may be having a bit of fun here in Tom’s metaphor of a series of experiments. Crane, when St. Peter asks him to clarify his position vis-à-vis the

notes to chapter 4  /  199 Outland patent, claims that Tom was a flawed scientist: “He benefited by my criticism, and I often helped him with his experiments. He never acquired a nice laboratory technic. He would fail repeatedly in some perfectly sound experiment because of careless procedure. . . . He was impatient. . . . His conception was right, but very delicate manipulation was necessary, and he was a careless experimentor” (127). 14.  Howard Horwitz is one of the few critics I have come across who abstains from positivism in reading Tom and his “Story.” He insists that “Tom Outland’s Story” can rightly only be read for how it fits into the narrative structure of the novel and therefore into St. Peter’s consciousness: “With its discontinuous structure, The Professor’s House critically examines, even as it epitomizes, the desire to tell anthropological stories. The novel at once exalts the anthropological impulse and deflates anthropology’s ambitions.” While Horwitz’s concern with the novel’s relation to the discipline of anthropology carries his essay afield of my own focus here, his intelligent vigilance is notable (see Howard Horwitz, “Selling Relics, Preserving Antiquities: The Professor’s House and the Narrative of American Anthropology,” Configurations 3, no. 3 [1995]: 355–56). 15.  Cather, Willa Cather on Writing, 48–49, 51; see also Wilson, National History and Literary Form, 592 n. 7. 16.  Incidentally, where the boat is headed when the design of St. Peter’s book becomes legible and inevitable, Algeciras, may be significant in the imaginative economy of Cather’s book. The Algeciras Conference, held during the early months of 1906, paved the way for the formal alliance of France, Great Britain, and Russia, with more tacit support from Spain and the United States, as a bulwark against the coalition between Germany and Austria-Hungary. Held in response to the First Moroccan Crisis, the Algeciras Conference was an important episode in the lead-up to World War I. Additionally, St. Peter may very well sail to Algeciras at roughly the same time as the conference—certainly within a few years: Louie explains to Sir Spilling that Tom was “barely thirty” when he died in “the second year of the war,” which would make the year of his birth 1885, give or take a year or two. We can also infer that the war begins in Europe three or four years after Tom graduated from college; thus he may have come to Hamilton in 1907 (again, give or take). And if Tom arrived in Hamilton as St. Peter was beginning the third volume of the History (234), it is quite possible that he was organizing the project a year or two earlier. So if Algeciras is an important site in the development of St. Peter’s great work, it also foreshadows the death of Tom Outland, with whom St. Peter will identify that work. 17.  Matthew Wilson suggests these two revelations of design are linked also by the imagery with which they are described. Both St. Peter’s History and Tom’s Cliff City are apprehended in an atmosphere of sea and air. St. Peter floats on the “purple water” as “the design of the book unfolded in the air above him,” while Tom sees the Cliff City hanging like a “bird’s nest . . . facing an ocean of clear air” (191) (see “Willa Cather’s Godfrey St. Peter: Historian of Repressed Sensibility?” College Literature 21, no. 2 [June 1994]: 66). 18.  William Spanos calls this function “super-visory”: “By the hermeneutics of super-vision, I mean the imposition of meaning from the normative/panoptic perspective on the subversive aporetic elements—the differential force—to make them conform to the larger (imperial) design” (The Errant Art of Moby Dick: The Canon,

200  /  notes to chapter 4 the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995], 11). 19.  We learn that a concern for the bottom line threatens the university, as manifested in “the new commercialism, the aim to ‘show results’ that was undermining and vulgarizing education. The State Legislature and the board of regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the university” and are increasingly unwilling to support “research work of an uncommercial nature,” such as the professor’s and Dr. Crane’s (120–21). 20.  Chip Rhodes, Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Discourse in American Modernism (New York: Verso, 1998), 63. 21.  Such as what Wilson meant by her phrase “bad history.” 22.  Hilgart, “Death Comes for the Aesthete,” 397. 23.  We recall Kathleen’s informing St. Peter that Augusta lost more than five hundred dollars when, ignoring Marsellus’s warning against doing so, she invested in the Kinkoo Copper Co. because the members of her church were so investing their money, and she therefore thought it proper (108–9).

Chapter 5 1.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text (New York: Scribner, 1991), 43–54, 6. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2.  Incidentally, for Gatsby it is precisely clichés’ recognizability that grounds his faith in reality. 3.  A threat reinforced, perhaps, in Tom’s later confusion over whether the sun is getting “hotter” or “colder” each year, the other scientific fact before which he falters. Irrepressibly drawn to, but always stumbling over, fact, Tom shows how evidence is always secondary to (and dependent on) the conclusions it is presumed to support. 4.  I would like to thank Zoe Trodd for providing some of these examples—but more importantly the insight. 5.  Carlyle Van Thompson, The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 79, 85, 77–78, 102. 6.  Meredith Goldsmith, “White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in the Great Gatsby,” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 443–44. 7.  Michaels, Our America, 2, 26. 8.  Bryan R. Washington, The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 42, 45. 9.  Michaels, Our America, 26. 10.  Ibid., 150. 11.  Betsy L. Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920’s (New York: Routledge, 2002), 102–3, 107. 12.  While we may not finally be able always to trust Nick as a reliable narrator, we appreciate his skepticism as a useful trait in the circles he travels. 13.  John Aldridge, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (New York: Noonday, 1958), 6. 14.  Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), xxi, 63. 15.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success,” in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1996), 90.

notes to chapter 5  /  201 16.  Jeffrey Decker argues that “Jimmy Gatz’s transcription, on the flyleaf of a dime novel, of a Franklin-style timetable and resolves” “undermines” the Franklinian discourse of moral uplift” (“Gatsby’s Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 28, no. 1 [Fall 1994]: 62). 17.  This juxtaposition of optimism and skepticism is not surprising given Fitzgerald’s oft-cited 1936 description of his realization that he “had prematurely cracked”: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” If a healthy intelligence can simultaneously consider opposing ideas, Fitzgerald argues, it does so in the service of a kind of imperial design. In explaining his youthful (and incompletely intellectualized) optimism, he remarks, “Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both.” His crack-up, however, amounts to an enervation of this faith; he no longer assumes this effort will succeed: “this was something I could neither accept nor struggle against, something which tended to make my efforts obsolescent . . . an exterior force, unbeatable.” Though life previously yielded to intelligence, this imperial labor is now impotent. He loses his existential confidence: “So there was not an ‘I’ any more—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect—save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.” The only firm ground in this sea of skepticism is his experience of loss: “I felt—therefore I was.” In place of faith in a future aligned with his own desire, Fitzgerald’s cynical cogito underwrites his discontent. Like Fitzgerald was to discover, Nick finds himself unable to reconcile desire and knowledge (Fitzgerald, “The CrackUp,” in The Crack-Up, ed. Wilson, 69, 78–80). 18.  Gatsby’s fetishistic idealism is gorgeous indeed in manipulating the consumerist ethos of twentieth-century capitalism—and transfiguring the goods in which it is manifest into brilliant accretions of emotional and intellectual energies—but its misapplication is tragicomic. Recall Gatsby’s shirts: “He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher— shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily” (97–98). Each tossed shirt is an emblem of the scope of his imagination—and the insignia of a dialectics in which Nick and this text have no faith. In a rare and paradoxical display of perspicacity, Daisy realizes this, too, but at the same moment she reveals herself at her most banal. The perversity of Gatsby’s success is underscored by Daisy’s base defeat: “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before’ ” (98). In Gatsby’s ability to make beautiful that “for which [Nick has] unaffected scorn,” Nick realizes that Gatsby’s idealistic imagination is misaligned, but its energy is not lost on Nick. 19.  Nick is never himself so generous, and looks to see through most people right away. 20.  Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in The Crack-Up, ed. Wilson, 22. 21.  Rhodes, Structures of the Jazz Age, 3.

202  /  notes to chapter 5 22.  Though it’s true that the sort of racialized allusions that excite so much recent criticism are rather more pronounced in Trimalchio, the earlier, 1924, rendering of Gatsby (see F. Scott Fitzgerald, Trimalchio: An Early Version of “The Great Gatsby,” ed. James L. W. West III [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]) than they are in the published novel—for example, Gatsby has a “negro dressed as a field hand” (81) at a bar inside his house at one of his parties and insists to Daisy (after she tells Nick that she and Gatsby are having a “row . . . [a]bout the future—the future of the black race. My theory is we’ve got to beat them down”), that “You don’t know what you want” (84), and he even sits in a Pullman porter’s chair on leaving Louisville after the postwar visit during which he retraced alone the steps he had taken with Daisy (123)—there is still no decisive ground on which to take the historical (or historicist) significance of the novel for granted.

Chapter 6 1.  Nathanael West, “To Malcolm Cowley,” 11 May 1939, in Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings, ed. Sacvan Berkovitch (New York: Library of America, 1997), 794–95. All further citations of West’s works will be from this edition and noted parenthetically in the text. 2.  On this score, Miss Lonelyhearts can perhaps be read alongside Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, whose central thesis is that pain and frustration—and therefore repression—are inescapable facts of modern existence. But while suffering and repression are categorically allied with knowledge for both writers, the configurations of this alliance are quite different. For Freud, normative consciousness requires the repression not only of errant impulses, but also of the second-degree knowledge of this first-degree repression. For West, on the other hand, indomitable suffering gives birth to the inescapable and humiliating knowledge that it neither serves a normative end nor is remediable. 3.  Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 167–68. 4.  The term is Leslie Fiedler’s, from Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Meridian, 1960), 316. 5.  Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism, 166. 6.  Incongruously, the medal, when Miss Lonelyhearts is finally able to make out its inscription, reads, “Awarded by the Boston Latin School for first place in the 100 yd. dash.” 7.  Rita Barnard, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 192, 26. 8.  Warren Susman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1985), xii, xx. 9.  Barnard, Culture of Abundance, 10. 10.  Ibid., 205–6. 11.  Ibid., 37. 12.  Ibid., 10, 6, 10, 192–93. 13.  Jonathan Veitch, American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 4, 15 14.  Ibid., xiii, xi–xii. 15.  Ibid., 69, 72, xvii.

notes to chapter 6  /  203 16.  Ibid., 4, 7, 15, 71–73. 17.  Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, 26. 18.  William Carlos Williams, “A New American Writer,” in Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jay Martin (Edgewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 48–49. This piece appeared in 1931, before West’s complete novel had been published. 19.  Quoted in Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 257. 20.  Norman Podhoretz, “Nathanael West: A Particular Kind of Joking,” in Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin, 154–58. 21.  Fiedler, Love and Death, 461–62. 22.  This difference can be understood as part of an epochal shift in the understanding of U.S. national culture among [leftist] literary and cultural intellectuals that Caren Irr locates in the mid-1930s. Whereas in the early part of the decade, “leftists defined national culture primarily in relation to time,” describing, in Granville Hicks’s term, “a ‘great tradition’ of American literature that relates the recent past to an imminently revolutionary future,” a “coherent narrative of national culture [that] harmonized with a political agenda that emphasized the role of federal agencies” as a “site of progress over chaos,” the “terms had shifted” by the onset of the Cold War, not least because “the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 had made it impossible for many left intellectuals—among them Hicks—to continue to associate themselves with the Communist Party” and programmatic party agendas. As a result, Irr argues, “national culture began to be defined in terms of space (if not actual territory) rather than time, and form rather than content.” Thus, for example, “Matthiessen is ultimately more concerned with the [American] Renaissance’s exemplification of enduring features of the national culture than with the maturation or progressive alteration of that culture.” By the late 1930s, Irr claims, American national culture “became more narrowly associated with the political ideology of individualism, as against the supposedly structurally identical determinisms of fascism and Communism,” a view that “relies on a map of culture on which the United States is a lone isle of democratic freedom.” Thus the liberal antifascists of the Cold War came to rely on a fairly static cultural problematic in which individualism stood against totalitarianism in a kind of perioddefining, timeless struggle; persuaded by such a problematic, intellectuals “could only predict a future of stalemates. It was not change or progress that they imagined as a national goal, but simply the preservation of a tiny space of individualistic resistance” (Caren Irr, The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998], 41–44). 23.  Ibid., 193. 24.  Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism, 183–84, 7, 184. 25.  Barnard, Culture of Abundance, 195–98, 206–7, 210. 26.  Ibid., 211–13. 27.  Veitch, American Superrealism, 73–76. 28.  Martin, Nathanael West, 166–68. 29.  West was apparently not taking that much license here. Despite the novel’s having “almost no sale whatever” and being a “total commercial failure,” the film rights to Miss Lonelyhearts were sold almost immediately, based partly on the book’s good reviews and partly on the book’s “sensational” character. The purchaser was Zanuck

204  /  notes to chapter 6 and Joseph M. Schenck’s new Twentieth Century Pictures (Tom Dardis, Some Time in the Sun [New York: Charles Scribner’s Son’s, 1976], 154–56). After Zanuck bought the rights, however, the initial reader’s report had little good to say about the novel: “This is a book which could not possibly be translated to the screen. Great stress is laid on fornications and perversions, and on disgustingly intimate details which seek to define the psychopathic character but which do little to further the slight plot. The convention [sic] reader of fiction would class this novel as vile and without apparent purpose save to shock” (quoted in Veitch, American Superrealism, 77). While we may never know Zanuck’s intentions in purchasing the rights, the produced film, a “comedy-melodrama” and morality tale, had little to do with West’s novel.

Afterword 1.  I here use “reify” as Horkheimer and Adorno do their “objectification,” when they write that “All objectification is a forgetting.” If critical theory thereby becomes a practice of remembrance, it bears noting that remembering undoes no crime in restoring knowledge (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming [1972; New York: Continuum, 1993], 230). 2.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31. 3.  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1952), 3. 4.  Ibid., 581. 5.  Ibid., 439–41. 6.  Ibid., 576. 7.  Michel Foucault, “The Functions of Literature,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), 309. 8.  Jonathan Arac, “Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man After Fifty Years,” Boundary 2 30, no. 2 (Summer 2003), 200; the distinction as I use it between the indicative and the optative also comes from this article (197–98). 9.  Michael Bérubé, The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 144. 10.  Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 224.

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Index

accident, 80, 103–4, 111, 142, 190n19: personal history as, 70, 104, 107, 109–10, 112–14. See also education: accidental accuracy: of observation, 187; of representation of reality, 21, 27, 119, 152, 187n6 Adams, Charles Francis, 74 Adams, Henry, xxii, 30, 43, 54–84: Adams’s cynicism, 52, 54–57, 193n10; concern with responsibility, 57–58; Democracy, An American Novel, 71; Education of Henry Adams, xxii, 29, 30, 52, 55–56, as autobiography, 192–93n5; Esther, A Novel, 71; Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, 54, 68; History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 57, 63, 69, 71; John Randolph, 71; letters to Charles Milnes Gaskell, 54, 55, to Mabel Hooper La Farge, 57, to Molly Warner, 60; Life of Albert Gallatin, 71; wife Marian’s suicide, 56 “Adventurer, The” (unpublished story by West), 171, 173–74 advertisement, 152, 156, 165, 166, 168 advice column, 145, 147, 154: as model of 1930s discourse, 155, 169 (see also discourse: public)

aesthetic, the, xvi, 9, 25, 49, 193n5 aestheticism, 148 African American, reading Gatsby as, 125–26 agency, 13, 27, 64, 68, 81, 126, 128, 136, 138–39, 141, 169: culture as, 38; cynicism and, 20, 27, 84; historicism as, 45, 128; and history, 64, 68, 84, 169; individual, 79, 84, 138–39; as irrelevant to education, 79, 81; of knowledge, 27 Aldridge, John, 132 Alexander the Great: in relation to Diogenes, 32, 34, 40; in relation to political evolution, 76 alienation, 13, 37, 57, 66, 174: Henry Adams’s, 65, 66; Diogenes’s, 28; from fantasy, 174; and thinking, 57; and cynicism, 8, 9, 28, 36, 178; modernist, 186n7; Nick Carraway’s, 129, 131, 134, 138; from sincerity, 178; Godfrey St. Peter’s, 107, 110 Amazon.com, “Search Inside!” feature, 19 ambiguity, 35, 125, 158, 181 ambivalence, 42, 127, 129: cynicism and, 130, 133, 136, 191n19 (see also cynicism) America, 53–56, 74, 123, 124, 142–44: American character, 59, 60, 65, 192n1; and Americanist criticism (see Americanism); American culture, cynicism’s role in, xv; American

214  /  index literature; xvii, xix; American mind, 61; American modernism, xx–xxi; origins of, 86, 142; racial and social hybridization of, 126–27; Americans, 2, 17–18, 55, 58–59, 100, 154, 166, 168, 178, 180 American Dream: 11, 14–15, 125 American studies, xx, 44 Americanism, xi, 128, 140, 142, 192–93n5, 203n22: machinery of, 128; and normativity, 30; literary criticism, xviii, 133–47 anachrony, 66 anarchism, 72: modern v. ancient, 41; anarchists, 71–72 anecdotes, 45: of Diogenes and classical Cynics, 33, 34, 38–39, 189n2 Anti-Nazi League, 145 anti-Semitism, in Professor’s House, 107, 197n6 Antisthenes, and the Cynic movement, 33, 189n4 anxiety, xx, 107: and cynicism, 3; in Education, 57, 63–65, 66, 81, 83; about identity, 119, 120, 125, 127; about legibility, 92; and historicism, 45, 92; normative, 3; in Professor’s House, 85; about self-evidence, 107, 114, 119 apathy, xvii, 3, 5, 10, 22, 41, 92: in mistaken equivalence with cynicism, 64, 81, 83, 85, 114 (see also hypocrisy; nihilism; quietism; selfishness) Arac, Jonathan, 182 Aristotle, 41, 172 Arneson, Pat, 8, 15, 21 Arnett, Ronald, 8, 15, 21 art, 47, 158 Athens, 33, 41, 43 Augusta (character in Professor’s House), 92, 106, 112–14, 200n23 authenticity, xxi–xxii, 125, 152, 154, 167. See also inauthenticity; Trilling, Lionel authority, 2, 7, 18, 28, 38, 42, 44, 53, 62, 76, 114, 167, 176. See also hegemony autobiography, 55, 60, 84, 192–93n5 autonomy, xvi, 12, 111, 130 Baker, Jordan (character in Gatsby), 116, 117, 122, 130, 137, 139 banality, 134, 156, 167, 201n18 Barnard, Rita, 153–54, 168–70, 177

behavior, 11, 18, 41: normalized, 16, 35, 117; racially differentiated, 125–26 belief, 72, 140, 145–46, 150, 169, 197n6: ability to act on, 146, 169; and cynicism, 2–4, 11, 13, 15–16, 191n19; political, 21, 145–46 Benjamin, Walter: essay “The Storyteller,” 154 Bennett, William, 18–20, 21 Berubé, Michael, 182–83 Betty (character in Miss Lonelyhearts), 150–51, 156–57, 166, 175–76 Bewes, Timothy, 8, 9, 15 Bierce, Ambrose: definition of cynic, 1, 5, 20, 195n49 Bishop, John Peale, 132 Blackmur, R. P., 66–67, 81, 83 Blake, Roddy (character in Professor’s House), 85–88, 99, 100–101, 196n2; comparison to Dreyfus, 197n6, 198n12 (see also Dreyfus, Alfred) Blue Mesa, 87, 90, 97, 105, 106, 115: discovery of, 85–86, 101. See also Cliff City Boer War, 80 boundary, 36, 159: and normativity, xix, 32, 36, 43. See also limit bourgeois, xvi, 72 Bové, Paul, xi, 20–21, 28–29, 60–69, 77, 192–93n5, 194n30 Branham, R. Bracht, 39, 40, 190n7 Brooks, Rosa, 1, 2, 27 Brooks, Van Wyck, xviii, 192n1. See also usable past Buchanan, Daisy (character in Gatsby), 120–23, 135–39, 142, 201n18, 202n22 Buchanan, Tom (character in Gatsby), 119–23, 125–32, 135–37, 139–40, 200n3 Bush, George W., 1, 188n34 Caesar, Julius. See political evolution Caldwell, Wilber, 10–11, 14, 15, 21, 40, 42 Calisthenes, 34 capital, 79: analysis of, 64 capitalism, 62, 64, 79–80, 162, 192–93n5: capitalist society, 186n7; consumer, 151, 157, 170, 175, 201n18 Cappella, Joseph N., 2 Carraway, Nick (protagonist in Gatsby), 30, 116–44, 200n12, 201n17: identification with Jay Gatsby, xxiii, 133–38, 141, 143;

index  /  215 reader’s relationship to, 133, 200n12; attitude toward Gatsby, 116–20, 121–25, 127–28, 137–44, 201n19; speculations about Gatsby, 117–20, 201n18 cash-value, 61–62, 65, 77, 79. See also James, William; pragmatism Cater, Harold Dean, 55–56, 57, 65, 192n5, 193n8 Cather, Willa, 43, 196n4, 197n6: on structure and form, 97–99, 102, 104; Death Comes for the Archbishop, 198n9; The Professor’s House, xxii, 85–115, 196n5, 198n8, 198n12, 199n16 Chaloupka, William, 11, 15–16, 20, 33 change, 6, 61, 62, 82, 94, 111: in America, 57, 79; and cash-value, 61–62; economic, 57, 78; and evolution, 76–77; historical, xvii, 30, 82, 180; inability to describe, 61–65, 83, 113; radical, 62, 68, 188n35; social, 10, 55 chaos, 59, 66, 80, 165, 182, 195n44, 203n22 Cheney, Dick, 1, 2, 27 Christ, xxi, 64, 151, 164: and commodity culture, 153, 156; desire to believe in, 165; dream, 157–58, 159, 164, 166; figure, 160, 161; as joke, 148. See also “Christ business” “Christ business,” 148, 149, 152, 156, 161 Christianity, 75, 88, 148, 176 Church, the, 63, 76, 79, 156; Miss Lonelyhearts and, 159, 160 citizenry, vii, 5, 18–20, 23, 79, 87: and democratic culture, 4, 22 civic engagement, xix, 4, 10, 32 civilization, xv, 72, 88, 103–4: American, xv, 88, 100, 111, 119. See also Cliff City civil society, 2 Civil War, the, 74 class, xvi, 50, 58, 72, 79, 64, 125, 126 cliché, xx, 22, 140, 147, 148, 150, 153, 155–56, 164, 165, 192–93n5, 200n2: advice column as, 150, 157; Jay Gatsby as, 133, 134 Cliff City, 85–88, 90, 93, 99, 103–4, 110–11, 196n2: discovery of, 85–86; Indians, 85, 86, 88, 100, 111, 198n12. See also Blue Mesa Clinton, William (Bill) Jefferson: 17–19, 21 close reading, xvi, xx, 30, 49 codes/coding, xvi, xviii, 14, 23–24, 34, 154: of desire, 6, 157; of experience, 23–24,

44; and hegemony, 14; of history, xviii, 47; of reality, 6, 8, 22, 34, 154; See also encoding; inscription coherence, xx, 3, 17, 29, 30, 80, 84, 104, 126, 177: of historical narrative, 86, 203n22; legible, 30, 104 Cold War, 167–68, 203n22: critics, 166, 168 Columbian Exposition of 1892, 55, 78–79 comedy, 56, 204n29 comic, the, 164, 171, 177: comic writing, 146, 177 (see writing: comic) comic strip, 155, 161, 169 commercialism, 107, 147, 200n19: language of, 153, 168–69 commodity, 148, 153–54, 160, 166: form, 155, 157 communication, 163, 164, 169, 177 Communist Party, the, 154, 167, 181, 203n22 competence, 3, 6, 23, 25, 27, 29, 46, 50, 51, 71, 76, 81, 83, 145, 175, 177–80: and criticism, xvii, xxiii, 23, 31, 45–46; and cynicism, xxi, 23, 32–53; expectation of, xxiii, 46, 66–67, 74–75, 157, 162, 175; failure of, 5, 83; and historicism, xvii, 44, 48, 64, 66, 83; ideal of, xvii, xxiii, 25, 43, 60; and instrumentalism, 22, 68, 79; and interpretation, 20, 44, 47, 59; and knowing, 3, 120; linguistic, 24–25, 163–64; and normativity, xviii, 6, 15, 50, 70, 84, 153, 165; and recognition, 6, 44, 52, 60, 157, 165–71. See also incompetence compromise, 87–88, 90, 116: compromised desires or fantasies, 109, 111–12, 164, 173 confidence, 58, 76, 116, 141, 201n17; at rotten core of historicism, 88–89, 182; and desire, 92, 107, 124, 150, 168 consciousness, 15, 41–42, 51, 69, 192n1: counterhegemonic, 29; false, xxiii, 15, 26–28, 42 constestation, 169: Foucault’s idea of, 36, 38, 52: hegemonic discourse as open to, 169 consumer culture, 153, 156, 174: fantasies of, 152, 174, 175. See also hegemony consumerism, 154, 156, 168, 172, 176, 201n18. See also capitalism: consumer contempt, 130, 163 Contact magazine, 145

216  /  index contextualization, 30, 44. See also decontextualization continuity, xx, 61, 75: historical, 64–65, 74, 80, 101; and normativity, 3, 65. See also discontinuity convention, 36, 41, 43, 111, 154, 197n6, 204n29: cynical critique of, 33–39, 155 conviction, xxii, 92, 93, 119, 129, 136, 146, 155, 189n49: and cynicism, 6, 21; political, 146, 155; and self-evidence, 101, 124 corruption: 101, 132, 134, 143: political, 1, 6, 16 counterhegemony, 29, 75: and cynicism, 21, 52 Cowley, Malcolm, 132, 145–46, 151, 153, 155, 158, 178 critic, literary, xvii–xx, 25, 44, 48, 49: Cold War, 166, 168; relationship to culture he or she interprets, 49–50 criticism, xvi, xviii–xix, xxii–xxiii, 5, 7, 10, 14, 26, 29–31, 43, 45, 49, 50–52, 82, 132, 140–41, 166, 183: Americanist (see Americanism); and competence, xxiii, 31, 44–45; critical commitment, 49; critical responsibility, xix, 51; critical theory, 25; critical thought, 13, 36; and cynicism, 14–15, 28, 30, 33–34; cultural materialism, xvii, 191–92n25; and hegemony, 20, 29; historicist, 44, 143; literature and, xv, 23; and race; 125, 128, 134; and recognition, xvi, xviii–xix, 29; self-, 10, 23–24, 54; social 8, 10, 11, 72. See also historicist criticism; literary criticism; New Criticism cultural studies, xvii, 46 culture, xv, xviii–xix, 16, 37, 46, 50, 67: Christian, 11, 64, 75, 88, 148, 161–62, 176; consumer, 148, 151–57, 160, 168, 170, 172–76, 201n18; critique of, 3, 169–70; cultural history, xviii; of literacy, 23–24, 58, 182–83, 188n35; cultural materialism, xvii, 46, 52, 191n25; narratives of, 20–21; national, xviii, 203n22; production, 3, 48, 50; reproduction, 21; of simulation, 168, 170; textualized, 47–50. See also mass culture custom, 1, 33, 34, 35, 59, 195–96n49 Cynics, classical: 6, 32, 38–41, 43, 189n1; anecdotes about, 189n2, 190n19; Cynic parrhesia, 189n3

cynics, modern, xvii, 1–8, 11–12, 30, 32, 35, 40–43, 44, 54, 189n1: alienation of, 8; Bierce’s definition of, 1, 195n49; and mistrust of language, 2 Cynicism, classical, xv, 32, 39–43, 189n1: 3 fundamental aspects of, 40; modern vs. classical, 190–91n19; tenets of Diogenes’ practice, 40 cynicism, xv–xxiii, 1–53, 57, 60, 65–66, 68–70, 73, 77–78, 83–84, 86, 88, 91–92, 115, 124, 129–30, 134, 136–37, 140–46, 148–49, 168–69, 189n1: ambivalent, xvii, 42, 71, 124, 127, 129–36, 190– 91n19, 198n12; vs. apathy, hypocrisy, nihilism, quietism, or selfishness, xvii, 3, 5, 22, 87; comic, 145–47, 171–72, 177; critical potential of, 12; “cure” for, 15; danger of, 7–8, 9; dismissal of, xix, 4, 11–15, 29, 57, 180; essence of, 36; and eternal return, 186n4, 195n42; failure of, 14, 18; as false consciousness, xxiii, 4, 8, 15, 26–29; history of the term, 30, 32; and judgment, 179; and knowledge, 2; modern vs. classical, 32, 42, 190–91n19; and modernism, xvi; morphology of, xxii; as pathology, 4, 6, 20; phenomenological account of, xxii; and norms (allegiance to and skepticism of), xv; and normative selfevidence, xix; political, 1–19, 25, 27, 40– 41, 59–60, 79–80, 145–46; problem of, xxiii, 22, 27; as criticism of hegemonic thought, 29; as reconstructive, 4, 20; as threat to democratic society, 2; and sincerity, xv Daisy (character in Gatsby). See Buchanan, Daisy Darwin, Charles, 75, 76, 195n46 Decker, Jeffrey, 201n16 decontextualization, 99. See also contextualization Deleuze, Gilles, 195n42, 195n48 delusion, 18, 134 democracy, 2–3, 6–10, 14, 19, 20–22, 43, 58, 203n22: democratic culture, xv, 2, 4, 188n34; democratic institutions, 4, 5, 9; incompetence capable of illuminating injustices in, 188n34; democratic norms (see norms: democratic) Democrats (political party), 1, 19 Depression, the. See Great Depression

index  /  217 Derrida, Jacques, xviii–xix design, 102–5, 199n16, 199n17; imperial, 201n17; and self-evidence, 102, 104; as trope in Professor’s House, 105–6, 110, 112, 199n16, 199n17, 199n18 desire, xvii, xix, xxii–xxiii, 6, 15, 18, 28, 30, 47- 48, 52, 60, 65, 66, 69–70, 75–76, 79–81, 83, 88–95, 97, 101–2, 105–12, 114–15, 118–21, 123–29, 131–41, 143–44, 146–49, 151–54, 156–57, 160–62, 166, 171–74, 176–77, 178, 179, 198n12, 201n17: Americanist, 137; as criterion for knowledge, 123; encoding of, 151, 170; for legibility, 118–19; legitimation of, 153; historicist, xix; identification with, 133; for identification, 132, 137; instrumental, 137; trajectory of, 134; to produce normative accounts of history, xxii; for recognition, 120–21; for representativity, 137, 140 despair, 9, 10, 13, 40, 59, 101, 146 determination, 77, 130, 171, 181. See also overdetermination Dickens, Charles, 50 Dio Crysostom, 39 Diogenes the Cynic, 5, 11, 28, 29, 32–43, 65, 189n4, 190n19: banishment/exile of, 34–36, 37, 190n7 Diogenes Laertius, 33, 34, 36, 39 disaffection, 66, 91, 105, 129 disapproval, 89, 91, 130 discontent, 26–28, 91, 156, 201n17 discontinuity, 64, 67, 70, 72, 76, 77, 83 discourse, 14, 25, 149, 165, 168–70, 183, 201n16: nationalist, 137; new historicist, 47–48, 192n35; poetic, xx, 47–48; political, xxii, 12, 186n7; public, 155, 169, 186n7; racialized, 125, 128, 133–34; therapeutic, 156, 164, 168–70 disdain, 120, 130, 131 disengagement, 4, 9, 12. See also engagement disillusionment, 8, 132, 133, 136 dispossession, 132, 143, 159, 174 disruption, 29, 155, 161, 186n7: of convention, 37; cynical, of sincerity, xxii, 83; of desire, 107, 137; of normative processes, 30, 57, 75 dissatisfaction, 71–72, 88, 99, 129, 132 dissidence, 25, 28 distaste, 130, 197n6

distrust: cynicism’s, 9, 17, 27; of interpretation, 24; Nick’s, of Gatsby, 118, 127 domestication, xvii dominant, the, xvii, 29, 77. See also hegemony domination, 4, 7, 27, 41, 43: social, 14, 15, 27 Doyle, Fay and Peter (characters in Miss Lonelyhearts), 162–64, 165–66, 170 dreams, business of, 152, 157, 166 Dreyfus, Alfred, 87, 100, 197n6, 198n12 Duchene, Father (character in Professor’s House), 86–88, 99, 103–4, 196n2 Dudley, Donald, 33, 38, 40, 41, 189n4 duty, 74, 76, 81, 104, 196n3 dysfunction, misreading of cynicism as, xix. See also cynicism; functionality earnestness, 2, 123, 132, 146, 151: earnest civic commitment, 32; earnest desire, 93, 123, 143; earnest faith, 124, 156, 161. See also sincerity education, 2, 10, 23, 55–56, 61–65, 66–67, 69–84, 162, 195n49, 200n19: accidental, 74–75, 77, 195n49; educational economy, 73; failure of, 67; negative, 77, 78; negative dialectic of, 73–84; problem of, 10; and commercialism, 200n19 Education of Henry Adams, The (Adams): xxii, 29, 30, 52, 54–84; as autobiography, 192–93n5 engagement, 7–8, 10, 12, 62, 71, 124, 167. See also disengagement Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man, 180–82 Eliot, T. S., 194n41 Emmanuel, Rahm, 1, 2, 5–6, 27 encoding, 37, 47, 151, 153, 155–57, 167–71. See also codes/coding enlightenment, 2, 18, 25–27, 42 entropy, 52, 66, 67, 175, 177. See also thermodynamics eternal return, 186n4, 194–95n42 ethics, xix, 9, 15, 19, 21, 40, 57, 68, 189n4 ethnicity, 117–18, 125–27 Europe, xv, 74: European modernism, xx; European society, xv, 54–55, 58; European states, xx evidence, 2, 24, 50, 52, 68, 101, 108, 141, 150, 190n7, 200n3. See also self-evidence

218  /  index evolution: political, 59, 76; theory of, 75–76, 77, 195n46 expectation, xx, 7–8, 65, 106, 120, 136, 140, 146, 150, 151: betrayed, 77, 147; and competence, xviii, xxiii, 60, 67, 75, 145– 46, 157, 162, 175; and cynicism, xvii, 21, 22, 83, 179; language in defiance of, 158, 161–62, 182; of legibility, 92, 105, 118, 157; literature resisting, 146; of significance, 65, 91, 112, 139–40; of new historicism, xx, 52, 88, 170; normative, 66, 70, 151, 163, 164, 175; and reading of history, 111; reading people through one’s, 116, 117, 138; of recognition, 114, 166, 177, 185n4; of self-evident teleology, 88, 91; of self-evident value, 91, 112. See also criticism expediency, 166, 168, 170, 180, 182 experience, xxii, 3, 5, 15–17, 22, 23, 44, 49, 52, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 67–69, 77–79, 81–83, 86, 88–91, 93, 100–105, 108–10, 112, 116–19, 129–32, 135–36, 139–41, 143, 152, 154–55, 159, 163–65, 168, 170–71, 173, 175–76, 194n30, 198n9, 201n17: aesthetic, 49; and desire, 141; historical, 55, 57; inscription of, 168; interpretation of, 22, 44, 59; of loss, 201n17; of reality, 5; recognition of, 194n30; as representative of national identity, 116; self-evidence of, 15; social, xxii, 24, 52 failure, xxii, 78, 86, 108, 120, 124, 133, 156: as trope, 65–73; of national image, 105, 142–44 faith, 76, 88, 124, 128, 134, 135, 136, 139, 167, 175, 200n2: bad, 160, 161; and cynicism, 8, 10, 13, 15, 28; and hope, 146, 148, 149, 150, 153, 166, 178; lost, 201n17, 201n18; medieval ethic of, 57, 63, 64, 73 fantasy, 100, 106, 111, 173–77: consumerist, 152; failed, 88; futurity of, 175; of history, 106, 171–78; of legibility, 100, 112, 176; and nationalism, 87–88, 93, 114; normativity as, 153; of nonaffiliation, 198n12; and recognition, 105, 175–76; of redemption, 159, 176; of reference, 165; secondhand, 173–76; of self-evidence, 106–7, 111 Farrell, James, 155

fascination, 46, 47, 48, 61, 62, 131 fascism, 155, 167, 176, 203n22 Father Duchene. See Duchene, Father field-Imaginary, 189n49 Fiedler, Leslie, 167, 202n4 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 43, 201n17: “Crack-up, The,” 201n17; “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” 201n22; on enthusiasm, 140; on Gatsby, 133; Gatsby, xxiii, 116–44; and identity, racial, 125–28, 129; “My Lost City,” 116 force, 4, 38, 69, 194–95n42, 196n51: of the Cross, 64, 80, 176; of cultural authority, 38; normative, xxi, 35, 64; of recognition, 65, 109; and self-evidence, 20, 26; social and historical, xviii, 7, 61, 79; Virgin and Dynamo as, 63, 80 Foucault, Michel, vii, 14, 36, 38, 52, 59, 180, 182, 185n6, 189n3 fragmentation, 24, 76, 163: fragmentary experience, 154, 165; fragmented narratives, 153 Franklin, Benjamin, 134, 201n16 freedom, 64, 98, 108–9, 130, 166; cynic, 40–41: democratic, 203n33; from obligation, 110; of thought, 12 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 50: normative consciousness, 202n2 functionality: of historical structures, 170; normalized, xix, 22; recognizable, 43, 62. See also dysfunction future, xxiii, 2, 6–7, 9, 11, 71–72, 110, 126, 201n17: of America, 1, 10, 58, 76, 203n22; of the black race, 202n22; hegemonic, 43; orgastic, 121, 140, 143; past and, 60–61, 62, 65, 70, 126, 133, 196n51; recognizable, 11–12, 20, 22 futurity, 203n22: of desire, 106; of fantasy, 175; legibility and, 168; normative, 165, 182; of possibility, 170 Gallagher, Catherine, 45–49, 191n25, 192n35 Gallatin, Albert, 58 Gaskell, Charles Milnes, 54, 55 Gatsby, Jay (protagonist in Gatsby), 116–44, 201n18: and America, xxiii, 116, 140, 142; as African American, 125–26; as contemptible, 134; irony of, 137; Nick’s inability to identify with, 133–34; overdetermination of, 117, 116; reading and misreading of, 116, 137–38;

index  /  219 as signifier, 139, 141; Gatsby’s dream, 123, 133–34, 136, 142; Gatsby’s smile, 116–17, 121, 138 (see also gesture); speculations on origins of, 117–20 Geertz, Clifford, 47 gesture, 25, 111, 163: and cynicism, 171–72; Gatsby’s 137–38 Glass, Loren, 62–63, 65–68 Giroux, Henry, 9–10, 14, 21 Godzich, Wlad, 23–25, 28, 43–44, 46, 52, 164, 182, 188n35: criticism, 44, 46; labor of opacification, 164; on relationship between literacy and competence, 23–24; on normalization, 43; on theory, 24–25, 52; writing and recognition, xviii–xix, 188n43 Gold, Mike, 166 Goldfarb, Jeffrey C., 6–7, 8, 14, 21, 40, 42 Goldsmith, Meredith, 125–26, 128 gossip, 130 Gould, Jay, 76 Goulet-Cazé, Marie-Odile, 39, 40 government, xxii, 19, 22, 32, 87: cynical view of, 1, 2, 6, 22; emergence of, 186n7; failure of, 66 Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 146 Gramsci, Antonio, 20, 29, 62: nationalpopular, 191n19 Grant, Ulysses S., 56, 76, 78 Great Depression, 153–55, 185–86n7 Great Divide, 168, 169 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 29, 30, 51, 52, 116–44 Greenblatt, Stephen, 45–49, 191n25, 192n35 Griem, Julika, 194–95n42 Guattari, Felix, 195n48 Haack, Susan, 9 habit, vii, xvi, xxii, 4, 16, 28–29, 32–36, 38–39, 44, 52, 58, 59–64, 66, 68–69, 72–83, 113, 127, 170, 177, 180, 188n34, 194n30, 194–95n42, 195n44: critical, xvi, xxii, 44, 180; of mind, 58–60, 64, 68–69, 72–74, 78; normative, xvi–xvii, 16, 33, 38, 52, 75, 80, 82–83, 177, 188n34; of recognition, 28–29, 58, 63, 66, 68, 72, 75–77, 81, 127, 194n30; vs. thinking, 60–61, 170; of thought, 4, 34–35, 180 Hamlet, 82 Harrell, David, 196n4 Hay, John, 54, 55, 80, 82, 193n8, 196n50

Hegel, G. W. F., 12–14: Phenomenology of Spirit, 12 hegemony, xvi, xix, 20–21, 24–25, 28–29, 37, 42–43, 50, 52, 150, 168–70, 173, 182. See also Bové; Godzich; Gramsci; recognition; self-evidence Hellman, Lillian, 187n6 Hiley, David R., 9, 21 Hilgart, John, 95, 112 historicism, xvii, xix, 31, 44, 64–65, 69, 89, 101–2, 110–11, 143, 170, 173, 178, 180, 185n4, 202n22: challenge to, 68–69, 83, 88–89, 92, 110, 112, 114, 185n4, 186n9; instrumentalist assumptions of, 64–66, 83, 88–89, 92, 101–2, 110, 114, 149, 178, 186n9; teleology of, 60, 170; historical thinking, 55, 65–67, 81; relation to relevance, 173, 177. See also historicist criticism; new historicism historicist criticism, xviii–xix, 31, 45, 143, 180: historicist interpretations, 31, 44. See also historicism historicity, 39, 44, 173, 174, 179–80 historicization, xix, 30, 50, 55, 83, 84, 111: as anti-critical, xix, 30, 50 historiography, xvii, 44, 57, 59, 64 history, xvi–xxiii, 30–31, 43–53, 60, 62, 65, 67, 68, 70, 79, 80, 82, 92, 102, 111, 120, 180–81: accounts of, xxii, 3, 30, 46; cultural, xviii–xix; dynamic theory of, 81; indeterminacy of, 108; and knowledge, xxii, 57; legibility of, xxii, 101; literary (see literary history); and literary criticism (see literary criticism); moment of, 8, 15, 21; narratives of, 44; national, 87, 100, 143; personal, 38; theory of, 196n51; usable, 66; writing, 59 History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (Adams), 57, 60, 68, 71 Hollywood, 145 Hooper, Marian, 71 hope, 10, 75, 135, 137, 142, 146, 149, 152, 163, 168–71, 178: degradation of, 135–36 Horwitz, Howard, 199n14 Howard, Jean E., 45, 49 humanities, the, xvi, xxii humanity, 9, 86, 157: and pain, 170 Hume, David, 186n9

220  /  index humor: Adams’s, 55–57. See also comic, the hypocrisy, xvii, 3, 5, 22, 33, 41, 57 idealism, 9, 10, 41, 143, 188n34, 198n9: in cynicism, modern v. ancient, 40, 42; Gatsby’s, 136, 141, 201n18 identity, 91, 127, 133, 195n44, 198n12, 201n18: American, 106, 120, 122–23, 124, 129, 143–44, 198n12; as compensation for indeterminacy, failed, 125; and desire, 172; errant thinking of, 128; legibility of, 128–29; national, xxiii, 114, 116, 119–20, 128; possibility of, 12; racial and ethnic, 125–28, 143, 189n49; self-evident, 119, 120, 123, 127, 128 identification, 124–25, 135: broken, 136; desire for, 123, 132; failed, 132–37; and Gatsby, 117, 133–34, 142–43; mistaken, 137–39, 143; provisional, 143; and skepticism, 135 ideology, 11, 26–27, 42, 44, 47, 129, 153, 155–56, 168, 169, 170, 203n22: Americanist, 129; consumerist, 153; critique of, 26, 44, 47; of healthymindedness, 155; idealism as, 42; of individualism, political, 203n22; reproduction of, 11; of therapeutic culture, 168, 169, 170 ignorance, 54, 55, 59, 64, 66–67, 73: acknowledging one’s own, 60; maintenance of, 133; productivity of, 133 imagination, xvi, 67, 90, 91, 131, 135, 141, 157, 167, 180: and cultural refuse and detritus, 174; and failure of identification, 137; Gatsby’s, 135, 201n18; hegemonic, 22; and narration of identity, 129; romance of, 93; St. Peter’s, in relation to Tom Outland, 92, 100, 102, 109, 196n5 imitation, 125, 127, 161, 163 impeachment, 19 inauthenticity, 157, 168, 170–71: and cynicism, 8, 41. See also authenticity incompetence, 176, 178, 188n34; linguistic, 149, 163, 165, 175, 176. See also competence independence, 12, 33, 130, 131, 143 indifference, 3, 9, 86, 92, 139, 149 individualism, 9, 203n22: Cynical, 41; political ideology of, 203n22

inertia, 58, 59, 72 injustice, 4, 11, 14, 27, 188n34 innovation, xix, 10, 62, 63 inscription, 60, 68, 104, 111, 112, 170: biographical, 78, 81; and competence, 15, 68; of convention, 154; of cultural authority, the possibility of, 38; cynical, 146, 179; of desires, 33, 156; of education, 76, 77; of evidence, 101; of experience, 60, 81, 82, 141, 155, 168; of the future, 20, 21, 110; indeterminacy, uninscribable, 120, 124; historical, 63, 82, 84, 88, 100; of knowledge, 50; normative, xvii, 6, 170; of race, 144; and recognition, 105, 149, 171; of selfevident value, 91; self-inscription, 106; of suffering, 156; teleological, 11, 20, 35, 55. See also codes/coding; encoding insincerity, 7, 158: and cynicism, xvii, 5, 6, 28; rhetorics that foster, 7; and selfevidence, 166, 177. See also sincerity institutions, vii, xv, 2, 3, 8, 11, 15–17, 24, 35, 43, 50, 62, 64, 87, 123, 182: and cynicism, 11, 14, 15, 16, 35, 39; and democracy, 4–6, 9; economic, 17, 186n7; force, institutional, 148; fragmentation, institutional, 24; future of, 2; and knowledge, 50–51; institutional responses to economic disruption, 186n7; public, 2, 3, 7, 11, 87; and thinking, problem of, 58 instrumentalism, xv, xviii, 4, 11, 24, 94, 110, 158, 162–63, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 198n12: and competence, xviii, 60, 79; critical, xv–xvi, 52; of desire, 106, 107, 124, 127, 137; failure of, 61; of historicist criticism, 44, 49, 51–52, 116, 129, 137; normative, 60; pragmatic elevation of, 52; and recognition, 60–61, 74, 76, 84, 92, 124, 127, 143; self-evidence of, xxiii; instrumentalization of cynicism, 15, 20–24, 52 intellectuals, xvi, 60, 62, 63, 167, 203n22: and change, 62, 68; cynicism, as an intellectual mode, xvii; and the distinction between thinking and forms of recognition, 63; hegemonic, 193n5; literary and cultural, 203n22; projects, intellectual, 10, 14; work of, vii intelligence, 33–43, 61, 64, 69, 72, 80, 129, 201n17: in America, 54; and competence, 29; forms of, 57, 63, 69,

index  /  221 76, 129; normative failure of, 66; selfevidence of, 103–4; as unrestricted to categorical oppositions, 61 interpretation: of American society, 154–55; burden of, 189n4; competence of, 20; cultural, xix, 48, 49, 170; and cynicism, 17, 22, 28; distrust of, 24; expectations about, 139; of experience, 23, 59; of Gatsby, 139–41; historicist, 31; inaccessibility of, 141; interpretive error, 138; interpretive security, 134; and language, 24, 44, 50, 122; literary, 45–46; practice of, 52; St. Peter’s, in relation to Tom Outland, 100; varieties of, 182 interregnum, 62, 65, 69, 71, 76, 77, 80. See also Gramsci Iraq war, 1 irony, 5, 13, 55, 56, 80, 132, 137, 145, 158, 197n6 Irr, Caren, xi, 167, 203n22 isolation, 12, 66, 98, 99, 135 iteration. See repetition

agency of, 27; cash-value of, 61, 65; and competence, 68, 120; and criticism, 182–83; and cynicism, xvii, 2, 3, 7, 14, 26, 43, 53, 140, 190n19; and democracy, 2–3; and desire, 92, 123, 132, 133, 137, 143, 201n17; disenchanted, 105, 132, 135; and disenchantment, 135–36; expectations about, 70; failure of, 119, 175; habits of, xvii; historical, xxii, 57, 63, 66; historicist, xx, 68; vs. ignorance, 54, 67; normalization of, 14; positive, xx, 52, possibility of, 81, 119, 189n4; problem of, 51, 73, 79; recognizable, xxii, 30, 60; relevant, xxii, 65, 74; selfknowledge, 55; and skepticism, 12–13, 143; and theory, 25; and thinking, 60; and tragedy, 194; usefulness of, xvii– xviii, 22, 30, 63, 65, 66, 84, 135. See also cynicism; knowing Kropotkin, Peter, 72 kunikos tropos, 33. See also cynicism kynicism, 41–42. See also cynicism kyon, 32. See also cynic

James, William: Henry Adams’s argument with, 60–62, 65, 73, 194n30; Pragmatism, 61. See also cash-value; pragmatism Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 2 Jefferson, Thomas, 58, 60 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 102, 104 Jordy, William, 75–76 judgment, 18, 19, 20, 30, 50, 60, 132, 142, 168, 197n6: normative, xxii; reservation of, 117, 123, 130, 135; sincere, 69, 71, 179 justice, 183, 190n19, 197n6. See also injustice

La Farge, Mabel Hooper, 57 Lang, R. D., xxi Lane, Christopher, xvii, 47, 185n4 language, xviii–xix, xviii, 3, 10, 12, 14, 23–25, 41, 43, 44, 48, 50, 72, 103, 123, 125, 149–53, 156–62, 164, 166, 168–70, 177–78, 181, 194n30: and cynicism, xvii; failure to be meaningful, 150; function of, 23–25, 44; history and, xxiii; mistrust of, 2–3; nativist, 125; normative, 149, 153; as representational, 151; thought and, 194n30 law, 19, 65, 79, 190n19: historical, 62, 80; second, of thermodynamics, 66 Lefebvre, Henri, xvi–xvii legibility, xviii, 20–22, 29–30, 36, 44, 46–47, 51, 55, 76, 86, 96, 100–102, 104–5, 112, 123, 146, 150–54, 159–61, 165–66, 168, 174–76, 178, 199n16: and desire, 118, 151, 170; expectation of, 91–92, 105, 118, 157, 175; of experience, 152, 165; fantasy of, 100; of identity, 120, 127–29; of history, xxii, 86, 88, 92, 101, 108; normative, xxiii, 160–61, 165–66, 176; presumption of, 88; of value, 109–12

Kafka, Franz, 99 Kanter, Donald L., 7–8, 21, 40 Kathleen (character in Professor’s House), see McGregor, Kathleen Keyes, Dick, 11, 15, 20 keywords, 16–17, 103. See also Williams, Raymond King, Clarence, 82 knowing, 13, 60, 83, 119, 135; knowing as competence, 120; romance with knowing, 119; way of, 2, 22, 63, 131. See also intelligence; knowledge knowledge, xix, xxii, 42, 50, 58, 60, 70, 75, 136, 193n5, 198n9, 202n2, 204n1:

222  /  index legitimacy, 57, 59, 77–80, 95, 106, 120, 121, 127, 146, 153, 164, 169, 172, 173, 195n48: and classical Cynicism, 32, 34–40, 42–43, 47, 52–53; and modern cynicism, 6, 10, 14–15, 21–22, 29–30; hegemonic production of, 38, 53 Lerner, Michael, 17–18, 19–20, 21, 42, 190n19 letters: Henry Adams, 54–57, 60, 65, 78 (see also Charles Milnes Gaskel; John Hay; Mabel Hooper La Farge); to advice columnist Miss Lonelyhearts, 146–52, 154–68, 170, 174, 177–78; Willa Cather, 97, 102; Nathanael West, 145–46, 151, 155, 158, 177–78 (see also Malcolm Cowley; Edmund Wilson) Levenson, J. C., 60 liberation, 42 Lieberman, Joseph, 19 limit, 36–37, 38, 76, 195n42: delimitations, xix; of mass structures, 7, 14. See also boundary linguistic: ambiguity, 35; competence, 24, 25; fragmentation, 24; incompetence, 149, 157–58, 163, 176; practices, 25, 41, 96, 150, 182. See also incompetence: linguistic; practices: linguistic linguistic turn, the, 47 literacy, 24, 58, 182–83: crisis of, 23–25; Godzich and the culture of, 188n35 literary criticism, xvii, xxiii, 3, 31, 51, 140–41, 144: and competence, 50, 179; and cynicism, 29, 43; and recognition, 51; statist model of, xv. See also criticism literary history, xxiii, 43, 177, 186n3: American, xvi–xvii, xx, 30, 140. See also criticism literary modernism, xv, 30, 62 literary past, xviii, 143 literary studies, xviii, xx, 44. See also criticism literature, 65, 132, 155, 169, 185n4, 192–93n5, 203n22: and culture, 44–45, 128; and cynicism, xv–xxiii, 9; and historicism, 52 (see also historicism; new historicism); and politics, xviii, 146; and positivism, xxi; teaching of, 23–24 (see also literacy; writing) longing, 132, 134, 137, 139, 156: administration of, 129; association of

understanding with, 139; modes of, 139–41; narrativization of, 124; for representation, 139; as trope, 137 loss, 8–9, 26, 109, 154, 197n5, 201n17: consciousness of, 106; and cynicism, 8, 9, 22, 26; of self-evidence, 22 “Lost Generation,” the, 132 Lucian, 39 Lyell, Sir Charles, 75–76, 195n46 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 191n19 machine, 27, 77, 79, 102, 105, 108: alienation, 57; identification, 125; normativity, 17, 21, 165; reality, 152, 165; recognition, 108, 157 Malthus, Thomas, 56 manipulation, 17, 28, 41: and consumerism, 201n18; and cynicism, 7, 14; of desire, 119 Marsellus, Louis (character in Professor’s House), 91, 93, 95–96, 107, 110, 196n5, 199n16: and anti-Semitism, 197n6, 198n12 Marsellus, Rosamond (character in Professor’s House), 88, 91, 93–95, 97, 106–7, 110, 197n6, 198n12 Martin, Bill, 9 Martin, Jay, 173–74 Marx, Karl, 50: Marxism, 26, 191n25 Mary (character in Miss Lonelyhearts). See Shrike, Mary mass culture, 149, 150, 151, 157, 163, 167–68, 170, 172, 177: authority of, 167; and the “Great Divide,” 168; as hegemonic, 148, 150, 159; as incoherent, 177; and hope, 168–69; and mechanical reproduction, 155; mediation, masscultural, 156; modernism and, 167–68; and representation, 159, 168; and satisfaction, expectation of, 162 mass media. See mass culture mass production, 150–52, 160, 162, 165, 166, 170, 171 master narrative, xvi materialism, 17–18, 20, 52, 100: cultural, xvii, 46, 49, 52, 191–92n25; and the cynic, 21, 41, 42 Mazella, David, 5, 6, 12, 14, 33, 40, 186n3 McGregor, Kathleen (character in Professor’s House), 87, 93, 96–97, 99, 107 McGregor, Scott (character in Professor’s House), 93, 96, 104, 110

index  /  223 McKinley, William, assassination, 71 meaning, 17–18, 24, 102, 111, 140, 149–53, 165, 169, 171–72, 175, 188n43: and culture, 37, 46, 153; and cynicism, 19, 171, 179; and experience, 67, 140, 154; of Gatsby, 123, 124, 134, 139, 140; historical, 67, 70, 100, 126, 143, 148; of identity, 127, 172; instrumental, 177; and language, 150, 153, 163, 165; and new historicism, 48, 52; normalization of, 17–18, 153; and realism, 9; recognition of, 24–25, 29, 153, 165, 188n43; self-evidence of, 128; teleological, 68; and vocabulary, 9, 16, 77 media, 2, 19: multimedia society, xvi. See also mass culture metanarratives, 8 metaphor, 40, 86, 125, 158, 159–60, 164: of enlightenment, 25, 159; for freedom, 97; Tom’s metaphor of a series of experiments (Professor’s House), 110, 198n13 metonymy, 161 Michaels, Walter Benn, 126, 128, 134, 137, 140, 198n12 Michigan, Lake, 94, 98, 108, 109 Midwest, the, 85, 122, 133: midwestern upbringing, 117, 130, 132 Mirvis, Philip H., 7–8, 21, 40 miscegenation, 125, 140 misery. See suffering Miss Farkis (character in Miss Lonelyhearts), 153, 159, 164 Miss Lonelyhearts (West), xxiii, 29, 30, 52, 145–79: commercial failure of West’s novel, 203–4n29 Miss Lonelyhearts (protagonist/advice columnist): xxiii, 145–79; and Christian redemption narrative, 148–49, 150, 157–66, 176–77; inability to answer letters, 146–50, 157–68 Mississippi River, 54, 58 mistrust, cynicism and, 2, 17, 22 Mizener, Arthur, 132 modernism, xv–xvii, xx–xxi, 30, 62–63, 126, 167–68, 185n7: alienation, modernist, 186n7; definitions of, xvi–xvii; New Deal, 185–86n7. See also literary modernism modernity, 8, 12, 29, 42, 66, 77, 126, 152

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (Adams), 54, 61, 63, 68 morality, 3, 34, 43, 77, 147, 157, 190–91n19, 204n29: and literature, xxi; public, 18–19, 43, 76; slave, 195n43 Morse, Jr., John T., 71 Myers, D. G., 44, 47 myth, xvi, 12, 143 naiveté: and cynicism, 10, 26, 132, 136, 144; hegemonic, 33 narrative, 29, 44, 60, 75, 76, 99, 125, 133, 135, 143, 161, 179, 181: of change, 55; of corruption, 132; critical, 169; of culture, 20, 21; and cynicism, 21, 30, 84, 130; of emancipation, 36; encoding, 22; fragmented, 153–54; hegemonic, 25, 170; historical, 44, 83, 86, 101, 108, 168; and identity, 128; and knowledge, 30, 84; legitimacy of, 29, 80; and longing, 139; mass-produced, 171; narrative structure, 124, 199n14; national, xxiii, 61, 198n12, 203n22; normative, 20, 29; of nostalgia, 89, 107; of passing, 125; of redemption, 148, 155, 176; of salvation, 148; of self (autobiography), 84, 109; of social development, xxii; of sovereignty, 130; narrativization, xvii, 22, 108. See also master narrative; metanarrative narrator, reliable, 200n12 nation, 10, 18, 58, 66, 71, 78, 79, 143, 168, 191n19, 203n22: boundaries, national, xix, 43; culture, national, xviii, 203n22; discourses, nationalist, 137; experience, nationalizing, 88; fantasy, nationalist, 87–88, 93, 106, 114; identity, national, xxiii, 114, 116, 119, 120, 125, 128, 129, 198n12; past, national 142; teleology, national, 10, 66, 112. See also narrative: national national-popular, 191n19. See also Gramsci, Antonio nationalism, 87–88, 92, 100, 104, 105, 137, 176, 191n19: and nostalgia, 90–91, 105; and Tom Outland (Professor’s House), 100–101, 112 nativism, 51, 100, 120, 126, 141, 198n12: and recognition, 120, 122, 128; Tom Outland’s (Professor’s House), 128, 198n12 Navia, Luis, 41, 190n19

224  /  index negation, 12, 13–14 New Criticism, xix–xx, xxi, 191n22 New Deal, 185–86n7 new historicism, xvii, xix, 44–52, 191n25, 192n35: and competence, xvii, 31, 43–52; and context, xvii–xix, 45; critical bankruptcy of, 44–45; and cultural poetics, 44–45; incoherence of defense of, 45–52, 191n25; instrumentalist assumptions of, xix–xx, 31, 44–52, 185n4, 191n22; and New Criticism, xix–xx, 191n22, 191–92n25; practices of, 45–52, 191n22; and pragmatism, 52; and recognition, xviii–xix, 47, 185n4; transparency, textual, 31, 44. See also historicism New Masses (periodical), 146 “New Vocationalism,” the, 24, 182 Nies, Betsy L., 127–28, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 50, 194–95n42 nihilism, xxii, 13, 41, 190–91n19: cynicism vs., xvii, 3, 5, 9, 22 Nixon, Richard, 19 normalization, xxii–xxiii, 14, 18, 25, 30, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 44, 50, 52, 62, 72, 73, 146, 149–51, 161, 164–65, 168, 176, 188n34: critique of, xxiii, 39–40; displacement of, 30; normalized functionality, xix; normalized self-evidence, xxiii; normalized sincerity, xxii; relationship to recognition, 176 normativity, xxi–xxiii, 14–15, 53, 77, 148– 49, 153, 154–56, 160–61, 164–66, 170, 179, 182: expectation of self-evidence of, 148, 160–61, 164; normative accounts of history, xxii; normative competence, xviii; normative consciousness, 202n2; normative desires, xvii; normative habit, xvi, 177; normative processes, 30; normative structure, 16, 99; normative teleology, xxii; as unstable artifice, 195n44 norms, xv, xxiii, 2–4, 6–8, 11–12, 14–15, 20–21, 33, 35, 51, 177, 190–91n19: defacement of, 35; democratic, 6–7, 11; social, 14 nostalgia, 62–63, 67, 83, 91, 92, 108, 112: narrative of, 89, 107 novelty, 61, 62, 74, 75, 78, 79: and counternormativity, 58, 74–75, 78; as opposed to the “old habits of mind,” 58, 78; threat to recognition, 74, 75

obligation, 73, 77, 83, 104, 110, 112–14: of new thought, 73; patriotic, 91; Tom Outland’s relationship to the Cliff City (Professor’s House), 104, 112, 196n3 opacity, 25, 45: opacification, labor of, 25, 52, 164 optimism, 60, 140, 124, 181–82, 201n17 order, xx, 7, 25, 63, 65, 69, 72, 75, 76, 83, 86, 124, 175, 188n43: “order and security,” theme in Professor’s House, 86, 88, 90, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 110, 112; social, xxi, 42, 74 origins, 75, 84, 106, 118, 120, 125, 126, 174: American, 87, 102, 111, 143, 198n12; fantasy of, 106 Outland, Tom (protagonist in Professor’s House), 85–115: diary, 90–91, 105; as marker of self-evidence, 107; memory of, 96–97, 105; overdetermination of, 95; as signifer, 95 overdetermination, 88, 94, 105, 112, 114, 158, 160, 174, 179: of Gatsby, 117; of modernism, xvi; of reality, 155, 166, 168; of meaning, 153; of Tom Outland (Professor’s House), 88, 93–95, 97 Owl-Eyes (character in Gatsby), 116, 121, 122 pain. See suffering Panic of 1893, 78, 79 Paris Exposition of 1900, 83 parody, 40, 167: in Miss Lonelyhearts, 149, 156, 167. See also satire participation, 57, 68, 132: civic, xix, 19; vs. estrangement, 70, 129, 132; political, 2, 21, 146; social, 68, 90 past, 64, 133, 174: Adams’s, 57; American literary, xviii; fictional national, 142–43; and future, 59–61, 65, 70, 140, 196n51, 203n22; Gatsby’s, 116–20, 126–27, 137; knowledge, 60, 75; models of, 62–63; and new historicism, 49; and normativity, 14; pre-Columbian, 88, 114; and the present, xviii, 59, 64–65, 69, 74, 101, 105, 110, 180, 185n6, 192n1; recognized, xviii–xix, 21, 50–52, 75, 85–86, 88, 101, 108, 110, 181, 185n4; rewriting the, 59, 126; usable, xviii, 63, 65, 68–69; withdraw/retreat into, 92, 94–95

index  /  225 pathology, 179: cynicism characterized as, 4–5, 8, 15, 20, 22 pathos, 82, 134, 177 patriotism, xx, 87, 91 Pease, Donald, xi, 189n49 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 194n30 perception, 55, 122: and cynicism, 2, 22 performance, 39: Gatsby’s, 116, 118, 125 pessimism, 182: Adams’s, 56, 65; and cynicism, 11, 22 phenomenology, xxii, 1, 81, 179: of cynicism, 4, 14, 28 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 12 physics, 67, 80 pity, 145, 158 Plato, 39, 40, 41, 120, 126, 190n7, 190n19 pleasure, 140, 175, 189n4: mementos of, 172–74; in Miss Lonelyhearts, 157, 162, 169, 172, 177; symbols of, 172, 174 Podhoretz, Norman, 166–67 poetics, cultural, 44–45, 52 poetry, xx, xxi, 47, 167. See also discourse: poetic politics, vii, 25, 33, 51, 59, 65, 72, 77, 79–80, 153, 166–68, 178, 185–86n7, 191n19, 198n12, 203n22: contemporary U.S., 1–16, 27; and cynicism, 1–16, 19, 27, 33, 40–41; failure of, 44; and history, xviii; and individualism, 203n22; and knowledge, xix; political action, 12; political agenda, 146, 167, 203n22; political beliefs, 145–46; political conviction, 146, 155; political discourse, xxii, 12; political engagement, 167; political formations, xviii–xix; political language, 12; political participation, 2, 146; political party, 166–67, 203n22; political stupidity, 59–60; political teleology, 80 popular inertia, 58–59 positivism, xx–xxi, 68, 69, 97–98, 106, 124, 179, 199n14: and criticism, 52; and literature, xxi; positivistic expectations, xx; and self-evidence, 81; refusal of, 64, 67 possibility, xix, 22, 27–29, 35, 37–38, 47–52, 56, 66–71, 100, 106, 110, 123, 136, 140, 143, 146, 156, 169–70, 173, 176, 180–82: of alterity, 35; of competence, 6; counterhegemonic, 52; of criticism, xxiii, 10, 14, 31; and the future, 62, 110;

and history, 64, 66–67, 82, 100, 169; and identity, 12, 119, 124, 126, 198n12; and knowledge, xxii, 57, 66, 81, 119, 135, 189n4; of legible experience, 165; and new historicism, 49; of normative judgments, xxii; of novel thought, 60; and the present, 68; social, xxi, 6, 14; of value, 35, 109 postmodernism, 8 postwar literary criticism, 140 powerlessness, 67 practices: linguistic, 24, 43, 51–52, 182, 183; literary critical, xvi, 22, 24, 43, 45; normative, 6–7, 15–16, 20, 51–52, 57, 104; social and cultural, xv–xix, 3–4, 11, 14, 16, 20, 22, 52, 58, 127, 134, 189n1 pragmatism, 47, 51, 52, 61–62, 192–93n5, 194n30: pragmatic continuity, 61; pragmatic elevation of instrumentality, 52; pragmatic recognition, 61–62. See also James, William Pragmatism (William James), 61–62. See also cash-value; pragmatism present, xviii, 22, 56, 63–65, 72, 74, 92, 101, 105, 106, 110: and future, 22, 61, 65, 71, 72; and past, xviii, 64, 65, 68, 69, 74, 88, 92, 101, 180, 192n1; recognition, 20, 65, 101, 110; writing a history of the past in terms of the present (Foucault), 59, 180, 185n6 Professor’s House, The (Cather), xxii, 29, 30, 51, 52, 85–115, 198n12, 199n14 provincialism, 117, 130, 131 Pteraspis, 75, 76, 83 public, xxi, 5, 6, 10, 18, 19, 22, 154: cynical view of government, 1, 2, 6, 27; discourse, 155, 169; institutions, 2, 3, 7, 11, 87 public sphere, 2, 6, 10, 42, 62 quietism, xvii, 3, 6 race, 119–20, 122, 125–28, 133, 134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 178, 182, 198n12, 202n22 racism, 127–28 Ransom, John Crowe, xx, xxi reading, 50, 52, 68, 100–101, 167, 173, 180– 83, 191n19, 191n25, 192n5: cultural, 44, 48; of Education, 62–63, 67–68; Gatsby, 116, 127–28, 140; of history, 68, 92; Tom Outland, 198n12, 199n14; past in terms

226  /  index of present, 101; of West, 168–69. See also close reading realism, 7, 9, 10, 15, 26, 27, 154, 166–67: and cynicism, 5, 15, 26, 27; normativity of, 156. See also reality reality, 5, 8–9, 13, 15–16, 26, 29, 51, 90, 114, 136, 142, 151–52, 154, 158, 164, 165–66, 168, 171, 182, 200n2: certainty of, 90, 114; and cynicism, 16, 136; encoding of, 8, 151, 171; experience of, 5, 158, 168, 171, 181; faith in, 200n2; of history, 8, 15; management of, 3, 158, 164, 166; as normative concept, 152, 154, 164; objective, 8, 90; overdetermination of, 158, 166, 168; recognition of, 15, 90, 116, 142, 181–82; representation of, 8–9, 151, 154, 158, 165–66, 181–82; social, 3, 15–16, 26; understanding of, 9, 182 Reclus, Élisée, 72 reception (of), xx, 23, 39, 151: of modern and ancient cynics, 32, 39 recognition, xxi, 5, 14, 17, 20, 22, 28–29, 30, 44, 51, 57, 59, 63, 65, 72, 74, 78, 81, 82, 83, 86, 114, 120, 124, 128, 139–41, 143, 152, 155, 157, 180–81, 183, 188n43: authority of, 5, 17, 20, 22, 33, 35–38, 59, 152–53, 181–83; and competence, 25, 33, 35–37, 44, 52, 59–60, 66, 68, 78–79, 81–82, 118, 120, 157, 178, 188n43, 194n30; critique of, 155, 181; vs. cynicism, 20–22, 28–30, 33, 35–38, 148, 180; and the dismissal of cynicism, 4–5, 7–8, 11–12, 14, 16–17, 20–21, 65; displacement of criticism by, xviii, xx, 6, 24, 29–30, 50–51, 141, 148, 183; enticements, seductions of, xvi, 59, 91–92, 123–24, 127, 140–41, 172–73; and functionality, xvii–xix, xxii, 5, 7, 12, 15, 17, 22, 24, 28–31, 33, 35, 37, 43, 57, 62, 68, 72, 74, 78–79, 124, 151, 164, 177; and hegemony, 20–21, 25, 28–29, 42–43, 50, 52, 155, 157, 170; and historicism, xx, 49–52, 66, 68, 81–83, 88, 100–102, 108, 110–12, 114, 120, 178, 185n4; and history, interpretation of, xviii–xix, 68, 72, 80–81, 86, 88, 100–102, 105, 108, 181; of identity, 118, 120–23, 125, 128–29, 139, 143, 172, 181; and normativity, xv, xix, 4–5, 11–12, 14–17, 20–21, 23, 25, 29–30, 33, 35–36, 55–57, 60, 65–66, 68, 72, 80, 86, 88,

101, 148–49, 151, 164–66, 168, 170, 176–78; vs. novelty, 57–58, 60–62, 71, 74, 76, 78, 83; of the past, xviii, 85–86, 101, 110; and statism, 59, 88, 100–101, 112, 123; recognizable future, 11–12, 15, 21–22, 29, 37, 65, 101, 155, 165, 171; recognizable knowledge, xxii, 14, 17, 24–25, 71–72, 74–75, 78, 81, 92, 118–20, 122–23, 127–28, 140, 148, 152, 155, 158, 165, 174–75, 180, 186n9; vs. thinking, xxi, 6, 21–22, 24–25, 38–39, 59, 61–63, 68, 84, 128, 188n43, 194n30. See also reality: recognition of redemption, xxiii, 14, 15, 69, 149, 153, 155, 168: Christian, narrative, 148, 176; as commodity, 160; and cynical criticism, 15; fantasy of, 159, 176 Reid, Harry, 1, 2, 27 reinscription. See inscription referentiality, 152, 159, 161: failure of, 149, 155, 157, 158–59, 162, 165–66; relation to historicism, 149; fantasy of, 165 regulation, 148, 156, 161, 188n34: and cynicism, 188n34; medical, 156; of narrative fiction, 161; of suffering, 148 relevance, 65, 70, 80, 83, 154, 168–69, 173, 177, 179: expectation of, 65; historical, xx, xxii, 52, 111, 167, 177, 179; of hope, 10; normative, 65 repetition, 105, 131, 136: rendering Miss Lonelyhearts professionally impotent, 150–52, 155, 157; of suffering, 146, 149, 150–52, 155, 157 representation, 13, 22, 99–100, 139, 155, 159, 167, 170–71, 182: and criticism, 44–45, 51; and culture, xxiii, 45, 167–68; and Diogenes, 28–29, 35, 39; and desire, 135, 137, 162; expectation of, 139, 154, 159; hegemonic, 8; of identity, 116, 124, 128–29, 141, 143; and language, xviii; longing for, 139–40; of meaning, 140–41; of pain, 148–49; and reality, 5, 15; textual, xxi; as untenable, 134, 182 reproach, 20, 32: and Diogenes, 33, 36 republicanism, 58, 62–63, 75 Republican Party, 74 resistance, 21, 52, 110, 130, 169–70, 203n22 responsibility, xx, 9, 19, 20, 43, 57, 59–60, 73, 74, 82, 110, 112: critical, xix, 48, 51; dismissal of, 92; and education, 73–74, 82; and thinking, 57, 59, 60, 182

index  /  227 revelation, xxii, 72, 84, 136, 177, 182, 199n17 Rhodes, Chip, 111, 140 rhetoric, 50, 51, 153, 169: cynicism and, 6–7; and distinctiveness, 45, 47; of mass culture, 150. See also cynicism; mass culture; nativism Rosamond (character in Professor’s House), see Marsellus, Rosamond Rucker, Joe (character in “The Adventurer”), 172–74, 176–77 Ryan, Kiernan, 44, 45, 47: and new historicism, 191n22, 191n25 Said, Edward, 37–38, 50–51, 52, 73, 182–83 salvation, 11, 15, 43, 162: critical narrative, salvific potential of, 169; cynicism’s potential, 28; and mass culture, 169; narratives of, 148 sarcasm, 55, 130, 156, 160 satire, 40, 132, 149, 167. See also parody Schwartz, Delmore, vii science, xvi, 2, 3, 9, 65, 66, 67, 75, 173, 196n51 scorn, 131, 133, 134, 201n18 Scott, James C., 188n42 Scythians, 1, 5, 196n49 secondhand, the, 171–76. See also fantasy security, 134, 155, 186n7. See also order: “order and security” self, apparatus of, 137, 138 self-assurance, 131: as disrespected by Diogenes, 33 self-criticism, 23, 34, 54 self-consciousness, 12, 20, 109, 132 self-evidence, vii, 16–17, 20–23, 28, 37–38, 44, 52–53, 64, 68–69, 75–76, 83, 91, 95–96, 98, 104–7, 109, 112–14, 118, 124, 133, 136, 156–58, 160, 165–66, 168, 175–76, 179, 182: of America, xx; of competence, 26, 28–29, 46, 50, 66; degradation of, 114; as design, 102, 132; and education, 81; expectation of, 21, 102; of experience, 15, 139; failure of, xxii; and history, 86, 112; and identity, 119–20, 123–28; of knowledge, 22; legitimacy of, 106; of national narrative, xxiii, 87, 132; normative, xxiii, xix, 3, 21, 43, 66–67, 88, 91, 148–53, 154, 161; reality and, 16, 113–14; seductions of, xvii–xviii; social,

33–35; and teleology, xxii, 43, 66–67, 88, 91; of text, xx; of thought, 55; and transparency, 23; of truth, xix; of value, 68, 88–91, 100, 102, 104, 110, 112, 160 self-government, 19 self-interest, 5, 7, 17, 191n19 selfishness, xvii, 17: selfish withdrawal, 78, 83 semiotic codes, xvi sentimentality/sentimentalism: 17, 65, 109, 121, 124, 131, 132, 134, 141, 143–44, 148–49, 152, 164. See also identity: American Seward, William H., 74 Shaw, George Bernard, 187n6 Shrike (character in Miss Lonelyhearts), 148–49, 150, 151, 153, 156–61, 164, 165 Shrike, Mary (character in Miss Lonelyhearts), 151–52, 155, 164, 174 signification, 165, 175: breakdown of, 122; excess of, 153, 174–77; expectation of, 137, 141, 159, 177, 182; failure of, 120, 122; and legibility, 159; massproducible, 153 signifier, 44: Gatsby as, 139; Tom Outland as, 94–97 sign, 47, 141 sincerity, xxi–xxii. 2–3, 5–7, 10–13, 16, 17, 27–28, 43, 52, 66, 69–73, 107, 123–24, 132–33, 135, 145–49, 151, 152, 156, 157– 58, 163–64, 169, 171, 176–78, 179: and cynicism, xv, xxi–xxii; desire for, 148; normative, xxii. See also insincerity skepticism: xv, 2, 4, 5, 10–13, 16, 17, 27–28, 43, 114, 124, 129–30, 135–36, 200n12, 201n17: ambivalent, 129; cynical, 11; healthy, 2; as useful trait for Nick Carraway, 200n12 Sloterdijk, Peter, 26–28, 41, 42, 43 social experience, xv, xxii, 52, social order. See order: social social practices. See practices: social and cultural social security, 186n7 society, xvi, xxi, 2, 7, 10, 24, 33, 40–43, 46, 55, 56, 58, 71, 76, 79, 153, 168, 181, 186n7: alienation from, 8; American, 10, 72, 140, 155, 168; consumer, 176; criticisms of, 72; culture and, xxii, 16–17, 32; democratic, 2, 11, 20, 58; and education, 61, 73, 74; engagement with,

228  /  index 8; European, 54–55, 58; ideology and reproduction of, 21; literature and, xxii; mass, 7; normative desires inscribed in, xvii; transformation of, 62; values of, xxi Socrates, 33, 39, 189n4, 190n7 solution/solutions, 7, 10, 13, 18, 61, 70, 75, 153; cynicism as approached through its, 12, 14, 20, 27 Southwest, the, 89, 90, 102, 106 sovereignty, 38, 42, 130, 159: of hegemonic forms of thought, 35, 195n48; of mass culture, 159; narrative of, 130, 155 Spanish Adventurers in North America (Godfrey St. Peter’s multivolume work in Professor’s House), 86, 89–90, 93, 102, 111 Spanish-American War, 80 Spanos, William, 199n18 spectatorship, 132 speech, 125, 137, 138, 150, 159, 163, 166: free, 40, 189n3; sincerity of, 10 St. Peter, Godfrey (protagonist in Professor’s House), xxii, 30, 85–115: achievement, 94–95, 106, 110, 114; imagination of, 100; malaise of, 93; relationship with Lillian, 89 St. Peter, Lillian (character in Professor’s House): 86–93, 95–96, 100, 105, 107–10, 114, 196–97n5 standards, 18, 19–21, 40, 77, 188n43: standard-bearer, 120, 147; gold, 79; normative, 30, 57,67 statism, 79, 88, 128, 143–44: statist thinking and literary criticism, xv, xxii, 32, 88, 116, 119, 128, 144; statist teleology, 59 Stivers, Richard, 9, 15 Stoicism, 12, 21, 189n4 stupidity: American, 55; European, 55, 60; social or political, 59–60 structure, 7, 14, 20, 64, 70, 74, 81, 150, 155, 168: cynical, 28, 30; fantasy-structure, 111; hegemonic, 168, 170; historical, 170; ideological, 48, 156, 168, 170; interpretive, 50, 52, 74, 84; literary, xix–xx, 70, 194n39; narrative, 99, 101, 124, 199n14; normative, 16, 84; social, 37, 170; of thought, 74, 150, 186n7 Strychacz, Thomas, 150–51, 167–68 subject, xviii, 12, 13, 26, 27, 44, 180

subjectivity, 8, 139, 154: and Gatsby, 138–39 suffering, 145–51, 155–60, 170, 172–74, 176– 77, 202n2: encoding of, 147–48, 150, 155, 170, 176–77; inability to respond to, 146–47, 150; and knowledge, 202n2; persistence of, 146–47; plea to be relieved from, 146–47, 149–50; normalization of, 149; regulation of, 148 Sumner, Senator Charles, 74–75, 77 Superior, Lake, 142 superrealism, 154 super-vision, 180, 199n18 surrealism, 154 Susman, Warren, 153 symbol, 64, 88, 160, 166, 176: of authority, 176; of ideas, 111; need for taking literally, 161, 176; of pleasure, 172, 174; symbolic resistance, 169–70; symbolism, 124, 125, 160, 166 Szalay, Michael: definitions of modernism, xvi–xvii; on New Deal modernism and governance, 185–86n7 Tate, Allen, xx teleology, 15, 29, 43, 101, 104, 134, 170, 194n39: authoritative, 4; of conventionality, 35; fantasy of, 111; and hegemony, 35–36, 38, 43, 52, 55, 57; historical, 67; historicist, 59, 60, 68, 101, 104, 111, 170; and interpretation of cynicism, xvii, 4, 5, 11, 15, 20–21, 28– 29, 38, 43, 52; legible, 29, 111; national, 10, 15, 66, 101, 111–12; normative, xxii, 5, 11, 21, 29, 43, 52, 55, 57, 60, 66, 68, 88; political, 80; self-evident, 43, 71, 88, 91, 101, 104, 112; statist, 59, 91 text, literary, xvii, xx, 30, 43: close reading of, xvi; critical responsibility to, xviii– xix; culture as, 47–48; cynicism of, xix, xxiii; historicist reading of, xix, 44, 47–48; historicization of, 50; meaning of, 43; structure of, xix–xx, 45; and recognition, logic of, 30, 52 textuality: of culture, 44, 51, 127 textual transparency, 31 theory, 9, 23–25, 46, 52, 62, 75–76, 77, 81, 146, 191n25, 195n46, 196n51, 197n6, 204n1: Adams’s dynamic theory of history, 81; of evolution, 75–76; and literacy, 23–25

index  /  229 thermodynamics, 66. See also entropy thinking, xvi–xvii, xxi, 3, 4, 6, 16, 22, 33, 35, 36, 43, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63–65, 69, 77, 81, 83, 84, 128, 144, 170, 177, 182, 195n48: economic, 77; historical, 55, 65, 81; statist, 144 Thompson, Carlyle Van, 125, 128, 134 thought, xviii, 12–13, 17, 22, 25, 29, 32, 35– 36, 38–40, 47, 55, 57–61, 63–65, 67–69, 72–73, 77–78, 81, 83, 123, 128, 179, 180, 186n7, 194n30, 195n48: hegemonic, 29, 35; integrity of, xviii–xix; new, 65, 73; structures of, 186n7 Thrasymachus, 190n19 Tom (character in Gatsby). See Buchanan, Tom Tom Outland (character in Professor’s House), see Outland, Tom “Tom Outland’s Story” (section of Professor’s House), 85–87, 96–99, 101, 106, 199n14 tolerance, pedagogy of, 9 tragedy, 18, 143: Gatsby misread as, 133; teleological structure promised by, 194n39 transgression, 18, 93: cynical, 18, 35; and limit, 36–37 transition, 62, 181: moments of, 67; political, 77 transparency, xxiii, 23, 25, 27, 44, 50: critical assumption about, xxiii, 20, 22, 23, 25, 31, 44, 50, 164, 179; of language, 20, 22–25, 27, 31; vs. opacity, 25 Trilling, Lionel, xxi–xxii truth, vii, xix, 19, 29, 37, 47, 75, 109–11, 120, 153, 188n43, 189n3: no absolute, 69, 195n44; and critical theory, 25; concept of, 27–28, 43; and cynicism, 43, 187n6; literary, as not synonymous with fact, 167; nonhegemonic, 28; and parrhesia, 189n3; and recognition, xix, 111 twentieth century, 70, 71, 82, 186n7, 198n12: America, 149, 166; capitalism, 201n18; career, Adams’s starting, 70, 71; gap between eighteenth and, 82; epistemological challenges posed by, 63; literature, xvi, 3 Twentieth Century Pictures, 204n29 typewriter: Miss Lonelyhearts’s inability to write before, 146, 148, 150; as

undermining the legibility of politically coherent hope and faith, 178 unconscious, xvi unhappy consciousness, 13, 26 uniformity, 64, 69, 75, 76, 135 uniformitarianism, 76 United States, 1, 22, 23, 58, 87, 100, 112, 199n16: and cynicism, 1, 9; divergence of, from European states, xx; as island of democratic freedom, 203n22; nationalist fantasy of self-evidently pure origins, 87. See also History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (Adams) unity, xviii, 53, 65, 67–69, 80, 81: cultural, 50; expectation of, 67; as form of faith, 76, 81; recognition of, 50, 67, 69, 76, 81; and transparency, 25; and uniformity, 75 universe, 69, 73, 81 U.S. Constitution, 68 usable history. See history: usable usable past, xviii, 63, 68 utopian promise, 168–69, 170 value, xviii, xxii, 8, 17, 21, 22, 34, 35, 68, 73, 86, 88, 90–92, 95, 100, 105, 109, 134, 136, 160, 166, 169, 173, 181–82, 190–91n19, 192n1: common, 64, 80; historical, xxii, 86, 112; institutional, 35; legible, 109–10; legitimate, 173; national, 87; normative, 190–91n19; possibility of, 35; recognizable, 8, 68, 73, 102, 110, 112; self-evident, 21, 88, 90–92, 100, 102–4, 107, 110, 112, 160. See also cash-value vanity, 82, 145, 171: Christ as, 158, 166 Veitch, Jonathan, 154, 155, 157, 168–70 Vietnam, 1, 23 Virgin, the, 57, 63, 69, 70, 83 virtue, 35, 49, 191n19 vision, 5, 9, 10, 14, 17, 48, 67: cynic’s faulty, 1, 5, 20, 195n49; double, 49, 132; failure of, 71–72, 134; historical, 44, 81; normalized, 72; unity as, 81. See also super-vision vocabulary, 10, 31, 79, 104, 110, 114, 151; critical, 10, 16–17, 29, 31, 125, 151, 154; normative, 16–17, 29, 77–79, 122;

230  /  index problem of, 16–17; and recognition, 16–17, 29, 79, 122, 156; shared, 16 vocationalism, 24, 182 Warner, Molly, letter from Henry Adams, 60 Washington, Brian R., 126, 128 Washington, President George, 76, 196n3 Weber, Max, 42 Wendell, Barrett, 54 West, Nathanael, 43, 145–46, 148, 150–51, 153–56, 158, 161, 164, 166–73, 176–78, 202n2, 203n29: Day of the Locust, 145; letter to Malcolm Cowley, 145–46, 151, 153, 155, 158, 178; letter to Edmund Wilson, 155, 177, 178; Miss Lonelyhearts, xxiii, 29, 30, 52, 145–79, 203–4n29 whorehouse, 145 will, intellectual, 75–76 Williams, Raymond, 16–17, 29 Williams, William Carlos, 145, 166–67 Wilson (character in Gatsby), 120, 136 Wilson, Edmund, Nathanael West’s letter to, 155, 177, 178

Wilson, Matthew, 199n17 Wilson, Myrtle (character in Gatsby), 129 Wilson, Sarah, 98–99, 198n12 withdrawal: Adams’s selfish, 78, 83; cynicism and danger of, 2, 4, 10; social, 78, 83, 89, 135 Wolfe, Thomas, 155 writing, xx, 12, 38, 55, 84, 102, 145–46, 150, 152, 158, 163, 164, 166, 177, 188n43, 191n25: comic, 146, 177; composition and the teaching of, 23–24; overwriting, 92, 160; and theory, xviii– xix, 188n43; as transcription of agency, 145–46, 160, 163; writing history, 59, 92, 126, 180, 185n4; writing programs, 23–24. See also literacy: crisis of Xenophon, 39 Zanuck, Darryl F., 177 Žižek, Slavoj, 26, 27 Zola, Emile, 197n6