Transnational Na(rra)tion : Home and Homeland in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 9781611478167, 9781611478150

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Transnational Na(rra)tion

Transnational Na(rra)tion Home and Homeland in Nineteenth-Century American Literature John Dolis

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Madison • Teaneck

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by John Dolis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dolis, John, 1945Transnational na(rra)tion : home and homeland in nineteenth-century American literature / John Dolis. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61147-815-0 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61147-816-7 (electronic) 1. American literature--19th century--History and criticism. 2. National characteristics, American, in literature. 3. Transnationalism in literature. I. Title. PS169.N35D65 2015 810.9'358--dc23 2015008021 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Dr. Tom Tierney Trine University

Contents

Acknowledgments Pre-lude: Performance Criticism Overture: Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home First Movement: Washington Irving: The Cutting Edge of Gross Anatomy Second Movement: Frederick Douglass: Domestic Hardships and Capital Gains Third Movement: Louisa May Alcott: The Dividends of Foreign Exchange Fourth Movement: Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Citizen of Somewhere Else Finale: Mark Twain: Beauty and the (B)east References Index About the Author

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ix xi 1 41 75 109 137 157 185 195 199

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude to Kenneth Dauber, SUNY Buffalo. Two sections of this book have previously appeared in article form. For permission to reprint, I’m grateful to the following: “Twain’s (Dis)figuration of Travel: Humoring the (B)east,” reprinted from Studies in the Humanities 24.1&2 (1997), by permission of Studies in the Humanities; and “Hawthorne’s Transnational Coup: Double-Crossing the Na(rra)tion,” reprinted from Arizona Quarterly 66.1 (2010), by permission of the Regents of The University of Arizona.

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Pre-lude Performance Criticism

With this prefatory piece, allow me to give vent, to sound a cautionary note, before the recess bell goes off. In the pages that ensue, you’ll find no moral righteousness, no reprimands, no disposition to correct the trials and tribulations of society—to wit, the customary victuals dished out in the name of literary criticism that, today, looks more like “social work” (manipulated, willful, and contrived) than genuine textual analysis and interpretation. To rearticulate, you’ll find no overview of erstwhile scholarship; no proclamation of its blunders, bloopers, oversights; no summary of what lies up ahead; no deployment of the text as an occasion, as a ruse to grind an ax, to set the record straight, or to repair (permit me to employ a mix of metaphors, the symptoms in the parlance of Lacan) a comprehensive gamut of cultural malfunctions, failures, “fault” lines— literary criticism as jack-of-all-trades. I’ll neither slight the text nor cheat it, nor calculatingly (mis)take it as a means to explicate, amend, and rectify its context (be it social, sexual, or historical). I seek the pleasure of the text alone, and offer you a textured writing that enacts a textured reading of the text itself: that is to say, the “narrative” as such—specifically, its economics and psychology. Forget the “author,” and forsake the solace that the reader, seeking “true” interpretations of the text, discovers extricating, not unlike Little Jack Horner, the plum of authorial intentionality. Once the author sends his offspring to the printing press, the child is on its own; the meaning of that “darling” now arises in the fissure opened up between the reader and the narrator, in the relationship, the (counter)point of “transference,” established twixt the two. Make no mistake, the author knows not what he says—or means. Would you have him be (a) god? Lest we forget, he bears within his consciousness the cross (and cost) we all must pay in this regard. Intentions go astray—unconsciously. The reader subsequently serves as analyst to the analysand, the narrative, its self, the narrative itSelf (I’ll have recourse to return to this neologism frequently). The author is (as good as) dead. To this effect, my idiosyncratic reading of a text embraces both the deconstructive and the psychoanalytic temperament: it would expose aporias, the knots within narration’s threads, its very fabric, where it contradicts itself, where the narration contradicts its self, the discourse of the narrator as such. xi

xii

Pre-lude

Here, my own pro-vocative critical voice, its “drive,” in psychoanalytic terms, operates against the grain of traditional literary criticism; its tongue-in-cheek, “irreverent” performance (let the text speak for itself) serves up a medley of related fragments ultimately open-ended and bereft of any final sense of things, of a determinate resolve. Call this “performance criticism,” if you like. All work and no play—well, you know the rest: “Jack” is, in any case, today, a very dull boy, indeed. At any rate, the “John” who lays claim to authoring the literary renditions contained herein finds his own jouissance in the event/advent of language alone. Let me spell it out: the readings that follow are intended to be both ludic yet fatiguing in their exposition of narrative dynamics and what I generally call the textual unconscious. This makes its own demands upon the reader who comes out to play. To mix the metaphors a final time, there is no spoon-feeding, no pablum. If the reader wishes to digest this grub, he’ll have to chew. By any other name, rereading calls the reader to account for what he would ingest. Hark! I hear the bell.

Overture Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home

“Moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“Dear Son”: invested by this intimate inaugural address, the Autobiography justifies the recollection of its self, its history, as a domestic exchange: “I have ever had a Pleasure in obtaining any little Anecdotes of my Ancestors. . . . Now imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the Circumstances of my Life, . . . and expecting a Weeks uninterrupted Leisure in my present Country Retirement, I sit down to write them for you.” 1 So begins the pleasure of the text, an unpretentious transaction— old-fashioned, to be sure—twixt father and son, re-collected in tranquillity, removed entirely now from London politics and its contextual nuances.

The biographical incision to which this “Pleasure” of the text will serve as suture embodies a coup that failed, that fostered this autobiographical impulse in the first place. An economic downturn occasions this domestic turn. Franklin’s fiery confrontation with Lord Hillsborough for having been denied the opportunity to act as agent for the colony of Massachusetts in England portends his departure from England for the final time while, in the bargain, his partnership with the Walpole Company, involving the acquisition of hundreds of thousands of acres in the West, goes up in smoke. As Gordon S. Wood suggests, “in the aftermath of this failure, Franklin began reflecting upon his remarkable life. . . . No longer did he refer to England as ‘home.’ America became the ‘home’ he increasingly began to long for.” 2 His favor with the Ministry fatigued, his royal capital spent, Franklin thus acknowledges that his political interest in imperial affairs is at an end. Stunned, depressed, and writing as a “gentleman” comfortably ensconced within the English country house of his good friend Jonathan Shipley during the summer of 1771, the condition of possibility for autobiography inaugurates the subject to its self, one having emerged “from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & some Degree of Reputation in the 1

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Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home

World” (A 567). Here begins the user-friendly, businesslike examination of a life. Domestic recollection sidesteps Franklin’s measured years in London spent in adulation of a king who could do nothing wrong, when the gossip all around, as Franklin expressed it in a letter to William, 9 January 1768, had been “of getting me appointed under secretary to Lord Hillsborough,” but now “with little likelihood as it is a settled point here that I am too much of an American” (91). Let’s supplement this disillusionment and disappointment with the homeland by capitalizing on the most humiliating moment of Franklin’s life—the Hutchinson Affair. Purloined letters generate the mise-en-scène; the “Cockpit” operates as setting for the final act on 29 January 1774. Some feathers will get ruffled, although Franklin, afterward, recounts himself as baited bull. Duplicity accounts for the conclusive dressingdown, what Jerry Weinberger calls Franklin’s “hairbrained intention of easing colonial passions by deflecting blame from Parliament to the governor and lieutenant governor”—specifically, sending certain letters written by Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, to Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts House, suggesting that Hutchinson was partly responsible for England’s punitive attitude toward the colonies. 3 At the final hearing by the Privy Council to remove from office both Hutchinson and his lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver, Alexander Wedderburn, Solicitor General, “delivered an hour-long diatribe attacking Franklin’s behavior and character in the matter of the letters. . . . Wedderburn called Franklin a thief and a scoundrel and a violator of private correspondence moved by the ‘coolest and most deliberate malice.’ Wedderburn made a vicious joke, based on a line from Plautus, that elicited laughter from the crowd.” 4 Franklin utters not a word. It spells the end of his political courtship with the Motherland. 5 Love’s labor lost, the father figure of a king momentarily expunged (Louis XVI looms ahead), Franklin thus despairs of a united Britain and America, a unitary homeland wed politically. In a letter to an unknown correspondent, 28 November 1768, he already intuits this double-cross: “Being born and bred in one of the countries, and having lived long and made many agreeable connexions of friendship in the other, I wish all prosperity to both; but . . . I do not find that I have gained any point, in either country, except that of rendering myself suspected, by my impartiality; in England, of being too much an American, and in America of being too much an Englishman.” 6 So much for “impartiality,” the lack of ideology, the subject compromised and compromising equally, subjected to the vagaries of politics. Politics alone induces him to contemplate his past, and the precipitous reversal of fate regarding which he henceforth turns his back on England, no longer feeling welcome and at “home.” 7 The fiction of the family (“Dear Son”) subsequently counterfeits as a domestic prop—the subject properly positioned, placed, set up “at home,” subjected to the rubrics

Overture

3

and morality of family life and its familiar (mise-en-) scene whence life embarks upon the re-citation of its self—and, at the same time, shrouds the ghostly, foreign, international tableau, the ambidexterous swap of homeland(s) that precipitates this urge to write, to publicize one’s self. In the meantime, home goes by the boards, a fiction to be scripted and rehearsed, though ineffectually composed. Its virtuous formality, mere maquillage, betrays an innermost abyss supplanted by those carefree, careless London years on Craven Street when Franklin cannot bring himself to leave the motherland despite the urgency of letters from his wife, Deborah, pleading his return, letters teeming with detailed descriptions of the Market Street house in Philadelphia, one built to Franklin’s specifications, yet one that he had yet to inhabit—one that, in fact, he had yet to see. The distance of far-off London only seems to heighten Franklin’s interest in the house, as Claude-Anne Lopez observes; his letters home “were full of eager inquiries and no end of advice,” including “detailed instructions on the way to hang the mohair curtains in the blue room,” the use of tubs to catch the rainwater, how to lock up his books and papers, as well as requests for “the measurements of the windows, the chimney, the buffet.” 8 Indeed, as Edward Cahill remarks, he played an elaborate role in the creation of the Market Street house’s interiors, “from purchasing furniture, ceramics, silver, and textiles to superintending the decorating of rooms and the placement of objects.” 9 A 1758 letter to Deborah, for example, enumerates an embarrassment of luxury items shipped from London to Philadelphia: “English China,” “Coffee Cups,” a “China Bason,” “Silver Salt Ladles,” “Breakfast Clothes,” “Carpeting,” “Flanders Bed Ticks,” “Damask Table Cloths and Napkins,” “Chair Bottoms,” “Snuffers, Snuff Stand and Extinguisher, of Steel,” “Microscopes and other Optical Instruments,” “Silk Blankets,” “Table Glass,” “Knives and Forks,” “Silver Candlesticks,” and “a large fine Jugg for Beer.” 10 Indeed, the Market Street house figures as a comfortably remote haven for retirement from public life, while Deborah figures simply as a useful object in the home itself—that “large fine Jugg for Beer” suggestive of “a fat jolly Dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white Calico Gown on, good natur’d and lovely, and put me in mind of—Somebody.” 11 The missing “you” (and “missing you”) postponed by anonymity abides on Craven Street, where Franklin’s publicly acknowledged stand-in family serves as proxy—Mrs. Stevenson and Polly more vivacious substitutes for wife and daughter back in Philadelphia. Even his flirtations make the press when, in the absence of his landlady, the Craven Street Gazette reports that “Dr. Fatsides made 469 turns in his dining room, as the exact distance of a visit to the lovely Lady Barwell, whom he did not find at home, so there was no struggle for and against a kiss.” 12 Little wonder, then, that Franklin puts off going home. In a letter to Deborah, 1773, nine years since having seen her last, he voices his mistrust about returning to America, fearing “I shall find my-

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Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home

self a Stranger in my Own Country; and leaving so many Friends here, it will seem leaving Home to go there.” 13 She writes her final letter to him in October of that year, and it’s William, the (“Dear”) son, who subsequently notifies the father of her death: “I came here on Thursday last to attend the funeral of my poor old mother, who died Monday. . . . She told me that she never expected to see you unless you returned this winter. . . . I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment preyed a good deal on her spirits”—concluding with a cautionary gloss that “[y]ou are looked upon with an evil eye in that country, and are in no small danger of being brought into trouble for your political conduct. . . . You had certainly better return while you are able to bear the fatigues of the voyage to a country where the people revere you.” 14 Confused, dispirited, and “angry at the system he had tried and failed to conquer,” Franklin thus departs from England, fearing imminent arrest, on 20 March 1775—committed to America as home: “His emotional separation from England was now final and complete.” 15 Posthaste, “America” provides the pharmakon to rectify the sense of being wrong(ed): it tenders its embrace, extends its “arms.” Two days after his return, the Pennsylvania Assembly elects him as delegate to the Second Continental Congress—during which time, as Weinberger sums things up, “Franklin drafted and worked for [the] Articles of Confederation and served on the committee to write the Declaration of Independence. In July of 1776, he served as delegate to and president of the Pennsylvania state convention, . . . and two months later he was elected by Congress to serve as commissioner to France.” 16 England steadily amounts to nothing but a scar: a spectral presence, phantasm—a trace. “Home rule” (oikos nomos) designates the “economic” crux of this (ex)change: the change of homeland silhouettes the subject as displaced, remaindered, shortchanged by the absence of both home and homeland equally. “Domestic” failure haunts the very heart of Franklin’s life; this lack of home life constitutes the ghost in the machine. 17 Despite (in spite of) this domestic void, the narrative inexorably speculates on home’s uncanny return(s). It’s not by chance that a domestic moment (“Dear Son”) thus inaugurates the subject’s recollection of its self, the saga of the self-made man—one having emerged “from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & some Degree of Reputation in the World” (A 567)—for whom success and happiness become synonymous with “virtue” liberated from its Christian source: a moral saga, to be sure, yet one that would rewrite, correct, the biblical directive for self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice profits the subject; it generates an interest of its own, its own self-interest.

Overture

5

Originally, then, the subject wishes to bequeath its self to (its) posterity—and, in the self-same move, expose its individual life, its private part(s), to public scrutiny. In serving its self best (“I have ever had a Pleasure in obtaining any little Anecdotes of my Ancestors”), it serves its self up—obliquely, to be sure, as Hugh J. Dawson suggests, exposing “how the law of primogeniture had worked through five generations to deny him resources and favor.” 18 Subject to economic accountability, life initially rationalizes itself in this domestic exchange by looking backward at its ancestry, a paternal transaction retrieving the family name from history, familiar and familial at once, that guarantees an interest of its own, its own self-interest momentarily discounted, held in reserve, but that, in time, will serve as capital precisely insofar as recollection guarantees a second chance at life, a chance to live life over once again: “the Thing most like living one’s Life over again, seems to be a Recollection of that Life” (A 67). Autobiography underwrites a lifetime while, at the same time, it indemnifies a second life with the advantage authors have, in the exchange of time, to rectify their gaffes, their faults, their own mistakes—not unlike “the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first” (A 567). In print, the commerce of this temporal exchange involves the barter of the author’s time—with errata in the bargain—for the reader’s time, the time it takes the reader to consume the other’s life. The reader pays doubly—for both the loss of its time and price of the book. The author speculates as much. In the meantime, count as capital the family line, the fact that son and father hitherto had journeyed together through England amassing those “little Anecdotes,” connecting those dots that delineate the “Franklin” line of descent, “the Name . . . assum’d . . . for a Surname, when others took Surnames all over the Kingdom” (A 568). In effect, displacement and de-parture silhouette the psychic dimensions of this family romance—the subject’s own refractory relationship to both his father and his brother hence postponed. De-parting (from) the family line, the subject of the discourse, in effect, circuitously arrives at its self. The written word, meanwhile, removes the scene from all familial propriety; orality gets superseded by the printed text: “Dear Son.” There will be no heart-to-heart talk. Rather, the father’s words will serve as deeds—deeds nonetheless inseparable from the “oral” context to which they more properly (familia[r]ly) belong. To wit, these deeds will be served up as wholesome fare, salvific fodder incommensurate with any apposite distinction between a literal and metaphorical (heart-to-heart) talk. These tidbits transfigure the subject’s remains, the de-parted “self,” what will remain unsaid—the nuts and bolts of Franklin’s private parts, his headstrong separation from his loyalist son. Likewise, the apostrophic framework of the letter obviates the issue of legality, the illicit issue to whom the letter is addressed, the illegitimate son (now roughly forty years old, and with an illegitimate son of his

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Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home

own). In actual fact, the family “line” is legally estranged, the family tree divested of its past integrity. The mother goes unspoken—to this day unknown. So, too, it goes unsaid that Franklin’s lifelong bond with Deborah Read, correcting “that great Erratum” of those early years and its erratic disposition toward marriage, adheres by common law, her prior husband’s death uncertain—a “marriage” of convenience that felicitously circumvents “the Inconviences . . . that we had apprehended”; in the end, despite this author-ized domestic infelicity, Deborah proves to be “a good & faithful Helpmate” who “assisted me chearfully in my Business, folding & stitching Pamphlets, tending Shop, purchasing old Linen Rags for the Paper-makers, &c &c” (A 631, 641–42). So sanctified, use value colonizes family life. Nonetheless, the family “line,” in line with domesticity, now sets the stage, and thus “historically” sets off the story line, the saga of the selfmade man, the fiction of the subject’s origin, the man who fabricates its self from scratch, whose scratch transformed to print amounts to scratch that counts, that counts as currency. The narrative itSelf will serve as home, home of the subject’s self, its proper dwelling now bequeathed to print—a second edition of its life, amended and interred at once: a posthumous voice reclaiming itSelf from beyond the grave. 19

The story fittingly begins at home with books: from childhood, “I was fond of Reading,” and “[p]leas’d with the Pilgrim’s Progress, my first Collection was of John Bunyan’s Works”—and where, at length, “[t]his Bookish Inclination . . . determin’d my Father to make me a Printer” (A 577). Franklin’s bookish inclination leans unambiguously away from poetry toward prose: “my Father discourag’d me, . . . telling me Versemakers were generally Beggars; so I escap’d being a Poet. . . . But . . . Prose Writing has been a great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement” (A 578). Poetry won’t do once prose adds up to capital—hence, Franklin’s censure of James Ralph’s poetry, having copied and sent him one of Edward Young’s satires “which set in a strong Light the Folly of pursuing the Muses with any Hope of Advancement by them” (A 607). Yet, on the hither side of Franklin’s prose, poetry informs the rhetoric, its diction and its “Import” equally: I found I wanted a Stock of Words . . . which I thought I should have acquir’d before . . . if I had gone on making Verses since the continual Occasion for Words of the same Import but of different Length, to suit the Measure, or of different Sound for the Rhyme, would have laid me under a constant Necessity of searching for Variety. . . . Therefore I took some of [the tales from the Spectator] & turn’d them into Verse. And

Overture

7

after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the Prose, turn’d them back again. (A 580)

This compromise—this mutual exchange, or interchange, of discourses pragmatically at odds—reveals the nucleus of Franklin’s general understanding and acceptance of the “other” side of argument, the usefulness of modesty, of moderation in an argument, a method inherently Socratic by means of which Franklin grows “very artful & expert in drawing People even of superior Knowledge into Concessions” (A 581). Those given to disputation, on the other hand, “are generally unfortunate in their Affairs. They get Victory sometimes, but they never get Good Will, which would be of more use to them” (692). This aversion to argumentation accounts for the differential “calculus” that generally inflects the politics of Franklin’s implicit philosophy of intersubjectivity: “If you wish Information & Improvement from the Knowledge of others and yet at the same time express your self as firmly fix’d in your present Opinions, modest sensible Men, who do not love Disputation, will probably leave you undisturb’d in the Possession of your Error” (A 582). Poetry, not prose, incongruously serves to illustrate this sentiment— some lines from Pope’s Essay on Criticism. Franklin couples Pope’s line, “Immodest Words admit of no Defence” with another line—which, as Jerry Weinberger notes, is not from the Essay—“For Want of Modesty is Want of Sense” (A 582). 20 Franklin next turns Pope’s lines upside down, inverts their sense. Here is Franklin’s “moderation” of the verse’s sense: Now is not Want of Sense, (where a Man is so unfortunate as to want it) some Apology for his Want of Modesty? and would not the Lines stand more justly thus? Immodest Words admit but this Defence, That Want of Modesty is Want of Sense. (A583)

Thus, Franklin transfigures Pope’s coupling of immodesty with morality to a mere “Want of Sense”—that is, indiscretion. And this inversion of positions bears, in turn, its own reversal with an equal sense of modesty: “This however I should submit to better Judgments” (A 583). Despite the interchangeable mechanics governing this “compromise,” this moderation of the rhetoric, let’s not forget the hyperbolic figuration that embellishes the narrative’s foundational scene, that “poetic” entrance into Philadelphia, bereft of worldly goods and impecunious (his luggage, coming from New York by sea, is on the way), with nothing but those “three great Puffy Rolls,” one “under each Arm, & eating the other” (A 589)—or, to continue the poetic trans-figuration of this pilgrim’s progress, three rolls, in their biblical configuration, that, given time, will multiply and, in the bargain, turn, to ape the one-liners from which Poor Richard’s reputation was made, to “dough”:

8

Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home I was dirty from my Journey; my Pockets were stuff’d out with Shirts and Stockings; I knew no Soul, nor where to look for Lodging. I was fatigu’d with Travelling. . . . I was very hungry, and my whole Stock of Cash consisted of a Dutch Dollar and about a Shilling in Copper. . . . Thus I went up Market Street . . . , passing by the Door of Mr Read, my future Wife’s Father, when she standing at the Door saw me, & thought I made as I certainly did a most awkward ridiculous Appearance. (A 588–89)

Announcing the arrival of its self, this figure of poor Benjamin prefigures its departure from poverty—although, in fact, that figure will erect, in later life (1764), a Georgian mansion on this very site. Here, the poetic figuration of the subject disregards the fact that “Want of Modesty is Want of Sense” (as will the house on Market Street). Instead, the discourse testifies to nothing less than the miraculous, having met, along the way, his future wife, as well as having resurrected, prior to this scene, not only a drowning “drunken Dutchman,” but also a book pulled, dripping, from his pocket that “prov’d to be my old favourite Author, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress” (in Dutch, no less)—a miracle in light of which the figure doesn’t lie “that you may in your Mind compare such unlikely Beginning with the Figure I have since made” (A 586, 588). As Jennifer T. Kennedy remarks, that Franklin’s Autobiography “should be so rife with literary effects (or that he should so skillfully novelize it, we cannot know for certain) itself adds a literary touch: the great printer and writer has a life that makes the perfect book.” 21 Although the “calculus” of moderation and positionality are subsequently said to regulate the subject’s sense of self, the hyperbolic figure “made,” as things turn out, is but a pose, resounding poverty personified, a trope, a work of art, if not a “lie”—a fiction, to be sure, most likely brokered in a compromise with Hume’s account of subjectivity.

Initially, the narrative addresses issues of identity, the progress of a life obsessed with recollecting self-determination and “character.” Here, subjectivity and industry change hands—erase or, better, double-cross each other in the masquerade of “character” and “credit”—such that, working late one night, “this Industry visible to our Neighbours began to give us Character and Credit”; as Doctor Baird, a Scot, remarks: “the Industry of that Franklin . . . is superior to any thing I ever saw of the kind: I see him still at work when I go home from Club; and he is at Work again before his Neighbours are out of bed” (A 623). The bottom line consigns the tradesman’s credit to a role: In order to secure my Credit and Character as a Tradesman, I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary. . . . I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion; . . .

Overture

9

and to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow. Thus being esteem’d an industrious thriving young Man, and paying duly for what I bought, the Merchants . . . solicited my Custom, . . . & I went on swimmingly.—In the mean time Keimer’s Credit & Business declining daily, he was at last forc’d to sell his Printinghouse to satisfy his Creditors. (A 629)

Commerce thus exposes its ownmost economic principle whereby the conflation of fiction and fact acquire their specular reality—appearance as reality. In their exchange, trade simply constitutes a game, while subjectivity—itself an empty set—embraces nothing but roles, simulated character, “provisional identities,” as, for example, Robert F. Sayre remarks on what has since become a critical commonplace: “clergyman, seaman, tallow chandler and soap boiler, printer, poet, swimming instructor . . . merchant . . . scientist, politician, diplomat”; this typifies “the actor in him,” constructing “his roles—sampling sundry occupations, hoaxes, disguises, and literary masks.” 22 Herbert Leibowitz, finding scarcely any hint of “inwardness” in Franklin’s character, wryly pushes this reading to its logical extreme, being “tempted to say that he appears to be the only person in American history without an unconscious.” 23 In any case, mask and reality are indistinguishable when and wherever the self-fashioned subject manipulates “character” to secure credit. 24 Don’t credit it to chance that Franklin threads the recitation of his life along the lines of fortune and its economic spin; here, fortune knows nothing of chance: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & some Degree of Reputation in the world, . . . my Posterity may like to know” the “conducing Means I made use of” since “they may find some of them suitable to their own Situations, & therefore fit to be imitated” (A 567). Fortune hinges on the sheer (ambi)dexterity of these “conducing Means.” On the one hand, the guileless portrait of Part One serves as the fall guy for youth’s immaturity, the subject utterly exposed and vulnerable “[b]efore I enter upon my public Appearance in Business” (A 618). On the other hand, the public appearance institutes the subject as a catalog of masquerades, its life disguised, composed of poses, “figures” fundamentally contrived in order to lend credit to its “character”—which guarantees good credit in return. Print affords the glue—or more propitiously, the binding—that conjoins these interchangeable identities—to which the figuration of Franklin’s “poetic” epitaph ironically attests: “The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author.” 25 The Autobiography single-mindedly attests to the pivotal economy of this self-

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Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home

contained figure—Benjamin Franklin: “Printer.” 26 Print alone assures the subject’s reappearance in an afterlife, and, in the self-same coup, embodies the gestalt inosculation of the value of “exchange” and the exchange of “value” at the heart of all economy as such—the commerce of exchange. In the empire of commerce, all things being equal, nothing is inherently valuable. The printed word as such—positioning itself between the ratio of reason and its uni-versal space—elicits merely an egalitarian exchange of views, not unlike the Junto Club, whose debates were “to be conducted . . . without fondness for Dispute” (A 621). The “value” of commercial publishing ironically emerges in this “democratic” sphere, the absence of inherent value as a whole—eschewing dogma and disdaining any sense of exclusivity, including right or wrong. Indeed, the transatlantic commerce of ideas will revolutionize the subject’s sense of “self,” as well as citizen and national identity, across the European continent. Franklin’s linguistic dexterity, his literary legerdemain, is bound to the technology of print, as Douglas Anderson remarks: “Long familiarity with a composing stick, setting lines of text, assembling pages and forms, casting fresh type in lead matrices, mixing ink, or engraving ornaments had steeped him in the tactile life of language, in the remarkable malleability that enabled writing to capture meaning without confining it.” 27 The democracy of print transfigures, in a single coup, both language and knowledge as capital and, even more importantly, virtually embodies— more enduringly than Franklin’s body in his epitaph—the cryptic significance, the quid pro quo, of value per se. Invested in a printing press, Franklin’s speculation puts in place the circuitry that guarantees that language works as capital. 28 It’s to his “credit” that he advocates the widespread printing of paper currency by printing The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency—a pamphlet that, in its own circular way, argues for the necessity of printing (the value of) “value” itself, of printing paper currency as a universal medium of exchange, reasoning that it “had done much good, by increasing the Trade Employment, & Number of Inhabitants” in Philadelphia (A 627). Forget the gold standard. 29 His word’s as good as gold: “It was well receiv’d by the common People in general; but the Rich Men dislik’d it; for it increas’d and strengthen’d the Clamour for more Money; and they happening to have no Writers among them that were able to answer it, their Opposition slacken’d, & the Point was carried by the Majority in the House” (A 628). Circulation of the text, in turn, brings with it its own rewards: “My Friends there [in the House], who conceiv’d I had been of some Service, thought fit to reward me, by employing me in printing the Money, a very profitable Jobb. . . . This was another Advantage gain’d by my being able to write” (A 628). The circuit is complete. Print not only works like money; it certifies itself: its value is (as good as) gold. As both fortune and cliché would have it, both being circular in their design, money makes money—and Franklin, in turn, is paid by what he gets paid

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for: “convenience” speaks for itself: “The Utility of this Currency became by Time and Experience so evident, as never afterwards to be much disputed” (A 628). In its ironic inversion, time, indeed, is money—both in deed and in effect. While writing the Autobiography takes time, time buys itSelf back, with oodles in reserve. Life is a capital affair precisely when and wherever it makes its self communicable, exchangeable—commercial. To turn the screw once more, Franklin’s Life is the commodity that buys its self time by selling it: in the exchange, the subject reserves its future in advance, in the advance of its self. Money, in reality, appears as what is: time placed in reserve. 30 In its account, narration saves, redeems, itSelf; by correcting its “errata,” it both saves itself time and saves time itself. It “gains time” insofar as it economizes its life(time) in terms of the time it takes to write itSelf. For the reader, on the other end of this exchange, this translates to the time it takes to read the Life. Don’t think the reader gets shortchanged here. In spending its time reading an other’s life, the reader banks on having the time of its life. There’s nothing genuine but the exchange itself. For Franklin, value forfeits any claim to “authenticity”; it emerges, as Paul Giles suggests, “through various mechanisms of exchange rather than being inherent within any particular object or dogma.” 31 In the long run, language mirrors this provisional significance: it simply figures as a medium of exchange, the transaction of ideas. Language, in effect, becomes the capitalist’s most valuable currency. All things being equal, print underwrites itself as “paper currency” in light of which the discourse on value and the value of discourse amount to the same thing. Nothing matters in the end except the thing (res) itself—as a matter for discourse. 32 Here, everything cancels itself out—and, in the bargain, the subject’s own identity—hence Franklin’s own self-canceling delineation of himself as both “Printer” and the printed text alike: nothing but the cover of an old book. Credit no one: credit no-thing, then, but print to the success of paper currency and the transatlantic facilitation of commercial transactions whose value is universally invaluable—and to the subject’s own success, as well, equally convenient and transatlantic at once, a homeless envoi shuttling hither/thither in the post.

On balance, the Autobiography takes credit for its self: life is an open book, as Franklin’s frequent “confessions” seem to imply, often to his own embarrassment. Witness, for example, his admission of regret for having offended Mrs. T., of whom “I grew fond . . . , and being at this time under no Religious Restraints, & presuming on my Importance to her, I attempted Familiarities, (another Erratum) which she repuls’d with a proper Resentment,” or his disclosure that, in youth, passion “had hur-

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ried me frequently into Intrigues with low Women that fell in my Way, which were attended with some Expence & great Inconvenience, besides a continual Risque to my Health” (607, 631). While such confessions seem to undercut the value of the self, they actually lend credit to the character who re-collects them “honestly.” 33 Such honesty is most unusual, untypical, exceptional; such shortcomings, however, belong to Everyman. Levity gives further credit to character, to “Honest Ben,” who would make light of himself—and, in so doing, implicates the socius in selfdeceipt, as well. Here’s Franklin’s own disparaging self-portrait when, opposed to the Rev. Mr. Whitfield’s building an orphan house in Georgia rather than his own Philadelphia, he refused to contribute to the project: I happened soon after to attend one of his Sermons, in the Course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a Collection, & I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper, Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five Pistoles in Gold. As he proceeded, I began to soften, and concluded to give the Coppers. Another Stroke of his Oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the Silver; & he finish’d so admirably, that I empty’d my Pocket wholly into the Collector’s Dish, Gold and all. (667)

Language figures as both fool and villain in the grand design. Humiliated as the dupe of rhetoric, Franklin ironizes the intrinsic “truth” of honesty: there was also one of our Club, who being of my Sentiments respecting the Building in Georgia, and suspecting a Collection might be intended, had by Precaution emptied his Pockets before he came from Home; towards the Conclusion of the Discourse however, he felt a strong Desire to give, and apply’d to a Neighbour who stood near him to borrow some Money for the Purpose. The Application was unfortunately to perhaps the only Man in the Company who had the firmness not to be affected by the Preacher. His Answer was, At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely; but not now; for thee seems to be out of thy right Senses. (667–68)

While honesty serves as a virtue in refashioning one’s self, self-revision guarantees no truth. If truth be told, truth is not a virtue in itself. In effect, the truth may do more harm than good, as Franklin remarks of his pamphlet, written during the “dangerous Time of Youth,” championing the deistic faith: “I began to suspect that this Doctrine tho’ it might be true, was not very useful” (619). Indeed, I had concluded that “Vice & Virtue were empty Distinctions, no such Things existing,” which later appeared “not so clever a Performance as I once thought it; and I doubted whether some Error had not insinuated itself unperceiv’d, into my Argument, so as to infect all that follow’d, as is common in metaphysical Reasonings” (620, 619). In general, reason reasons best precisely insofar as it appreciates its own provisional sense; truth’s value lies solely in its usefulness: “Revelation

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had indeed no weight with me as such; but I entertain’d an Opinion, that tho’ certain Actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them; yet probably those Actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us” (619–20). “Truth” is best served in the interest of society, for the sake of felicitous human relationships. To this end, the Autobiography flirts with truth at the expense of itself while utilizing honesty to garner interest in its self—entrusting itSelf entirely to the reader. In other words, it puts its self in debt—and at the mercy of the reader’s liberality. Indebted to the reader, the discourse of disclosure inversely bears an interest of its own. Witness how the debt repays the debtor in “real” life, how one subject earns recompense from another by putting itself in the other’s debt: a new Member [of the General Assembly] made a long Speech against me in order to favour some other Candidate. . . . I did not however aim at gaining his Favour by paying any servile Respect to him, but after some time took this other Method. Having heard that he had in his Library a certain very scarce & curious Book, I wrote a Note to him expressing my Desire of perusing that Book, and requesting he would do me the Favour of lending it to me for a few Days. He sent it immediately; and I return’d it in about a week with another Note expressing strongly my Sense of the Favour. When we next met in the House he spoke to me, (which he had never done before), and with great Civility. And he ever afterwards manifested a Readiness to serve me on all Occasions, so that we became great Friends, & our Friendship continu’d to his Death. (663)

Thus, borrowing earns interest on the debt itself, serving to confirm this as an “Instance of the Truth of an old Maxim I had learn’t, which says, He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself has obliged. And it shows how much more profitable it is prudently to remove, than to resent, return & continue inimical Proceedings” (663–64). In confessing as much, the Autobiography profits from its credibility, entrusting its self to the reader’s trust—and doubly so. Its lifetime earns time from the reader’s life, the time it takes to read the book while, at the same time, the reader pays up-front: a capital transaction, indeed. Life pays its debt and pockets the (ex)change. Character and credibility go hand in hand: good credit pays its debt and thus begets good fortune for its self: “My Business was now continually augmenting, and . . . I experienc’d too the Truth of the Observation, that after getting the first hundred Pound, it is more easy to get the second: Money itself being of a prolific Nature” (670). In the long run, money propogates itself. Time is money, to be sure—a lifetime should good fortune lend its hand. To this event, time gives itself promiscuously. In the meantime, reason dictates that the subject wisely spend its time by saving up. Thus, Franklin accredits fortune to “a regular design in life”—

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that is, to regulating life’s time so that “I may live in all respects like a rational creature”; in this regard, “[i]t is necessary for me to be extremely frugal . . . till I have paid what I owe,” and “to apply myself industriously . . . ; for industry and patience are the surest means to plenty.” 34 The subject must be ultimately free of debt in order to make cents of its time. To this effect, it bides its time, postpones its own jouissance. It tightens its belt and draws upon the credit of its character—trustworthy, worth its word and worthy of imitation. The “other” figures in this economic scheme of things. Call it virtue if you like.

In crossing the Atlantic to the Other side (Passy, France: 1784), Part Two of the Autobiography resurrects the 1771 memoir—the “Affairs of the Revolution [having] occasion’d the Interruption.” 35 The narrative entirely passes over these “Affairs,” affairs involving the “translation,” the exchange, of home and homeland both. Instead, ensuing from Part One’s delineation of the sense of “character,” Part Two translates the moral sense from the religious sphere into a social pact, a compromise incorporating virtue and its economic yield, its “interest.” Virtuous citizens promote the nation’s interest—as well as their own. By way of a digression in Part One, the narrative prefigures this impending turn toward virtue and morality: “Before I enter upon my public Appearance in Business, it may be well to let you know the then State of my Mind, with regard to my Principles and Morals”—whereupon Franklin recounts his religious upbringing, his “conversion” to Deism, and his subsequent renunciation of religion as such: I grew convinc’d that Truth, Sincerity & Integrity in Dealings between Man & Man, were of the utmost Importance to the Felicity of Life. . . . Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such; but I entertain’d an Opinion, that tho’ certain Actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them; yet probably those Actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own Natures, all the Circumstances of things considered. And this Persuasion . . . preserved me . . . without any wilful gross Immorality or Injustice that might have been expected from my Want of Religion. . . . I had therefore a tolerable Character to begin the World with, . . . & determin’d to preserve it. (A 618, 619–20)

Having tempered his rise to fame with these remarks, Franklin next highlights certain business transactions that account for his (good) fortune, concluding with the publication of his pamphlet The Nature & Necessity of a Paper Currency, which “was well receiv’d by the common People in general,” and, in the end, proved “a very profitable Job” (A 628).

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Eliciting, once more, the rags-to-riches parable, three rolls in hand and destitute, Franklin moralizes that such currency “had done much good, by increasing the Trade Employment, & Number of Inhabitants in the Province”; in this regard, “I now saw all the old Houses inhabited, & many new ones building, where as I remember’d well, that when I first walk’d about the Streets of Philadelphia, eating my Roll, I saw most of the Houses . . . with Bills on their Doors, to be let; . . . which made me then think the Inhabitants of the City were one after another deserting it” (627–28). This conflation of private interest and civic act now leads to “the Printing of the NewCastle Paper Money”; this leads, in turn, to opening “a little Stationer’s Shop” and beginning “gradually to pay off the Debt I was under for the Printing-House,” which, in its own turn, leads, by way of the narrative’s internal economy, its psychic drive, to household issues sans Deborah, to issues skirting the commercial import of that threerolled Market Street entrance into Philadelphia, that foundational scene of both a marriage and the Market Street house: “I had hitherto continu’d to board with Godfrey in Part of my House with his Wife & Children. . . . Mrs Godfrey projected a Match for me with a Relation’s Daughter . . . till a serious Courtship on my Part ensu’d the Girl being in herself very deserving” (A 630). Here, in the concluding section of Part One, recalling his emergence from debt to “an industrious thriving young Man,” Franklin recollects a (failed) romance, the courtship of a girl whose dowry he had hoped would “pay off my Remaining Debt for the Printing-house”—a courtship doomed when Franklin is brought word that “they had no such Sum to spare” (A 630). Subsequently hurried “frequently into Intrigues with low Women,” his thoughts return to marriage, renewing his relationship with Deborah Read, who, after marriage, “prov’d a good and faithful Helpmate” and “assisted me much by attending the Shop. . . . Thus I corrected that great Erratum as well as I could” (A 631). Having thus amended this “typographical” error in life, the narrative effortlessly segues to the printed word, to books: “About this Time . . . a Proposition was made by me, that since our Books [the Junto Club] were often referr’d to in our Disquisitions upon the Queries, it might be convenient to us to have them all together where we met . . . ; and By thus clubbing our Books to a common Library, we should . . . have each of us the Advantage of using the Books of all the other Members” (A 631–32). Thus, “now I set on foot my first Project of a public Nature, that for a Subscription Library. . . . This was the Mother of all the N American Subscription Libraries now so numerous. It is become a great thing itself, & continually increasing” (A 632). Uncannily, it’s print—triangulated, not unlike the oedipal configuration it conceals—that binds currency, the book, and the domestic sphere. To wit, the narrative—in keeping with its own economy, a narrative befitting the free association of the analyst’s couch—slips seamlessly from

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private life, from the domestic realm, as a financial enterprise, to public life, where the library, conversely, in its “affairs” and its “posterity,” continues to increase. If family matters fundamentally degenerate to mercantile concerns, social “issues,” on the other hand, beget a “family” of their own: libraries propagate while the Subscription Library, as Ada Van Gastel observes, iconically personifies the Mother of them all. 36 Indeed, these libraries, thus propagated, serve to shape the backbone of the nation’s citizens and underpin the homeland as a rehabilitated family: “These libraries have improv’d the general Conversation of the Americans, made the common Tradesmen & Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges” (A 632). Part Two, written thirteen years later, picks up this thread once more, from “the time I establish’d my self in Pensylvania”—that is, from the time of that primal entrance scene—providing a detailed account “of the means I used to establish the Philadelphia publick Library” (A 639). Its “Articles of Agreement” were “to be binding on us, our Heirs, &c for fifty Years” (A 640, italics mine). Again, the narrative deploys a rhetoric of matrimony and domestic life, as Van Gastel observes, with the transition from private to public life now reversed: “Only after the account of the library project does Franklin mention that this was also the time of his life when he got married,” thus reversing “the order of Part One, in which the marriage is mentioned first, the library project second.” 37 An English proverb marks the turning point: “ ‘He that would thrive/ Must ask his Wife’; it was lucky for me that I had one as much dispos’d to Industry & Frugality as my self. . . . We kept no idle Servants, our Table was plain & simple, our Furniture of the cheapest” (A 641–42). Thus, Franklin “subordinates and incorporates his wife into his business life,” an enterprise that Van Gastel ascribes to sublimation. 38 In any case, the public sphere felicitously functions as a surrogate for family life. Family life as such, the “home” itself, subsists predominantly as an economic enterprise (oikos nomos), ruled exclusively by “Industry & Frugality,” the exemplary wife reduced to shopkeeper, intersubjectivity reduced to everyday utilitarian affairs. Vanished is the sense of subjectivity itself, vanquished by the thing: commodities rule family life, domestic intersubjectivity—initially, by their absence or simplicity (“our Table was plain & simple, our Furniture of the cheapest”), yet by accumulation and repletion in the end. Deborah’s economic “sense” originally bears the blame; witness the preamble to those material possessions that, in later life, will glut the Market Street house: my Breakfast was a long time Bread and Milk, (no Tea,) and I ate it out of a twopenny earthen Porringer with a Pewter Spoon. But mark how Luxury will enter Families, and make a Progress, in Spite of Principle.

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Being call’d one Morning to Breakfast, I found it in a China Bowl with a Spoon of Silver. They had been bought for me without my Knowledge by my Wife, and had cost her the enormous Sum of three and twenty Shillings, for which she had no other Excuse or Apology to make, but that she thought her Husband deserv’d a Silver Spoon & China Bowl as well as any of his Neighbours. This was the first Appearance of Plate & China in our House, which afterwards in a Course of Years as our Wealth encreas’d, augmented gradually to several Hundred Pounds in Value. (A 642)

Mis-taken for domestic life, the house impersonates the home, usurps the whereabouts of family life; household objects counterfeit as intersubjective rapport, abbreviate intersubjectivity to commercial exchange. At the intersection of commerce and desire, frugality and industry thus deputize the sense of “character,” character itself—if you recall—in debt to nothing and no one, the product of (its) credit alone. It’s not by chance that, following the anecdote of this domestic scene, the narrative next turns to its religious upbringing at home: “religiously educated as a Presbyterian,” Franklin recalls a certain preacher whose “Discourses were . . . all to me very dry, uninteresting and unedifying, since not a single moral Principle was inculcated or enforc’d, their Aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good Citizens” (A 642–43). At this point in the narrative, Franklin sets out his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection” (A 643)—virtue now affiliated with (the credit of) the citizen-subject’s character. If the narrative, to this point, seems disjointed, moving freely between its private and public life, inciting uncanny connections between the two, the seam that self-evidently binds Parts One and Two of Franklin’s life consists of letters ironizing Franklin’s life as an exemplum “both to sons and fathers” (A 635), letters that corroborate the value and utility of “character,” imploring Franklin to continue the account of his life precisely insofar as and to the extent that “no Character living . . . has so much in his Power as Thyself to promote a greater Spirit of Industry & early Attention to Business . . . with the American Youth” (A 633). Indeed, while character champions “Industry & early Attention to Business,” it not only accounts for itself, but for the nation, as well. Here, narration’s psychic drive conjoins the subject and the other as commercial entities, bearers of the na(rra)tion’s corporate capital, a rising nation’s social dividends: All that has happened to you is also connected with the detail of the manners and situation of a rising people; . . . and, as your own character will be the principal one to receive a scrutiny, it is proper (even for its effects upon your vast and rising country, as well as upon England and upon Europe), that it should stand respectable. . . . Let Englishmen be made not only to respect, but even to love you. When they think well of individuals in your native country, they will go nearer to thinking well

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Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home of your country; and when your countrymen see themselves well thought of by Englishmen, they will go nearer to thinking well of England. Extend your views even further; do not stop at those who speak the English tongue, but after having settled so many points in nature and politics, think of bettering the whole race of men. (A 634, 638)

This exhortation serves as preface to the face that comes to symbolize the spirit of America (and later grace the very currency it so conveniently endorsed), a phantom fashioned not at home, but forged on foreign soil, in France, where Franklin’s reputation as the representative American— the moralist, the rustic, the ingenuous philosopher—was first cooked up, and where the philosophes, seeking to reform the ancien régime, pre-figured his ultimate “Americanization.” Lionized by French nobility, Franklin’s face appears “on statues and prints and on medallions, snuffboxes, candy boxes, rings, clocks, vases, dishes, handkerchiefs, and pocketknives.” 39 Reduced to its most exemplary characteristics, this mask personifies simplicity and rectitude. To this end, as Wood observes, “Franklin as the representative American belonged to France before he belonged to America itself.” 40 Franklin, in (re)turn, exploits this purloined character, this doublecross of his mercurial identity reduced to its republican simplicity. True to form, to his chameleon pliability, he feels contentedly ensconced, immediately at home, in France and fully Frenchified, as he self-effacingly remarks in a letter to Polly Stevenson: “I had not been here Six Days before my Taylor and Peruquier had transform’d me into a Frenchman. Only think what a Figure I make in a little Bag Wig and naked Ears! They told me I was become 20 Years younger, and look’d very galante.” 41 Yet, over and against (the image of) the French sophisticate, he nonetheless portrays himself, throughout these years in France, as the naïve American. Calling attention to this masquerade, John Adams notes that Franklin was, quite frankly, “master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naïveté, which never fails to charm.” 42 Thus, unassumingly attired and shuttling in the transatlantic post as envoi, 43 credit, debt, and invoice all at once, Franklin lays bare for public scrutiny the ledgers of his personal “accounts” where virtue and expediency come face-to-face—that “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection”: “I wish’d to live without committing any Fault at any time; I would conquer all that either Natural Inclination, Custom, or Company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other” (A 643–44). In light of this youthful attempt at selfrevision, and redeploying naïveté to accommodate his canny French façade, that portion of his life that Franklin re-collects in France epitomizes “a most delicate manipulation of his youthful experience to the purposes of the public character he played at Versailles, in the salons of

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Mmes. Helvetius and Brillon, and in the French press. . . . The mask Franklin wears . . . is his French one of the naïf ‘Philosophical Quaker.’ ” 44 The game’s afoot on foreign ground—in its uncanny drift, on moral ground. Innocently poised to realize perfection, Franklin quickly finds that “I had undertaken a Task of more Difficulty than I had imagined,” concluding, at length, “that the mere speculative Conviction that it was our Interest to be compleatly virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our Slipping” (A 644). The language of capital has always already destabilized this scene, along with Reason’s interest in “speculation,” to borrow from Kant. In contrast to imagination’s own disinterested ideality, Franklin’s interest in moral perfection—ever practical, to be sure—confronts reality: “I was surpriz’d to find myself so much fuller of Faults than I had imagined” (A 649). Surprised, moreover, to discover the moral Project’s utter impossibility, and, after tracking his “progress” by means of daily charts that constantly require erasures of his old faults to make room for new ones so that, accordingly, “my little Book . . . became full of Holes,” Franklin, circumnavigating Kant, wittily pits reason’s wiles over and against morality: “something that pretended to be Reason was every now and then suggesting to me, that such extream Nicety as I exacted of my self might be a kind of Foppery in Morals . . . ; that a perfect Character might be attended with the Inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent Man should allow a few Faults in himself, to keep his Friends in Countenance” (A 650). In this account, and in the interest of morality itself, its credibility, it stands to reason that appearance supersedes reality, that pretense be allowed the upper hand since reason’s ownmost reasons are methodically riddled with holes—those little black spots, marking “every Fault,” at last reduced to fissures, fractures, fault lines where the page no longer testifies to anything. Thus virtue wears itself out; call it rationalization, if you will, reason’s ownmost “cunning” in the Hegelian lexicon, executed in the interest of industry: “After a while I went thro’ one Course only in a Year, and afterwards only one in several Years; till at length I omitted them entirely, being employ’d in Voyages & Business abroad with a Multiplicity of Affairs, that interfered” (A 649–50). Fortunately, virtue’s holes bear interest of their own and serve to balance the account, it being to “every ones Interest to be virtuous, who wish’d to be happy,” not to mention wealthy, there being “no Qualities . . . so likely to make a poor Man’s Fortune as those of Probity & Integrity” (A 652). Over and against religion’s doctrinaire appropriation of virtue as inherently valuable, and end in itself, Franklin values virtue for its social dividends: “tho’ my Scheme was not wholly without Religion there was in it no Mark of any of the distinguishing Tenets of any particular Sect.—I had purposely avoided them . . . being fully persuaded of the Utility and Excellency of my Method, and that it might be serviceable to people in all

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Religions” (A 651). As with the man of masquerade, the subject as an empty universal set, an Everyman, an interchangeable commodity, virtue likewise yokes appearance and reality as the exchangeable constituents of being as a (w)hole, what Giles calls Franklin’s “ontological duality” 45 — by any other name, a social field defined by capital, by calculation and the keeping of accounts. In short, Franklin’s “own” accounting of morality, as Rekha Rosha suggests, situates consciousness within a narrative of economic decisions and actions: “the account book . . . inscribes Franklin into a subject position defined in strict relationship to capital, and in direct opposition to the kind of radical individualism Franklin is conventionally read as symbolizing.” 46 Other than those typical habits of mind that Adorno finds indispensable to capitalism, there is no “person” here, no “individual” representative of “American selfhood,” as Christopher Looby argues; rather, as Rosha suggests, Franklin’s “personal decisions . . . are calculated to determine their broader value, either in dollars or sense.” 47 Accordingly, the moral Project’s supplement, “humility,” its twelve converted to a baker’s dozen, at length returns morality to “character” in light of its neutrality, its sense of compromise, its nature ceded to the “other” from the start. Here reason holds its interest(s) in the balance while humility supplies the missing principal and the moral of the story all at once: “a Quaker Friend having kindly inform’d me that I was generally thought proud . . . I determined endeavouring to cure myself if I could of this Vice or Folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list” (A 652–53). The outcome equally accommodates its own duplicity: “I cannot boast of much Success in acquiring the Reality of this Virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the Appearance of it” (A 653). In the process, humility amounts to a (con)version of naïveté, a hedge fund that obscures the difference between appearance and reality—reality’s own differance: I made it a Rule to forbear all direct Contradiction to the Sentiments of others, and all positive Assertion of my own. I even forbid myself agreable to the old Laws of our Junto, the Use of every Word or Expression in the Language that imported a fix’d Opinion; such as certainly, undoubtedly, &c. . . . When another asserted something that I thought an Error, I deny’d my self the Pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, . . . and in answering I began by observing that in certain Cases or Circumstances his Opinion would be right, but that in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some Difference, &c. I soon found the Advantage of this change in my Manners. (A 653)

So much for morality once the simulation of a virtue purges, cancels out, negates an actual vice. In transit, in the self-same step, the subject’s “character” is rational and reason right whenever it admits, owns up with all

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humility, to its indifference—the subject self-effaced and othered in the self-same act. To its (good) credit, then, the subject right-fully manipulates itself. Virtue takes advantage of this moral draw, draws up the interest that, by any other name, amounts to “capital”—a universal supplement, benign and neutered of all value other than the “well” of how it’s put to use, the apparatus that “enabled him to be an useful Citizen, and obtain’d for him some Degree of Reputation among the Learned” (A 651). To its (good) credit, equally, the subject freely engineers society since, to its “Habit” of humility, “I think it principally owing, that I had early so much Weight with my Fellow Citizens, when I proposed new Institutions, or Alterations in the old” (A 653). Good citizens are useful ones; they represent a credit to the nation: to their character, the homeland owes a debt.

Thus rehabilitated morally, the narrative returns to the “domestic” pretense of Part One, the father of the son transfigured now as Founding Father of the nation. Henceforth, Part Three—written “at home” in Philadelphia (1788)—attests to virtue’s interest(s). The moral of the story enumerates a succession of good deeds, a series of civic-minded actions that represent the wealth of Franklin’s individual accomplishments and, simultaneously, amalgamate the multiple personae of his “character,” the citizen-subject as corporate entity, as Sacvan Bercovitch remarks: “Through all his provisional personae, Franklin, as even his first readers saw, assumes an identity representative of the rising nation. The link between the Franklins of the particular moments in his career and the ‘essential Franklin’ is the exemplum of corporate selfhood, ascending from dependence to dominance.” 48 To this end, virtue counterfeits as capital. In the service of the public good, Franklin’s representative citizensubject functions, in effect, as a corporate entity, a body of civic-minded deeds, a corpus of (doing) good(s), the product of its labor, its industry— an impersonal, interchangeable, exchangeable part of the nation’s body, of the homeland as a sociopolitical economic whole. Other-wise, the (citizen) subject is (nothing) but its chameleon-like veneer, a plenitude of masks, full of its personae and depleted of its personality, subjected to its virtue, to the credit of its character, and “serviceable to People in all Religions” (A 651). 49 Character, as credit to itself and to the nation both, depletes the subject of all depth, its (in)dividuality: character, at heart, impersonates a universal moral space, itself a roundabout in the exchange of reason and economy, where “Industry and Frugality” masquerade “as the Means of procuring Wealth and thereby securing Virtue, it being more difficult for a Man in Want to act always honestly, as . . . it is hard for an empty Sack to stand upright” (A 657).

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Virtue thus emerges as an economic product, balancing the books; proverbial wisdom says it’s so—culture’s edifice of knowledge “tried and true,” a universal form of common sense. In turn, the nation, to its credit, produces productive citizens, citizens indicative of its virtue, its rising “character,” citizens having earmarked their own “particular private Interest,” citizens interested, equally, in a “View of the Good of their Country”—economic entities that, as a whole, incorporate a virtuous society, a “Society of the Free and Easy; Free, as being by general Practice and Habit of the Virtues, free from the Dominion of Vice, and particularly by the Practice of Industry & Frugality, free from Debt, which exposes a Man to Confinement and a Species of Slavery to his Creditors” (A 655, 656). Apropos the individual (citizen) subject itself, don’t for a moment think that regulation and denial thwart self-interest. The subject might deny its self behind its masquerade, and yet deny itself nothing, to which Franklin’s own discourse on self-denial attests. Virtue is nothing if not, as Franklin declares, a “reasonable science.” 50 To the credit of the subjects’ “character,” it stands to reason that wealth and virtue work in sync to squirrel away an interest of their own, as Edward Cahill observes of Franklin’s “Anthony Afterwit” (a fictive letter to the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1732), who, by replacing his wife’s luxurious “TeaTable” with a more practical spinning wheel, manages, at the same time, to retain her most-treasured mirror: “Franklin never equates self-denial with virtue; rather, he calls it ‘neither good nor bad’ but as ‘tis apply’d.’ Thus, Afterwit’s problem is not so much one of overindulgence as bad timing: clamoring after luxuries without the wealth and discipline to sustain their virtuous use. Indeed, the story’s implicit economic logic understands luxurious affluence not as the opposite of frugality and simplicity but as the result of it.” 51 By way of its ironic inversion, then, “frugality” thus constitutes that very “excess” by means of which, and in whose name, the representatative citizen-subject defers its own self-interest, an “advance” at once synonymous with the good of the homeland, the nation’s progress. Emptied of the subject’s individuality, the homeland operates as though it were a self-sufficient, (re)productive conduit (uncannily deistic in its “irreligious” sense), immobilizing the individual laborer’s “body,” his desire (in the interest of frugality), for the sake of the “body” of labor as a homeostatically regulated whole, a stable circuit concentrated in the character, the virtue, of its ideal citizen. Self-regulation and Republican ideals go hand in hand. Corporate, as such, “America” is put in place. Call the psychic economics of this national libido “inhibition,” if you like, itself the discharge of frugality, the restrictive regulation of desire and its return, the subject retained in reserve. Industry, in turn, the body of the laborer, provides the conduit by means of which the national economy underwrites the virtuous character of (re)production—the nation’s wealth, in turn, defined by Franklin’s Paper-Currency as “the Quantity of

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Labour its Inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the Quantity of Silver and Gold they possess.” 52 The nation thus incorporates the credit of its citizens into the self-same current as its paper currency, a universal system of signifiers devoid of any and all inherent value. Contrariwise, the object, the commodity itself, acquires a certain “life,” a “moral” dimension. By and large, the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, galvanized by the growth of foreign trade—not to neglect the advance of paper currency—produced innovative markets with corresponding products of their own: consumers for whom material objects reflect the subject’s quintessential worth, its ownmost self, its “character”—objects that acquire a life and language of their own, a universal “vocabulary of personal value,” as Cary Carson phrases it. 53 Recall the introductory section of Part Two and Franklin’s reprimand to Deborah for replacing his “twopenny earthen Porridger” and “Pewter Spoon” with a “China Bowl” and “Spoon of Silver” as but “the first Appearance of Plate & China in our House, which afterwards in a Course of Years as our Wealth encreas’d, augmented gradually to several Hundred Pounds in Value (A 642). This re-collection of augmented wealth implicitly approves of it. Frugality thus compromised, Franklin’s affluence over the course of his life exposes the contradiction of classical republican virtue when its rewards are “literally brought home,” as Cahill remarks: such speciousness “emerges at the intersection of virtue and desire, in the same rhetorical space in which the Franklinian self is effaced.” 54 (The object of) refinement—“culture” by its other name—ventriloquizes subjectivity, the masquerading self supplanted by the object’s moral worth. The very excess constitutive of the object’s “moral” worth institutes it as a rule, in turn, that the commodity requires a certain sacrifice to which the subject willingly commits itself, postponing, in the interest of frugality, its own desire, its own self (interest). This fundamental lack—remainder of the subject, its reserve, equal to the credit of its character—at the same time, and in the face of reason’s own economy, furnishes its capital, capital that guarantees its future reinvestment in the circulation of commodities and their equivalence. The national economy thus profits from the credit-worthy citizen who, through the virtue of its character, advances nothing but the good(s), the credit of its time, its very life, while speculation’s specularity goes, for the most part, unremarked. It’s left for reason’s shadow, reason’s cunning, to expose the spectacle that characterizes the nation’s house as such, the nation’s ownmost “Domestic Institution” that incorporates the House of State. Meanwhile, the house on Market Street hoards objects to excess. 55 Captured—and remaindered—by the lure of superfluity, Franklin’s “house” postpones the everyday reality of home: home life held at bay. Effacing domesticity as such, the commodity stands in for home life void of intersubjectivity—Deborah transfigured as “a large fine Jugg for Beer,” not unlike the “fat jolly Dame” at home on Market Street speculating on

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return(s). When, from his Craven Street town house in London, Franklin requests of Deborah that she send him “a particular Account of every Room” to “make me seem a little at home,” Deborah—ungrammatically yet unambiguously—sums things up: “O my Child there is graite odes between a mans being at home and a broad.” 56

Upon returning from his mission to France, Deborah’s “great odds” come home to roost—Deborah deceased, the house itself plundered by the British during the Revolutionary War, “a very good house that I built so long ago to retire into, without being able till now to enjoy it”; hereafter, Franklin settles “into my niche, after being kept out of it 24 years by foreign employments.” 57 Welcomed home as a national hero, Franklin subsequently makes use of the house as a hub for some of Philadelphia’s “most important political, scientific, and social gatherings,” as Cahill remarks, “particularly during the Constitutional Convention of 1787”—its republican mode of luxury representing “the civic-oriented refinement of the public man,” its arrangement of fine objects “reflecting the harmonious arrangement of virtuous ideas” in Franklin’s mind. 58 Resuming, in these final years, the recitation of his life from “home,” Franklin sketches in those political affairs in which he played a major role in the colonies, terminating with his arrival in London, 27 July 1757. It’s with a muddled sense of resignation and regret that he recounts his slighted “Plan for the Union of all the Colonies,” and with a soupçon of nostalgia, he laments the fractured motherland: “I am still of Opinion it would have been happy for both Sides the Water if it had been adopted. The Colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves; there would then have been no need of Troops from England; of course the subsequent Pretence for Taxing America, and the bloody Contest it occasioned, would have been avoided” (A 690, 691). History is full of such political mistakes, “the Errors of States & Princes,” missteps that jeopardize the public good: “Look round the habitable World, how few / Know their own Good, or knowing it pursue” (A 691). Interspersed between this discourse of political maneuvering that occupies the balance of Part Three, the narrative tenaciously chronicles the spirit of Enlightenment that informs Franklin’s “scientific” frame of mind—itself a product of the Age of Reason—enumerating, most notably, a congregation of inventions and discoveries expressly beneficial to the public good (that good known only to a few), a corpus of good works, a virtuous body of civic-minded projects that simultaneously characterize the face behind the mask(s) and underwrite the master plot of his life, a life that reciprocally uses knowledge to profit itself. In turn, the aggregate of citizens and their good work incorporate the homeland as a whole, a conglomerate of “publick-spirited Gentlemen” fashioned by its universal

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character, a “Society of the Free and Easy; Free, as being by general Practice and Habit of the Virtues, free from the Dominion of Vice, and particularly by the Practice of Industry & Frugality, free from Debt, which exposes a Man to Confinement and a Species of Slavery to his Creditors” (A 678, 655, 656). 59 Slavery, indeed: Thus, while the nation owes its virtue to the credit of its citizens whose character is, both in fact and in effect, a masquerade, the nation, in its own right, signifies an empty set regarding which its citizen-subjects’ virtuous deeds add up to, if not ultimately equal to, their worth in print (“all men are created . . .”). The nation profits from the truth of this “equation” whose very excess lies hidden in its “self”-evident exchange (“We hold these truths to be . . . ”), the interest of the citizen-subject’s wealth congruent with the wealth of the nation’s interest. In the draft declaring the righteousness of this truth, Louis P. Masur remarks its drift: To help prepare the Declaration of Independence, Franklin’s “main contribution to Jefferson’s draft was to substitute ‘selfevident’ for ‘sacred and undeniable’ in describing immutable ‘truths.’” 60 For the moment, let’s put aside the capital required in this exchange, the prospect of the nation’s fate foreshadowed at this intersection of the universal (citizen) subject virtuously free and easy—a discursive construction at best, a textual practice, bill of rights—and that Other practice embodying the homeland’s most domestic character, the “Domestic Institution” as such, to which the homeland as a (w)hole is truth-fully indebted for its forthcoming insolvency. What chiefly lends credit to Franklin’s character, what distinguishes him as the ideal citizen-subject of the new republic, a credit to the nation, affiliates him with Enlightenment Reason’s interest in “natural philosophy,” in science and “speculation” as such—a disposition modified, as Carla Mulford remarks, by “his qualified dismissal of studies that did not have outcomes in what Franklin called ‘use.’” 61 Franklin’s wealth—his worth—is measured by his single-minded attachment to production, to usefulness and practicality, to invention, to scientific experimentation, to innovative technologies—new methods for regulating the city watch, for forming fire companies and improving their equipment, for heating homes, for paving, lighting, and cleaning city streets. This, too, applies to Franklin’s foremost scientific investigation, the “Philadelphia Experiments.” Sandwiched between accounts of Franklin’s part in colonial politics, he feels compelled “to give some Account of the Rise & Progress of my Philosophical Reputation,” and calls attention to the “Paper which I wrote . . . on the Sameness of Lightning and Electricity” and its subsequent translation into “French, and later into Italian, German, and Latin,” remarking that “the Doctrine it contain’d was by degrees universally adopted by the Philosophers of Europe” (712, 713, 715). The theory counts for much less than the use to which it will be put—the lightning

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rod indisputably of greater value than “that capital Experiment” itself (715). Scientific knowledge and technology work hand in hand, speculation held in check to the extent that science is put to use; its value lies in its application. Franklin’s own words sum things up: “This is the Age of Experiments” (723). Scientific knowledge here transfigures the place of capital and the commodity, as Lyotard suggests: “the technologies required by the scientific process open the way for the production and distribution of new commodities, either directly committed to scientific research, or modified with a view to popular use. To this extent at least, means of knowledge become means of production.” 62 Hence, knowledge circulates as capital. Scientific “truth,” in turn, requires its own technology; proof costs dearly in the end. For example, in his Discourse on Method, as Lyotard observes, Descartes was already requesting laboratory funds. The game initially belongs to the rich—no wealth, no technology: “whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established”; by the eighteenth century, the reverse is equally the case—no technology, no wealth: Science henceforth becomes “a force of production, in other words, a moment in the circulation of capital.” 63 Hence, on the one hand, progress plays itself out—Pilgrim’s faith displaced by a scientific body of knowledge, Reason’s upper hand. On the other hand, Reason’s underhanded cunning—speculation’s specularity—obscures this scene of progress, usefulness, and virtue-osity; something overshadows, blackens things. What is this Thing? At face value, the Autobiography recites the progress of Reason transfigured as capital. Within this universal space, the socioeconomic field opened up by capital, Franklin’s narrative rationalizes virtue insofar as it accounts for scientific knowledge—itself indebted to narration for its very life—as an accumulation of good deeds. 64 Intellectual labor’s value counts for nothing but its universal democratic principle (“the pursuit of . . . ). Both here, and in The Way to Wealth, as Rosha asserts, “knowledge is not internal but the effect of collective relations”; to this effect, “selfknowledge is oddly lacking in Franklin’s memoir.” 65 Conveniently and eerily absent, to be precise: The narrative exposes nothing but this lack; the “auto”-biographical account is (nothing if not) ghostly, spectral to the end. There is nothing but the mise-en-scène, the staging of the spectacle, Enlightenment Reason: speculation held to account for itself. 66 However, vis-à-vis the nation’s labor as a corpus of good deeds, Reason overshadows this collective wealth: In the self-same moment that the commodity standard institutes production as the intrinsic, innate force in whose name wealth is put to use, that very energy, dissimulated in its use, puts (re)production at risk by means of its ghostly, specular, equivalent. Speculation as such—or its complement in the psychic economy of the nation, the “drive”—threatens to destroy the very system it sustains, to pass into the service of, in psychoanalytic patois, the homeland’s “id.”

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Partial in its constitution and “inequitable,” Reason plays its underhanded trump, regarding which, and in whose name, the citizen-subject has, at times, “excus’d my-self for having made some Use of Cunning” (A 684). Recollect that parable of Reason that takes place at sea. Adhering strictly to his vegetarian diet, Franklin recalls that “when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs:—Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily. . . . So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do” (A 599). While Reason, here, ostensibly hands itself over to its own inherent fallibility, to rationalizing itself, in reality it overtrumps its own deficiency, since Reason blows the whistle on itself. Its ownmost cunning has the upper hand. To this effect, Franklin’s “Moral or Prudential Algebra,” as he cunningly defines it in a letter to Joseph Priestley, approvingly puts virtue at the service of reason as a matter of expediency (A 139). Translated to the economic sphere, sans categorical imperative and “radical responsibility,” reason’s prudential algebra recognizes moral “progress” as the product of prudence conjoined with industry—industry, above all, “as a Means of obtaining Wealth and Distinction” (A 641). What is the object of this wealth, its cause in the Lacanian sense: what is the “master” signifier here, the dead end of this phantasy? The nature of this wealth is not to be conflated with the Lacanian objet a, that petit excess (jouissance) over and above those limits placed upon the pleasure principle by the incommensurate operation of “reality” in the psychic economy of the representative citizen-subject—a subject individually devoted to its own (self)-interest and (the pursuit of) “happiness.” The nation’s wealth exceeds the totality of capital amassed by these citizen-subjects. While the credit of its citizen-subject’s character principally accounts for the nation’s capital, the nation’s ownmost “excess,” its jouissance, nonetheless, lies elsewhere and Otherwise, unaccountably invested in the homeland’s most definitive “reality,” what lies beyond, outside its symbolically discursive space. To the credit of the homeland’s character, the “Domestic Institution” is itself (sur)rendered as the homeland’s “happy,” “hallowed” (what value lies in words; what are they worth?) wound (blessure), the rend, the crack (the “Fault” to recollect the Moral Project’s own discursive space) in the nation’s ideologically uniform discursive space whose textual practice equally identifies the universal subject (“all men . . .”) with the self-same right to “happiness.” This institution constitutes the Freudian Thing itself (Das Ding), the body of the nation’s reinvestment capital, its corporate identity, its “signifier-ness” as such—unsignified, unsignifiable: the material rem(a)inder of the hypothetically discursive unity of these United States, that unspeakable leftover of the nation’s psychic state whose (un)avoidable and

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silent (absent) presence equi-vocates any and all attempts at symbolization (“We hold these truths . . . ”). Call this (pursuit of) “happiness,” this surplus value, Lacan’s objet (a), and not the petit a. Call the homeland’s most “domestic” institution its “usufruct,” the very fruit of the virtuously civic-minded homeland’s body (of labor) as a (w)hole whose jouissance cunningly exceeds (the right to) itself, its “right” to life, liberty, and (the pursuit of) happiness, precisely insofar as, and to the extent that, it includes the “right” of ownership, the right not only to enjoy the profit generated by the corpus of its labor force, but also to possess that very body as its property—part of the libido that circulates the nation’s virtuously civic-minded body, its outside (hors corps). In affect, this surplus designates, beyond the pleasure principle, the nation’s own primordial loss, its always-already outstanding debt, the corpus of labor’s own dead head (caput mortuum), speculation’s specter, its corpse. This surplus-value (credit) isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Beyond its discursive, symbolic identification with liberty, the homeland, structured by a phantasy (“all men are [created] . . . ”) becomes, in fact, an effect of a belief (in which its members believe that its members believe)—a semantic void, as Slavoj Žižek defines it, “a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field,” exposing the kinks, the very cracks, in its symbolic recognition of itself. 67 Something’s “out of place” (qui manque à sa place). Where is the homeland’s civicminded citizen if not “between” its individual deeds? The national Deed itself, on paper, constitutes a Bill whose value is “equal” to the universal sum of its cracks. “What” is the subject here, the universal (“all men”), virtuously civic-minded citizen devoted to the nation’s “good”? Or, more succinctly, what is missing; what pre-occupies the good; what institutes the spec(tac)ular in this phantasy (“all men . . . ”)? Given the bearer of this note, let’s bear in mind the corporatist temptation to hold in check capital’s inherent excess, its libidinal economy, its bent toward speculation, reason’s cunningly tight-lipped subject (of apperception, in the idiom of Kant). What is this discourse of the nation if not the Lacanian “discourse of the Master” whose self-evident truths exist to control, repress, restrain the homeland’s capital? Franklin’s virtuously civic-minded deeds, his universal body of scientific knowledge (Lacan’s “discourse of the University” aligned now with the Master), occupies (after all, this is territorial at heart) the “heart” of this machine, the body politic, whose spectral “skin,” universal reason’s cunning (“all men . . . ”), endorses speculation in the trading of inequitable commodities, and is itself indebted to and “black’d” 68 by the very excess it desires to regulate, inhibit, dominate. Credit Hegel with the final pennyworth in this financial debacle—the Master, in the play of dialectics, bound as slave, held captive by the discourse of its own desire. Such is the power and the democratic “principal” of Reason’s universal declaration of equality.

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Contra Adam Smith, the nation’s universal (“all men . . . ”) body (of labor)—not its individuals—founds and funds its capital whose surplus jouissance silhouettes the corps(e) of its good deed(s), the national imaginary’s moral “rights”: In “Other” words, the “lost object” of its discursive unity, what, in fact, never existed in the first place. This spectral discourse of the “Other” conjures up the national libido’s loot—(the body of) labor’s ghostly limb, to once more mix the metaphors (the “symptoms” in the argot of Lacan). Lest we con-fuse things asymmetrically, let’s not naïvely mystify the homeland’s excess with the jouissance of its phantasy, the national imaginary (the homeland’s ownmost Transcendental Illusion, to summon for a final time Kant’s First Critique). This excess, this jouissance incalculably beyond the pleasure principle, exposes what is “real,” the national reality disfigured and “black’d” (not unlike that other Moral Project [sur]rendered on paper, with its little black spots, marking “every Fault,” at last reduced to empty, worthless fissures) by the discourse of dissimulation (“all men . . . ”)—Sancho Panza’s government (mis)apprehended as its own ironic joke. Here’s the joke in full, delivered with a forthright cogency: In gay Conversation over our Wine after Supper he [Governor Morris] told us Jokingly that he much admir’d the Idea of Sancho Panza, who when it was propos’d to give him a Government, requested it might be a Government of Blacks, as then, if he could not agree with his People he might sell them. One of his Friends who sat next to me, says, “Franklin, why do you continue to side with these damn’d Quakers? had not you better sell them? the Proprietor would give you a good Price.” The Governor, says I, has not yet black’d them enough. He had indeed labour’d hard to blacken the Assembly in all his Messages, but they wip’d off his Colouring as fast as he laid it on, and plac’d it in return thick upon his own Face; so that finding he was likely to be negrify’d himself, he as well as Mr Hamilton, grew tir’d of the Contest, and quitted the Government. (A 693)

As that Kern of nonsense at the heart of the nation’s universal symbolic space, the “domestic institution” embodies that future forfeiture the homeland risks by speculating on its capital, its “negrify’d” reserve, the silence of the “brute,” the “dumb.”

In his final “death-bed” years at home, and “likely to be negrify’d himself,” the universal citizen-subject undergoes a change of heart regarding slavery lest “freedom . . . prove a misfortune to himself and prejudicial to society. Attention to emancipated black people, it is therefore to be hoped, will become a branch of our national policy.” 69 Not so for other “foreign” elements: Indeed, as Alberto Lena remarks, Franklin’s “pessimism regarding the multi-ethnic composition of post-Revolution-

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ary America” testifies to his lifelong wish that “the English language and a Puritan mythology of the past become the very essence of the United States—a mythology that in the nineteenth-century disregarded the Native American, African, Dutch, German, French and Spanish elements inherent in the composition of the early North American population.” 70 Yet, if “Africa” defines the fundamental “foreign” element in light of which the nation finds its house of state estranged, a stranger to itself, the homeland’s universal citizen—interested in forming “the Virtuous and good Men of all Nations into a regular Body”—is equally bereft of its identity. The universal citizen-subject, uncannily at home in London, mimics family life inside its house on Craven Street, until, through subterfuge in foreign politics, it finds itself inhospitably sent back, deported, to America. Posted next, posthaste, to Paris, the subject subsequently finds itself the subject of a hero’s homecoming on foreign soil. As Stacy Schiff observes, “The Franklin known to the French . . . was—in Voltaire’s description—the discoverer of electricity, a man of genius, a first name in science, a successor to Newton and Galileo.” 71 And it’s with nothing but regret that he departs. The good-byes were labored and drawn out, as Schiff recounts the scene—Madame Brillon inconsolable, Madame Helvétius hopelessly distraught (had she accepted his proposal, he’d have spent the final five years of his life in France), and, on Franklin’s part, nothing but praise for the king: “Perhaps no sovereign born to reign ever felt so much for other men or had more of the milk of human kindness nature.” 72 Writing to Madame Helvétius from the Star Inn on the Isle of Wight, he unequivocally expresses his despondency at leaving France, “la Païs du monde que j’aime le plus” (the country that I love most in all the world). 73 The triumphal entrance back in Philadelphia—cannons booming, a plethora of international salutes, including four British ships with their colors displayed—overtrumps the primal scene itself, that mythic, threerolled chronicle foreshadowing the recompense of industry. Upon this self-same site, the scene is eerily replayed, this time a drum-rolled entrance linked to cheering crowds who shepherd Franklin to the Market Street Courtyard adjacent to his celebrated house. As Schiff recounts the epic tableau, the faces were new, the voices familiar; disorientation was profound: “while reports of American prosperity had reached Paris, nothing had prepared him for what Philadelphia had become in his absence, a flourishing city with thousands of new homes, an orderly market, and a cluster of public buildings, amid which poverty had no place and tolerance reigned, . . . in every respect the promised land”—an avatar of Rip Van Winkle, “who had also missed the American Revolution, though to different effect.” 74 What speculation puts in play returns now, doubled in its specularity, a ghost, a foreign body as such—an American naïf in France, now a

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debonair, frenchified American back “home,” one whom many of his countrymen believe to be more loyal to France: disoriented to be sure. The universal citizen-subject’s arrival takes in stride the interval of its departure and waits to be announced, to be accounted for, disoriented by its passage westward to America and the finality of its return—a subject subsequently regarded by many as a Founding Father and the representative American, a subject who, as Michael Warner remarks, “spent twenty years of his life in London and as late as the 1760s fully intended to live there permanently as a happy Englishman,” one who, once domiciled in France, “changed his image and played the American, a role he invented for the occasion,” one, moreover, who staged a performance so successful that “critics cannot always see past it to recover the English colonial author whose narrative of a transatlantic mercantile career is addressed to the royal governer of New Jersey.” 75 I needn’t add to this theatricality Reason’s own equivocation with desire, “principle” thus compromised by “inclination” in the eighteenth-century parlance of psychology: to wit, the lure of France, the spell of luxury, the charm of royalty, the thrall of Madame Helvétius: “Adieu, ma trés trés trés chere Amie.” 76 Throw home and homeland to the wind: They but materialize in phantasy—as ghosts. Accordingly, let’s at long last abandon the Autobiography’s hackneyed commonplace, that discursive construction of the citizen-subject’s self so often misconstrued by critics as the representative “American.” 77 Speculation entails risk and loss. The narrative speaks for (the absence of) itself. Founded under British rule, (re)fashioned in France, resolved in America, the “subject” of the narrative emerges utterly devoid of any sense of representative consequence, much less radical individualism—always and everywhere a stranger to itself. Rather, Franklin’s psychic “interiority,” as Rosha argues, “is so densely furnished with rules of economic exchange, the routes of capital, and the slogans of capitalism that the text evinces not a distinctive, self-authored individual but a capitalist wholly patterned by the narrative logic of capital”—specifically, the account book. 78 Credit the economic rhetoric for this loss of face—and for the absence of domestic life as such.

Back on Market Street, the ghostly economics of both “home” and “home”-land having finally materialized in the house, Franklin writes his sister Jane to the effect that all the rooms “are now finished and inhabited, very much to the Convenience of the Family, who were before too much crowded,” while in a postscript to the letter he conceals his own self-interest, the private, “individual” drive toward wealth and superfluity: “When I look at these Buildings, my dear Sister, and compare them with that in which our good Parents educated us, the Difference strikes me with Wonder; and fills me with humble Thankfulness to that divine

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Being who had graciously conducted my Steps, and prospered me in this strange Land to a degree that I could not rationally have expected, and can by no means conceive my self to have merited.” 79 Given the credit of the subject’s character, such histrionics exemplify the habitual disappearing act, the theater of masks, necessitated by expedience, the zero-sum game equating virtue and the commerce of identity. The house accounts for what is left, left over, the remainder of jouissance after the subject, counting on the revenue of its advance, on the credit of its character, discounts itself. This very surplus equally defines a loss, the loss of home, domestic life—of family. The house, in turn, becomes itself a ghost upon the Founding Father’s death. 80 In the end, the only house that counts remains the printing house. Words alone account for the remains—the solitary, material testament to the universal citizen-subject whose textual self-construction translates Enlightenment Reason into a virtuously civic-minded body of deeds. These written deeds, in turn, transliterate the disinterested subject into “a man made out of words,” as Giles aptly sums things up. 81 As things turn out, this subject, who since youth avoided church on Sundays “when I contrived to be in the Printing House alone” (A 580), apprehends its sole identity in print, a “character” whose universal signature remains identical throughout its life, “B. Franklin, Printer.” 82 This figure announces its departure ahead of time, ahead of its self, captured by the legendary epitaph composed for its amusement at the age of eighteen: The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering & Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost. For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended by the Author. 83

Axiomatically, the Autobiography of this spectral figure fittingly comes to a halt in the countinghouse—where the generative nature of money, more economically than family, proliferates, money begetting money and its offspring even more, as Franklin’s “Advice to a Young Tradesman” spells it out. 84 Accounting for a tax on the colonial Proprietaries, the Autobiography unaccountably ends with a commercial transaction in print, with the equivalent of an exchange, with “equity” mistaken for equality: “After a full Enquiry they unanimously sign’d a Report that they found the tax had been assess’d with perfect Equity. The Assembly look’d on

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my entring into the first Part of the Engagement as an essential Service to the Province, since it secur’d the Credit of the Paper Money then spread over all the Country; and they gave me their Thanks in form when I return’d” (A 727). All told, the story ends where it begins, having rehearsed and authorized, in the course of its progress, the proverb Franklin’s father repeatedly drilled into him since early childhood. I recall you to that mise-enscène preliminary to the staging of the Moral Project in Part Two: “Seest thou a Man diligent in his Calling, he shall stand before Kings”; thenceforward, Franklin “consider’d Industry as a Means of obtaining Wealth and Distinction, which encourag’d me; tho’ I did not think that I should ever literally stand before Kings, which however has since happened.—for I have stood before five, & even had the honour of sitting down with one, the King of Denmark, to Dinner” (A 641). Throughout his life, Franklin’s instinctive respect for kings evokes the Autobiography’s genealogical prologue delineating father figures in relation to the exploits of the family line, figures generally invested with honesty and cunning equally—“cunning,” in its ancient sense, implying knowledge, as Franklin remarks in his essay “On Simplicity.” The word “king” (ken), moreover, “may perhaps be akin to it; it is of Saxon Original, and we are told the Word King is derived from it.” 85 The father figure of the king testifies to Franklin’s conflicted investment in author-ity, the disinterested economy of print in the domestication and dissemination of the Republic of Letters at odds with an impassioned interest in paternity—that is, the economics of domestic life in terms of the transferential relationship between father and son. 86 Uncannily, the transference leaves cunning with a final trump to play.

Estranged since the termination of the Revolutionary War, William offers to visit his father in Paris. Franklin turns him down, requesting, instead, that William’s son, Temple, be sent to London to act as intermediary. Passy, 16 August 1784: Dear Son, I received your Letter of the 22d past, and am glad to find that you desire to revive the affectionate Intercourse, that formerly existed between us. It will be very agreeable to me; indeed nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen Sensations, as to find myself deserted in my old Age by my only Son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up Arms against me, in a Cause, wherein my good Fame, Fortune and Life were all at stake. You conceived, you say, that your Duty to your King and Regard for your Country requir’d this. . . . Your Situation was such that few would have censured your remaining Neuter, ’tho there are Natural Duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguish’d by them. . . .

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Benjamin Franklin: A House Is Not a Home . . . . I did intend returning this year; but the Congress . . . have sent me another Commission, which will keep me here at least a Year longer; and perhaps I may then be too old and feeble to bear the Voyage. I am here among a People that love and respect me, a most amiable Nation to live with; and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; . . . and I have been so long abroad, that I should now be almost a Stranger in my own Country. I shall be glad to see you when convenient, but would not have you come here at present. You may confide to your son the Family Affairs you wished to confer upon with me, for he is discreet. And I trust, that you will prudently avoid introducing him to Company, that it may be improper for him to be seen with. 87

Witness, once again, how cunningly home haunts the rhetoric, Reason’s underhanded coup implying impropriety in handling “Family Affairs.” The issue of the dislocated father figure contaminates the discourse of reconciliation, a foreign body at the heart of domesticity, the father now deserted, a phantom announcing its departure from the Other side, “here among a People that love and respect me, a most amiable Nation to live with.” At this remove, the homeland comes between the two, the father and the son divided and estranged, double-crossed by duties natural and political, each the other’s remainder, the leftover of duty’s private part(s). Subsequent events play themselves out against the backdrop of this domestic intrigue, one son disavowed by his father and simultaneously dissociated from his own son by the grandfather’s authority. It’s not by chance paternity cannibalizes the discourse of home. Having received official word that Congress had accepted his resignation, the citizen-subject’s thoughts return to Polly Stevenson and to the hybrid family on Craven Street. Passy, July 4, 1785: Dear Friend, By this Post I have given Orders to engage a fine Ship, now at London, to carry me and my Family [Temple and Benny] to Philadelphia. . . . The Ship has a large, convenient Cabin, with good LodgingPlaces. The whole to be at my Disposition, and there is plenty of room for you and yours. You may never have so good an Opportunity of passing to America, if it is your Intention. Think of it, and take your Resolution. . . . 88

She declines. In the days preceding his immediate departure from France, Franklin writes his sister Jane. St. Germain, July 13, 1785: Dear Sister, I am to be taken on board a Philadelphia Ship on the Coast of England . . . the beginning of next Month. . . . I did my last public Act in the Country just before I set out, which was signing a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Prussia. I have continu’d to work till late in the Day: ’tis time I should go home, and go to Bed. 89

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One final scene remains to be played out, one final issue brought to account: William visits his father at the Star Inn, Isle of Wight, prior to Franklin’s departure for America. No reconciliation ensues—nothing but stony diplomacy over property and debt, as Isaacson remarks: Franklin had regained full control over Temple by then. . . . He insisted that William sell his New Jersey farm to Temple for less than he had paid, and he applied against the purchase price the decades of debt, carefully recorded, that William still owed him. He also took title to all of William’s land claims in New York. Having taken William’s son from him, he was now extracting his wealth and his connections to America. . . . This final reunion of three generations of Franklin men, so fraught with father-son tensions, ended so coldly that none of them ever saw fit to discuss it. . . . He and his son never corresponded again. 90

Nor was William among those invited to his father’s farewell party on the evening of 27 July 1785.

CODA: Upon his death, Franklin leaves William several worthless claims to land in Nova Scotia and the annulment of all outstanding debts his son still owed him. In other words, as Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert credit the account, nothing—nothing “wrapped in a final reproof.” 91 Witness, in the will, the heart of that reproof, a final dressingdown of the “Dear Son”—to the discredit of his character: “The Part he acted against me in the late War, which is of public Notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an Estate he endeavored to deprive me of.” 92 NOTES 1. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), 567. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Franklin will be to this edition, parenthetically cited in the text. Quotations specifically from the Autobiography will be cited as “A.” 2. Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004), 138. 3. Jerry Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 11. 4. Weinberger, 12. 5. For an intriguing historical reading of the letters precipitating the Hutchinson Affair, see Christopher Looby, “Franklin’s Purloined Letters,” Arizona Quarterly 46.2 (1990): 11: “What emerges from Franklin’s and others’ discussions of the Hutchinson letters affair . . . is a master metaphor: the figure of historical descent, mother country or patria to colonial offspring, is recast as the transmission of messages.”

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6. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–present), 15:272–73, hereafter parenthetically cited as PBP. 7. Cf. James Campbell, Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 178. 8. Claude-Anne Lopez, Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Good House’: The Story of Franklin Court (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1981), 25–26. 9. Edward Cahill, “Benjamin Franklin’s Interiors,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6.1 (2008): 30. 10. Papers, 7:381–84. 11. Papers, 7:381–84. 12. Papers, 17:222. 13. Papers, 20:383; see also Wood, 133. 14. Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 282–83. 15. Wood, 138, 151. 16. Weinberger, 12. 17. See, for example, Peter Bastian, “‘Let’s Do Lunch’: Benjamin Franklin and the American Character,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 24.1 (2005): 88: “he rarely kept close intimate friends for any length of time despite being a great joiner of clubs and societies. He effectively abandoned his wife Deborah to live in England for years on end and refused to return home either for his only daughter’s wedding or when his wife’s health began to fail. Yet he could cut short a holiday to attend the British Court for the King’s birthday. He was close to his son, William, for many years but when he chose the loyalist cause, Franklin effectively cut him out of his life and spurned all attempts by William at reconciliation. . . . There is a general suspicion that Franklin’s world revolved around himself.” 18. Hugh J. Dawson, “Fathers and Sons: Franklin’s ‘Memoirs’ as Myth and Metaphor,” Early American Literature 14.3 (1979/80): 270. 19. I deploy the neologism “itSelf” in its reflexive sense to emphasize that the narrative act—narration in itself—implies a subject capable of not only reflection but also duplicity—that is, otherness. Call it the “unconscious of the text,” an unconscious that never and in no way underwrites intentionality. Narration might deceive, might contradict, its self. This textual unconscious bears the mark of difference in deconstructive terms. Distinct from the “narrator,” the narrative itSelf is always and everywhere genderless—an “it,” neither/nor, neuter(ed). Elsewhere, this neologism applies, and refers back, to notions equally duplicitous—for example, consciousness, authority, the text, reflection, and subjectivity itSelf. 20. Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked, 177. 21. Jennifer T. Kennedy, “Death Effects: Revisiting the Conceit of Franklin’s Memoir,” Early American Literature 36.2 (2001): 224. 22. Robert F. Sayre, “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” in Early American Literature: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Michael T. Gilmore (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 87–88. On Franklin’s various alter egos and doubles, most notably his “traded” identities with John Collins and James Ralph in the Autobiography, see Michael T. Gilmore, “Franklin and the Shaping of American Ideology,” in Benjamin Franklin: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Brian M. Barbour (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 108–11. See also William Breitenbach, “Religious Affections and Religious Affectations: Antinomianism and Hypocrisy in the Writings of Edwards and Franklin,” in Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture, ed. Barbara B. Oberg and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 18–19. 23. Herbert A. Leibowitz, Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1989), 30. 24. For further critical commentary on Franklin’s self-fashioning, see, for example, Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the

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United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). 25. Quoted in Sayre, 88. 26. See Sayre, 91: “his first and most lasting public character . . . was always to be for him, ‘Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, Printer.’” Cf. also, for example, Kennedy, 203: “while Franklin has come to be so strongly identified with the current investigation of eighteenth-century print culture that it is almost impossible to imagine him in any other way than as America’s archetypal printer, it is important to remember that this was, in fact, the myth Franklin constructed for himself.” 27. Douglas Anderson, The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 123. 28. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 61: “Printers starting new presses always included a newspaper in their productions, to which they were usually the main, even the sole, contributor. Thus the printer-journalist was an essentially NorthAmerican phenomenon. Since the main problem facing the printer-journalist was reaching readers, there developed an alliance with the post-master so intimate that often each became the other. Hence, the printer’s office emerged as the key to North American communications and community intellectual life.” 29. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 67. 30. See Lyotard, The Inhuman, 66–67: “‘Real time’ is only the moment at which the time conserved in the form of money is realized. . . . Why do we have to save money and time to the point where this imperative seems like the law of our lives? Because saving (at the level of the system as a whole) allows the system to increase the quantity of money given over to anticipating the future.” 31. Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 79. 32. See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 174: “the Old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter. . . . The Romans called a matter for discourse res.” 33. Cf. Kenneth Dauber, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990): 32–33: “Franklin does not confess his misgivings. Confession does not emerge in American narrative until Charles Brockden Brown. . . . And besides, the Autobiography, as most scholars of the form have noted, is no confession in the first place. But Franklin does publish his misgivings, which is quite another matter. He is not a representative man. He neither bares nor justifies a soul somehow typical. He is an individual.” 34. The Way to Wealth, in Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: Signet, 1961), 182. 35. Benjamin Franklin’s Memoirs: Parallel Text Edition, ed. Max Farrand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 184. 36. Ada Van Gastel, “Franklin and Freud: Love in the Autobiography,” Early American Literature 25.2 (1990): 175. 37. Van Gastel, 176. 38. Van Gastel, 176. 39. Wood, 177. 40. Wood, 174. 41. Quoted in Wood, 172. 42. Quoted in Charles L. Sanford, Benjamin Franklin and the American Character (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1955), 25. 43. Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xx–xxi: “envoi . . . is derived from

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the Latin inviare, to send on the way. . . . [T]he English ‘invoice,’ meaning bill of sale, is actually derived from envoi (and inviare), thus linking the senses of sending,message, and debt.” 44. Sayre, 92. 45. Giles, 85. 46. Rekha Rosha, “Accounting Capital, Race and Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Pecuniary Habits’ of Mind in The Autobiography,” in Culture, Capital and Representation, ed. Robert J. Balfour (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 35–36. 47. Cf. Looby, Voicing America, 109; Rosha, 43. 48. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 234, note 12. Cf. Dawson, 284: “That Franklin speaks of himself as a ‘Citizen’ rather than a subject and describes his charge as having been from his ‘Country’ rather than the colonies he had formerly represented are measures of his new consciousness.” 49. Forget the disclaimer in Part Three that serves to qualify the “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection” in Part Two, the disavowal of Franklin’s youthful Deism acknowledged in Part One: “That there is one God who made all things. That he governs the World by his Providence. . . . That the Soul is immortal. And that God will certainly reward Virtue and punish Vice either here or hereafter” (A 656). Virtue merely capitalizes on religion here—and hereafter. 50. “Self-Denial Not the Essence of Virtue,” in Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 242. 51. Cahill, 41. 52. Papers, 1:149. 53. Cary Carson, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America: Why Demand?” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 618. 54. Cahill, 30. 55. For an overview of those material possessions, see Page Talbott, “Benjamin Franklin at Home,” in Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World, ed. Page Talbott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 124–61. 56. PBP, 12:250–51, 12:298. 57. To John Hunter, November 24, 1786, in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth (New York: Haskell House, 1970), 9:547. 58. Cahill, 55. 59. For a reading of Franklin’s writings in relation to “collectivities” other than the nation, see Jim Egan, “Turning Identity Upside Down: Benjamin Franklin’s Antipodean Cosmopolitanism,” in Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies, ed. Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 203–22. 60. Louis P. Masur, “Introduction,” The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 11. Cf. also Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 1991), 550. 61. Carla Mulford, “Franklin, Modernity, and Themes of Dissent in the Early Modern Era,” Modern Language Studies, 28 (1998): 17. See also Verner Crane, Benjamin Franklin, Englishman and American (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1936), 39–40, and Richard E. Amacher, Benjamin Franklin (New York, Twayne, 1962), 146–47. 62. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 71. 63. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 44–45: “A technical apparatus requires an investment; but since it optimizes the efficiency of the task to which it is applied, it also optimizes the surplusvalue derived from this improved performance. All that is needed is for the surplusvalue to be realized, in other words, for the product of the task performed to be sold.

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And the system can be scaled in the following way: a portion of the sale is recycled into a research fund dedicated to further performance improvement.” 64. Cf. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 28, 29: “the language game of science desires its statements to be true but does not have the resources to legitimate their truth on its own. . . . Scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all. Without such recourse it would be in the position of presupposing its own validity and would be stooping to what it condemns: begging the question. . . . But does it not fall into the same trap by using narrative as its authority?” 65. Rosha, 42, 43. 66. For a reading of Franklin and the Enlightenment at odds with my own, one that understands the Autobiography as having been written in the spirit of confident selfknowledge, see Seavey, 29–51. 67. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 202. 68. See Franklin on Sancho Panza’s government of “Blacks” (A 693). 69. “An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery,” November 9, 1789, Smyth, 10:67. 70. Alberto Lena, “Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Canada Pamphlet’ or ‘The Ravings of a Mad Prophet’: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Imperialism,” European Journal of American Culture 20.1 (2001), 49. Lena argues for a Counter-Enlightenment element in Franklin’s thinking—that the importance Franklin attaches “to nationalism and to irrational factors in human behavior” place him “within the frame of reference of the Counter-Enlightenment tradition,” an ideology that “postulated the relativity of human values” (48–49). 71. Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 14–15. 72. Quoted in Schiff, 393–94. 73. To Madame Helvétius, July 19, 1785, in Smyth, 9:364. 74. Schiff, 397, 396. 75. Michael Warner, “What’s Colonial about Colonial America,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 65–66. 76. To Madame Helvétius, July 27, 1785, in Smyth, 9:372. 77. As advocates of Franklin as representative American, cf., for example, H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000); Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003); and Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York, Penguin, 2004). 78. Rosha, 35. 79. To Jane Mecom, May 30, 1787, in Smyth, 9:590; quoted in Cahill, 56–57. 80. See Lopez, Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Good House,’ 49–50: The house gradually deteriorated, leased by the Portuguese minister to the United States, then subsequently serving as a boardinghouse, as home to a female academy, a coffeehouse, and a hotel—then finally demolished less than fifty years after it was built to make way for new construction. 81. Giles, 84. 82. For an especially incisive discussion of Franklin’s career in light of print, see Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 73–96. 83. See Papers, 1:111. 84. Smyth, 2:370–72. 85. Lemay, 183. 86. For a discussion of Franklin’s vocation as a printer in relation to the Republic of Letters, see Louis P. Simpson, “The Printer as a Man of Letters: Franklin and the

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Symbolism of the Third Realm,” in Benjamin Franklin: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Brian M. Barbour (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 30–49. See also David S. Shields, “Franklin in the Republic of Letters,” in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin, ed. Carla Mulford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 50–62. 87. To William Franklin, August 16, 1784, in Smyth, 9:252–53. 88. To Mrs. Mary Hewson, in Smyth, 9:352. 89. To Mrs. Jane Mecom, in Smyth, 9:363. 90. Isaacson, 434–35. 91. Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 305. 92. “Last Will and Testament,” June 23, 1789, in Smyth, 10:493–510.

First Movement Washington Irving: The Cutting Edge of Gross Anatomy

“History, n. An account mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

It’s not without a sense of irony that a lifelong bachelor by design, Washington Irving, arguably figures as the father of the nation’s literature (he bears, no less ironically, the father of the nation’s very name). Hearken to the father’s pronouncement on the legal institution itself: marriage, Irving wrote in a letter to a friend, is “the grave of Bachelors intimacy.” 1 The situation bears traces of scandal, not only for a literature in search of a father, but, even more so, a nation in search of citizens: that is, as many fathers as it can father. To further obfuscate the irony, he was, as Van Wyck Brooks so quaintly puts it, “everybody’s uncle.” 2 Behind the staging of this scene, it would appear that Irving lost his head—or, in the gossip of the housewives, put it where it didn’t belong. Bereft of wife and home, Irving was, to all intents and purposes, without a country, as well. Given his extensive travel to, and extended sojourns in, Europe, it’s not by chance that Thackeray christened him the first ambassador of letters from the New World to the Old. The Atlantic Ocean figures in the sense of this exchange, both blank page and perilous gulf, as Irving’s alter ego, Geoffrey Crayon—“author” of The Sketch Book—notes: The vast space of waters, that separates the hemispheres is like a blank page in existence. There is no gradual transition. . . . From the moment you lose sight of the land you have left, all is vacancy. . . . In travelling by land there is a continuity of scene and a connected succession of persons and incidents, that carry on the story of life, and lessen the effect of absence and separation. We drag, it is true, “a lengthening chain” at each remove of our pilgrimage; but the chain is unbroken— we can trace it back link by link; and we feel that the last still grapples us to home. But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. . . . It interposes a gulf, not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes—a gulf subject to tempest and fear and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable and return precarious. 3

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The transaction is not without its risks: estrangement and expatriation— “a stranger in the land” (SB 751). In this regard, Irving was accused, throughout his life, of being un-American. Richard Henry Dana Sr. attacked The Sketch Book, for instance, for its lack of significant “home qualities.” 4 Irving parried the attack in a letter to Brevoort: Whatever I have written has been written with the feelings and published as the writing of an American—Is that renouncing my country? How else am I to serve my country—by coming home and begging an office of it? . . . If I can do any good in this world it is with my pen . . . if I do that little and do it as an american [sic] I think my exertions ought to guarantee me from so unkind a question as that which you say is generally made. 5

If Irving, the bachelor-father, was unwelcome at home, his progeny were no less unwelcome in England, as he observed of American literary culture in general, and “the severity with which American productions had been treated by the British press” (SB 737). Caught up in the economics of this scene, Irving services himself, self-publishes The Sketch Book—in England, no less. Here, the plot (bachelor, by definition) thickens. Back home, Irving was criticized, and doubly so, for adulation, if not idolization, of the English tradition. Ironically, however, that tradition is both re-presented and critiqued by Geoffrey Crayon, bachelor par excellence, whose narration, in effect, criticizes the very thing it idolizes, the ideal literary line, “the parent country” (SB 791). By positioning “The Author’s Account of Himself” at the head of The Sketch Book, whose tales now function as its tail, the récit guarantees, up-front, that Europe as a (w)hole gets buggered in the end, securing, in a bold, ironic stroke, the narrative itself as ultimately and uniquely American: We have, it is true, our great men in America. . . . But I was anxious to see the great men of Europe; for I had read in the works of various philosophers, that all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number. A great man of Europe, thought I, must therefore be as superior to a great man of America, as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson. . . . I will visit this land of wonders, thought I, and see the gigantic race from which I am degenerated. (SB 744)

In its underhanded way, narration possesses sufficient cultural authority to criticize European culture as a whole—or so it would appear. In its evenhanded way, however, narration would balance the account between England and America, account for the increasing acrimony on both sides: “It is with feelings of deep regret that I observe the literary animosity daily growing up between England and America” (SB 786). On the one hand, England is to blame, specifically the London press, teeming with volumes of travel through the States, intended, it would seem, “to diffuse error rather than knowledge,” and written, in general, by narrowminded, self-indulgent, disillusioned entrepreneurs “disappointed in

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some unreasonable expectation of sudden gain” (SB 786, 787). The parent country shares responsibility, possessing, as it does, “the fountain head from whence the literature of the language flows”; as such, parental power and duty ought to work to make the language “the medium of amiable and magnanimous feeling—a stream where the two nations might meet together and drink in peace and kindness” (SB 790). In the long run, such misrepresentation, “instilling anger and resentment into the bosom of a youthful nation,” does far more damage to the parent than the child; one day England will regret its careless handling of “a kindred nation,” an “infant giant,” a country “in a singular state of moral and physical development; a country in which one of the greatest political experiments in the history of the world is now performing, and which presents the most profound and momentous studies to the statesman and the philosopher” (SB 789, 788, 789, 787). America, on the other hand, must stem its “general soreness at the illiberality of the English press,” where “recrimination on our part would be equally ill judged” (SB 791, 791–92). While the “national character is yet in a state of fermentation,” it promises “to settle down into something substantially excellent” (SB 787). In the meantime, the American press must see that it doesn’t “sour the sweet flow of our early literature” with querulous and peevish retorts that do nothing but “sow thorns and brambles among . . . blossoms” (SB 792). The press itself is finally accountable, especially in a nation where, more than any other, it holds absolute control: “for the universal education of the poorest classes, makes every individual a reader” (SB 790). The issue, it appears, is moral at heart—a question of eradicating “virulent national prejudices” (SB 792). Insofar as the republic is governed by public opinion, “the utmost care should be taken to preserve the purity of the public mind. Knowledge is power, and truth is knowledge; whosoever therefore knowingly propagates a prejudice, willfully saps the foundation of his country’s strength” (SB 792). Regarding the nation’s character, knowledge and morality go hand in hand. Yet sentiment frames nationality, as well, configures a domestic miseen-scène. On the one hand, America must look to England with “a hallowed feeling of tenderness and veneration as the land of our forefathers,” the birthplace of our “paternal history,” and thereby preserve “the sparks of future friendship,” this “golden band of kindred sympathies, so rare between nations” (SB 791). On the other hand, and mutually implicated in a morally evenhanded way, popular sentiment should be, by definition, international in both spirit and effect: Opening too, as we do, an asylum for strangers from every portion of the earth, we should receive all with impartiality. It should be our pride to exhibit an example of one nation at least, destitute of national antipathies, and exercising, not merely the overt acts of hospitality but

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Washington Irving: The Cutting Edge of Gross Anatomy those more rare and noble courtesies which spring from liberality of opinion. What have we to do with national prejudices? They are the inveterate diseases of old countries, contracted in rude and ignorant ages, when nations knew but little of each other, and looked beyond their own boundaries with distrust and hostility. We, on the contrary, have sprung into national existence in an enlightened and philosophic age; when the different parts of the habitable world, and the various branches of the human family, have been indefatigably studied and made known to each other; and we forego the advantages of our birth, if we do not shake off the national prejudices, as we would the local superstitions, of the old world. (SB 793)

Here, “England” functions as a printed text, a publication in itself, an authoritative reference work, “wherein are recorded sound deductions from ages of experience . . . golden maxims of practical wisdom, wherewith to strengthen and to embellish our national character” (SB 794). A few exemplary pages in The Sketch Book on “Rural Life in England” provide the key to the ultimate morality of national character. To begin, a “rural feeling” runs through British literature, from Chaucer to the present—a genuine fondness for, and knowledge of, nature that exceeds the “occasional visit” it receives in the pastoral literature of other nations; the British poets have virtually taken nature to bed, “wooed her in her most secret haunts”—the whole affair “wrought up into some beautiful morality” (SB 799). This exemplifies, in essence, the seductive charm of English scenery, “the moral feeling that seems to pervade it”—to wit, “ideas of order, of quiet, of sober well-established principles, of hoary usage and reverend custom” (SB 800). To further turn the figure, English rural life but mirrors home and the domestic scene itself, an “hereditary transmission of home bred virtues and local attachments, that speak deeply and touchingly for the moral character of the nation. . . . It is this sweet home feeling; this settled repose of affection in the domestic scene, that is, after all, the parent of the steadiest virtues” (SB 800–01). Morality is local, home-bred, family-oriented. Domestic life inosculates the nation’s moral character. Note, of course, the scene is rural, not the wilderness: Law informs the heart of things. Here national character accords with nature only insofar as it is ordered, conventional, domesticated. A nation’s character is finally a family affair, the nation a family, naturally, free of artifice—of any artificial division as such. Little wonder that America promises “to settle down into something substantially excellent,” a nation “in a singular state of moral . . . development,” a society “where there are no artificial distinctions, and where, by any chance, such individuals as themselves can rise to consequence” (SB 787–88). Americans therefore needn’t take the aspersions of the British press to heart since these misrepresentations evaporate naturally. The nation, an “infant giant,” continually outgrows them: “We have but to live on, and

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every day we live a whole volume of refutation. All the writers of England united . . . could not conceal our rapidly growing importance and matchless prosperity”—a prosperity owing, “not merely to physical and local, but also to moral causes . . . which give force and sustained energy to the character of a people; and which . . . have been the acknowledged . . . supporters of their own national power and glory” (SB 789). Free of national prejudice, international in its kinship and temperament, its political life domesticated and suffused with moral character, America is therefore destined to “power and glory”; they are, in “deed,” the nation’s natural birthright: “The world at large is the arbiter of a nation’s fame; with its thousand eyes it witnesses a nation’s deeds” (SB 789). To this effect, The Sketch Book champions “family” values regarding national character, the helping hand that forwards, as Bryce Traister contends, “a narrative of national independence and differentiation from England not in spite of but because of [Irving’s] independence from the social standards he memorializes in his sketches of English rural life.” 6 Those social standards, to be sure, begin and end at home, where virtue and morality originate. Yet English family life is not to be dismissed. The “Christmas” chapters of The Sketch Book singularly testify to the significance of home: “Nothing in England exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination, than the lingerings of the holyday customs . . . ; they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which . . . I am apt to think the world was more homebred, social, and joyous, than at present” (SB 911). The Christmas holidays embody “the season for gathering together of family connexions . . . ; of calling back the children of a family . . . once more to assemble about the paternal hearth” (SB 912). Specifically, the fireplace gathers each to all. Here, domesticity and hospitality go hand in hand: “Where does the honest face of hospitality expand into a broader and more cordial smile . . . than by the winter fireside?” (SB 913). Accordingly, at Bracebridge Hall, the vagrant bachelor, Geoffrey Crayon, feels equally the season and its hospitality: “Stranger and sojourner as I am in the land—though for me no social hearth may blaze, no hospitable roof throw open its doors, nor the warm grasp of friendship welcome me at the threshold—yet I feel the influence of the season beaming into my soul”; indeed, “[t]here is an emanation from the heart in genuine hospitality, which . . . is immediately felt, and puts the stranger at once at his ease. I had not been seated many minutes by the comfortable hearth of the worthy old cavalier [Bracebridge, “the old Squire”], before I found myself as much at home as if I had been one of the family” (SB 915, 929–30). Let’s get closer to the fire.

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In a piece entitled “Fireside Chastity,” Vincent Bertolini observes that “[b]achelors and fireplaces go together in the antebellum period.” 7 The scene of the solitary bachelor, lost in revery before the fireside, constitutes a commonplace of nineteenth-century American literature, and plays itself out, in Bertolini’s scenario, against the background of domestic life. What’s the bachelor doing by his fire? In Bertolini’s script, he’s “sitting and thinking: sitting before the lonely bachelor hearth . . . and thinking . . . primarily of what it would be like not to be a bachelor.” 8 The erection of this scene, however, represses the erection itself. In this “othered” scene, the nation, newly erected from the ashes of the Revolutionary War, prematurely goes to seed. The nation’s house is threatened with extinction at birth: The bachelor is not a proper citizen. Thus, as the century wears on, it’s not by chance that public sentiment increasingly perceives the bachelor as nearly “criminal,” conflating bachelorhood, a cultural pathology, with what it called the bachelor’s “disease,” arguably the most worrisome male medical problem in the nineteenth century— aka “spermatorrhea,” involuntary seminal leakage, often, it was commonly thought, due to excessive masturbation, and not uncommonly associated with impotence and, to bring this logic to climax, suicide. 9 Suffice it to say that self-destruction here tropes bachelorhood itself, as Bertolini observes, “the self-inflicted destruction of a proper masculine identity.” 10 In this sense, too, the nation might self-destruct. By refusing to assume his proper role in the nation’s reproductive order, the bachelor therefore threatens the nation’s integrity—so much so that, as the century progressed, attempts were made to levy an additional tax on unmarried men. The bachelor tax would subsequently fuel the nation’s economy where the bachelor himself had failed. By midcentury, society unanimously endorsed a moral cure: Beside the conjugal hearth, full erections come to their wise and proper conclusion.

At the furthest reach of this domestic bliss, the family “proper,” it would seem, determines social values that define a national morality, “natural” principles in light of which the nation’s “character” appears— its genuine identity. Apprehended in this light, “America,” by nature, hankers for a proper family. Conceived in liberty, the new-born nation’s “house” requires a populace of rightful, upright citizens in order to secure the house of state. The figure of domestic economy—oikos nomos: home rule—does fundamental housework here while moral sentiment does homework of its own, housing the “nation” in terms of an emotional repertoire. Home and homeland constitute the same event: identity, in either case, a family affair, in whose configuration domestic economy transfigures moral sentiment and proper family life to civic membership in the body politic, bequeathing, in the self-same move, affective signifi-

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cance to political events. 11 At the same time, domesticity ironically aligns itself with loss, and serves to recuperate the nation’s “natural” innocence, its proper disengagement from duplicity—indeed, from “politics” as such. Thus, given this allegiance to domestic life, witness Geoffrey Crayon’s valuation of the present-day “John Bull,” and how severely things have gone astray: “The common orders of English seem wonderfully captivated with the beau ideal which they have formed of John Bull, and endeavour to act up to the broad caricature that is perpetually before their eyes. Unluckily, they sometimes make their boasted Bull-ism an apology for their prejudice or grossness”; and “this I have especially noticed among those truly homebred and genuine sons of the soil, who have never migrated beyond the sound of Bow bells”—those, in other words, who have forsaken hospitality (SB 1029–30). On the whole, however, from the viewpoint of “a stranger who wishes to study English peculiarities,” John Bull’s virtues are his own: “all plain, homebred and unaffected” while “[t]here is something, too, in the appearance of his old family mansion, that is extremely poetical and picturesque; and as long as it can be rendered comfortably habitable, I should almost tremble to see it meddled with during the present conflict of tastes and opinions” (SB 1030, 1038–39). Nonetheless, if John Bull’s house is one that Crayon can admire, as William L. Hedges remarks, “it is not one he can really inhabit for long.” 12 Thus comes the caveat: All that I wish is, that John’s present troubles may teach him more prudence in future. That he may cease to distress his mind about other people’s affairs; that he may give up the fruitless attempt to promote the good of his neighbors, and the peace and happiness of the world, by dint of the cudgel; that he may remain quietly at home; gradually get his house into repair; cultivate his rich estate according to his fancy; husband his income, if he thinks proper; bring his unruly children into order if he can; renew the jovial scenes of ancient prosperity, and long enjoy, on his paternal lands, a green, an honourable, and a merry old age. (SB 1039)

To paraphrase, stick to the business of the family and mind your own affairs. In the end, domestic life, with its “propriety,” alone accounts for national integrity—accounts, that is, entirely for itself, and for itself alone. Critics have commonly domesticated Irving along these lines by drawing their assumptions, as Paul Giles observes, “from the values associated with national literary traditions constructed later in the nineteenth century.” 13 The bulk of Irving’s fiction, however, transpires along the margin of this event: The dialectical interplay of home and homeland, private and public spheres, operates within the larger context of romantic irony, where sentiment might double back upon itself, always already alienated from its own naïve desire, structured in paradox and contradic-

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tion, dispossessed, uncannily displaced. Indeed, these ironic dis-locations embedded within Irving’s oeuvre generally accommodate a fundamental narrative duplicity, a “double-tongued voice,” as Jane D. Eberwein dubs it, that serves to swindle any sense of national identity. 14 I recall you to those “Christmas” holidays. Uncannily, an older bachelor, Master Simon, oversees those crucial fireside scenes, “a tight brisk little man,” demonstrably “the wit of the family, dealing very much in sly jokes and innuendoes with the ladies”; likewise, “[i]t seemed to be his great delight during supper, to keep a young girl next to him in a continual agony of stifled laughter, in spite of her awe of the reproving looks of her mother, who sat opposite. Indeed, he was the idol of the younger part of the company” (SB 930). It’s he, in fact, who constitutes, “like a vagrant comet in its orbit,” the “connecting link between the old times and the new” (SB 931, 932). In short, [h]e was a complete family chronicle, being versed in the genealogy, history, and intermarriages of the whole house of Bracebridge, which made him a great favourite with the old folks; he was a beau of all the elder ladies and superannuated spinsters, among whom he was habitually considered rather a young fellow, and he was master of the revels among the children; so that there was not a more popular being in the sphere in which he moved, than Mr. Simon Bracebridge. (SB 931)

From the outset, the bachelor figures in the composition of this homely scene. Repressed, “foreign,” other, he is nonetheless embedded in the magnitude of family life and national identity.

Double-crossing the Atlantic to the “other” side, the bachelor likewise finds himself peculiarly at home, but rather as a disconcerting force that jeopardizes any sentiment affiliated with domestic ideology. He serves, in fact, as midwife to the new-born nation’s pristine, spanking-new, and newly minted literature. Here, (re)production in the name of home-bred family values and morality begets its economic complement. Uncannily, consumption trumps the heart of moral sentiment and underwrites the bachelor figure as a principal commercial force, a downright homely stimulus that serves to fuel the national economy. Crayon succinctly situates the heart of this event within the purlieu of the hearth itself in “Stratford-on-Avon”: “To a homeless man, who has no spot on this wide world which he can truly call his own, there is a momentary feeling of something like independence and territorial consequence, when, after a weary day’s travel, he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into slippers, and stretches himself before an inn fire. Let . . . kingdoms rise or fall, so long as he has the wherewithal to pay his bill, he is, for the time being, the very monarch of all he surveys”; in effect, the comforts of the inn here recompense the price of vagrancy, more than compensate for “the uncertainties

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of life,” and “he who has advanced some way on the pilgrimage of existence, knows the importance of husbanding even morsels and moments of enjoyment” (SB 983, italics mine). Such is the commerce of jouissance, the bachelor’s husbandry, with its domesticated “moments of enjoyment,” moments confiscated by allusion to an English bard—one other than the one who set up house in Stratford-on-Avon. To steal a moment from the pages of another bachelor, Diedrich Knickerbocker, “Sleepy Hollow” illustrates a variant construal of the homeless bachelor and his relation to the national economy. Recall the narrative account of Ichabod Crane, “a huge feeder” with “the dilating powers of an Anaconda,” an itinerant teacher whose schoolhouse resembles “an eelpot,” who, after-hours, “would convoy some of the smaller [boys] home, who happened to have . . . good housewives for mothers, noted for the comforts of the cupboard,” and, most remarkably, whose gaze, when entering “the world of charms” afforded by Van Tassel’s home, fell first not on the “buxom lasses” gathered there, but rather on “the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea table,” beguilements such as those “heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives” (SB 1062, 1061, 1062, 1076). Here appetite outfoxes sexuality, puts reproduction in parenthesis, on hold. The narrative itSelf aspires to mimic, replicate—to “reproduce”—this leitmotif, transfiguring the female sex itself as dinner fare: “Katrina Van Tassel . . . was a blooming lass . . . , plump as a partridge; ripe and melting . . . as one of her father’s peaches”; little wonder that “so tempting a morsel soon found favour” in Ichabod’s eyes (SB 1065–66). To further figure out this “peach,” this tempting “morsel,” she “was withal a little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress. . . . She wore . . . a provokingly short petticoat, to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round” (SB 1065–66). Witness, then, seduction at a distance in the lingo of philosophy—the peach, the foot, the ankle thus supplanting “apple” as a figure for bemusement, for bewitchment and duplicity (SB 1065). If “truth” (on what narration hangs its line) be told, “[o]ur man of letters”—with “vastly superior taste and accomplishments,” indeed “inferior in learning only to the parson,” and having “a soft and foolish heart toward the sex”—takes the bait: hook, line, and sinker (SB 1063, 1066). Headwork, in this tale, plays second fiddle to desire, to appetite, and Ichabod, whose “head was small,” would have “passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man, than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was—a woman” (SB 1061, 1065). To paraphrase, the bachelor narrative defines a “woman” (“Woman” generally, to tweak a term from Nietzsche demarcating “truth”) as “flirt,” a lure compared to which Ichabod’s

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guileless obsession with “tales of ghosts and goblins”—mere “phantoms of the mind”—pales (SB 1064–65). Accordingly, in courtship, Ichabod had more real difficulties than generally fell to the lot of a knight errant of yore, who seldom had anything but giants, enchanters, fiery dragons, and such like easily conquered adversaries, to contend with; and had to make his way merely . . . to the castle keep, where the lady of his heart was confined; all which he achieved as easily as a man would carve his way to the centre of a Christmas pie. . . . Ichabod, on the contrary, had to win his way to the heart of a country coquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices. (SB 1068)

Consistent with this innate dissonance ascribed to gender and societal relationships, the narrative personifies Van Tassel’s barnyard provender in light of its domesticated sexuality: regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farm yard, and guinea fowls fretting about it like ill tempered housewives, with their peevish discontented cry. Before the door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, . . . crowing in the pride and gladness of his heart . . . and then generously calling his ever hungry family of wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered. (SB 1066–67)

Even plant life disconcertingly engenders traces of desire and domesticity: “great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty pudding; . . . yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon . . . the fragrant buckwheat fields, breathing the odour of the bee hive,” while holding forth the promise of “dainty slap jacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel” (SB 1074–75). To turn the screw and tighten up the figure with a further twist, the narrative conflation of sexuality and food finds its ironic inversion, as Terence Martin has observed, in Ichabod’s con-fusion of food with sexuality, a conjugal rendition of domestic bliss—call this sublimation, if you like. 15 The pedagogue’s mouth watered, as he looked upon this sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind’s eye, he pictured to himself every roasting pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce; . . . not a turkey, but he beheld daintily trussed up, with . . . a necklace of savoury sausages. (SB 1067, italics mine)

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Although he doesn’t reproduce, the bachelor nonetheless consumes, a stimulus to amplified production and expansion of the marketplace. Configured by the ideology and binary logic of “separate spheres,” the figure of the bachelor finds itself domesticated from the start, “generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood,” “a kind of travelling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house” (SB 1063). The bachelor’s feminized position in both the literature and national economy marks the site where appetite displaces sexuality as such: Consumption, rather than (re)production, compensates the nation for his arrested development, the failure to assume his proper place in the reproductive chain. 16 Epicurean at heart, the bachelor’s appetite epitomizes sublimated sexual desire. 17 Emasculated thus, the bachelor poses a minimal threat to the nation; his consumerism more than makes up for his un(re)productivity in the marketplace. Over and against “masculine” (re)production, the bachelor’s consumerism equally facilitates the nation’s independence from England, from the Motherland: It authorizes the nation’s identity in light of a transgendered home rule, an uncannily transmogrified economy.

While the bachelor does his homework, let’s not underestimate the headwork this involves. Thus, Ichabod, a man whose eye is “ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance,” correspondingly satiates his head, consuming narrative with comparably indiscriminate indulgence, “feeding his mind with many sweet thoughts and ‘sugared suppositions’” (SB 1074–75). Indeed, “[h]is appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary. . . . No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow” (SB 1063–64). To this effect, one of his sources of pleasure was, to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and sputtering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman. . . . He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut. (SB 1064)

In general, headwork, as the product of bewildered speculation, comes to nothing in the end, above all Ichabod’s imaginary transmutation of Van Tassel’s land into a cache of capital as he “rolled his great green eyes over . . . the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn”; at the same time, yearning for “the damsel who was to inherit these domains,” his undomesticated imagination “expanded with the idea, how [these lands] might be readily turned into cash, and the money

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invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness” (NY 1067). Given his unruly Yankee spirit, as Gregg Camfield observes, incapable of living on the land, “he only imagines himself living off of it, literally, by turning it into cash and moving on.” 18 So too, the hollow gossip, which attends the van(qu)ished Ichabod, comes to naught: The mysterious event caused much speculation at the Church on the following Sunday. Knots of gazers and gossips were collected in the church yard, at the bridge, and at the spot where the hat and pumpkin had been found. The stories of Brouwer, of Bones, and a whole budget of others, were called to mind; and when they had diligently considered them all, . . . they shook their heads, and came to the conclusion, that Ichabod had been carried off by the gallopping Hessian. As he was a bachelor, and in nobody’s debt, nobody troubled his head any more about him. (SB 1086)

It’s not for nothing, therefore, that, upon the disappearance of the tale’s “knight errant,” the remainder of his cerebral affairs give up the ghost, as well, his “magic books” and “poetic scrawl” forthwith “consigned to the flames by Hans Van Ripper, who from that time forward determined to send his children no more to school, observing, that he never knew any good come of this same reading and writing” (SB 1068, 1086). So much for homework and the schoolhouse generally—an onerous encumbrance “on the purses of [its] rustic patrons, who are apt to consider the costs . . . a grievous burden and schoolmasters as mere drones”—whence issues nothing but the “murmur of [its] pupils’ voices conning over their lessons,” and might be gotten wind of on “a drowsy summer’s day, like the hum of a bee hive,” a tintinnabulum of gibberish (SB 1062, 1061). Elsewhere and otherwise, headwork looks like no work whatsoever; hence, Ichabod Crane “was thought, by all who understood nothing of the labour of headwork, to have a wonderfully easy life of it” (SB 1063).

Ahead of things, the narrative itSelf apes public sentiment—the head of its own tale sundered from, surrendered to, another tale. Accordingly, it’s with a certain sense of loss, of forfeiture, that the narration, in its headpiece, borrows and re-cites The Castle of Indolence, a “pleasing land of drowsy head,” at the head of a tale in which any head at all is hard to come by—and he who does (come by a head, that is) carries it before him on the pommel of his saddle, then throws it away (SB 1058). Let’s not lose headway now. Despite its headless pose engendered in the “land of drowsy head,” the narrative is not without erections of its own; they come from such uncanny upwellings that the lethargic reader disregards them while the credulous one scarfs them up, to mix the metaphors, and voids them, undigested, unassimilated, rendered null. Witness, for exam-

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ple, how the narrative beguilingly erects itSelf, exposing Ichabod’s tenacity: “He had . . . a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in his nature; he was in form and spirit like a supple jack—yielding, but tough; though he bent, he never broke; and though he bowed beneath the slightest pressure, yet, the moment it was away—jerk!—he was as erect, and carried his head as high as ever” (SB 1070). Given to such repartee, the narrative flirtatiously makes headway as coquette, delays its own advance, its progress put on hold. Note again the sexual role ascribed to food while time, immobilized by the récit’s foreplay, stands still: Fain would I pause to dwell upon the world of charms that burst upon the enraptured gaze of my hero, as he entered the state parlour of Van Tassel’s mansion. Not those of the bevy of buxom lasses . . . ; but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea table, in the sumptuous time of autumn. Such heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds. . . . There was the doughty dough nut, the tenderer oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies and peach pies and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy . . . with the motherly tea pot sending up its clouds of vapour from the midst. . . . I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. (SB 1076, italics mine)

Along these lines, narration takes its time, delays its climax, baits the reader with the same deportment it attributes to Katrina, and to women generally. Witness, elsewhere, how it dawdles, loafs around, in keeping with the pace of Ichabod’s decrepit steed en route to the Van Tassel feast: The sun gradually wheeled his broad disk down into the west. The wide bosom of the Tappaan Zee lay motionless and glassy, excepting that here and there a gentle undulation waved and prolonged the blue shadow of the distant mountain: a few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a purple apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid-heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth to the dark grey and purple of their rocky sides. A sloop was loitering in the distance, dropping slowly down with the tide, her sail hanging uselessly against the mast, and as the reflection of the sky gleamed along the still water, it seemed as if the vessel was suspended in the air. (SB 1075).

Amid the listlessness that permeates this scene, a lethargy that penetrates it from the inside out, that overpowers things—primarily that “loitering”

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associated with the flacid sail that limply hangs against the mast—time hangs heavy on narration’s rigid hands. At the same time, while the narrative delights in the postponement of its dénouement, it confesses to a certain witlessness about itSelf, coquettishly mistaking ignorance as innocence: The revel now gradually broke up. . . . Ichabod only lingered behind, according to the custom of country lovers, to have a tête-a-tête with the heiress. . . . What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know. Something . . . must have gone wrong, for he certainly sallied forth, after no great interval, with an air quite desolate and chopfallen—Oh these women! these women! Could that girl have been playing off any of her coquettish tricks?—Was her encouragement of the poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival?—Heaven only knows, not I!—Let it suffice to say, Ichabod stole forth with the air of one who had been sacking a hen roost, rather than a fair lady’s heart. (SB 1080)

And yet, ironically, despite this feigned ineptitude, this impotence, narration gilds the lily when it comes to the (un)consciousness of barnyard animals—witness Gunpowder, roused “uncourteously” from sleep, while “dreaming of mountains of corn and oats, and whole valleys of timothy and clover” (SB 1080). Elsewhere, narration, over and against deferring its own end, professes to intensify the rhythm of its intercourse, accelerate its pace, “eager to get on with my story”—not unlike the Headless Horseman himself, “belated, and in a hurry to get back to the church yard before day break—fretful lest its climax come belatedly as well” (SB 1076). Yet, in the end, despite (in spite of) everything, its rhythm suits itSelf, what takes its fancy, what predominantly gratifies its own desire. What does it want? It wants, of course, to get around—and, in “The End,” to be consumed. Here’s Geoffrey Crayon’s overall assessment of his own intent: his work being miscellaneous, and written for different humours, it could not be expected that any one would be pleased with the whole; but that if it should contain something to suit each reader, his end would be completely answered. Few guests sit down to a varied table with an equal appetite for every dish. One has an elegant horror of a roasted pig; another holds a curry or a devil in utter abomination; a third cannot tolerate the ancient flavour of venison and wild fowl; and a fourth, of truly masculine stomach, looks with sovereign contempt on those knick-knacks, here and there dished up for the ladies. Thus each article is condemned in its turn; and yet, amidst this variety of appetites, seldom does a dish go away from the table without being tasted and relished by some one or other of the guests. (SB 1090)

Let’s not beat around the bush: Stories constitute a “fabrication” destined for a comprehensive audience. Fiction is a product made for market, a

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commodity. 19 In this event, a bachelor pays his economic debt, and settles up his duty to the nation—at both ends: (re)production and consumption equally. As for that product (for the most part) in itself, and like the tease it would impersonate, narration’s drive, to trump a notion from Lacan designed to rectify relationships, is partial to the feminine, courting the reader, “or, as it is termed, ‘sparking,’ within”—within its devious, manipulative récit—with its “kinck-knacks” and ironic deviltry, its coquetry, the distance of its double-tongued deceit (SB 1070). Whence and whither the narration comes and goes, it runs its nuanced course with gendered force and sexual innuendo, two-faced from its opening line designed to propogate the amatory (under)tone in light of which the narrative unfolds. Its inaugural—its “maiden,” if you will—delineation of “Tarry Town” prefigures the heady rhetoric to come, the town itself companionably situated “[i]n the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappaan Zee” (SB 1058, italics mine).

Despite the town, despite its Hessian wraith, the tale itself is haunted by (the ghost of) history—a phantom of the mind, the equal of Katrina, a coquette. It teases us with facts, with authenticity, yet it amounts to nothing more than speculation in “The End.” As for the facts, [i]t is true, an old farmer, who had been down to New York on a visit several years after, and from whom this account of the ghostly adventure was received, brought home the intelligence that Ichabod Crane was still alive; that he had left the neighbourhood partly through fear of the goblin and Hans Van Ripper, and partly in mortification at having been suddenly dismissed by the heiress; that he had changed his quarters to a distant part of the country; had kept school and studied law at the same time; had been admitted to the bar, turned politician, electioneered, written for the newspapers, and finally had been made a Justice of the Ten Pound Court.” (SB 1086)

Inversely, for those old Dutch country wives, “who are the best judges of these matters, . . . Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means” (SB 1086–87). Indeed, as far as headwork, for the most part, is concerned, “[t]he mysterious event caused much speculation at the Church on the following Sunday”; here, “[t]he stories of Brouwer, of Bones, and a whole budget of others, were called to mind; and when they had diligently considered them all, and compared them with the symptoms of the present case, they shook their heads, and came to the conclusion, that Ichabod had been carried off by the galloping Hessian. As he was a

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bachelor, and in nobody’s debt, nobody troubled his head any more about him” (SB 1068). As for the moral of the story, let’s not lose our head; recall the reason given for the meaning of the denouement, the “ratiocination of the syllogism” that accounts for all the speculation afterward occasioned by “The End”—to wit: That there is no situation in life but has its advantages and pleasures, provided we will but take a joke as we find it: That, therefore, he that runs races with goblin troopers, is likely to have rough riding of it: Ergo, for a country schoolmaster to be refused the hand of a Dutch heiress, is a certain step to high preferment in the state. (SB 1088)

Don’t linger on the logic of the syllogism here; its “ratiocination” speculates on issues dealing with political economy. After all, the “Postscript” situates the narrative as having risen “at a corporation meeting of the ancient city of Manhattoes” (SB 1087, italics mine). Imagination does the rest. Not only does it haunt the tale’s (ir)rational economy arrested by desire—its interest in time, its own investment in the risk narration takes between beginning and “The End”— but, at the same time, it supplies the surplus necessary for the narrative jouissance, its capital. Speculation constitutes, in other words, the “economic” avatar that corresponds to reason’s ghost—what constitutes the differance, to borrow from the deconstructive glossary—between the house of fiction and authentic history, the facts. Kant drew this line in broader strokes between the First and Second of his three Critiques. Irving’s fiction underscores this line in red: imagination—that is, Transcendental Reason in its speculative attire—haunts equally the house of Reason and the house of State. 20 It’s not by accident that politics and headwork surreptitiously tie the knot amid the bedlam of this backdoor scene. Rather, from the start, narration always already finds itSelf preoccupied, arrested in this pasttime, in past time, in the past of national identity, a “textual” event, imaginary and at risk—the “nationalist imaginary,” as Michael Warner notes—in this case, one that banks its capital investment “in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since”: to be more economically accountable, in the temporal divide between an old Dutch settlement and Hessian troops, between, in other words, a “pre-” and “post-” revolutionary “America” (SB 1060). 21 Here, time does not stand still despite the narrative’s “occasional” desire to stem the tide of progress generally, its own, as well—despite, specifically, its own investment in the myth, the phantasy, the fiction that embodies John Bull’s timelessness. Recall the bottom line of Crayon’s reprimand of English politics, that John Bull’s debt stems from an elementary historical aversion to change: “[h]is economy is of a whimsical kind, its chief object

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being to devise how he may afford to be extravagant”; indeed, “these whims and habits have concurred wofully to drain the old gentleman’s purse”; meanwhile, “the old establishment should be kept up in all its state, whatever may be the cost” such that “the mere mention of retrenchment or reform is a signal for a brawl” (SB 1032, 1036, 1037). Such timelessness, ironically, accounts for England’s quintessential “timeliness” regarding its political economy, its institutions—not to mention its architectural “stateliness”—immersed in ominous decay.

Vis-à-vis the spanking-new “America,” the infant nation has no past. In order to secure a sense of national identity, (the history of) its parentage is on the line, a narrative that leads back to, and follows from, that “ancient city of Manhattoes.” The narrative account itself belongs to Diedrich Knickerbocker’s “most excellent and faithful HISTORY OF NEW YORK,” the nation’s lineage, its family romance, rehearsed and authorized therein in light of a desire “to trace the rise of sundry customs and institutions in this best of cities, and to compare them when in the germ of infancy, with what they are in the present old age of knowledge and improvement. But the chief merit upon which I value myself, and found my hopes for future regard, is that faithful veracity with which I have compiled this invaluable little work”—a work, above all, that ostensibly vouchsafes allegiance to the facts: “I am no land speculator, but a plain matter of fact historian.” 22 Accordingly, narration, in the interest of truth, alleges to address itself “to our judgment, rather than to our imagination” (NY 379). “Reason,” in effect, hence guarantees it won’t go overboard. Apropos the interest of the narrative economy itSelf, “I therefore renounce all lunatic, or solaric excursions, and confine myself to the limits of this terrene or earthly globe; somewhere on the surface of which I pledge my credit as a historian—(which heaven and my landlord know is all the credit I possess)” (NY 387). Credit this to Diedrich Knickerbocker, bachelor-historian of the toddler nation, whose household possessions—embodied entirely “in a pair of saddle bags,” abandoned and left behind—mirror the dispossessed narrative discovered within: “a large bundle of blotted paper” (NY 373). This blotted history of New York, in fact, discovered as a left-over, reveals a dearth of housecleaning—the narrative deranged, disordered, and delinquent, reminiscent of the room in which it was composed, as the landlord of the Independent Columbian Hotel, from which Knickerbocker absconds, remarks: “He would keep in his room for days together, and, if any of the children . . . made a noise about his door, he would bounce out . . . and say something about ‘deranging his ideas,’ which made my wife believe sometimes that he was not altogether compos. Indeed there was more than one reason to make her think so, for his room was always

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covered with scraps of paper and old mouldy books” (NY 373). Not altogether compos (mentis), indeed, this “[l]uckless Diedrich! born in a degenerate age . . . a stranger and a weary pilgrim in thy native land; blest with no weeping wife, nor family of helpless children—but doomed to wander neglected through those crowded streets, and elbowed by foreign upstarts from those fair abodes, where once thine ancestors held sovereign empire” (NY 454). Not altogether compos, likewise, is the composition of New York itself (much less “New York”), a “little work . . . on which a host of worthies shall hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until Knickerbocker’s New York shall be equally voluminous, with Gibbon’s Rome, or Hume and Smollet’s England,” a work that Knickerbocker lyrically figures as a ship—“my bark”—and that he self-assuredly “sets adrift . . . to float upon the waters” of his reading public, a “crazy vessel” upon which he begs the “Sharks of criticism” for mercy (NY 381). As for the reading public as a whole, “ye great little fish! ye tadpoles, ye sprats, ye minnows, ye chubbs, ye grubs, ye barnacles, and all you small fry of literature, be cautious how you insult my new launched vessel, or swim within my view; lest . . . I sweep you up in a scoop net, and roast half a hundred of you for my breakfast” (NY 381). So surfaces narration’s point of departure, looking much more like a shipwreck than a ship—and lands us, in its course of progress, in a muddle of Kant’s three Critiques, replete with an embarrassment of judgments, void of anything resembling reason in its practice, grounded in gargantuan imagination. The narrative account eventually exposes its own bedrock, and takes pains to qualify, or even contra-dict, itSelf. Despite its self-proclaimed commitment to veracity, the bottom line of history amounts to fiction, fabrication, in the end. Thus, Knickerbocker acknowledges that, having snared the reader “fairly in my clutches,” nothing “hinders me from indulging in a little recreation, and varying the dull task of narrative by stultifying my readers with a drove of sober reflections about this, that and the other thing—by pushing forward a few of my own darling opinions” (NY 511). Indeed, “your experienced writers . . . often resort to this expedient—illustrating their favorite doctrines by pleasing fictions on established facts—and so mingling historic truth, and subtle speculation together” (NY 511). Around this axis of alterity, as Paul Giles remarks, revolves an ideological sense of liminality, an “uneasy threshold where history is refracted into various forms of discursive incoherence, thereby creating divisions within supposedly stable identities,” sites of “ontological self-contradiction.” 23 So, too, the history of “Reason,” as a rule, exposes the suppressed duplicity of its advance, its “progress.” Witness, for example, how it clarifies—indeed, illuminates—the “art” of war: “[A]s man advanced in refinement, as his faculties expanded, . . . he grew rapidly more ingenious and experienced, in the art of murdering his fellow beings. He invented a

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thousand devices to defend and to assault” (NY 575). To this effect, the narrative surrenders “divers philosophical speculations on war,” specifically remarking those “powers of mind” that bespeak the “divine endowment of reason”—a power “which distinguishes us from the animals, our inferiors,” and that doubles back upon itself: Thus, “[i]n proportion as the art of war has increased in improvement, has the art of preserving peace advanced in equal ratio” (NY 575). In this regard, a treaty, “or to speak more correctly a negociation,” constitutes “a cunning endeavour to obtain by peaceful manœuvre . . . those advantages, which a nation would otherwise have wrested by force of arms”—hence, the importance of delays “in consequence of which the negociation goes on swimmingly. . . . Nothing is lost by these delays and obstacles but time, and in a negociation, . . . all time lost is in reality so much time gained—with what delightful paradoxes, does the modern arcana of political economy abound” (NY 576–77). To further ironize the “consequence” of this economy, while “a negociation is the most harmonizing of all national transactions, yet a treaty of peace is a great political evil and one of the most fruitful sources of war” (NY 577). In other words, treaties are made to be broken. The economy of this scenario delineates the borderline between domestic and political affairs, and borders, in itself, on issues dealing with propriety, with property, appropriation—in translation, call it “land.”

In lighting out for the territory, little did Henry Hudson’s speculation entertain the uncharted opportunity awaiting his enterprise, “being employed by the Dutch East India Company, to seek a north-west passage to China” (NY 427). Chalk it up to “the great and good ST. NICHOLAS, who immediately took the infant town of New Amsterdam under his peculiar patronage” (NY 454). Yet colonization, by definition, draws lines, boundary lines, hypothetical incisions in the earth engendered by a patriotic “spirit” (in this case, good St. Nick) that, in turn, invites transgression from without: “at this time our infant colony was in that enviable state, so much coveted by ambitious nations, that is to say, the government had a vast extent of territory” (NY 537). The short story begins amid this advent of prosperity and well-being, when, in the thick of things, a foreign body threatens to pollute New Amsterdam, provoking Peter Stuyvesant to assault and capture the Swedish Fort Casimer, thereby reducing “the whole country of New Sweden” to “a colony called South River” (NY 663). Enter now upon the scene another outsider—that “Yankee tribe” whose “incessant irruptions and spoliations” of the Dutch frontier provide, if nothing else, “a sufficient reason, according to the maxims of national dignity and honour, for throwing the whole universe into hostil-

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ity and confusion” (NY 554). Void of all necessity, these frontier violations merely postulate “sufficient” reason for the universal discord that ensues, and subsequently constitute a topographical vanishing point in light of which, narration reasons, “the honest dutchmen do gradually disappear, retiring slowly like the Indians before the whites” (NY 678). Indeed, as Wendell Berry argues, such transgression constitutes the law consistently operative in American history—that is, “the members of any established people or group or community sooner or later become ‘redskins,’ . . . the designated victims of an utterly ruthless, officially sanctioned and subsidized exploitation” of the land. 24 In passing reference to those Indians, notice how the narrative inversely reasons that the Dutch incorporated them, quite seamlessly, into New Amsterdam itself, endeavoring to ameliorate the situation of these “uncivilized tenants of the forest” by “benevolently giving them gin, rum and glass beads, in exchange for all the furs they brought” (NY 456)—an exchange conspicuously lacking speculation altogether. Inversely, let’s not overlook the sleight of hand provoking reason to mistake the unmistakable foreign bodies in “America.” But I’m ahead of things, and will have reason to return to this. Meanwhile, taking into this account the circum-stance of those subdued, “rebellious Swedes” in South River, a supplemental Swedish toxin by the name of Fendal, a “chieftain who ruled over the colony of Maryland,” threatens to contaminate New Amsterdam more lethally by claiming it entirely “as the rightful property of lord Baltimore” (NY 678). Over and against this peril jeopardizing all colonial propriety, the narrative advances arguments framed by domestic paradigms—arguments, that is, to mind one’s own business, to stay at home since “[t]he conquerer who wrests the property of his neighbour, who wrongs a nation and desolates a country, . . . ensures his own inevitable punishment. He . . . incorporates with his late sound domain, a loose part—a rotten disaffected member; which is an exhaustless source of internal treason and disunion, and external altercation and hostility” (NY 678, 679). And so it happens inauspiciously that, in the end, ironically, while “Fendal and his Myrmidons remained at home, carousing it soundly upon hoe cakes, bacon, and mint julep, and running horses, and fighting cocks,” Lord Baltimore lays his claim before the British Cabinet, at which point, it is said, “his majesty Charles II . . . settled the whole matter by a dash of the pen, by which he made a present of a large tract of North America, including the province of New Netherlands, to his brother the duke of York” (NY 681). Hence, while at home those “honest burghers” of New Amsterdam “are soberly smoking their pipes and thinking of nothing at all,” His Majesty, Charles II, “on the 12th of March 1664, ordered that a gallant armament should be forthwith prepared, to invade the city of New Amsterdam by land and water, and put his brother in complete possession of the premises” (NY 681). Upon such premises, “America” now promises to pay the bill.

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The budget is drawn up on the frontier. Here, speculation underwrites the promise of “America” as “promised land,” a frontier apologue of certified prosperity and laden with domestic bliss. Precisely here, on the frontier, along these very “lines,” the myth assumes the pre-text of reality, its promise proven by attempts to violate its exclusivity. Hence, “commanders on the frontiers were especially careful to evince their vigilance and soldier-like zeal, by striving who should send home the most frequent and voluminous budgets of complaint, as your faithful servant is continually running with complaints to the parlour, of all the petty squabbles and misdemeanours of the kitchen” (NY 553). Indeed, those colonial subjects, “credulous to believe these frontier fables,” betoken, as Knickerbocker argues, the patriotic raison d’être of the present-day American, “my fellow citizens,” eager “to swallow those amusing stories with which our papers are daily filled, about British aggressions at sea, French sequestrations on shore, and Spanish infringements in the promised land of Louisiana—all which proves what I have before asserted, that your enlightened people love to be miserable” (NY 553–54). So much for reason in its speculative disguise. For reasons “other” than those purely speculative, the logical account amounts to nothing but a “plain deduction” such that the entire province of New Netherlands forms but a single “link in a subtle chain of events, originating at the capture of Fort Casimer, which has produced the present convulsions of the globe” (NY 721). In its comprehensive magnitude, the syllogism ultimately spells out the global consequences of political economy: By the conquest of New Sweden Peter Stuyvesant aroused the claims of Lord Baltimore, who appealed to the cabinet of Great Britain, who subdued the whole province of New Netherlands—By this great achievement the whole extent of North America . . . was rendered one entire dependency upon the British crown—but mark the consequence—The hitherto scattered colonies being thus consolidated, and having no rival colonies to check or keep them in awe, waxed great and powerful, and finally becoming too strong for the mother country, were enabled to shake off its bonds, and by a glorious revolution became an independent empire—But the chain of effects stopped not here; the successful revolution in America produced the sanguinary revolution in France, which produced the puissant Buonaparte who produced the French Despotism, which has thrown the whole world in confusion!—Thus have these great powers been successively punished for their ill-starred conquests. . . . Let then the potentates of Europe, beware how they meddle with our beloved country. If the surprisal of a comparatively insignificant fort has overturned the economy of empires, what (reasoning from analogy) would be the effect of conquering a vast republic? . . . [T]he whole system of nature would be hurled into chaos. . . .

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The argument, full-circle, takes us back to the domestic Kern of all economy (oikos nomos)—home rule: “[t]he accumulating wealth and consequence of New Amsterdam and its dependencies, at length awakened the serious solicitude of the mother country; who finding it a thriving and opulent colony, . . . began to load it with tokens of regard” in the same way “that people are sure to oppress rich relations with their affection and loving kindness. . . . The usual marks of protection shewn by mother countries to wealthy colonies, were forthwith evinced—the first care always being to send rulers to the new settlement, with orders to squeeze as much revenue from it as it will yield” (NY 458–59, italics mine).

The logic’s circularity returns this economic reduction of world history to its ironic underside, the “other” side of all political economy—those “delightful paradoxes,” as the narrative insists, with which “the modern arcana of political economy abound” (NY 577). Indeed, Knickerbocker’s “economic” speculation of (world) history invites us to rehearse the history of economics in New Netherlands, specifically the narrative account of Wilhelmus Kieft, during whose reign the national economy collapsed. Wholeheartedly committed to the borderland and its defense, William the Testy “suffered the enemy to break its [New Netherland’s] head”; in other words, “he was so intent upon rendering it cheap, that he invariably rendered it ineffectual” (NY 535). Blame it on the ideological conundrum that obscures the (border) line, the differance, between savings and expenditures as they accrue in time. The history of economics obfuscates the very meaning of “economy,” a “grand political cabalistic word” according to the narrative, which Kieft learned at the Hague, as Mary Weatherspoon Bowden remarks, and to which narration claims ignorance of its origin, “a talismanic term . . . as terrible . . . as any in the arcana of necromancy,” and that had “so wonderfully arrested the attention of William the Testy” that he “immediately incorporated [it] into his great scheme of government, to the irretrievable injury and delusion of the honest province of Nieuw Nederlandts, and the eternal misleading, of all experimental rulers” (NY 535, 536). 25 Witness, consequently, in the economic wake of things, how fluently an abstract, systematic process morphs into the realm of human physiology: When pronounced in a national assembly it has an immediate effect in . . . beclouding the intellects, drawing the purse strings and buttoning the breeches pockets of all philosophic legislators. . . . It produces a contraction of the retina, . . . an induration of the tunica sclerotica and a convexity of the cornea; insomuch that . . . the unfortunate patient becomes myopes or in plain English, purblind; perceiving only the amount of immediate expense without being able to look further, and regard it in connexion with the ultimate object to be effected. (NY 536)

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In effect, political economy encourages transgression of the border line— not only territorial, but also, in its speculative drift, that boundary that historically delineates the irredeemable ontological divide between culture and nature; here reason, in the custody of Enlightenment philosophy, succumbs to narrative burlesque, all “philosophic” legislation now reduced to physical disintegration and disease, as Giles suggests: “A History of New York does not univocally privilege ‘nature’ over ‘system’; instead, it takes delight in foregrounding those processes by which system slides back into something more grossly corporeal or anti-systematic.” 26 So much for progress in the general scheme of things, the forward march of history mistaken, taken by internal discord and regress. This, too, accounts for the creation of the party system in political economy, disintegration and division from within: Behold “the worthy politicians of New Amsterdam,” taxed with “the sublime project of saving the nation,” exceedingly “perplexed by dissentions, and strange contrariety of opinions among themselves, so that they were often thrown into the most chaotic uproar and confusion, and all for the simple want of party classification”; to be sure, “it is equally necessary to have a distinct classification and nomenclature in politics, as in the physical sciences” so that “the several orders of patriots . . . may be properly distinguished” (NY 547). History universally exposes this partitionment: Observe, for instance, “Guelfs and Ghibbelins—Round heads and Cavaliers—Big endians and Little endians—Whig and Tory—Aristocrat and Democrat—Republican and Jacobin—Federalist and Anti-federalist” (NY 547). Without these parties, Knickerbocker argues, “hard working patriots” would never know their own minds, “or which way to think on a subject” (NY 547). Thus, in New Amsterdam, specifically, the “enlightened inhabitants” stalwartly align themselves with one of two parties, “Square head” or “Plater breech”—the former deficient in intellect, the latter destitute of courage or “good bottom”—whose names bespeak their origin “in recondite and scientific deductions of certain Dutch philosophers: “the craniology of Dr. Gall” and “the breechology of professor Higgenbottom” (NY 548, 549). Scatologically inscribed, the headwork characteristic of social enlightenment amounts to ordure in the end—or, should one still insist upon enlightenment, this ontological transmogrification illuminates “the surprizing and intimate connection between the seat of honour, and the seat of intellect—a doctrine supported by experiments of pedagogues in all ages, who have found that applications a parte poste, are marvellously efficacious in quickening the perceptions of their scholars, and that the most expeditious mode of instilling knowledge into their heads, is to hammer it into their bottoms” (NY 549). In the end, the force of such ironic transmutation stalls, indeed embalms, the course of history—at least its “progress,” as Knickerbocker’s enlightened contemporaries would define the “spirit” of the age, sans St.

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Nick. For what is Knickerbocker’s History of New York if not a narrative account that, in the interest of economy, recoups—or, better, saves—itSelf by spending time on past events that, in their latitude, define the present age as the embodiment of the Enlightenment in economic terms, reason’s detritus, the psychopatho-logical deduction of political economy as such: in other words, “democracy,” a mob mentality, the masquerade of progress doubled in its ownmost liminality, an inborn fetish or perversion, speculation’s specter, if you will. Here’s the punch line, wrested from the “sage assemblages” of “old” New Amsterdam, reduced to its corporeal frontier, the frontline and the “bottom” line conjoined: I have noticed, the philosophic reader will at once perceive the faint germs of those sapient convocations called popular meetings, prevalent at our day—Hither resorted all those idlers and “squires of low degree”. . . . Coblers abandoned their stalls and hastened hither to give lessons on political economy—blacksmiths left their handicraft . . . ; and even taylors . . . neglected their own measures, to attend to the measures of government—Nothing was wanting but half a dozen newspapers and patriotic editors, to have completed this public illumination and to have thrown the whole province into an uproar! I should not forget to mention, that these popular meetings were always held at a noted tavern; for houses of that description, have always been found the most congenial nurseries of politicks; abounding with those genial streams which give strength and sustenance to faction—We are told that the ancient Germans, had an admirable mode of treating any question of importance; they first deliberated upon it when drunk, and afterwards reconsidered it, when sober. The shrewder mobs of America, who dislike having two minds upon a subject, both determine and act upon it drunk; by which means a world of cold and tedious speculation is dispensed with—and as it is universally allowed that when a man is drunk he sees double, it follows most conclusively that he sees twice as well as his sober neighbours. (NY 546)

Nurtured in the most congenial domestic confines of the tavern house, political economy, quite absentmindedly, might bankrupt a society.

Return, now, to those days of yore before the “territory” of the promised land was parceled out, appropriated, by its first discoverers beset with “forests to cut down, underwood to grub up, marshes to drain, and savages to exterminate” (NY 404). Behold, once more, those Indians so seamlessly incorporated into New Amsterdam by means of “gin, rum and glass beads, in exchange for all the furs they brought” (NY 456). Mull over how the irony implicit in the nature of this evenhanded “commerce” equally inverts the nature of the “corporate” transaction tacitly inferred— the (ex)change that swindles native Indians as foreign bodies in America. 27

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To set the record straight, Knickerbocker takes a detour ’round the issue of paternity, providing, in effect, as Robert A. Ferguson argues, “the first American book to question the civic vision of the Founding Fathers.” 28 Despite the Founding Fathers’ claims, he cites a host of “other” claimants to the promised land, including the children of Noah, the Israelites, the devil, the Canaanites, the Norwegians, the Egyptians, the Scandinavians, the Gauls, the Celts, the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Moors, the Abyssinians—not to mention “England, Ireland, and the Orcadesmay” (NY 406–08). The proof, nonetheless, lies in the pudding—in light of which the narrative concludes that this part of the world has actually been peopled (Q. E. D.) to support which, we have living proofs in the numerous tribes of Indians that inhabit it. Secondly, That it has been peopled in five hundred different ways, as proved by a cloud of authors, who . . . seem to have been eye witnesses to the fact—Thirdly, That the people of this country had a variety of fathers, which as it may not be thought much to their credit by the common run of readers, the less we say on the subject the better. (NY 411)

Lest we conclude the nation is a bastard child—or worse, a freak of nature, inconceivable—the question of paternity gives way to questions of propriety, the right to property, to the appropriation of the land: in other words (in the translation of “nature” into “civilization”), to real estate (put “liberty of conscience” in parentheses). 29 Taking the liberty to take it out, the irredeemable gap between the Christian “democratic” rhetoric, staking its claim to the (promised) land, and its brutally oppressive practice of nation building reveals, as Matthew Brophy avers, “a hypocrisy more appalling than comic.” 30 All promises aside, to frame the question fairly in the interest of economic equipoise, and taking into the account the yardstick of a nation’s capital, specifically, “what right had the first discoverers of America to land, and take possession of a country, without asking the consent of its inhabitants, or yielding them an adequate compensation for their territory?” (NY 412). Until this question is resolved, “the worthy people of America can by no means enjoy the soil they inhabit, with clear right and title, and quiet, unsullied consciences” (NY 412). In the arithmetic of capital, the right amounts to four. To begin, a nation has the right of discovery, provided that the land is “totally uninhabited by man”—a point that would, at first, appear to pose some difficulty since the land “abounded with certain animals” who “walked erect on two feet” and “uttered certain unintelligible sounds, very much like language,” but, in the end, were found to be “detestable monsters,” void of all ambition for “honour, fame, reputation, riches, posts, and distinctions” (NY 413, 414). While these “peculiarities,” the narrative ironically remarks, “in the unenlightened states of Greece . . . would have entitled

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their possessors to immortal honour,” in the present instance, they were proven “to betoken a most abject and brutified nature, totally beneath the human character” (NY 414). In this regard (take good notes here), “it was all the same as if they were negroes—and negroes are black, ‘and black’ said the pious fathers . . . ‘is the colour of the Devil!’ Therefore . . . they had no right even to personal freedom” (NY 414). Secondly, propriety involves the right to cultivation of the soil, “an obligation imposed by nature on mankind,” and since “the savages knew nothing of agriculture,” being “careless stewards” of the land, “they had no right to the soil, and therefore “ought to be exterminated” (NY 415, 416). The third right functions appositely as corollary to the agricultural decree—that is, the right to civilization, to “the comforts of life”—most notably, “rum, gin and brandy,” and, by definition, introduction to “the Christian faith” in light of which “[t]he Indians improved daily, learning how “to cheat, to lie, to swear, to gamble, to quarrel, to cut each others throats” (NY 417–18). Here, then, “are three complete and undeniable sources of right,” any one of which “was more than ample to establish a property in . . . America” (NY 419). The fourth right “is worth all the others put together”—and has Blackstone “and all the learned expounders of the law” on its side—the right by extermination: “in other words, the RIGHT BY GUNPOWDER” (NY 419). Lest any scruples of conscience remain, “to settle the question of right forever, his holiness Pope Alexander VI, issued one of those mighty bulls, which bear down reason, argument and every thing before them; by which he generously granted the newly discovered quarter of the globe, to the Spaniards and Portuguese” (NY 419). Thus, in the interest of reason, and to balance the account, “were the European worthies who first discovered America, clearly entitled to the soil” (NY 420). Reasoning thus about the right to real estate, the narrative at last lets speculation overtrump itself. A lunar landing is in order at this point: A lunatic narration is at hand, deferring matters to none other than the illustrious man in the moon. Assume, the supposition goes, “that the inhabitants of the moon” were capable of navigating space as easily as Europeans navigate their “floating castles” through “the world of waters”—and, furthermore, that “a roving crew of these soaring philosophers, in the course of an ærial voyage of discovery among the stars, should chance to alight upon this outlandish planet” (NY 420, italics mine). Putting aside “an endless chain of . . . unprofitable speculations,” the narrative resumes its cost-effective course: “let us suppose [these ærial visitants] superior to us in knowledge, and consequently in power, as the Europeans were to the Indians, [and] . . . finding this planet to be nothing but a howling wilderness, inhabited by us, poor savages and wild beasts, shall take formal possession of it, in the name of his most gracious and philosophic excellency, the man in the moon”—to whom these ærial visi-

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tants now present their case (NY 421). Bear with me while I navigate the sweeping landscape here: “Most serene and mighty Potentate, . . . [w]e have . . . found these miserable savages sunk into a state of the utmost ignorance and depravity, every man shamelessly living with his own wife, and rearing his own children, instead of indulging in that community of wives, enjoined by the law of nature, as expounded by the philosophers of the moon. In a word they . . . are in fact, utter heretics, ignoramuses and barbarians. Taking compassion therefore on the sad condition of these sublunary wretches, we have endeavoured, while we remained on their planet, to introduce among them the light of reason—and the comforts of the moon.” At these words, the great man in the moon . . . possessing equal authority over things that do not belong to him, as did whilome his holiness the Pope, shall forthwith issue a formidable bull,—specifying, “That—whereas a certain crew of Lunatics have lately discovered and taken possession of that little dirty planet, called the earth—and that whereas it is inhabited by none but a race of two legged animals, that carry their heads on their shoulders instead of under their arms; cannot talk the lunatic language; have two eyes instead of one; are . . . of a horrible whiteness, instead of pea green—therefore . . . they are considered incapable of possessing any property in the planet they infest, and the right and title to it are confirmed to its original discoverers.” In consequence of this benevolent bull, our philosophic benefactors go to work with hearty zeal. They seize upon our fertile territories, scourge us from our rightful possessions, relieve us from our wives, and when we are unreasonable enough to complain, they will turn upon us and say—miserable barbarians! ungrateful wretches! . . . But finding that we . . . even go so far as daringly defend our property, . . . they shall . . . demolish our cities with moonstones . . . [and] graciously permit us to exist in the torrid deserts of Arabia, or the frozen regions of Lapland. . . . Thus have I clearly proved . . . the right of the early colonists to the possession of this country—and thus is this gigantic question, completely knocked in the head. (NY 422–24)

Thus, too, by means of logical analogy, ’tis proven, speculation to the contrary, that, in the practice of political econmy, it’s best (allow me, here, to modulate Voltaire) to stay at home.

In its corporeal configuration, Knickerbocker’s History equates the “occupation” of America to a (political) disease, a foreign body, a contaminant. Arrested, though, in its xenophobic prejudice, the History myopically condemns the English for transgressing boundary lines, for confiscating property to which they have no right, with no aspersions cast reciprocally upon the Dutch. 31 The etiology of the contagion reverts

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to an impropriety in reasoning itself, “many years previous to the time of which we are treating,” when “the sage cabinet of England had adopted a certain national creed, . . . a religious turnpike in which every loyal subject was directed to travel to Zion” (NY 493). Initially compelled to emigrate for reasons of religious persecution, it behooved these refugees to show that they, too, “had become proficients in the art”; accordingly, they “employed their leisure hours in banishing, scourging or hanging, divers heretical papists, quakers and anabaptists, for daring to abuse the liberty of conscience,” verifying that “every man should think as he pleased in matters of religion—provided he thought right; . . . [W]hoever thought wrong . . . was a . . . corrupt and infectious member of the body politic” (NY 495). Such gravity, however, failed to hinder the proliferation of this “Yankee” tribe, committed to the custom known as “bundling” and incited by a migratory spirit disinclined to settle down. Accordingly, this “wandering Arab of America,” surrounded by “a score of flaxen headed urchins,” routinely “builds himself a log hut” in the wilderness, clears out a cornfield and potato patch, and then expands the hut into a derelict “palace of pine boards” with one half-finished room where “the whole family burrow together” (NY 499). Once at home and settled “to rights,” reason suggests “that he would begin to . . . read newspapers, talk politics, neglect his own business, and attend to the affairs of the nation, like a useful and patriotic citizen, but now it is that his wayward disposition begins again to operate”; contrariwise, he soon grows tired of things, “sells his farm,” and “wanders away in search of new lands—again to fell trees—again to clear cornfields—again to build a shingle palace, and again to sell off, and wander” (NY 500). And so it came to pass, as Knickerbocker claims, that “[g]angs of these marauders” penetrated “into the New Netherland settlements and threw whole villages into consternation” since “our ancestors were noted, as being men . . . who neither knew nor cared aught about any body’s concerns but their own” (NY 500–01). Thus, with unconscious irony, the narrative hypothesizes what unsettled the integrity of these mis-takenly indigenous Dutch settlements. Beyond political economy and border rights, those “hordes” of Yankee wanderers, those “singular barbarians,” took the “unwarrantable liberty” of “settling themselves down, without leave or license, to improve the land”—the liberty, in other words, of “squatting,” a term “odious in the ears of all great landholders, and which is given to those enterprizing worthies, who seize upon land first, and take their chance to make good their title to it afterwards” (NY 498, 501). Lest this domestic squabble over homestead rights reduce itself to legal terminology, to speculation drawing up the territory, demarcating boundary lines, distinguishing the foreign body from the host, the narrative itSelf accentuates internally the gross, corporeal dimensions of the “land” as such, its territorial apportionment in the divide, which “natu-

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rally” takes place, between a culture and its agriculture. Recall that “grand council of the east,” in which a meddlesome Yankee “endeavour[ed] to establish a character for patriotism” by “preaching up a crusade against Peter Stuyvesant,” and made a speech . . . in which he represented the dutch as a race of impious heretics, who neither believed in witchcraft, nor the sovereign virtues of horse shoes—who, left their country for the lucre of gain, not like themselves for the enjoyment of liberty of conscience—who, in short, were a race of mere cannibals and anthropophagi, inasmuch as they never eat cod-fish of saturdays, devoured swine’s flesh without molasses, and held pumpkins in utter contempt. . . . The speech had the desired effect, for the council . . . declared that it was just and politic to declare instant war against these unchristian anti-pumpkinites. (NY 584–85)

Here pumpkins (over and against the Dutch regard for cabbage) serve as vestiges of ideology, incorporating all political economy within a single difference of “taste.” Put “reason” on the back burner (and resurrect Kant’s Third Critique). National identity boils down to nothing but this single gesture and its pathologically overdetermined worth, its “interest.” The difference is further complicated and con-fused when we evoke the fundamental spirit of Dutch sovereignty, the phantom “limb” of Antony Van Corlear, whose “trumpet of defiance” corresponds to epic sexual exploits perpetrated on the Yankee lasses of Connecticut when Antony, stopping to “dance at country frolicks” and to “bundle with the beauteous lasses of those parts—whom he rejoiced exceedingly with his soul stirring instrument,” did likewise stop “occasionally to eat pumpkin pies” (NY 582). Speculation to the contrary, in practice, nothing matters but the gross anatomy of subject-citizens, that borderline that differentiates the territory between individuals and their natural “rights.” The economic bottom line amounts to this: Both cabbages and pumpkins occupy the same space in the end. Witness, therefore, the redundancy at play in Peter Stuyvesant’s rendition of the deathbed scene—the passing of a sovereign who “possessed a sovereign contempt for the sovereign people, and an iron aspect, which was enough of itself to make the very bowels of his adversaries quake with terror and dismay” (NY 565). Having ascertained the news of “a great victory obtained by the combined English and French fleets, over the brave De Ruyter, . . . he took to his bed, and . . . was brought to death’s door, by a violent cholera morbus,” all the while displaying “the unconquerable spirit of Peter the Headstrong; holding out, to the last gasp, with most inflexible obstinacy, against a whole army of old women, who were bent upon driving the enemy out of his bowels, after a true Dutch

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mode of defence, by inundating the seat of war, with catnip and penny royal” (NY 726).

CODA: Upon the death and celebration of the funeral obsequies of Peter Stuyvesant, the town was likewise “emptied of its inhabitants” (NY 726), who crowded the procession to his grave in throngs, attesting to the patriotic fervor his sovereignty inspired, a zeal short-lived if measured by the sands of time. A foreign body would, in no time, ravage the terrain to which the Dutch claimed singular entitlement—a body, in its own time, that would morph, transmute into a foreign body that, in turn, would revolutionize its host. As for the timely differance between the foreign body and the host, discounting any speculative returns, each is to the other as the other is to it—by means of which each “other” understands itself, becomes, by definition, (other than) its self. In the meantime, let’s dissect “America” itself, unearth the cloak-anddagger toxin, the pollutant, the obsequious foreign body that lies dormant and subservient within the promised land since the occasion of its miscellaneous “discovery.” Recall the funeral cavalcade of Peter Stuyvesant, “closed by a number of grey headed negroes, who had wintered and summered in the household of their departed master, for the greater part of a century” (NY 727). If Knickerbocker’s narrative affirms the Dutch incorporation of the Indian to be benign, a sleight of hand betrays narration’s ownmost understanding of itSelf. Here, all political economy amounts to nothing but a hoax, the narrative as such the butt end of a joke that misfires, backfires on itSelf: Once a year, on the first day of April, [Peter Stuyvesant] used to array himself in full regimentals, being the anniversary of his triumphal entry into New Amsterdam, after the conquest of New Sweden. This was always a kind of saturnalia among the domestics, when they considered themselves at liberty in some measure, to say and do what they pleased; for on this day their master was always observed to unbend, and become exceeding pleasant and jocose, sending the old greyheaded negroes on April fools errands for pigeons milk; not one of whom but allowed himself to be taken in, and humoured his old master’s jokes; as became a faithful and well disciplined dependant. Thus did he reign, happily and peacefully on his own land—injuring no man—envying no man—molested by no outward strifes; perplexed by no internal commotions—and the mighty monarchs of the earth, who were vainly seeking to maintain peace, and promote the welfare of mankind, by war and desolation, would have done well to have made a voyage to the little island of Manna-hata, and learned a lesson in government, from the domestic economy of Peter Stuyvesant. (NY 725)

So much for the lesson in political economy educed from Dutch domestic life. Uncannily, narration’s economic punch line will ironically account

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for the insolvency of future “family life” (quite literally) in the united colonies, as well as for the future of “America”—and its “United” (House of) “State(s).” Elsewhere and otherwise, a more familiar specter haunts the scene. I’ll leave you where its presence first appeared. In terminating this phantastic History of New York, the narrative itSelf is prompted to rehearse the lines that, in the interest of brevity, shortchange both its complexion and futurity: “Willingly would I, like the impetuous Peter, draw my trusty weapon and defend it through another volume; but truth . . . forbids the rash attempt, and what is more imperious still, a phantom, hideous, huge and black, forever haunts my mind, the direful spectrum of my landlord’s bill” (NY 720–21, italics mine). Credit everything to paper in the end, the world of paper credit underwritten by the spectrum of Ben Franklin and endorsed by the historian, who builds on paper, as Bryan Jay Wolf remarks, a world of speculation “entirely textual in its values.” 32 Yet Knickerbocker’s own delinquent bill but foreshadows the woeful shadow of the spectacle to come, the vast, appalling spectrum cast upon the homeland once the newly minted nation’s Bill (of Rights) falls due. NOTES 1. Letters I / Washington Irving, 1802–1823, eds. Ralph M. Aderman, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jenifer S. Banks (Boston: Twayne, 1978–82), 508. 2. Van Wyck Brooks, The World of Washington Irving (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1944), 162: “he collected wonderful stories. . . . [H]e got into the confidence of every old woman who had her own budget of tales . . . , and he always had in the back of his mind the nieces and nephews in Birmingham and the little sons and daughters of his friends.” 3. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., in Washington Irving: History, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1983), 746, hereafter parenthetically cited in the text as SB. 4. North American Review, September, 1819: 348. 5. Letters I, 614. 6. Bryce Traister, “The Wandering Bachelor: Irving, Masculinity, and Authorship,” American Literature 74.1 (2002): 112. 7. Vincent J. Bertolini, “Fireside Chastity: The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850s,” American Literature 68.4 (1996): 707. 8. Bertolini, 19. 9. See Bertolini, 710–12. 10. Bertolini, 714. 11. Cf. Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4. 12. William L. Hedges, Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802–1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 144. 13. Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 142. 14. Jane D. Eberwein, “Transatlantic Contrasts in Irving’s Sketch Book,” College Literature 15 (1988): 157.

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15. Terence Martin, “Rip, Ichabod, and the American Imagination,” American Literature 31 (1959): 143–44. 16. Cf. Bertolini, 709: Although, in one sense, the figure of the bachelor falls on the side of the feminine, in another sense, the bachelor configures liminality as such, a figure “on the threshold between domestication and transgression” representing “a transitional state within proper masculine development.” 17. Traister, 118. 18. Gregg Camfield, Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 38. Cf. Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 117: Ichabod “would neither husband the resources nor conserve the riches of Sleepy Hollow but exploit them by turning the self-sustaining farm of Van Tassel into a capitalistic enterprise. . . . Here Ichabod resembles the farmers’ greatest enemy—and a recognizable villain in the early Republic—the land speculator.” Cf. also Matthew J. Pethers, “Transatlantic Migration and the Politics of the Picturesque in Washington Irving’s Sketch Book,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 9.2 (2005): 152: Ichabod “is congenitally incapable of understanding the non-material value of the natural world.” Cf. finally, Michael Schnell, “The Tasteful Traveller: Irving’s The Sketch Book and the Gustatory Self,” Mosaic 35 (2002): 111–27, for a reading of Ichabod’s insatiable appetite as parody of novel forms of consumption materializing in Irving’s own time. 19. The market, to be sure, is saturated, as Crayon laments in “The Mutability of Literature”: “the inventions of paper and the press . . . have made every one a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print. . . . The consequences are alarming. The stream of literature has swoln into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea” (SB 861). 20. Cf. Hedges, 107: “What Irving needed was a theory of imagination or Transcendental Reason. What he had was a flair for style and a sense of the picturesque.” 21. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 149. See also, Walter Sondey, “From Nation of Virtue to Virtual Nation: Washington Irving and American Nationalism,” in Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism, eds. Jean Pickering and Suzanne Kehde (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 53: “insofar as this nationalist imaginary is of a literary nature, . . . Irving taught his readers to experience national identity as a matter of reading a book.” 22. Washington Irving, A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (New York: Library of America, 1983), 376, 379, 387, hereafter parenthetically cited in the text as NY. 23. Paul Giles, “From Transgression to Liminality: The Thresholds of Washington Irving,” in A Place That Is Not a Place: Essays in Liminality and Text, ed. Isabel Soto (Madrid: Gateway Press, 2000), 33, 39. 24. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986), 4: “The colonists who drove off the Indians came to be intolerably exploited by their imperial governments. And that alien imperialism was thrown off only to be succeeded by a domestic version of the same thing; the class of independent small farmers who fought the war of independence has been exploited by, and recruited into, the industrial society until by now it is almost extinct.” 25. Mary Weatherspoon Bowden, Washington Irving (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 40: “This satire on ‘economy’ is aimed at both the national and local governments, for in 1809, [DeWitt Clinton, mayor of New York] and the Common Council were debating the most economical way to fortify New York Harbor.” 26. Giles, “From Transgression to Liminality,” 38. 27. Ironically, as Geoffrey Crayon surreptitiously maintains, the (ab)original American inherently embodies the American ideal: “There is something in the character and habits of the North American savage, taken in connexion with the scenery over

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which he is accustomed to range, . . . that is, to my mind, wonderfully striking and sublime” (SB 1002). Cf. both “Traits of Indian Character” and “Philip of Pokanoket” (SB 1002–28). 28. Robert A. Ferguson, “‘Hunting Down a Nation’: Irving’s A History of New York,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36.1 (1981), 38. 29. The Dutch, of course, are equally complicit in such speculation: Witness Wolfert Webber’s “transubstantiation” of his cabbage field transformed to streets and building lots: “when his paternal lands were distributed into building lots, and rented out to safe tenants, instead of producing a paltry crop of cabbages, they returned him an abundant crop of rents”; subsequently, waxing “old and rich and corpulent,” to “commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for his crest a full blown cabbage painted on the pannels, with the pithy motto . . . ALL HEAD; meaning thereby that he had risen by sheer head work”—in this case, speculation by default (Washington Irving, “The Money Diggers,” Tales of a Traveller [New York: Library of America, 1991], 716–17). 30. Matthew Brophy, “Burlesquing America’s Errand: Savage Satire in Irving’s History of New York and Melville’s The Confidence Man,” in American Exceptionalism: From Winthrop to Winfrey, eds. Sylvia Söderlind and James Taylor Carson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 84. 31. For a supplemental take on Dutch and British animosity, and the eventual influence of New Amsterdam on the American psyche, largely overlooked in the classic telling of American beginnings because of enmity between the English victors and the conquered Dutch, see Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America ( New York: Vintage, 2004). 32. Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Revision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 118. Hearken back to Geoffrey Crayon’s take on speculation during the days of Governor Belcher in “The Devil and Tom Walker,” when “money was particularly scarce. It was a time of paper credit. The country had been deluged with government bills; . . . there had been a rage for speculating; . . . for building cities in the wilderness. . . . In a word, the great speculating fever . . . had raged to an alarming degree, . . . and the whole country resounded with the consequent cry of ‘hard times’” (Tales of a Traveller, 663).

Second Movement Frederick Douglass: Domestic Hardships and Capital Gains

“Liberty, n. One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Astride the psychoanalytic logic of castration, Douglass embarks upon the recitation of his life with reference to mislaid origins. Hearsay and gossip dominate this scene, the subject subjected to indeterminate paternity: “My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father.” 1 The staging of this genealogical lack concomitantly mimics a void that contaminates the heart of the narration. Lacking familial “authority,” the subject is always already estranged from, a stranger to, its self. This scene reflects a requisite duplicity at the “domestic” institution’s nucleus, a nucleus whose back story con-fuses and conflates the institution and the family: The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father. (N 16–17)

A certain narrative duplicity emerges here, as well. For “it is of but little consequence to my purpose” read, instead, “this makes all the difference in the world.” The subject’s very “world” is at stake, positioned from birth between two dissonant authorities, “the double relation of master and father.” Narration will subsequently spend itSelf unknotting this double bind, the father’s mastery authorized by a side step—that is, the “step”father who now authenticates any and all (trans)actions, all translations proper to the institution of slavery, its inherent economy, its homework. In effect, this “step” must be undone, taken back—the father educed authentically: Language will finance the repossession of this 75

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(w)hole. Transfigured in the end, narration owns up to itSelf, turns from a brute into “its own,” into a man (who owns itself, its self its ownmost property). In the meantime, narration hinges on maternity, one diachronic step (re)moved to grandmother: “My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. . . . She died when I was about seven years old” (N 15–16). The second version of the Life elaborates this void, during which time “Grandmammy was . . . all the world to me.” 2 Otherwise, the Narrative claims but an obscure handful of maternal memories: I never saw my mother . . . more than four or five times in my life. . . . She made her journeys to see me in the night, . . . after the performance of her day’s work. . . . I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. . . . I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew any thing about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger. (N 16)

Even should she live, the mother and her child abide as strangers, nonetheless, since, characteristically, the practice of separating children from their mothers “is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system. . . . It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution” (BF 142). So much for the “domestic institution” as such: At heart, it countermands itself. Bereft of home, discord and division rule, regulate whatever is (mis)taken as family life, as Douglass discovers upon removal to Edward Lloyd’s plantation: “Grandmother pointed out my brother PERRY, my sister SARAH, and my sister ELIZA, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and . . . I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. . . . Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers”—had, in fact, “robbed these terms of their true meaning” (BF 149). Strangers to each other, foreigners, siblings know nothing of domestic rivalry, robbed, from birth, of all familial identity: “brother” and “sister” thus signify an empty set—a contra-diction, in reality. The “domestic institution” further proliferates dissension within its own domain insofar as “the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers,” a cunning arrangement whereby the slaveholder “sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father,” yet an arrangement not without its own domestic duplicity, for

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such children “invariably suffer greater hardships. . . . They are . . . a constant offence to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; . . . she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black slaves” (N 16–17). Indeed, the deed commonly precipitates its own undoing: The slave master frequently finds himself “compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human fleshmongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself” (N 17). The logic of the Master Household must submit to this internal inconsistency so long as the “domestic institution” keeps brothers and sisters at odds—strangers, to be sure—the family in ruins. The Narrative, at heart, betrays an archetypal fixation on family and kinship effusively embedded in domestic imagery, a state of mind nurtured by the institution of slavery itself. Accordingly, slaves often (mis)take the “master” for “father,” assuming that “their own masters are better than the masters of other slaves” and that “the greatness of their masters” is “transferable to themselves” (N 28); they similarly “manage to weave something of the Great House Farm” into all their songs (N 23). The “domestic institution” itself installs an apparatus that ironically educes a sense of longing for a home and family of which the slave is simultaneously deprived: Slave mothers dole out their children’s “monthly allowance of food,” “course corn meal boiled . . . called mush”; the ties “that ordinarily bind children to their homes” are “all suspended” so that “parting from it, I could not feel that I was leaving any thing which I could have enjoyed by staying” (N 21, 33–34). Indeed, the very homeland itself is stolen from the slave, the slave abducted from the homeland: “I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes” (N 42). Even after his escape to freedom and the free state of New York, Douglass is haunted, held captive, by a homeless state of mind, a stranger in a strange land: “loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends,” “in the midst of houses, yet having no home,” utterly subjected to a “homeless, houseless, and helpless condition” (N 89–91). The institution of the “home” and restitution of its fractured sibling relationship—including its universal configuration, “my brethren in bonds” (N 96)—requires a spatial matrix that recuperates the family from birth. Incontrovertibly, the mother will return: Repression decrees it so. The father, on the other hand, interred amid a discourse “littered with failed paternal figures,” as Andrew Levy remarks, seems mysteriously

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lost. 3 Douglass tables the enigma with a shrug: “I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate. Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families” (BF 151).

Let’s take a detour and go backward into the future. My Bondage and My Freedom re-collects the virtual absence of the mother with a trump card deftly played; it re-members, in detail, an image that aspires to repossess the mother as a (w)hole: “Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall, and finely proportioned; of deep black, glossy complexion. . . . There is in ‘Prichard’s Natural History of Man,’ the head of a figure . . . the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones” (BF 151–52). Witness the condensation that accrues to this uncanny moment: Headstrong to recover a derelict maternity, narration puts the mother “on a pedestal,” absent-“mindedly” (mis)takes her for a man (for an Egyptian no less, for Ramses the Great— for royalty, to boot). At this juncture, having recouped a head (dis)severed from the body (of the text), narration annotates the portrait of the mother cited in a “Natural History” text. Here’s the head-liner, the caption, if you will, the re-citation of this textual mise-en-abîme: I learned, after my mother’s death, that she could read, and that she was the only one of all the slaves and colored people in Tuckahoe who enjoyed that advantage. How she acquired this knowledge, I know not, for Tuckahoe is the last place in the world where she would be apt to find facilities for learning. I can, therefore, fondly and proudly ascribe to her an earnest love of knowledge. . . . [T]he achievement of my mother, considering the place, was very extraordinary; and, in view of that fact, I am quite willing, and even happy, to attribute any love of letters I possess, and for which I have got—despite of prejudices—only too much credit, not to my admitted Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother. (BF 155–56)

This speaking picture of “the mind,” the mother as narration’s literate and “literary” origin, turns culture’s ethno-graphic capital against itself; it turns the tables, turns the page, returns the sable mother, in an ambidexterous sleight of hand, to European culture’s white-washed book, specifically, American ethnology, its rancor, its divisiveness, its “trade” in race, exemplified by Samuel G. Morton’s Crania Americana (1839) and subsequent elaborations. Reconfigured as a cultural icon, a symbolic genealogy, bisecting, in its Egyptian mise-en-scène, the very cradle of civilization itself, the “mother”—now cross-dressed, cross-gendered in the mix— thus generates a trans-subjective matrix, a cleft in the imaginary that, at

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once, transfigures both subject and culture at their point of origin, or, to further trope the figure here, the “womb”—a single womb, no less, that contra-dicts the claim of polygenesis. By re-collecting forward the “uncultivated” mother with a “cultured” mother tongue, narration no longer needs, indeed transcends, the logic of castration—its missing member, its absent paternity—in light of which it has been thus far mystified. It’s not by chance the body is conspicuously lost in the erection of this scene as death pays tribute to its cryptic whereabouts. A period of mourning duly overshadows the text: “I cannot say that I was very deeply attached to my mother. . . . We were separated, according to the common custom, when I was but an infant. . . . I never think of this terrible interference of slavery with my infantile affections, and its diverting them from their natural course, without feelings to which I can give no adequate expression” (BF 152). Despite the lack of deep attachment, nonetheless, a single memory now “screens,” in psychoanalytic patois, the scene, a most uncanny, sentimental moment when, suffering from hunger, his mother enigmatically appears with a substantial ginger cake, nostalgically embellished “in the shape of a heart,” then disappears as “I dropped off to sleep” and waked “to find my mother gone” (BF 155). 4 Thus, in the differential space between the first and second versions of the Life, in what Michael A. Chaney, in a dexterous article, calls “the interplay of maternal differences,” Douglass “fashions for himself a rhetorical self-definition that destroys the logic of ethnography through the sentimental revisioning of his mother.” 5 From the side, strangely enough, the portrait, doing double duty, holds its tongue: “the side view of her face is imaged on my memory, . . . but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of her’s treasured up” (BF 155). 6 It’s left for Douglass to unearth the buried treasure here, the cache of capital. It’s not by chance that he becomes an orator, the very incarnation of the text on which his literary expertise, ironically, is nursed: “while attending an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket . . . I felt strongly moved to speak. . . . I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren” (N 96). 7 As for the Narrative, author-ity is left to figure out itSelf.

The enigma of the missing body “turns” around the figure of the brute, Shelley’s monster repossessed. 8 The “sense” of slavery’s brutality finetunes the light in which the slave is reasoned ignorant and rendered equal to the (“dumb”) animals. To this effect, the narrative exposes a subject ruthlessly displaced by a compendium of barnyard imagery. I needn’t rehearse the critical attention paid to this. 9 At Colonel Lloyd’s

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plantation, for instance, the subject functions as a dog—a bird dog, to be precise: “The most of my leisure time I spent in helping Master Daniel Lloyd in finding his birds, after he had shot them” (N 32–33). Upon teaching himself to read and write, Douglass envies his fellow slaves “for their stupidity,” preferring “the condition of the meanest reptile to my own” (N 42). At the division of property attending Captain Anthony’s death, Douglass remarks that “all ranked together at the valuation”: Men and women “were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being” (N 46). Routinely, the slave most closely resembles a pig: “Our food . . . was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied” (N 33). Even the horses fare better than the homeless slave, housed in a comfortable stable with its attendant carriage house: “in nothing was Colonel Lloyd more particular than in the management of his horses. The slightest inattention to these was unpardonable” (N 26). At times, the Narrative itSelf feigns kinship with the figures it critiques, the metaphor a mirror of identity. For instance, the augmented version of the oxen story in My Bondage and My Freedom embodies quintessential points of similarity: “They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I. Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken—such is life” (BF 263). Yet, in the end, the Narrative escapes the metaphor in terms of which it is enslaved; it “masters” it by force, the force of rhetoric—of language, that which fundamentally separates the human from the beast. Narration overpowers Covey with its own brutality. Whereas Covey is, at sundry times, a wild, predatory animal (a “wolf,” a “snake,” a “tiger”), as Peter A. Dorsey observes, Douglass identifies with “the domesticated animals of agrarian society”—that is, “slow to anger yet as unstoppable as an ox once set in motion, as wise and stubborn as an old sheep, and as supple, cagy, and regenerative as a cat.” 10 At bottom, reason, freedom’s bottom line, now draws the line between the master and the slave: “the brutal chastisements of which I was the victim” reciprocally engender (self)-reflection, the “ever-gnawing and soul-devouring thought—‘I am a slave . . . a slave with no rational ground to hope for freedom’” (BF 269). For “slave,” exchange its denotation as capital: read “brute.” In any case, brutality, in every case, is not without its inverse irony, the “master” subject, with a bow to Hegel, to becoming its antithesis, as Mrs. Auld becomes a slave not only to her husband, but to the idea of slavery itself, an institution just “as injurious to her as . . . to me,” divesting her of all “heavenly qualities”: Under its influence, “the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one

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of tiger-like fierceness” (N 40). Indeed, as Houston A. Baker Jr. suggests, “practically every character we encounter in the Narrative is rendered less human by the effects of slavery.” 11 Narration’s panorama of brutality suffers its own erotic con-“figuration”—brutality and violence habitually tinged with sexuality—that overshadows the discourse and gives to it an aura of Sade, what David Van Leer calls “a subtle form of pornography.” 12 Con-textualized, the mother’s missing body, genealogically (re)moved, turns up, supplanted by a member of the family primordially affiliated with the rhetoric of brutality that permeates the text and everywhere supplants the image of the mother’s “cultured” head. Witness the “primal,” if you will, the very “closet,” scene, “the blood-stained gate,” narration’s “entrance to the hell of slavery”: I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I shall never forget it whilst I remember any thing. Aunt Hester went out one night . . . with a young man [Ned Roberts] . . . called Lloyd’s Ned. . . . Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed [Colonel Lloyd’s] orders in going out, but had been found in company with Lloyd’s Ned; which circumstance, I found, from what he said while whipping her, was the chief offence. . . . Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist. . . . He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d-----d b-----h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong rope. . . . He made her get upon [a] stool, and tied her hands to [a] hook. . . . Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. . . . [A]nd after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heartrending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-striken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. (N 18–19)

At this remove, the Narrative transmutes the mother’s cultured head to Hester’s unvoiced back, defaced by the domestic institution and diminished, silenced, in the self-same act, to mute graffiti, to pornography— “an exercise in sadomasochistic eroticism,” as William S. McFeely phrases it, that fails to stimulate the “readers’ brains,” but, rather, goes directly to “their groins.” 13 Subjected to these head-lines, Hester’s back, disfigured, figures as the “parchment,” as Deborah E. McDowell translates the scene, “on which Douglass narrates his linear progression from bondage to freedom.” 14 The fight with Covey, what Maurice O. Wallace calls “a psychosexual reaction to the whipping/rape of Hester indelibly inscribed in Douglass’s memory,” will serve to equalize the psychic expenditure generated by this closet scene in the general economy of the Narrative. 15

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A new day dawns in Baltimore—the missing body resurrected—with “Miss” Sophia Auld in whom (the) mother cannily returns in present-day (dis)guise. Mastering the alphabet restores the missing mother to the Narrative, the seat of culture, cultivation’s cradle, the very font (to further mix the metaphors) of learning how to read and write (the mother tongue): “My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at the door,—a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. . . . Her face was made of heavenly smiles” (N 36–37). 16 This angelic creature, embodying “a mother’s tenderness” and “the most kindly emotions” (N 82, 35), in later versions of the Life, redeems the subject from being treated “as a pig on the plantation” to being treated “as a child now. . . . I therefore soon learned to regard her as something more akin to a mother” (BF 215). Sophia’s reading from the Bible aloud soon “awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn” so that soon, “by her kind assistance, I had mastered the alphabet (LT 526). Mastery here authorizes “the master” itSelf: Language and power are indivisibly one: The mystery is (dis)solved—a “mystery” whose connotations mysteriously conflate the signifier (“this mystery of reading”) and the loss of the father (“shrouded in a mystery”) as inexplicably one, a solitary (w)hole. The wholesome mother’s image, in the mean time, nurtures Douglass’s contention that the “intellect is uniformly derived from the maternal side.” 17 Narration’s trans-subjective template, conjoining mother and child, symbolically regenerates the sibling space constitutive of the family as a whole, the domestic economy (oikos nomos) that augurs the incorporation of all “my brethren in bonds” as but “a part of the human family” (N 96, 27). 18 Beyond the family, a cultivated mother tongue, that is, the written word, reciprocally returns the subject to society, the polis, and, at length, the motherland—the written word thus minted, in the words of Robert Stepto, “as the coin of freedom’s realm.” 19 This structure of familial relations simultaneously (with)holds, in its Hegelian (dis)guise, an ethical consciousness—the family divested of personal ties. Little wonder that the educated, “cultured” Douglass deploys a metaphor that likens the slave’s mentality to politics at large: The home plantation of Colonel Lloyd “was called by the slaves the Great House Farm. . . . A representative could not be prouder of his election to a seat in the American Congress, than a slave on one of the outfarms would be of his election to do errands at the Great House Farm”; indeed, “[t]he competitors for this office sought as diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers in the political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The same traits of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd’s slaves, as are seen in the slaves of the political parties” (N 22–23).

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The scene of reading and writing, of culture and the cultivated (mother) tongue, is not without inversions of its own, the lesson forcibly (read “fatherly”) brought home by Mr. Hugh Auld, who, having forbidden his wife to further instruct Douglass in learning how to read, reasons with her that a slave “should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. Now . . . if you teach that nigger . . . how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy” (N 37). For Douglass, such reasoning engenders “a new and special revelation. . . . I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. . . . From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. . . . I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read” (N 37–38). The Narrative’s numerous references to “irresponsible power” reiterate the antithetical nature of this linguistic configuration—that is, the master as (equally) slave precisely insofar as and to the extent that his power operates elsewhere and otherwise than at the level of intersubjective utterance. 20 Ironically, the master’s claim to mastery dictates that he cannot “respond,” that, like the slave, he is incapable of speaking back because, in order to respond, he must have heard a meaningful utterance in the first place—a logical impossibility that goes against the very rationale of the domestic institution that situates the slave, by definition, outside and beyond the reach of language: A brute cannot speak (back). So, too, the master is held speechless and beyond “responsibility,” a brute thus captivated and ensnared by wielding power manifestly “irresponsible.” The apple of knowledge, inside out, brings with it the worm, as well, the divisiveness inherent in reason’s ownmost ratio, the “dis-” of its content: As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. . . . It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. . . . In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! . . . Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. (N 42–43)

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Viewed from the side, then, reading and writing engender the subject, con-figure (self)-reflection—both its jouissance and agony as but the price of knowledge as such. Notice, in the bargain, that knowledge is initially “domestic,” an “economic” affair (oikos nomos): Home rule governs this transaction, initiated by “mother” and subsequently over-ruled by “father.” Notice, also, the involuntary irony embedded in the scene: “Christian” marriage mimics the “domestic” institution of slavery itself, the husband/wife relationship subjected to the self-same master/slave dynamic it communally indemnifies—the slave master, in general, “author of his own subjection” (BF 189). Notice, finally, the scene transpires— again, ironically—within the “home,” a house that straightaway holds Douglass as a mere “domestic” (prop), a household good, commodity, a part and parcel of its property. In passing, I recall you to the utterance that “dominates” a future scene, the punning that so “master”-fully defines the failed escape, the vow of silence universally required—and doubly so by way of repetition of its utterance: “we passed the word around, ‘Own nothing;’ and ‘Own nothing!’ said we all” (N 78). Deprived of its propriety, the subject, thus legally “translated” as object, categorically exists to serve: His is not to reason why. Reason, so it seems, defenestrates the scene. Ignorance provides the guarantee: “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one”—that is, “to annihilate the power of reason” (N 83). In its ironic inversion, reason turns back upon the subject itSelf, triggers the reflex of an economic “whole”—the reason that drives Douglass to appropriate culture and its capital as one: “During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk” (N 44). Commerce drives the heart of the transaction as such: “I used . . . to carry bread with me. . . . This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge” (N 41). Here culture’s price necessitates duplicity; the deal entails a scam, the dealer snared in fraud: “when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, ‘I don’t believe you. Let me see you try it.’ I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way” (N 44). Plagiarism finalizes things: On Monday afternoons, “I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas” (N 45). Already reason justifies these stolen moments, rights and underwrites the act of theft. I’ll have reason to return to this.

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The shipyard is no stranger to this scene; its primal vestiges map out the point of intersection where capital and culture pinion labor—selfculture and the body of the laborer itself: the site of reading and writing “at work.” In its eventuation, the primordial shape appears along these lines: The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being in Durgin and Bailey’s ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use, write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was intended. When a piece of timber was intended for the larboard side it would be marked thus—“L.” When a piece was for the starboard side, it would be marked thus—“S.” . . . I soon learned the names of these letters, and for what they were intended when placed upon a piece of timber in the ship-yard. I immediately commenced copying them, and in a short time was able to make the . . . letters named. (N 44)

The scene returns with cost-effective force, the price of liberty, appropriately where the subject finds itSelf with leisure time, time heavy on its hands: [Master Hugh] took me into the ship-yard of which he was foreman, in the employment of Mr. Walter Price. There I . . . very soon learned the art of using my mallet and irons. In the course of one year . . . I was able to command the highest wages. . . . After learning how to calk, I sought my own employment, made my own contracts, and collected the money which I earned. . . . When I could get no calking to do, I did nothing. During these leisure times, those old notions about freedom would steal over me again. When in Mr. Gardner’s employment, I was kept in such a perpetual whirl of excitement, I could think of nothing, scarcely, but my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty. (N 83)

Let’s speculate a bit, postpone the scene of ships for future reference—an interval, a spot of time, held in reserve. It happens in the nick of time: The ship comes in. Yet, for the moment, notice that the moment, this event, this singularity, comes with its cost, that the moment in which freedom is “stolen” consolidates a nook, a niche, the self-same nick of time in which money is lost—an incision in the fabric of life whose suture seamlessly (con)fuses time and money as a unitary, altogether solitary, (w)hole.

Language (and all “interest” in its cultural capital) transfigures the subject, occasions physical force to figure as a language of its own—a language whose ironic inversions expose the fundamental duplicity of the “domestic institution” itself. Hence, for example, slavery, designed to transform human to brute (a being outside language, broken and “dumb”), to prevent, in fact, the subject from entering the sphere of “culture” as such, carries with it its own reversals—its antitheses, to call upon

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the figure that defines the “shade,” the hither-side, of irony. To wit, since Covey’s single slave (woman) exists purely as a “breeder,” turning her into a brute becomes itself a brutal act that seems to go against the grain of all morality. Its sense is “economic,” to be sure, its reason(s) economic, as well. Thus reason rationalizes (its) capital. So, too, brutalizing others “equally” subjects the subject to its own brutality. The circle is vicious, of course; the circulation, meanwhile, ensures its capital: “Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute” (N 58). A phantom in the Narrative prefigures the subject’s liberation, its emancipation from this “dark night of the soul.” In the interim, narration has its cross to bear. Christianity aside, the word must suffer reasons of its own. Language ornaments the scene that now unfolds in nearly blinding detail. Here, time stops still, arrested in its tracks. And, in its wake, to further muddle up the metaphors, the specter of brutality and slavery returns, white as a sheet: Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. . . . My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:— “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! . . . You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world. . . . O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! . . . O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? . . . I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I’ll try it. . . . I will take to the water.” (N 59)

Consider, to begin, the figures at play, the interplay of personification, metonymy, and apostrophe: The object comes to life; the subject, overshadowed (for the moment), vanishes. Beneath it all, the mother, once again, returns. Nestled in the haven of the bay’s “broad bosom,” bountifully dotted by sails and uniformly white, the ships themselves resemble nothing more than “shrouded ghosts” to the incarcerated subject captured by the spell of freedom’s lure, shadows that tarnish (mother) nature’s purity and innocence. Baptismal font and nurse at once, the bay holds forth the promise of redemption, resurrection, and reform.

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Consider, also, the ironic alignment of image and figure in the scene. The white sails function metonymically, against the “dark night of slavery,” as figures of liberty itself. For the black man, freedom comes to naught, nothing but a ghostly reminder (remainder) whose presence is brought home (oikos) “in light of” its absence—as but the shadow “white” casts back upon the subject enslaved, subjected to the land. A further paradoxical “turn” configures the object as free, a “natural” part of nature’s “landscape” as a whole; the subject, on the other hand, is not. The subject, in its turn, disturbs the natural order of things (res): Discourse figures nature as a (w)hole, reduces it to ruin, to partial object—both remainder and reminder of the subject (matter) as a whole. Slavery makes nature seem unnatural. Here, thought itself cannot take wing, moored—unlike those ships the scene reflects—to the “apostrophe,” reduced to speaking “absent”-mindedly to things. No “other” is in sight: The subject might as well be speaking to itSelf—or to the dead. Indeed, it is: “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip” (N 59). The subject’s very words curtail all spontaneity, the free and easy motion of the scene. Recall the setup (dispositif, to cull a term from Lyotard) that provokes apostrophe: “Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor between sleep and wake, under some large tree” (N 58). Apostrophe ensnares the very motion of its subject (matter) in the stillness of the subject’s borrowed time—a time, moreover, that knows nothing of motion, of change, knows nothing of its destiny, a future of its own, but only stolen moments, moments outside (its own) time, moments that “wholly” belong to an “other,” confiscated moments that stand outside the stillness of that time it calls its “own,” the stillness of a being so caught up in repetition it resembles nothing if not death. In this event, its life knows nothing of eventuality: Its life but mimics, rather, that “perpetual present” of the brute, bereft of any future of its own: “O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute” (N 59). It comes as no surprise that self-reflection seeks to flee the scene to which it’s moored: “I will run away. I will not stand it. . . . I had as well be killed running as die standing. . . . This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom” (N 59). The white sails bring the subject (back) to life: Those unmoored ships (re)animate the subject, and “remark” (the beginning of) the end of his life as a slave. By “turning” object into subject, apostrophe, in turn, returns the subject to itSelf. Discourse “masters” the scene, restores the subject to life: It bids farewell to “objectivity,” to slavery as such. The discourse runs ahead; the subject catches up with itSelf: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (N 60). The ensuing fight with Covey precipitated by this scene, “the turning-point in my career as a slave,” rekindles Douglass’s self-

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confidence and the “determination to be free,” a “glorious resurrection”; it “revived within me a sense of my own manhood,” and “I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact” (N 65). 21

A final epiphany indemnifies the deed, one underwriting Douglass as master of himself, his own man. 22 A crucial economic issue now turns the tables for good. Reason is the culprit. The Enlightenment ideal(ity) of reason is to blame (its own paternity imputed, in the gossip of philosophy, to Kant), its contradictory investment in the (w)hole: It wants (and this is its desire, desire’s own reason—to borrow from Pascal) the integer, integrity, the whole (the truth, and nothing but—to wit, the sum of all the parts must fit the whole), and, in the self-same operation, it accommodates, wholeheartedly, the fraction, the quotient, the ratio, as an essential part, an indispensible component of its household enterprise, the very heart of its economy. 23 On the one hand, reason wants nothing remaindered, left over, outside the “one”; the rational won’t traffic in the fraction as such. It stakes its claim, its choke hold on the whole, initially, to families: “my poor old grandmother” had been “the source of [Master Andrew’s] wealth; . . . had peopled his plantation with slaves. . . . She was nevertheless left a slave . . . in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep” (N 47). Accordingly, “my mother and I were separated when I was but an infant”—a common custom “to part children from their mothers at a very early age” (N 15–16), a custom, parenthetically, domestically irrational, and yet a crucial rationale for the domestic institution’s success. A contradictory incision in the social order likewise splinters the legal sphere of property, and, by extension, the disposition of the slave: “After the valuation [of Captain Anthony’s estate], then came the division. . . . We had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we were ranked. A single word from the white men was enough . . . to sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings” (N 46). To wit, the valuation grounds the rationale for the division as a (w)hole. Hence the “domestic institution” reasons that, to liquidate all liability, the very voice of reason must, ironically, be quelled: “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man” (N 83–84). Notice, early on, how “right” and “reason” constitute an

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inverse reflex married to the “sense” of (im)morality, a kinship both involuntary and innate: he must be made to feel that slavery is right. Within the slave community, as well, division decimates its ranks, as when, for instance, Douglass is betrayed in planning his escape, and, though “our master would not tell us who it was,” we “found the evidence against us to be the testimony of one person,” and “came to a unanimous decision . . . as to who [it] was” (N 78). Reciprocally, the mere existence of the ratio solidifies the whole; the whole (community), in turn, excludes, expels, eradicates a part, remainders any fraction “other” than the whole—what doesn’t fit, what isn’t right: A colored man and a fugitive slave were on friendly terms. The former was heard to threaten the latter with informing his master of his whereabouts. Straightway a meeting was called among the colored people. . . . The betrayer was invited to attend. The people came . . . , and organized the meeting by appointing a very religious old gentleman as president, who . . . addressed the meeting as follows: “Friends, we have got him here, and I would recommend that you young men just take him outside the door, and kill him!” With this, a number of them bolted at him; but . . . the betrayer escaped. . . . I believe there have been no more such threats, and should there be hereafter, I doubt not that death would be the consequence. (N 94–95)

Here, the community labors to safeguard the whole in sight of which it sites its rationale. Thus reason works for the community; it labors for (what’s right for) the communal integrity. This knee-jerk reflex equally applies to work as such. It (self)-evidently stands to reason that labor earn its rightful due, what dutifully belongs to it, what’s wholly its own. At work for Master Hugh in Baltimore, and having learned the art of calking in the shipyard, Douglass reasons thus: “I was able to command the highest wages. . . . I was now of some importance to my master. I was bringing him from six to seven dollars per week. I sometimes brought him nine dollars per week: my wages were a dollar and a half a day. . . . I sought my own employment, made my own contracts, and collected the money which I earned” (N 83). Reasoning from this disparity, the sense of “inequality” is monetary from beginning to end, a question of managing his house, his economic affairs, a question of “wholly” keeping his earnings from the labor of his hands. The diction leans preponderously to the right: I was now getting, as I have said, one dollar and fifty cents per day. I contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully my own; yet, . . . I was compelled to deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh. And why? Not because he earned it,—not because he had any hand in earning it,—not because I owed it to him,—nor because he possessed the slightest shadow of a right to it; but solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up. The right of the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas is exactly the same. (N 84, italics mine)

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The issue’s moral, to be sure—”the slightest shadow of a right”—yet economic, just the same: Beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, it’s piracy. Morality and money share the stage. Henceforward, reason works it out, works out itSelf: In the early part of the year 1838, I became quite restless. I could see no reason why I should . . . pour the reward of my toil into the purse of my master. When I carried to him my weekly wages, he would . . . look me in the face with a robber-like fierceness, and ask, “Is this all?” He was satisfied with nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I made him six dollars, sometimes give me six cents, to encourage me. It had the opposite effect. I regarded it as a sort of admission of my right to the whole. The fact that he gave me any part of my wages was proof, to my mind, that he believed me entitled to the whole of them. (N 85–86, italics mine)

Freedom—not to discount the Narrative itself—is always already entangled in this “domestic” web: reason in cahoots with the economy. The specter of Franklin overshadows the scene. Here’s how the haunting plays itself out: “I applied to Master Hugh for the privilege of hiring my time. . . . [A]fter some reflection, he granted me the privilege. . . . I was to be allowed all my time . . . and find my own employment; and, in return for this liberty, I was to pay him three dollars at the end of each week” (N 86–87). Precisely here, where “liberty” (assessed at “three dollars” per week) and “my own employment” (ex)change hands, reason puts in play their difference, reason’s own remainder befitting capital: My board was two dollars and a half per week. This, with the wear and tear of clothing and caulking tools, made my regular expenses about six dollars per week. This amount I was compelled to make up, or relinquish the privilege of hiring my time. Rain or shine, . . . at the end of each week the money must be forthcoming, or I must give up my privilege. This arrangement, it will be perceived, was decidedly in my master’s favor. . . . He received all the benefits of slaveholding without its evils; while I endured all the evils of a slave, and suffered all the care and anxiety of a freeman. (N 87)

At length, “I found it a hard bargain” (N 87), a bargain ultimately nonnegotiable, and the precipitating cause of Douglass’s escape: “on the third day of September, 1838, I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York” (N 89). Witness, in the bargain, that time and money have become synonymous. Witness, also, that the bargain comes with a hidden cost: “It was a step towards freedom to be allowed to bear the responsibilities of a freeman, and I was determined to hold on upon it. I bent myself to the work of making money. I was ready to work at night as well as day, and by the most untiring perseverence and industry, I made enough to meet my expenses, and lay up a little money every week” (N 87, italics mine).

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Witness, finally, the bargain—that is, freedom’s very reason, the foundation of “liberty”—incurs a difference: a “falling-out,” a marginal risk, a “calculated” liability, manipulated and decisively determined by a body (corpus) of capital (“lay up a little money every week”) whose “head” (caput/capital) sums up the price of liberty, what, in the end, amounts to nothing but the corpse of reason as a (w)hole. The economics of “free” enterprise is grounded in this “ratio(n)” of capital, the fraction, the remainder (aka profit) over and above the whole—regarding which, in its interest, capitalism equally and uniformly rationalizes the division of labor. Capital eclipses society, and is itself divorced from economics as such. Thus, Lyotard cryptically remarks that capital “is not an economic . . . phenomenon. It is the shadow cast by the principle of reason on human relations.” 24 When, fifty-six years later, Booker T. Washington publishes his Up from Slavery, morality (or, in its Kantian raiment, reason “practical,” “im”-pure) and capital have shared their nuptials: They cast a single shadow, lengthened exponentially. 25 As a “free” man, Douglass subsequently reasons that his (life)time is his “own,” no longer someone else’s property; he’ll spend it as he so desires. Yet now it must be earned. Work covers the cost, the excess of desire that generates the consciousness of duty and responsibility, in view of which the subject, at present, speculates on its time, its very future in advance of its self: I found employment [in New Bedford], the third day after my arrival. . . . It was new, dirty, and hard work for me; but I went at it with a glad heart and a willing hand. I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and newly-married wife. It was to me the starting point of a new existence. . . . There was no work too hard—none too dirty. . . . (N 95)

Little wonder that the subject is ek-static since, as slave, its life knows nothing but the present, living, like the beasts, the brutes, wholly in the moment, dissevered from the past, foreclosed on possibility—that is, a future that, in any way, might transpire differently. Work constitutes the heartbeat of its virginal domestic life (oikos nomos) and its attendant obligations—that is, the “care and anxiety of a freeman,” the “duties and responsibilities of a life of freedom” (N 87, 92)—regarding which the “liberated” subject subsequently must prepare itSelf. Thus money now appears for what it is, a variation on, a differential of, Ben Franklin’s formula: not time as such, but, rather, time placed in reserve, time spent ahead of time. 26

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Accordingly, in the equation for liberty, the cost-effective variables emerge, materialize in advance: Work earns its interest, its interest dutyfree. Here, labor masquerades as dignity, as duty’s truth, what, in a future oeuvre (by any other name it’s “work”) on “Self-Made Men” (1874), establishes the worth of a successful life, “a sense of the dignity of labor or the value of manhood.” 27 The “or” here constitutes an “and,” an equal sign, a cache of common cents. This coin turned on its edge already gets inserted in the Narrative: I found myself surrounded [in New Bedford] with the strongest proofs of wealth. Lying at wharves . . . I saw many ships of the finest model, in the best order, and of the largest size. Upon the right and left, I was walled in by granite warehouses of the widest dimensions, stowed to their utmost capacity with the necessaries and comforts of life. Added to this, almost every body seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so. . . . I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men. . . . Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which betokened the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing, as well as a sense of his own dignity as a man. . . . From the wharves I strolled around and over the town, . . . evincing an amount of wealth, comfort, taste, and refinement, such as I had never seen in any part of slaveholding Maryland. Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful. . . . The people looked more able, stronger, healthier, and happier, than those of Maryland. I was for once made glad by a view of extreme wealth, without being saddened by seeing extreme poverty. (N 93–94)

This comes not without its foresight, eyesight now directed heavenward and backward all at once, fixed on that “Great House Farm” (N 23), the “Big House” in the sky, on the horizon, in the North. Wealth, not slavery as such, exposes the South in its appalling dishabille, and, simultaneously, (the “reason” for) the nation’s most lethal divide: The impression which I had received respecting the character and condition of the people of the north, I found to be singularly erroneous. I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts, and scarcely any of the luxuries, of life were enjoyed at the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people owned no slaves. I supposed that they were about upon a level with the non-slaveholding population of the south. . . . I had somehow imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth, and very little refinement. (N 93)

The scene exemplifies a dress rehearsal for the Civil War.

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Let’s get down to business. The dissimulation inherent in capital represents the nation’s own libidinal economy, the very apparatus of the national psyche—as Freud might say, its homeostatic regulation—whose reservoir no longer labors to balance the accounts, drawn singularly to itself, withdrawn from interest in the “outside” world, a hypochondriac, a stranger to itself. The inequality of race emerges in this mirror-like divide, this labyrinthine fold, itself the shade of labor’s (re)citation of capital. Observe the underside of “freedom” exposed when Douglass, still a slave, is hired to Mr. William Gardner in Baltimore: Many of the black carpenters were freemen. Things seemed to be going on very well. All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they would not work with free colored workmen. Their reason for this, as alleged, was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, they would soon take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men would be thrown out of employment. . . . [T]hey broke off, swearing they would work no longer, unless [Mr. Gardner] would discharge his black carpenters. Now, though this did not extend to me in form, it did reach me in fact. My fellow-apprentices very soon began to feel it degrading to them to work with me. They began to put on airs, and talk about the “niggers” taking the country . . . and . . . they commenced making my condition as hard as they could. . . . (N 81)

Race redraws the borderline of capital, a national divide reduced, quite simply, as My Bondage and My Freedom puts it, to white labor “brought into competition with that of the colored people” (BF 331). North and South equi-vocate the (w)hole, the nation’s house in disarray, a nation milked not at but by the legend of a “united” state(s) excluding reason’s ratio, E PLURIBUS UNUM (“America” a state of mind, a hybrid race, not unlike Douglass’s Egyptian “heritage”), liberty’s maternal breast (the statue biding its time), the Motherland, “home” rule (oikos nomos) unfettered from Great Britain’s royalty, its patriarchal tyranny, its economic hegemony. 28 Douglass, too, deliberating his escape, romances this lore: “In coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage” (N 74). His only hope lies in a declaration signed, sealed, and delivered by “the fathers of this republic” acknowledging the “just and inalienable rights of man”—and authorizing, in the end, the right to “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (BF 302, 301, 389). As John Seelye, in a most remarkable article, observes, a printed document, “a manifesto, a millennial proclamation” declares it so. 29 In print, doubt not that liberty and happiness are one: It’s in the interest of freedom’s highest good, the summum bonum of a just “United States.” Thus, in My Bondage and My Freeedom, vacillating “on the point of making [my] escape,” Douglass reinstates the fabled call to arms: “Patrick Hen-

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ry . . . could say, ‘GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH,’ and this saying was a sublime one, even for a freeman; but, incomparably more sublime, is the same sentiment, when practically asserted by men accustomed to the lash and chain” (BF 312). At this point, in the resolute revisions of the Life, the right to liberty and (the pursuit of) happiness is reasoned “practically.” The Narrative already “speculates” as much. It underwrites the epic saga of this “uni”-versal a priori verity, (the age of) reason’s foremost postulate: Speaking for itSelf, its unitary singularity, its own identity, the text incontrovertibly indemnifies a body of evidence, its first-person-plural patriotic rationale: “We,” “the people,” “hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Ironically, and as the discourse “equally” attests, the rudimentary sibling experience engendered by the (“Grand”) Mother, that enabling trans-subjective buttress of the family, of “sympathy for my brethren in bonds” (N 96), of patriotic dedication to the Motherland, and ultimately for the “human family” (N 27) as a whole, conversely spawns the “other” from the “same,” and, at the same time, grounds the racial “otherness” that now emerges in this margin and obscures the “sameness” that the discourse would retrieve, an otherness beyond the bonds and boundary of home and homeland both. 30 Cathected by a foreign body, the narration mutates to a strange hybridity—a meld that equally transforms the principle of kinship and translates the law of hospitality. Beyond the nation’s house, between the lines, the Narrative has Ireland on its mind. The scene takes place in Baltimore; the incident begins with an uncanny sentiment: “I had something of the feeling about Baltimore that is expressed in the proverb, that ‘being hanged in England is preferable to dying a natural death in Ireland’” (N 34). This transatlantic mind-set eerily presages what sows the very seed of his escape from slavery: I went one day down on the wharf of Mr. Waters; and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone, I went, unasked, and helped them. When we had finished, one of them came to me and asked me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, “Are ye a slave for life?” I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed to be deeply affected by the statement. He said to the other that it was a pity so fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for life. . . . They both advised me to run away to the north; that I should find friends there, and that I should be free. (N 43–44)

An earlier allusion to “Sheridan’s [actually O’Connor’s] mighty speeches on, and in behalf of, Catholic emancipation” (N 42) already leads Douglass to link the plight of Irish Catholics under British rule with that of Southern slavery. Indeed, the reprehensible conditions of the Irish and the slave attest to a political and economic kinship, a kinship readily

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acknowledged before the publication of the Narrative, and afterward finessed throughout Douglass’s life, as Paul Giles observes: Journeying in England, Douglass commiserates with the “black” Irish as a subjugated race; crusading in Dublin for repeal of the Corn Laws, he welcomes being introduced by Daniel O’Connell as the black O’Connell of the United States; identifying with the Irish cause, in general, he describes himself as “something of an Irishman as well as a Negro.” 31 In general, Douglass acerbically remarks that “[w]ealth, learning and ability made an Irishman an Englishman. The same metamorphosing power converts a Negro into a white man in this country.” 32 Conversely, this familiar, familial hybridity—what, in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass calls “the high ground of human brotherhood” (BF 379)—is no less subject to uncanny inversions and reversals as the site of contestation and contradiction—particularly insofar as economic inflections modulate society and politics alike. Thus, for example, the shadow of capital induces Douglass to marginalize the Irish immigrants as “foreigners swarming in your midst” and, at the same time, part of the despotic white establishment conditioned to believe that slavery “is essential to their prosperity.” 33 To this effect, Douglass argues that “colored Americans” fare worse in their homeland than aliens: “Aliens are we in our native land.” 34 The Life and Times affords a further dressing-down: “Perhaps no class of our fellow-citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow-citizens, and yet no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed . . . than have this same Irish people” (LT 973). In any case, when all is said and done, destitute, impoverished Ireland, with an irony in no sense penurious, supplies the very economic principal that buys Douglass his liberty; for it was Mrs. Anna Richardson of Newcastle, who, in 1846, arranged the purchase of his freedom, and thus, as Lee Jenkins suggests, in some sense, “on a literal as much as on a metaphorical level, Douglass found his freedom through Ireland.” 35 In short, throughout his life, as Patricia Ferreira remarks, “his association with the Irish functioned as a critical component to his own liberation.” 36 The economics of this scene already occupy the psychic landscape of the Narrative, transnational in latitude (let’s not forget that Egypt has been smuggled into the “account,” the very Narrative itSelf, from “birth”), concerned with issues that exceed the limits of the family, community, and nation-state as such, always already, as Douglass would express it in the Life and Times, “[s]tanding outside the pale of American humanity” (LT 769). Indeed, the very name by means of which the Narrative identifies itSelf outdistances that “pale”—a Scot invented by Sir Walter Scott. 37 And then, of course, there’s Africa itself (where “successful robbers” stole us “from our homes”), which, in the later Life, informs the diasporic legacy that constitutes a home translated to a realm beyond the

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nation-state and national identity—a complex political attitude, as Russ Castronovo argues, “which allows one to live in the United States, even as a citizen, without acceding to its classifications, maps, and designs”; in other words, to call America home “is not to belong to a nation; . . . to call America home is to think in ways beyond geography, tradition, and exclusion.” 38 In the Narrative, however, quite specifically, the Irish question ultimately implicates the subject in a global kinship that concurrently imperils the “national” fiction and undermines the boundaries of host and guest, of home, the homeland, and the foreigner—the question of the foreigner not only, as Jacques Derrida suggests, “a foreigner’s question,” but also a foreign question in itself. 39 The familiar and the strange (ex)change hands, a sleight of hand, a trade-off dealt by reason’s rationale for work, by labor’s own division on behalf of capital. Let’s not forget that those Irishmen who hasten Douglass’s escape are, in the long run, part and parcel of that “horrid fight . . . in which my left eye was nearly knocked out” when white carpenters refused to work with black: “[t]heir reason for this, as alleged, was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, . . . poor white men would be thrown out of employment” (N 80–81). In the short run, racial difference effectually capitalizes on the surfeit of wealth and its division; its principal is not without an interest of its own, as argued in the Life and Times, where prejudicial interest accumulates: “Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. . . . There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the hard-handed workingman. There is, worst of all, religious prejudice, a prejudice which has stained whole continents with blood. It is, in fact, a spirit infernal, against which every enlightened man should wage perpetual war” (LT 973). Dichotomies succumb to differentials in a global world, a world uncannily familiar and familial in terms of its commercial ethos—yet held hostage by its ownmost impropriety, divided and estranged for reason(s) of its own, and inhospitable. In the Narrative, the Irish Catholic uniformly presages and perforates the staging of this scene, the scene of “rich against poor,” the “idle dandy against the hard-handed workingman.” The scene writ large inscribes the site of uni-versal economic pandemonium. A cross-examination shows the question of religion doing double duty in the text, a double-cross, an issue altogether foreign to the rationale of capital, a foreign body in the spectacle of reason as a (w)hole (“irrational”). Yet here, uncannily, religion finds itself most properly at home— with faith and reason sharing the same bed. Specifically, in practice, it’s the interest of reason, “impure” and adulterated, here and now, that wins the day: The hope of happiness, to milk a catch-all term from Kant, begins and ends with God. 40 Let’s not speculate on this. The heart has

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reason(s) of its own, reasons, to recite Pascal, of which reason itself knows nothing.

It’s not for nothing that the narrative authority amasses the irrational, desire held in reserve (coitus reservatus), its priceless capital on which it speculates its life: Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity. . . . I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise. (N 36)

Held to account for “all my subsequent prosperity,” the Master Host, held hostage by narration’s own economy, must co-respondingly account for itself: “Does a righteous God govern the universe?” (N 71). The narrative thus questions its ownmost raison d’être (its reason being, paradoxically, its faith) most trenchantly—no less ironically—within the con“text” of the “Sabbath school,” the scene of mastering the word of God: instead of spending the Sabbath in wrestling, boxing, and drinking whisky, we were trying to learn to read the will of God. . . . The work of instructing my dear fellow-slaves was the sweetest engagement with which I was ever blessed. . . . When I think that these precious souls are to-day shut up in the prison-house of slavery, my feelings overcome me, and I am almost ready to ask, “Does a righteous God govern the universe? and for what does he hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler?” (N 71)

Granted, the “almost” that qualifies the candor of the question merely constitutes a stutter step, one not to be mistaken for the step beyond (pas au-delà). Desire knows better than to risk, to speculate, its priceless capital. So, too, it’s inappropriate to reckon that the (proper) subject of the discourse has been “fatherless,” or that religion unassumingly gets tacked on at the end, in the appendix, as an afterthought. In actuality, religious figuration evenly impregnates and aborts the discourse as a

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(w)hole—the subject bound by brotherhood, all “children of a common Father” (N 90), the narrative a veritable “house of prayer” and profanation alike. Thus, for example, while Colonel Lloyd’s plantation seemingly embodies an Eden-like “garden,” abounding in fruits, including, unsurprisingly, the “hardy apple,” quite a “temptation” to the “hungry swarms of boys” and “older slaves,” it constitutes, in fact, the very “hell of slavery” itself in light of which emancipation signifies “a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom” (N 25, 18, 65). Religion implements its own authority on which the narrative need only capitalize. I afford you but a fraction of the interest from which a cache of literary criticism bolsters its investment: The very presence of Mr. Severe, “a profane swearer [in the field], . . . made it both the field of blood and of blasphemy,” his death, in turn, “regarded by the slaves as the result of a merciful providence”; the tonal modulations of the slave songs function as “a prayer to God for deliverance from chains”; the Auld household in Baltimore serves as “the first plain manifestation of that kind providence which has ever since attended me”; the time spent while employed by Mr. Freeland “was heavenly, compared with what I experienced at the hands of Mr. Edward Covey”; the feeling that expresses best the subject’s state of mind upon escape accords with having fled “a den of hungry lions” (N 22, 24, 36, 70, 89, italics mine). Indeed, a prior failed escape, “a matter of life and death,” re-cites the consummate scene of Christianity, the resurrection and its raison d’être—plotted to occur “upon the Saturday night previous to Easter holidays,” and, in the end, betrayed by one of their own, a veritable “Judas” in their midst (N 75, 74). The plot, here, “turns” quite literally, yet inadvertently (I’ll euphemize this turn), to excrement: “We were spreading manure; and all at once, while thus engaged, I was overwhelmed with an indescribable feeling, in the fulness of which I turned to Sandy, who was near by, and said, ‘We are betrayed!’ . . . I was never more certain of any thing” (N 76). Inversely, Christianity is called to order: The “Appendix” cleans house from the rear. Homework, here, amounts to summoning the House of God to balance its account(s)—that is, “the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land” (N 97). Religion’s very rationale has gone awry: “Indeed, I can see no reason . . . for calling the religion of this land Christianity” (N 97, italics mine). 41 To wit, “[t]he slave auctioneer’s bell and the churchgoing bell chime in with each other. . . . Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. . . . Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise” (N 98). In short, “the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America” avow to “love the heathen on the other side of the globe. They can pray for him, pay money to have the Bible put into his hand, and missionaries to instruct him;

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while they despise and totally neglect the heathen at their own doors” (N 99–100). In actuality, that heathen on the far side of Christianity (praise Allah) stands a better chance, as Twain, with typical aplomb, observes: “Many of the negroes are held in slavery by the Moors. But the moment a female slave becomes her master’s concubine her bonds are broken, and as soon as a male slave can read the first chapter of the Koran (which contains the creed,) he can no longer be held in bondage.” 42 The body of the Narrative affords religious censure of its own. Thus, for example, when Captain Auld, attending a religious revival, “experienced religion,” “it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways. . . . Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. He made the greatest pretensions to piety. His house was the house of prayer. . . . His house was the preachers’ home” (N 52). Covey, also, “a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church,” who “seemed to think himself equal to deceiving the Almighty,” “would make a short prayer in the morning, and a long prayer at night”; “I do verily believe that he sometimes deceived himself into the solemn belief, that he was a sincere worshipper of the most high God” (N 54, 57). In brief, “[w]ere I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that of enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For . . . religious slaveholders are the worst” (N 68). Regarding the “domestic institution” as a whole, it reads its scriptural authority with blinders on: “a very differentlooking class of people are springing up at the south . . . from those originally brought to this country from Africa,” and it seems only reasonable to assume this fact “will do away the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendents of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers” (N 17–18). So much for the house of God, the Christian “church,” the Christian churches’ (let me stress the plural) own authority, disseminated and disjoined.

Religion constitutes that priceless capital, the uni-versal rationale on which narration banks its life: the Life and (proper) Christianity a multivalue calculus, a test-ament immobilized at every “turn” by discord, conflict, and divisiveness despite its sibling matrices, “my brethren in bonds” (N 102), and finally the brotherhood of man, “the human family” (N 27). Theoretically, the body of the text affirms this synthesis, that “special interposition of divine Providence in my favor” which has “at-

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tended me, and marked my life with so many favors” (N 36)—both life and Providence a single, unitary, fused (co)incidence, the whole stockpiled and virginal against a hostile, uninviting, disembodied world, a world forbidding and con-fused. It stands to reason that narration comes to rest around this blockage, this obstruction, this inhospitable impediment. Over and against its priceless capital, life has its price. Author-ity must bear the cost, must hold itSelf accountable, borne by a lion’s share of Emersonian reliance, to be sure—sans all transcendence and transparency. 43 It’s not by chance that, from the start, a maxim surfaces in light of which the Narrative, henceforward, vows to live its life: “The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this—‘Trust no man’” (N 90). A “fugitive slave,” a “stranger” in a “strange land,” “without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren—children of a common Father. . . . I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of moneyloving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey” (N 94, 90). Doubt not, the very text itself, dis-jointed, paralyzed and perilized, falls prey to its most vital principle for reasons of the heart. It authorizes faith: Trust (no man). Reason—here a symptom of what ails the discourse, what is wrong—is impotent. Tough-skinned, impregnable, authority re-rights itSelf: It plays its hand, it writes the “other” off and underwrites itSelf (jouissance into the bargain). Author-ity, between the lines, beneath the sheets, if you prefer, “subliminally,” takes “the step beyond” (pas au-delà), puts its libido into play—a process, I remind you (to deploy the psychoanalytic lingo that configures this release of energy, this discharge, “liberation”) that accredits only the material. 44 The process, in itSelf, is primary and timeless, to be sure. Note that, in the self-same act that authorizes the erection of itSelf, a part displaces and exceeds the whole, a fetish whose cathexis functions as a supplement and circumscribes a body foreign to the auto of biography, a guest inhabiting its “life.” There’s reason to believe that reason’s shadow, now a fraction of itSelf, commands the scene. To speculate on Kant, there’s reason to believe that reason “ought” to be more “practical.” 45 Authority, in duty’s shadow, suffers its own death. 46 And so it happens, in the shadow of the nation’s patriarch, the nation’s bona fide self-made man, that, in its rehabilitated form, author-ity—subjected to an accident, skin-deep—whites out the “differance” in culture’s capital, reason’s racial dividend. It underwrites the labor, the work (oeuvre), the duty of selfculture, sells its self in order to amount to more. It trades its unambiguously lacerated, “speaking” body for the body of a text, a document belabored and be-mused in black and white—a script, a white man’s sacrament, an article (of faith) to which the reader will subscribe, a life re-

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righted and transformed as documentary material (so, too, the “rights of man” come into being once, and only when, they are inscribed: The Constitution generates the fact). It’s only right that publication seals the deal, an inverse gesture for the life (time: in advance), duty’s advance—the time it took to write the Life. Let’s not discredit the investment of this capital. In Hazel Carby’s words, “the time to sell the lives of black men” had begun. 47 The word shall set you free, the word itself held hostage, duty-bound and paper-thin, indemnified by a bilateral, two-faced paternity—the universal mother’s “speaking picture” of the mind, that common ancestry of different tongues, turned sideways now, on edge: the spitting image of the revolutionary fathers and the immutable Heavenly Host. 48 Bear in mind the bearer of this note is two-sided, as well. In speculating on the reader(ship), the small print in the contract goes unread: “Trust no man.” As for the reader’s credibility, it goes unsaid: Morality takes credit where it’s due. 49 The credit goes to Providence as a religious infrastructure that indemnifies the Narrative’s success. And so the moral of the story comes to this: The Narrative, in letting itSelf go, holds in its ownmost hand (writing) its life—to mix the metaphors, the symptoms of the discourse, yet a final time, Ben Franklin through the looking-glass, the Second Coming of the nation’s “representative (‘colored’) man,” redeeming, as Joseph Fichtelberg remarks, “the millennial ideals of an America foretold in the Declaration of Independence.” 50 Author-ity, self-evidently, gets recirculated and exchanged. On this, the Narrative depends; on this it rights itSelf, erects itSelf; on this it speculates: It purchases and spends itSelf at once. 51

CODA: Ben Franklin, as the printing press attests, here represents the ghost in the machine, the récit’s circulating capital, the value of a life in print. 52 I needn’t press Poor Richard’s point: “Distrust and caution are the parents of security.” 53 In print, you bet your life, there’s but a single riskfree “article,” a solitary guarantee, on which author-ity might (p)lay its hand. I’ll give to Seigneur de la Coquille, Lord of Misprints, final say: “In God We Trust.” NOTES 1. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave (1845), in Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 15, hereafter parenthetically cited in the text as N.Douglass published three autobiographies in his lifetime: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881 and 1893). All three, to which, as a conglomerate, I’ll henceforth call the Life, are published as a single text in Autobiographies. While the second and third versions revise and augment the first, my

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reading of the Life addresses, with few exceptions, the first, the Narrative—those earliest “memories” determining a psychic economy. While the later versions, arguably weaker both stylistically and structurally, capitalize on the first, I realize, in the end, there is, of course, no “first time”; repetition is always already at play—that is, the origin belongs to myth; as for beginnings, considered psychoanalytically or not, they but repeat, (re)constitute, what is already left behind. Cf. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 29: “To identify a point as a beginning is to classify it after the fact. . . . [A] beginning is often that which is left behind.” 2. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in Autobiographies, 143, hereafter parenthetically cited in the text as BF. 3. Andrew Levy, “Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Franklin, and the Trickster Reader,” College English 52.7 (1990): 748. 4. Cf. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, in Autobiographies, hereafter parenthetically cited in the text as LT, where, enigmatically, the final version of the Life deletes the heart-shaped ginger cake, and yet retains its force wholeheartedly: the prior “disappointment” with Aunt Katy and the expectation “that her heart would relent at last,” the summation of his mother’s life as one of “weariness and heartfelt sorrow,” and, finally, his intellectual inheritance for “any love of letters I may have” (483–84, italics mine). 5. Michael A. Chaney, “Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto(bio)ethnography,” African American Review 35.3 (2001): 399.Apropos the role of Egypt in this sentimental revisioning—specifically, the issue of race—see Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 95: “Douglass’s racial vision reflected his fundamental belief in a composite or mixed American race, which he, as a mulatto, personified.” Chapters 8 and 9, respectively, provide a comprehensive overview of this “composite nationality” and Douglass’s position on ethnology in general (197–250). For a discussion of Douglass’s philosophical acumen regarding American ethnology in light of his 1854 Commencement Address, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” at Western Reserve College, see Roderick M. Stewart, “The Claims of Frederick Douglass Philosophically Considered,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, eds. Bill E. Lawson and Frand M. Kirkland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 145–72. 6. The side view, here, works overtime, reiterates that “facial angle” that aligns the “colored” race halfway between the beast and “human” race according to American ethnography of the period, while, at the same time, narration’s “cultured” profile of the mother mutely contra-dicts its beastial classification. 7. Here’s Douglass on the genesis of this event: “I got hold of a book entitled ‘The Columbian Orator.’ Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter, I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. . . . In this dialogue, the whole argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave” (N 41–42). 8. See Eduardo Cadava, “The Monstrosity of Human Rights,” PMLA 121.5 (2006): 1560, 1562: “Beyond the monster’s body, in which Douglass would have recognized several features linked to black slaves (his brutelike strength, size, ‘lustrous’ and ‘ragged’ black hair, black lips, capacity to subsist on course diets and to endure extreme climes), it is his story that first would have caught Douglass’s attention. . . . Bereft of a determinable childhood, the monster embodies Douglass’s own sense of monstrosity and the slave’s nonrelation to parentage, to date and place of birth, and to brothers and sisters. . . . Like the monster, he becomes a creature of language.” 9. See, for instance, H. Bruce Franklin, “Animal Farm Unbound,” New Letters 43.3 (1977): 31: “These images not only structure the development of the Narrative, but also locate the book on the front lines of a major ideological battleground of the 1840’s and 1850’s. Douglass is asking, and answering, one central question in the Narrative: What is a human being?”

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10. Peter A. Dorsey, “Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Metaphor in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom,” PMLA 3.3 (1996): 440. 11. Houston A. Baker Jr., Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 76. 12. David Van Leer, “Reading Slavery: The Anxiety of Ethnicity in Douglass’ Narrative,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 132. 13. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 180. For a reading of McFeely’s book against the background of biography in general, see Ben Slote, “Revising Freely: Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Disembodiment,” Auto/ Biography Studies 11.1 (1996): 19–37. 14. Deborah E. McDowell, “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 201. 15. Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 91.For variant readings of this scene, see, for example, Van Leer, who argues that Douglass, as a boy, “does not understand . . . that this particular horror is not and never will be his” (131). Cf. Wallace, who reads the scene in light of its homoerotic implications—most notably, Douglass’s terror at the thought “it would be my turn next” (N 19)—and thus sees Douglass caught up by “the logic of spectragraphia as the object of Anthony’s sadistic desires in his own fearful imagination” (87): Hence, his own “boyish polymorphism,” its “phobic posture toward dynamic sexual identity generally and its feminine displays specifically . . . provokes Douglass’s sudden retaliation against Covey later on” (91). Cf., also, Jenny Franchot, “The Punishment of Ester: Frederick Douglass and the Constitution of the Feminine,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 150, who argues that this scene constitutes the “originating moment” of the Covey scene, “and thus lodges a memorial urge inside his rhetoric of indictment aimed at exposing slavery’s ‘foul embrace.’” 16. Cf. Thad Ziolkowski, “Antitheses: The Dialectic of Violence and Literacy in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of 1845,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 159, 160, who notes, in passing, that “Douglass’s quest for literacy can be seen in some sense as a displaced attempt to relocate and reunite with his mother (a mother tongue)”; therefore, “since Mrs. Auld is inextricably connected to his acquisition of literacy (a fact that accounts in part for the radiance of his description), one feels compelled to [remark] the mother-identified valence of literacy.” 17. Quoted in Martin, 235. 18. Cf. Donald B. Gibson, “Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and the Slavery Debate: Bondage, Family, and the Discourse of Domesticity,” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays, eds. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 162: “What might appear to western critics inclined to Freudian interpretations to be a search for the father . . . is in fact a wish to establish community, a mode of response far more compatible with an Africanist bent, more in keeping with the subject’s historical connection to his African past.”For a theoretical model of this trans-subjective matrix, see Stefani Engelstein, “Sibling Logic; or, Antigone Again,” PMLA 126.1 (2011), 38–54. 19. Robert B. Stepto, “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 301. 20. See Ann Kibbey and Michele Stepto, “The Antilanguage of Slavery: Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” in Andrews, 166–67: “The absence of intersubjective utterance—an absence definitive, for Douglass, of all master-slave discourse—constitutes

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the linguistic meaning of enslavement. . . . In this primary relation of slavery, where the humanity of both master and slave is concealed, the words that pass between them function as an antilanguage, creating a social territory marked by an unutterable ‘I’ and ‘you.’” 21. Cf. Albert E. Stone, “Identity and Art in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative,” College Language Association Journal 17 (1973): 207, who argues that “Douglass’s deepest impulses towards freedom, personal identity, and self-expression are fused and represented in [the] memories and images of ships and the sea. . . . Far more so than animal imagery, I believe, this pattern is central to Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography for it connects and defines all stages of his personal history.” 22. Cf. Daniel Walker Howe, The Making of the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 151: “There is no single moment of ‘new birth’ in Douglass’s life story,” rather, “there are recurrent epiphanies.” 23. I frame the theoretical foundation of my subsequent argument, regarding reason and capital, in the philosophical space between Kant’s First and Second Critique— that is, the difference (and differance, as well) between “pure” reason (speculation: the transcendental Ideas), and its moral cohort, reason “practical”—that is, the will’s “imperatives,” its own interior divide, conditioned by, in Kant’s term, interest (viz. “hypothetical”), and that imperative entirely unconditional (viz. “categorical”). Morality— the categorical imperative, a practical, synthetic a priori proposition—“in the end” thus gives itSelf those laws that it obeys: It must not (ought not) be determined by its interest. Disposed to, and set up by, (the idea of) freedom, happiness, ironically, can never be its ground. In other words, it takes no risks. This leads, of course, to duty, to religion, and to God. The value of pure reason, on the other hand, devoid of all deception and illusion, equally affords its own indemnity since speculation underwrites and guarantees its own Idea(l): In other words, it takes no risks, as well. Thus, speculation guarantees a risk-free apparatus that discredits any fracture, any “fraction,” of the whole; it discounts its “irrationality,” while reason, in its “practice,” in the practice of morality, its duty, seeks to plug the holes (of happiness, its own desire). Reason, as a (w)hole, thus freely constitutes what’s right; yet, in the “mean”time, reason’s happiness (its capital in practice), having turned up hypothetically (and afterward remaindered in the interest of morality as such), returns as speculation’s specter; it haunts the stage and steals the show. Time earns itself, its own return(s), since, in “the end,” morality brings (with it) happiness.For a discussion of Douglass’s position regarding the inosculation of states of mind, morality, and language/grammar in light of Kant’s moral maxims, see Stephen L. Thompson, “The Grammar of Civilization: Douglass and Crummell on Doing Things with Words,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, eds. Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 173–203. For a discussion of Douglass’s position regarding moral suasion in relation to discourse and acts of violence in light of Kant’s essay, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” see Frank M. Kirkland, “Enslavement, Moral Suasion, and Struggles for Recognition: Frederick Douglass’s Answer to the Question—‘What Is Enlightenment?’” in Lawson and Kirkland, 243–310. 24. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 69. 25. Waldo Martin tips his hat to this configuration in Douglass’s oeuvre, most notably the essay on “Self-Made Men,” but skirts the principal contention of my argument by sanctioning the primacy of moral principles: “Douglass’s standard speech on ‘Self-Made Men’ . . . accentuated the morality of success rather than its economics”; his “vision of success,” however, while “essentially moral,” was, at the same time, “very much economic” (256). Conversely, I maintain that “economics,” in the Narrative, already holds, at least unconsciously, the upper hand—above all, its con-fusion and conflation of domestic issues (oikos nomos) and the “ideology” of capital—as when, for instance, Douglass backs the right to steal in order to survive: “I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for

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carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out” (N 33).H. Bruce Franklin cleverly observes the economic dimension of this moral inversion: “the slave must violate the property rights defined by society; he must steal a bag intended to help produce profits” (36, italics mine). Indeed, morality is left behind once theft becomes a simple, single matter of legality—a matter (res: that is, a matter for discourse, as in “he knows his things”) inosculated by a profit margin, marginalized, that is, by capital. Religion, by definition, is subsequently compromised as well. In the 1855 re-vision of the Life, the institution of slavery, as such, ordains the right to steal: It was necessary that the right to steal [food] from others should be established; and this could only rest upon a wider range of generalization than that which supposed the right to steal from my master. It was sometime before I arrived at this clear right. The reader will get some idea of my train of reasoning, by a brief statement of the case. “I am,” thought I, “not only the slave of Master Thomas, but I am the slave of society at large. Society at large has bound itself, in form and in fact, to assist Master Thomas in robbing me of my rightful liberty, and of the just reward of my labor; therefore, whatever rights I have against Master Thomas, I have equally, against those confederated with him in robbing me of liberty. . . .” . . . . I hold that the slave is fully justified in helping himself to the gold and silver, and the best apparel of his master, or that of any other slaveholder; and that such taking is not stealing in any just sense of that word. The morality of free society can have no application to slave society (BF 247–48). Cf. also David Leverenz, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Refashioning,” Criticism 29.3 (1987): 365, on later incarnations of the “self-made man” within the evolution of the oeuvre: “Douglass’s claims for manhood show his realism about the capitalist middle class. Competition and material success, not kinship ties and craftsmanship, formed the new basis for a man’s self-respect.” 26. Cf. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 66: “Let us say merely that what is called capital is grounded in the principle that money is nothing other than time placed in reserve, available. It matters little whether this be after the event or in advance of what is called ‘real time.’ ‘Real time’ is only the moment at which the time conserved in the form of money is realized. What is important for capital is not the time already invested in goods and services, but the time still stored in stocks of ‘free’ or ‘fresh’ money, given that this represents the only time which can be used with a view to organizing the future and neutralizing the event.”Cf. also, for a classic Marxist interpretation, R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: Penguin, 1961), 249: “The typical qualities of the successful business life, in the days before the rise of joint-stock enterprise, were intensity and earnestness of labour, concentration, system and method, the initiative which broke with routine and the foresight which postponed the present to the future” (italics mine). 27. Quoted in Martin, 254. 28. The whole scenario is not without its irony—and price. In England (“Mother” England, to be sure), treated as an equal everywhere—“never, during the whole time, having met with a single word, look, or gesture, which gave me the slightest reason to think my color was an offense to anybody”—Douglass finally secures his liberty: To . . . friends I owe my freedom in the United States. . . . [T]hey raised a fund sufficient to purchase my freedom, and actually paid it over, and placed the papers of my manumission in my hands. . . . To this commercial transaction I owe my exemption from the democratic operation of the fugitive slave bill of 1850. . . . The sum paid for my freedom was one hundred and fifty pounds sterling.

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Frederick Douglass: Domestic Hardships and Capital Gains Some of my uncompromising anti-slavery friends . . . failed to see the wisdom of this arrangement. . . . They thought it a violation of anti-slavery principles—conceding a right of property in man—and a wasteful expenditure of money. On the other hand, viewing it simply in the light of a ransom, or as money extorted by a robber, . . . I could not see either a violation of the laws of morality, or those of economy, in the transaction. (BF 388, 376–77)

29. See John Seelye, “The Measure of His Company: Richard M. Nixon in Amber,” Virginia Quarterly Review 53.4 (1977): 594: “The Declaration is a manifesto, a millennial proclamation, the Constitution a body of laws founded on the sacredness of property, . . . the kind of scaffold from which men were sold to other men, a transaction protected by the shibboleth of property even as it belied the proposition concerning the equality of all men, under God, Amen.” 30. Cf. Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 48: “Does not the early sibling experience of creating ‘otherness’ out of sameness underlie the instant ‘otherness’ of race, class and ethnicity, an otherness that renders invisible the sameness that then has to be rediscovered at a greatly sophisticated level?” 31. Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 45, 39, 40. In general, Giles argues that My Bondage and My Freedom revises the patriotic features of the Narrative in light of a transnational perspective that both demystifies and reconstitutes the sense of national identity.Cf. Roosevelt Montás, “Meaning and Transcendence: Melville, Douglass, and the Anxiety of Interpretation,” Leviathan 10.2 (2008): 69–83, who reads the “progress” of Douglass’s three autobiographical accounts, and its understanding of the Constitution, as one which gradually moves away from addressing specific social ills of slavery, to one which finally negotiates a more transcendent sense of liberty.” 32. “The Douglass Institute,” quoted in Giles, Virtual Americas, 40. 33. “Colored Americans, and Aliens—T. F. Meagher” and “The Present Condition and Future Prospects of the Negro People,” respectively, quoted in Giles, Virtual Americas, 41. 34. “Speech before American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society,” quoted in the “Introduction” to BF, 128. 35. Lee Jenkins, “‘The Black O’Connell’: Frederick Douglass and Ireland,” Nineteenth Century Studies 13 (1999): 38. 36. Patricia Ferreira, “All But ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine,” American Studies International 37.2 (1999): 72. 37. See Sarah Luria, “Racial Equality Begins at Home: Frederick Douglass’s Challenge to American Domesticity,” in The American Home: Material Culture, Domestic Space, and Family Life, ed. Eleanor McD. Thompson (Winterthur, DE: Winterthur Museum, 1998), 33, who, in the context of discussing the architectural space(s) of Douglass’s Cedar Hill home, remarks that “Douglass’s literary father (from whom he took his name) was Sir James of Douglas, a character in Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Sir James was also nobility and was wrongfully banished from his estate. Placed within the literary context from which Douglass fashioned an identity for himself, Cedar Hill becomes the estate from which Douglass’s noble, enslaved family had been dispossessed and to which he triumphantly returns at the end of his life.” 38. Russ Castronovo, “‘As to Nation, I Belong to None’: Ambivalence, Diaspora, and Frederick Douglass,” American Transcendental Quarterly 9.3 (1995): 258. 39. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3. 40. In the Enlightenment context of Kant, morality leads to religion insofar as practical reason postulates the ideas of freedom, immortality, and God. Ultimately, only the idea of God can unify both pure and practical reason. And, while pure reason cannot prove that God exists, the moral law demands it. Ergo, faith is “justifiable”; belief in God makes sense.

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41. Indeed, I can see no reason for making a distinction between Douglass’s conception of Providence and of a Christian God: They are, to all intents and purposes, identical. Cf. SallyAnn H. Ferguson, “Christian Violence and the Slave Narrative,” American Literature 68.2 (1996): 309: “Douglass . . . acknowledges the rule of a universal Providence over his life and credits good fortune to that Providence rather than to a culture-based Christian God.” 42. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad: Or,The New Pilgrims’ Progress (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 56. 43. Cf. Jeannine DeLombard, “‘Eye-Witness to the Cruelty’: Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” American Literature 73.2 (2001): 252: “Because the vision of the enslaved witness exposes but does not transcend the property and caste relations that threaten to divide the nation into more than just separate farms, the eye (and the I) of the witness can never be transparent; it is always, like Frederick’s ‘burst’ eyeball, undeniably corporeal.” 44. See Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 243: “everything is material to the libido.” 45. I have in mind, once more, Kant’s regulative deployment of the transcendental Idea(l) of “pure” reason—that is, religion as grounded in reflection on “practical” reason, on reason in its moral use. 46. See Seelye, 595: “In many ways, the black man in America is the white man’s shadow, and Douglass is Ben Franklin’s specific shade, his book assuming the shape of spiritual autobiography also. For Douglass’s is definably a black book, in Gothic characters putting forth the outlines of the Protestant Epic in reverse, being not a record of essays to do good but attempts to be bad, . . . inventing virtue from an evil necessity”; as a perversion of the Protestant Epic and its work ethic, “it also manifests its essential flaw, an ontological fault in the little, lower layer, the corium, which is neither white or black but red, signifying our universal mortality.” 47. Hazel Carby, “Imagining Black Men: The Politics of Cultural Identity,” Yale Review 80.3 (1992): 187. 48. Cf. Douglass’s “Speech before American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society,” quoted in the “Introduction” to BF, 128: “The glorious doctrines of your revolutionary fathers, and the more glorious teachings of the Son of God, are construed and applied against us. We are literally scourged beyond the beneficent range of both authorities, human and divine.” 49. So, too, in changing his opinion on the Constitution (“Change of Opinion”), Douglass discredits the reader’s credibility, a reader badly in need of tutelage. See Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 176–77: “In arriving at the conclusion that . . . the proslavery interpretation of the Constitution [was wrong], Douglass could now argue explicitly the crucial fact that white Americans were bad readers. . . . [W]hite Americans had to be reeducated as readers. . . . The root of the present crisis lay . . . [with] a conscious act of misreading on the part of the slave owners and a potentially more troubling misreading on the part of the Garrisonians.” 50. Joseph Fichtelberg, The Complex Image: Faith and Method in American Autobiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 116.In the years between the Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass reconstructs this scene in constitutional terms, arguing that “those provisions intended to apply to slavery” were couched in “uncertain” and “equivocal” terms, an ambiguity that, if divorced from its historical context, can only be resolved by reinterpreting the “dead” letter of the Constitution as a “living” document in and of itself (Dorsey, 446–47). My Bondage and My Freedom rehearses the argument in light of reason’s “passion” for the whole: I held it to be the first duty of the non-slaveholding states to dissolve the union. . . . [U]pon a reconsideration of the whole subject, I became convinced that there was no necessity for dissolving the “union between the northern

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Frederick Douglass: Domestic Hardships and Capital Gains and southern states”; that to seek this dissolution was no part of my duty as an abolitionist. . . . [T]he constitution . . . is, in its letter and spirit, an antislavery instrument. . . . [N]ot one word can be found in the constitution to authorize [slavery]. Then, . . . if the declared purposes of an instrument are to govern the meaning of all its parts and details, . . . the constitution of our country is our warrant for the abolition of slavery. (393)

51. Recall the ending of the Narrative, and the subscription to a newspaper, the “Liberator,” which “became my meat and my drink” (N 96), and then compound that interest with the subsequent investment in a printing press—to wit, establishing a newspaper whose speculation cost, according to James M’Cune Smith, roughly “twelve thousand dollars of his own hard earned money” (“Introduction” to BF, 131).The concluding chapter of My Bondage and My Freedom gives a further overview of its parameters in 1855: “The paper has been successful. It is a large sheet, costing eighty dollars per week—has three thousand subscribers—has been published regularly nearly eight years” (391). 52. Within fifteen years, the Narrative had sold a whopping thirty thousand copies; for more specifics, see the “Introduction” to The Slave’s Narrative, eds. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), xvi. 53. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, in Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), 447.

Third Movement Louisa May Alcott: The Dividends of Foreign Exchange

“Duty, n. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo March; “It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg; “I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have lots of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,” added little Amy; “We’ve got father and mother, and each other, anyhow,” said Beth: So begins a text devoted to home and its economy (oikos nomos). 1 Home rule knows nothing of extravagance. Notice, also, from its ownmost inception, the récit exposes distress. Absence rules at home—an emptiness marked by a fall: “When Mr. March lost his property in trying to help an unfortunate friend, the two oldest girls begged to be allowed to do something toward their own support” (36). Notice, further, a lack that implicates the household’s innermost integrity, regarding which Jo amends Beth’s hasty remark: “‘We haven’t got father, and shall not have him for a long time.’ She didn’t say ‘perhaps never,’ but each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was” (1). Here, the household’s missing masculine member signals the state of the nation’s house, as well, its economy equally distressed and dismembered, as one old man remarks to Mrs. March: “I had four [sons], but two were killed; one is a prisoner, and I’m going to the other, who is very sick in a Washington hospital” (43). Don’t think this scene arrives without its oedipal triangulation: The political unconscious, forever and a day, bears with it the price of parricide, embedded in all “affairs” of state—here further transfigured by issues congenitally related to home and hospitality. 2 Death has memorized its whereabouts in this opening scene, and devastates both private household and the house of state in a comprehensive coup—one nonetheless, in its ironic dissemination, seemingly recuperated, by a single stroke, a Divine Economy, the “outside” of castration, if you will, always and everywhere at work, an unrestricted economy: “learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father”—“the best lover of all” (81, 437). 3 The House of God, however, suffers its own wound: Protestant Christianity finds itself at war, internally divided between its 109

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Northern and Southern positions on slavery. Christmas figures into this account as both its “principle” and interest at once, the interest compounded when Christmas rolls around a second time—bankrolled by Dickens. 4 The absence of the father binds home and homeland in a single patriotic gesture that drives narration’s ownmost desire, determined, by an overdetermined sense of duty, to restore domestic and political integrity to a bankrupt “American” economy. Mrs. March sums up the sentiment: “speaking of father reminded me how much I miss him, how much I owe him, and how faithfully I should watch and work to keep his little daughters safe and good for him. . . . I gave my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone. Why should I complain, when we both have merely done our duty” (81). In the meantime, in the time it takes to heal this wound (blessure), narration—“taking time by the fetlock” (105), the forelock, the foreskin, however you choose to figure it—extols labor as the pharmakon; housework constitutes a blessing in disguise: “work is a blessed solace. Hope, and keep busy” (167). Jo sets the household gears in motion—the “domestic machinery” in its entirety: “I’ll try and be what [father] loves to call me, ‘a little woman,’ and not be rough and wild; but do my duty here instead of wanting to be somewhere else”; then “out came the four little work-baskets and the needles flew” (260, 9, 10). Homework transforms “house” to “home,” a “glorified bower” into “paradise,” and, what’s more, carries with it its own rewards (273). Work, according to Carlyle, one of Alcott’s venerated writers, provides a remedy to introspection and despair, as Elaine Showalter observes, as well as “an opiate for controlling . . . anger and passion.” 5 Recall the hostility to which both Mrs. March and Jo are held hostage: Both women would, in turn, prefer to be at home with their hostility. Housework generates a sense of equanimity; under its mesmeric spell, as Jo’s “pome” sermonizes, “The busy mind has no time to think/ Of sorrow or care or gloom;/ And anxious thoughts may be swept away,/ As we bravely wield a broom./ ‘I am glad a task to me is given,/ To labour at day by day;/ For it brings me health and strength and hope’”—not to mention happiness, as Mr. March proclaims: “I value the womanly skill which keeps home happy more than white hands or fashionable accomplishments” (171, 195). Work lubricates the household machinery: It (with)holds the promise of jouissance—up to a point.

Unless I’m grievously mistaken, Hannah’s in the kitchen, who works “like three women in one,” and, with the advent of Amy’s luncheon, for instance, “was out of humor because her week’s work was deranged and prophesied that ‘ef the washin’ and ironin’ warn’t done reg’lar nothin’

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would go well anywheres”—a “hitch in the main-spring of the domestic machinery” that “had a bad effect upon the whole concern” (159, 260).

No matter how you choose to slice it, housework can be anything but heavenly: “it was an immense relief to them all to have a little work, and they took hold with a will, but soon realised the truth of Hannah’s saying, ‘Housekeeping ain’t no joke’” (111). Homework, despite everything, remains work, and this remainder amounts to nothing if it fails to guarantee the household’s fundamental economy, proper home rule. Witness, for instance, Meg’s consummate domestic impropriety, “free to take what she liked” from her husband’s income so long as “she should keep account of every penny, pay bills once a month, and remember that she was a poor man’s wife” (280–81). One autumn, however, “the serpent got into Meg’s paradise, and tempted her, like many a modern Eve, not with apples, but with dress” (281). Time (aka money) is out of joint, home rule ruined. Still, in the end, love trumps extravagance, and with it comes a moral, as well: “Meg learned to love her husband better for his poverty, because it seemed to have made a man of him . . . and taught him a tender patience with which to bear and comfort the natural longings and failures of those he loved” (284). So, too, time draws nigh itself; home retrieves its punctuality, the very time of life itself: “the year rolled round, and at Midsummer there came to Meg a new experience—the deepest and tenderest of a woman’s life” (284). Turning dream, Meg’s “castle in the air,” into reality, the homestead is accordingly made steadfast (164)—a labor of love.

Innately homely, narration is uncannily driven toward redeeming the American dream, regaining paradise, regulated solely by domestic authority—routine, familial, familiar—despite, in spite of, an alien specter conspicuously at work, a foreign presence that “governs” the récit and (over)rules narration’s progress from the start. I recall you to the work “in progress” that binds the feminine to home and homeland at once— sisters, one and all: pilgrims, to boot. Haunted from the outset, its own authority deferred, the text appropriates a ghostwriter, an English author, John Bunyan, whose “proper” name now author-izes the narrative’s integrity. Pilgrim’s Progress, “a true guide-book for any pilgrim going the long journey” (12), serves to rectify the discord in this Concord household, and the nation as a whole. Doubly so precisely insofar as narration itself becomes an exercise in reading characters reading, a veritable miseen-abyme. During the inaugural Christmas scene, in which each girl is given her own individually colored edition, Meg encourages the girls to keep their Bunyan close at hand, “and read a little every morning”; then

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“the rooms were very still while the pages were softly turned, and the winter sunshine crept in to touch the bright heads and serious faces with a Christmas greeting” (13). Accordingly, narration marks its own “progress,” regulated and adjudicated by an-“other” plot with which it religiously keeps step. For example, chapter 16, “Letters,” commences in “the cold gray dawn,” as “the sisters lit their lamp, and read their chapter with an earnestness never felt before, for now the shadow of a real trouble had come, showing them how rich in sunshine their lives had been”; now, more than ever, those “little books were full of help and comfort” (166). In chapter 22, “Pleasant Meadows,” the narrative advances with the two texts still in step, the present presaging the future, as well: “I read,” says Beth, “in ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ today, how, after many troubles, Christian and Hopeful came to a pleasant green meadow, where . . . they rested happily, as we do now, before they went on to their journey’s end” (224). And chapter 40, “The Valley of the Shadow,” sees that future come to pass with Beth’s passing: “those about her felt that she was ready, saw that the first pilgrim called was likewise the fittest, and waited with her on the shore, trying to see the shining ones coming to receive her when she crossed the river” (415–16). Here, as everywhere, narration takes its Pilgrim’s Progress in stride, its own “identity” both mirrored in and doubled by this “habitual” text to which it proves itself duty-bound—foreign, yet familialy familiar, housed uniformly in the mother tongue. Strange bedfellows, perhaps—a Yankee and a Brit—but, then, such (double)crossing demarcates the threshold of the home, the seat of hospitality, the site of a contested space, a space contested by the stranger as “guest.” At bottom, hospitality transcends all questions of economy (the law itself: oikos nomos): it transfigures, so to speak, economy (home rule) into the step (trans-) beyond. In crossing the threshold, the guest, the outsider, the “foreigner” as such, transgresses the host, the host itself held hostage now, contaminated, by a parasite. 6 To conjugate this pair—Bunyan bestride Alcott, in conjugal terms—paternity lays down the (phallocentric) law. Hence, in a text so captured by the lure (méconnaissance)—if not the phantasy—of its “American” integrity, its temperament and character, the foreign, inopportune as it may seem, has always already routinely settled in (as in this sentence, as well), con-fusing and con-founding the very basis of identity. 7 It serves to further unsettle things. Note, also, the epidemic of references to foreign texts, either directly or by way of allusion, by means of which this tainted narrative line simultaneously threads its way through issues of identity—of limits, of space, of one’s abode—and weaves its transnational threads. To cite a few: Jo reads The Vicar of Wakefield while Aunt March, who favors Belsham’s Essays, sleeps (41); Meg reads Ivanhoe (38); Mr. Davis has no more talent for teaching than Dickens’s “Dr. Blimber” (67); Mrs. March reads

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aloud from Bremer, Scott, and Edgeworth (99); the girls establish a Pickwick Club with its “Pickwick Portfolio” newspaper, and name their canary Pip (100–04, 113); Kate reads French novels and “admired the style” (128); Meg reads Schiller’s Mary Stuart aloud to Mr. Brooke (133); Laurie praises Jo’s stories as “works of Shakespeare compared to half the rubbish that’s published every day” (151); Jo and Mr. Laurence exchange quips about “Boswell’s Johnson” while Johnson’s Rasselas “tumbled face downward on the floor” (214); Jo’s countenance bears a “deportment like ‘Maud’s’ face” (290); Professor Bhaer sings lines from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (335); Jo reads Hans Andersen’s fairy tales in German (342); Jo possesses “a womanly instinct” regarding the power of clothes, though she “had never read Sartor Resartus” (346); a “famous divine flirted openly with one of the Madame de Staëls of the age, who looked daggers at another Corinne” (351); Laurie tells Amy, “You look like Balzac’s ‘Femme peinte par elle même’” (386); Amy sings lines from Thomas More (453); and Laurie refers to Amy as Madame Récamier (457). 8 In effect, such invasive textual “contamination” erodes any sense of national integrity, de-moralizes, if you will, narration’s ownmost ethos and identity. 9 A mishmash of nations and nationalities further muddles up—or, better, hybridizes—the narrative line, infects its purity. Meg proclaims the night sky “dark as Egypt” (30); Aunt March’s parrot “talked Spanish” (51); Sallie assures Meg that she looks “quite French” in her “French heels” (91); Meg wears a “French print” at Camp Laurence in the presence of Laurie’s English friend, Fred, whom Laurie calls “a true John Bull” while Sallie expresses her preference for “French gloves” (121, 132); Laurie declares his home life “dull as the desert of Sahara” (140); Laurie’s grandfather wants him “to be an India merchant” (144); Jo tells Laurie, “I’ll teach you to knit as the Scotchmen do” (146); Jo writes a letter to her mother “on a big sheet of thin, foreign paper, ornamented with blots, and all manner of flourishes and curly-tailed letters” (170); Aunt March orders her French maid, Estelle, to change her name to “Esther” (192); Amy’s chief delight at Aunt March’s “was an Indian cabinet” (193); Jo attends a lecture with Miss Crocker “on the Pyramids” (266). And, on the very threshold of the text, the sisters make sheets for Aunt March, adopting “Jo’s plan of dividing the long seams into four parts, and calling the quarters Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in that way got on capitally, especially when they talked about the different countries as they stitched their way through them” (10). Narration itSelf has memorized this “sheet” as if its life depended on a similar stitch—a stitch in time so fast, so hastily (mis)taken, that it comes to a halt. But I’m ahead of things. Character likewise yields to this precipitate necessity, abandons its “self,” con-fusing and con-founding “American” identity, always already belated, never properly itself, uncertain of its parentage. Laurie, most ostensibly, represents a strange and somewhat exotic bird in the Concord

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nest, an amalgam of national interests—schooled in Switzerland, fluent in French, mad about Napoleon, determined to live in Italy and, later, to settle in Germany (28, 131, 29, 142). When Jo teasingly invites him to dance the polka, he responds “with a queer little French bow” (29); when skating on the river, he sprints away, “looking like a young Russian, in his fur-trimmed coat and cap” (77); and when walking on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, he “looked like an Italian, was dressed like an Englishman, and had the independent air of an American” (377). Similarly, Jo is generally considered a “Sancho” (15), and Aunt March “a regular Old Man of the Sea” (34). Indeed, narration’s very own vocabulary, its mother tongue, freely imports foreign words, as well—the second half of the récit entrenched in them, a veritable glossary of foreign terms: chateau en Espagne (345), désillusionnée (352), aplomb (380), coiffures, chasséed, mouchoir (382), débonnaire, salle à manger (383), Dolce far niente (403), dénouement (430), tableau (431), confidante (437), châtelaine, (448), coupé (449). The effect of such widespread “translation,” this American appropriation of the foreign, of foreign elements, indicates a crisis in the proper as such—what is proper to nation and narration at once. Such impropriety, quite properly, belongs to sentiment, and constitutes its ownmost property. Ethics—or, in the language of sentiment, “the moral of the story”—straddles this aporia.

On the one hand, as Shirley Samuels suggests, sentimentality lies “literally at the heart of nineteenth-century American culture” and frames a “national project about imagining the nation’s bodies and the national body.” 10 In this respect, Alcott’s Little Women mirrors this project—an ideological maneuver in whose service the national imaginary puts into play the archetypal divide between masculine and feminine with its clichéd accoutrement: head/heart, reason/emotion, public/private. On the other hand, however, Little Women’s sentiment gives in to this hedge, gives away the very thing it most desires, desire itself, in favor of morality. Here, sentiment knows nothing whatsoever of the body “proper”— personal or national; rather, it transcends all sense of nationality, driven by its categorical imperative to moralize the drift of temporality. In this wake, narration serves up sentiment to both temporalize morality and temporize its own desire, as well (arguably, Goethe represents the outer limits of this nonsense). Given its contradictory “drive(s),” narration ironically prohibits intercourse with any vestige of propriety: In other words, it cries at the drop of a hat—the hat, in this case, operating at the level of the fetish. 11 In this sense, Elizabeth Janeway observes, sentimentality “falsifies emotion and manipulates the process of life.” 12

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Duty is the culprit and scapegoat at once. Call it love, or “benevolence” (312), if you like (a rose by any other name)—or even “character” (314). From the outset, narration upstages itself, denying self-denial in the name of charity; the moral of the opening scene comes down to feeding the poor (Germans, to boot); it all amounts to this: Four hungry little girls “who gave away their breakfasts” (16). 13 Meg speaks for all: “That’s loving our neighbor better than ourselves” (16). In the meantime, “mother was upstairs collecting clothes for the poor Hummels” (16). Narration’s “line” confounds morality and sentiment. This constitutes the bottom line. At bottom, narration is a mother, a supplement—“the faceless figure of a figurant, an extra,” to recite Derrida on Nietzsche, who “gives rise to all the figures by losing herself in the background of the scene like an anonymous persona. . . . She survives on the condition of remaining at bottom. 14 Yet, in between time, in its crevices, narration falls apart, disintegrates. While it identifies with Jo, the “intellectual” who denies all “sentimental stuff” (56), and thus denies, as well, its own desire (not to desire) by sticking to its moral precedence, narration, nonetheless, betrays itSelf. I bring to your attention the fault lines in its third-person, omniscient point of view, those fractures in narration where a gendered, sentimental “feminine” peeps out, exposes the Kern—the very “heart”—of all morality. 15 To re-collect Pascal, the heart has reasons of which reason itself knows nothing. Let’s inspect the cracks, narration’s heart-felt wrinkles in time—most notably, the following abyss: “Now if there is anything mortifying to our feelings, when we are young, it is to be told that [little girls shouldn’t ask questions]; and to be bidden to ‘run away, dear,’ is still more trying to us” (72). Elsewhere and otherwise, the fault line looks like this: “dear me, let us be elegant or die” (26); “I think Jo was right” (33); “If you will believe me, . . . ” (64); “it’s my private belief that . . . ” (68); “we will rob an imaginary mail, and read them [letters]”; “I am glad of it” (186); “the curtain falls. . . . Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act” (235); “In order that we may start afresh, . . . it will be well to begin with a little gossip. . . . And here let me premise, that if any of the elders think there is too much ‘lovering’ in the story, as I fear they may, . . . I can only say . . . ” (236); “I don’t think . . . ” (240); “it may be a good time to tell of a few changes which three years have wrought . . . ” (249); “It wasn’t at all the thing, I’m afraid” (251); “‘Morals don’t sell nowadays’; which was not quite a correct statement, by the way” (347); “Ah, Jo, instead of wishing that, thank God that ‘father and mother were particular’” (356); “we all have our little weaknesses” (382); “Women work a good many miracles, and I have a persuasion that they may perform even that of raising the standard of manhood” (423); “we will not hint that . . . ” (426); “I cannot feel that I have done my duty as humble historian of the March family, without . . . ” (461); “so I suppose . . . ” (465). In working through these irrepressible outbursts, the

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narrative economy works overtime to guarantee the intercourse of reason and morality (I’ll let Kant annotate this scene)—that is, narration “works over” time to iron out any wrinkle of desire. Tocqueville commandingly expressed the sentiment: “morals are the work of woman.” 16 Sentiment, in turn, affords the sauce with which morality is served, what sweetens up the moral meat attached to duty’s bone.

Over and against narration’s self-absorbed engagement with domestic life, Jo March has a bone to pick, and threatens the domestic economy as such. Unlike her siblings, who seem more or less content within the “private” sphere, with household matters, with the domestic as such, Jo, the most “sensible” of the bunch, who appositely tells her mother that “Amy is distinguishing herself abroad; but if anything is amiss at home, I’m your man,” desires money, and the power it brings: “She saw that money conferred power: money and power, therefore, she resolved to have” (322, 345). To this end, she translates her common sense to cents, playing on the market’s demand for the sensational, and turns “to writing sensation stories—for in those dark ages, even all-perfect America read rubbish” (345–46). Sensation, by definition, militates against sense—its rubbish amounts to nonsense, chicken scratch, part and parcel of the henhouse product Hawthorne decried, imagination gone to seed, gone wild: (common) sense beside itself. In keeping with supply and its demand, sensation constitutes a form of currency, exchange, as well as a commodity. In this sense, Jo aligns herself with the traditional male subject position, with commerce and the “public” sphere—cross-dressed, to be sure, and looking very much like Hawthorne’s rebellious “angel and apostle of the coming revelation.” 17 For money, Jo prostitutes herself. Forget morality, as Mr. Dashwood observes: “People want to be amused, not preached at, you know. Morals don’t sell nowadays” (347). Rubbish does. Moreover, the nation itself, entangled in a civil war and heading toward the rubbish heap, is currently sensational. Given these “dark ages,” narration plies its trade along similar lines: “make it short and spicy, and never mind the moral” (348). For “thrilling tales,” however, Jo lacks experience. Eager to “bring home quantities of material for my rubbish,” she ransacks “police records and lunatic asylums”; she “searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes; she excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons; she studied faces in the street, and characters, good, bad, and indifferent, all about her; she delved in the dust of ancient times . . . and introduced herself to folly, sin, and misery” (329, 349). Such profit carries a price tag of its own: “unconsciously, she was beginning to desecrate some of the womenliest attributes of a woman’s character. She was living in bad society; and, imaginary though it was, its influence affected her,

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for she was feeding heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature” (349). Ironically, imagination trumps reality in the reviews: “I’ve got the joke on my side, after all; for the parts that were taken straight out of real life, are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head, are pronounced ‘charmingly natural, tender, and true.’” (272). To further conjugate the irony, Little Women, with its domestic economy, reconfigures the ideological divide between head/heart, real/imaginary, masculine/feminine. Witness, for example, this stereotypical confusion: “with Jo, brain developed earlier than heart, and she preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because, when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin-kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable” (324). Over and against the “reality” of (feminine) sentiment, (masculine) mentality gets taken as imaginary. Home-work works toward similar ends: It (man)handles things, manages the “affairs” of home, including its men. In keeping with this logic, Meg remarks, “I . . . was rather glad I hadn’t any wild brothers to do wicked things, and disgrace the family” (42). So, too, narration, in general, (mis)takes matters of the heart (the feminine) as “real” while the “head” (the masculine), now lines up with the imaginary itself. That is, bachelorhood and masculinity in general (a)void reality, whereas “feeling” names that spot marked with an “X” on the map of the real, which, to call upon Lacan, always returns to the same place: in this case, heart(h) and home. Homework takes it for granted: “boys will be boys” (422). You can bet the bank on this. 18 Narration’s take on Demi shows little sign of hedging the bet. Daisy, at the age of three, “demanded a ‘needler,’ and . . . set up housekeeping in the side-board. . . . A rosy, chubby, sunshiny little soul was Daisy, who found her way to everybody’s heart, and nestled there. . . . It was all fair weather in her world” (461–62). Demi, on the other hand, “was a true boy, . . . dear, dirty, naughty” (463–64)—and single-minded, to boot: When asked by grandpa “where you keep your mind,” Demi, “in a tone of calm conviction,” replies, quite simply, “[i]n my little belly” (463). Puberty confounds this single-mindedness with the addition of a second element. Let’s take a broad view of that scene in the omnibus: When Amy justifies the lobster to “the Tudor” boy (“Don’t you wish you were to have some of the salad he’s to make, and to see the charming young ladies who are to eat it?”), narration throws out this saucy remark: “Now that was tact, for two of the ruling foibles of the masculine mind were touched; the lobster was instantly surrounded by a halo of pleasing reminiscences, and curiosity about ‘the charming young ladies’ diverted his mind” (262–63). In the kitchen, this reduction boils down to food and sex. 19

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Perhaps the central chapter, “Tender Troubles,” knots itself most economically around the latter, translating the “reality” to an imaginary register it “knows” by heart. Here Jo, momentarily given to the very thing she works to control, (mis)reads the interplay between Laurie and Beth as a symptom of love: “If she had not got the new idea into her head, she would have seen nothing unusual in the fact, that Beth was very quiet, and Laurie very kind to her. But having given the rein to her lively fancy, it galloped away with her at a great pace; and common sense, being rather weakened by a long course of romance writing, did not come to the rescue” (324). Note the scene: “Beth lay on the sofa, and Laurie sat in a low chair close by” (324). The sofa is both setting and scene, the divan divine. 20 Looking to place herself out of the way, “to dispose of herself with all speed” (325), Jo wonders where to go, and “burning to lay herself upon the shrine of sisterly devotion, she sat down to settle that point” (325). This is not where (common) sense would go. Despite the narrative’s attempt to disregard this point, the stage is set. The point appears all on its own: “Now, the old sofa was a regular patriarch of a sofa—long, broad, well-cushioned, and low” (325). It represents the very “heart” of family life: “for the girls had slept and sprawled on it as babies, fished over the back, rode on the arms, and had menageries under it as children, and rested tired heads, dreamed dreams, and listened to tender talk on it as young women. They all loved it . . . and one corner had always been Jo’s favorite lounging-place” (325). It’s not by chance narration is now given to romance. Heads up: “Among the many pillows that adorned the venerable couch was one, hard, round, covered with prickly horsehair, and furnished with a knobby button at each end; this repulsive pillow was her especial property” (325). Tender buttons or prickly balls, the pillow’s uncanny anatomy leaves something to be desired (or nothing, as the case may be). Jo handles this aberration with dexterity—manhandles things: “Laurie knew this pillow well, and had cause to regard it with deep aversion, having been unmercifully pummelled with it in former days . . . and now frequently debarred by it from taking the seat he most coveted, next to Jo in the sofa corner” (325). Indeed, the pillow signals Jo’s desire: “If ‘the sausage,’ as they called it, stood on end, it was a sign that he might approach and repose; but if it lay flat across the sofa, woe to the man, woman, or child who dared disturb it” (325). 21 Something’s out of joint—something other than the disjointed penis itself. All significance revolves around this point. Narration does nothing if not flirt with this event. Let’s reconstitute the lay of the land, the lay-out of the scene where nothing goes by chance. It’s not for nothing that Jo forgets to barricade her corner—“and had not been in her seat five minutes, before a massive form appeared beside her, and with both arms spread over the sofa-back, both long legs

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stretched out before him, Laurie exclaimed, with a sigh of satisfaction,— ‘Now this is filling at the price’” (325). Jouissance this is not—but close. Little wonder that Laurie’s figure fills the vacant place, the place of the phallus; less wonder, still, that, falling toward the floor, the sausage “disappeared in a most mysterious manner”; no wonder whatsoever that Laurie takes its place, demanding to be pet: “a fellow deserves petting and ought to get it” (326). When Jo refuses his “touching appeal” (“Come, Jo, don’t be thorny”), she’s acting like a prick—to his desire: “Mother doesn’t approve of flirting, even in fun; and you do flirt desperately, Teddy” (326). Rejection only fans the flames: “my feelings must have a went” (326). Narration must, as well—Pickwick aside. Entirely (mis)taken by this scene, it cannot get enough. Sentimental narrative is nothing but a flirt. It drags things out and yet denies the value of that thing to which it is attracted most, to what, in fact, keeps it going, keeps it up—to what, in “truth,” constitutes, according to Nietzsche, the very fiction of truth as such: aka “a women,” aka “action at a distance,” aka seduction. Here, narration turns the tables on the dialogue: Jo, it seems, would play “that pleasant little game” if only she knew how: “it does look pleasant, but I can’t learn how it’s done” (326). It seems she’s doing fine while Laurie chokes desire to death: “I’m glad you can’t flirt; it’s really refreshing to see a sensible, straightforward girl” (326). Sense, not sentiment, now gets the better of the dialogue. Masculinity is not to be denied denial’s own seductive charm. Laurie speaks for all the boys: “We don’t like romps and flirts, though we may act as if we did sometimes” (327). While Laurie plays Cock Robin to “those harum-scarum girls,” narration is cocksure of things: “It was impossible to help laughing at the funny conflict between Laurie’s chivalrous reluctance to speak ill of womankind, and his very natural dislike of the unfeminine folly of which fashionable society showed him many samples. Jo knew that ‘young Laurence’ was . . . flattered enough by ladies of all ages to make a coxcomb of him” (327). Laurie’s “natural dislike” of flirtation looks forced, uncanny—appears, in fact, unnatural in light of the scene: Indeed, it seems as though “young Laurence” flirts quite naturally. Narration, in effect, denies the scene it draws—doubly insofar as it denies to human nature what is natural (romance) while it denies itself (“romance”) the value of flirtation. Sentimental narrative enacts this naturally. Denial constitutes its energy and force. This doesn’t stop the narrative from doing what it most cocksuredly denies—flirting with flirtation as such. Indeed, the outing at “Camp Laurence” had previously rehearsed narration’s pose here—buttressing Meg, this time, regarding Ned’s accusation (“There isn’t a bit of flirt in that girl”) as Sallie, in turn, likewise defends her friend “even while confessing her shortcomings” (137). If, at Camp Laurence, narration, by way of implication, appears to come up short, the “sausage” elongates those “Tender Troubles” into “Tender Buttons.” Narration gets off. Here Little Women comes (by its jouissance). It

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comes to this: By denying flirtation its proper place in romance, the sentimental narrative denies “romance” its ownmost sense of play. Everything is business-like, home-work. Narration sticks to its point: It has its flock to tend, its sentimental audience. It’s not by chance a moral clears the air, the very raison d’être of sentiment: “If you must have a ‘went,’ Teddy, go and devote yourself to one of the ‘pretty modest girls’ whom you do respect, and not waste your time with the silly ones” (327). Thus, “diving for the pillow,” Jo dismisses Laurie who, in the interim, had “absently wound Jo’s apron tassel round his finger” (328, 327). Things are cooking now: It’s time to go from frying pan to fire. Sausage in hand, Jo “plays dead” to guard against the prick of desire. No fowl play: A pillow does as well as anything, “raised” to signify the splitting of the subject tethered to “a woman’s apron-string” (328): It figures in the dis-stance of domestic liberty, as well, the (dis)appearance of demand. 22 Parenthetically, it’s only after Laurie marries Amy that “[t]he old pillow is up garret,” sent into retirement (442). Meanwhile, any coxcomb can figure on this: Whenever the heart aches, a headache’s close behind—though, as narration states of Beth, “at eighteen, neither heads nor hearts ache long” (329). Domesticity’s ownmost desire, its desire to domesticate desire itself, revolves around this point: the distance between apron and tassel—or, to call upon Freud, string and spool (0, 1). To finalize the scene, to firm things up, Jo resolves to disappear, to fade (aphanisis) from view, leave town, “for the home-nest was growing too narrow” (331). Narration, too, must have its “went,” must come (and go)—desires itself to be desired, to take its turn, be “it.” In this game of tag, “it” shows up in the fading of this scene. 23 Leaving home thus serves to tie up everything: “It may be vain and wrong to say it, but—I’m afraid—Laurie is getting too fond of me”; Beth “can pet and comfort him after I’m gone, and so cure him of this romantic notion” (330, 331). Given the perplexity of subject positions in (the) place of desire, the elbowing, the shoving match, who can blame the narrative for being equally confused? This leaves Laurie more resolved than (common) sense suggests: “It won’t do a bit of good, Jo. My eye is on you; so mind what you do, or I’ll come and bring you home” (332). “My eye,” my eye: Better the alternative, make good with the threat and come (go, go off—and bring her with you). He won’t. Narration knows its things ahead of time, and “screens,” ironically, its memory: Resolving to turn over “a new leaf,” Laurie’s intention collapses the plot upon this wrinkle in time: “I mean this one shall stay turned” (331). Mrs. March serves up the moral, a sentimental frisson, in its half-baked form to Jo: “You I leave to enjoy your liberty till you tire of it; for only then will you find that there is something sweeter” (331). “Something sweeter”: don’t bet the kitchen till this bread will rise: Nothing’s sweeter than that c . . . ouch.

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Concord’s in back of this; the grapes are sour, to be sure, transcendentalism’s lees—what Bram Dijkstra calls “the cult of the Household Nun.” 24 It’s to this safe-house that Mr. Laurence blissfully consigns his own grandson: “I’ve been coddling the fellow as if I’d been his grandmother. Let him do what he likes, as long as he is happy; he can’t get into mischief in that little nunnery over there” (59). A father figure this is not, nor God the Father in disguise. 25 Let’s cut away to what “the Angel of the House”—or, to call upon the Hummel family, “Der angel-kinder,” those “good angels” whose future Mrs. March works so tenaciously to secure— would rectify (15). It’s not the prostitute who throws a wrench into the work(s), who threatens to contaminate the nation’s economic health. Rather, the bachelor represents the locus of infection, of disease—a foreign body in the corpus of “America” (history’s exemplarary work “in progress”), dysfunctional, an obstacle to progress on the whole; he alienates both home and homeland from their own economy, the multiplication of citizen subjects—the alienation compounded when the bachelor, that foreign body, is itself a foreigner. Narration has rehearsed the staging of this scene. Recall Camp Laurence, where the doppelganger of romance (aka flirtation) appears to hold narration spellbound, that mischievously drawn-out scene between Meg and Mr. Brooke in which the topic turns to reading Schiller’s “Mary Stuart” and the advantages of learning German, despite its difficulty, especially as “a valuable accomplishment to teachers” (134). Things “German,” here and elsewhere, serve to give narration fits, hysteria’s “divine afflatus” (266). 26 Witness, for example, Jo’s frustrated desire to buy Fouqué’s Undine and Sintram in the novel’s opening scene (what goes around comes around—or, to call upon Freud, the repressed returns—when Christmas comes around a second time), or the predicament in which the Marches are placed by caring for the Hummel family at Christmas, or Margaret, who makes Laurie think of “German girls,” not to mention the polka, which Laurie awkwardly teaches to Jo, and through which, elsewhere, Meg blunders, “nearly upsetting her partner” and “romping in a way that scandalized Laurie” (15, 28–30, 94). Enter, then, “the German” as such, Professor Bhaer, the comic dupe, an ironic perseveration of Ichabod Crane—another teacher, to be sure, a glutton to boot, though Jo March doesn’t seem to mind: “If Amy had been there, she’d have turned her back on him forever, because, sad to relate, he had a great appetite, and shovelled in his dinner in a manner which would have horrified ‘her ladyship.’ I didn’t mind, for I like ‘to see folks eat with a relish,’ as Hannah says, and the poor man must have needed a deal of food after teaching idiots all day” (337). It isn’t long before narration’s wild card trumps American identity. A bachelor gives it further fits—a man, no less, whom narration deems “more like a romantic student than a grave professor,” and who confesses to Jo that “your language is almost as beautiful as mine,” and identifies, at heart,

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with his Germanic heritage: “we Germans believe in sentiment, and keep ourselves young mit it”; a man whom little Tina calls her “effalunt,” who, on “hands and knees, with Tina on his back,” lets Kitty lead him with a jump rope, and whom Tina “follows . . . about the house like a dog whenever he is at home, which delights him,—as he is very fond of children, though a ‘bacheldore’”; a man whom Kitty and Minnie Kirke “regard with affection” because he tells them “all sorts of stories about the plays he invents,” and brings them presents; a man whom young men tease and call “Old Fritz,” “Lager Beer,” and “Ursa Major,” yet who enjoys it “like a boy”; a man whom Jo encounters standing “in his dressing-gown, with a big blue sock on one hand and a darning-needle in the other” and “didn’t seem at all ashamed of it”; a man whom Jo initially considers laughable and piteous: “I laughed all the way down stairs; but it was a little pathetic, also, to think of the poor man having to mend his own clothes. The German gentlemen embroider, I know,—but darning hose is another thing, and not so pretty” (475, 337–39). Jo, nonetheless, exposes her attraction here, double-crossed by both the gender swap and the exchange of national identity, as well: “I wish Americans were as simple and natural as Germans” (339). Professor Bhaer’s “den” reveals the magnitude of this simplicity, his absentmindedness and childlike vulnerability, the residue of Diedrich Knickerbocker in narration’s sentimental looking glass: “Books and papers, everywhere; a broken meerschaum, and an old flute over the mantelpiece, . . . a ragged bird, without any tail, chirped on one window-seat, and a box of white mice adorned the other; half-finished boats, and bits of string, lay among the manuscripts; dirty little boots stood drying before the fire” (340). Mrs. Kirke sums things up: “It’s dreadful, but I can’t scold him; he’s so absent-minded and goodnatured” (340). If not, as with Ichabod Crane, wholly castrated, Professor Bhaer comes off, in any case, half-cocked, his head cut down to size: “His bushy hair had been cut and smoothly brushed, but . . . in exciting moments, he rumpled it up . . . and Jo liked it rampantly erect, better than flat” (452)— a condition, I might add, uncannily reflecting Jo’s own when she’s ensconced in her “scribbling suit, with the bow rampantly erect upon her cap” (380). Though not entirely bereft of all sense (what he lacks in common sense, he makes up for in erudition), Bhaer’s head, “esteemed for learning” in Berlin (351), in due course, peters out, transfigured, in the end, as a defender of (the) faith—over and against those luminaries at the grand symposium, with its “philosophic pyrotechnics,” to which Miss Norton brings Jo, where intellect appears “to be the only God” (352)— and, by a further transformation, figured as a butt (of a joke). To give these metaphors a final tweak, he wears his cock on his head. Here’s how the trick comes off:

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one evening the Professor came in to give Jo her lesson, with a paper soldier-cap on his head, which Tina had put there, and he had forgotten to take off. . . . [He] sat soberly down, quite unconscious of the ludicrous contrast between his subject and his head-gear, for he was going to read her “Death of Wallenstein.” She said nothing at first, for she liked to hear him laugh . . . when anything funny happened, so she left him to discover it for himself. . . . After the reading came the lesson, which was a lively one, for Jo was in a gay mood that night, and the cocked-hat kept her eyes dancing with merriment. (353)

Let in on the joke, “the absent-minded Professor gravely felt and removed the little cocked-hat, looked at it a minute, and then threw back his head, and laughed like a merry bass-viol” (354). As a picture on the hat arrests his gaze, the professor unfolds it to discover a sensationalist newspaper account of a crime unfit for “young people to read” (354). And, “though an absent man,” the Professor, who “saw a good deal more than people fancied,” now suspects that Jo, betrayed “by a look and a blush,” was doing “what she was ashamed to own, and it troubled him” (354). It’s not by chance that things go up in smoke: “Mr. Bhaer spoke warmly, and walked to the fire, crumpling the paper in his hands. Jo sat still, looking as if the fire had come to her; for her cheeks burned long after the cocked hat had turned to smoke, and gone harmlessly up the chimney” (355). Returning to her room, and turning “hot at the bare idea” of her sensational “trash,” Jo “stuffed the whole bundle into her stove, nearly setting the chimney afire with the blaze” (356). While Jo “corked up her inkstand” (357), Professor Bhaer, in turn, uncocked, is left to play the fireside game as Jo heads home: “he sat long before his fire, with the tired look on his face, and the ‘heimweh,’ or homesickness, lying heavy at his heart,” reproaching himself “for the longing that he could not repress,” then “took down his seldom-used meerschaum, and opened his Plato” (358–59). From headache to heartache: You can bet the family homestead that narration has a moral to bank. Put this in your pipe and smoke it: “He did his best, and did it manfully; but I don’t think he found that . . . a pipe, or even the divine Plato, were very satisfactory substitutes for wife and child, and home” (359).

Let’s retrace, by a circuitous route, the way in which narration has rehearsed this call-back scene: Recall Jo’s partiality for hats, most notably the “funny” one Laurie sends her “because I burn my face every hot day” (120). Here’s a glimpse of the audition: “I’ll wear it, for fun, and show him I don’t care for the fashion,” announces Jo, “hanging the antique broad-brim on a bust of Plato” (120). The narrative’s dramatic unity here hinges on its ownmost punctuality.

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Margaret flits somewhere in the wings, hat or no hat: “Plato,” observes Fuller, “the man of intellect, treats woman in the Republic as property,” and further remarks that, in the Timaeus, “the sage” claimed that the souls of “vain and foppish men will be degraded after death, to the forms of women, and, if they do not there make great efforts to retrieve themselves, will become birds.” 27 To the contrary, Fuller contends, this sentiment is profoundly “antipoetical,” for the poet naturally selects various birds as symbols of the “most gracious and ethereal thoughts.” 28 Such thoughts inhabit Little Women from the opening scene, where Beth dispels all discord in the home, recouping homework’s ownmost bliss: “Birds in their little nests agree” (3). Narration endearingly houses bird talk, and is, itself, serenely nestled in ornithological exposé. Witness elsewhere the bewilderment of Amy, “left alone outside the safe homenest”; the secret sorrow hidden in a motherly heart “at the flight of the first bird from the nest” (195, 249); Meg’s delight in even the “homeliest tasks” related to “her small nest” (240); Jo’s admonition to her mother to “resign yourself to all sorts of worries, and let your birds hop out of the nest, one by one” (322); Jo’s eagerness to be gone, “for the home-nest was growing too narrow” (331); and her inverse desire at Mrs. Kirke’s “to settle myself into my new nest” (334). Similarly, Mrs. March sings “like a lark” (11); Beth likewise sings “like a little lark” (39); the girls feed the Hummel children “like so many hungry birds” (15); Meg stands “like the jackdaw in the fable, enjoying her borrowed plumes, while the rest chattered like a party of magpies” (91); Jo grows sunflowers “to feed ‘Aunt Cockle-top’ and her family of chicks” (99); Jo parries Amy’s reprimand for using “lark” as slang with the riposte that she’ll use “nightingales” with Laurie, instead, “since he’s a warbler” (109); Mr. Laurence watches over the Marches “like a motherly old hen” (170); Jo declares that home life is “like living in a nest of turtledoves” (170); Amy chides Laurie for calling her “Chick” (172); the Brookes designate their new home the “Dove-cote” (239); Amy advises her mother not to “ruffle up” like a “motherly hen” when “your chickens get pecked by smarter birds” (258); Jo sends her “poor little romance” into the world “like a picked robin” (271); Amy remarks that English hens have “a contented cluck, as if they never got nervous, like Yankee biddies” (312); Jo observes, regarding the professor, that sorrow, if he had any, “sat with its head under its wing” (350); Beth proclaims that Jo is a gull, “strong and wild . . . and happy all alone,” Meg a “turtle-dove,” and Amy “a lark,” trying “to get up among the clouds, but always dropping down into its nest again” (375); Jo calls Demi a “precocious chick” (466). And lest we fly this coop in haste, I’ll recoup the spectacle of that most heartless cut of all, homework’s moral a propos minding the nest, where Jo hurries into the parlor “to find Beth sobbing over Pip, the canary, who

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lay dead in the cage, with his little claws pathetically extended, as if imploring the food for want of which he had died” (113). Let’s lay this birdbrained digression to rest.

In the end, the bachelor turns to home and family: Professor Bhaer turns to Jo. Amy sums things up: “Men are so helpless” (456). Let’s cut to what the text bears out as its most sentimental scene, that episode, circumscribed by recollection, beneath the umbrella—the professor has remembered his, while Jo can only remember “the little umbrella, which she had forgotten to take in her hurry to be off” (469). I needn’t call upon Freud—who had forgotten his, as well. Recall an earlier affair, to which the current incident arrives on the installment plan: “to-day, as I passed his door on my way out, by accident I knocked against it with my umbrella. It flew open, and there he stood in his dressing-gown, with a big blue sock on one hand and a darning-needle in the other; he . . . waved his hand, . . . saying, . . . ‘You haf a fine day to make your walk’” (338). Cut back to the present, where rain serves momentarily to dampen the “humor” of this scene, which ends with a proposal, under the umbrella, that apportions Jo “to walk through life beside [the Professor], even though she had no better shelter than the old umbrella, if he carried it” (474). So much for chivalry—but not for sentiment. “Heart’s Dearest, why do you cry?” . . . . “Because you are going away.” . . . . “Can you make a little place in your heart for old Fritz?” . . . . “Oh, yes!” . . . . “Friedrich, why didn’t you—” [“tell me all this sooner?”] “Ah, heaven! she gifs me the name that no one speaks since Minna died! . . . . Say ‘Thou,’ also, and I shall say your language is almost as beautiful as mine.” “Isn’t ‘thou’ a little sentimental?” . . . . “Sentimental? yes; thank Gott, we Germans believe in sentiment. . . .” (475)

Break out those “Hamburg grapes”—and “drink to the Fatherland” (472). And so the moral of the story, at long last, comes to this: “that was the crowning moment of both their lives, when, turning from the night, and storm, and loneliness, to the household light, and warmth, and peace, waiting to receive them with a glad ‘Welcome home,’ Jo led her love in, and shut the door” (480). In the end, yet with a firm conviction that “to soothe . . . with . . . reason” proves that one knows “nothing about love” (363), narration, for the most part, at wits’ end, wants only to “be reasonable, and take a sensible view of the case” (364). In Jo’s own words, “Fritz is getting gray and stout, I’m growing as thin as a shadow, and am over thirty; we shall never be rich, and Plumfield may burn up any night, . . . . But in spite of these unromantic facts, I have nothing to complain of”

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(490). Unless I miss my guess, economy depends upon this for its very life.

Homework, nonetheless, does not end here. Housekeeping reforms the public sphere, as well, as Freda Baum remarks: “Alcott felt that women were fully capable of doing some of the work needed to make the world a better place. . . . Even the wife and mother should be concerned about social issues.” 29 Jane Tompkins notes the larger sense in which this influence restructures national identity: “The notion that women in the home exerted a moral force that shaped the destinies of the race had become central to this country’s vision of itself as a redeemer nation.” 30 Tocqueville had divined a similar sentiment years before: “although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, . . . I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.” 31 As things turn out, the feminine alone, “eager to embrace and nourish the whole world” (462), possesses sufficient virtue to redeem not only the domestic scene, but public life, as well—not just those “forlorn little lads” who might attend that “home-like school” (482) for boys, “a capital joke” (483), as Laurie so incisively discerns (the joke’s on capital: “I’m afraid your crop won’t be profitable, in a worldly sense” [483]), but also, and above all, the affairs of state, internally divided now, discordant, uncivil at heart: the national ob-scene. Beyond its damage to paternity, the dissolution of the family line, the Civil War defined the national imaginary as an issue in itself (will the nation cease to be an issue, to issue itself?)—and national sentiment as, quite literally, a matter of blood. Don’t send a man to do a woman’s job. Homework’s ownmost labor can salvage democracy—an economic conversion, moreover, ironically informed by aristocratic ideals. Here, domesticity exposes its double-edged coup, a transformative energy that, in the self-same nick of time, recuperates the past it seeks to supersede, as Amy’s character attests: “in spite of her American birth and breeding, she possessed that reverence for titles which haunts the best of us,” and though “she was a gentlewoman, she cultivated her aristocratic tastes and feelings” (294, 257). Time itself hinges upon this reconfiguration of patrician and plebe, whereby each individual home transcends the workplace and the marketplace at once. Popularized by Andrew Jackson Downing, the era’s Gothic Revival in home architecture translates domestic rhetoric into household space, an “interior” removed from public life that properly belongs “to the habitation of man in a cultivated and refined state of society” 32 —and, as Amy so aptly observes, an “exterior”

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suitably attuned to the typically American penchant for ostentatiousness: “Fred will have the [English] estate. . . . A city house, in a fashionable street,—not so showy as our big houses” (318). Capital thus reassesses its rationale: “a man’s home is his castle.” 33 Aristocratic attributes and democratic values need not be contradictory, as Gillian Brown suggests: Indeed, those aristocratic connotations “prominent in middle-class domestic ideology signal, not merely the persistence of aristocratic ideals and middle-class aspirations, but the nostalgic function domesticity serves”; to this effect, democracy “offered every individual castles in the air, the opportunity of a kingdom in the domestic domain, apart from democratic struggles.” 34 Homework transforms plebe to aristocrat, as Jo’s washtub attests (“Queen of my tub, I merrily sing”) while home itself embowers nothing short of royalty—hence, the seamless transfiguration of Mr. and Mrs. Laurence to “My Lord and Lady,” and their subsequent resolve: “airing our best bonnet, we shall astonish you by the elegant hospitalities of our mansion” (171, 456, 457). Meanwhile, Amy—“made a princess” by Laurie, “as the king does the beggar-maid in the old story”—decrees that “there should be a home with a good wife in it before she set [sic] up a salon as a queen of society” (460, 457). Tocqueville knew his things ahead of time. His assessment of the lofty position of woman in democracy, her genuine “superiority,” prefigures its later staging at the end of the century. In “this glorious land,” Emma Hewitt opined, all women “are queens governing by the God-given right of womanhood.” 35

Let’s segue to the unabridged scenario, where narration’s own jouissance, caught up in the facile exchange of its metaphors, full of itself, turns kings to queens, and queens to kings, with that “delightful sense of power which comes when young girls first discover the new and lovely kingdom they are born to rule by virtue of beauty, youth, and womanhood” (384), and, by a further turn of the screw, returns everything to motherhood: “a woman’s happiest kingdom is home, her highest honor the art of ruling it, not as a queen, but a wise wife and mother” (399). The figure collapses, here, upon the issue of maternity whence both nation and narration issue: the kingdom of queens—queens lost, I might add, without the labor of love, and who had best love labor. Consumer economics collapses on this issue, as well: Production means reproduction in the end. So much for the shelf life of love, “the sort of shelf on which young wives and mothers may consent to be laid, safe from the restless fret and fever of the world, finding loyal lovers in the little sons and daughters who cling to them” (399). Buttressed by the Cult of True Womanhood (and its pre-Oedipal phantasy), the feminine—whose “natural instinct” sides with what is

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“honest, brave and strong” (350)—straightaway emerges from consumer economics to figure as a moral juggernaut that reconfigures and re-forms not only authors (strictly speaking, Jo, who, with the collapse of patriarchy, becomes both mistress of Professor Bhaer’s school and matriarch of home), but also the nonsense at the heart of all authority, redirects all sense toward sentiment, transfigures mental into sentimental, and, by a similar logic, repairs—repopulates—the nation’s house, as well, a household nearly bankrupt from mismanaged male authority and the dissipation of the Civil War. 36 Narration says it’s so: “Women work a good many miracles . . . even that of raising the standard of manhood” (423). The household, now, is international in its domain, taking a German immigrant, its “Teddy” Bhaer, to heart. Narration transfigures paternity: The nation needs new blood. More than a cosmetic change, American identity requires a veritable trans-fusion: “Foreign life polishes one in spite of one’s self” (387). Narration thus leaves home, inclined toward international affairs: “So Amy sailed away to find the old world, which is always new and beautiful to young eyes” (310). Here, as Amy soon discovers, life is cosmopolitan, a bewildering mélange. Witness, for example, the Christmas ball where “[t]he company assembled . . . was such as one sees nowhere but on the continent,” and where a “Russian prince condescended to sit in a corner for an hour, and talk with a massive lady. . . . A Polish count . . . devoted himself to the ladies, who pronounced him ‘a fascinating dear,’ and a German Serene Something . . . roamed vaguely about, seeking what he might devour”; meanwhile, “Baron Rothschild’s private secretary, a large-nosed Jew, in tight boots, affably beamed upon the world . . . ; a stout Frenchman, who knew the Emperor, came to indulge his mania for dancing, and Lady de Jones, a British matron, adorned the scene with her little family of eight”—and, as a footnote to this scene, “mammas of all nations lined the walls” (383–84). In step, the novel’s own economy (ex)changes scenes between the New World and the Old, where, for example, Amy’s presence “seemed to give a home-like charm to the foreign scenes” (400), between domestic and foreign, between the canny and uncanny, playfully confusing and conflating home and nation, self and nationality. Note, for instance, this narrative aside: In France the young girls have a dull time of it till they are married, when “Vive la liberté” becomes their motto. In America, as everyone knows, girls early sign the declaration of independence, and enjoy their freedom with republican zest; but the young matrons usually abdicate with the first heir to the throne, and go into a seclusion almost as close as a French nunnery, though by no means as quiet. Whether they like it or not, they are virtually put upon the shelf as soon as the wedding excitement is over. (388)

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Alcott, it appears, has memorized her Tocqueville. 37 Nonetheless, don’t be deceived by the apparent fatalism of these lines; narration has already given to the sisters, one and all, “an independent selfhood,” grounded in, as Nina Auerbach observes, the “freedom not to fall in love.” 38 In Mrs. March’s words, “better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands” (98). At Camp Laurence, Mr. Brooke had offered a complementary view: “Young ladies in America love independence as much as their ancestors did, and are admired and respected for supporting themselves” (133). 39 Narration, in due course, imagines feminine autonomy beyond the home as such, where public and private intersect, as Mrs. March opines: “Don’t shut yourself up in a bandbox because you are a woman, but understand what is going on, and educate yourself to take your part in the world’s work, for it all affects you and yours” (392). Unlike Meg, who fights “to keep her thoughts from wandering from the state of the nation to the state of her bonnet” (397), the narrative configures home as national, the nation international. Its female agency incorporates the outsider, the “other,” and the reader—all—as equally its own (“Vive la liberté”). As for the bachelor, the nation cannot do without him, cannot entirely sever itself from him, remove him. Narration, like the Civil War itself, dismembers him; yet, in the self-same coup, re-members him, as well. Recall both Laurie, whose “eligibility”—destined to Meg, refused by Jo, ignored by Beth—had been chucked about by the sisters with greater gusto than Jo’s pillow, and Mr. Scott, who “had married and gone to housekeeping” (389). In marriage, the bachelor earns his member(ship) in home and nation at once. Narration now puts the bachelor behind it—a thing of the past—while it erects, as both its future and its destiny, the sisterhood of motherhood, whose figurehead now speaks, through Jo, “in a maternal way of all mankind” (489). It’s this erection—sentimental, no doubt—which, in the wake of the Civil War, transfigures the carnage of the Revolutionary War as merely a domestic argument, the pain, the gore, the bloodshed accordingly reduced to a solitary gesture, a slap on the wrist, while the nation as a whole still bears a filial love for the motherland, “like . . . a big son for an imperious little mother, who held him while she could, and let him go with a farewell scolding when he rebelled” (294). 40

CODA: In the mise-en-scène of foreign and domestic exchange, in the inter-national (ex)change of scenes, the na(rra)tion comes up short, shortchanges itself, not properly its own, estranged, a victim of its own legerdemain. As usual, narration has rehearsed its lines. Let’s go behind the scene(s).

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Notice, first, the emphasis on Laurie’s Italianate legacy, as Mrs. March explains to Meg: “Laurie’s father . . . married an Italian lady. . . . I fancy the boy, who was born in Italy . . . is like his mother”—an observation further reinforced by Amy’s remark: “how like an Italian he looked” (56, 404). Notice, second, narration’s mania for roses and buttonholes, which orchestrates the backdrop of myriad acts—most notably, the intersection of the two in Amy’s first letter from Europe: “the young folks do a deal of flirting here; I saw a pair exchange rose-buds, for it’s the thing to wear one in the button-hole, and I thought it rather a nice little idea” (314). 41 As it turns out, Amy has repressed (that is, forgotten, on purpose) an earlier scene at Camp Laurence, when Mr. Brooke, enchanted by Meg, distractedly plays “with the wild rose in his button-hole” (130). It would appear that it’s “American” to wear one in the button-hole, as well. As for the narrative itself, it has forgotten nothing—has memorized its lines, knows everything by heart, especially that most uncanny point of the Freudian fort-da (0, 1) where life and death not only intersect, but coincide: Later, in this very scene, while speaking to Meg, Mr. Brooke “absently put the dead rose in the hole he had made, and covered it up, like a little grave” (134). Re-member, in good time, that “other” scene narration stages with identical props, when “a half-blown rose was discovered on Amy’s bush in the window” while Beth “lay in that heavy stupor, . . . the once rosy face so changed and vacant,” and how Homer resurrects the narrative’s unconscious in the self-same act, how that “once rosy face” cross-fades to (rosy-fingered) dawn: “‘See,’ said Meg, coming up with a white, halfopened rose, ‘I thought this would hardly be ready to lay in Beth’s hand to-morrow if she—went away from us. But it has blossomed in the night, and now I mean to put it in my vase here, so that when the darling wakes, the first thing she sees will be the little rose. . . .’ Never had the sun risen so beautifully . . . as it did to the heavy eyes of Meg and Jo, as they looked out in the early morning, when their long, sad vigil was done” (188). A rosy-fingered scene, indeed, this quaint allusion here—a homecoming: The text uncannily extends its hospitality, Old World familialy nestled in New, the foreign in the familiar, all traces of the double-cross crossed out. The stage is set: “love among the roses” (444). Narration makes a flagrant scene, beside itself, self-absorbed in its jouissance: Valrosa well deserved its name,—for in that climate of perpetual summer roses blossomed everywhere. They overhung the archway, thrust themselves between the bars of the great gate with a sweet welcome to passers-by, and lined the avenue, winding through lemon-trees and feathery palms up to the villa on the hill. Every shadowy nook, where seats invited one to stop and rest, was a mass of bloom; every cool grotto had its marble nymph smiling from a veil of flowers; and every fountain reflected crimson, white, or pale pink roses, leaning down to

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smile at their own beauty. Roses covered the walls of the house, draped the cornices, climbed the pillars, and ran riot over the balustrade of the wide terrace, whence one looked down on the sunny Mediterranean and the white-walled city on its shore. (402, italics mine)

Now here’s the scene between the acts, the scenic inter-est; it plays with sentiment. Amy, the “peroxided, girl-doll, gold-digger,” as Brigid Brophy puts it, with “‘Good pull-in for Laurie’ emblazoned on her chest from the moment her chest began to bud,” places three tiny cream-colored roses in Laurie’s buttonhole. 42 As for the act interred between the scenes, between the sheets, if you prefer—where life and death converge—it’s here narration figures things out: he stood a minute looking down at them with a curious expression, for in the Italian part of his nature there was a touch of superstition, and he was just then in that state of half-sweet, half-bitter melancholy, when imaginative young men find significance in trifles, and food for romance everywhere. He had thought of Jo in reaching after the thorny red rose,—for vivid flowers became her,—and she had often worn ones like that, from the green-house at home. The pale roses Amy gave him were the sort that the Italians lay in dead hands,—never in bridal wreaths,—and, for a moment, he wondered if the omen was for Jo or for himself. But the next instant his American common-sense got the better of sentimentality, and he laughed. . . . (402)

Notice, in passing, that the omen is, of course, for Beth—Valley of Roses, Valley of Death, “Valley of the Shadow” (chapter 40), “veil of flowers” (402), whichever you prefer. Notice, too, the way in which the scene is later dis-inter-red with compound interest, as Laurie, with finality, inters his interest in Jo: Tumbling about in one part of the desk, among bills, passports, and business documents of various kinds, were several of Jo’s letters, and in another compartment were three notes from Amy, carefully tied up with one of her blue ribbons, and sweetly suggestive of the little dead roses put away inside. With a half-repentant, half-amused expression, Laurie gathered up all Jo’s letters, smoothed, folded, and put them neatly into a small drawer of the desk, . . . locked the drawer, and went out to hear High Mass at Saint Stefan’s, feeling as if there had been a funeral. (424)

Notice, in the end, what’s more (is less), the figures don’t add up. If common sense is so American, the narrative, in turn—seduced, up to the hilt, by sentiment and its mentality—erects itSelf, to mix the metaphors a final time, on foreign soil. Its own erection is Italian, to be sure. Or is it German (if my sense of duty serves me right)?

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NOTES 1. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (New York: Penguin, 1989), 1. Subsequent quotations are parenthetically cited in the text. 2. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 39–40: “It is the law of the city that, without wishing or knowing it, drove [Oedipus] to crime, to incest and parricide: this law must have produced the outside-the-law. . . . This scene of parricide is regularly to be found wherever there is a question of foreignness and hospitality.” 3. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 26: “dissemination cannot simply be equated with the castration it entails or entrains.” 4. “There never was such a Christmas dinner as they had that day. The fat turkey was a sight to behold. . . . So was the plum-pudding, which quite melted in one’s mouth; likewise the jellies” (221). 5. Elaine Showalter, ed., Alternative Alcott (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), xxxii. 6. See Derrida, Of Hospitality, 75–83, 121–27; on the notion of the “step” (trans-), see Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 397. 7. Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 186: “the object of desire, in the usual sense, is either a phantasy that is in reality the support of desire, or a lure.” That is, for Lacan, knowledge and “misconstruction” go hand in hand—or, better, hand in glove. 8. Uncannily, while certain elements of plot and character reflect the influence of Charlotte Brontë, her name does not appear. See Christine Doyle, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Brontë: Transatlantic Translations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 66–76. 9. For a discussion of literary references in Little Women in relation to Alcott herself, see Jesse S. Crisler, “Alcott’s Reading in Little Women: Shaping the Autobiographical Self,” Resources for American Literary Study 20.1 (1994): 27–36. 10. Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3. 11. Indeed, the narrative line obsesses over “head” covers. Consider, for example, the following: Meg’s “very best go-to-concert and theatre bonnet,” which John confuses with “a breakfast cap” (398); Jo’s “funny hat” at Camp Laurence, which “deserved a vote of thanks, for it was of general utility; it broke the ice in the beginning, by producing a laugh; it created quite a refreshing breeze, flapping to and fro, as she rowed, and would make an excellent umbrella for the whole party, if a shower came up” (123); Laurie’s hat, which fashions an equally amusing stunt when “the felt-basin fell off, and Jo walked on it, which insult only afforded him an opportunity for expatiating on the advantages of a rough-and-ready costume, as he folded up the maltreated hat, and stuffed it into his pocket” (246); Jo’s “scribbling suit which, with the bow rampantly erect upon her cap,” affords the perfect counter-“point” to Bhaer’s “headgear”—that “paper soldier-cap” (353). Other uncanny objects that resonate with phallic overtones include sundry flowers placed in buttonholes, and, of course, Beth’s outcast dolls—perhaps most conspicuously, Jo’s invalid doll, “Joanna”: “One forlorn fragment of dollanity had belonged to Jo; and, having led a tempestuous life, was left a wreck in the rag-bag, from which dreary poorhouse it was rescued by Beth, and taken to her refuge. Having no top to its head, she tied on a neat little cap, and, as both arms and legs were gone, she hid these deficiencies by folding it in a blanket, and devoting her best bed to this chronic invalid” (39). In its ironic reversal, this dollhouse (senti)mentality configures the dynamics of the sisterly “membership” itself—those four missing limbs: “The two older girls . . . took one of the younger into her keeping . . . ; ‘playing mother’ they called it, and put their sisters in the places of discarded dolls, with the maternal instinct of little

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women” (41). Note, elsewhere, the following: “They are making a fool of that little girl [Meg]; . . . they have spoilt her entirely; she’s nothing but a doll to-night”; “I’m not Meg to-night; I’m ‘a doll,’ who does all sorts of crazy things” (93, 94). 12. Elizabeth Janeway, “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy and Louisa,” New York Times Book Review (29 September 1968), 42. 13. Such a “homely” text configures food in most uncanny ways. See Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier, “Strawberries and Salt: Culinary Hazards and Moral Education in Little Women,” in Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, eds. Monika Elbert and Marie Drews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 193, 202: episodes involving eating in Little Women “often end in hunger and loss. . . . [F]ood is constantly criticized, given away, wasted, or destroyed; eating seems an indulgent, even risky, luxury,” as with the Christmas breakfast, as well as Amy’s limes, Beth’s bird, and the enforced temperance at Meg’s wedding: Such scenes “reveal Alcott’s culinary anxieties”—anxieties finally transcended, however, in the closing chapter, where “Alcott presents . . . a filling meal that is consumed without recrimination,” a moment wherein and whereby narration “finally overcomes its anorexic resistance to eating.” 14. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 38. 15. Granted, this critical vocabulary is highly suspect. For a deeply intelligent discussion of narrative “omniscience,” see Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 183–201. 16. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve; rev. trans. Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 484. 17. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. 23 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962–94), I:263. Hawthorne’s shadow falls upon the text in other places, as well: Amy, who decrees, “if I have any genius, I shall find it out in Rome”—and, later, discovers she doesn’t (“Rome took all the vanity out of me, for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live, and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair. . . . [T]alent isn’t genius” [405])—corresponds, in her creative disposition, to Hilda’s occupation as copyist, in The Marble Faun, and Meg’s new home, like Hilda’s lodging, is called the “Dove-cote”; Jo, who “could use a needle as well as a pen” as part of a single household economy, and “would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and ‘fall into a vortex,’” simultaneously evokes both Hester’s skill with the needle in The Scarlet Letter, and Hawthorne’s “mob of scribbling women” (308, 287, 265). 18. Boys might bear this in mind, as well: “the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color” (441). 19. Cf. Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 97, for a rather typical feminist reading of the text—and one that goes against the grain of my own: “The nature of women, this book suggests, is to be frivolous, foolish, vain, and lazy. They must be laboriously taught to be otherwise. Only in relative isolation can they learn to be good, since female society is thoroughly corrupt.” 20. Sofa scenes are so ubiquitous, they nearly constitute the psychosexual “behind” of narration as a (w)hole. To cite a few: “Laurie watched [Jo] in respectful silence; and, when she beckoned him to his sofa, he sat down with a sigh of satisfaction” (49); Amy bemoans the fact that Jo and Meg “are going somewhere with Laurie; . . . you were whispering and laughing together, on the sofa, last night” (72); “[Jo] rushed out of the room up to the old sofa in the garret, and finished her fight alone” (75); Meg, on coming home one day, finds Jo “laid upon the sofa in an unusual state of exhaustion” (108); Meg hastily puts the parlor in order “by whisking the litter under the sofa” (112); Mrs. March’s “big trunk stood ready in the hall,” while her “cloak and bonnet lay on the sofa” (166); Jo beholds John “serenely sitting on the sofa, with [Meg] en-

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throned upon his knee, and wearing an expression of the most abject submission” (232); “Jo was alone in the twilight, lying on the old sofa, looking at the fire, and thinking” (440); Jo laughs at the newly married Laurie, “and patted the sofa invitingly” (442). 21. See Gloria T. Delamar, Louisa May Alcott and “Little Women”: Biography, Critique, Publications, Poems, Songs and Contemporary Relevance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1990), 247: “On a settee [at Orchard House] is Louisa’s ‘mood pillow,’ which when pointed up signaled that she was in a good mood; if pointed down, she was letting the household know that she was in a bad mood.” 22. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 288: The phallus “can play its role only when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of signifier. The phallus is the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance.” 23. See Jerry Aline Flieger, “The Purloined Punchline: Joke as Textual Paradigm,” in Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, ed. Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 957: “the player is never so feminine as when it is ‘his’ turn to be ‘it,’ when s/he is possessed of the phallic object (and not when ‘she’ is castrated or deprived of the phallus, as psychoanalytic convention would have it).” 24. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. 25. Cf. Sean O’Faolain, “This Is Your Life . . . Louisa May Alcott,” Holiday 44 (November 1968): 26: “So after these good girls give up their breakfast on Christmas morning to the raggedness of the unhappy German immigrants, what happens? Great rewarding dishes of ice cream, the daintiest French bonbons and four large bouquets of hot-house flowers appear that very Christmas night—the gift of a God-the-Father figure, old Mr. Laurence in the big house next store.” 26. Hysteria epitomizes writing’s own arrhythmia; it goes by fits and starts: “Every few weeks [Jo] would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, . . . writing away at her novel. . . . If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on; in exciting moments it was pushed rashly askew. . . . [W]hen the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather. . . . The divine afflatus usually lasted a week or two, and then she emerged from her ‘vortex’ hungry, sleepy, cross, or despondent. She was just recovering from one of these attacks when she was . . . rewarded with a new idea” (265–66). 27. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” and Other Writings, ed. Donna Dickenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 66, 32. 28. Fuller, 66. 29. Freda Baum, “The Scarlet Strand: Reform Motifs in the Writings of Louisa May Alcott,” in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, ed. Madeleine B. Stern (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 254. 30. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 172. 31. De Tocqueville, 501. 32. Andrew Jackson Downing, Cottage Residences [1848] (New York: Dover, 1981), 13. 33. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 69: “Capital is not an economic and social phenomenon. It is the shadow cast by the principle of reason on human relations.” 34. Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 70, 76.

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35. Emma Hewitt, Queen of the Home: Her Reign from Infancy to Age, from Attic to Cellar (Philadelphia: Miller-Megee, 1892), quoted in Brown, 70. 36. Alcott was equally disillusioned with Washington itself, the vast discrepancy between its fairy-tale surface glitz and the fragile, threadbare reality beneath. See Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War, intro. Jan Turnquist (Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2007), 57: “The Capitol was so like the pictures that hang opposite the staring Father of his Country, in boarding-houses and hotels, that it did not impress me, except to recall the time when I was sure that Cinderella went to housekeeping in just such a place, after she had married the inflammable Prince; though, even at that early period, I had my doubts as to the wisdom of a match whose foundation was of glass.” 37. Cf. de Tocqueville, 488: “In America the independence of woman is irrecoverably lost in the bonds of matrimony. If an unmarried woman is less constrained there than elsewhere, a wife is subjected to stricter obligations. The former makes her father’s house an abode of freedom and of pleasure; the latter lives in the home of her husband as if it were a cloister.” Here, as elsewhere, Little Women reads almost as a gloss on Tocqueville’s Democracy. Clearly, Alcott had read him—either from the substantial passages printed in American schoolbooks of the period, or from her own extracurricular readings; see my own reading of Alcott’s reading of Tocqueville: John Dolis, “Alcott and Tocqueville: Toward a Textual Conjugation,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 31 (2010): 223–29. 38. Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 63, 62. 39. Writing constitutes the signature event for such author-ity. Cf. Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant, “Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” Children’s Literature 17 (1989): 107: “Jo, the writer, longs to control language, to make herself independent, and her family secure with her use of language”—as, of course, does Alcott. 40. Narration now leaves behind its grudge against the Mother(land), embodied at Camp Laurence, where a French game, croquet, ironically pits English, who play well but cheat, against Americans, who “played better, and contested every inch of the ground as strongly as if the spirit of ’76 inspired them” (124). 41. On roses, see also pp. 22, 130, 134, 188, 190, 248, 250, 251, 282, 288, 380, and 398; on buttons and buttonholes, see, among others, pp. 130, 196, 253, and 335. 42. Brigid Brophy, Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), 117.

Fourth Movement Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Citizen of Somewhere Else

“Patriotism, n. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

The idea of “America,” its “National Fantasy,” as Lauren Berlant defines it, 1 reveals a complex network of discursive practices, a network that represses, by definition, the diachronic insofar as it represents America as something necessary, mythic, ideal, utopian—the Promised Land, the New Jerusalem: a phantasy, indeed. The diachronic chronicle, however, complicates this scene at birth. Here, the “always already” of the utopian “future perfect” finds itself internally divided by two historical moments whose claim to origin-ality forecloses the subl(im)ation of the event itself (“America”): pre-revolutionary (Puritan) utopia and revolutionary (secular) post-utopia. Both Puritans and Revolutionaries might serve as Founding Fathers. Hawthorne’s oeuvre annexes these two moments in non-synthetic tension, a duplicitous conjugation whose textual economy confuses both “home” and “homeland” in a single transaction designed to break the nation’s bank, or—to mix the metaphors—locates the technology of citizenship in domestic “limbo.” Hawthorne understood this all too well; his oeuvre repeatedly con-fuses the metaphors that figure out this scene; the very symptoms of the discourse configure a divisiveness and incoherence of their own. Nothing in the homeland is ever quite at home. As for the “diminishing returns” of this (primal) scene, forget “limbo.” Home itself amounts to hell. Where the heart is this is not. Let’s step lightly here, a step (“trans-”) whose stride is so pedestrianly (mis)taken that its mis-step stipulates a detour first.

In “Hawthorne,” this step (pas) beyond (au-delà) stumbles in advance of itself, a stutter step: Its movement uncannily repeats the progress of the “proper,” the familial, the familiar (Heimlichkeit)—always and everywhere estranged. 2 Desire is on the outside looking in (Freud’s Wolf Man is here). It looks backward toward home, the (primal) scene where noth137

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ing takes place, takes up its place, and does so from the outset. Here, domesticity and emptiness are not “extremes,” as Douglas Anderson suggests, “between which human existence is poised.” 3 Rather, they configure the same event. Nothing (always already) happens at home. It happens by surprise (die Unheimlichkeit): Nothing happens by surprise. It takes the subject, overtakes it, from behind. “Home,” in other words, is most uncannily itself when and wherever nothing overtakes its daily interest, disturbs the space of its familiar routine—where and whenever nothing exposes itself. Precisely here, where nothing takes place, takes up a space of its own, the home reveals its ownmost lack of specificity, its own unhomeliness, the deadly ennui that properly belongs to it and to which it most properly belongs: Witness, for example, Wakefield. In “Hawthorne,” home configures the space that anxiously awaits some “thing” (res), something that “matters,” that waits for something to take place, to begin—the space that knows not (what it awaits), the space that waits for discourse, the space that engenders narration itSelf: the site of lethargy, indifference, incubation: witness, elsewhere, The House. Home itself is nothing, nothing in itself. It simply waits (for something): It waits (for life to begin): the nothing that waits for something. In this, it waits for nothing. Let’s hurry to catch up. In “Hawthorne,” to recapitulate, home waits for nothing to happen by surprise. In the meantime (for all time), everyone walks on eggs. Sublime, inhuman, monstrous, original, unspeakable, literal: At the heart of domesticity, home embraces (nothing [but ghosts, skeletons]) death. Death occupies home, preoccupies the oeuvre, inhabits (the heart of) Hawthorne’s house (“Hawthorne”), just as the figure (the dead [Judge]) of nothing occupies the heart of The House, its last judgment. 4 Divided from within, cut off from itself, home exposes the crack in its economy, a divisiveness and incoherence that characterize a region uninhabitable and inhospitable—in other words, a space always already captured by the uncanny, the “foreign,” a space accustomed to the lure of “politics.”

Recall “The Custom-House,” that borderland of international exchange: It’s strictly for the birds: a nest of unweaned, bird-brained bureaucratic squatters coddled by the motherland, consuming it. The motherland thus figures as the mouth that eats itself. In its ironic inversion, the mother, in turn, transforms to big-bird-in-the-sky, an eagle whose thunderbolts echo an incipient violence, treacherous, traitorous, ready at the moment to “fling off her nestlings.” 5 As such, the “National Symbolic” flaunts its birdbrained ideology. Such is the House of State, the state of the nation. “Uncle” Sam beds down in this nest. It raises the very “issue” of national identity. To wit: Who is the father? The question likewise haunts the text that follows this scene. Make no mistake: The nation’s

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going to seed. Little wonder the “author” is beheaded, the citizen betrayed, a cuckold in his own house—a house in whose maternal bosom reside its patriarchal castrati, mere ghosts of men transmuted to hens. Little wonder, too, the Letter turns up as but a dead weight that clutters Uncle Sam’s house. Here time stands still. In this haunted house, “Hawthorne” figures as the ghost of himself, a remainder, a supplement, a leftover. His goose is cooked. I needn’t rehearse this scene. Custom memorizes its domestic technique: good housekeeping. After all, what generates the Custom-House if not the politics of cleaning—a politics configured by its single most defining gesture, the guillotine? Politics knows only butchery. Less wonder, then, that everyone walks on eggs. The House embraces nothing but death: skeletons, the spectral supplement of men. Nothing is there. It is the custom of the house. Death customarily occupies home. It’s (not) for nothing that the Custom-House is haunted by ghosts—and by the specter of the “Author,” the shadow of Hawthorne, whose very presence is itself uncanny, absent, always already dead, missing (from) itSelf, missing its own meaning, missing out on itSelf from the outset. Where nothing is rendered to “Hawthorne,” the “Author” surrenders itSelf. Witness, elsewhere, the ending of The Faun, where “Hawthorne,” relegated to the form of an addendum, knows less than his characters, depends upon them, suspended, stuck onto the tail (of the tale) like the Nietzschean subject—headless, to be sure. 6 Author-ity pays with its head. Hawthorne’s disappointing political appointments and dismissals attest to this. The nation’s ownmost subjects, its (civil) servants, are destined to exile and dismemberment, not unlike the way in which those bodies at the opposite end of a bayonet succumbed to the blade of “the Collector, our gallant old General”—indeed, “had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep of a scythe.” 7 Death both “figures” and “figures in” the nation’s capital, secures its very interest. Among the instruments of bureaucracy, its “inkstands, paper-folders, and mahogany rulers,” the old General might seem as much out of place “as an old sword—now rusty, but which had flashed once on the battle’s front, and showed still a bright gleam along its blade” (1:23). What’s missing, however, from the scene of such bureaucracy, from the site of the nation’s house and its political domestication—its inkstands, paper-folders, and rulers—is, of course, what makes the General, most uncannily, at home: He figures as the very instrument by means of which the nation carves out the space of its perpetuation, and in whose name bureaucracy recits itself. 8 The nation’s “place” is outlined by the path of this coup. It cuts to the quick. Hawthorne’s récit, in turn, re-turns the nation’s wound (blessure), provides the cutting edge by means of which it turns the nation on its side, sidesteps the nation with astonishing disinterest: “The life of the CustomHouse lies like a dream behind me. . . . Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality

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in my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else” (1:44). The general public was outraged. As “a citizen of somewhere else,” moreover, Hawthorne’s narration highlights the national icon that overshadows the entrance to both Custom-House and text: Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,—oftener soon than late,—is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows. (1:5)

Here, thunderbolts echo the malignity of the Mother(land): Treachery and treason strike home. 9 Dispossessed, evicted, the citizen is homeless, the homeland defunct, de trop. Such is the House of State, the state of the nation: Uncle Sam beds down in this nest; in its unmaternal bosom reside those patriarchal castrati who inhabit “The Custom-House.” No wonder the Citizen feels betrayed: The chicken coop is dark; the lights are out. 10 If the nation was incensed, however, with “The Custom-House” sketch (its indictment of an impotent community and a decrepit bureaucracy), clamoring for an apology, Hawthorne’s Preface to the second edition would leave it kicking and screaming—“without the change of a word” (1:2). 11 Public hysteria aside, take note: There’s no utopian scheme inscribed within this plot. “Nowhere” this is not. “Somewhere” the “Author” is, indeed, a citizen, at home. Let’s take this to heart: Author-ity knows not its whereabouts, knows only that its whereabouts are never where it is. Always and everywhere, it’s somewhere else, foreign to itself. In the meantime, narration turns its own disinterest into capital. Foreclosing on “America,” the “Author” sends an envoy abroad while the repressed, in turn, returns as “[l]etters . . . with armorial seals . . . unknown to English heraldry” (1:262). “Somewhere else,” love finds and founds a home on unfamiliar ground; life takes root in foreign soil. As for “America,” its singularity, a correspondence has been established in its place. Take it to the bank: The na(rra)tion guarantees that this transaction will take place.

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In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got. . . . Fun this is not. Once again narration waits: It bides its time. And once again, the foreign, unsurprisingly, preoccupies the scene: An Italian organ-grinder turns a crank that sets a myriad of occupations into play, while, at the music’s cessation, “everybody was petrified at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor” (2:163). Meanwhile, a house, too, bides its time: A house, conceived now “in the grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy” (2:11), waits to be occupied, its single occupant preoccupied solely with the ghost of itself. Given its descriptive surface—“antique,” “feudal,” “Gothic”—the House appears to mirror a certain depth, the social and historical complexity associated with the Old World, over and against the cultural paucity and transparently meager commercialism constitutive of the New World and its deadeningly repetitive “plot,” the plotting of commerce and trade, a life-time characterized by nothing if not the “plodding” of horses (2:6, 10, 11, 161). Such monotonous repetition signifies the absence of origin-ality, a privileged author-ity that guarantees meaning— to wit, the elemental loss incurred by the nineteenth-century market economy driven, first and foremost, by commodification and speculation: “with us, rank is the grosser substance of wealth” (2:38). Lacking those historically shaped social institutions necessary to maintaining “hereditary” selves, American identity, as Anne Lounsbery observes, subsists entirely on the state of its economy, its wealth. 12 Here, Judge Pyncheon’s unconditional commitment to “symbolic” wealth, the value of “paper” as such (the Indian deed, an ancient map, money, and, of course, the world of banking, in general) ironically aligns his “Old-World” lineage with the cutting edge of “New-World” economics—an economy that, from the outset, dooms Hepzibah’s cent shop and the Republican (Jacksonian) ideal of trade it represents, “an exchange economy of producers and small shopkeepers in a market free of manipulation by banks.” 13 Judge Pyncheon typifies the new order of subject citizen, irrevocably divorced from all previous socioeconomic structures, and, as Lounsbery remarks, able to cash in on speculation, to exploit those “new kinds of economic and political relations that transformed antebellum America.” 14 The present thus disowns the past on the installment plan, installs the future as its only guarantee. This lack now signifies its plenitude, the meaning of value as such. Holgrave (aka Emerson) represents its representative man: “in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew” (2:179). In keeping with this (onto)logical untimeliness, the future—that is, death, nothing (at all)—enters, here, ahead of time: “[t]hus early had . . . the only guest who is certain . . . to find his way into every human

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dwelling . . . stept across the threshold of the House of the Seven Gables” (2:16). Once nothing is at home, The House endures: Narration now proceeds until “The End,” disrupted only from the inside out, not unlike that recess in the wall, behind the portrait of the Judge, that hides “an ancient deed, signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, . . . conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of territory at the eastward,” its own inherent value worthless to be sure, as are those Indians it leaves behind (2:316). In the end, narration figures out the value of this deed: The house is left for dead. The very meaning of value amounts to nothing but the value of meaning as such. Here, too, The House is dispossessed of all author-ity, its meaning found outside the frame of its rècit, “somewhere else.” Old and New World reconfigure one another. Each mirrors the other’s own duplicity, as Giles remarks, its inherent tendency toward betrayal and backsliding—each a mutually distorting mirror of the other: “refractions of each other’s consciousness” re-presented in “unfamiliar form.” 15 Such is the way both nation and narration take shape. As with The Letter and its own circuitous route, the foreign figures into the account, not only accounts for the Indian deed’s significance as but a fraction of itself, a remainder of another “nation,” an Indian nation, but also serves as a reminder of America’s “original” debt. Here, as well, Judge Pyncheon’s obsession, his claim to part of America, mirrors the “incest” obsession parodied in Our Old Home and self-flagellated to death in the “American Claimant” manuscripts, an obsession that synecdochically figures, in turn, as America’s claim to part of England. I’ll return to this.

If the “foreign” inhabits the text of The House with a certain “civility,” it conversely plunders Blithedale, where it ruptures both personal and national identity in the construction of “Arcadia”—itself a self-cancelling bricolage of literary and political allusion: The Arcadians (Virgil) constitute a “Pantisocracy” (Coleridge), associates of Candide (Voltaire), “sworn comrades to Falstaff’s ragged regiment” (Shakespeare), “denizens of Grub-street” (Gissing), whose daily work, sans song, amounts to nothing more than “loading the hay-cart” (Burns), a mindless routine that serves to shrink the average Arcadian’s brain to the dimensions of a Savoy cabbage—that is, Fourier transfigured as grub (3:66–67). Such is the “transnational” texture on which the Blithedale community both founds itself and founders, a masquerade, as E. Shaskan Bumas suggests, of “culturally subversive transformations” whose carnivalesque properties but serve to erase the epic dimension toward which Coverdale’s narration aspires. 16 Blithedale and its narrative (Blithedale) are equally destined to collapse beneath the logical impossibility of an “epic” America. 17 Utopia will not take root at home. In present-day America, the dem-

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ocratic individual subverts, in fact, the possibility of a communal ideal, perverts Blithedale’s revisionist version of conversion ideology disseminated by the Puritan patriarchs—that is, Hollingsworth’s monomania. In this perversion, America’s foundation is foreign to its origin: The nation’s genealogy reveals its own internal divide. The nation’s founding “fathers” confound its Puritan “fathers,” crisscross the nation’s story line and individual liberty. Between the lines, an Indian nation gives ground. As Bumas remarks, “Eliot’s pulpit” provides the backdrop to this scenario, an apparatus that reconfigures John Eliot’s zeal with that of the Blithedale community “as they consider the possibility of incorporating into their project an Indian aspect of American history.” 18 The reformers initially resurrect “the old Indian name of the premises,” but finally reject it since “it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles” (3:37). Elsewhere and otherwise, the matter of nomination recuperates terrain that would transcend the boundaries of a “nation” entirely: “The Oasis,” or “Saharah” (3:37). From the outset, then, aesthetic issues might seem to establish an implicit priority over sociopolitical concerns. Such, however, is not the case. Utopia, by definition, knows not its whereabouts, not even its resemblance to another scene, a “primal” scene—the scene in sight of which it always already accomplishes its “end,” its own demise. The scene, a warm September afternoon, suggests an Indian summer’s day. 19 It mimics an earlier scene in “Hawthorne,” one in which aesthetics and politics converge, the carnival of masqueraders at Merry Mount, where Thomas Morton’s prospect of a New Canaan, incorporating both Old World and New, Puritan and Indian, is so abruptly curtailed by “a settlement of Puritans, most dismal wretches,” and their myopic utopian scheme (9:60). The “future complexion of New England”—indeed, the very future of the nation itself—will be involved in this epic quarrel: “Should the grisly saints establish their jurisdiction over the gay sinners, then would their spirits darken all the clime, and make it a land of clouded visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm, forever” (9:62). Between maypole and whipping post, as William Heath observes, between “Merry” Old England and “dismal” New England (9:57, 60), the national imaginary exposes its epic parameters. 20 Witness, thus, the Blithedale constituents at Eliot’s pulpit, where literature and history converge, transfigured from devoted socialists to a transhistorical amalgamation of carnavelesque figures: a “Bavarian broom-girl,” a “negro of the Jim Crow order,” a “Kentucky woodsman,” and “allegorical figures from the Faerie Queen” oddly mixed up with “grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary officers” (3:209). America will not be turned into a national epic: At best, it’s but a masquerade, a convocation of interchangeable identites, a republic of imposters. Hence, Blithedale’s end arrives in its untimely way, stretched between masquerade and corpse, as Bumas remarks,

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upon Coverdale’s return from his self-imposed exile: “[w]here once there was a group of serious-minded transcendental socialists, now there is a mixture of archetypal historical figures from U.S., colonial, and British history, and English literary history enacting a masquerade”—a scene that constitutes, in fact, “a mise-en-abyme of the situation of the book’s characters.” 21 Reunited, at Eliot’s pulpit, with Priscilla, Zenobia, and Hollingsworth, Coverdale perceives in Hollingsworth “all that an artist could desire for the grim portrait of a Puritan magistrate, holding inquest of life and death in a case of witchcraft. . . . Had a pile of faggots been heaped against the rock, this hint of impending doom would have completed the suggestive picture” (3:214). That very night, the revelers recover Zenobia’s body. Between Puritan community and Merry Mount liberty, the Blithedale “republic” dissolves, obliterates all traces of its outline. Narration mirrors this chiasmus, straddles the line, double-crosses national identity and personal identity: Consider, for instance, Coverdale’s own oscillation between the individual and communal, between lyric and epic. Narration, here, constitutes its own perversion. As Giles observes, just as “the libidinal motivations that circulate through Blithedale” pervert the utopian community, rather than subvert or invalidate it, “so that the focus of the text always swings between opposite potentialities,” so, too, Coverdale’s “perverse sensibility betokens a radical ambivalence, an unwillingness finally to decide which side of the line he wants to inhabit.” 22 Stymied by this crisis of misdirection, the narrative line repeatedly fails to advance, lacks any progress of its own—or, better, perhaps, in its ironic inversion, takes two steps back for every forward step it undertakes, its self-designated “epic” poet exiled—at Eliot’s pulpit, no less— from the community he would memorialize. 23 In effect, such textual “economy” exposes a uni-versal crack in the utopian ideal—and in “America” as such. Narration doesn’t memorize a thing: Stopped dead, with Coverdale’s “confession,” its sentiment, its “lyricism,” epic “America,” in the twinkling of an eye—a wink, perhaps, in its parodic mode— erases its tracks. At its utopian extreme, the narrative succeeds, indeed, in going “nowhere” in the end. 24

Let’s segue to Europe, 1860: Narration overtakes itSelf. After a decade in the dead-letter office, a letter reaches “somewhere else,” the Other Side, but in its “catholic,” transubstantiated figuration—as (communion) wine: “This invaluable liquor [‘Sunshine’] . . . , if carelessly and irreligiously quaffed, might have been mistaken for a very fine sort of Champagne. . . . [T]o drink it was really more a moral than a physical enjoyment. There was a deliciousness in it that eluded analysis” (4:223, italics mine). The Letter takes narration from behind, re-collects, reconstitutes that mise-en-scène, con-fusing the narrative line, confounding both the

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family plot and what lies buried here. It’s not by chance the “Author” lays “felonious hands upon a . . . statue of a Pearl-Diver” in order to resite Akers at the scene of Kenyon’s studio—the statue of a “beautiful youth, a pearl-fisher, who had got entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among the pearl-oysters” (4:4, 117). Narration now figures in its capital, its own reserve, figures out itSelf. The Faun transfigures Pearl to Donatello, the scarlet letter to “a beautiful youth,” regarding which Miriam observes, “the form has not settled itself into sufficient repose” (4:117). To recapitulate, “Donatello”—that is, the marble faun as both the site of an object, cite of a text (The Marble Faun)—is but another name for “Pearl.” To disseminate its psychoanalytic nucleus, the oeuvre’s primal scene is doubled here, duplicitous, to be sure. Regarding that configuration of Romances called “Hawthorne,” The Faun recites The Letter, reverses the very circuit of the letter (Pearl), the circuitry (of the return) of the repressed, the (counter)transference for which the Gentle Reader has served its final purpose, and regarding which it may, at last, be dismissed—having paid, I might add, by way of inversion once again, its final debt to the analysand (“Hawthorne”) for its discourse, and having paid it up the nose, through the ears, wherever you desire to place it. Having posted The Letter to Europe in the metamorphosed shape of Pearl, the “Author” now returns The Faun to America in the translated shape of Donatello. Having posted America’s past, its history, to Europe, the “Author” now returns Europe’s past, its history, to America—and as its very own: the history of itself, but in reverse form. 25 If, as Clark Davis suggests, what remains for the “fallen Americans”— that is, Hilda and Kenyon—“divorced from the continental past, is the ripening trope of return, reengagement,” 26 this narrative design nonetheless incurs one final stroke of irony. (Re)united to home and homeland in a single coup, the quintessential American couple, copycats at heart, return what both originally lack to the na(rra)tion itself—originality: that timeless “spiritual” ideal inherent in the work of art and subsequently exposed by Hilda’s self-effacing labor in tribute to originality as such, the “genius” of the past, those “spirits of the Old Masters” (4:58) to which she faithfully submits. 27 Such fidelity, that feminine virtue par exellence, incongruously saves her from herself, her own originality. It’s here narration turns the screw: “The handmaid of Raphael, whom she loved with a virgin’s love! Would it have been worth Hilda’s while to relinquish this office, for the sake of giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart, in picture, of so many feminine achievements in literature” (4:61). So much for the feminine—and the elemental absence of originality that weds it to fidelity. Recouping its double-edged gravity, this coup (blessure) becomes a blessing in disguise. In the blink (augenblick) of an eye, the na(rra)tion— that is, “America,” now “wholly given over to a d------d mob of scribbling women” (17:304)—(re)appropriates this lack, (re)locates originality as

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such. The copy transcends its origin, translates “what the great Master had conceived in his imagination, but had not so perfectly succeeded in putting upon canvas” (4:59). Best go home with this “Idea” (4:379) in hand, return to home’s ennui, to timelessness, to “happily ever after,” and—not unlike the “Happy Valley” couple of The House—to domestic bliss as such (aka hell). In the New World, then, the Old World belatedly arrives at its prelapsarian origin: It finally happens (upon itself). The na(rra)tion exposes this spirit, this idea(l): “Hail, Columbia,” indeed (4:163). With this reversal of effect, Europe’s past, the past of Western civilization, arises out of America’s future: Europe—or, synecdochically, “Rome”—is as it always was: a dead letter. This step reconfigures home and homeland at once: “Italy . . . was chiefly valuable . . . as affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America” (4:3). Writing “in a foreign land, and after a long, long absence from my own,” the “Author” gets his head (on) straight at last: “the Author was somewhat surprised to see the extent to which he had introduced descriptions of various Italian objects, antique, pictorial, and statuesque. Yet these things fill the mind, everywhere in Italy, and especially in Rome, and cannot easily be kept from flowing out upon the page, when one writes freely, and with self-enjoyment” (4:3). It comes to this: Art (that is, “Italian objects, antique, pictorial, and statuesque”) transcends the borders of the national. “Rome” supplies the antithetical metonymy for “nature’s nation” as a whole: “an artificially created urban world,” a museum world, itself a work of art—sensuous, luxurious, and “Catholic” to boot. 28 Organized, moreover, “around elaborate dialogues between the values of American Puritanism and Italian Catholicism,” as Giles observes, The Faun repeats, in forward recollection, to call upon Kierkegaard, Hester’s aesthetic—and implicitly Catholic—elaborations on (the Letter [of the law of]) Puritanism, elaborations in light of which Governor Bellingham identifies Hester with that “worthy type of her of Babylon” (1:110). 29 With this return (of the repressed), The Faun aestheticizes religion as part of its transnational agenda. In crossing borders, aesthetics, like Catholicism, frees itself of any national ideology, always otherwise and elsewhere, somewhere other than itself, contra-dictory, to be sure: foreign to itself: uncanny. Ditto for nations. Thus, “Italy,” as such, appears most like itself from somewhere else—to wit, England: “while reproducing the book, on the broad and dreary sands of Redcar, with the gray German Ocean tumbling in upon me, . . . the complete change of scene made these Italian reminiscences shine out so vividly, that I could not find in my heart to cancel them” (4:3). With this doublecross, narration erects itSelf. Its erection, uncannily, comes to nothing if not “self-enjoyment,” jouissance. That is, it comes to itSelf. It finally comes to this: In double-crossing itSelf, it “cannot easily be kept from flowing out upon the page.” Let’s step back.

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Henry James incisively remarked this play of paradox in Hawthorne, the contradiction of “place”—a certain “aloofness” wherever he is, “an alien everywhere.” 30 Giles further examines this uncanny dimension of the oeuvre: “Hawthorne forges a link between psychological notions of strangeness and the exile’s condition of foreignness, as he writes about how the physical transgression of national boundaries evokes a sense of estrangement.” 31 Narration deploys the cutting edge of its political vexation specifically along these lines. If Hawthorne is a stranger to himself at home, a citizen of somewhere else, his writing “is never more at home than when describing the ‘alien everywhere.’” 32 In contrast to “The Custom-House,” for instance, the Old Manse seems to represent the most endearing qualities of home and hospitality, its guests leaving their cares behind them “like the Enchanted Ground, through which the pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City” (10:28). Or so it would appear. However, the Manse itself is characteristically unamerican at heart; rather, it recollects “one of the time-honored parsonages of England” (10:4). The state of the nation is hereby put on alert. Hawthorne would recuperate the very cultural constituents his Puritan ancestors so vigorously sought to exclude, as Frederick Newberry argues. 33 Accordingly, Hawthorne over-writes the Manse’s arid study with a “cheerful coat of paint, and golden-tinted paper-hangings,” replacing “grim prints” with “one of Raphael’s Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como” (10:5). Let’s not miss the irony at play: It was here, as Newberry remarks, that Emerson wrote “Nature.” In crossing out the nation’s origin, its Puritan past, these alterations “suggest reversals of history resonant with European Catholic traditions,” thereby extending the text of The Manse/ the context of the Manse “beyond the parochial boundaries of Concord, of New England, and of America herself.” 34 In this ambidextrous manoeuvre, Hawthorne’s incestuous handiwork engenders a transnational context within which to examine the historical interface of England and America. Reduced to its uncommon denominator, “England had a history of valuing its artists, while America did not.” 35 It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Pearl, “the richest heiress of her day, in the New World,” vanishes from the scene of the Letter while in “the flush and bloom of early womanhood,” the inhabitant, henceforth, of “another land” (1:262). In Puritan America, the artwork doesn’t stand a chance. Similarly, Pearl, “the letter in another form,” will no more be tolerated, much less appreciated, than the baby garment that Hester embroiders “with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult, had any infant, thus apparelled, been shown to our sombre-hued community” (1:102, 262). Enacted, subsequently, through the interplay of letters from “another land,” this mise-en-scène puts into play a “significant” effort to reconnect Old World and New,

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some “utopian transcendence,” as John Carlos Rowe suggests, between “aristocratic privilege and democratic equality, New England Puritanism and European Catholicism.” 36 Utopia aside, narration surreptitiously deploys the “foreign country” as a condition of possibility by means of which the nation might rewrite itself. Given this displacement, the “nation” herein occupies the site of transference: Through the locus of the Other, as Homi K. Bhabha argues, cultural identity and the identity of cultural difference are reinscribed within the very same event. 37 The na(rra)tion’s sole salvation must come, ironically, at its own expense, “redemption” by means of a transnational identity—an identity transacted by the transference “elsewhere” as such. England, more than any“where” else, perhaps, afforded the proper (Heimlichkeit) dis-stance required of the dis-course to successfully transport this step, to translate this exchange. Hawthorne’s liverpool consulship traverses this doublecross.

In Our Old Home (1863), Hawthorne draws eleven vignettes of English culture and life, as well as an introductory essay, “Consular Experiences,” recounting representative sociopolitical moments that define his four years in England as American consul at Liverpool. British reviews frequently accused Hawthorne of abusing English hospitality while parading national prejudice. On the surface, the charge seems justified, for Hawthorne’s narrative relentlessly puts into play the theme of nationality—and prejudice, in fact, provides its mise-en-scène. Even the weather comes into play, invoking “the most changeable and immanent signs of national difference.” 38 The very opening lines of “A Pilgrimage to Old Boston,” for example, provoke a subtle antagonism that marks the scene of (double) writing, the patriotic ambivalence that underscores the essays as a (w)hole. Here’s Hawthorne: “We set out at a little past eleven, and made our first stage to Manchester. We were by this time sufficiently anglicized to reckon the morning a bright and sunny one; although the May sunshine was mingled with water, as it were, and distempered with a very bitter east-wind” (5:139). Indeed, in a letter to Ticknor, Hawthorne typified the book as “too good and true to bear publication. It would bring a terrible hornet’s nest about my ears” (17:493). In effect, the work abounds with barbs and stings of its own. Witness, for instance, the patriotic ploy that inaugurates the introductory essay on “Consular Experiences”: Describing the Liverpool consulate, Hawthorne remarks, “[t]he staircase and passage-way were often thronged, of a morning, with a set of beggarly and piraticallooking scoundrels, (I do no wrong to our own countrymen in styling them so, for not one in twenty was a genuine American), purporting to belong to our mercantile marine, and chiefly composed of Liverpool

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Blackballers and the scum of every maritime nation on earth” (5:6). Under the ruse of national prejudice, Hawthorne’s narrative incites a sense of confrontation from the start, confirming what the English critics claim—or so it seems. Rather than invite the reader into an American slant on things, such statements seem designed to alienate him from the outset—effectively foreclosed to hospitality of any sort. The narrative’s patriotic reach even extends to issues touching on the general nature of English and American womanhood. Witness the figure of the dowager in the essay on “Leamington Spa”—the epitome of middle-aged English ladies at which Hawthorne ceaselessly marvels: “an English lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined and delicate, so far as her physique goes, than anything that we Western people class under the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of frame, . . . massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that . . . you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine” (5:48–49). Unimpeded by the “P.C. police,” the discourse gallops on, cannot let go of this figure: “she has the effect of a seventy-four gun ship in time of peace; for, while you assure yourself that there is no real danger, you cannot help thinking how tremendous would be her onset, if pugnaciously inclined. . . . But conceive of her in a ballroom, . . . a spectacle to howl at” (5:49). Elsewhere, English corpulence appears in yet a different form: “It has often perplexed me to imagine how an Englishman will be able to reconcile himself to any future state of existence, from which the earthly institution of Dinner shall be excluded. . . . The idea of Dinner has so embedded itself among his highest and deepest characteristics . . . that, by taking it utterly away, Death . . . would leave him infinitely less complete” (5:310). Comments such as these, doled out on nearly every page, appear purposely designed to stage the inhospitable as such. Narration itSelf, always and everywhere, seems indisposed—insular, provincial, cocksure: “I looked upon [the consul chamber] as not altogether fit to be tenanted by the commercial representative of so great and prosperous a country as the United States. . . . So I settled quietly down, striking some of my roots into such soil as I could find” (5:9). Incited by such rhetoric, narration functions like a rearview mirror: It sites what lies before it, yet, for the most part, sets its sights not on whither it goes but, rather, whence it came—on home, its native soil. Wherever it turns, narration sees nothing hospitable in foreign lands: Nothing compares to home. Patriotic rhetoric declares it so. From a distance, here’s the overview: Hither, in the course of my incumbency, came a great variety of visitors, . . . including almost every other nationality on earth, especially the distressed and downfallen. . . . Italian bandits, . . . proscribed conspirators from Old Spain, Spanish Americans, Cubans who professed to have stood by Lopez . . . , scarred French soldiers of the second Republic—in a word, all sufferers, or pretended ones, in the cause of

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Let’s not miss the irony in light of which this scene unfolds. These homeless strays deserve—indeed, have earned—“America.” Conversely, Americans, if not downright outlaws, are likewise strays at heart: “Sitting, as it were, in the gateway between the old world and the new, where the steamers and packets landed the greater part of our wandering countrymen, . . . I saw that no people on earth have such vagabond habits as ourselves” (5:12). While hospitality is certainly a central and controlling figure at play in the work, issues such as “home” and “homeland” might be more duplicitous than they at first appear, especially in light of a narrative economy intent on cancelling, erasing, itself—one driven to double-cross the sense of “patriotism” as such: For what narration deals out with one hand is invariably taken back with the other. Notice, here, the “other” of its twohanded deal, the rhetorical equivocation that configures, for instance, Hawthorne’s “stray” countrymen. Among the applications, personal or by letter, that Hawthorne receives from these Americans, he discerns an obsession common to many, what he calls the “English romance”: The cause of this “peculiar insanity,” he observes, “lies deep in the AngloAmerican heart. After all these bloody wars and vindictive animosities, we have still an unspeakable yearning towards England. When our forefathers left the old home, they pulled up many of their roots, but trailed along with them others, which were never . . . torn out of the original soil by the violence of subsequent struggles” (5:18). Thus rooted by heartstrings to English soil, the average, everyday American “feels a blind, pathetic tendency to wander back again” (5:19). Over and against its patriotic insularity, the discourse now appears to level the playing field, attributing this backward pull, in general, to American provincialism and cupidity: “a silver mug on which an anciently engraved coat-of-arms has been half scrubbed out, a seal with an uncertain crest, an old yellow letter or document, in faded ink, . . . rubbish of this kind . . . has been potent enough to turn the brain of many an honest Republican” (5:19–20). To this effect, Hawthorne observes, “I might fill many pages with instances of this diseased American appetite for English soil” (5:20), and subsequently sketches a host of caricatures, including a New England woman claiming to own “the site on which Castle-street, the Town Hall, the Exchange, and all the principal business part [sic] of Liverpool, have long been situated”; two ladies claiming a great estate in Cheshire, “and announcing themselves as blood-relatives of Queen Vic-

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toria,” with “an eye to the possibility of the eventual succession of one or both of them to the crown of Great Britain”—a point, however, on which Hawthorne claims a certain disinterestedness since, “encountering them thus in the dawn of their fortunes, I forebore to put in a plea for a future dukedom”; and a gentleman believing himself, at birth, assigned to the wrong mother, attributing his genuine lineage to that of a nobleman “in the picture-gallery of whose country-seat . . . he had discovered a portrait bearing a striking resemblance to himself” (5:20–23). 39 Attending the parody of these Americans, however, patriotism once more seems to sour the discourse as it counterbalances, crisscrosses, crosses out the American obsession with discovering an English inheritance with “an equivalent multitude of English rogues, dexterously counterfeiting the genuine Yankee article.” Prejudice wastes no time cutting to the quick; for while Americans, in general, still bear “an unspeakable yearning towards England” (5:18), it has required “nothing less than the boorishness, . . . the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, a province of their small island” (5:19). Hawthorne further condenses these negative traits of the English, “blind of one eye,” to what he calls “the massive materiality of the English character”—a corpulence not only physical, but reaching to the British soul, its national spirit, as well (5:19). Yet this riposte is parried with another still: Americans, as such, are equally restricted in their character: “We, in our dry atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser” (5:64). In other words, the discourse seems to work against itSelf, mired in conflict, contradiction, and duplicity. In fact, it cannot help but work this way, grounded, as it is, in prejudice. 40 Yet something more insidious plays beneath the prejudice, beyond the banter and exchange of patriotic quips. While patriotic discourse counterfeits itSelf, narration, in the end, reveals its own subversive sense, its non-sense at heart. If, by definition, patriotism is always and everywhere duplicitous, so, too, appears the subject that defines itSelf in terms of nationality. 41 Hawthorne’s discourse exploits the dupe involved where and whenever the subject depends upon the nation for the heart of its identity. Subject to generalization and cliché, the patriotic self devolves to no one in particular: Identity itSelf amounts to nothing. It’s (not) for nothing that the discourse therefore authorizes a sense of “internationalism.” Notice, for example, the transnational chiasmus that concludes “Leamington Spa”: Despite what Hawthorne calls “the bitterness of feeling” that the English entertain between themselves and other nationalities, “especially that of America,” an American, on the other hand, “requires no long residence to make him love their island. . . . For my part, I used to wish that we could annex it,

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transferring their thirty millions of inhabitants to some convenient wilderness in the great West, and putting half or a quarter as many of ourselves into their places. The change would be beneficial to both parties” (5:64). Don’t be deceived by the implicit swindle of the irony—which once more seems to serve the patriotic pose; it draws attention all the more to the buffoonery that occupies the heart of national identity. Between the lines, narration’s own desire transcends such counterfeit boundaries, aspiring toward a sense of “cultural” response and sensibility—a “broader and more generous patriotism which might almost amalgamate with that of England, without losing an atom of its native force and flavor” (5:37). To this effect, the discourse turns away from politics as such—most pointedly the political favoritism that occupies the heart of the American diplomatic service, what “The Custom-House” recites: “an American never is thoroughly qualified for a foreign post, nor has time to make himself so, before the revolution of the political wheel discards him from his office” (5:36). Ideally conceived, Hawthorne’s own position is itself impossible—a responsible consulship “totally beyond the attainment of an American; there to-day, bristling all over with the porcupine-quills of our Republic, and gone tomorrow” (5:37). Not only politics comes in for censure and reproach. In the “end,” narration turns its back upon itself, as well; tongue-in-cheek, it turns the other “cheek”: “I was not at all the kind of man to grow into such an ideal Consul as I have here suggested. . . . I disliked my office from the first. . . . Its dignity, so far as it had any, was an incumbrance; the attentions it drew upon me . . . were—as I may say without incivility or ingratitude, because there is nothing personal in that sort of hospitality—a bore” (5:37–38). Once out of office, Hawthorne notes his own duplicitous identity, looks back on this “unnatural life,” and how, in retrospect, it seems unreal: “I could scarcely believe that it was I, that figure whom they called a Consul, but a sort of Double Ganger, who had been permitted to assume my aspect . . . while my real self had lain . . . in a state of suspended animation” (5:38). From start to finish, national narration is a joke. Both citizen subject and national identity amount to (nothing but) parody: Each parodies the other; each lampoons itself. Thus, for instance, Hawthorne enumerates the hodgepodge—the bricolage of (what narration laughingly refers to as) “art works”—that adorns the walls of his consular apartments: “some rude engravings of our naval victories in the war of 1812, together with the Tennessee State House, . . . a Hudson river steamer, and a . . . lithograph of General Taylor, with an honest hideousness of aspect, occupying the place of honor above the mantel-piece” (5:7–8). With characteristic irony, he concludes: “my patriotism forbade me to take down . . . the pictures, both because it seemed no more than right that an American Consulate . . . should fairly represent the American taste in the fine arts,

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and because these decorations reminded me so delightfully of an oldfashioned American barber’s shop” (5:8). 42 Indeed, the barber shop’s cuttings fairly figure the state of the nation’s house—divided now, in 1863, by civil war—perhaps more acutely than a large map likewise adorning the consulate wall, a map of the United States “as they were, twenty years ago, but seem little likely to be, twenty years hence” (5:7). Threatened by civil war and grounded in prejudice, national identity thus cancels itSelf out by virtue of its own duplicity, its otherness. “Other”-wise, the nation amounts to nothing, the nothing that always and everywhere occupies the heart of home and homeland at once, nothing but the butt of a joke, a practical joke addressed to “nowhere,” dispatched from “somewhere else.” Divided within and doubled without, the patriotic subject bears witness to its own charade: the ghost of itSelf. Critics on both sides of the water missed the mark, as Hawthorne observed in a letter to Fields: “The English critics seem to think me very bitter against their countrymen, . . . but I really think that Americans have more cause than they to complain of me. Looking over the volume, I am rather surprised to find that, whenever I draw a comparison between the two peoples, I almost invariably cast the balance against ourselves” (18:603). On its own, the patriotic posturing of Our Old Home exposes this divisiveness within itself. In the end, narration bears witness to the very compromise it disavows: Witness the concluding lines of “Consular Experiences”: “I hope that I do not compromise my American patriotism by acknowledging that I was often conscious of a fervent hereditary attachment to the native soil of our forefathers, and felt it to be our own Old Home” (5:40). In light of its duplicitous configurations of patriotism, its changes and exchanges of prejudice, Our Old Home exposes, beyond all else, the double-cross of personal identity, the very cancellation of itSelf, which nationalism invites. Here, narration concurs, uncompromisingly, with Sam Johnson, Hawthorne’s most revered English subject, whom he endearingly sketched in the “Lichfield and Uttoxeter” essay, and to whom I’ll give the closing word. Patriotism, Dr. Johnson once remarked, is the last refuge of scoundrels.

CODA: It’s not by chance—in a text that figures both the reading of figures and the figure of reading—that Hepzibah reads to Clifford a story whose ending prefigures the “happy” ending of the story that frames it: “Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve Clifford and herself for this one day. But the Happy Valley had a cloud over it” (2:134). Judge Pyncheon’s death, however, will serve to clear things up so that “The End” of The House both returns its figures to this interior “shot” of the House—this

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internal frame of The House—and simultaneously opens them upon another frame external to the space of both the House and The House, a frame that opens narration onto an “other” end, an end that figures itself out, figures out itself—an end that frames those figures that inhabit its “house” as ones who live happily ever after: that is, without an end. In between (time), the timeless “ever-after” of The House enters a foreign space, an English text, no less—and from the rear, its “end”—where the final chapter of Rasselas sets out its “Conclusion, in which Nothing is Concluded,” and where its figures remain confined to a house in the end. Trumping Johnson, Hawthorne turns the screw: In the end, narration figures the end of its figures as endless. Configuring narration and the nation at once, the abysmal structure of allusion eludes itself, confounding and inconclusive: The crossing of a border con-fuses both native and foreigner alike: Each one double-crosses the other. Here everything is figured into the account; nothing is crossed out. In this uncanny duplicity, one nation’s presence in another always already prefigures the other in itself. NOTES 1. Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4–5. 2. On the notion of the “step” (trans-), see Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 397. 3. Douglas Anderson, A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 200. 4. John Dolis, “Hawthorne’s Circe: Turning Water to (S)wine,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 24.1 (1998): 42–44. 5. Berlant, 169–70. 6. Frederick Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), 227. 7. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al., 23 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962–94), 1:22, 20. Subsequent quotations refer exclusively to this edition, hereafter parenthetically cited in the text by volume and page number. 8. See John Dolis, “Domesticating Hawthorne: Home Is for the Birds,” Criticism 43.1 (2001): 9. 9. See Berlant, 169–70. 10. See Dolis, “Domesticating Hawthorne,” 18–19. 11. See John Dolis, The Style of Hawthorne’s Gaze: Regarding Subjectivity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 176. 12. Anne Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 171. 13. Alan Trachtenberg, “Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne’s Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables,” in National Imaginaries, American Identities: The Cultural Work of American Iconography, eds. Larry J. Reynolds and Gordon Hutner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 47. 14. Lounsbery, 174.

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15. Giles, “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature,” PMLA 118.1 (2003): 173, 177. 16. E. Shaskan Bumas, “‘The Forgotten Art of Gayety’: Masquerade, Utopia, and the Complexion of Empire,” Arizona Quarterly 59.4 (2003): 17, 25. 17. In “A Select Party,” Hawthorne parodies this “national” delusion represented by a “famous performer of acknowledged impossibilities; a character of superhuman capacity and virtue”—the “only writer of the age whose genius is equal to the production of an epic poem” (X:60–61). 18. Bumas, 7. 19. See Bumas, 11. 20. William Heath, “Merry Old England and Hawthorne’s ‘The May-Pole of Merry Mount,’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 33.1 (2007): 59, 46–47. 21. Bumas, 10. 22. Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 169, 168. 23. In characteristic ways, Coverdale mimics Hawthorne’s “Master Genius” in “A Select Party,” who seems “destined to fulfil (sic) the great mission of an American literature. . . . From him, whether moulded in the form of an epic poem, or assuming a guise altogether new, as the spirit itself may determine, we are to receive our first great original work, which shall do all that remains to be achieved for our glory among the nations” (X:66). 24. So, too, “A Select Party” ends with the destruction of its own phantasy: “a blast of the rising tempest blew out all their lights in the twinkling of an eye. . . . People should think of these matters, before they trust themselves on a pleasure-party into the realm of Nowhere” (X:73). 25. Dolis, The Style of Hawthorne’s Gaze, 210. 26. Clark Davis, Hawthorne’s Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 152. 27. See Lounsbery, 255: “in the figure of Hilda, Hawthorne struggles to revalue this dependent and belated relationship to (European) high culture that is the American’s lot, attempting to reconceive an inevitable imitativeness as a higher creativity. Because in The Marble Faun the exalted status of the artist depends largely on the ability to transcend (or circumvent) the messy physical process of actually creating art objects, the narrative must work hard to mystify what is essentially Hilda’s mechanical skill. And yet, strikingly, the passage that makes perhaps the most grandiose claims for art’s spiritual power describes an aesthetic response evoked by an incontestably physical sense, the experience of drinking wine . . . asserting that even the most patently sensual of pleasures must be ‘spiritualized’ before it can be acknowledged as legitimate. This passage deploys the full lexicon of terms used throughout the novel to drive home the idea of art’s holy mystery (including in particular the obvious imagery of Holy Communion) and the penetrating intuition required of one who would fathom it.” 28. William L. Vance, America’s Rome, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 2:82. See also Lounsbery, 235. 29. Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections, 170. 30. Henry James, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” in Henry James: The American Essays, ed. Leon Edel, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 22, 23. 31. Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections, 171. 32. Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections, 172. 33. Frederick Newberry, Hawthorne’s Divided Loyalties: England and America in His Works (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), 141. 34. Newberry, 142. 35. Newberry, 167. 36. John Carlos Rowe, “Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality,” PMLA 118.1 (2003): 83.

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37. Cf. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 312–13. 38. Bhabha, 319. 39. Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve; rev. trans. Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 463: “There is hardly an American to be met who does not claim some remote kindred with the first founders of the colonies; and as for the scions of the noble families of England, America seemed to me to be covered with them.” 40. See Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 230: “the concept of ideology must be disengaged from the ‘representationalist’ problematic: ideology has nothing to do with ‘illusion,’ with a wrong, distorted representation of its social content.” Cf. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1986), 233: Ideology is primarily and “profoundly unconscious”—a system of representations only. 41. See Rumina Sethi, Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 20–21: “A nationalistic representation may become very nearly a ‘world view’ in its less abstract meaning, or crudely put, a false-consciousness.” 42. For kicks, compare Alcott’s remark about American art: Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War, intro. Jan Turnquist (Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2007), 57: “I meditated upon the perfection which Art had attained in America having just passed a bronze statue of some hero, who looked like a black Methodist minister, in a cocked hat, above the gist, and a tipsy squire below; while his horse stood like an opera dancer, on one leg, in a high, but somewhat remarkable wind, which blew his mane one way and his massive tail the other.”

Finale Mark Twain: Beauty and the (B)east

“Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Regarding the discourse of history, Roland Barthes has observed the following: “historical discourse is essentially an ideological elaboration or, to be more specific, an imaginary elaboration. . . . Hence, we understand why the notion of historical ‘fact’ has so often given rise to a certain mistrust.” 1 Nietzsche already blazed this path. There are no facts as such; facts only arise at the site upon which meaning has already been introduced. Let’s recite this scene at the site of another scenario: Sociological discourse is essentially an ideological elaboration or, to be more specific, an imaginary elaboration. Hence, the notion of “sociological” fact (that is, the “reality” of the socius)—like any fact—never has any but a linguistic guarantee, a reference that merely “recommends” it, if you will. Yet everything appears as though a discourse on the socius provides a copy of reality, as though its referent exists external to the discourse and magically, enchantingly, grounds it. Travel literature traditionally sets up this simplistic schema as its paradigm: a two-term schematic that erases the signified by virtue of an immediate correspondence beween signifier and referent. Here it’s taken for granted: Potentially, at least, descriptions of travel represent reality. The subject merely “takes note” of its experience, experience itself. Experience is effortless; it actively intrudes upon the subject’s space. The subject need only “move around,” transport itSelf, its only pain the ache of an occasional discomfort, a momentary disorientation. In this “occupied territory,” the site of extrusion upon which reality and its representation (referent and signifier) come “fact” to “face,” interface, experience displaces the signified; reality now occupies the place of meaning. It is its own transparent text. Such an assumption serves to repress a fiction itself, the fiction of “non-fiction,” which but presumes its own presuppositions, assumes the truth it would discover, asserts “a level of facticity which conceals its own ideology,” a ground from which “judgements of classification, generalization and value can be made.” 2 And while it seems that this engagement arises, by definition, “after the fact,” the tourist complicates the staging of this scene; the 157

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traveling subject arrives, more often than not, before the encounter, ahead of its experience, its destination, preoccupied by its inseparable companion, the guide book—its destination a supplement to the supplement(s) of the subject itSelf. 3 Experience, in this transformed shape, points to what Barthes calls the “reality effect” insofar as textuality disguises reality: The guide book gives the socius the shape of the signifier. The guide book tells us what it means to occupy a certain place, a space whose structure constitutes the socius as such. This locale is that upon which the subject sets its sights in advance. Having handed itSelf over to the guide book, the subject subsequently arrives ahead of time; it arrives—in effect—before it gets “there.” In this sense, travel is recitation; it recites sightseeing at the site of a previous text. Rather than solicit imagination, travel, thus transformed, transposes the subject—indeed, transfixes it; it sets the subject in place— in the place of the real—in order to incite a meaningful locale. This dilemma is further compounded by those other texts with which the subject chooses to travel, texts other than—and in addition to—the guide book: supplementary texts, or so it seems. In this regard, as Terry Caesar remarks, the question, “what is the place of the travel book in travel?” recuperates another: “what is the place of the book in travel books?” 4 “Most writers of travel books, especially if they travel in order to write a book, take books with them”; of course, such reading must be purely accidental; otherwise, “there would be no point in going anywhere in the first place.” 5 Travel, on the other hand, is incidental precisely to the extent that it loses itself in reading. To recover itSelf, the subject must erase this incident, must cite experience in the first place—as the site of its subsequent insights—despite the “fact” that, by reciting its own travels, by writing the text of its own displacement, textuality always already threatens the authority of experience. 6 To further complicate the irony, as Hilton Obenzinger observes, “the physical presence of the traveler on the terrain itself, the actual art of traveling, already alters (‘writes’) the landscape at the same time as the journey reconstitutes (‘writes’) the subjectivity of the traveler through a process of constant reciprocity.” 7

Twain’s Innocents Abroad, “arguably the most popular travel book ever written and unarguably the funniest,” establishes this ironic configuration at the site of its own displacement. 8 As Twain remarks in the preface, “notwithstanding it is only a record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. . . . I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel writing that may be charged against me—for I think I have seen with impartial eyes.” 9 “Im-

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partial” indeed: And, if so, then to whom do we attribute this experience? Where is the (American) subject here? It’s not by chance that Innocents Abroad bears the subtitle “The New Pilgrims Progress,” for the very subject of these travels will be the Protestant (American) subject in its movement eastward—Europe and then the (Middle) East—to recover the purity of its origin, an origin, I remind you, whose “gospel” is quintessentially governed by love. Fittingly, then, but not without its apposite irony, love appears adjacent to the disappearance of America itself: “The next morning, we weighed anchor and went to sea. . . . All my malicious instincts were dead within me; and as America faded out of sight, I think a spirit of charity rose up in their place that was as boundless, for the time being, as the broad ocean that was heaving its billows about us” (IA 15–16). “For the time being”: At the same time, notice how many Americans implicitly welcome a similar experience: “Every body was going to Europe. . . . The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week” (IA 12). 10 And yet, no sooner under way, love cannot bear its weight—nor, heading east, can pilgrims bear the wait. Single-handedly, the ship’s executive officer fathoms the impasse, gauges the contrary winds that always already menace the westerly “progress” these pilgrims henceforth command—that is, the contra-diction at the heart of prayer itself: There they are, down there every night at eight bells, praying for fair winds—when they know as well as I do that this is the only ship going east this time of the year, but there’s a thousand coming west—what’s a fair wind for us is a head wind for them—the Almighty’s blowing a fair wind for a thousand vessels, and this tribe wants him to turn it clear around so as to accommodate one,—and she a steamship at that! It ain’t good sense, it ain’t good reason, it ain’t good Christianity, it ain’t common human charity. Avast with such nonsense. (IA 25)

Indeed, to lurch ahead of things, by journey’s end, all Christian charity will listlessly be set adrift: “there was no comfort or peace any where, on account of the regiment of boys and girls and beggars that persecuted us all the time for bucksheesh. The guide wanted us to give them some money, and we did it; but when he went on to say that they were starving to death we could not but feel that we had done a great sin in throwing obstacles in the way of such a desirable consummation, and so we tried to collect it back, but it could not be done” (IA 437). In a further ironic inversion, recuperating the work of the Crusades, these pilgrims would recapture the Holy Land, but in the spirit of “play.” 11 Something’s missing in America, its Protestant work ethic covertly exposed—not to mention both the drudgery and economics (oikos nomos), the very cost, of keeping house. 12 Aboard the steamship Quaker City, these “Christian dogs” now undertake a “pleasure excursion” that

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overtakes them in the end, overtakes them in its wake—sinks the very ship of the sacred. In face of the profane, the sacred is deeply at risk: It risks facing itself. In this regard, one of the two must lose face. It’s not for nothing that the face of Muslim beauty goes in hiding: “I have caught a glimpse of the faces of several Moorish women, (for they are only human, and will expose their faces for the admiration of a Christian dog when no male Moor is by,) and I am full of veneration for the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness” (IA 56). So much for beauty and romance, so much for love—so much for Christian charity. But I’m ahead of the tale. Travel runs the risk of disillusionment. For the pilgrims, disenchantment begins with beauty, with “romance” itself. Travel through the East does nothing but disappoint, points solely to what extent the Muslim East repeatedly fails to frame a pretty picture, an image that doesn’t match the gist of the accounts.

The beauty of the East, its fascination, its magical appeal: It would seem that these have been engraved upon the fabric of Western consciousness. For the source of this image we needn’t search far. If any “region” can be sited for this state of affairs, it is the site of all citation. It is, in other words, a text—the text that haunts not only Twain’s, but all accounts of the East: The Arabian Nights. This cite recites the site of possibility itself: talking birds, a city of brass, an ivory “picture” tube, an artifical apple whose odor cures disease, magic carpets, magic lamps, genies—and everywhere an excess of wealth, precious jewels, silver, gold. Twain’s own récit recalls as much, repeats the scene of ideality, scenarios of possibility that drive the narrative to question reality itself, that question the narrative drive—its need to travel, to see with its own eyes, to account for itself. Arabian Nights recounts the traveler’s own desire, recites its youthful dreams to leave home, exceed its bounds, incite the new, the strange, the wonderful: To see a camel train laden with the spices of Arabia and the rare fabrics of Persia come marching through the narrow alleys of the bazaar, among porters with their burdens, money-changers, lamp merchants, Alnaschars in the glassware business, portly cross-legged Turks smoking the famous narghili, and the crowds drifting to and fro in the fanciful costumes of the East, is a genuine revelation of the Orient. The picture lacks nothing. It casts you back at once into your forgotten boyhood, and again you dream over the wonders of The Arabian Nights; again your companions are princes, your lord is the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid, and your servants are terrific giants and genii that come with smoke and lightning and thunder, . . . and go as the storm goes when they depart! (IA 301)

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Here anything goes: The picture lacks nothing. Magic and riches structure its récit, propel its thousand and one scenarios, designed by Scheherazade, let’s not forget, in order to forstall the very “end” itself. Postponement, deferral, supplementation, excess: These interosculate the ultimate design of this utopian space, its narrative contour, its detour that suspends narration’s own desire—the will to end. In this utopian space, narration goes out of its way: Time stands still. The narrative exists to put itSelf off, delay its demise. To this end, it installs the “Other” in its place—the extraordinary, the spellbinding. Narration (“Scheherazade”) thereby secures a new lease on life, convinces its audience (Shahriar) of its value, its “faithfulness.” Romance casts a spell. Beyond all else, the Holy Land dis-“spells” all magic (pre)tendered by the text. “Romance” is at an end: I hope that in future I may be spared any more sentimental praises of the Arab’s idolatry of his horse. In boyhood, I longed to be an Arab of the desert and have a beautiful mare, and call her Selim or Benjamin or Mohammed, and feed her with my own hands, and let her come into the tent, and teach her to caress me and look fondly upon me with her great tender eyes; and I wished that a stranger might come at such a time and offer me a hundred thousand dollars for her, so that I could do like the other Arabs—hesitate, yearn for the money, but overcome by my love for my mare, at last say, “Part with thee, my beautiful one! Never with my life! Away, tempter, I scorn the gold!” and then bound into the saddle and speed over the desert like the wind! (IA 351)

Twain’s narrative now takes it back, refutes its boyhood dreams; the thread of all Romance must come undone: “But I recall those aspirations. If these Arabs be like the other Arabs, their love for their beautiful mares is a fraud. These of my acquaintance have no love for their horses . . . and no knowledge of how to care for them. . . . These pirates never think of washing a horse’s back. They do not shelter the horses in their tents, either” (IA 351–52). To travel with eyes of one’s own; it’s here that Nights must turn to day: “Look at poor cropped and dilapidated ‘Baalbec,’ and weep for the sentiment that has been wasted upon the Selims of romance” (IA 352). It’s all a sham: At last, here were the “wild, free sons of the desert, speeding over the plain like the wind, on their beautiful Arabian mares” we had read so much about and longed so much to see! Here were the “picturesque costumes”! This was the “gallant spectacle”! Tatterdemalion vagrants—cheap braggadocio—“Arabian mares” spined and necked like the ichthyosaurus in the museum and humped and cornered like a dromedary! To glance at the genuine son of the desert is to take the romance out of him forever. (IA 406)

With this, the dream dissolves; narration goes mad; it feigns indifference to those pre-“texts” it re-cites: “It used to make my blood run cold to read

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Wm. C. Grimes’ hairbreadth escapes from Bedouins, but I think I could read them now without a tremor” (IA 356). Romance must be disowned, imagination disallowed, reality reduced: “I can see easily enough that if I wish to profit by this tour and come to a correct understanding of the matters of interest conncected with it, I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many things. . . . I must begin a system of reduction. . . . One gets large impressions in boyhood sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life” (IA 359). Indifference bespeaks the facts, the narrative “fall,” its limited time. Forget the dreams of youth, the lure of those unlimited possibilities. Unlike the timeless world of The Nights, travel is glued to the clock. The voyage—aka “pilgrimage”—points to this reality, although the Holy Land extends its own seductive wiles: “Here, you feel all the time just as if you were living about the year 1200 before Christ—or back to the patriarchs—or forward to the New Era. The scenery of the bible is about you—the customs of the partiarchs . . . the same people . . . the same impressive religious solemnity and silence rest upon the desert and the mountains that were upon them in the remote ages of antiquity” (IA 343). Narration, on the other hand, cannot but note the time it takes, the time narration takes to mark the length of its “progress,” to measure the pilgrimage itself: “All distances in the East are measured by hours, not miles. A good horse will walk three miles an hour over nearly any kind of road; therefore, an hour here always stands for three miles. This method of computation is bothersome and annoying,” and makes no sense until one translates “pagan hours into Christian miles, just as people do with the spoken words of a foreign language they are acquainted with, but not familiarly enough to catch the meaning in a moment. . . . In Constantinople you ask, ‘How far is it to the Consulate?’ and they answer, ‘About ten minutes.’ . . . I can not [sic] be positive about it, but I think that there, when a man orders a pair of pantaloons, he says he wants them a quarter of a minute in the legs and nine seconds around the waist” (IA 390). Where history is all in all, there’s nothing but time: It occupies the whole of things. Precisely here the narrative belies its feigned indifference: We have got so far east, now—a hundred and fifty-five degrees of longitude from San Francisco—that my watch can not “keep the hang” of the time anymore. It has grown discouraged and stopped. I think it did a wise thing. The difference in time between Sevastopol and the Pacific coast is enormous. When it is six o’clock in the morning here, it is somewhere about week before last in California. . . . These . . . distresses . . . have worried me so much that I was afraid . . . that I never would have any appreciation of time again; but when I noticed how handy I was yet about comprehending when it was dinner-time, a blessed tranquillity settled down upon me. (IA 282)

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The “difference” in time, its own indifference, but underscores narration’s malaise—its disillusionment at every turn. Reality is less than what the books portray—most notably, the spectacle of Christianity imagined in the West: “One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen under our observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity”; over and against the American appreciation of distance and open space, Christ “spent his life . . . within a compass no larger than an ordinary county in the United States. It is as much as I can do to comprehend this stupefying fact” (IA 371). So, too, the Sea of Galilee “is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe,” and “is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow” (IA 375). And elsewhere, at Baalbek, even those grapes that Joshua and another “spy” brought back from the land of Canaan do nothing but disappoint narration’s own discerning eye: “in the children’s picture-books they are always represented as bearing one monstrous bunch swung to a pole between them, a respectable load for a pack-train. The Sunday-school books exaggerated it a little. The . . . bunches are not as large as those in the pictures. I was surprised and hurt when I saw them, because those colossal bunches of grapes were one of my most cherished juvenile traditions” (IA 324). Juvenile, indeed: so much for Sunday school texts (and Christianity “writ large”). All pre-texts now dissolve. There is, in fact, no difference between those “Sunday-school books” and Nights; each, in its turn, (re)iterates Romance, repeats the dream engendered by excess and hyperbole: Everything boils down to snake oil, bogus, sham. A similar opinion sparked Nerval’s remark to Gautier: “For a person who has never seen the Orient, a lotus is still a lotus; for me it is only a kind of onion.” 13 Twain’s own récit recounts the nightmare of reality, accounts for less; its own economy at stake, it rambles on, wanders aimlessly around. Despite its weak resolve, however, the narrative will count: The travel account reins in narration’s travels, orders it “around.” To this extent, “Twain could rely on the sequence of the journey itself to provide at least a simulacrum of coherence for his materials.” 14 As for the journey itself, travel comes to nothing but travail, a “wearisome pilgrimage” on which the subject is itself subject to unlearn everything, to this point, it has learned—a journey, in the end, that might prove “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” (IA 459, 491). More to the point, there’s no fulfillment up ahead. Instead of fullness and repletion, the narrative line leads only to fragmentation and ruin. The Holy Land is less than whole, amounts to nothing much—not even the sum of its parts. At Nazareth, for instance, the very site of the Annunciation—an event “which the princes of art have made it their loftiest ambition to picture worthily on their canvas; a spot . . . which myriads of men would toil across the breadth of the world to see”—the scene dissolves to aught, imagination’s

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void: “I saw the little recess from which the angel stepped, but could not fill its void. The angels that I know are creatures of unstable fancy—they will not fit in niches of substantial stone. Imagination labors best in distant fields” (IA 392). Reality is less than picturesque. The picturesque itself distorts the facts, fills in the blanks, fills up the whole—a pretext for Romance. Like all pre-“texts,” the guide book bamboozles the gullible: Between “fools and guide-books, a man could acquire ignorance enough in twenty-four hours . . . to last him a year” (IA 152). The guide book tells a story—if not a lie; it prevaricates, exaggerates, recites Romance upon a site where, in reality, “if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers be stripped from it, a skeleton will be found beneath” (IA 377). The spectacle will have its price: The specular inhabits the spectacular. Beneath the glare of its hypnotic pull, the spec(tac)ular must take to heart the specter of decay, of dissolution, of death. Take Galilee: “Nearly every book concerning Galilee and its lake describes the scenery as beautiful. . . . But a careful analysis of these descriptions will show that the materials of which they are formed are not individually beautiful and can not be wrought into combinations that are beautiful. The veneration and the affection which some of these men felt for the scenes they were speaking of heated their fancies and biased their judgment” (IA 378). The “pilgrims,” however, refuse what meets the eye, must play it by the book. Committed to the pre-“text” of Romance, [o]ur pilgrims have brought their verdicts with them. . . . I can almost tell, in set phrase, what they will say when they see Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho, and Jerusalem—because I have the books they will “smouch” their ideas from. These authors write pictures and frame rhapsodies, and lesser men follow and see with the author’s eyes instead of their own, and speak with his tongue. . . . The pilgrims will tell of Palestine, when they get home, not as it appeared to them, but as it appeared to Thompson and Robinson and Grimes. (IA 379)

Grimes, beyond all others, dishes out “the kind of gruel” on which the pilgrims feast daily; he constitutes “the representative of a class,”—that is, the guide book in general: “I love to quote from Grimes, because he is so dramatic. And because he is so romantic. And because he seems to care but little whether he tells the truth or not. . . . He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver and the other on his pocket-handkerchief” (IA 395, 398, 395). The pilgrims merely follow suit, mimicking the guide-book sentiment: “The pilgrims read ‘Nomadic Life’ and keep themselves in a constant state of Quixotic heroism. They have their hands on their pistols all the time, and every now and then . . . they snatch them out and take aim at Bedouins who are not visible. . . . If I am accidentally murdered . . . during one of these romantic frenzies . . . Mr. Grimes must be rigidly held to answer as an accessory before the fact”

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(IA 401–02). The inference proves plausible when two of the pilgrims, “who brought about the difficulty,” are stoned for “showing their revolvers when they did not intend to use them—a thing which is deemed bad judgment in the Far West, and ought certainly to be so considered any where. In the new Territories, when a man puts his hand on a weapon, he knows that he must use it . . . instantly or expect to be shot down where he stands. Those pilgrims had been reading Grimes” (IA 409). In “The End,” Romance might deal a deadly hand. Narration, on the other hand, to be its own, must excavate its sight, recite the site for what it’s worth: “I claim the right to correct misstatements” (IA 377). Make no mistake, economy’s at issue here. To this effect, the narrative will travel to expose the fraudulence of textuality—including itSelf. Here every site recites the length of its displacement from the point of origin (oikos), its distance from home, the economics of its journey. There’s nothing original in “the first place.” Where time and text converge, the landscape must be read—its space a “page” of time itself, of history: at an elevation of twelve hundred feet above the lake . . . , as bald and unthrilling a panorama as any land can afford, perhaps, was spread out before us. Yet it was so crowded with historical interest, that if all the pages that have been written about it were spread upon its surface, they would flag it from horizon to horizon like a pavement. Among the localities comprised in this view were Mount Hermon; . . . Tiberias; the Sea of Galilee; . . . Capernaum; Bethsaida; . . . Safed; . . . and . . . Mount Tabor. (IA 384)

Like any book, the landscape provokes interpretation: Each site invites narration’s own account. This is the journey’s end: to travel with eyes of one’s own. When guide books interrupt the scene, textuality wears the “pilgrim” down, and not the pilgrimage as such: “How it wears a man out to have to read up a hundred pages of history every two or three miles” (IA 371). In this regard, the subject owes it to itSelf: Put down the book; take up the looking glass. Yet, even then, a certain fraudulence creeps in: the subject’s own desire for objectivity. This dis-stance of the discourse would incite the “truth.” I alert you to its lure, the source of its seductive wiles: To recall Nietzsche, Truth is (a) “Woman.” So, too, the Muslim East’s appeal begins to take effect as action at a distance. It’s thus the picturesque, as such, acquires its pull, the root of its appeal. Made up to hide deficiency, its makeup enchants. Let’s not be deceived: The “truth” of Truth lies in its deceit, the deception of distance. Mount Tabor, for example, stages this dynamic: “The view presented from its highest peak was almost beautiful. . . . To glance at the salient features of this landscape through the picturesque framework of a ragged and ruined stone window-arch of the time of Christ, thus hiding from sight all that is unattractive, is to secure

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to yourself a pleasure worth climbing the mountain to enjoy” (IA 386). Such distance makes the travel book itself. Its very seduction disguises this distance: “being a/broad.” Take Constantinople: “From a mile or so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen. Its dense array of houses swells upward from the water’s edge . . . and the gardens that peep out here and there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets . . . invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental aspect one dreams of when he reads books of Eastern travel. Constantinople makes a noble picture” (IA 259). This attraction, however, “begins and ends with its picturesqueness” (IA 259)—that is to say, “reality” at a distance, reality held at bay, untouched, virginal, seductive, ideal. Ashore, on the other hand, Constantinople “was—well, it was an eternal circus” (IA 259). Up close, the image dissolves into illusion; the imaginary betrays a reality riddled with the grotesque, with aberration, with monstrosity: If you want dwarfs—I mean just a few dwarfs for a curiosity—go to Genoa. If you wish to buy them by the gross for retail, go to Milan. There are plenty of dwarfs all over Italy. . . . [I]n Milan the crop was luxuriant. If you would see a fair average style of assorted cripples, go to Naples. . . . But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople. A beggar in Naples who can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one shapeless nail on it, has a fortune—but such an exhibition as that would not provoke any notice in Constantinople. The man would starve. Who would pay any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their deformities in the gutters of Stamboul? O, wretched impostor! How could he stand against the three-legged woman, and the man with his eye in his cheek? How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow? Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each hand, no upper lip, and his underjaw gone, came down in his majesty? Bismillah! The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud. The truly gifted flourish only in the byways of Pera and Stamboul. (IA 261)

The reality of the Muslim East is nothing but this fragmentary accumulation of body parts: That three-legged woman lay on the bridge. . . . Then there was a man further along who had no eyes, and whose face was the color of a flyblown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted like a lava flow . . . no man could tell the wart that served him for a nose from his cheek-bones. In Stamboul was a man with a prodigious head, an uncommonly long body, legs eight inches long, and feet like snowshoes. He traveled on those feet and his hands. . . . A blue-faced man . . . would be regarded as a rank inpostor, and a mere damaged soldier on crutches would never make a cent. It would pay him to get a piece of his head taken off, and cultivate a wen like a carpet sack. (IA 261)

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An “oriental picture,” thus, resembles nothing if not butchery: “When a man steals cattle, they cut off his right hand and left leg, and nail them up in the market-place as a warning to every body. Their surgery is not artistic. They slice around the bone a little; then break off the limb. Sometimes the patient gets well; but, as a general thing, he don’t” (IA 55). Brutally de-formed, the Muslim East embodies unconditional abomination, beastly, abhorrent, appalling, a world apart from the beauty of the West—which serves narration as its necessary fiction, yet cannot be posited as such: “[t]o reproduce a Jerusalem street, it would only be necessary to up-end a chicken-coop and hang it before each window in an alley of American houses” (IA 417).

These unsightly parts of the (b)east but constitute the “art,” the beauty, of the East in its entirety, and recall us to another guide to the Holy Land, that Other that disrupts the text of The Arabian Nights: the Bible. Indeed, the Bible, here, returns as a ghost, the specter of what lies beneath the spectacular, yet superficial, beauty of the Eastern Nights—the daily sight of illness and decay. To wit, Jerusalem, overshadowed by the Holy Sepulchre, resembles nothing but a sepulchre itself, city of the dead— “mournful, and dreary, and lifeless,” replete with “[r]ags, wretchedness, poverty, and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule”; here, “[l]epers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand. . . . To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda” (IA 418). According to this account, the East requires a comprehensive regimen, a fundamental course of therapy in light of which “redemption” translates principally as cure. In this context, Twain’s text denounces not Muslim, but Jew. As Sander Gilman argues, “Christ preached to the biblical Jews. . . . [H]e cured them of their afflictions. But the Jews remain essentially uncured, as they remain unconverted to Christianity. . . . [T]he Jews are illness incarnate. . . . Disease and religion . . . are linked in the very essence of the Jew.” 15 In any case, the diseased world of the Bible confuses the scenic Nights with the reality of fragmentation, deformation, and disease—and, ultimately, “irredeemable” loss. This “reality”—to which the shadow of death (and, by inference, Christianity as such) refers—bears out a Holy Land not whole, unholy, one whose truth lies wholly in ruin.

For these pilgrims, their progress East becomes, in effect, regression. It’s a grim age, indeed, when pilgrimage can only further ruin ruin, can

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ruin, indeed, “American” identity itself as an ideal: “The incorrigible pilgrims have come in with their pockets full of specimens broken from the ruins. I wish this vandalism could be stopped. They broke off fragments from Noah’s tomb, from the exquisite sculptures of the temples of Baalbek; from the houses of Judas and Ananias, . . . and now they have been hacking and chipping these old arches here that Jesus looked upon in the flesh. Heaven protect the Sepulchre when this tribe invades Jerusalem” (IA 346–47). And at a “Roman-looking ruin,” said to the be remains of Mary Magdalene’s house, the pilgrims “took down portions of the front wall for specimens, as is their honored custom, and then we departed” (IA 373). Indeed, these “image-breakers and tomb-desecraters,” whithersoever they go, “destroy and spare not”; not even the Sphynx, that “most majestic creation the hand of man has wrought,” escapes the pilgrims’ insularity: “while we stood looking, a wart, or an excrescence of some kind, appeared on the jaw of the Sphynx. We heard the familiar clink of a hammer, and understood the case at once. One of our wellmeaning reptiles—I mean relic hunters—had crawled up there and was trying to break a ‘specimen’” (IA 364, 473–74). American identity boils down to this: an unidentifiable “excresence,” a wart. Back at the ranch, the reader, snug and smug in his American digs, cannot escape the pummeling, devalued, in two shakes, from “gentle” to “savage” (IA 293). Denied the courtship and respect (s)he mindlessly expects, “the savage reader,” still left standing in the ring, has, come what may, survived the sucker punch Twain previously landed on the chin: “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I shall have finished my travels” (IA 164–65). 16 The pilgrims’ iconoclastic inclination, provincial and categorically puritanical at heart, mirrors the savage reader’s primitive state while, at the same time, it sardonically accentuates the pilgrims’ ownmost prejudice and bigotry—and this, despite the educational potential that travel affords. In Nain, the scene turns downright ugly, prefiguring the stereotype in terms of which American travelers would henceforth be cast: the pilglrims broke specimens from the foundation walls, though they had to touch, and even step, upon the “praying carpets” to do it. It was almost the same as breaking pieces from the hearts of those old Arabs. To step rudely upon the sacred praying mats with booted feet . . . was to inflict pain upon men who had not offended us in any way. Suppose a party of armed foreigners were to enter a village church in America and break ornaments from the altar railings for curiosities, and climb up and walk upon the Bible and the pulpit cushions? However, the

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cases are different. One is the profanation of a temple of our faith—the other only the profanation of a pagan one. (IA 404)

Vis-à-vis the Muslim (B)east, every aspect of the “Ugly American” routinely incites horror. Twain’s narrative, cast with its own iconoclastic aplomb, defaces the very prospect of American integrity, derides both Christianity and nationality at once, deflates any and all “pretentions of Anglo-American identity along with the sacred.” 17 The pilgrimage amounts to nothing more than plunder and pillage, hatchet work—the pilgrims themselves a band of vandals predisposed to leave their mark, their “signature.” Void of intellectual urbanity, incapable of taking in and being affected by the cultural sites they encounter, and consequently given, to call upon Schopenhauer, entirely to the governance of “will,” the pilgrims accordingly repress their average everyday-ness, their ownmost abyss, by maliciously affecting those places that fail to affect them. 18 Vandalism and graffiti thus go hand in hand: Hence at a chapel in Nazareth, the pilgrims “would have liked very well to get out their lampblack and stencil-plates and paint their names on that rock, together with the names of the villages they hail from in America, but the priests permit nothing of that kind” (IA 394). 19 Let’s not overlook how vandalism and defacement desecrate the New Jerusalem, an ideology routinely invoked, as John Davis remarks, “over three centuries of American cultural development as its motivating myth.” 20 Such self-indulgent acts belie the New World’s re-citation of both Holy Land and Holy Book. America can neither properly lay claim to sacred territory as its own, nor can it fundamentally appropriate the Holy Book as national property, the nucleus of national myth. The primordially iconoclastic behavior to which the “pilgrims” succumb serves merely to blur the lines between religion and colonial appropriation as such. Protestant Americans abroad profane the ordained mission they profess “divine”; such impropriety defaces and effaces, mutually, the very property it covets: Iconoclasm fractures the inosculation of text and territory in light of which Twain’s countertext rewrites the “infidelity” of both. The homeland contradicts its own pretentions, its masquerade of purity, its “innocents.” Americans abroad expose the fraud that underwrites their ownmost identity: average, middle-class, “plush-parlor, church-going, unliterary, provincial, flag-waving” pilgrims transfigured as tourists, as circulating capital, who venerate the souvenir. 21 Consumed by the consumption of sites transfigured as sights, the pilgrims do nothing but mechanically and mindlessly mimic “an exercise in the accumulation of cultural commodities.” 22

In general, arrogance and ignorance fashion the ugly American who takes on faith the fact that, as a rule, everyone will thrill to meet him, as

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“Harris,” Twain’s traveling companion, in A Tramp Abroad, sarcastically remarks: “All you need to do is to use the common formula over here: go and say, ‘I’m an American.’” 23 A “loudmouth” quite often accompanies this mien: At Marseilles, Twain notes being “troubled a little at dinner . . . by the conduct of an American, who talked very loudly and coursely, and laughed boisterously where all the others were so quiet and well-behaved” (IA 67); in Baden-Baden, he spots a group of “vociferous Americans at breakfast,” talking “at everybody” while “pretending to talk among themselves. . . . Showing off. The usual signs, . . . references to grand distances and foreign places. ‘Well, good-bye, old fellow,—if I don’t run across you in Italy, you hunt me up in London before you sail” (TA 106). Add ignorance to kick things up a notch: “I love to talk. It refreshes me up so. . . . As long as I’m talking I never feel bored. . . . I don’t care to talk to everybody, myself. If a person starts in to jabber-jabber-jabber about the scenery, and history, and pictures, and all sorts of tiresome things, I get the fan-tods mighty soon” (TA 150). As for those who mimic the guide book, feigning expertise in art, Twain, with his customary tongue-in-cheek assurance, drolly parodies himself: “What a red rag is to a bull, Turner’s ‘Slave Ship’ was to me, before I studied Art”—that is, before he read Ruskin’s account of the painting; “most of the picture is a manifest impossibility,—that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. But it enabled Mr. Ruskin to do it, and it has enabled me to do it, and I am thankful for it” (TA 125). Pity, then, the poor Boston newspaper reporter who “took a look at the Slave Ship floundering about in that fierce conflagration of reds and yellows, and said it reminded him of a tortoiseshell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes”—to which Twain doles out the moral: “In my then uneducated state, that went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye. Mr. Ruskin would have said: This person is an ass. That is what I would say, now” (TA 125). 24 Ignorance equally infuses—indeed, confuses—issues dealing with the acquisition and nature of (foreign) language. Witness the American, “about to enter Harvard next year,” and studying German for his entrance exams: “It’s awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together” (TA 149); or the American homesick for the mother tongue: “My tongue’s all warped with trying to curl it around these ----------forsaken wind-galled nine-jointed German words here; now I tell you it’s awful to lay it over a Christian word once more and let the old taste soak in” (TA 100); or the Californian student in Heidelberg who said, “in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective” (TA 320). In a parodic vein, Twain appends “The Awful German Language” to A Tramp, in which he glibly cites a notebook entry (“In the hospital, yesterday, a word of thirteen syllables was successfully removed from a patient,—a North-German from near Ham-

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burg; but . . . most unfortunately . . . he died”), and subsequently offers the following facetious suggestions to reform the German language in its entirety: In the first place, I would leave out the Dative Case. . . . In the next place, I would move the Verb further up to the front . . . to a position where it may be easily seen with the naked eye. Thirdly, I would import some strong words from the English tongue,—to swear with. . . . Fourthly, I would reorganize the sexes, and distribute them according to the will of the Creator. . . . Fifthly, I would do away with those great long compounded words; or require the speaker to deliver them in sections, with intermissions for refreshments. . . . And . . . lastly, I would retain Zug and Schlag, with their pendants, and discard the rest of the vocabulary. This would simplify the language. (TA 324, 328–29)

So much for simplicity—and, in the bargain, (American) simpletons. 25 In passing, notice the impasse with language as such. Consigned to a dilemma similar to that of the pilgrims, those paradigmatic strangers to language, including their own, left foundering on foreign soil, language itself is never and nowhere “at home,” not even, and above all, with itself. Language, like the subject who presumes to “know” it, is always in a jam, a scrape, a pickle. To this effect, and “merely for the pleasure of being cruel,” Twain and his pilgrim cronies “put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles” (IA 77). So, too, in Germany, when speaking of private matters on the train, Twain’s companion urges him to “Speak in German,—these Germans may understand English” (TA 48). Though counterintuitive, there is a kind of Marx Brothers’s logic at work here—uncanny, to be sure. No one is out-and-out at home in language; rather, everyone is on the outside looking in (Freud’s Wolf Man in a counter-valent dream). In the end, there’s but a single language that the pilgrims understand. Witness, for instance, the graffiti painted on “a massive pyramidal rock eighty feet high” by an American: TRY SOZODONT; BUY SUN STOVE POLISH; HELMBOLD’S BUCHU; TRY BENZALINE FOR THE BLOOD. (TA 148)

Upon his trial, the judge admonished the American: “You are from a land where any insolent that wants to, is privileged to profane and insult Nature, and through her, Nature’s God, if by so doing he can put a sordid penny in his pocket. . . . Because you are a foreigner and ignorant, I will make your sentence light” (TA 148). In Portugal, Twain further qualifies the ignorance at play when an American, braggadociously paying the entire bill for a table of ten and unable to “translate” foreign currency, is

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brought his bill in Portuguese reis; the waiter finally “brought back his bill translated into a language that a Christian could understand—thus: 10 dinners . . . 25 cigars . . . 11 bottles of wine . . . $21.70” (IA 30). Ugly, to be sure, no pretty picture here, a portrait, in “affect,” that rivals anything the East denotes: The typical American is equally as beastly as the East. 26

On the whole, Twain’s “pilgrimage” memorializes nothing but “disgrace,” progress as regress—no “saving grace” but, rather, its divestiture, its comprehensive bankruptcy—both for the pilgrims and the Holy Land itself. Irrevocably disgraced, nothing now can ever re-collect the whole, salvage the hole in the Holy. In the Holy Land, dismemberment abides. The guide books have lied, have painted a false picture, have not remembered the reality, have ruined “the truth.” In Dan, a stream forms “a large shallow pool. . . . This puddle is an important source of the Jordan. Its banks, and those of the brook are respectably adorned with blooming oleanders, but the unutterable beauty of the spot will not throw a wellbalanced man into convulsions, as the Syrian books of travel would lead one to suppose” (IA 353). The Holy Book is likewise on the block. In Magdala, where the houses are five to seven feet high, Twain reminisces: “When I used to read that they let a bed-ridden man down through the roof of a house in Capernaum to get him into the presence of the Saviour, I generally had a three-story brick in my mind, and marveled that they did not break his neck with the strange experiment. I perceive now, however, that they might have taken him by the heels and thrown him clear over the house without discommoding him very much” (IA 373). And so it goes throughout the Muslim East. The real consistently falls short of—cannot measure up to—the image of the Holy. Imagination, here, confronts reality, as with “the pigmy jackasses one sees all over Syria and remembers in all the pictures of the ‘Flight into Egypt,’ where Mary and the Young Child are riding and Joseph is walking alongside”; reality reveals the opposite: “here the man rides and carries the child . . . and the woman walks. . . . We would not have in our houses a picture representing Joseph riding and Mary walking; we would see profanation in it, but a Syrian Christian would not. I know that hereafter the picture I first spoke of will look odd to me” (IA 356). In Nain, the scene likewise highlights the mendacity and swindle of its conventional scenario: Picturesque Arabs sat upon the ground, in groups, and solemnly smoked their long-stemmed chibouks. Other Arabs were filling black hog-skins with water—skins which, well filled, and distended with water till the short legs projected painfully out of the proper line, looked like the corpses of hogs bloated by drowning. Here was a grand Oriental picture which I had worshipped a thousand times in soft, rich steel engravings! But in the engraving there was no desolation; no dirt;

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no rags; no fleas; no ugly features; no sore eyes; no feasting flies; no besotted ignorance in the countenances; no raw places on the donkeys’ backs; no disagreeable jabbering in unknown tongues; no stench of camels; no suggestion that a couple of tons of powder placed under the party and touched off would heighten the effect and give to the scene a genuine interest and a charm which it would always be pleasant to recall, even though a man lived a thousand years. (IA 405)

The picturesque descriptions in the guide books constitute a frame that filters reality, a “framework” designed to hide “all that is unattractive” (IA 386). Transfiguring an Emersonian moment, Twain further differentriates the picturesque as the reality turned upside down: “One must stand on his head to get the best effect in a fine sunset, and set a landscape in a bold, strong framework that is very close at hand, to bring out all its beauty” (IA 386–87). Elsewhere and otherwise, without the frame and “in reality,” the Holy Land is always and everywhere ruined. The scene’s the same, no matter where the subject turns: “If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness . . . , that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this stupid village of Tiberias . . . ; yonder desolate declivity where the swine of the miracle ran down into the sea . . . ; this solemn, sailless, tintless lake . . . looking just as expressionless and unpoetical . . . as any metropolitan reservoir in Christendom—if these things are not food for rock me to sleep, mother, none exist, I think” (IA 376). At journey’s end, heartbreak and hopelessness epitomize the Holy Land: “[o]f all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. . . . The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture. . . . Every outline is harsh. . . . It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land” (IA 456). And again: “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes”; and again: “Nazareth is forlorn”; and again: “Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin”; and again: Bethlehem, “the hollowed spot where the shephards watched their flocks by night . . . is . . . unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye”; and again: “Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history . . . is become a pauper village”; and again: The borders of the Sea of Galilee “are a silent wilderness,” Capernaum “a shapeless ruin,” Magdala “the home of beggared Arabs,” Bethsaida and Chorazin “vanished from the earth” (IA 456–57). To wit, “Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition—it is dream-land” (IA 457). Thus reduced, Christianity amounts to no more than a curse, the Holy Land a dream, illusion, a Disneyland of tourists and commercial fraud, a con man’s paradise—a wooden nickel, at best. Indeed, the failure of the picturesque to mask the ruination that occupies the Holy Land augments the failure of redemption as such, the very

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hoax of Christianity. Witness, for example, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where all sects of Christians “have chapels . . . and each must keep to itself and not venture upon another’s ground. It has been proven conclusively that they can not worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the world in peace” (IA 419). Likewise, in the Church of the Nativity “built fifteen hundred years ago by the inveterate St. Helena,” the grotto avowed to be the self-same “manger” where Christ was born, “tricked out in the usual tasteless style observable in all the holy places of Palestine,” bears witness to nothing but the “envy and uncharitableness . . . apparent here”—and, for that matter, everywhere: “The priests and the members of the Greek and Latin Churches can not come by the same corridor to kneel in the sacred birthplace of the Redeemer, but are compelled to approach and retire by different avenues, lest they quarrel and fight on this holiest ground on earth” (IA 451–52). So, too, the marble slab marking the place “where St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, found the crosses [upon which Christ and the two thieves died] about three hundred years after the Crucifixion” amounts to nothing more than “legend,” a fabrication: “The monks call this apartment the ‘Chapel of the Invention of the Cross’—a name which is unfortunate, because it leads the ignorant to imagine that a tacit acknowledgment is thus made that the tradition that Helena found the true cross here is a fiction—an invention. It is happiness to know, however, that intelligent people do not doubt the story in any of its particulars” (IA 419–20, 425). The saints, in turn, are nothing if not “heroes of romance,” the fodder from which tall tales breed—the “spirit of Grimes” (IA 421). As for that most “original” yarn, it is “a singular circumstance that right under the roof of this same great church [the Church of the Holy Sepulchre] . . . Adam himself, the father of the human race lies buried” (IA 423). And now Twain ruthlessly nails down the text, crucifies the very crux of Christianity: “The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. . . . I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears. . . . Noble old man—he did not live to see me— he did not live to see his child. And I—I—alas, I did not live to see him. . . . [H]e died . . . six thousand brief summers before I was born. But let us try to bear it with fortitude” (IA 423). 27 Twain subsequently drives the final nail home: And so I close my chapter on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—the most sacred locality on earth to millions and millions of men, and women, and children. . . . In its history from the first, and in its tremendous associations, it is the most illustrious edifice in Christendom. With all its clap-trap side-shows and unseemly impostures of every kind, it is still grand, reverend, venerable—for a god died there; . . . the most gallant knights that ever wielded sword wasted their lives away in a struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from infidel pollution. Even

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in our own day a war, that cost millions of treasure and rivers of blood, was fought because two rival nations claimed the sole right to put a new dome upon it. History is full of this old Church of the Holy Sepulchre—full of blood that was shed because of the respect and the veneration in which men held the last resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of Peace! (IA 428–29).

Fittingly, it’s not for nothing that Twain’s most decisive “meditation” in the Holy Land, and in the Church of the Nativity no less, forecloses on the very possibility of meditation on the Holy itself—a meditation, rather, that returns him to the myth of origins as but the origin of myth. Over and against those “pilgrims” whose “progress” he remarks—and wholly disillusioned with the “holy,” a narrative riddled with holes—his progress requires regress to conclude the same of Christ as Santa Claus: “I have no ‘meditations,’ suggested by this spot where the very first ‘Merry Christmas!’ was uttered in all the world, and from whence the friend of my childhood, Santa Claus, departed on his first journey, to gladden and continue to gladden roaring firesides on wintry mornings in many a distant land forever and forever. I touch, with reverent finger, the actual spot where the infant Jesus lay, but I think—nothing” (IA 452).

If, then, the Holy Land recites a ghastly tale, a grisly hoax, consider its context. “In effect,” the idea of the holy is always and everywhere a textual event. If East and West seem worlds apart, two mutually exclusive spheres, words themselves sustain this distance, this difference. Both Bible and Koran not only outline the values of a social field, but also structure the nature of that experience. In Turkey, for instance, this lesson humorously occasions the return of the repressed: “They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however” (IA 266). Travel disturbs, dislocates custom, displaces the everyday, provides experience with novel contexts. It threatens the fabric of experience as a whole. It disrupts the subject, dismembers it, castrates it in the face of its own experience: “[t]ravel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most cherished traditions of our boyhood” (IA 448). The subject, here, fails to live (up to) its own expectations. Experience fails to match its pretext, those books that precede it. Conversely, the experience of travel can no more be impartial than its own account of that experience. Travel literature recites a point of view. The subject must travel with its own eyes. And if the guide book fails to fit experience—if experience inevitably falls short of its pretext, its previous citations—it does so only to the extent that experience is itself textual through and through. Travel is no less an exercise in reading than

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reading an exercise in travel. While the voyage conforms to certain narrative rules, narration itSelf travels, transports the subject. Every narrative, as Michel de Certeau observes, is a travel narrative. 28 “Travel then becomes the metaphor of metaphor while the structure of the metaphor becomes the metaphor for the travel of meaning.” 29 In this, narration is subject to err, to wander, to go astray: “Marking the moment of the turn or of the detour . . . metaphor also opens the wandering of the semantic.” 30 So, too, the subject is a metaphor for itSelf: Its meaning must travel, change place, “translate.” Subjects saunter—pilgrims, one and all: “sightsurfeited wanderers” (IA 466). Travel thus reconstitutes the subject as nomad: “[t]he nomadic instinct is a human instinct” (IA 441). The subject is itSelf this traveling text, the traveling text of its self. Books are incidental to travel only insofar as the subject discovers the degree to which what it reads coincides with its experience. 31 Experience makes “sense” of texts, confers on them another meaning. Recalling the Bible, tongue in cheek as usual, Twain remarks: “It did not seem reasonable to me that men should kiss each other, but I am aware, now, that they did. There was reason in it, too. The custom was natural and proper; because people must kiss, and a man would not be likely to kiss one of the women of this country of his own free will and accord. One must travel, to learn” (IA 405). Twain’s flippancy aside, if experience makes sense of texts, it does so because texts conversely make sense of experience. Experience is, to this extent, always already borrowed, subsists on borrowed time. The book is not a supplement to travel. Travel, rather, is a supplementary text whose destination, it would seem, is never to arrive at a destination, for that would spell the end of itself. To arrive, once and for all, would mean to close the book, to put the journey behind us, to return home (oikos). Compared to the best the West affords, the Muslim (b)east must occupy, in this regard, the position of figuration itself, the figure of figure, the very possibility of the figurative over and against whose disfiguration the West might literally appear. Wor(l)ds apart, the East becomes that ideological elaboration—imaginary, to be sure—in whose name experience dissociates itself from the referent so that it might signify the West. The “reality” of this event depends upon the location of its discourse. Travel holds before its destination, its very ideal—its ideal destination. Yet both before the journey, and throughout, the subject has been reading all the way. The “social,” as such, suggests this armchair nature of experience. The textuality of experience recites the experience of textuality. Twain’s travels (re)present the guide book—that is, humanist ideology—as comedy, farce, the masquerade of body parts in place of an-other culture as a (w)hole, an “anthology,” as it were, of social Reality, the site upon which Truth “lies” in ruin. Beyond this fragmentary structure of the socius, the literature of travel recuperates the discourse of sociology, “knowledge” of society and culture in general, within the space of narration—the sub-

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ject’s means of experience, the very “train” of transport, if you will. Occasionally the traveler grows weary, puts down the book, looks out the window. Inexorably, the traveler comes home.

Inevitably, it happens that the final destination, not unlike the Holy Grail itself, comes into view. Memory looks ahead, anticipates itself. Twain now recalls the sanctuary home portends, alleges that, as Harold Hellwig notes, “the backward glance forgives the threats and risks one has survived.” 32 In time, the pain of pilgrimage will be forgotten—“and then, all that will be left will be pleasant memories,” holy memories, if you will, sacred memories, memories that someday “will become all beautiful,” just as we canonize our school days “because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations,” and remember only “its fishing holidays” (IA 438–39). So, too, for the moment—that is, presently—the pilgrims are satisfied: “We can wait. Our reward will come” (IA 439). In the future, rest assured that the travails of travel in the Holy Land exist for Christian pilgrims to go fishing, once again, for memories—memories “which money could not buy from us” (IA 439). Appropriately, then, as they approach the journey’s end, perfectly secure “against failing to accomplish any detail of the pilgrimage,” the pilgrims “felt like drawing in advance upon the holyday soon to be placed to their credit. . . . [T]hey showed a strong disposition to lie on the cool divans in the hotel and smoke and talk about pleasant experiences of a month or so gone by—for even thus early do episodes of travel . . . begin to rise above the dead level of monotonous reminiscences and become shapely landmarks in one’s memory” (IA 440). Travel therefore reaps its ultimate reward, ironically, as an advance upon time borrowed in the future: Speculation supplies its own ironic principal. To paraphrase the economic stimulus, travel both anticipates a future that looks back upon itself, and, at the same time, spends its time, the very present as such, in order to eventually capitalize on its future, time saved in advance, to draw upon the future for interest, for future “interest.” Re-collection, as the final keepsake, hence becomes its ownmost souvenir.

Back home, the memorized becomes memorialized, transfigured instantly to “varied scenes” that “linger pleasantly”—and will “for many a year to come” (IA 492). Observe that speculation on the future is fully guaranteed. Memory knows its whereabouts, its whence and wither equally. Recall Twain’s own appraisal in advance of the return: “we were at home in Palestine. It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe” (IA 487). Note also that, at home, Twain recollects the foreign in familiar terms:

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“we were at home in Palestine.” Note, finally, and most uncannily, that, in translation, as the saying goes, something will be lost. The homeland now withdraws: “We shall remember something of pleasant France; and . . . Paris. . . . We shall remember, always, . . . majestic Gibraltar. . . . And Padua—Verona—Como . . . and patrician Venice. . . . We can not forget Florence—Naples—nor . . . the delicious atmosphere of Greece— and surely not Athens. . . . Surely not venerable Rome. . . . We shall remember St. Peter’s . . . in the flush of sunset, full of dignity and grace, strongly outlined as a mountain” (IA 492). And as it most befits an armchair scene, the spectacle of greatest consequence at last comes into view: We shall remember Constantinople and the Bosporus—the colossal magnificance of Baalbec—the Pyramids of Egypt—the prodigious form, the benignant countenance of the Sphynx—Oriental Smyrna— sacred Jerusalem—Damascus, the “Pearl of the East,” the pride of Syria, the fabled Garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest metropolis on earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten! (IA 492–93)

Lights-out, then, for the West, held hostage by the East, and for the “little season” left America. Like the “progress” of Twain’s text, the progress of culture incessantly recuperates, reiterates, repeats, or, if you prefer the Kierkegaardian vernacular, “recollects forward” its infancy, the East— preordained, predestined, in the Puritan vernacular, to faithfully go nowhere in the end—while, in the selfsame movement, progress for the pilgrims comes to regress as Twain’s own narration—at its end, in old age, if you will—returns to childhood reminiscences once more (forget the facts; forget the pilgrimage), to fantasies whose sleight of hand turns what remains of its declining days to disingenuous Nights. 33

CODA: Let’s re-collect a strange, most uncanny moment in the East. Recall the Turkish bath, regarding which Twain fumes: “When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast” (IA 272). Strange business this: a stranger in a strange land, in foreign parts, who would berate the host and substitute hostility for hospitality: A copper-colored skeleton, with a rag around him, brought me a glass decanter of water, with a lighted tobacco pipe in the top of it, and a pliant stem a yard long with a brass mouth-piece to it. It was the famous “narghili” of the East—the thing the Grand Turk smokes in the pictures. This began to look like luxury. I took one blast at it, and it was sufficient. . . . I exploded one mighty cough . . . as if Vesuvius had let

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go. . . . Not any more narghili for me. The smoke had a vile taste, and the taste of a thousand infidel tongues that remained on that brass mouth-piece was viler still. (IA 274)

Something more distasteful than the “taste of a thousand infidel tongues” haunts Twain’s harangue, something so unspeakable that it engenders the cannibalistic desire to eat a tourist, to devour a fellow countryman— one of his own, his kind, his kindred—for breakfast, no less. 34 Notice, in the first place, that Twain interjects a foreign figure into the familiar figure of the (Grand) Turk—forcing the Turk, in turn, to swallow, to incorporate, its own vituperative rhetoric (an “infidel” [“dog”] himself)— to wit, the figure of the “French,” a figure that becomes, perhaps, more volatile when one considers that the “brass mouth-piece” has never known a woman’s tongue. And then there is Vesuvius: The West clandestinely contaminates the East. Notice, further, that the vile taste of the Turk that lingers on Twain’s tongue self-referentially infects the very site that talks about it. Notice, finally, that any difference between the foreign and familiar necessitates the law of hospitality—that is, home is never so homely as when it entertains a guest, its ownmost raison d’être. Incorporation, here, reflects the homeland’s strange internal logic that compels it to cannibalize the foreign as its own. In effect, the Grand Turk typifies— indeed, personifies—a foreign body in America, a most unhomely site as a familiar sight that occupies, on foreign soil, the very heart of hearth and home: “Whenever, hereafter, I see the cross-legged Grand Turk smoking his narghili, in pretended bliss, on the outside of a paper of Connecticut tobacco, I shall know him for the shameless humbug he is” (IA 274). Humbug or not, the Grand Turk signifies a cultural commodity regarding which both nation and narration pay more than lip service to purchase their identity. NOTES 1. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 138. 2. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1993), 99. 3. I won’t dwell upon the traditional distinction between traveler and tourist, generally defined in terms of their activity and passivity respectively. The difference is finally one of degree. See, for instance, Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Study of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976), 10: Even the tourist seeks “deeper involvement” with the various cultures he encounters “to some degree.” See also Jeffrey Alan Melton, “Keeping the Faith in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad,” South Atlantic Review 64.2 (1999): 61: The distinction “between travelers and tourists” reveals “how fragile and perhaps even arbitrary such definitions of behavior may be.” Tramps constitute a further variable in this “ad-equation.” See Peter Messent, “Tramps and Tourists: Europe in Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad,” The Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004): 154: Tramps and tourists “are not finally as different as they might at first appear.”

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4. Terry Caesar, “The Book in Travel: Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express,” Arizona Quarterly 46 (1990): 101. 5. Caesar, 101. 6. Caesar, 102. 7. Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 40. 8. Gorman Beauchamp, “The American Vandal in Italy,” Centennial Review 40 (1996): 69. Regarding Beauchamp’s assessment of this work, I couldn’t agree more. 9. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad: Or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), xxxiii. Subsequent quotations are parenthetically cited in the text as IA. 10. See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 186: Twain’s journey “would mark a milestone in American cultural navigation. The great explorers of the past had planted European flags on the soil of the New World. Twain sailed back the other way and figuratively planted an American flag on the European continent.” 11. Ironically, with the advent of mass tourism, pilgrim and tourist appear to occupy two mutually exclusive poles, the pilgrim traveling to his value “center,” the tourist traveling away from it. For a thoughtful analysis of the various gradations between these extremes, see Erik Cohen, “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,” Sociology 13.2 (1979): 179–201. 12. Twain remarked as much; see Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, 1877–1833, eds. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 2:62: “Going abroad we let up on the weight and wear and responsibility of housekeeping. . . . [T]o go abroad is the true rest—you cease wholly to keep house, then, both national and domestic.” 13. Quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 101. 14. Richard Bridgman, Traveling in Mark Twain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 2. 15. Sander L. Gilman, “Mark Twain and the Diseases of the Jews,” American Literature 65 (1993): 103–04. 16. Pretension plays a leading role in this scenario; witness, for example, the following scene: there are Americans abroad in Italy who have actually forgotten their mother tongue in three months—forgot it in France. They can not even write their address in English in a hotel register. I append these evidences, which I copied verbatim from the register of a hotel in a certain Italian city: “John P. Whitcomb, Etats Unis. “Wm. L. Ainsworth, travailleur (he meant traveler, I suppose,) Etats Unis. “George P. Morton et fils, d’Amerique. “Lloyd B. Williams, et trois amis, ville de Boston, Amerique. “J. Ellsworth Baker, tout de suite de France, place de naissance Amerique, destination la Grand Bretagne.” I love this sort of people. A lady passenger of ours tells of a fellow citizen of hers who spent eight weeks in Paris and then returned home and addressed his dearest old bosom friend Herbert as Mr. “Er-bare!” . . . Think of our Whitcombs, and our Ainsworths and our Williamses writing themselves down in dilapidated French in foreign hotel registers! . . . It is not pleasant to see an American thrusting his nationality forward obtrusively in a foreign land, but Oh, it is pitiable to see him making of himself a thing that is neither male nor female, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl—a poor, miserable, hermaphrodite Frenchman! (165–66)

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Let’s not be too hasty here. Recall Twain’s own indictment of himself: “I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I shall have finished my travels.” 17. Obenzinger, 6. 18. Cf. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 3 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1883), 1:405: “the great majority of men . . . are . . . incapable of the joys which lie in pure knowledge. They are entirely given up to willing. . . . We may find in trifles and everyday occurrences the naïve expressions of this quality. Thus, for example, at any place worth seeing they may visit, they write their names, in order thus to react, to affect the place since it does not affect them.” Let’s linger back here, for the moment, to muster Flaubert, Schopenhauer’s ally in this campaign: Stupidity is an immovable object: you can’t try to attack it without being broken by it. . . . In Alexandria, a certain Thompson, of Sunderland, has inscribed his name in letters six feet high on Pompey’s Pillar. You can read it from a quarter of a mile away. You can’t see the pillar without seeing Thompson’s name and consequently thinking of Thompson. This cretin has thus become part of the monument and has perpetuated himself along with it. But what am I saying? He has in fact overwhelmed it with the splendour of his gigantic lettering. . . . All imbeciles are more or less Thompsons from Sunderland. How many of them one comes across in life, in the most beautiful places and in front of the finest views! (quoted in Alain De Botton, The Art of Travel [New York: Pantheon, 2002], 95) 19. Parenthetically take note: The priests are set at odds against these Protestant hooligans. Elsewhere and otherwise, as well, Catholicism trumps Protestant iconoclasm; popery lines up with civilization, the Protestant with the barbarian. Felicitously joking around, for instance, Twain makes this “sacrilegious” yoke: If it had been left to Protestants . . . , we would not even know where Jerusalem is to-day. . . . The world owes the Catholics its good will even for the happy rascality of hewing out these bogus grottoes in the rock; for it is infinitely more satisfactory to look at a grotto, where people have faithfully believed for centuries that the Virgin once lived, than to have to imagine a dwelling-place for her somewhere, any where, nowhere. . . . The memory of the Pilgrims can not perish while Plymouth Rock remains to us. The old monks are wise. They know how to drive a stake through a pleasant tradition that will hold it to its place forever. (IA 393) On the other hand, in a religiously serious vein, a further observation exemplifies how travel unlearns learning itself, regarding which Twain will always be ready and willing “to touch glasses and drink health, prosperity and long life to the Convent Fathers of Palestine”: I have been educated to enmity toward every thing that is Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits. But there is one thing I feel no disposition to overlook, and no disposition to forget: and that is, the honest gratitude I and all pilgrims owe, to the Convent Fathers in Palestine. Their doors are always open, and there is always a welcome for any worthy man who comes, whether he comes in rags or clad in purple. The Catholic convents are a priceless blessing to the poor. A pilgrim without money, whether he be a Protestant or a Catholic, can travel the length and breadth of Palestine, and in the midst of her desert wastes find wholesome food and a clean bed every night, in these buildings. (450–51) 20. John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in NineteenthCentury American Art and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 13.

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21. Larzer Ziff, Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 190. 22. Obenzinger, 165. See also Richard S. Lowry, “Littery Man”: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 57–58: “Sights, for Twain, are commodities, their cultural value established . . . , most of all, by the act of consumption itself.” 23. Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 128. Subsequent quotations are parenthetically cited in the text as TA. 24. While the East steadfastly garners scorn and ridicule, Western culture proves equally subject to circus and spectacle, a product of “education,” of “textuality,” a ruse, a con: a con man’s most exploitable commodity. In Munich, for example, attending an opera, Twain avows the following: “A German lady in Munich told me that a person could not like Wagner’s music at first, but must go through the deliberate process of learning to like it. . . . I could have said, ‘But would you advise a person to deliberately practice having the toothache in the pit of his stomach for a couple of years in order that he might then come to enjoy it?’ But I reserved that remark” (TA 40). Lohengrin epitomizes the experience: The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed. . . . [A]t times the pain was so exquisite that I could hardly keep the tears back. At those times, as the howlings and wailings and shriekings of the singers, and the ragings and roarings and explosions of the vast orchestra rose higher and higher, and wilder and wilder, and fiercer and fiercer, I could have cried if I had been alone. (TA 37) Eventually, however, Twain concedes that “cultured” opinion will customize Wagner as an aesthetic habit in America, as well: “One in fifty of those who attend our operas likes it already, perhaps, but I think a good many of the other forty-nine go in order to learn to like it, and the rest in order to be able to talk knowingly about it. The latter usually hum the airs while they are being sung, so that their neighbors may perceive that they have been to operas before. The funerals of these do not occur often enough” (TA 39). On this score, Stravinsky, recalling Debussy’s remark that Wagner’s Ring suggested “a sort of vast musical city directory,” would have the final hoot; see Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music: In the Form of Six Lessons (New York: Vintage, 1947), 80: If I am told that the power of genius is here great enough to justify this identification, then I shall ask what is the use of those widely circulated little guides that are the material embodiment of the musical city directory Debussy had in mind, little guides that make the neophyte attending a presentation of Götterdämmerung resemble one of those tourists you see on top of the Empire State Building trying to orient himself by spreading out a map of New York. And never let it be said that these little memory-books are an insult to Wagner and betray his thought: their wide circulation alone sufficiently proves that they answer a real need (80). Regarding Twain’s general attitude toward music, see Emma Sutton, “Foreign Bodies: Mark Twain, Music, and Anglo-American Identity,” Symbiosis 8 (2004): 109–19. 25. Notice, also, regarding language, the uncanny effect produced by the misappropriation of proper nouns—the naming/misnaming of persons, places, and things. Typically, the misnomer arises from various configurations of arrogance, ignorance, and condescension, from some unformulated threat to personal and national identity rather than the more transparent act of colonization: “We are camped near Temnin-elFoka—a name which the boys have simplified a good deal, for the sake of convenience in spelling. They call it Jacksonville” (IA 321). See also pp. 82–83, 344, and 356. 26. Twain’s summation of the beast amounts to this:

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We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans— Americans! When we found that a good many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a good many more knew it only as a barbarous province away off somewhere, . . . we pitied the ignorance of the Old World. . . . Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere will remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of our Lord 1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to imagine in some unaccountable way that they had a right to be proud of it. . . . The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. . . . They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses, and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. . . . . . . . In France and Spain we attracted some attention. . . . In Italy they naturally took us for distempered Garibaldians. . . . We made Rome howl. . . . But at Constantinople, how we turned out! Turbans, scimetars, fezzes, horse-pistols, tunics, sashes, baggy trowsers, yellow slippers—Oh, we were gorgeous! The illustrious dogs of Constantinople barked their under jaws off, and even then failed to do us justice. They are all dead by this time. They could not go through such a run of business as we gave them and survive. (IA 486–87) “A run of business,” indeed: This little slip anticipates both Freud and Marx . . . and Groucho. For readings that go against the grain of my own, cf., for example, Daniel McKay, “Imperial Therapy: Mark Twain and the Discourse of National Consciousness in Innocents Abroad,” Colloquy 11 (2006): 168: “Much of Innocents is constructed around . . . redemption of the homeland, . . . effectively . . . asserting the positive pole of [Twain’s] native culture”; Keith Mears, “Facing Death: American Eyes and Europe,” Symbiosis 8.2 (2004): 167: “The sole raison d’être [of Innocents Abroad] is to repeatedly satirise and subvert the historically legitimised predominance of European civilisation”; James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humour (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966), 38: Humor buttresses “an attitude of national assurance and confidence which neither the nation nor its travellers had had before the [Civil] war”; and Robert A. Wiggins, Mark Twain: Jackleg Novelist (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), 85: Humor in Innocents is founded upon the “assumption of folk superiority. The elemental mind is somehow superior to the more complex but morally corrupt civilised mind.” 27. One wonders what kind of fortitude would be required of Twain were he to witness a museum showing dinosaurs with saddles in Hebron, Kentucky. 28. Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien I: Arts de faire (Paris: 10/18, 1980), 206. 29. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xxiii. 30. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 241. 31. Caesar, 103. 32. Harold H. Hellwig, Mark Twain’s Travel Literature: The Odyssey of a Mind (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 19. 33. Cf. Clark Griffith, Achilles and the Tortoise: Mark Twain’s Fictions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 46: “A world with one immutable outcome . . . is a world without movement.” Cf. John Hyde Preston, “Searching for Roots in America,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 173 (October 1936): 491, for a contemporary quote that gives this screw a further turn: “It was wonderful to find America but it would be more wonderful to lose it.”

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34. Cannibalism eerily functions as a recurring supplement throughout Twain’s travels with the “innocents”; see also pp. 143–44, 186, 206, 409, and 443–44. Other than recapitulate the Davy Crockett “frontier” mentality that straddles both savage and civil terrain, or shadow the commodification of travel whereby the tourist consumes delectable sites/sights, cannibalism, insofar as and to the extent that it resonates with Eucharistic connotations, transgresses the theological boundary lines in light of which the Muslim East defines itself. Cf. Obenzinger, 249–51.

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Index

Adams, John, 18 Adorno, Theodor, 19 Akers, Benjamin Paul, 144 Andersen, Hans Christian, 112 Anderson, Douglas, 10, 137 Anthony, Captain, 79, 88, 103n15 Auerbach, Nina, 129 Auld, Hugh, 83, 85, 89, 90, 91, 99 Auld, Sophia, 80, 82, 103n16 Auld, Thomas, 84, 104n25 Baird, Doctor, 8 Baker, Jr., Houston A., 80 Baltimore, Lord, 60, 61 Barthes, Roland, 157, 158 Barwell, Lady, 3 Baum, Freda, 126 Belcher, Governor, 73n32 Belsham, William, 112 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 21 Berlant, Lauren, 137 Berry, Wendell, 59 Bertolini, Vincent, 45 Bhabha, Homi K., 147 Boswell, James, 112 Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon, 62 Bremer, Francis, 112 Brevoort, J. Carson, 42 Brillon, Mme., 18, 30 Brontë, Charlotte, 132n8 Brooks, Van Wyck, 41 Brophy, Brigid, 131 Brophy, Matthew, 65 Brown, Charles Brockden, 37n33 Brown, Gillian, 126 Bumas, E. Shaskan, 142–143 Bunyan, John, 6, 8, 111, 112 Buonaparte, Napoleone, 61 Burns, Robert, 142

Caesar, Terry, 158 Cahill, Edward, 3, 22–23, 24 Camfield, Gregg, 52 Carby, Hazel, 100 Carlyle, Thomas, 110 Carson, Cary, 23 Castronovo, Russ, 95 Chaney, Michael A., 79 Charles II, 60 Chaucer, 44 Christ, 162, 163, 165, 167, 173, 175 Clinton, DeWitt, 72n25 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 142 Collins, John, 36n22 Constantine, 173 Covey, Edward, 80, 81, 85, 88, 98, 99, 103n15 Crockett, Davy, 184n34 Cushing, Thomas, 2 Dana, Sr., Richard Henry, 42 Davis, Clark, 145 Davis, John, 169 Dawson, Hugh, J., 5 de Balzac, Honoré, 112 de Certeau, Michel, 175 de Nerval, Gérard, 163 de Ruyter, Michiel, 70 de Sade, Marquis, 81 de Staël, Madame, 112 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 115, 126, 127, 129, 135n37 Debussy, Claude, 182n25 Derrida, Jacques, 96, 115 Dickens, Charles, 109, 112 Dijkstra, Bram, 121 Dorsey, Peter A., 80 Downing, Andrew Jackson, 126 Durgin and Bailey, 85

195

196

Index

Eberwein, Jane D., 48 Edgeworth, Maria, 112 Eliot, John, 143–144 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 100, 141, 147, 173

Hillsborough, Lord, 1–2 Homer, 130 Hudson, Henry, 59 Hume, David, 8, 58 Hutchinson, Thomas, 2, 35n5

Fendal, 60 Ferguson, Robert, A., 65 Ferreira, Patricia, 95 Fichtelberg, Joseph, 101 Fields, James Thomas, 153 Flaubert, Gustave, 181n18 Fouqué, Friedrich, 121 Fourier, François Marie Charles, 142 Franklin, Deborah, 3, 5, 15, 16, 23, 23–24, 36n17 Franklin Mecom, Jane, 31, 34 Franklin, Temple, 33, 34, 35 Franklin, William, 2, 3, 33, 35, 36n17 Freeland, William, 98 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 37n36, 37n42, 93, 103n18, 120, 121, 125, 130, 137, 171, 182n26 Fuller, Margaret, 124

Isaacson, Walter, 35

Galileo, 30 Gall, Dr., 63 Gardner, William, 85, 93 Gautier, Théophile, 163 Gibbon, Edward, 58 Giles, Paul, 11, 19, 32, 47, 58, 63, 94, 106n31, 141, 144, 147 Gilman, Sander, 167 Gissing, George, 142 Godfrey, Mrs., 15 Grimes, William C., 161, 164–165, 173 Ham, 99 Heath, William, 143 Hedges, William L., 47 Hegel, G. W. F., 19, 28, 80, 83 Helena, St., 173 Helvetius, Mme., 18, 30, 31 Hellwig, Harold, 177 Henry, Patrick, 93 Herbert, Eugenia, W., 10 Hester, Aunt, 81 Hewitt, Emma, 127 Higgenbottom, Professor, 63

James, Henry, 147 Jefferson, Thomas, 25 Jenkins, Lee, 95 Johnson, Samuel, 112, 137, 153, 154 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 28–29, 56, 58, 69, 88, 90, 97, 100, 104n23–104n24, 106n40, 107n45 Keimer, Samuel, 8 Kennedy, Jennifer, T., 8 Kieft, Wilhelmus, 62 Kierkegaard, Søren, 147, 178 Lacan, Jacques, xi, 27, 28–29, 55, 117, 132n7 Leibowitz, Herbert, 9 Lena, Alberto, 30, 39n70 Levy, Andrew, 77 Lloyd, Daniel, 79 Lloyd, Edward, 76, 79–80, 81, 83, 97 Looby, Christopher, 19 Lopez, Claude-Anne, 3, 35 López, Narciso, 149 Louis XVI, 2 Lounsbery, Anne, 141 Lyotard, Jean-François, 26, 87, 90 Magdalene, Mary, 167 Martin, Terence, 50 Marx, Groucho, 171, 182n26 Marx, Karl, 105n26 Masur, Louis, P., 25 McDowell, Deborah E., 81 McFeely, William S., 81, 103n13 More, Thomas, 112 Morris, Governor, 29 Morton, Samuel G., 79 Morton, Thomas, 143 Mulford, Carla, 25 Newberry, Frederick, 147

Index Newton, Isaac, 30 Nicholas, St., 59 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49, 115, 119, 139, 157, 165 Obenzinger, Hilton, 158 O’Connell, Daniel, 94 O’Connor, Arthur, 94 Oliver, Andrew, 2 Panza, Sancho, 29, 39n68 Pascal, Blaise, 88, 97, 115 Plato, 123–124 Plautus, 2 Pope Alexander VI, 66 Pope, Alexander, 7 Price, Walter, 85 Prichard, James Cowles, 78 Priestley, Joseph, 27 Ralph, James, 6, 36n22 Ramses the Great, 78 Raphael, 145, 147 Read, Deborah, 5, 15 Read, Mr., 8 Récamier, Madame, 112 Richard, Poor, 101 Richardson, Anna, 95 Roberts, Ned, 81 Robinson, Edward, 164 Rosha, Rekha, 19, 26, 31 Rothschild, Baron, 128 Rowe, John Carlos, 148 Ruskin, John, 169 Said, Edward W., 101n1 Samuels, Shirley, 114 Sayre, Robert, F., 9 Schiff, Stacy, 30 Schiller, Friedrich, 112, 121 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 169, 181n18 Scott, Sir Walter, 95, 106n38, 112 Seelye, John, 93 Severe, Mr., 98 Shakespeare, William, 112, 142

197

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 79 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 94 Shipley, Jonathan, 1 Showalter, Elaine, 110 Smith, Adam, 29 Smith, James M’Cune, 108n51 Smollett, Tobias, 58 Socrates, 7 Stepto, Robert, 83 Stevenson, Mrs., 3 Stevenson, Polly, 3, 18, 34 Stravinsky, Igor, 182n25 Stuyvesant, Peter, 59, 61, 68, 69–70 Taylor, Zachary, 153 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 41 Thompson, William McClure, 164 Ticknor, William Davis, 148 Tompkins, Jane, 126 Traister, Bryce, 44 Turner, J. M. W., 169 Van Corlear, Antony, 69 Van Gastel, Ada, 16 Van Leer, David, 81 Virgil, 142 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 30, 67, 142 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 112, 114 Wagner, Richard, 182n24–182n25 Wallace, Maurice O., 81, 103n15 Warner, Michael, 31, 56 Washington, Booker T., 90 Waters, Mr., 94 Wederburn, Alexander, 2 Weinberger, Jerry, 2, 4, 7 Whitfield, Rev., 12 Wolf, Bryan Jay, 71 Wood, Gordon S., 1, 18 Young, Edward, 6 Žižek, Slavoj, 28

About the Author

John Dolis is professor of English and American studies at Penn State University, Scranton. His academic awards include Fulbright Professorships in American Literature at the University of Turin, Italy, and the University of Bucharest, Romania, a visiting professorship in American Literature at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, and Summer Seminar Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the University of Arizona and Yale University. His publications include numerous articles in literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic journals, several chapbooks of poetry, and two books of literary criticism: The Style of Hawthorne’s Gaze: Regarding Subjectivity (1993) and Tracking Thoreau: Double-Crossing Nature and Technology (2005). He has been awarded the Fulbright Danish Distinguished Chair of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark for the academic year 2015–2016.

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