Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion 9781474468480

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TRANSNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE

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EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor Modern global culture makes it clear that literary study can no longer operate on nation-based or exceptionalist models. In practice, American literatures have always been understood and defined in relation to the literatures of Europe and Asia. The books in this series work within a broad comparative framework to question place-based identities and monocular visions, in historical contexts from the earliest European settlements to contemporary affairs, and across all literary genres. They explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity. The Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series fosters new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for transatlantic literary studies, expanding the critical and theoretical work of this rapidly developing field. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag Ellen Crowell Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells Frank Christianson Transatlantic Women’s Literature Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective Günter Leypoldt Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money Erik Simpson

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TRANSNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE ESSAYS ON AMERICAN STUDIES, LITERATURE AND RELIGION

◆ ◆ ◆

PAUL GILES

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Paul Giles, 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4049 2 (hardback) The right of Paul Giles to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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CONTENTS

Preface Copyright Acknowledgments Books by Paul Giles Introduction: The Evolution of Critical Transnationalism III. II 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

III. 6. 7. 8.

AMERICAN STUDIES

vii ix xi 1 17

Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives (1994) Transnationalism in Practice (2001) Post-liberalism: George W. Bush and the Internationalization of American Studies (2005) E Pluribus Multitudinum: The New World of Journal Publishing in American Studies (2005) Historicizing the Transnational: Robert Coover, Kathy Acker, and the Rewriting of British Cultural History, 1970–1997 (2007)

108

LITERATURE

139

19 44 53 66

F. O. Matthiessen: Comparative Criticism and the Rhetoric of Violence (2001, revised 2009) 141 Henry James Athwart: Deterritorialization in The Sacred Fount (2003) 152 “The Magnet Attracting”: Dreiser’s Literary Style (2004) 163

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9.

The Literary Culture of Colonial America: Theology and Aesthetics (2005) 10. The Abjection of American Literature: Jamaica Kincaid and the Ghosts of Postcolonialism (2009) III.

RELIGION

11. Catholic Ideology and American Slave Narratives (1997) 12. The Intertextual Politics of Cultural Catholicism: Tiepolo, Madonna, Scorsese (1997) 13. “Like a Black Bell”: Henry Carlile and the Negative Theology of Place (2007) 14. The Springsteen Affect: Religion in American Studies (2009) Index

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181 202 233 235 248 267 285 307

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PREFACE

I am grateful to Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor for expressing interest in this project, and to Máiréad McElligott for helping to bring it to fruition. Acknowledgments of places of first publication, where appropriate, are listed separately, but I wish also to recognize the editorial assistance provided by particular individuals: Michael Heale, for “Reconstructing American Studies”; Cristina Giorcelli, for “Post-Liberalism”; Dick Ellis and Marita Sturken, for “E Pluribus Multitudinum,” as well as John Carlos Rowe who first proposed the essay; Lenny Cassuto and Clare Eby, for “Dreiser’s Literary Style”; Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, for “The Literary Culture of Colonial America”; Thomas J. Ferraro, for “The Intertextual Politics of Cultural Catholicism”; Primus St. John, for “Henry Carlile and the Negative Theology of Place.” Chapter 6, on F. O. Matthiessen, was originally presented at Richard King’s invitation as a paper at the British Association for American Studies conference held at Keele University in April 2001, in a panel on American cultural criticism which also included Richard himself speaking on Alfred Kazin and Donald Pease on Marxists of the 1930s; this paper has been revised slightly and is published here for the first time. For the introductory essay, I draw in part upon two previously published pieces: “American Catholic Arts and Fictions and the New Catholic Scholarship,” U.S. Catholic Historian 17.3 (Summer 1999): 1–8, and “European American Studies and American American Studies,” European Journal of American Culture 19.1 (2000): 12–16. Part of Chapter 10 that discusses Jamaica Kincaid was published in an earlier form in Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local

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Communities, Global Connections, edited by Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi (Routledge, 2008). I would also like to thank Katrine Thygesen of the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, for assisting with permission to reproduce the Tiepolo painting in Chapter 12; Christopher J. Kauffman and Mark Whalan, for other permissions; Mike Weaver, for his continued interest and support; Jim Fisher, for some valuable suggestions; and Robert Coover, Jamaica Kincaid and Henry Carlile, for their willingness to engage in correspondence and conversation about their work. Oxford September 2009

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COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives,” Journal of American Studies, 28.3 (1994): 335–58. 2009 © Cambridge Journals, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission “Transnationalism in Practice,” from 49th Parallel, No. 8 (Summer 2001): “Post-Liberalism: George W. Bush and the Internationalization of American Studies,” Letterature d’America (Rome), 24, No. 103–104 (2004): 45–61. “E Pluribus Multitudinum: The New World of Journal Publishing in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 57. 4 (December 2005): 1033–1078. © 2005 The American Studies Association “Historicizing the Transnational: Robert Coover, Kathy Acker, and the Rewriting of British Cultural History, 1970–1997,” Journal of American Studies, 41.1 (2007): 3–30. 2007 © Cambridge Journals, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission. “Deterritorialization in The Sacred Fount,” Henry James Review, 24.3 (Fall 2003): 225–32. © Johns Hopkins University Press

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“Dreiser’s Style,” in The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, ed. Clare Eby and Leonard Cassuto (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47–62. © Cambridge University Press “The Culture of Colonial America: Theology and Aesthetics,” in A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy T. Schweitzer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 78–93. “Catholic Ideology and American Slave Narratives,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 15.2 (Spring 1997): 55–66. “The Intertextual Politics of Cultural Catholicism: Tiepolo, Madonna, Scorsese,” in Catholic Lives/Contemporary America, ed. Thomas J. Ferarro (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997): 120–40. © Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. “‘Like a Black Bell’: On the Poetry of Henry Carlile,” Oregon Literary Review, 2.2 (Summer/Fall 2007):

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BOOKS BY PAUL GILES

Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge (1986) American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (1992) Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (2001) Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002) Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (2006) The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011)

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Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney

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INTRODUCTION: THE EVOLUTION OF CRITICAL TRANSNATIONALISM

I first stumbled across the idea of transnationalism in the early 1980s, when I was researching a doctorate at Oxford University on the poetry of Hart Crane. I had completed in 1979 a BA at Oxford in “English Language and Literature,” a degree at that time with a strong philological element, based resolutely, though largely unconsciously, upon the kind of Anglican Church ideology that had informed the program since its inception in 1893.1 One of the senior professors of English during my student days there was John Bayley, husband of Iris Murdoch, and Murdoch’s 1961 essay “Against Dryness” – contrasting the rigours of a disciplined imagination against the self-indulgence of fantasy, and arguing that the contingencies of everyday life by definition exceeded any attempt theoretically to circumscribe them – epitomized the particular version of natural goodness to which this Anglican temper was attached.2 In the work of Bayley and Murdoch themselves, this emphasis on moral realism formed the basis of an intellectual approach of great sophistication and flexibility. As is often the case, however, in the hands of others such a heavily loaded version of “nature” was liable quickly to degenerate into more coercive forms of tradition. The ghosts of Lord David Cecil and C. S. Lewis still stalked the college quads, and many of the tutors at this time seemed to be less concerned with the academic profession of literary criticism than with fine furniture, polished manners and the propagation of a stalwart Christian decency. I was initially attracted to American literature as an alternative to this kind of moralizing idiom, and the focus of my attention during my DPhil was on the intellectual relationship between Crane and

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James Joyce, in whom, as a lapsed Catholic with Irish ancestry on one side of my family, I had a long-standing interest. It was not until I got a couple of years into the research, however, that I came to realize the intensity of Joyce’s influence on Crane and the ways in which the latter’s trip to Paris in 1929 had helped finally to bring into focus the cultural agenda for his long poem The Bridge, first published in 1930. My argument turned upon ways in which the Surrealists in Paris and New York had helped to shape Crane’s artistic imagination, so that he came to see himself as poetically constructing a verbal machine made out of elaborate punning components, a suspension bridge of systematic ambiguity that could be understood within the same aesthetic framework as Finnegans Wake, which Joyce had started as early as 1924 to serialize as “Work in Progress” in various little magazines based in Paris, London and New York. Although this research was exciting, what I did not fully understand at the time were the implications of going so far against the institutional norms of Crane criticism. Since his suicide in 1932, Crane had generally been understood within the annals of American literary criticism as a kind of Whitman manqué, a Romantic visionary who aspired to project an integral vision for the modern world but who, frustrated by his own alcoholism and homosexuality as much as by the alienated conditions of urban life, finally collapsed in an entropic heap, jumped off a ship in the Gulf of Mexico, and was promptly eaten up by sharks. This was, again, a heavily moralizing retrospective narrative, whose implicit suggestion was that Crane got just about what he deserved. Writing in 1947, Yvor Winters described The Bridge as “a failure,” whose “magnificent passages” were demeaned by the poem’s “careless and pretentious” aspects, along with its “looseness of construction,” which Winters believed were a “natural consequence of the theme, which is inherited from Whitman and Emerson.”3 My own work placed less emphasis both on this Whitman inheritance and the legacy of American Romanticism in general, but correspondingly more on the specific historical milieu of the 1920s, when Crane was living and writing. I looked closely, for example, at his engagement with the popular culture of the contemporary New York underworld, considering how cultural phenomena such as Prohibition and burlesque theatre are reflected, often in comic ways, in The Bridge. The resultant thesis, however, suffered the indignity of initially being failed outright by my examiners at Oxford, who thought that I had entirely misconstrued the nature of Crane’s high symbolic art and its relation to the American literary tradition. The internal examiner,

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Richard Ellmann, an American who had moved from Northwestern to the Goldsmiths’ chair at Oxford in 1970 and whose famous biography of Joyce presents the modernist writer as above all a decent family man, was appalled to think that any other writer could have been experimenting with Joyceian methods in the late 1920s, still less a ne’er-do-well from New York with a pronounced sailor fetish. After the English Faculty Board expressed its “disquiet” at this verdict, the examiners relented to the limited extent of agreeing to award me a Master’s degree, provided that I agreed to rewrite the thesis entirely: “What the thesis requires,” thundered Ellmann, “is for Mr. Giles to make more of his virtues and less of his defects, and to use his research effectively. Since his argument about linguistic deformation and transformation appears irredeemably unconvincing,” he continued, it would “be necessary to eschew the unsupported linguistic speculations” that had disfigured the original thesis, without any “biographical evidence” to support them. This was, of course, a horrendous experience to go through, particularly at the age of 25, but I was fortunate enough to enjoy the loyal support of my supervisor, Mike Weaver, and my Oxford college, Christ Church, which continued my graduate scholarship for a year after the debacle of the viva in June 1983. To this day I still make a small monthly donation to the Christ Church coffers, not because they need it, but in recognition of the college’s largesse in a situation where it would have been much easier for it to be censorious. One of the many idiosyncrasies of life at Oxford is that its weaknesses are also its strengths: the chaotic and frequently amateurish academic structure of the central faculties is balanced by a multiplicity of different centres of gravity, so that there is a greater degree of institutional space than at universities organized along more corporate lines for alternative points of view. (My predecessor as director of the Rothermere American Institute, Alan Ryan, once described the Oxford system as resembling how America would have been if the Confederacy had won the U.S. Civil War, with states’ rights always trumping federal control.) In this case, the Faculty Board eventually received a “request” from Oxford’s administrative overseer of the time, an ancient philosopher who had taken on the university’s rotating position of “Senior Proctor,” to reexamine the thesis. At the second time of asking, after the manuscript had already been accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press, it was waved through by new examiners in January 1985 without any problems. All this was an early awakening not only to how odd academic

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life can be, but also to the lengths scholars will go in order to protect what they take to be the boundaries and integrity of their own disciplinary domain. In a world where there is generally not much money to be made, a cathectic investment in the way particular fields are organized often takes on the form of a modus vivendi, assuming the kind of importance that cold cash attracts in other walks of life. In the early 1980s, deconstruction was first beginning to make an impact in English departments in the U.K., with Colin MacCabe notoriously evicted in 1981 from his appointment as an assistant lecturer at Cambridge; but there was at that time still very little attention to metacritical matters of any kind at Oxford, where seminars in research methods consisted of compulsory courses in antiquarian book history and Elizabethan palaeography, and where theory generally was still regarded as the work of the devil. This meant that I remained largely innocent of the wider conceptual implications of my work until I moved to Portland State University in 1987 and began teaching surveys of American literature, like everyone else, from the Norton anthologies. I remember a meal at the Cajun Café in Northwest Portland where Peter Carafiol, who had brought me over from England, explained how the politics of American graduate schools worked, and the ways in which my situating Crane within a European intellectual context would seem altogether foreign within a U.S. academic environment where Crane was positioned proprietorially within the rubric of a native Romanticism and what Hugh Kenner in 1975 called the “homemade world” of American Modernism.4 Carafiol himself had studied at Claremont Graduate School with William C. Spengemann, one of the great iconoclasts who first punched holes in the old myths of American literary nationalism, and I now consider the seven years I spent in Oregon, from 1987 to 1994, as among the most fortunate and intellectually formative of my life. The move itself, however, was impelled above all by economic motives. After Margaret Thatcher had won her third general election victory in Britain in June 1987, the prospects of gainful employment for junior faculty in the U.K. were very limited, since Thatcher was vigorously opposed in principle to public spending, particularly in such soft options as higher education, and above all in anything to do with the humanities. I know of many people in Britain who went through graduate school in the 1980s, who published their Ph.D. thesis with major university presses, but who eventually decided to give up altogether on academic life and went on to have successful

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careers as tax accountants or civil servants. I know of several others who chose at this time simply to leave Britain, including the writers Caryl Phillips and Adam Thorpe, who had both been in my undergraduate year at Oxford; Phillips said later that his “desire to abandon Britain altogether . . . surfaced most powerfully in 1987 when Mrs. Thatcher achieved her third successive election victory. Her government’s continued incantation of a discordant, neo-imperialist rhetoric of exclusion led me to the conclusion that I simply did not need the grief.”5 Phillips eventually moved to America, while Thorpe moved to France for similar reasons. Various British academics in the field of American studies also moved away: Andrew Ross to the United States after completing a Ph.D. at the University of Kent in 1984, Maureen Montgomery to the University of Canterbury, New Zealand in 1986 from the University of East Anglia. In this sense, transnationalism, like most cultural movements, had a particular economic provenance, being linked not only to the new international mobility of capital – as I discuss in Chapter 5, “Historicizing the Transnational” – but also to the way these social changes played themselves out in the lives of an academic generation compelled to witness them at first hand. This was the kind of world given fictional expression in David Lodge’s comic novel Nice Work (1988), although of course to live through it was not nearly so funny. In retrospect, it might also be true to say more generally that the late 1980s, between Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987 and her resignation as prime minister in November 1990, was as repressive a cultural moment as Britain has experienced in recent times. As I noted in an essay on Channel 4 television films written while I was in Oregon (which is not included here), these kinds of prohibition manifested themselves particularly in the way government censorship was applied to television, including the banning in 1988 of all appearances by speakers on behalf of Sinn Féin, a lawful political organization with duly elected members of parliament, supposedly in order to “starve them of the oxygen of publicity.”6 As I suggest in Chapter 5, such authoritarian tendencies were more redolent of the McCarthy era in America in the early 1950s, although, as with the McCarthy era, such coerciveness could not be sustained for very long. By the time the bumbling John Major became prime minister in the early 1990s, a rapid growth in satellite television, driven in part by the formation of the BSkyB company in 1990, had made the centralized control of information technology much more difficult to regulate.

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To move to Oregon during the twilight months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a welcome relief from all this. For one thing, it was instructive to see how much less direct power Reagan wielded in the United States than Thatcher had enjoyed in Britain. Because of the constitutional system of checks and balances that gives as much authority to state as to federal government, and because of the vast size of the country, nobody in Oregon seemed unduly bothered when Reagan showed up on the evening news, whereas Thatcher, within the much narrower British confines, was able for a while to dominate the agenda entirely. Although my teaching load at Portland State (three courses a quarter) was high by American standards, this also seemed comparatively blissful after the exigencies of my two-year temporary lectureship at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, in the English West Midlands, where the timetable had been much more gruelling. It was in Portland that I wrote my second book, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, a treatment of how Catholicism in its secularized forms had affected American literature and culture which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1992. Though this work was generally well received, its intellectual problems are all too apparent to me now: there is, I think, too much of an inclination here to essentialize a notion of Catholic writing, to identify it with a series of recurring patterns which have the cumulative effect of locking the rhetoric of cultural Catholicism into an idealized whole. Nevertheless, this still remains the personal favourite of all my books, partly because it is inextricably associated in my mind with the memory of moving to America and encountering, like so many before, a land of relative freedom and plenty. I had actually begun this American Catholic project while still in England, but of course Stafford in the mid 1980s was a place where materials on religious minority cultures in the United States were, to say the least, thin on the ground. I remember triumphantly coming across a copy of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan in the town’s Public Library, but, back in those pre-Amazon days, it was high street chains such as W. H. Smith that set reading parameters for the great British public. All of this changed quickly in Portland, though, where I suddenly found myself living within walking distance of Powell’s, once described to me by Eric Sandeen at the University of Wyoming as probably the best bookstore in the United States. Within the huge arena of Powell’s, the self-proclaimed “kingdom of books” which takes up several blocks on the west side of the city, second-hand copies of the works of Farrell and others could be picked up readily

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for just a few dollars. In one significant sense, then, the range of authors covered in my study was a direct result of the easy availability of materials in this new environment, while of course the library facilities in the United States were also much better than in the UK, especially for material relating specifically to American culture. I also found it valuable to be teaching at this time a wide range of American literature to American students, so that I could get a clearer sense of the different assumptions they tended to bring to their native tradition. I remember in one of my classes during my first year in Oregon teaching the poetry of Edward Taylor, whose work I had never so much as read before, and trying to make some kind of inane joke about the mistake he had made in 1668 by leaving Leicestershire to move to Massachusetts Bay. One patriotic sophomore immediately dropped the class, and, so I subsequently heard, went to complain to the chair of the department about the wisdom of allowing an alien to spread such un-American ideas about the American literary canon. There is also a wider sense in which American Catholic Arts and Fictions might be seen as part of what Paul R. Messbarger referred to as “a rapidly maturing field of Catholic Studies” in the early 1990s.7 One notable work that had appeared slightly earlier was James T. Fisher’s The Catholic Counterculture in America (1989), which begins with the Catholic Worker movement of the 1930s and traces its story through “the last Catholic Romantics,” Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton, of the 1960s.8 In the field of Catholic history, Robert A. Orsi produced in 1985 Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, a study of urban ethnicity within a Catholic context, while my fellow Oxford graduate Patrick F. Allitt wrote Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America (1993), an analysis of the associations between Catholicism and conservatism in the years after the Second World War, and also Catholic Converts (1997), a study of how and why twentieth-century British and American intellectuals converted to Catholicism. In the same period, the literary and cultural critic Thomas J. Ferraro published Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (1993), a study of displaced writing which owed much to the new theories of ethnicity propounded by Werner Sollors and others, while one year later Ferraro edited a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled “Catholic Lives, Contemporary America,” featuring pieces by well-known scholars from an Italian-Catholic background such as Frank Lentricchia and Camille Paglia. Also in 1994, the late lamented Jenny Franchot completed her work Roads

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to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism, a highly acclaimed account of how nineteenth-century American intellectuals were engaged in implicit dialogues with Catholic ideas as they sought to define the boundaries of American cultural identity. There were several ways in which this cycle of Catholic scholarship might be distinguished from its predecessors. These authors had largely done their doctoral work at institutions without any specific religious affiliation: Ferraro in the American Studies Program at Yale, Fisher at Rutgers, Franchot at Stanford, Allitt at Berkeley, myself at Oxford (“at Oxford of all places,” exclaimed Jim Fisher in his review of my book).9 Our relationships with specific versions of Catholic orthodoxy were often equivocal and sometimes nonexistent: Allitt, for example, was brought up in the Church of England and became Episcopalian after his move to America, while my own allegiance has been more to the antipopes of Avignon than to their rivals in Rome. Fisher, who moved from his first job at Yale to a Chair at Saint Louis University and then to Fordham, offers perhaps the most traditional example of committed Catholic scholarship, though even he, in his more recent writing, has moved from a biographical study of the putative Catholic “saint” Thomas A. Dooley to broader cultural work on representations of sport, the cultural politics of the Cold War, and Irish-American ethnicity in New York.10 Overall, this kind of work on religion that began to develop in the 1990s was influenced less by theological controversies per se than by the renewed emphasis within academic communities on manifestations of ethnicity and other forms of material difference as these were shaped by the emerging field of Cultural Studies. Challenges to canonical hegemony, in every aspect of scholarship, brought about a situation in which the tradition of Catholicism was re-imagined in oppositional relation to the dominant ideologies of American culture. As I discuss in Chapter 3, the political theorist Louis Hartz, when describing “the liberal tradition in America” after the Second World War, noted how the idea of Lockean liberalism in the United States had been naturalized to such an extent that it had become “a silent quality in the national atmosphere, not so much blocking alien decisions as preventing them from ever being made.” In this light, discourses of Catholicism worked positively to re-illuminate what Hartz described as “the blindspots of ‘Americanism,’” the tendency of the national idiom to circumscribe and foreclose the conditions of its own production.11 Adhering neither to Emile Durkheim’s functionalist view of religion as false consciousness, nor to Mircea Eliade’s projection of it as a

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repository for vague intimations of the “mythic” or “sacred,” the new Catholic scholarship of the 1990s understood religion more in terms of a series of contingent constructions, where meaning was generated according to specific cultural circumstances and expressed in a wide variety of aesthetic and sociological forms.12 Although all of the essays collected in this book post-date American Catholic Arts and Fictions, there is, I think, a clear intellectual continuity between this earlier work on religion and my later work on transnationalism. Cultural historian Peter R. D’Agostino uses the term “transnational” to describe the conflict between competing loyalties to Washington DC and to Rome among American Catholic organizations in the nineteenth century, and there is a sense in which both my Catholic book and the subsequent transatlantic trilogy – Transatlantic Insurrections (2001), Virtual Americas (2002) and Atlantic Republic (2006) – are designed to scrutinize sceptically the designs of national narratives, as they manifested themselves in Britain as well as the United States.13 Only the first of the essays reprinted here, “Reconstructing American Studies,” was written in Portland; it was initially presented at the Pacific Northwest American Studies Association held in Lincoln City, Oregon, in April 1994, and was then published in the Journal of American Studies in December of that year, a few months after I had returned to work in England. But interest in ideas associated with transnationalism was beginning to emerge in the United States through the early 1990s, with the Australian historian Ian Tyrrell’s pioneering essay “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” being published in the American Historical Review in 1991. I first heard of Paul Gilroy’s work when Edward Said talked about The Black Atlantic as a forthcoming phenomenon at an MLA session in New York in December 1992, and after finishing the Catholic project the time seemed propitious for a treatment of American literature and culture along similar transnational lines.14 Sadly, however, it became all too evident that Portland State was not going to be interested in supporting such an intellectual enterprise. When I went there in 1987 the cry had been for the university to develop a “national reputation,” but I underestimated the volatility of new universities on the West Coast and, after a big property tax roll-back mandated by the Oregon voters in 1990, a new PSU president arrived, full of supposedly charismatic ideas for disbanding what she thought of as self-indulgent notions of academic expertise by increasing community involvement. The university’s new slogan

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became “urban mission,” which was code for an increased emphasis on general education and what the president, under the influence of Carnegie Foundation guru Ernest L. Boyer, tried to spin as “the scholarship of teaching.” Yet although working within higher education in Oregon was frustrating in all kinds of ways, the city of Portland was a wonderful environment to live in, and, as I said at my leaving party there, the decision to move away involved the kind of dilemma W. B. Yeats was addressing when he wrote about being “forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.”15 Though “perfection” was never part of my vocabulary, for philosophical as much as professional reasons, the return to England to work at the University of Nottingham turned out to be much more difficult than the original move to the United States had been. As many have observed, reverse culture shock, where you are supposed to know your own culture intimately but after several years away find that you don’t, is much more disconcerting than the first alien encounter, and it took some time before I was able to acclimatize to life back in the U.K. Part of the reason for this sense of disjunction was the problem of working again with much scarcer library resources. As Bruce Spear pointed out from Berlin in 1999, this is a structural difficulty faced by many European universities, which are generally state-supported and underfunded, and which consequently have enormous difficulties in coming to terms with the proliferation of diverse academic material generated by economically stronger programs in the United States.16 This is one of the obvious sources of discord between European American Studies and American American Studies: if your university library can only afford to buy a few books and journals dedicated to American studies, then the syllabus is naturally going to have a vested economic interest in preserving a more familiar model of cultural homogeneity. Traditional American studies programs in European universities during the mid 1990s tended accordingly to be based upon a reductive idea of interdisciplinary method that was predicated upon an illusion of synchronicity, or what might be called the synecdochic fallacy. This was the misleading notion that by placing different kinds of narrative in juxtaposition with each other – The Great Gatsby and the jazz age, for instance, or The Grapes of Wrath and the politics of the Great Depression – it might be possible to develop an inherently more complete and progressive perspective on any given scene. It was, in fact, always just as likely that such carefully calibrated juxtapositions served simply to provide discourses which turned into mirror images of each other, where a

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line of extension was drawn between text and context as though they fitted together through the organicist trope of synecdoche.17 The difficulty here comes when certain kinds of themes, attributed to “America,” are recapitulated without sufficient reflection upon their epistemological implications. The University of Nottingham, where Richard King and I introduced and team-taught a Master’s course on American studies methods, was generally responsive to these kinds of critical concern, but there was always a conflict between old and new. I recall a student in the program there who struggled uncomfortably through various essays on cultural representation before, with an almost audible sigh of relief, turning back to John Updike’s 1990 novel, Rabbit at Rest, and writing what he thought was a detailed account of how “America” is portrayed in that book. The problem was, of course, that by failing to internalize these questions of representation he had not, as he thought, avoided such abstruse concerns, but had simply slipped back into an older theoretical model, predicated upon a naïve conception of mimesis and an unwarranted form of synecdochic extension, whereby the demise of burger-loving Rabbit Angstrom was seen to stand unproblematically as a symbol of the corruption of, as the student blithely put it, “America” itself. Whereas most students on an English degree course in the 1990s had some grasp of rhetorical theory, and most history students at least some basic conception of historiography, there was still considerable resistance within many American studies programs towards any methodology of area studies or national identity, of the kind that Vicente L. Rafael talked about in a 1994 essay when he referred to the need of “a critical genealogy of area studies specific to our moment.”18 In part this was because American studies, thanks to its traditional populist inclinations, had always prided itself on what Leo Marx in 1969 called an “unscientific method”; but by the mid 1990s such resistance to methodological self-consciousness meant that the orientation of American studies was beginning to find itself out of touch with contemporary developments in the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity.19 The essays in this book date from 1994 to 2009, when I was working at the Universities of Nottingham (1994–99), Cambridge (1999–2002) and Oxford (2002–2009). They chart various aspects of the evolution of this Americanist field in the light of different kinds of institutional pressures. Back at Oxford, in particular, I became heavily involved in institutional aspects of American studies – serving as second director of the new Rothermere American Institute at

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Oxford between 2003 and 2008, and as second president of the International American Studies Association between 2005 and 2007 – and this gave me ample opportunity to reflect upon the tensions and opportunities associated with the internationalization of this academic field, a process that began to develop rapidly in the twentyfirst century. The first section of the book, “American Studies,” includes an essay commissioned by American Quarterly in 2005 to review how an exponential growth in new professional journals concerned in some form with American culture had helped to remap the contours of the subject. This piece was written in conjunction with R. J. Ellis, now Professor of American Studies at the University of Birmingham but a former colleague of mine at Stafford. I drafted the body of the text reprinted here while Dick drew up the list of journals originally printed by American Quarterly as an appendix to the essay, which is omitted here for lack of space; but both parts of the article went out under our joint names, and I am grateful to Dick for allowing me to reproduce it here. The book’s second section, “Literature,” also raises institutional questions, most obviously in the context of F. O. Matthiessen’s work, but also through a consideration in Chapter 9 of how “early” American literature relates to the American canon, and in Chapter 10 of how postcolonial issues come into the Americanist equation. In the third section, “Religion,” I tease out some of the conceptual overlaps between transnationalism and religion, looking primarily, as in American Catholic Arts and Fictions, at how Catholic discourse enters in subliminal, secularized ways into the making of U.S. culture. Whereas in that work I consider how the visual arts (Warhol, Mapplethorpe) and cinema (Altman, Scorsese) relate to literary forms, here I include a new essay on Bruce Springsteen that attempts something similar in the context of rock music while also thinking more broadly about the anomalous place of religion within American social and political life. Although these essays focus primarily on literature and culture, the issue of transnationalism has always carried a much wider valence. While globalization has often degenerated over the past two decades into a banal buzz word, one cherished particularly by deans’ offices in universities trying to recruit a larger number of overseas students, there is a more interesting sense in which the globalizing process is at its most illuminating precisely when it runs up against the sharp vested interests of local concerns. Indeed, many of the most crucial – and often the most heated – debates in social and political life are taking place at various boundaries where traditional allegiances

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of national identity are encountering the turbulence of the transnational. These points of friction are manifesting themselves in many diverse areas, from the jurisdiction of international law to control of the media and ownership of sports teams, and it is these tensions between competing conceptions of local affiliation and global dislocation that a transnational remapping of American studies should help to elucidate. Just to give one anecdotal example of this, about a year after we had moved back to England my then wife saw a newspaper advertisement for laser eye surgery offering to correct shortsighted vision, something she had suffered from since childhood. The cost, £750 as I recall, did not seem unduly exorbitant considering the potential benefits at stake, although of course it would have been beyond the means of many. At the initial consultation in London, she was told by the clinic that they did indeed consider her a suitable candidate for this procedure, but that as a matter of protocol she should inform her local doctor first. The general practitioner in Nottingham, when consulted, cautioned strongly against the operation, saying that its success rate was unproven and that there might also be medical dangers involved. However, we decided ourselves to look further into the basis of these claims, searching online through old copies of the Harvard Medical Journal and so on, and in the end, finding no evidence of substantial risk, we decided to go ahead with the operation. Opting deliberately to go against the advice of the doctor was nerve-racking, but, after the procedure had been carried out successfully, my wife saw him again and this time he was fully supportive of her course of action. He said that he was personally very much in favour of this treatment, but that all doctors had been instructed by the management of the National Health Service to recommend against it on medical grounds. The problem was, of course, that it would have been too expensive to offer this treatment to everyone who might want it free of charge, as is always the requirement in the NHS for political reasons. The crucial issue of principle here is not about the legitimacy of setting medical priorities, in which this kind of procedure would probably have been ranked low down, or about the necessity of making difficult policy choices on economic grounds. It is, though, about freedom of information and intellectual transparency, about the rights of people to be fully informed about matters which affect their lives, rather than being manipulated by state-sponsored narratives which, in the interests of fostering a docile society, would have them believe they always live in the best of all possible worlds. Many

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government organizations, much more familiar with top-down systems of management, have found themselves distinctly uncomfortable in a new kind of transnational environment where they cannot always control the flow of information, and, as JÜrgen Habermas has observed, the traditional institutions of democratic representation have not yet caught up with this new state of affairs.20 Certainly such a challenge to medical authority would have been much more difficult without the access to international sources provided by the Internet, and indeed the wider practice of transnationalism itself has been heavily indebted to Internet access, which started to become widespread in universities around 1994. This again suggests how transnationalism crucially had a technological as well as an economic driver, with its cultural narratives running alongside a much wider social dynamic. Although the cheap plaster skull that I keep in my study, à la Caravaggio, is a constant reminder that the call to judgment may come at any time, I fondly imagine these essays as belonging to the middle years of my career, after the early formative spell in Oregon. These pieces were written in the margins, as it were, of my long-term projects of this period: a trilogy of books exploring interrelations between British and American literary cultures from the eighteenth century through to the present day, and an interrogation of the relationship between U.S. national culture and world geography in The Global Remapping of American Literature. The essay on Robert Coover and Kathy Acker which appears here as “Historicizing the Transnational” was originally intended to be part of Atlantic Republic, before that book got reorganized in a different way, while the piece on Henry Carlile, with whom I had worked twenty years earlier in Portland, arose out of my critique of regionalism in Global Remapping. Some people have suggested my particular version of transnationalism focuses too narrowly on relations between Britain and the United States, which may well be true. In my defence, though, I would argue, as I do in Chapter 2, that transnational analysis always tends to be more effective when it illuminates specific points of dissensus within material cultures, and that the kinds of method suggested here are theoretically transferable into other, quite different situations. For myself, the conclusion of my transatlantic project, which extended back in total over some twelve years, seems like a natural break and a good time to pull these essays together. In 2010, I plan to inaugurate a new phase of my life and work by relocating to the University of Sydney, Australia, in order to reconsider

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American literature and culture across an alternative axis of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “the immensely changeful and vast scenario of the evolving Asia-Pacific.”21 I look forward to the intellectual challenge of perhaps helping to reorient transnationalism in a different direction, and to the paradoxical pleasure of growing old in a new country.

NOTES

1. On the contribution of a “Broad Church” Protestantism to British cultural identity in the nineteenth century, see Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 163. 2. Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” Encounter 16.1 (Jan. 1961), 16–20. 3. Yvor Winters, “The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X?” (1947), in In Defense of Reason (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 598. 4. Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York: Knopf, 1975). 5. Caryl Phillips, A New World Order: Selected Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 2001), 304. 6. Paul Giles, “History with Holes: Channel 4 Television Films of the 1980s,” in Lester Friedman, ed., Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 87–88. 7. Paul R. Messbarger, review of American Catholic Arts and Fictions, Religion and Literature 25.1 (Spring 1993), 81–85. 8. James T. Fisher, The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933–1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 205. 9. James T. Fisher, review of America Catholic Arts and Fictions, Modern Language Quarterly 55.1 (March 1994), 112. 10. James T. Fisher, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927– 1961 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), and On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 11. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), 226, 303. 12. For an overview of these debates, see Charlotte Allen, “Is Nothing Sacred? Casting Out the Gods from Religious Studies,” Lingua Franca, Nov. 1996, 30–40. Allen describes how the American Academy of Religion identifies itself more with Eliade’s position, and the

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13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

Transnationalism in Practice North American Association for the Study of Religion more with Durkheim’s. Peter R. D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 53–83. Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (Oct. 1991), 1031–55; Edward W. Said, “Literary Criticism and Politics?,” MLA Convention, New York, 30 Dec. 1992. W. B. Yeats, “The Choice,” in Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1950), 278. Bruce Spear, “Universalizing American Studies,” online, H-NET List for American Studies, , 6 Jan. 1999. For a critique of this method, see Brook Thomas, “Parts Related to Wholes and the Nature of Subaltern Opposition,” Modern Language Quarterly 55.1 (March 1994), 79–80. Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text 41 (Winter 1994), 107. Leo Marx, “American Studies: A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” New Literary History 1.1 (Oct. 1969), 75–90. JÜrgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (1998), trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 84.

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CHAPTER 1

RECONSTRUCTING AMERICAN STUDIES: TRANSNATIONAL PARADOXES, COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

i While American Studies continues to be a popular subject in universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, several influential critics have recently expressed some sense that its methodological direction appears increasingly uncertain. To be sure, there never was a time when this field’s methodology has not been problematic: arguments about what American Studies should include, and indeed whether its eclectic narratives could reasonably be said to constitute an academic discipline at all, have circulated many times since the rapid growth of the subject in the late 1940s. This development has been well documented over the last few years. Philip Gleason has shown how the end of the Second World War led to a patriotic desire to identify certain specifically American values and characteristics; this led to various mythic idealizations of the American spirit in seminal critical works of the 1950s; and this in turn was followed by a more empiricist reaction in the 1960s and 1970s, when social scientists and historians of popular culture were concerned to demystify those earlier, holistic images of a “virgin land” and an “American Adam.”1 These are old controversies, and I do not intend to rehearse them in detail here. From the perspective of the early 1990s, what is more urgent is to consider how, or indeed if, the field of American Studies might continue to make an important contribution to our understanding of the United States, as well as a significant intervention within the world of learning more generally.

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There are some reasons to doubt this. In a 1979 issue of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, Gene Wise observed that “unquestionably, American Studies is no longer working on the frontiers of scholarship.” In 1987, Giles Gunn argued that one way to gauge the health of any academic field is to determine the kind of conceptual questions it begs, and he went on to suggest by such a standard American Studies is “in considerable trouble.” A year later, critical theorist Jonathan Culler remarked that “American Studies has not had the influence on other disciplines that one might expect and has produced an interdisciplinary subfield rather than a reorganization of knowledge.” And in a 1992 essay for the Journal of American Studies, Richard King continued to express anxieties about a certain staleness and a lack of theoretical contemporaneity, particularly in the work of some British Americanists.2 It should be said this kind of complaint, about an apparent absence of theoretical selfconsciousness, has been a long-standing issue within the American Studies world, one that has resurfaced periodically. “Theory” in general has never sat very comfortably with American Studies paradigms, partly because the Anglo-American philosophical temperament has for centuries preferred pragmatic empiricism to rigid systematization, partly because (as Michael Denning has written) the whole idea of American “freedom” has traditionally defined itself in opposition to those cultural models of abstract regulation and codification popularly associated with Marxism.3 But to defend the inchoate nature of American Studies by invoking the principled freedom of American society must by now be considered a dubious strategy, particularly in this era when even those who continue to defend the specificity of an American cultural identity agree that the nation’s older exclusivist idylls should be consigned to the “ Cold War scrap heap.”4 Indeed, this is also a time when other scholars aggressively challenge any idea of American exceptionalism, preferring to talk instead about “international history” or “post-national narratives.”5 In this light, a question arises over whether American Studies might not have become a tautology, the redundant residue of an age of patriotic empire building that bears little relevance to the increasingly transnational networks of the 1990s. For instance, Fredric Jameson noted that the “American mythic explanation” for cultural events “seems to flourish primarily in those American Studies programs which have a vested interest in preserving the specificity of their object and in preserving the boundaries of their discipline.” He also argued more generally that the “area studies” paradigm is always

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in danger of becoming conceptually self-referential: the predominant emphasis placed by area-based scholars upon (in our case) the American elements in American Studies paradoxically ensures this academic field becomes increasingly inward looking and self-defining the more successful and coherent it becomes. Jameson found such intellectual boundaries peculiarly inappropriate in this developing age of “global culture,” where multi-national capitalism and communications are rendering the idea of autonomous cultures and clear national frontiers obsolete.6 These are especially important issues for British partisans of American Studies, many of whose initial enthusiasms for the United States can be traced back to ideas and icons that by now seem outdated. The British Association for American Studies was founded in 1955 – just four years after its American counterpart – and during this decade America connoted for British observers a hard-edged modernity and material opulence, qualities that made it appear to stand in sharp contrast to the economic austerity and (in Malcolm Bradbury’s phrase) “coddling claims of British domesticity.” American literature of the 1950s, recalled Bradbury in 1980, seemed to possess the kind of historical, moral and sexual urgency which the “provincialism and universal virginity” of Britain at this time altogether lacked.7 Hence America in the 1950s appeared to many British intellectuals as a vision of economic and erotic liberation, not altogether unlike the image of Paris in the 1920s for American writers of that earlier time; in both cases, the land of new opportunity became constructed figuratively, as an implicit inversion of the stuffy and repressive society left behind. Colin Maclnnes’s novels of the late 1950s, for example, conjured up images of American popular culture – jazz, Cadillacs, Elvis Presley – as emblems of existential freedom and generational rebellion for London youth who, in most cases, had never seen America and never would. Similar kinds of projection took place in the 1960s, though British academics at this time tended to be less concerned with America’s libertarian possibilities and more receptive to the dark, comic surrealism that seemed to characterize national life during this era. Film critic Raymond Durgnat, writing in 1966, produced one typical reaction: The cynicism, violence and vehemence of many “black” American films seem to cut human nature to the bone. American films are often so crude as to seem immature to the more sophisticated European; but that crudity, at its best, has a lacerating honesty. Though American

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“primitivism” often hamstrings transatlantic attempts at “subtle” art, it gives a strange energy and universality to many Hollywood films, and is the secret of the nonchalant stoicism of such directors as Huston, Hawks and Flaherty. If American culture – from Mack Sennett to rock’n’-roll – is so infectious it is not only because of the dollar behind it but also because its very crudity gives it access to responses underlying many cultures. America abounds in “good bad” films, i.e. films which are full of flagrant badnesses but which by fair means or foul open up new vistas and old wounds, helping to crystallize obscure yet powerful feelings which one’s “ home culture” keeps all too tactfully tucked away.8

Durgnat’s argument is that the same kind of licentious, anarchic energies lurk somewhere within British culture, but that American films have made these forces visible, while British productions have chosen to keep them safely repressed. Again, Durgnat is just as interested in what Britain lacks as in what America embodies; the foreign culture is made to reflect back upon its native counterpart. Much important and innovatory work was done by British Americanists during the 1950s and 1960s, of course, but my point is that in retrospect these idealizations of the United States can be seen as a correlative to those mythic explanations of American culture promulgated by American scholars like Henry Nash Smith, R. W. B. Lewis, Richard Chase and Leo Marx during the same time period. Those American Americanists described their territory as a land of pastoral renewal where the complexities and contradictions of history, particularly European history, could be internalized and ultimately transcended; the British Americanists, similarly, conceived the glamorous New World in terms of a flight from poverty and institutional repression. Today, however, such reifications have long since been dismantled. Within the United States itself, increased attention to the differential equations of gender, ethnicity and (particularly) race have undermined that Cold War intellectual synthesis which associated America with innocence and freedom; while, in post-punk Britain, youth culture has tended to take an increasingly oppositional stance towards the more vapid aspects of American consumerism. “I’m So Bored with the USA,” sang The Clash in 1977; American popular culture in recent years has often seemed to betoken a stultifying complacency, an obsession with self-gratification, qualities which have enjoyed little hold upon the disaffected condition of British youth. Rather than a distant Utopian land lent the charm of

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inaccessibility, America appeared to many British eyes during the 1980s as all too drearily familiar, the source of innumerable tepid films and predictable situation comedies, piped, via the increasing globalization of communications systems, through British television screens. The fact that Margaret Thatcher idealized the American entrepreneurial system, indeed held it up as a role model, only added to the sense of alienation from American culture and values felt by many young people in Britain at this time, including those associated with academic communities. Within Europe generally, some of the former fascination with this transatlantic connection, with construing America as an alternative imaginary world, seemed to become displaced into excitement at the new cultural possibilities of a united Europe. It is time, then, for British Americanists to take stock. We are faced with a situation where our subject no longer appears by definition poised on the cutting edge of cultural theory. Among students, of course, interest in various aspects of American culture remains strong, but it is rarer to find those conceptual equations between “America” and some form of social or intellectual modernity that fueled the growth of this new field in the 1950s and 1960s. Further, the definition of American Studies itself would appear to be sliding from the fluid to the chimerical, as the national boundaries of the United States become reconfigured into what Rob Wilson in 1992 called “an entity of transnational cyberspace.”9 Yet I believe the increasingly unstable nature of national identities may create its own opportunities for the future development of American Studies, and in particular may help British (and other European) Americanists make a major contribution to the renovation of this academic area. ii Over the past generation, much of the most significant work by British Americanists has been concerned with points of intersection or miscegenation between the North Atlantic cultures. The most obvious categories here include histories of emigration (Charlotte Erickson, Stephen Fender) and travel narratives (Christopher Mulvey, Peter Conrad); but this general body of work also involves a more abstract, conceptual challenge to American ideas of separatism and exclusivism. Back in 1961, for instance, Marcus Cunliffe was taking issue with the propensity of American historians to explain social change

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through “clumsy metaphors of watersheds and turning-points,” metaphors that imply “one has been cut off decisively from the past as if by a physical barrier.”10 Rather than chronicling history as a continuous process, argued Cunliffe, American historians have preferred to stress discontinuity, cataclysm, the radical cleavage between past and future. Cunliffe preferred instead to focus upon the interactions between old and new, and it is this kind of bifocal perspective that has often been reflected in the work of other British Americanists: in Malcolm Bradbury’s affiliation of Frank Norris and other American writers usually presented as working “on native grounds” with larger traditions of European naturalism, for example; or in Robert Lawson-Peebles’s demonstration of how metaphors taken over from the British Redcoats continued to inform the rhetoric of even the most fervently nationalist Americans in the late eighteenth century.11 One prominent example of this British intellectual challenge to the ideals of American exceptionalism was Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which created a furor by its suggestion that the United States might be bound to the same inevitable cycles of supremacy and decline as the ancient empires of the East and the European nation-states of the Renaissance. More indirectly, it may be this implicit concern to represent cultural traditions diachronically, as consecutive narratives, that has helped generate the impressive scholarly writings by British Americanists about the South, a region where the heavy burdens of the past often evoke a “literature of memory.” In the work of Michael O’Brien, Helen Taylor, Richard Gray and others, the historical dimension tends to be represented as an inexorable force circumscribing the direction of particular events and, therefore, undermining the possibilities of apocalyptic renewal or other forms of infinite mobility. On a more specific level, one noticeable emphasis in the writings of British Americanists during the 1980s was an increasing reliance on the theoretical directions of European Marxism and linguistics to interrogate the assumptions of American culture. In the hardening political climate of this decade, several British critics undertook ideological demystifications of American literature, as if to demonstrate how mythic constructions of the American past, like the Reaganite fantasy of “Morning in America,” were nothing more than insubstantial shadows. My examples of British Americanist criticism from this era will be weighted towards literary criticism, since this is the area with which I am most familiar, but in all of these cases the author was specifically concerned to juxtapose literary texts with

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other kinds of social and historical discourses. For instance, Michael Spindler’s American Literature and Social Change (1983) traced a development from the ideologies of economic production framing late-nineteenth-century fiction to “the consumption-oriented phase” within which twentieth-century writers such as Fitzgerald and Dos Passos were ensnared. Robert Clark’s History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction,1822–52 (1984) emphasized the discrepancy between Emerson’s mystification of nature and the hard facts of economic depression in the mid nineteenth century. Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking (1985) paralleled Dreiser’s fiction with the burgeoning of consumerism propelled by the growth of department stores at the turn of the century – thus providing what American critic Michael Denning called a “long overdue marxist reevaluation of the naturalist tradition.”12 Duncan Webster’s Looka Yonder! (1988) probed contradictions between various populist images of “America” and the social struggles that such rhetoric worked simply to gloss over. Richard Godden’s Fictions of Capital (1990) analyzed how the reader can see the corporate structures of monopoly capitalism and “Fordism” refracted in the work of twentieth-century novelists, from Henry James to Norman Mailer. Some sense of this political agenda also worked its way into American criticism. In her Introduction to a 1986 collection of essays significantly entitled Ideology and Classic American Literature, Myra Jehlen wrote of how a large number of American academics had been influenced recently by European theories of culture, leading to “an increasing recognition that the political categories of race, gender and class enter into the formal making of American literature,” with the result that the “ideological dimension of literary works has emerged . . . as integral to their entire composition.” Traditionally, Marxist theory had been seen as un-American and therefore of dubious relevance for American Studies; but the intellectual cross-fertilization apparent here – Richard Slotkin’s nod to E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class in his essay on the frontier myth, Carolyn Porter’s analysis of Emerson and Henry James through a Lukácsian critique of reified consciousness – testify to an increasing recognition of how American Studies could, and indeed should, break free of its own nationalistic preconceptions. As Sacvan Bercovitch wrote in the same year: We need a forum where native Americanists (if I may call them so), scholars trained in the rhetoric and rituals of “Americanness,” can learn

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from their colleagues abroad to re-see American literature in an international perspective. It may well be that this will alter our very concept of “Americanness” by recontextualizing it – for example, by accentuating Emerson’s links to Descartes on the one hand and to Nietzsche on the other, or by replacing the tautologies of exceptionalism with the transnational categories of gender, class, and race. . . It may even be that this comparatist perspective will eventuate in a shift in the literary center of gravity, from the nationalist American Renaissance to the transatlantic enterprise of a later era. . . 13

Nevertheless, to regard Marxist or other kinds of cultural theory emanating from Europe as some kind of master “key” capable of decoding the complexities of American literature and culture would be excessively autotelic. Jehlen, when she wrote about this new interest in the ideological dimension to classic American texts, also argued that such literature could still create space for the transcendent, for that which refuses to be encompassed by cultural materialism: “Precisely by taking us to the limits of ideology,” she wrote, “literature may offer a way to look a little beyond.”14 It is, of course, any such manifestation of a disembodied American “spirit” that British critics of the 1980s viewed with such skepticism. My intention here is not to decide between these different philosophical positions – a choice which would simply involve a replication of prior value judgments I might happen to hold – but rather to note how these opposing discourses can illuminate each other’s ideological assumptions through this very process of contradiction. By demurring from the values of American transcendence, British materialism reveals such transcendence to be a relative and contingent rather than absolute quality; similarly, by aspiring to escape from the parameters of materialism, American transcendence implies the culturally specific base and boundaries of British academic Marxism. This is not to essentialize either side of the equation, to claim national cultures can unproblematically be associated with one particular ideological perspective; on the contrary, it is to suggest the complicated ways in which such discourses circulate, miscegenate and overlap. But it is to put forward the paradoxical proposition that British accounts of American culture may be valuable not so much for their “truth” as for their implicit observation of what America lacks, their magnification of those silences, absences and blindspots upon which the American idiom constructs itself. As Derrida wrote in a 1992 essay on national identity, such processes of national self-identification

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become conflated with a conceptual agenda which “never presents itself as a particularism but as a universal philosophical model.” In this way, Derrida continued, “nationalism does not even present itself as a philosophy, but as philosophy itself, philosophy par excellence.”15 At the end of the eighteenth century, for instance, Edmund Burke wrote his famous defense of British social customs not simply to validate the existence of Britain alone, but also to attack what he took to be the more fundamental evils and misconceptions of the French Revolution. Discourses of nationalism rarely declare themselves to be particularist rather than universal models, and it is one of the tasks of comparativist criticism to recover a sense of that latent contingency. It is not difficult to arrive at general agreement about the desirability of comparative methods. Back in 1979, Gene Wise was writing of the need for a more “reflexive” and theoretically self-conscious approach to American Studies, rather than conceiving the subject simply in terms of an accumulation of “information bits.” Giles Gunn, Guenter H. Lenz, Michael Cowan and others have all stressed how “comparatist and internationalist perspectives,” as Cowan put it, are “increasingly incumbent upon a nonparochial American Studies.”16 The more arduous task, however, is to move beyond pious words and hopes towards scholarly work which actually makes a difference to how this field is represented. And this is where we find stumbling blocks: for all of the talk about post-national narratives and comparativist perspectives, it remains very difficult to dislodge many of the primary, foundational assumptions of American Studies, because such assumptions are often bound unconsciously to a residual cultural transcendentalism that fails to acknowledge the national specificity of its own discourse. It is not too difficult today to see how, back in his 1941 book American Renaissance, F. O. Matthiessen was reconvening the energies of Emerson and Whitman to underpin his own agenda of social, political and sexual liberation, so that the Transcendentalists’ nineteenth-century Utopia became realigned in a continuum with the socialist, communitarian projects of the Great Depression era. It is less obvious, though, how many of the critical narratives in America today concerned with gender, race and ethnicity also involve a recycling and refurbishing of this transcendental idiom. Yet in the work of Paul Lauter and Cornel West, of Annette Kolodny and Jane Tompkins, we typically find rhetorical movements towards “liberation” understood as a triumph of the soul over the corrupting forces of history. Such gestures involve a recapitulation of

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the classic American pastoral pattern: an escape from the corrupt old world of division and conflict into the pure new world of reformation, authenticity and personal freedom. These declarations are also deeply embedded within religious metaphors of renewal: Lauter has written about the influence of his Quaker upbringing on his subsequent quests for political emancipation, while in 1992 Cornel West, whose work on black culture is heavily informed by liberation theology, noted how 97 per cent of Americans still believe in God, with 75 per cent holding to the doctrine that Jesus was the divine Son of God the Father.17 All of this provides a very different framework from the more skeptical epistemologies to which European intellectuals have become accustomed, and it helps to account for some of the tensions between American and European angles on American Studies. Lauter, for instance, champions in principle a comparative approach to American literature, but only insofar as such a method serves to relativize the dominance of “Anglo-European male writing” within the literary canon; his goals are to introduce “diversity” into the curriculum by rehabilitating marginalized writing – from Native American authors and others – so as “ to provide students access to the living cultures of twenty-first century America.” Such challenges to the traditional inertia of academic curricula are important and necessary, of course; but it is noticeable how little time Lauter has for Derrida, whom he specifically accuses of a ludic “irrelevance” and a failure to heed “the moral view.”18 “Comparative” for Lauter means comparative within America; anything from outside, especially anything that refuses to be embraced within the great American mosaic, is kept firmly at bay. In this way, the comparative method is appropriated so as to update and reinforce fundamental American ideas about civil liberty and existential freedom, without subjecting the basis of those ideas themselves to the kind of critical scrutiny a more rigorous comparative analysis would demand. The melting pot has turned into a patchwork quilt; the metaphor may have changed, but the old ideal of e pluribus unum has emerged relatively unscathed. In this context, Cornel West, himself a Christian theologian and preacher as well as a cultural critic, has expressed some discomfort with the more sinister designs of Foucault, calling the French writer “indispensable,” but noting also there is a “parochialism” in the way “his Eurocentrism and his Francocentrism stare at you on every page.” Jane Gallop, an American scholar of feminism and French literature, has commented upon similar kinds of tension in relation

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to mutual antipathies between the United States and the work of Jacques Lacan, whose work on the decentering and misrecognition of the self found itself quite at odds with the self-sustaining individualism characteristic of American ego psychology: “The most common reaction to Lacan here has been rejection,” complained Gallop. In all of these cases, the European theorist epitomizes discourses concerned with the impersonal circulation of power and with the radical subversion of personal autonomy and authenticity, concepts that run antithetically to an American vision of democratic freedom. Such visions of freedom generally carry with them an implicit ideology of liberal humanism, and it is this, according to Jeffrey Louis Decker, that has traditionally informed the practice of American Studies.19 One of the clearest examples of these methodological differences can be found in Philip Fisher’s Introduction to The New American Studies (1991), a collection of essays from the Berkeley journal Representations. Despite the heavy influence of post-structuralism on the new historicist modes of inquiry that characterize Representations, Fisher still chose here to define America as a culture of perpetual mobility and self-transformation, to be understood in terms of the relative absence of state monopolies and directives. Accordingly, argued Fisher, “[c]entralization of power on the European model, and with it the centralization of the power of representation and selfconception as it has been described by Foucault, was never present in America.” Fisher similarly dismissed as inappropriate the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who was said to deal with different kinds of societies, societies whose primary goals are reproduction, self-replication and continuity over time. By contrast, within the United States, said Fisher: the exhaustion of control is always imminent, and control itself is porous. Because America had no experience of monarchy, it has a permanent democratic core working not only against the centralization of power but, more important, against its inheritance or preservation over time . . . We have rhetorics because we have no ideology, and we have no ideology because we lack the apparatus of ideology. . . 20

One odd thing here is how Fisher’s idealization of American fluidity and mutability cuts directly against the critical perspectives of many European intellectuals, who have frequently been impressed more by America’s monolithic, overregulated capacities. We might think of Gramsci writing about “Americanism and Fordism” in the early

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1930s, discussing how even “the sexual instinct” of factory workers had become rationalized and collectivized in the name of economic efficiency; or of Baudrillard’s 1986 account of American hyperreality, a culture of depthless conformity and self-referential circulation, where the Reaganite smile is said to be “the sole principle of government.”21 Again, it is not my intention to adjudicate between these conflicting interpretations, but rather to highlight their mutual incompatibility. Fisher’s America is essentially Whitman’s America: an arena of democratic social space, predicated upon universal accessibility, openness and the possibilities of infinite renewal. Baudrillard’s America is a flatter and more comic landscape, a preprogrammed circuit of objectified simulacra. For all of the good-natured aspirations towards comparativist and internationalist models within American Studies, it is these kind of divergent assumptions and approaches that still create the most intense frictions. In November 1992, Jean-François Lyotard gave a lecture at the American Studies Association in Costa Mesa, California, on “The Postmodern Condition Today,” relating the idea of human rights and freedom to old Christian metanarratives of redemption and revelation which, claimed Lyotard, no longer carry fundamental validity or cogency. Lyotard’s assertion that liberty should now be seen as an efficient concept within a specific cultural system, not as an intrinsic right or truth, was greeted coolly by his largely American audience, many of whom in fact walked out. Enthusiastic proponents of an internally “comparativist” approach to American Studies – more Hispanics, more Native Americans – balked at the prospect of Lyotard’s cold Nietzschean skepticism. Those more accustomed to witnessing a politics of hope, to addressing radical situations through which negative social categories could be transformed, or at least escaped from, appeared uncomfortable with such a materialistic erasure of any realm of “spirit.” This kind of discomfort recalls Cornel West’s earlier dismissal of Lyotard as an “overcelebrated,” “highbrow” and merely “fashionable” figure, whose “French postmodern discourses about Otherness . . . really serve to hide and conceal the power of the voices and movements of Others.” That phrase “the power of the voices,” with its evangelical overtones, is especially telling, for West conceives his own project as the redefinition of American romanticism and self-reliance in the name of “empowering and enabling . . . the black underclass.” Therefore, in a belated echo of American exceptionalism, he is obliged to represent Foucault and Lyotard as being “very distant from the kind of

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debates about postmodernism we have in the States.” To reiterate, it is not a question here of Lyotard being “right” and West or Fisher “wrong,” or vice versa; it is more a matter of each approach serving to illuminate the ideological parameters of the other. Lyotard does not provide a “key” to American culture, but the rebarbative and politically unacceptable nature of his discourse works to highlight what American Studies lacks, and therefore – implicitly – what it encompasses.22 iii The more traditional paradigm for American Studies scholarship has arisen from a contextual mode – “contextual fundamentalism,” as Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., suggested sardonically – whereby any given text or event was thought to be more fully explained if inserted into a larger matrix of cultural affairs.23 This contextual imperative was crucially tied up with the old dreams of interdisciplinary formulas providing models of holistic knowledge. In the 1950s, when C. P. Snow was lamenting the divergence of “two cultures” of arts and sciences, some hoped that American Studies might offer a more progressive kind of synthesis, a way of bringing these different areas of learning together, especially since technology appeared so central to America’s sense of its own mission. Consequently, in 1965 Alan Trachtenberg wrote Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, considering the edifice as both a scientific and an aesthetic construction, paying attention to the engineering skills of the Roeblings as well as to Hart Crane’s subsequent poetic reconstruction. Similarly, during the late 1960s and 1970s there was a drive in American Studies to bear witness more fully to the state of America by embracing more of its popular entertainments and artefacts, thus harnessing both “high” and “low” culture to build up a more complete interdisciplinary picture of the American scene. Kenneth Silverman’s 1976 study, A Cultural History of the American Revolution, could be said to fit into this category, ranging widely as it does over the popular culture of late-eighteenth-century America so as to adumbrate what was distinctive and revolutionary in the life of the new nation. Both Trachtenberg and Silverman wrote excellent books, of course, and made a major contribution to American Studies; but both exemplify the problematic nature of their contextual assumptions, in which the larger context operates tautologously in relation to their prior agenda. It is wrong to suppose a historical

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context can ever be a neutral foundation which needs simply to be made visible before the relationship between text and context, individual event and larger process, can be appreciated in its true light. On the contrary, contexts are selected and adduced to support particular hypotheses, indeed to validate particular hypotheses, to lend them a (spurious) air of authenticity and empirical justification. By choosing American popular culture as his “context,” Silverman was implicitly advancing an agenda of American exceptionalism, the radical differences beginning to emerge between the United States and the rest of the world. This is a valid line of argument, to be sure, but only as a line of argument; it cannot be “proved” by a “contextual” process of requisitioning empirical facts to support the case, without some theoretical justification of why these particular facts were chosen rather than others. No kind of scholarship can accomplish everything, of course, and it is important to acknowledge the valuable contributions of contextualism to American Studies, just as today we admire classic critical works like F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance or Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land without necessarily sharing the philosophical assumptions framing these narratives. However, one particular problem with this contextual method – especially when addressing American popular culture – is that it has tended to reproduce the exclusivist idiom of the old “ideal America” school, albeit in a less mystified vein. Ebullient celebrations of supposedly representative American icons – the dating rituals, the popular romances, the baseball memorabilia – have often taken delight in their own intellectual unpretentiousness and, above all, in the fact that the items under consideration were homespun rather than European. Robert Sklar was attacking these folkish perspectives when he wrote in 1975 of a “strong antipathy among some sectors of the American Studies field toward efforts to move beyond individualistic, idiosyncratic and impressionistic modes of scholarly procedure.”24 Again, the issue here involves a nostalgia for open, transparent modes of representation, together with a resistance to the alleged obfuscations of theory. It is possible to trace these empiricist resistances within the practice of American Studies throughout the twentieth century. We can see such pressures in embryonic form among the group centered on the Seven Arts journal around the end of the First World War. This movement, marshaled by Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, declared its impatience with the narrow snobbery proffered by Ivy

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League anglophiles, and it sought instead to emphasize what it saw as the Whitmanian impulses within American life and art, the native strengths of writing in the American grain. Hence the group’s validation of William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrows and plums in the ice-box rather than T. S. Eliot’s etiolated, hierarchical theories of civilization. Another formative influence a few years later was the work of Vernon Louis Parrington, whose Main Currents in American Thought (1927–30) similarly extolled a broad Whitmanian social sweep rather than what the author saw as the more frivolous games of modernist aesthetics; Parrington resembled Van Wyck Brooks in that he was concerned, as he put it, with “the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic.”25 Crucially, it was this antimodernist version of American culture that became disseminated by the political atmosphere of the 1930s, the decade when academic study of the American scene was beginning to become widespread. Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe and other writers of this Great Depression era came to reject a European-influenced modernism as excessively abstruse and elitist, preferring to opt instead for more familiar modes of social realism; at the same time, the Popular Front, with its declared “faith in the common man,” was engaging the sympathies of literary critics such as Brooks, Matthiessen and Lewis Mumford. Therefore, academic studies of American literature and culture were beginning to get off the ground in an atmosphere where the notion of “commitment” to some larger group, community or movement was de rigueur, and where documentary or folk history was valued more than elaborate experiments with aesthetics or cultural theory. One of the most famous and characteristic works of this era was the Depression photographs and reportage produced by James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a project begun in 1936 and published in 1941. “Above all else,” said Agee, “in God’s name don’t think of it as Art.”26 Agee’s antipathy to “Art” arose out of an empiricist impatience with the pretentious and genteel, but it can be seen to anticipate the resistance of many subsequent practitioners of American Studies to the equally loaded term “Theory.” It is true, on a practical level, that this new concentration upon home-grown culture in the 1930s helped to introduce American Studies in the first place – it was during this era that phrases like “an American Way of Life” and “The American Dream” first came into common usage. But it is also important to recognize that there is no necessary correlation between the idea of

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American Studies and this kind of popular contextualism, so prevalent in the Thirties, that seeks to reproduce transparently the most familiar, everyday objects as a guarantee of American “authenticity.” The earliest practitioners of American Studies saw their method as a means of subverting rigid academic or disciplinary barriers so as to approach some vital, holistic conception of what America might actually be about; but more recent critics, working under the influence of post-structuralism, have redefined this interdisciplinary idea as a form of what Homi Bhabha has called the “discursive practice of cultural difference.”27 Post-structuralist interdisciplinarity betokens the inevitable failure of different theoretical discourses to coincide with each other, and therefore the necessary fragmentation of perspectives which such alternative conceptualizations bring about. In this revised model, the multifaceted elements of American Studies suggest not the ultimate coherence or identity of the nation, but rather the ubiquity of power, the tendency of cultural discourses to slide between different disciplines and levels of consciousness as they circulate in unpredictable, amorphous and non-teleological ways. Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking, for instance, shows how the allure of consumerism, as we can recognize it in Dreiser’s novels, was embroiled at the turn of the century not only with the worlds of industry and technology, but also with emerging theories of psychoanalysis (“what does a woman want?”).28 Thus a reconstructed American Studies needs to acknowledge how interdisciplinary perspectives involve a blurring of definitions, a collapsing of frontiers, not a nationalistic synthesis. By shifting the focus of American Studies from contextualism to comparativism, from studying objects within their natural or national arena to an analysis of how such an arena is constructed, we position ourselves on the theoretical boundaries of the subject, boundaries that enable us to see what is allowed into this particular field as well as what is kept out. The subject could usefully consider its position in relation to James Clifford’s notions of comparative ethnography, or Homi Bhabha’s understanding of how hybridity and paradox work to construct national identities. Some of the recent theories of postcolonialism may be relevant here, especially in considering how power relations and reversals between Britain and America have operated over the past four hundred years. For an example of how effective such criticism can be, we might take the work of Paul Gilroy, the black English sociologist cited with approval by Clifford in a recent lecture.29 Gilroy posits a

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“black Atlantic tradition,” comprising familiar literary figures such as Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright, whose careers were worked out over a transatlantic circuit; but he also writes about less celebrated migrants, whose cultural icons and cathectic investments tend to be centered less upon national spaces than around technologies of displacement and transmission: boats, airplanes, telephones, cassette tapes. This representation of black culture flowing between the Caribbean, the United States and the United Kingdom helps to unlock black history from the quasi-theological rhetoric of redemption with which it is too often encumbered in America, and so to relocate issues of slavery within a historical rather than a transposed metaphysical framework. Gilroy’s transnational binoculars offer an excellent example of how comparativist analysis can change the meaning by changing the context. By transgressing the boundaries of any given national community, the critic can avoid those philosophical assumptions which, as Derrida said, go hand in hand with the idea of national identity, and in this way can more readily deconstruct the (latent) metaphysical premises associated with such forms of idealism. It is significant that in his 1987 book, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’, Gilroy took issue with the essentialist, homogenized versions of community held up by English cultural critics from Carlyle and Ruskin through to E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Such critics, claimed Gilroy, tend to indulge in “a morbid celebration of England and Englishness from which blacks are systematically excluded,” and he wrote of the need “to overcome the sclerotic confines of the nation state as a precondition of the liberation of blacks everywhere.”30 One issue which becomes clarified here is how the tradition of cultural studies which has emerged from British academic life since the Second World War risks the same kind of parochialism in its outlook as those simultaneous idealizations of home-grown culture within American Studies. Just as F. O. Matthiessen sought to inscribe an organic pastoral tradition within America, so F. R. Leavis attempted to establish the teaching of English literature as a noble pursuit that would help reestablish that community imbued with “organic wholeness and vitality” for which Leavis nostalgically yearned. As Chris Baldick has observed, within Leavis’s projected Utopia a “doctrine of psychic wholeness” was conceived as the “analogue for a projected harmony and order in society.”31 In this model, ethics and aesthetics become mutually self-defining and self-sustaining; art is valued for its faithfulness in expressing the ethos of some particular community,

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whether that community be conceived as national, intellectual, religious, class-based or whatever. Indeed, it is ironically possible to see Leavis’s equation between literature and morality as an inverted mirror image of the similar kinds of symbioses advocated by various Anglican Oxbridge intellectuals whom Leavis so much abhorred. Drawing its impetus from figures such as C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Lord David Cecil and Helen Gardner, this Anglican style of literary appreciation characteristically scorned the use of critical abstraction and dehumanizing academic “jargon,” preferring instead to validate the “truth” of literature by its proximity to what these cultural aristocrats, within their own imagined community, recognized as “real life.” One of the central scholarly journals in this mould has been the Oxford-based Review of English Studies, founded in 1925, where gentlemanly values of “taste, tact, and decency” have been consistently promoted, along with a supposedly humane “emphasis on character, personality, and integrity.” As Brian Doyle has written, the Review of English Studies has traditionally cultivated the identification of an essential “ Englishness” in everything from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the modern novel.32 Critical idioms such as these tend to reify some form of communal ideology and then to extrapolate value judgments as a reflection of those prior interests. In Britain, such forces have worked inevitably to marginalize the more uncouth and erratic energies of American culture, just as Matthiessen’s organic agenda sought to exclude anything that smacked of European gentility. Nor are such moralizations simply a phenomenon from the past, as we see from the frequent conflation of ethics and aesthetics within the hardheaded school of British cultural materialism that emerged in the 1980s. Like its antiformalist predecessors, British cultural materialism attempts to map out its terrain as “real life” rather than art, praxis rather than pure theory, though from this oppositional perspective “real life” involves not the affairs of the aristocracy but the everyday existence of the British working classes. In an echo of the American antimodernists of the 1930s, for instance, Iain Chambers in 1991 rebuked an older literary critic for failing to recognize how significant narratives “are more likely to be encountered in newspapers, magazines, cinema, television, advertising, pop music and on the dance floor, than between the boundaries of ‘English literature.’”33 As in the work of Leavis and Raymond Williams, we may sense here a ghostly myth of plenitude, a nostalgia for some self-authenticating reality, against which the elitist conceptions of academia represent merely alienating distortions.

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I am not, of course, suggesting that all British accounts of British culture, or all American accounts of American culture, must by definition be inward-looking and self-validating. Some of the most interesting new work in British cultural studies has been engaged in problematizing these foundational landscapes of communal identity: again, Homi Bhabha’s iconoclastic work is the outstanding example here. Similarly, much of the most challenging American work in recent years – from literary critics William C. Spengemann and Henry Louis Gates, historian Laurence Veysey and others – has been concerned overtly to deploy comparativist techniques so as to interrogate the content-based reifications of their “Americanist” world. Nor am I trying to claim there is anything new in itself about the value associated with alien reconstitutions of American culture: think only of Crèvecoeur, de Tocqueville, D. H. Lawrence. Certainly I am not suggesting that work emanating from Britain should inherently enjoy a prior or higher status within this field: in the first chapter to The Rites of Assent (1993), Sacvan Bercovitch adduced his own Canadian background and immigrant experiences as underwriting his subsequent critical examinations of America’s “dreams of transcendence” and his desire to avoid what Walter Benjamin disparaged as “the tradition of empathy in historical studies.” But what it is important to recognize, I believe, is that the post-structuralist dissolution of essentialist forms of identity has licensed processes of misrecognition and misreading as the only interpretative paradigms available, and this in turn has radically undermined the validity of rhetorical claims to speak from a privileged position “within” any given culture. Through the process of what the German Americanist Werner Sollors has called a “pastoralization of the in-group,” such mystifications of insiderhood can become their own self-fulfilling prophecy; but it is that kind of conceptual tautology which the alien or comparativist perspective always works to disrupt.34 These are the intellectual circumstances that may help give direction to a new generation of British work in American Studies. Sites of exchange between these different North Atlantic territories could become a particularly fruitful place for future analysis, because the transgression of boundaries necessarily involved in such an enterprise creates interferences that counteract those self-perpetuating interactions between texts and contexts upon which studies of culture (in whatever form) have too often been predicated. This is the manner in which Paul Gilroy’s work interrupts the self-authenticating fictions of “freedom” so deeply (and subliminally) embedded within

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the Manichaean conscience of American liberalism. Andrew Ross, a British-born critic now working in the United States, is another who continues to derive energy from the political force of British cultural studies, but whose writing now crosses that tradition with a cyberpunk outlook and scientific discourses drawn from the American technological environment. In this way, Ross evades ethical preconceptions linked to nationalistic assumptions, and he engineers instead a radically anti-utopian style of cultural analysis whose focus is the multivalent circulations of power and difference. This method owes something to Foucault’s strategy of ataraxia: argument by reversal, the overturning of dogmatic assumptions, the circumvention of totalizing formulas by the marginal or the deviant. Not surprisingly, more orthodox British proponents of cultural materialism –Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie – have expressed concern about this “Americanization” of their academic field, fearing a vitiation of the political commitment that has traditionally supported their subject in Britain; but again, more important than apportioning praise or blame is comparatively to trace the contradictions and frictions which the reciprocal interactions between these different idioms have brought about, and thus to recognize to what extent the theoretical form of these subjects has (implicitly or explicitly) shaped their substantive content.35 An example of the same phenomenon in reverse might be the work of Michael Denning, an American Americanist who has acknowledged the influence of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies upon his researches into popular fiction and working-class culture in nineteenth-century America. Denning’s writing, like that of Ross, negotiates a series of internal dialectics, alternating between different models of academic discourse so that the objects under scrutiny come to appear from a bifocal or comparativist perspective. In this way, their work fulfils what Jonathan Culler conceived as one of the traditional functions of a comparative method, to exercise “a critical demystificatory force on the cultural pieties of a nation.”36 iv To reimagine American Literature as a comparative field of study is, oddly enough, to take the subject back to its earliest manifestations. The first American Literature group which met at the MLA in 1926 believed their field should not be understood primarily in nationalistic terms, but rather as one of the branches of literature in English.

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The Ivy League anglophiles would have been influential here, no doubt; but, equally significantly, this was the era of high modernism, when flying by the nets of nationality was in style and “provincialism,” as Ezra Pound proclaimed in 1917, “the enemy.”37 It is important to remember how modernism had more or less passed into the realms of history by 1949, when the Program in American Studies at the University of Minnesota began publishing American Quarterly: by this time, Joyce, Stein, Fitzgerald and Crane were dead; Pound was incarcerated; Faulkner, Hemingway and Eliot had finished their most significant work. Hence the academic development of American Studies postdated the more cosmopolitan proclivities of modernism, which Americanists generally came to recognize only as a phenomenon from the past. Still, this link between American Studies and antimodernism has always been more a matter of historical accident than conceptual necessity, and reconstituting some of modernism’s internationalist scope might provide an opportunity to relocate the study of American literature and culture within a larger global network, thus enabling us to reconfigure our view of the United States against a wider theoretical circumference. We would not want to take on board the old idealist baggage attached to modernism – its mysticism, utopianism and so on – but we might want to appropriate some of its linguistic powers, especially its strategies of defamiliarization: Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie, making strange. The Russian Formalists and other European theorists of estrangement were intent upon disturbing the old assumptions of literature as a reflection of local pieties, and it is precisely such a process of comparativist defamiliarization that finds itself at odds with the more mimetic strategies endorsed by most practitioners of American Studies today. In recent times, the most powerful theorist of estrangement has been Julia Kristeva, whose Strangers to Ourselves starts off with a wideranging consideration of the historically ambiguous status of metics, resident aliens, before proceeding to investigate the larger, metaphorical implications of foreignness. By transposing the idea of exile from a literal to a figurative construct, Kristeva discusses how such self-alienation allows everyone to recognize the strangeness within themselves, how “we are our own foreigners, we are divided.”38 It is these elements of foreignness and self-division within American culture that can best be drawn out through a comparativist rather than contextualist methodology. Writing of how defamiliarization expresses itself linguistically through patterns of stylistic density, Kristeva argued that a baroque and excessively formal language is

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characteristic of deracinated authors, who typically abjure simple description and prefer to represent what is strange or unheimlich. This argument has obvious repercussions in terms of the aesthetic qualities of “American” authors with hybrid national affiliations: Nabokov, Raymond Chandler (brought up in England and educated at Dulwich College), W. H. Auden, Thom Gunn, Charles Simic. It would also be possible to pursue the implications of Kristeva’s analysis for immigrant painters (Thomas Cole, David Hockney) or for filmmakers (Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders). But these modes of defamiliarization have ramifications beyond their relevance to literature or art. As we have noted, Paul Gilroy’s cross-cultural accounts of the black experience effectively defamiliarize conventional American understandings of liberty and slavery; while – to take one more example – contemporary British scholar David Simpson, another metic, has offered radically materialized versions of nineteenth-century American Romanticism that suggest the “ hegemonic posture” implicit in transcendentalist subjectivity and so the links between Emerson’s “ rhetoric of megalomania,” as Simpson put it, and the politics of manifest destiny.39 The crucial strategy for the comparativist scholar is to dissociate rhetoric from ethos, the cultural sign from the freight of moral values lodged (often unconsciously) within it. This serves to make manifest the ludic, “textual” qualities of the foreign landscape, and therefore (from our point of view) the constructed and radically provisional nature of the American experience. By the very fact of their location outside or on the margins of American society, Americanists from other parts of the globe may find themselves in a better position to avoid the tautologies of American exceptionalism, and so to help redesign the problematic framework of the area studies model. 1994 NOTES

1. Philip Gleason, “World War II and the Development of American Studies,” American Quarterly, 36 (1984), 343–58. For a good survey of American Studies in the 1950s, see Donald E. Pease, “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon,” boundary 2, 17 (1990), 1–37. 2. Gene Wise, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly, 31 (1979), 315; Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

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of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 147; Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 8; Richard King, “ Present at the Creation: Marcus Cunliffe and American Studies,” Journal of American Studies, 26 (1992), 265–68. Michael Denning, “‘The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies,” American Quarterly, 38 (1986), 356–80. Michael McGerr, “The Price of the ‘New Transnational History,’” American Historical Review, 96 (1991), 1057. Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review, 96 (1991), 1031–55; Donald E. Pease, “National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives,” boundary 2, 19 (1992), 1–13. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), 35, and “The State of the Subject (III),” Critical Quarterly, 29, No. 4 (1987), 16–25. Malcolm Bradbury, “How I Invented America,” Journal of American Studies, 14 (1980), 133, 130. Raymond Durgnat, Eros in the Cinema (London: Calder and Boyars, 1966), 95–96. Rob Wilson, “Techno-euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime,” boundary 2, 19 (1992), 209. Marcus Cunliffe, “American Watersheds,” American Quarterly, 13 (1961), 492, 489. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 7; Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 62. Denning, “‘The Special American Conditions,’” 363. Myra Jehlen, Introduction, Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1; Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry, 12 (1986), 652. Jehlen, 10. Jacques Derrida, “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis),” Oxford Literary Review, 14 (1992), 11, 13. Gene Wise, “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” Prospects, 4 (1979), 527; Michael Cowan, “Boundary as Center: Inventing an American Studies Culture,” Prospects, 12 (1987), 1. Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3; Cornel West, “The Postmodern Crisis of the Black Intellectuals,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 695.

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18. Lauter, 51, 87, 138, 135. 19. West, 689; Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 58; Jeffrey Louis Decker, “Dis-Assembling the Machine in the Garden: Antihumanism and the Critique of American Studies,” New Literary History, 23 (1992), 281–306. 20. Philip Fisher, Introduction, The New American Studies: Essays from Representations, ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), xxi–xxii. 21. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 297; Jean Baudrillard, America (1986), trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 34. 22. Anders Stephanson, “Interview with Cornel West,” in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 272–73, 277, 281. Douglas Tallack touches on the significance of Lyotard’s work for American Studies in Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context (London: Longman, 1991), 324–25. Tallack also makes the point that debates about American postmodernism “cannot now be understood other than on a European/American axis” (324). 23. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “A New Context for a New American Studies,” American Quarterly, 41 (1989), 589. 24. Robert Sklar, “The Problem of An American Studies Philosophy: A Bibliography of New Directions,” American Quarterly, 28 (1975), 262. 25. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930), I, iii. 26. Cited in Warren T. Susman, “The Thirties,” in The Development of an American Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Coben and Lorman Ratner (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 259. 27. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 314. 28. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), 31. 29. James Clifford, “Borders/Diasporas,” American Studies Association, Costa Mesa, California, 6 November 1992. 30. Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 12, 157. Gilroy develops these ideas in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), which appeared too late for full consideration here.

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31. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York: Knopf, 1956), 17; Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 218. 32. Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989), 83. 33. Iain Chambers, review of Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, by Alan Sinfield, Textual Practice, 5 (1991), 150. 34. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 5, 13; Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 31. 35. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), and Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991). For the anxieties of Hall and McRobbie, see their contributions to Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg et al., 277–94 and 719–30. 36. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and WorkingClass Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987); Jonathan Culler, “Comparative Literature and the Pieties,” Profession, 86 ([New York]: Modern Language Association of America, 1986), 30. 37. Ezra Pound, “Provincialism the Enemy,” in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber, 1973), 159–73. 38. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (1989), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 181. 39. David Simpson, “Destiny Made Manifest: The Styles of Whitman’s Poetry,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 189, and The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 248.

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CHAPTER 2

TRANSNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE

I want to consider the practice of transnationalism as an academic methodology, focusing in particular upon the institutional problems that it highlights and the specific situations within which it might intervene. One question which is often raised is how, if at all, transnationalism in its contemporary theoretical incarnation should be seen as different from the various moves to internationalize the study of literature and culture that have taken place at various times from the eighteenth century onwards. It is, of course, true that transnationalism involves distinct connections with various Enlightenment projects that were intent upon redescribing relations between the universal and the particular. In her 1993 book, published in English as Nations Without Nationalism, Julia Kristeva advocates a contemporary version of transnationalism through an invocation of Montesquieu’s “esprit général,” something she distinguishes from the idealization of Volksgeist, the spirit of the people, which became established in the nineteenth century through the romantic narratives of race and nation adduced by Herder and Hegel. In this sense, as Kristeva goes on to argue, the function of transnationalism involves stimulating and updating “discussion on the meaning of the ‘national’ today.”1 As a formal method of inquiry, transnationalism serves to reveal the parameters of national formations and thus to hollow out their pressing, peremptory claims to legitimacy. Accordingly, it differs from the older critical styles of Comparative Literature, very popular in the age of Goethe and then again in the American academy of the 1950s, which were predicated ultimately upon the notion of simply transcending national

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cultures, cultures which it viewed as parochial and intellectually irrelevant. Transnationalism, by contrast, positions itself at a point of intersection – Kristeva talks about “a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries” – where the coercive aspects of imagined communities are turned back on themselves, reversed or mirrored, so that their covert presuppositions and ideological inflections become apparent.2 Ulf Hannerz has similarly written of how “there is a certain irony in the tendency of the term ‘transnational’ to draw attention to what it negates – that is, to the continued significance of the national”; but such irony should be seen not merely as a casual phenomenon, but as part of that structural paradox through which the national and the transnational are uncomfortably interwoven with each other.3 Using national cultures against each other in this way functions as a kind of materialist version of deconstruction, whereby each cultural formation reveals the blindspots or limitations of the other. Clearly there are some affiliations here with the idea of a “contact zone,” as Mary Louise Pratt has described it, where “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”4 The geographical border between Mexico and the United States, for instance, might be seen in Pratt’s terms as a liminal space where the cultural values of particular countries and judicial territories mutually converge and diverge. There are also important links here with the wider theoretical agendas of postcolonialism, within whose rubric particular texts necessarily manifest traces of their position within dominant or subservient cultures. But transnationalism in theory, with its talk around issues of hybridity and multiculturalism, can easily become an excessively abstract or even predictable exercise. By contrast, transnationalism considered in relation to social or aesthetic practice can focus on where particular tensions emerge, and on the implications of those jagged edges, those structural paradoxes or incoherences, for an understanding – or, as Lacan would prefer, a misrecognition – of local situations. In aesthetic terms, this transnational impetus has much in common with the minimalist approach adopted by latter-day Foucauldian critics such as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, who have written brilliantly about what they call “the renunciation of art’s authority” in a writer like Samuel Beckett, or the painter Mark Rothko, or the filmmaker Alain Resnais. Bersani and Dutoit welcome in

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these artists their denial of what they call the “epistemologically or morally superior nature of art,” their categorical refusal to produce texts intent upon trying to organize the space within which they are disseminated, and their radical displacement of “stabilized and bounded being.” Beckett, Rothko and Resnais are very particular kinds of artist, of course, but Bersani and Dutoit draw upon them to make a more general point about the always intensely problematic relationship between ethics and aesthetics: “Rothko’s painting,” they write, “makes present the ambiguity of all framing projects,” while Beckett’s work divests English of its privileged relation to the past and to all the accoutrements of cultural tradition.5 It is no surprise that Bersani works institutionally out of a contemporary comparative perspective: as a specialist in French literature, he wrote in The Culture of Redemption (1990) a powerful critique of Melville, looking at the way Moby-Dick systematically resists the conventional impulse towards forms of analogical accommodation with narratives of America. From this vantage point transnationalism (although Bersani does not use this term specifically) betokens a form of asceticism, an emptying out of those plentiful moral agendas that have accumulated around the hypercanonized texts and the national narratives associated with any given domain. Bersani accordingly positions himself in opposition to the idea of trying to preserve the classics of Western civilization through the rigid petrification of “great books” syllabuses on university curricula, seeing such traditions as plagued by highly simplistic and implicitly authoritarian assumptions about the ethical values of literary works. Whether such assumptions might be conservative, liberal or radical is hardly the point here; this question concerns more the tautology of response, the well-known proclivity of educators simply to read back into any given texts the controlling metanarrative with which they started. By now, of course, we are all familiar enough with political arguments about the nature of literary and philosophical canons, but one of the historical problems about the construction of American Studies within a British context, in particular, is that it has tended simply to replicate the formation of these traditional canons from another perspective. Rather than using American Studies to interrogate and hollow out the whole question of professional and cultural hierarchies, various university courses in Britain and the rest of Europe have sought to establish parallel structures based around the same nationalist paradigm. The historical evolution of this pedagogical paradigm is described

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in the Autumn 2000 issue of the European English Messenger by Heinz Ickstadt, Professor of American Studies at the Kennedy Institute in Berlin and a former President of the European Association for American Studies. Ickstadt’s article is subtitled “Can English (and American) Studies be Globalized?,” and his theme is the impact of globalization upon traditional ways of organizing academic material in national terms. He traces the institutional situation of American Literature from the 1950s and early 1960s, when it generally held a minor status within English departments, through to the late 1960s and 1970s, when American Studies often succeeded in breaking away and establishing itself as an interdisciplinary unit or autonomous department committed to the academic study of American national culture as a synchronic whole. “Without undue exaggeration,” writes Ickstadt, “one can say that during the seventies in places like West Berlin, ‘conservative’ English departments and ‘progressive’ American Studies departments held each other mutually in contempt.” But contempt is, of course, a great energizer, and also a way of defining oneself as well as one’s enemy. As Ickstadt goes on to observe, many American Studies programs today are uncomfortable with the impact of globalization and the so-called “transnational turn” precisely because such developments would seem to undermine what he calls “the homogeneity of the field, the solidity and coherence of knowledge and competences transmitted.”6 Americanists who had spent the last twenty-five years congratulating themselves that they weren’t so moribund as to teach the old English Literature canon of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth now found that the boot was on the other foot. As the conceptual demarcations of national boundaries came increasingly to be placed under erasure, their own investment in a particular mode of academic competence, ironically based no less stringently than their English Literature enemies upon the imaginary coherence of a national tradition, came to seem more like shadow than substance. The most common strategic response to these potential traumas has been, predictably enough, replenishment. Gerald Graff has written about what he calls the typical “add on” method in university English departments, whereby the answer to developments in the field of literary theory is to hire a theorist, for feminism simply to hire a feminist, and so on, so that the institution “gets to congratulate itself for its up-to-dateness and tolerance” without having had to change significantly its pedagogical patterns of organization.7 This practice of benevolent incorporation fits well with the academic

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development of the area studies model, whose system has primarily involved the attempt to, as it were, fill things up: to encompass an identifiable bounded space, whether a nation, a region, or a city; to read, in a gesture of essentialist nostalgia, a particular country’s “thought and culture” alongside its canonical literature and history; to add into the mix film, music, or popular culture, so that lowbrow and highbrow would come together in a potent academic brew; or, most recently in relation to American Studies, to combine English with Spanish and other languages “from diverse linguistic and cultural traditions,” as the phrase goes, in the always forlorn (but never quite abandoned) effort to come closer to the heart of America.8 Some of the new anthologies of American literature are remarkable not just for their heftiness but for their implicit faith that such heft might, in itself, more accurately represent the true American experience. Like the Victorian novel piling up what Henry James called its “treasure-house of details” in a vain attempt to approximate a condition of transparent, encyclopedic realism, the new Americanist textbook would have us believe that these agreeable enough agendas of diversity and multiculturalism might in themselves come to represent a replenished, more complete version of American Studies, where the negative polarities of exclusion are annealed and the multiple languages of America brought, either sentimentally or dialogically, into accord.9 It is important to emphasize this point: transnational American Studies, as I understand it, involves not a filling up of partitioned spaces, but rather an emptying out of them. The method involves not so much a recuperation of buried material, but rather the deformation or dematerialization of cultural hierarchies and systems of authority that already obtain. Transnationalism in this sense is more of a Foucauldian exercise involving the renegotiation and redescription of power, not just the supplementation of power by parallel but fundamentally equivalent discourses of race, gender and ethnicity. Indeed, speaking of power, there is in fact no easier way of appreciating the assimilation of area studies within the existing academic hierarchies than to observe its comfortable accommodation with the state bureaucracies that currently finance and control higher education in the United Kingdom. If a self-regarding contempt for the supposed anachronisms of English as a subject provided the initial impetus for American Studies programs in the 1970s, as Ickstadt suggested, what greased their wheels in the 1990s was, above all, money. In what might be described as its comfortable middle age, American

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Studies in the UK consolidated itself by accumulating substantial income from state agencies like HEFCE and the QAA, from RAE and TQA exercises, a cycle whose success was paradoxically assured by the way American Studies continued vigorously to protest its own embattled, minority status.10 My purpose here is neither cynically to decry these institutional successes, nor idealistically to suggest that academic programs might somehow exist outside a bureaucratic or financial system. It is, rather, to highlight how, over the past few years, American Studies in Britain has actually become thoroughly complicit with these mechanisms, so that now the administrative and theoretical pressures in the subject are pulling in quite opposite directions. The institutional momentum is towards pedagogical coherence (witness the so-called subject “benchmarking” exercises) and the shoring up of moral authority, authority not necessarily of the old “great books” kind, but certainly based around a set of values associated with the idea of this particular subject being a worthwhile investment by the state. In that sense, of course, “value” carries an economic as well as an ethical valence. Conversely, the most significant theoretical moves in this field are being directed more towards the problematization of territorial and administrative boundaries, the displacement of national frontiers and of the naturalized teleologies that go along with them. Jonathan Culler remarked several years ago that “American Studies has not had the influence on other disciplines that one might expect and has produced an interdisciplinary subfield rather than a reorganization of knowledge,” and one reason for this, I would suggest, is that it has tended to take its boundaries too much for granted and to focus upon objects which might be conventionally defined as “American,” rather than considering how the permeability of those boundaries might affect the construction of other areas and other disciplines. 11 There is an interesting essay on this latter process of “transAmericanization,” as he calls it, by Rob Wilson, in the September 2000 issue of American Literature.12 Wilson talks here specifically about the relationship of the United States to Japan and the Orient during the nineteenth century, and his article points out some of the ways in which standardized conceptions of East and West began to change places within American discourse of this time, with important repercussions for the representation of Oriental thought in the work of Whitman, Thoreau and other writers. I cite Wilson’s essay partly because it reinforces the obvious enough point that this kind of transnationalism is not a phenomenon confined to the interaction between

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British and American culture. If, however, it can justifiably be said that transnationalism involves an interrogation of the circulations of power, then the historical legacy of Britain as the former colonial proprietor of what is now the United States should open up all kinds of questions about the legacies of such imperial domination: the issue of who controls whom, who seeks to escape from whose jurisdiction, the whole nexus of authority and emancipation. Back in 1778, in his “Tracts on Civil Liberty, the War with America, and the Debts and Finances of the Kingdom,” the Welsh political philosopher Richard Price observed that the British war with America made no sense at all in terms of economic logic and was fueled more by what he called the British aristocracy’s “spirit of domination” and their “lust of power”; and it is an analysis of those kinds of power relationships, rather than any futile search for integral forms of identity, which underwrites the emerging field of transnational American Studies.13 Barbara Fields and others have written about the persistent, sometimes manic, attempts during the nineteenth century to categorize scientifically the phenomenon of race, whether through biology, physiognomy, phrenology, or other medical schemes which would no doubt seem to us today as hopelessly quaint as the old practices of purging or leeching.14 Yet while we may have relinquished belief in the scientific definition of race, we seem often to cling to a positivistic belief in the viability of the nation as an appropriate conceptual matrix for intellectual enquiry. Perhaps such faith owes less to rational enquiry than to the coercive logic of the educational bureaucracies, with their vested interest in preserving the order and propriety of the areas they subsidize, but it is also inflected by a deeply romanticized image of the nation as a site of immanent rather than merely projected significance, whose meaning we might ultimately grasp if only we could give ourselves access to enough of its linguistic and cultural riches. Here again transnationalism can be linked valuably with forms of praxis, because its theory of displacement illuminates important ways in which the affiliation between the subject and its location is always an affective, imaginary phenomenon. Just as the nineteenthcentury scientists attempted to map a theory of identity onto what they saw as the objective reality of race, so practitioners of American Studies in the late twentieth century tried time and time again to validate individual objects by mapping them onto their understandings of America as a “whole.” Transnationalism, however, concerns itself not so much with these points of supposed identification but with the process of mapping itself, and it can perform particularly

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valuable work within nativist contexts, demystifying the naturalized affiliations between subject and object which are often reproduced less self-consciously within domestic environments. I remember attending a couple of meetings of the Pacific Northwest American Studies Association a few years ago, where some speakers cast their relationship to the environment chiefly in experiential or ontological terms. Yet to say that I am a Westerner because I feel myself to be a Westerner may be an important statement from the perspective of individual psychology, but its status as an objective fact is conceptually flimsy because, as Wilson and others have pointed out, the American “West” as such does not exist: not as a political, nor as a historical, nor as a geographical entity. Any demarcations of the “West” which we may choose to make are purely contingent and arbitrary, based upon cultural association or psychological projection. Consequently, the links we make between subject and object in relation to region or place tend principally to be emotive, with empirical location becoming displaced into the more diffuse realms of reception theory: the imagined construction of the West as a Zen paradise, or the empty land of a John Ford film, may have a distinct purchase upon the imagination, but ultimately it has no more intellectual credibility than the travel poster which simulates it. Location, in other words, might be said to provide a discursive rationale for imaginary identifications, but it can no more be extended into a coherent theory for area studies than the nineteenth-century phrenologists could extend their observations of bumps on the head into a theory of race. This is not, of course, simply to occlude social or economic determinants, but it is to deny that they can be explicated merely in local or regional terms. The politics of the West is not synonymous with politics in the West, and the same thing is true on a larger scale in relation to the United States more generally. One useful point about transnationalism, then, is that it can empty out the power relations that lurk ominously within these kinds of imaginary identification, interrupting the self-perpetuating circuit which tries simply to appropriate the authenticity of the land to underwrite certain forms of social authority or aesthetic closure. In this sense, transnationalism in practice can perform what might be described as a traditional scholarly function: the austere desublimation of worldly ceremony, the negative theology of spatial and rhetorical dislocation. 2001

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1. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 50. 2. Kristeva, 15. 3. Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996), 6. 4. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 5. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 2, 3, 8, 105. 6. Heinz Ickstadt, “Globalization and the National Paradigm; or, can English (and American) Studies be Globalised?,” European English Messenger, 9, No. 2 (Autumn 2000), 19, 21. 7. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 250. 8. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, Introduction, The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology, ed. Castillo and Schweitzer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), xvi. 9. Henry James, “Middlemarch,” in The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, eds. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 48. 10. Key to acronyms: HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England); QAA (Quality Assurance Agency); RAE (Research Assessment Exercise); TQA (Teaching Quality Assurance). 11. Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 8. 12. Rob Wilson, “Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing Hawaiian Sugar: The Trans-Americanization of Hawai’i,” American Literature, 72, No. 3 (Sept. 2000), 521–52. 13. Richard Price, “Two Tracts on Civil Liberty, the War with America, and the Debts and Finances of the Kingdom,” in Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 46–47. 14. Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review, no.181 (1990), 95–118.

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CHAPTER 3

POST-LIBERALISM: GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN STUDIES

The extent and the intensity of the fury visited upon George W. Bush since his election to the US presidency in 2000, particularly on the part of European commentators, is a curious and interesting phenomenon. John Berger, the English novelist and critic, epitomized this kind of hostility in a 2005 article which argued that the Bush administration was quite literally mad, since its political stance vacillates wildly “between fear and confidence,” with systematic “disconnections” from “the truth” leading to an “ignorance about most of what exists, and an abdication from the very minimum of what can be expected of government.”1 The purpose of my essay is not to justify George W. Bush or the policies of his administration but to attempt to position them in a broader cultural framework, one inflected by the kind of international approach to American studies that is becoming more current in the twenty-first century. In this light, the almost pathological demonization of Bush can be seen to speak more directly to the philosophical positions of European observers, who frequently despise the American president precisely because he exposes the outmoded nature of the liberal version of the United States to which many of them have clung doggedly throughout their careers. American studies in its classic phase of the 1940s and 1950s was, as Vicente L. Rafael has argued, organized around “the integrationist logic inherent in liberal conceptions of area studies,” through which a science of society might shed light on cultural problems. One purpose of American studies in this era was to mediate between disciplines, examining African American traditions and issues of civil rights, for

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example, within a holistic framework through which the literary and historical dimensions of US culture would mutually illuminate each other. In this sense, as Rafael observes, to modernize area studies is also to alienate it: by the late 1980s, social and economic conditions had changed to such an extent that it no longer made so much sense to think of US culture and society as isolated or categorically different.2 This erosion of exceptionalism also meant that the liberal logic inherent in American studies in the middle years of the twentieth century had been largely invalidated. In 1950, Lionel Trilling was able to write of a “liberal imagination,” through which the domestic virtues of flexibility and open-mindedness would counter the deterministic dogmatism of social conditioning, a philosophy at that time popularly associated with the malevolent power of the Soviet Union.3 In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, Louis Hartz wrote of how this kind of “irrational liberalism” was an ingrained aspect of American life, “a silent quality in the national atmosphere.” For Hartz, the “triumphant liberalism” of US society preceded political antagonisms and made routine conflicts between Democrat and Republican appear relatively trifling and nugatory.4 It was, of course, this refreshing ambience of freedom and apparent absence of class tensions and struggles that attracted many European enthusiasts for American studies during the years immediately after the Second World War. Given the milieu in which Europe had been ravaged by social discriminations and violent hierarchies of every kind, it was hardly surprising that post-war academics should be attracted to the United States as a culture of hope, youth and freedom. The enormous popular and critical success of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in the years immediately after its publication in 1951 was, as Leerom Medovoi has shown, based to a considerable extent upon the status attributed to it as a national allegory, a first-person narrative embodying the virtues of innocence and individualism.5 A similar kind of implicitly patriotic resistance to authoritarian hierarchies also inspired much of the Beat writing later in this decade, and in the last years of his life Jack Kerouac himself proselytized fiercely against Soviet Communism. One of the things this popular celebration of rebellious fiction tended to occlude, of course, was the paradoxical entanglement of romantic empathy with consumer culture, the ways in which the sympathetic process of identification between reader and narrative hero was a construction of the mass market. To put this another way, what Trilling fondly imagined as a “liberal imagination” was in fact an all-encompassing liberal

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ideology: the New York Intellectuals – Trilling, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe – who valued the ethics of detachment and separation failed, on the whole, to acknowledge how such virtues of independence had become commodified in the 1950s.6 For Medovoi, Salinger’s novel thus speaks not so much to an ethic of personal responsibility but to a commercial culture where dissent had become part of the corporate fabric, an “imaginary liberal consensus” that epitomized the nation’s anti-Soviet impetus during this era.7 The expansionist logic of this liberal marketplace led US culture towards the end of the twentieth century to promote an international neoliberalism where the economic laws of market trading would cut increasingly across national frontiers. This “neo-liberal hegemony,” in David Harvey’s phrase, was predicated upon the prevalence of open commodity and capital markets, on the fostering of a “good business climate,” and on the systematic relegation of those who declined to comply with this regime to the category of “failed” or “rogue” states.8 The idea of freedom, which in the 1950s had been imaginatively associated with an ethical idea of moral autonomy, was shown by the year 2000 to be an economic construction dominated by the idea of free markets. As Neil Smith wrote in 2003: “American globalism is no longer a liberal but a neoliberal project, the conservatism of which is manifest.”9 These neoliberal policies did not originate with George W. Bush; indeed, Bill Clinton, who on domestic issues was, according to Susan Watkins, “far to the right” of Richard Nixon, set about the process of bringing China into the global trade community back in the mid 1990s.10 The “conservatism” of neoliberalism is, then, not a new phenomenon; indeed, one of the consequences of twenty-first-century neoliberalism is to reilluminate the conservatism that was implicit rather than explicit in the structural logic of the liberal imagination which provided the epistemological framework for American studies in its “classic,” mid-twentiethcentury phase. The particular versions of democracy and freedom that inspired European models of American studies in the 1950s, in other words, were a distinctive historical phenomenon, something which arose specifically in response to the defeat of fascism, when it was thought that the protected boundaries of national territories could ensure the virtues of self-determination for their citizens. Area studies at this time were centered around the idea of attaching specific ideas to specific territories, of finding cognate equations between thought and place. This is one of the reasons Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was also hailed as a classic American novel after its publication

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in 1952, because it was thought to embody textually the values of optimism, individualism and freedom that were characteristic of the national culture as a whole. The world of transnational mediaocracy and plutocracy in 2005 is, of course, a full half-century away from the realms of liberal democracy and existential responsibility that prevailed in the early 1950s; yet, as Martin Jacques has noted, democracy (like liberalism) tends too often to be regarded “in a strangely ahistorical way” by the West.11 In relation to the world of American studies, in particular, democracy and liberalism have become almost fetishized conceptions in need of much more rigorous historicization and demystification. In a retrospective essay on the origins of European American studies published in 1980, Malcolm Bradbury recalled how American writing in the post-war era – Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Delmore Schwartz – seemed to represent a “humanistic urgency” whose “politics was amended through a sense of complexity and an awareness of despair, and this properly led to a questioning of the purely ideological mind.” Yet, with typical candor and insight, Bradbury acknowledged how his “was a Europeanized America, to a considerable degree a New York one. It hardly served to explain the phenomena beyond: the corn-belt, Truman, Senator McCarthy.”12 American studies, particularly as the subject was conceived in Europe, consequently tended to project something like a fantasy image of America, foregrounding its liberal, progressive aspects – jazz, the Civil Rights movement, Beat poetry – while largely overlooking the powerful forces of Christian fundamentalism and economic conservatism. Since European intellectuals needed at this time to appropriate the United States as an allegory of the classless, mobile society it hoped Europe itself would become, their own version of American studies necessarily suppressed the intense class conflicts and religious divisions that have always been part of American life, from the days of John Winthrop onwards. The empathy for America among European intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century was based frequently upon sentimental forms of misrecognition, upon a sense of empathy and identification with certain aspects of American culture that could be made relevant to Europe’s own narrative of emancipation. This, of course, is why so many European intellectuals, particularly professors of American studies, loathe Bush so much: because he forces them to recognize the fallacy of that version of America in which they have invested their academic careers. Past president of the European Association for American Studies Rob Kroes, in a

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lecture in Berlin in February 2005, talked of Europe and the United States appearing increasingly estranged from each other and of his own deepening sense of alienation from US culture.13 But there has always been a strong thread of anti-European, anti-cosmopolitan feeling in the United States; the only difference now is that their Party has gained power in Washington D.C. It is probably also true that the evolving political agenda of the European Union, emphasizing protectionism and collectivism rather than an “Anglo-American” model of the free market, has helped to crystallize this European hostility towards Bush; again, the venomous personal attacks can be seen as a sublimation of much wider social and historical forces. In line with this new mood of transatlantic alienation, British historian Tristram Hunt has written of the new “exurbia” constituencies of George W. Bush outside Phoenix, Arizona, landscapes of “ugliness” defined by what Hunt describes as “uniformity,” a lack of public space, and an absence of “downtown conviviality.” However, this indictment of Bush’s America for its lack of the old social graces is little more than mere intellectual snobbery, a form of instinctive traditionalism that cherishes grander images of American cities – New York, Boston, San Francisco – and is both correspondingly patronizing towards what Hunt scornfully calls “the eager new face of American Conservatism,” the Republican proletariat who watch Roseanne on TV in their millions but who have never heard of Frank Lloyd Wright or John Cage.14 Indeed, there is a deeply troubling blindness to class issues in contemporary European treatments of US culture, an extraordinary failure to understand the basis on which industrial workers and blue-collar families voted Republican in such large numbers at both the 2000 and 2004 elections.15 Instead of an analytical overview of how competing tensions are mediated, we too often find polemical accounts of what Simon Schama has typically described as “the Divided States of America,” where the good guys on both coasts are set in opposition to the backward-looking bigots and religious zealots in the South and the Midwest.16 Such journalistic stereotypes are massively reductive and unhelpful, and they should have no place in the academic world of American studies today. One fairly obvious thing obscured by the familiar map of red states and blue states is the extent to which every state, red and blue alike, is itself divided, often precariously, between those of different political persuasions. Another is the way in which “confidence” and “fear” are not, as in the Berger thesis, polarities kept separate by folly and madness but are, rather, qualities frequently

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tied up together in the minds of many sane and functioning US residents. Because the close election in November 2004 was ultimately swayed by the large turnout of Christian fundamentalists worried about gay marriage and the like, the legend has somehow got around in Europe that this is the primary Bush constituency, that his popular appeal is centered around this fairly small group of voters. Such a picture is highly misleading: the Republican Party in 2004 was backed by many who did not particularly admire Bush personally, but who trusted him, rightly or wrongly, to defend America’s best interests in what they perceived as an increasingly dangerous and hostile world. (There was a significant swing to Bush in New York state, for example.)17 These are the soccer moms scared for their children’s safety, the exurbia inhabitants threatened by redundancy, the churchgoers perplexed by genetic engineering, the suburbanites and airline passengers discomfited by the increasing erosion of that sense of security they have always felt to be their American birthright. Thomas Friedman has described how what he calls the flattening influences of globalization – from information technology carriers such as Netscape and Google, to economic factors such as outsourcing and supply-chaining – reached their “tipping point . . . sometime around the year 2000.”18 Not coincidentally, of course, this was the year that George W. Bush was first elected president. It was precisely at the moment when productivity began moving from a domestic to an international base that Americans chose a president with a downhome demeanor, one whom they thought could help them confront this potential trauma of displacement. Whether or not George W. Bush was the right choice as president, or even whether in the light of widespread voting irregularities his election was legitimate, are not my specific concerns here. More to the point is that George W. Bush has embodied precisely within his public persona “confidence” and “fear” in an uneasy but symbiotic partnership: the desire to develop US power abroad, to enhance free trade agreements and promote an empire of neoliberalism, while, simultaneously, offering Americans symbolic reassurance that their old values of church and community are the true and enduring ones. The events of 9/11 were of course a massive psychological jolt for a country whose domestic soil had been largely exempt from attack by foreign powers for nearly 200 years; as G. John Ikenberry has remarked, the effects of 9/11 have probably been underestimated in Europe, which retains a weary pride in its own perpetually war-torn status.19 But 9/11 was merely the culminating event in a whole series

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of dislocations – social, economic, religious – that had taken place in the United States over the previous ten years; as Jean Baudrillard observed, one notable feature of these attacks was the way they relied on the same facilities – rapid transfer of capital, internet and media technologies, aeronautics, international mobility – that had sparked the development of the information society in the first place.20 This sense of being caught up involuntarily in a system where the country’s domestic values had been turned back upon themselves is captured in former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s poem “9/11,” commissioned by the Washington Post to mark the first anniversary of September 11th: We adore images, we like the spectacle Of speed and size, the working of prodigious Systems. So on television we watched The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing Until we were sick not only of the sight Of our own prodigious systems turned against us But of the very system of our watching.

Later in this poem, Pinsky describes Will Rogers as “a Cherokee, a survivor / Of expropriation,” thereby attempting patriotically to recuperate this traumatic sense of dislocation by rationalizing displacement as a long-standing aspect of American historical experience.21 Pinsky, whose aggressively demotic writing positions itself overtly in opposition to what he takes to be “cosmopolitan” interests, thus shows how an indigenous empathy with emblems of Americana is not just the prerogative of Republican fundamentalists but has hardened, in the early twenty-first century, into a common feature of the US literary and cultural scene.22 Although their fates were not of course commensurate, the victims trapped in the World Trade Center were part of the same cultural cycle as the American workers chronicled by Friedman whose jobs, thanks to information technology, had been outsourced to India and other parts of Asia (where labor is, of course, much cheaper). It is noticeable that both sides before the 2004 election sought to downplay ways in which the US economy is becoming internationalized. The Democrats, under John Kerry, speculated openly about whether NAFTA, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, was still a good idea, while

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the Republicans sought to gag N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, because he spoke approvingly of outsourcing as the latest example of the search for economic efficiency that could be traced back philosophically to the capitalist manifestos of Adam Smith.23 The point, quite straightforwardly, is that the interface between local and global in US society at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a complicated affair, involving confidence and fear in roughly equal measure. To identify the “‘unipolar moment’ of global hegemony” as a time in which the United States “has unprecedented power” is to overlook ways in which the wider dissemination of scientific expertise and nuclear capabilities, along with the rapidly expanding economic capacities of China, India and other Asian powers, will lead almost inevitably over the course of the next century to a situation where the dominant position of the United States in relation to the rest of the world will undergo realignment.24 The United States could probably enter Iran or North Korea today to effect regime change, just as they did in Iraq; but it would be much harder for them to arrest the flow of global intelligence that will eventually, as Immanuel Wallerstein argues, ensure their position of military dominance and political “hegemony” is compromised. In this sense, it could be argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union has actually weakened, rather than strengthened, the United States; although of course in the short term this has allowed the United States to claim victory in the Cold War, in the longer term the absence of a global system based upon a secure balance of power will lead to a greater proliferation of nuclear capabilities.25 The United States itself is fully aware of this, and a recent (2005) report of the US’s own National Intelligence Council foresaw a world in 2020 in which, under the impact of globalization, “the United States will see its relative power position eroded” with “all countries . . . becoming less autonomous, including the United States.” The report goes on to suggest that “in many respects the US is [the country] best placed to handle the challenge”; but it is clearly the case that in the twenty-first century it will no longer be feasible to regard globalization as a simple synonym for Americanization and that US neoliberalism will no longer enjoy unbridled hegemony.26 One of the advantages of international American studies is that it can trace many of these tensions by dispassionately setting the United States within a wider global framework. American studies within the US in the late twentieth century tended to get caught up in the circular rituals of identity politics, seeking to enfranchise various minority

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groups by asserting how they, too, had an innate right to be validated and embraced as full members of American society; by contrast, international American studies offers the opportunity to throw this whole paraphernalia of American rights and freedom into relief. This is not to claim an inherently superior perspective for the international observer, nor to downplay the significance of frictions and inequities within US society. It is, though, to suggest that many of those frictions which manifest themselves most overtly in terms of class, race and ethnicity can also be related to the tensions between local and global that have permeated and destabilized US society at the turn of the twenty-first century. Thomas Frank, for example, points to ways in which multinational companies have infiltrated the Midwest and he interprets this as the exploitation by rich Republican grandees of factory workers, who remain unaccountably blind to where their own best political and economic interests lie. Although Frank is correct to point out the blue-collar fury towards a “shadowy, cosmopolitan Other,” he is surely mistaken to read this simply in terms of domestic class warfare or to assume that the trust placed by workingclass people in Kansas in the Republican right is purely the result of a conspiracy on the part of the rulers and a “species of derangement” on the part of the ruled. On the contrary, there is a clear and compulsive link, both psychological and political, between Republican rejections of “the liberal-elite stereotype” and working-class fears of finding their labor marginalized in the new global economy.27 This is not, of course, to imply that Kansas is necessarily making the right choice by voting Republican; it is, though, to suggest that the domestic politics of Kansas, and other parts of the United States, can now only be understood on an international axis, and that successful politicians will be those who can address both the confidence and the fears of their electorate, who can recognize how the developments of globalization will bring about divisions not just within nations or local communities but also within the minds of ordinary people. Fredric Jameson identified as early as 1992 what he called “a geopolitical unconscious,” the impulse “which now attempts to refashion national allegory into a conceptual instrument for grasping our new being-in-the-world . . . [A]ll thinking today,” Jameson went on, “is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such.”28 Whereas romantic and modernist versions of the nation gave primacy to symbolic forms as organic expressions of indigenous cultures, the post-national era seeks a different form of “cognitive mapping” in which the displaced signs of allegory allow all kinds of

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landscapes to function as figurative machinery in the system of the whole.29 This is precisely the situation of American studies at the turn of the twenty-first century: it represents not an organic national culture but an instrumental form of mediation between local and global, whose crucial task is to undertake the cognitive mapping that can trace these disparate affiliations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe the present time as an “age of network struggle,” of decentralization and multiple points of reference, whose fields of crisis – democratic representation, media power, ecology and global warming – can no longer be solved through domestic politics alone. Acknowledging that “the historical moment of liberalism has passed,” Hardt and Negri seek to conceptualize “a creation of the common” as “the basis for a postliberal and postsocialist political project” in an era when older notions of the public sphere have been all but exhausted.30 Provided it renounces its self-indulgent attachment to sectional interests, an international American studies, properly sympathetic to US society but also cognizant of how the country maps itself onto global geopolitical space, should be well placed to think through some of these conundrums. Given his own well-known suspicion of all things foreign, to salute George W. Bush as the harbinger of an international American studies might seem unusually perverse. Nevertheless, the emergence of specific presidents at particular junctures of US history has often seemed an appropriate response to the mood of the nation, and Bush is no exception to this rule. It is, of course, not within the president’s power to provide the blanket “homeland security” that US citizens crave, but his uncomfortable quest to expand the influence of American neoliberalism abroad while reasserting fundamentalist values at home testifies to contemporary fissures within US national culture, caught as it is between a drive for global supremacy in political and economic realms on the one hand and an equally powerful desire not to relinquish the sense of living in a privileged and protected space on the other. The contradictions of this position are witness to the illogicality of George W. Bush’s political policies, but this is a structural illogicality rather than simply a personal foible, one that exemplifies the paradoxical status of the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. To view Bush’s policies as the product of mere stupidity or madness is to fail to do justice to the complexity of US history and culture, both past and present. It is incumbent upon those who are professionally concerned with American studies to take a step back, as it were, to consider the

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country in terms of the multiplicity of its tensions and crosscurrents, and not to be too seduced by the romantic images of jazz clubs and Beat writing that attracted European Americanists forty or fifty years ago. The old version of America as a realm of liberal emancipation and democracy is now thoroughly played out, but it has been supplanted by a new and equally intriguing version of America as the site of interface and interference between local and global. America is the phenomenon which all local cultures must seek to come to terms with in relation to culture, politics, and power. Taking over the phrase from Edward Said, Bruce Robbins suggests that an “adversarial internationalization” might be of strategic value in helping to problematize some of the more complacent aspects of US culture, but this will happen only if such adversarial internationalization is equally attentive to its own forms of complacency.31 Bush has of course also been the object of much criticism from within the United States, particularly for his apparent exploitation of 9/11 in the interests of the Iraq war, and the competence or otherwise of his political leadership will quite rightly continue to be a topic of heated debate. What is not appropriate, however, is for the American studies community in any part of the world to regard the Bush presidency as a kind of constitutional hijacking or, worse, as some kind of betrayal of their personal interests. If George W. Bush refutes the ideals that have motivated European Americanists for so long, that shows in large part the inadequacy of their understanding of the United States, the structural chasm between highly selective, partial forms of identification and the alien quality of the United States at large. In this sense, if in no other, Donald Rumsfeld was right: “old Europe,” with its nostalgic affiliations to a superannuated liberalism, enjoys no innate moral or intellectual authority over the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to make telling interventions as international Americanists, we must abjure the buttoned-down intellectual’s notion of George W. Bush as some kind of ghastly aberration and attend seriously to what his presidency tells us about the contemporary conditions of the country he serves. 2005 NOTES

1. John Berger, “Ignorance and Abdication that Amounts to Madness,” The Guardian (London), 15 September 2005, 32.

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2. Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text, 41 (Winter 1994), 98, 105. 3. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950). 4. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), 30, 226, 176. 5. Leerom Medovoi, “Democracy, Capitalism, and American Literature: The Cold War Construction of J. D. Salinger’s Paperback Hero,” in Joel Foreman, ed., The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 259. 6. Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 61. 7. Medovoi, “Democracy, Capitalism, and American Literature,” 281. 8. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 96, 184. 9. Neil Smith, America’s Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 455. 10. Susan Watkins, “Editorial: A Weightless Hegemony,” New Left Review, 2nd series, no. 25 (Jan.-Feb. 2004), 33. 11. Martin Jacques, “Democracy isn’t Working,” The Guardian (London), 22 June 2004, 17. 12. Malcolm Bradbury, “How I Invented America,” Journal of American Studies, 14, No. 1 (1980), 124–25, 127. 13. Rob Kroes, “European Anti-Americanism: What’s New?,” European Perspectives in American Studies: Histories–Dialogues–Differences, JFK Institute for North American Studies, Free University of Berlin, 13 February 2005. 14. Tristram Hunt, “Nowhere Land,” Observer Review, 20 February 2005, 4–5. 15. Tom Mertes, “A Republican Proletariat,” New Left Review, 2nd series, no. 30 (Nov. –Dec. 2004), 37–47. 16. Simon Schama, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” The Guardian 2 (London), 5 November 2004, 2. 17. John Redwood, Superpower Struggles: Mighty America, Faltering Europe, Rising Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 9. 18. Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century (London: Allen Lane-Penguin, 2005), 176. 19. G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Dream of a Liberal World Order,” Institute for the Study of the Americas, London, 13 June 2005. 20. Jean Baudrillard, “L’Esprit du Terrorisme,” trans. Michel Valentin, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, No. 2 (2002), 409.

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21. Robert Pinsky, “9/11,” , 24 September 2005. This poem was first published in The Washington Post Magazine, 8 September 2002. 22. In particular, Pinsky has taken exception to Martha Nussbaum’s essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” which argues for recognition of the rights of non-citizens. See Joshua Cohen, ed., For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 87–88. This controversy is discussed by Bruce Robbins, “The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class,” in Vinay Dharwadker, ed., Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 15. 23. Friedman, The World is Flat, 199. 24. Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas, “Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and US Foreign Policy,” American Quarterly, 57, No. 2 (2005), 309. 25. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power (New York: New Press, 2003), 1, 207–10, 307. 26. “Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project,” online: , 22 September 2005. 27. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with America? The Resistible Rise of the American Right (London: Secker and Warburg, 2004), 239, 2, 108. 28. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3–4. 29. Jameson uses the phrase “cognitive mapping” in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 51. On the theory of post-nationalism, see John Carlos Rowe, “Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies,” in John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23–39. 30. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 62, 273, 303. 31. Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 39.

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CHAPTER 4

E PLURIBUS MULTITUDINUM: THE NEW WORLD OF JOURNAL PUBLISHING IN AMERICAN STUDIES* 1

i As part of the “international initiative” at the 2004 meeting of the American Studies Association in Atlanta, a roundtable took place at which nineteen editors of American studies journals from different countries introduced their publications and discussed the current state of the field. However, as with a similar workshop held at the First Congress of the International American Studies Association in Leiden one year earlier, the ultimate effect of the ASA session was to generate more bewilderment than enlightenment. The editors in Atlanta gave excellent presentations on behalf of their journals, but the audience was left wondering how and why American studies journal publishing could have proliferated in such a comparatively short space of time. In the 1950s there was just one journal dedicated specifically to American studies, American Quarterly (AQ), which had published its first issue in 1949. During the second half of the twentieth century the number grew steadily, often linked to the growth of national associations of American studies outside the United States; however, during the past ten years the volume of traffic has increased exponentially, despite the fact that library budgets in most universities worldwide are suffering severe fiscal retrenchment. In an attempt to respond to such concerns, AQ invited us to write a critical essay examining the state of journal publishing in American studies throughout the world, and we set out to ask why the market * Written in collaboration with R. J. Ellis

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for academic journals in this field has mutated and fragmented so much. We are well aware of our constitutional inadequacy for such a task and of how any attempt at a global perspective will find itself thwarted not only by limitations of linguistic competence but also by an unavoidable circumference of professional experience and investments; in a 2004 essay, Fernando Rosa Riberio aptly comments that “one of the more perverse effects of ‘world’ or ‘global’ history studies . . . is that, as we venture out to other shores . . . we often do so with the scholarly equivalent of a vanity bag as sole luggage.”1 Nevertheless, we believe that the story of American studies journal publishing is an interesting and, at times, not entirely obvious one, so that it is worth trying to tease out the alternative, often conflicting approaches that are emerging, even if they currently exist only in embryonic forms. Many will, no doubt, contest our findings, and this narrative, like any other, is presented as interpretation rather than as documentary truth. We have, though, consulted widely and tried to identify certain recurring patterns in what seems at times to be a confusing, indeed chaotic, arena.2 To trace the trajectory of journal publishing in American studies is also implicitly to chart the evolution of the subject, from one grounded initially on certain assumptions about territorial enclosure toward a situation wherein the boundaries of the field have become much more amorphous. It is important, then, to bear in mind the changing historical conditions within which different American studies journals have operated. The initial context for AQ was an academic environment in which US literature and history were studied largely as isolated disciplines, having little contact either with each other or with a broader cultural infrastructure. In this sense, the most obvious early successes of the American studies movement lay in the capacity of scholars to reconfigure national narratives within previously occluded frameworks of gender and race. Margaret McFadden recalls going to the library in the late 1990s to prepare a response to Nina Baym’s article “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” published in AQ in 1981; the sheer number of citations of Baym’s essay was, records McFadden, “staggering,” testifying to the way this article (and others like it) helped to enable a “wide range of scholarship in feminist literary criticism and in American studies more generally.”3 As Lucy Maddox notes in her preface to a 1999 collection of AQ articles, the inclusion within an American studies rubric of an increasing range of materials served to “decenter the older, monolithic narratives of national history”; and, seen from a position

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outside the United States, the strength of AQ in the second half of the twentieth century seemed to emerge from the way it engaged in dialogue with the kinds of essays being published in more traditional US academic journals, such as PMLA or the American Historical Review (AHR).4 The characteristic of essays in AQ was to elucidate how a purely formalist approach to literary analysis or supposedly empiricist historical methods always ran the risk of introducing blind spots that could overlook ways in which material conditions enter into the meaning of local events. What AQ was quite specifically not doing, however, was setting out any institutional agenda, either pedagogical or political, for the organization of American studies programs, something which was to differentiate it sharply from most of the journals subsequently established in Europe. Whereas most European journals were to follow in the footsteps of their national association of American studies, the inauguration of AQ predated the formation of the ASA by two years, and AQ’s resulting sense of having an independent life has always been intellectually significant. Many of the best-known contributors to the journal over the past few years – Houston A. Baker, Jr., Janice Radway, Amy Kaplan – have in fact been located not in departments of American studies but in departments of English, or, like Linda Kerber, in history. Recent articles in AQ –such as Jerusha Hull McCormack’s juxtaposition of “Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” or David Kaiser’s discussion of how the development of the American scientific profession after the Second World War ran alongside the country’s increasing suburbanization – testify to the heterodox temper of the journal, its continuing effort to illuminate US culture by bringing together discourses (literature/technology, science/sociology) often kept separate.5 It would appear that, seen in the larger perspective of international American studies, AQ’s general policy has been not to encompass all the apparatus of US nationalism, nor to promote the values of American civilization abroad, but to comment obliquely on ways in which local and national narratives have been constructed through highly selective mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Whereas AQ is now sent to all members of the ASA as part of their institutional subscription, the European Association for American Studies (EAAS) has never had a scholarly journal of comparable standing. Conceived at the Salzburg Seminar for American Studies in 1954, EAAS has experienced a much more checkered career than the ASA. Technically, every member of each national association affiliated to EAAS is, de facto, also a member of EAAS, which collects financial

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contributions from the member states according to the size of their constituencies. The relationship between the central administration of EAAS and autonomous national organizations has, though, often been fraught. In 1972, the editor of American Studies in Scandinavia, Sune Åkerman, published a scathing attack on EAAS, complaining that the organization was controlled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy whose “mean age is quite high” and who remained aloof from the younger generation of scholars, which in turn found itself “alienated and fairly indifferent toward EAAS’s activities.”6 As a response to this general sense of disquiet, Ari N. J. den Hollander, EAAS president of the time, proposed in the same year a fundamental change to the EAAS constitution, whereby its central board would become a body representing, selected by, and answerable to the national associations. This reform, unanimously agreed to, had the long-term effect of undermining EAAS’s central authority and returning power largely to its constituent national bodies.7 This ensured subsequently that it became impossible for EAAS to produce an academic journal to rival AQ, since most national European associations feared such a journal would cream off the best articles and relegate the journal of their own association to a subsidiary position. During the 1980s, in particular, European scholars of American studies almost ritually lamented how their work tended to be overlooked in the United States, but this was because it was often published in journals with small circulations and in languages other than English that were directed primarily to their own domestic audiences. EAAS, meanwhile, has until recently contented itself with publishing a newsletter, American Studies in Europe, which provides six pages of contact details for board members in all of its constituent associations, along with news of forthcoming events and conferences. (Conferences, rather than publications, have traditionally been the scholarly currency of EAAS, although each biennial EAAS conference would be followed by an edited volume bringing together a selection of the papers delivered there.) In his preamble to the May 2004 newsletter, EAAS president Marc Chénetier writes of how “one of the perks of being a European Americanist is that it is a substantial introduction to the meaning of Europe itself, a meaning that transcends the mere addition of national identities”; in light of all the recent difficulties about ratifying the EU constitution, this observation turns out to be more apt than Chénetier would perhaps have wished.8 Indeed, EAAS presents in miniature many of the problems associated with the EU itself: the difficulty of finding any kind of common purpose

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amid a welter of entrenched, conflicting interests and, at times, suspicions. All this has meant historically that the publication of American studies journals within Europe has been devolved to individual member nations. EAAS currently lists on its website eight journals – Amerikastudien, Atlantis, Irish Journal of American Studies, Journal of American Studies, Op Cit: Uma Revista deEstudosAngloAmericanos, Polish Journal for American Studies, Revue Française d'Études Américaines, Rivista annuale della Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani – representing the associations of Germany, Spain, Ireland, Britain, Portugal, Poland, France and Italy, respectively. All of these are interesting and distinguished publications in their own way, but they all suffer from similar editorial dilemmas and internal tensions, caught as they are between a desire to represent and consolidate their home community on the one hand while tracking academically the increasingly international focus of American studies on the other. Amerikastudien, one of the best of these journals, has undergone a marked shift in recent years from publishing about half of its material in German to publishing nearly all of it, apart from a few book reviews, in English. Although the journal’s advisory committee has remained entirely German, there has been a deliberate attempt on the part of previous editor Alfred Hornung and current editor Udo Hebel to document, in the latter’s words, “the interdisciplinary and transnational perspective to which the journal of the German Association for American Studies is dedicated.”9 An excellent special issue on internationalizing US history in 2003 was preceded in 2002 by Amerikastudien’s production of the first “European” version of a journal under the EAAS imprimatur. This elaborate scheme, devised at the 1999 EAAS conference in Graz, was an attempt to compensate for the obvious absence of an established EAAS journal by inviting all of the national associations in rotation to designate one of their journal’s issues as European and, accordingly, to make it widely available to EAAS members. The proposal amounted, in effect, to an attempt to set up an ersatz EAAS journal, to be published annually by successive national American studies associations. Editorially, Amerikastudien’s prototype for this initiative was a strong issue, featuring a symposium, “American Studies in a Globalizing World,” based on a panel discussion at the 2000 meeting of the ASA among Guenter Lenz, Bruce Tucker, Masako Notoji and Maureen Montgomery, as well as a series of reactions from international scholars to 9/11. Financially, however, the experiment

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was a disaster, with free distribution to more than four thousand EAAS members nearly bankrupting the German association. When Revue Française d'Études Américaines (RFEA) produced the second European issue, based on representations of the Mississippi river, in December 2003, the editors were much more modest in their plans for its circulation, opting simply to send one copy to the designated EAAS “correspondent” of each national organization, whose “task was to disseminate it to their colleagues in their own university or association.”10 Although this would have cut down printing and postage costs dramatically, the plan also, of course, ensured that very few members of EAAS outside France got to read or even to hear about this “special” European number, and, despite this trimming of what the initiative aimed to achieve, EAAS still found the extra costs (for this time EAAS bore these) difficult to absorb. The Journal of American Studies of Turkey produced the third European issue in fall 2004 on the theme “Challenging America,” again an interesting volume, which seeks to interrogate received ideas of US nationhood through discourses of multiculturalism, but one with a very limited circulation. RFEA itself, like Amerikastudien, is distributed automatically to the French national association as part of the membership package, and the consequent pressure on the journal’s editorial committee to represent French interests above all is heightened by funding from the Centre National du Livre, a key condition of which is that only one third of the journal’s annual output should be in English. This led to a large number of articles in French in the early 2004 issues to offset the 2003 European number, which had been entirely in English; it has also led at times to a slightly self-indulgent tone, exemplified by RFEA’s centenary issue in May 2004, in which French intellectual luminaries reminisced randomly about the particular icons of Americana that had first attracted them to US culture, with Superman and the Lone Ranger figuring prominently. In a particularly thoughtful intervention at the back of the European issue, Divina Frau-Meigs, editor of RFEA, noted that although academic journals “reflect our imaginary, somewhat Utopian, vision of scientific collaboration and exchange, with its attendant values of knowledge sharing, of freedom of self-expression and freedom from selfish interests,” in fact journals “behave like real territories: they cut up boundaries, within disciplines and within universities; they set anchor either in local waters or in national and international waters.” Frau-Meigs went on to caution against any journal becoming too dependent, either financially or philosophically, on a particular university or association:

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We should examine the relationship between our journals and learned societies, especially the national associations. Their position places them in an ambivalent relation to journals, sometimes acting as allies and also as brakes on innovation. Journals and learned societies can in fact be caught either in shared strategies or in oppositional strategies. Learned societies have intellectual missions that are mitigated with others, less exalted, like defense of the profession, representation at official events, connection with the United States, interface with authorities, etc. They also have contacts with decision-makers at ministry level and with evaluators of the discipline and as such their activism may help promote the field of American studies, which makes them a dynamic ally. But they may be tempted to utilize the journal they sponsor as an official tool for control of the field as well, especially as they are interested in the costeffectiveness of the publication and its certification power rather than its argumentation capacity. . . Reaching out to journals outside associations is essential to the current debate and to the finding of new alternatives.11

As part of this attempt to protect its scholarly integrity from the agendas of officialdom, the French association developed in 2001 a new online journal, TransatlanticA, to address directly these more immediate local concerns. The role of TransatlanticA is to “provide a space for debate,” while the book reviews formerly in RFEA are also now published in this online format “via the mail-list of the association, so as to allow for more flexibility and less time-lag.”12 Many of the other European journals mimic, to a greater or lesser extent, this kind of internal tension between, on the one hand, staking out a clearly demarcated academic area, community, and funding base and, on the other, considering in more theoretical terms America’s amorphous global reach. The Irish Journal of American Studies, sent free to all members of the Irish association, is fairly straightforwardly protectionist, publishing one issue per year based largely on papers given at the association’s annual conference and characteristically remarking in its “Notes on Contributors” on how it is a “pleasure to publish this article by a longtime member of the IAAS.”13 The Georgian Journal of American Studies, begun in 2002, publishes mainly in Georgian and so is, as vice president of the French association Jacques Pothier observed pithily, “destinée à présenter le monde américain au public géorgien.”14 The British Journal of American Studies (JAS) has, since its all-English first issue in 1967, moved out gradually beyond its Anglo-American base and has recently included more articles by scholars from Europe and

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the Middle East. Like RFEA, however, JAS suffers from a funding constraint, albeit a more indirect one, in that the American studies community in Britain is crucially dependent on its traditional flagship journal to preserve a separate funding stream for the subject within the government’s quinquennial research assessment exercise, which allocates funding to universities on the basis of “quality assessments” of the research being carried out, department by department. When he left Britain for Yale in 1999, Paul Gilroy gave as one of his reasons the fact that in the United States “there’s no research assessment exercise, there’s none of that bollocks, so you can free your brain to do some thinking”; but senior academics within Britain have proved more accommodating to the call of state, with a substantial overlap in personnel between the editorial board of JAS and the assessment panel for American studies on the 2008 funding exercise.15 It is true, of course, that academic assessments in all countries are interwoven with financial and political considerations (about hiring, tenure, and so on); but only Britain has devised a scenario wherein the legitimation of research “outputs” has become the function of a state agency, a process that inevitably leads, in classic Foucauldian fashion, to a situation in which the agency seeks to consolidate its authority by not merely assessing research but also setting the parameters for what it should be. The point, again, is that the intellectual development of the subject is stymied by administrative constraints: the British community revolving around JAS may be willing enough in principle to interrogate the boundaries of the field and to explore new approaches, but it is fearful in practice of pushing these boundaries so far that the subject is put in danger of losing the rationale for its identity and, consequently, its research funding base. The dominant impression taken from a survey of European journals is that an enormous amount of good work has been done in American studies over the past twenty years but that it has remained largely in fragmentary forms. For instance, the Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST), which published its first issue in 1995, declares its editorial aim to be “comparative studies of American and other cultures,” although the journal’s editorial rubric adds that copyright for JAST is held by the American Studies Association of Turkey, whose stated objective is also included on this page: “to further research and publication in Turkish-American comparative studies.” The Turkish association was established in 1988, a few years before JAST, and many of the journal’s essays in the 1990s seemed to harmonize well with the diplomatic presence on the editorial board of the Cultural

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Officer of the United States Information Service in Ankara: there was a piece in the 1996 volume, for instance, discussing John Dewey’s “educational mission” in Turkey, and a report the following year of a seminar held at Izmir on “Turkey/Britain/America: The History of Culture-The Culture of History,” featuring presentations by Susan Bassnett of the University of Warwick, invited to the seminar by the British Council, and Elaine Tyler May, a guest of the USIS.16 Over the past five years, JAST has become increasingly slick in its production values – several of the recent issues include color photographs – and more wide ranging in its editorial ambitions, taking advantage of the country’s Islamic heritage to raise pertinent questions about relations between US cultural politics and multicultural agendas in the fraught post-9/11 world.17 In its early days, though, JAST struggled to integrate its local positions into a larger vision of how multiculturalism circulates within an international framework, and the academic tone of the journal still fluctuates at times uncertainly between a specific concentration on Turkish-American relations and a treatment of wider issues. The fall 1997 issue includes a note from Werner Sollors on “Multilingual America and the Longfellow Institute [at Harvard],” reiterating Sollors’s well-known view that the absence of a multilingual capacity “is the blind spot of Cultural Studies, American Studies, and various other national literary studies alike,” and pointing out how the Widener Library at Harvard alone holds more than 120,000 non-English imprints published in the United States. It is clearly the case that there have been mutually supportive links between these enterprises: for example, Gönu˝l Pultar of Bilkent University, a member of JAST’s editorial board, has been a visiting fellow at the Longfellow Institute.18 But it is probably also true that there has not been sufficient direct engagement between academic work in European outlets such as JAST and US-based scholarship. Whereas AQ gained its initial impetus from intertextual arguments (implicit or explicit) with PMLA and AHR, these European journals have not done enough in terms of being willing similarly to take on AQ, to interrogate the version of the national narrative imbricated within AQ’s implicitly domestic agenda by deliberately exposing it to alternative points of view. In her recent account of “The Transnational Turn,” former ASA president Shelley Fisher Fishkin (also on the editorial advisory board of JAST) suggested it was incumbent on American scholars to take more heed of scholarship emanating from outside the borders of the United States. As a general principle this may be admirable, and

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Fishkin’s account of how the transnational is becoming “increasingly central to American studies” and how alien perspectives have become a necessary component of any contemporary analysis of North American culture serves usefully to complicate the geographical and intellectual boundaries that used to divide the United States from the rest of the world.19 The obvious problem with such an approach, however, is that, unless constantly and explicitly problematized, it runs the risk of remaining implicitly US-centric, raising familiar specters of incorporation and assimilation through which overseas scholarship is accepted on sufferance, as part of a grand gesture of largesse on the part of the US academy. Scholars such as Sollors (trained at the JFK Institute in Berlin), Gilroy, or Masao Miyoshi did not wait for such invitations, but simply forced their work on the attention of US universities through the way they brought their own native assumptions into juxtaposition and collision with American models, thereby creatively exposing the latter to conditions of estrangement. It is true this is a privileged group of scholars who have themselves spent extensive periods working in the United States, but of course such transmigrations are now very common among academics (and indeed among workers of all kinds) in different parts of the world, so that the categorical opposition between those “inside” and “outside” any given culture, a binary opposition beloved by those of a missionary disposition, has become all but redundant. Although recent issues of JAST have become increasingly cosmopolitan and ambitious, the historical problem with the Turkish journal and with others like it in Europe is that they have tended to remain too much within their own orbit, doing excellent work on a relatively small scale without seeking to disturb the larger conceptual framework within which American studies has perpetuated itself. This was one of the guiding principles behind the formation in 2003 of Comparative American Studies: An International Journal (CAS), in which the authors of this article should declare they have a vested interest. CAS has no institutional affiliation – it is sometimes thought, wrongly, to be tied to the International American Studies Association – and its commercial production by Sage Publications has made the journal professionally attractive but also a more expensive proposition for academic libraries than it might otherwise have been. David Goodman in the Australasian Journal of American Studies remarked that the founding of CAS “marks an important moment” in the evolution of the field, and, though it may be too soon to assess the success or otherwise of this particular venture, it was created in response to the need

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for an international forum in American studies wherein theoretical counternarratives might systemically balance those emanating from US-based journals.20 The myth among many non-US Americanists that their work has been unjustly neglected because of the prejudice and purblindness of the US academy does not, then, altogether accord with our experience. On the contrary, most American universities seem both curious about and welcoming toward outside perspectives; it seems at least as likely that the structural partitioning of the journal market, and the reluctance on the part of many national organizations to cede local power and influence over their subject, has hindered the discursive circulation of American studies in a wider sphere. There are, however, clear signs that such parochialism is now being recognized as an obstacle and that strategies are being put in place to address this problem. A good example of this is American Studies in Scandinavia (ASIS), a journal started in 1968 by the Nordic Association for American Studies, with representatives on the editorial board from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, and financial support from the National Councils for Research and the Humanities in the Scandinavian countries. The journal, published by the University Press of Southern Denmark, has been stable for some thirty-seven years, and the articles it has published (all in English) have often been thought provoking although, perhaps, rather uneven in quality. Typical of this tendency is a 2001 piece by David Mauk of the University of Trondheim, which makes an interesting case for the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as “the primary focal point of regional, and then national and international public exhibitions and assessments of the state of ‘Norwegian America.’”21 Citing Werner Sollors’s theories of ethnic descent and consent, Mauk considers how Norwegian immigrants and their descendants have formulated and publicized an ethnic identity in the American Midwest; but this is, as it were, “Sollors lite,” an article that raises intriguing questions about immigrant experience in the late nineteenth century without following through on these insights by going on to ask more fundamental questions about how national narratives of assimilation and acculturation might be modified if the experience of Minneapolis-St. Paul were seen as central, rather than marginal, to the constitution of American cultural history; again, the problem is there is not enough direct engagement or argument with current US scholarship. This makes it all the more timely that there should have been a statement in 2004 from the new editors of ASIS, Per Winther and

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Arne Neset, outlining plans to establish “a new editorial board, to be made up of experienced international scholars with distinguished publication careers of their own, who can offer advice on general journal policy as well as the editing of individual submissions.” Winther and Neset announced at the same time another revision of editorial practice: “systematic peer reviewing,” designed to “enhance the professional profile of the journal.” They explain that “while peer reviews have been used also in the past, the outgoing editors tell us this has happened on an ad hoc basis; we now wish to establish peer reviewing as official journal policy.”22 The underlying theme once again is greater professionalism, greater distance from the pressure simply to represent the interests of national bodies, and an attempt strategically to reposition ASIS at the interface between local concerns and the increasingly international focus of American studies. That this is an increasingly widespread tendency is demonstrated by the fact that Atlantis: A Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies underwent an almost identical reform in 2004, the journal’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Up until December 2004 its editorial board was elected by the general assembly of the Spanish association, a process that naturally resulted in a board, twenty-two strong, consisting entirely of Spaniards. Under the terms of the new regulations, the journal’s editorial committee from March 2005 has consisted of a board of advisors and a board of referees with more diverse profiles. The new editorial guidelines require that referees assess whether a contribution “is truly original and measures up to international standards,” while the editor, José Antonio Alvarez Amoros, makes it clear that membership in the Spanish association “is not required for publication, because we seek quality papers and do not cater exclusively for an intellectual coterie.”23 These changes in the conditions of production have been manifested most obviously in the radical transformation of American studies journals in Eastern Europe over the past fifteen years. The first volume of American Studies, published in 1983 by Warsaw University Press on behalf of the American Studies Center at Warsaw University, is the kind of publication Saul Bellow used to write bad-tempered novels about: produced on low-quality paper with poor English and frequent misspellings, it featured exclusively Polish authors writing on topics concerned mainly with political thought. There was a lot of work concerned directly with Cold War history and politics – a piece on “Policy of the US Towards Romania in 1945,” for example – but the emphasis on ideologies of business civilization, market regulation

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and liberal capitalism made the journal heavy going.24 (Nor were there any concessions to the fripperies of academic celebrity; there was no “Notes on Contributors” section, nor even details of contributors’ university affiliations.) Recently, however, the journal has dramatically improved its production values, included many more articles on literature and popular culture, and included among its contributors a mixture of Polish and overseas scholars. As with many other European journals, its focus is more multidisciplinary than interdisciplinary: the 2003 volume, for example, published articles on literature, film, civil rights, business and politics. In this sense, the Warsaw publication epitomizes a common situation in Europe: the guiding idea is not, as with AQ, the heterodox alterity of interdisciplinary method, but, more straightforwardly, “America” itself. In a situation in which, historically at least, not an enormous amount of American material has been taught, this has inevitably meant that anything whatsoever to do with the United States would come under the big tent of American studies. This in turn has ensured that many scholars working outside the United States were vehement in their opposition to Janice Radway’s call, in her 1998 ASA presidential address, to interrogate the assumptions of national identity as an epistemological basis for this academic domain. For instance, David E. Nye, an American citizen then serving as chair of the Center for American Studies at Odense University in Denmark, launched a scathing attack on Radway on the H-AMSTDY electronic discussion list, describing it as “an irony that those who have struggled successfully to get American Studies a place at the table in foreign universities should find that in the United States their field is contracting into a specialization in ethnic studies. What a strange turn of events,” Nye concluded, “that American Studies may soon be a broader and more inclusive endeavor in Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, Munich, Utrecht, East Anglia, Nottingham, Oslo, Odense, Aarhus, Uppsala, and Madrid than at many American universities.”25 The problem here, of course, is that these versions of American studies are intellectually distinct and institutionally incompatible. Radway seeks to demystify national narratives by exposing them to the pressures of everything they have excluded, while Nye needs to retain national narratives to give his multidisciplinary enterprise any semblance of coherence. This is the same kind of dilemma that we find in recent issues of the Polish American Studies, wherein, for example, a piece by Andrzej Filipiak argues that by abandoning “the meritocratic principle of social justice which is an essential part of

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what Samuel Huntington describes as the American Creed . . . the struggle for civil rights has lost its social legitimacy and, in a way, decayed.”26 Huntington’s work has become well known in Eastern Europe, partly because it has been widely translated into Polish and other languages; but it is, of course, unlikely that many US-based scholars would cite Huntington in such a context with complete approbation, still less that they would dignify “the American Creed” with capital letters. It is, though, precisely this process of reification that shadows the Warsaw journal: the intellectual danger here is that an idealized version of America is preserved as a counterbalance to the memory of Soviet repression and austerity. In this kind of situation, the subject of American studies works primarily as an allegory of Eastern European countries’ emergence from tyranny, running the concomitant risk that, over time, an excessively rigid idea of what America stands for might become a backward projection that lapses into an etiolated form of sentimentality. As the memory of 1989 begins to loom less compellingly for young Eastern European scholars, however, it is likely that America will for them become increasingly susceptible to analysis as one component within a complex world system, rather than being seen merely as the agent in an epoch-making Cold War. The Warsaw journal is clearly a mixed bag, generationally as well as in terms of subject disciplines. For example, a sophisticated essay by Magdalena Zape˛dowska, a young scholar at Adam Mickiewicz University, which considers Emily Dickinson alongside the Lithuanian-born Jewish-French thinker Emmanuel Levinas, sits alongside a tubthumping piece from the editor about the increasingly “elitist status” of American studies and the need to take the subject more into secondary school classrooms.27 The latter theme is, in fact, a recurrent refrain in many American studies journals around the world: the subject’s customary antagonism toward forms of academic ossification periodically manifests itself in a wholesale rejection of cultural theory and a determination to return to simpler pedagogical practices. What is particularly interesting about the Eastern European journals, though, is that because of their countries’ recent histories, they have consciously internalized as part of their own development the transition from national representativeness to global interface, a transition that seems to have quietly crept up on many of the more established Western European journals and caught them unawares. Perhaps the most spectacular success story in this regard is the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), which

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evolved in 1995 out of the old Hungarian Studies in English, founded in 1963. In his “editorial note” to the first number of HJEAS, Zoltán Abádi-Nagy stated explicitly that the relaunched journal was appearing in direct response “to the new situation created in the wake of the vast social changes that took place in 1989 in Hungary,” when the demise of the Soviet Union brought about an “astounding growth” in English departments, leading to “an unprecedented demand in this forum for opportunities to publish by a rapidly growing community of Hungarian scholars working in all the diverse fields of English and American Studies.”HJEAS would position itself, Abádi-Nagy continued, “to fulfill the double role of providing a forum for Hungarian scholars as well as to be able to continue inviting international contributions.”28 Indeed, the journal has deliberately exploited its liminal geographical position between Eastern and Western Europe, in the shadow of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, to articulate counternarratives on behalf of not just Hungary but Central Europe more generally. Although HJEAS does not cover history and politics, the range of issues and methods it encompasses in literature and cultural studies is impressive, demonstrating how American topics can gain resonance by being placed alongside issues in postcolonial theory, Irish studies, or new literatures in English. The general impression of the journal being au courant is heightened by its juxtaposition of local authors with contributions from American academics such as Jane Desmond, Virginia Dominguez, Donald Pease and Jonathan Culler. One of the most striking aspects of HJEAS is the way it reflects on Hungary’s recent political past. In the 2002 issue, Donald E. Morse reminisces about the early years of the Hungarian-American Fulbright Commission, in which he participated as a visiting professor from Oakland University before emigrating to Hungary permanently, and about the closure by the Communist Party in the 1950s of the Department of American Studies at the University of Debrecen.29 Former USIA cultural attaché John Jablonski similarly looks back to the difficult task of representing American values behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, a scenario that led him into activities more akin to espionage than what we would think of now as mainstream academic activity. By framing its subject in this way, HJEAS allows itself the perspective to acknowledge what has been lost, as well as what has been gained, in the drift toward globalization. Concluding in the aftermath of the Cold War that “the good guys – Hungarian and American – had won,” Jablonski nevertheless ruminates openly

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about some of the more dubious benefits of “McDonaldization” for this “new Hungary”: “Free and open exchange brings with it the risk of all the conveniences and attendant banalities of modern western life, from tasteless burgers to pornography, and I often wonder how much of my activity helped bring these to Hungary.”30 There are many problematic aspects to the increasingly indistinct nature of national boundaries – including the attenuation of local languages and communities – and among the considerable strengths of HJEAS is its capacity to place the internationalization of American studies in a broad historical and intellectual framework, so as to offer a thoughtful meditation on the journal’s own provenance. ii We have started with the European scene because, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it was Europe that became the most obvious front line for American studies during Cold War battles over the dissemination of information and ideological values. When we look to other parts of the world, however, it is clear that many of the generational conflicts in Europe around the status and identity of national bodies have also been played out elsewhere, with the question of the terrain on which American studies can be represented now manifesting itself as a global problem. For example, the first issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies(CRAS) in 1970 presented itself as a successor to the Canadian Association of American Studies Bulletin and as a direct response to the association’s recently enlarged nature, and it featured a report on a questionnaire sent to department chairs in thirty-seven Canadian universities on whether they felt themselves at risk of becoming “‘deCanadianized’ by the recent influx of faculty members, many of them American.”31CRAS receives financial support from the Canadian Publications Assistance Program and nearly all of its authors are indeed based in Canada, but the recent editorial policy of including substantial review essays alongside transcriptions of symposia and workshops has helped to broaden the journal’s conceptual range: for example, a roundtable in 2003, “Challenging the Boundaries of Geography,” discussed the kinds of comparative, transnational, and borderlands scholarship that, as Sheila McManus notes in her introduction to this piece, tends to be “dominated by junior scholars.”32 At its best, this kind of work can introduce a reverse perspective, forcing us to interrogate received assumptions and think of US history and culture from

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a new angle. Bernard Lemelin recently published in CRAS an essay emphasizing North Dakota’s cultural and geographic position bordering the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and he suggested that the political hostility toward the United Nations expressed by Senator William Langer and others during the post1945 period should be explained in terms of a transnational confluence of factors rather than purely in terms of US national policy.33 Similarly Transit Circle, the Brazilian journal of American studies relaunched in 2002, negotiates its way insightfully, if at times with difficulty, between the old world and the new. The laudable aim of this publication is to reconceive American studies from the vantage point of its relatively neglected southern hemisphere, “mapping new comparative, international, transnational or hemispheric routes.”34 The first article in the revamped journal was a piece by Indian political scientist Kousar J. Azam on “Globalisation of American Studies after 9/11,” testifying to the close, perhaps even symbiotic, link between that event and subsequent moves to internationalize American studies; as Azam notes, after 9/11 it became clear that the continuing credibility of the subject depended upon “expanding the discourse of American Studies by globalising” rather than relapsing into a futile attempt to explain US culture by keeping the field confined within the parameters of homeland security. A few other pieces in Transit Circle – by US cultural historian Robert A. Gross, for example – are of a specifically theoretical nature, but many of its other articles are on more standard American studies topics: Melville’s Pierre, Walt Disney, Jay Defeo’s last paintings, the New Deal.35 It is clear, in other words, that the “interdisciplinary” and “methodological” innovations announced boldly in the journal’s editorial statement are not embodied consistently in its selection of articles, which tend to be of a more traditionalist stripe than Transit Circle’s editorial policy would suggest. Most of these articles are published in English, though the journal officially has a trilingual policy, with two out of seven essays in the first volume written in Portuguese and one in Spanish. Perhaps the clearest example of a journal reflecting a crisis of confidence within an indigenous American studies community is the Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS), whose first volume appeared in July 1980, sixteen years after the establishment of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA). Although this journal is distributed free to ANZASA members, back issues can be difficult to find outside Australasia.

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This is unfortunate, since AJAS contains some remarkable work, particularly a special issue edited by Ian Tyrrell in 1993 on comparative history, in which Jim Levy and Peter Ross, two Australianbased Latin Americanists, suggest ways in which “patterns of Latin American development and underdevelopment can throw light on neglected aspects of North American historical experience.” Levy and Ross consequently challenge “the triumphalism dominant in US historiography” by observing that the militarism “frequently on display” in Latin America is no less entrenched, even if more covert, in the United States itself.36 Starting from C. Wright Mills’s observation that half the men who have been president of the United States have had military experience of some sort (with nine of them having been generals), Levy and Ross go on to argue that the United States should be identified as fundamentally a militarist society, uncomfortable as such an idea might be for home-grown American studies academics who have usually preferred to emphasize the country’s constitutionally liberal aspects. This notion of a militarist nation has, of course, gained even greater pertinence after the arrival on the scene of George W. Bush, and indeed there are many essays in AJAS in which an obstreperous Australasian perspective now seems prescient. Writing about colonial American historiography in 1992, Trevor Burnard takes issue with the promotion in the William and Mary Quarterly of ethnicity as a “new organizing principle,” arguing that this merely reflects US “obsession with the inviolability of cultural identity”; instead, he suggests a better paradigm for understanding colonial history would be to see it as a series of interactions between metropolis and periphery.37 In 1994, Manfred Mackenzie similarly critiqued Sacvan Bercovitch’s new historicist reading of The Scarlet Letter for ultimately “promoting a powerful nationalism” and raised the possibility instead of a “postcolonial cultural study” of Hawthorne’s novel that would focus on its more ambivalent interplay between Europe and America, thereby foregrounding the kinds of dialectical tensions that Bercovitch’s exclusive focus on US domestic politics tends to overlook.38 Despite the excellence of much of this scholarship, the general tone in recent issues of AJAS is one of elegy and decline. In “American Studies in Australia and New Zealand,” a symposium published in the July 2003 issue of AJAS, Keith Beattie went so far as to call it “a time of crisis,” fueled by the failure of ANZASA to attract younger members, the loss of academic ground to cultural studies, and the general absence of state funding for American studies programs. As

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David Goodman noted here, “there has probably never been so much American studies going on in Australia,” in the sense that American books, films, television shows, and politics have become more visible and taught widely than ever before. The obvious problem, though, one that Australia shares with many other locations, is that American studies no longer seems the most appropriate academic forum within which to examine these issues, and so, consequently, the rationale for the existence of AJAS is in danger of being undermined; Goodman concludes, with deliberate use of uppercase and lowercase, that one of the “obvious challenges for American Studies” in Australia “is to connect with, and engage in dialogue with this burgeoning of American studies outside American Studies.”39 Whereas Hector Kinloch, one of the first great Australian Americanists of the 1960s, used to wax lyrical about the iconoclastic ferment of civil rights and the Great Society, all of which seemed energizing and subversive in the staid Australian academy of that time, more recent events have served not only to deromanticize America but also to cast doubt on the exceptionalist premise of an essential difference between the United States and the rest of the world.40 This has meant, as Ian Tyrrell noted, that many Australian experts on US foreign policy are not members of ANZASA, since “their links are with strategic studies, defense policy analysis, and so on.”41 The increasing amorphousness of the Americanist field under the impact of globalization has led to increasing uncertainty among American studies journals as to how their terrain could most plausibly be circumscribed and defined. There is, then, an urgent need to consider how American studies might best be integrated into academic agendas in the new conditions of the twenty-first century and what role professional journals should play in facilitating such a process, particularly since there is a risk that, in the absence of such active reconceptualizations, the intervention of financial support from US information agencies will shape the field to an unconscionable degree. Since the end of the Cold War, the front line for American studies, so far as the proselytizing missions of US agencies are concerned, has in large part shifted from Europe to Asia. The American Studies Association of Korea publishes its Journal of American Studies three times a year – two in Korean, one in English – with support from the US embassy and the Fulbright Commission as well as the Korean Research Foundation; in the longer term, it will be interesting to observe what happens in China, Iraq, Pakistan and India, as well as parts of Africa. India, in fact,

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has already benefited from and then, fatally, lost one round of US government support. The Indian Journal of American Studies (IJAS), whose first issue was published in July 1969 by the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad, folded in 1999 after funding from the US State Department was withdrawn and the Hyderabad institution was (symptomatically) renamed the Indo-American Center of International Studies, as the loss of “front-end loading” from US government sources quickly led to institutional cutbacks. (Indeed, a battle had to be fought to persuade the Indian government, which had reluctantly stepped into the funding breach, to retain the word “American” anywhere in the new title of the center.)42 The Indian Association of American Studies, despite its large size, has itself never published an academic journal, only a newsletter and edited volumes of the proceedings of its annual conference, so that, since the disappearance of IJAS, publications by Americanists from the subcontinent have been dispersed among the journals of various related disciplines. It will be interesting to see if, in their efforts to enlighten the world about the inherent virtues of free-market capitalism, US information agencies replicate their past patterns: stepping into perceived trouble spots with financial support for the development of American studies, but then withdrawing it when the expectation is that front-end loading is no longer required and that programs will become self-sustaining. One inherent weakness of institutional journals of American studies, then, is trying to juggle too many balls in the air at once. The pragmatic need to appease political sponsors, the political need to serve their communities, the intellectual need to internationalize, along with the vocational need – often asserted – to foster emerging scholars in their own countries means these publications find it difficult to develop the kind of broad academic perspective that would help shape world American studies. One view is that generic American studies journals are destined to go the way of Time magazine, finding eventually that their generalist umbrella can no longer sustain an increasingly wide range of specialist interests. Just as Time found itself suffering a declining circulation in the latter part of the twentieth century as its “theme park view of the national essence,” in Andrew Ross’s killing phrase, was superseded by a variety of niche markets, so American studies journals may find themselves coming increasingly under pressure as twentieth-century fictions of national homogeneity become ever more obsolete.43 There are, of course, analogs to this developmental process in other media, notably in

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the world of broadcast television, where the Walter Cronkite-Dan Rather model of a network speaking to and on behalf of the entire nation has found itself slowly but surely usurped by narrowcast cable and satellite interests on the one hand and blogs on the other. Significantly, Prospects, the annual of “American cultural studies” edited since 1975 by Jack Salzman, is scheduled to cease publication in 2006; as a publication not affiliated to any national organization, Prospects has made an immense contribution to American studies scholarship for more than a quarter of a century, but Cambridge University Press has declined to appoint a successor to Salzman on his retirement, and it might perhaps be argued that any journal offering in its promotional material to “elucidate the essential nature of the American character” has passed its sell-by date.44 Such developments should not necessarily be seen as a cause for lament. John Muthyala has argued that “the institutionalization of American Studies in India . . . severely limited its trans-disciplinary potential,” effectively locking the subject into reproducing discourses of universalism and exceptionalism.45 All too often, it is still possible to level this charge at traditional American studies journals. In the twenty-first century when, as Etienne Balibar has observed, a nation’s borders are disseminated everywhere (through media, finance, information technology, and so on) rather than merely geographically “situated at the outer limits of territories,” one could argue that American studies is better served by being disseminated through many different disciplinary formations than by being encased in its own separate academic box.46 It is not, of course, that national identity has ceased to be an important locus of affective identification and of state administrative power, but such processes of identification and administration tend to be much more fluid and susceptible to interesting forms of misrecognition than the old monolithic area studies models would imply. One of the potential difficulties with the ASA’s recent “international initiative,” useful as it may be in many ways, is that it now makes even less sense than ever to talk of “Japanese” or “European” approaches to American Studies, so that the federal model of a reciprocal movement between hub and spoke, between positions inside and outside the United States, is always in danger of falling into disrepair. By any empirical or intellectual standard, the subject of American studies today is always already international. Again, some of the tensions here are generational: Muthyala points to significant differences in outlook between young scholars who return to Turkey after having taken their doctorates in the

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United States and senior professors there who have never enjoyed so much exposure to academic culture outside their homeland. The former tend to be entirely fluent in English and to resist stereotypical national categorizations; the latter tend to be more invested in their local associations as a means toward consolidating professional power.47 In Japan, these different tendencies have interestingly resulted in two distinct but complementary journals, both sponsored by the Japanese Association for American Studies: Amerika Kenkyu (The American Review), published entirely in Japanese, which continues to be the more prestigious venue in which to publish for those seeking advancement within the Japanese academy, and the Japanese Journal of American Studies (JJAS), published in English since 1981, which has sought deliberately to adopt a more open, internationalist posture. In his preface to the first issue of JJAS, Makoto Saito, president of the Japanese association, noted that “the barrier of the Japanese language has discouraged [Japanese specialists in American studies] from seeking readers abroad while it has protected them at home,” and it is significant that, as a matter of policy, editorial board meetings of JJAS are now conducted entirely in English.48 Although the Sollors paradigm of multilingualism can readily be understood as a desideratum for a global American studies, journals such as JJAS have found that the most effective way to involve non-American voices in the academic conversation is pragmatically to work with English as the universal second language of American studies, thereby avoiding the snare of linguistic and cultural isolationism by implicitly running a native idiom and a “lingua franca” in parallel. (“English,” writes David Crystal, “is now so widely established that it can no longer be thought of as ‘owned’ by any single nation.”)49 Indeed, how much longer Amerika Kenkyu will be able to preserve its privileged domestic status is not clear; several American studies scholars in Japan believe that, since Japanese tends to be spoken only by residents of Japan, Amerika Kenkyu’s prestige will become impossible to sustain as the subject increasingly internationalizes. This shift toward using English as a global language has gathered momentum in Japanese-American scholarship over just the past few years. For example, the Japan Mark Twain Society, whose website is still in Japanese, was founded in 1997, but October 2004 heralded the first issue of an English-language Mark Twain Studies journal, edited by Takayuki Tatsumi, which was described recently by Shelley Fisher Fishkin as “one of the most important publications of the year on Mark Twain.”50

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The topics addressed in JJAS have correlated with its commitment to a double linguistic aspect: the journal was, for example, in the vanguard of discussions on transnationalism back in the 1980s, producing a special issue in 1989 on “Japanese Immigrants and Japanese Americans.” Although JJAS remains the younger and more junior partner among Japanese publications, it has set out deliberately, as the editor of a special issue on “Space: Real and Imagined” put it in 2002, “to be an important medium for American Studies across both disciplinary and national boundaries”; its 2005 issue, “The Pacific and America,” speaks of a desire to engage with the “increasing internationalization of American Studies,” while the ready (and free) accessibility of all of its issues in online format substantially facilitates that endeavor.51 Recent issues have included innovatory discussions of geography and media as well as an instructive analysis by Naoki Onishi of the lack of interest in the subject of taboo among homegrown American studies scholars. Onishi attributes this phenomenon to the US emphasis on Enlightenment principles of legalism and rationality, something which, as he says, makes the pressure points around issues such as flag burning even more revealing: despite all of US society’s principled emphasis on tolerance, there remain some primitivist instincts that appear not to be so readily susceptible to liberal forms of accommodation.52 To publish in English is not, of course, simply to endorse Anglocentric or US cultural hegemony; on the contrary, by juxtaposing an Asian cultural discourse with an international language, JJAS enables itself to explore points of mutual crossover or incompatibility between them. One of the obvious strengths of journals such as JJAS is that they can potentially turn the subject inside out, thereby illuminating what US domestic agendas have implicitly occluded or marginalized. The response to globalization among American studies journals based in the United States has been interesting, since they are also frequently motivated by a dual, contradictory impulse: a desire to pursue the development of the subject wherever it leads while, at the same time, wanting not to relinquish their own discrete identity. One of the most established and respected of these journals, American Studies (AS) began life in 1960 as the Journal of the Central Mississippi Valley American Studies Association before renaming itself Midcontinent American Studies Journal in 1962 and then American Studies in 1970. AS has always had an institutional affiliation with the Mid-American ASA, and much of its editorial focus has been on American studies in the classic interdisciplinary

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sense: a piece in 2003 by Cotton Seiler, for example, draws on the sociological work of William Whyte to relate the theme of social mobility in the 1950s to the growth of the automobile industry and the federal highway program, while also charting the significance of “automobility” to fiction of this period (such as Kerouac’s On the Road).53 Leo Marx was on the editorial board of AS for many years, and Marx’s principle of national synecdoche, of using specific examples as allegories of national consciousness, has been one of the principles informing the journal’s editorial methods: “Articles which do not ultimately answer the question ‘What does this study tell us about society or culture in the United States,”‘ cautioned the editor in 1986, “are almost never printed.”54 Over the years, this has resulted in a slightly folksy feel to AS, a cherishing of the virtues of down-home “creativity” and a corresponding suppression of abstruse foreign theory. Dismissing the views on modern American culture of German scholar Hans Galinsky in 1967, Warren French charged him with being “too largely tainted by intellectualism,” suggesting his knowledge of US culture had been acquired not experientially but at an aloof distance: “Before Professor Galinsky could hope to speak informatively on this subject,” French admonished, “he would have to read certain works that most serious critics of literature hold beneath their contempt.”55 This populist strain has continued through until the present day: the 2003 issue of the journal includes an account of a graduate student retreat held at the University of Wyoming, where there is much emphasis on “applied American Studies” – renovating historic gardens, working in museums rather than colleges, getting “a greenbelt for your town or better medical care or access to food for the locals,” and so on.56 This is the kind of activist agenda, inevitably domestic in its orientation, that has been an important strand in the American studies movement since the 1960s, though it has seemed less compelling in recent times, when Utopian notions of the subject as a pastoral retreat from coercive disciplinary or political practices have seemed increasingly difficult to sustain. However, AS also did a very fine special issue in 2000 on “Globalization, Transnationalism, and the End of the American Century,” in which the editors’ introduction plausibly complains of how too much scholarship in this field has remained fixated on cultural studies and identity politics, “an insular focus . . . that was both inconsistent with and oblivious to the new economic, political, social, demographic, and cultural realities” at the beginning of the twenty-first century. “Most often,”

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suggest Norman R. Yetman and David M. Katzman, “the ‘internationalization’ of American Studies has simply involved opening the existing discourse to the perspectives of foreign scholars.” Instead of this, they “propose that American Studies be resituated within a broader framework (or, institutionally, within the organizational framework) of ‘global studies’ in which American Studies would be one among several constituent ‘area studies.’”57 This plan to shift the focus of American studies by examining more critically the role of the United States within a global system has been one of the factors that has led to the recent merger of AS and American Studies International (ASI); the latter was absorbed into the former as from ASI’s volume 42 (2004). On the face of it, this might seem like an odd match, since ASI has concerned itself primarily with American studies beyond the borders of the United States, while AS has reflected the interests of the Mid-American ASA. Closer inspection, though, reveals the journals have more in common than at first appears. They both started out around the same time (AS in 1960, ASI in 1962), and they have both been dominated by long-serving editors: Yetman, president of the Mid-American ASA in 1971, was still serving as editor of AS thirty-four years later, while Bernard Mergen at George Washington University was for many years “senior editor” at ASI. Unlike AS, though, ASI has suffered from an unstable publishing history, starting life as American Studies News, morphing in 1970 into American Studies: An International Newsletter, adopting its present title in 1975, being distributed as a supplement to AQ between 1970 and 1979, and then in the 1980s and 1990s publishing its annual volumes in various journal/newsletter combinations. These frequent changes of role and title betoken the journal’s incorrigibly marginalized status within the ASA, which could never quite decide how much of its resources should be allocated to international activities, while the withdrawal of support in 1982 by the US Information Agency, which had previously underwritten ASI, also added to its general condition of turbulence. Over the years, ASI has undoubtedly published some very fine essays from scholars based outside the United States, by Winfried Fluck, Paola Gemme, and many others.58 The obvious problem with ASI, though, is that it was excessively invested in what Muthyala has called the “export model” of American studies, being content to report back to the imperial center on American studies activities taking place “overseas” rather than seeking more forcefully to make an impression upon the dominant discourses of the discipline: Dr. Davaagyn

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Tsolmon’s “Historical Outline of Mongol-American Relations and American Studies in Mongolia,” published in the October 1995 issue of ASI, is a less than compelling example of how this kind of export model worked in practice.59 A harsh account of ASI might suggest it was never really international so much as based upon a Washington, D.C., model of internationalism or, perhaps, a specifically US graduate school conception of what an international program should look like; in his valedictory note, Mergen declared that he intended the journal’s last issue “to promote the work of the George Washington University American Studies department in public history,” adding that “our past affiliation with the Library of Congress, our 40–year affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution, and our recently established Center for Public History and Public Culture distinguish our department nationally and internationally.”60 Maybe so, but perhaps ASI suffered ultimately from being too immersed editorially in this GWU orbit. To be fair, Mergen was certainly aware of the problems surrounding the way American studies has developed within a specifically nationalist idiom in the United States, pointing out in 2000 how three of the eight contributors to the first issue of AQ in 1949 were non-US citizens, whereas when AQ’s fiftieth anniversary selection of articles, Locating American Studies, was published in 1999, the contribution to this field of scholars from outside the United States was totally ignored.61 It is arguable, though, that ASI unwittingly contributed to this process of marginalization by the way it allowed the ASA and AQ for so long to salve its internationalist conscience: since ASI was supposedly taking care of the international angle, the main channels of the organization felt free to direct their energies and resources elsewhere. iii Given this shift away from the teleology of national identity, one place to look today for articles relevant to American studies would be in journals that have no titular affiliation with the subject at all. Representations in the 1980s published a number of new historicist readings of American literature and culture that went on to be very influential throughout the profession, while boundary 2, whose subtitle describes itself as a “journal of postmodern literature,” similarly published two important special issues in the early 1990s mapping out the theoretical terrain of the “new Americanists.”62 Indeed, it was the impetus of scholarly activity from outside accustomed

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Americanist parameters that led Gordon Hutner in the late 1980s to conceive the new journal American Literary History (ALH) as a challenge to what seemed at that time like the “static” nature of the field, “the result of the Americanist establishment’s reluctance to welcome the new theoretical work being disseminated through the 1970s.”63ALH’s success soon exercised a transformative influence on more traditional journals such as American Literature, and it is not difficult to see a similar process at work in relation to AQ today. The number of journals worldwide that deal in some measure with American materials is, of course, too vast to count, but it is important at least to acknowledge the telling contributions they make. Some of these journals are long established, such as the German Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA), started in 1953, a journal of literary and cultural studies that treats topics such as Shakespeare, Twain, and crime fiction alongside more theoretical issues: “Postcolonial Passages: Migration and Its Metaphors” (a special issue in 2001), “Transculturations: Latin American Presences in US Culture since the Late Nineteenth Century” (a special issue in 1999). Similarly, Letterature d’America, founded at the University of Rome in 1980, has always sought explicitly to bring the different parts of the Americas – Canada, the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean – into cross-cultural dialogue. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, published since 1991 by the University of Toronto Press, has featured work on Mexican migration to the United States and on “Asian American differences” by Lisa Lowe alongside articles with no obvious relevance to American studies, such as patterns of Italian migration to Australia.64 Lowe also contributed the very first article in 1998 to the new Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) published by Johns Hopkins Press, a venue in which other well-known figures in the ASA such as Stephen Sumida have published.65 One interesting aspect of JAAS is the way it suggests a geographical shift in the field toward the Pacific Rim: four out of the five contributions to a 2002 issue came from the University of California, Riverside, with the one exception, Pei-te Lien of the University of Utah, also focusing on transpacific networks by her examination of the increasing visibility of Asian American politicians on the West Coast and the voting patterns of Asian groups in Southern California more generally.66 Whereas the early issues of the Emerson Society Quarterly (ESQ) in the 1950s were dominated by scholars from Harvard and Yale chronicling the cultural history of New England, the recent success of JAAS indicates how much

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the cartographic as well as the ethnic contours of American studies have altered in recent times. Also based editorially on the West Coast (in Seattle, at the University of Washington) is positions: east asia cultures critique, a journal founded in 1993 to offer “a new forum of debate for all concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events unfolding in East Asia and within the Asian diaspora.” The journal’s title, explains the editor, arises from an impulse to “displace currently fashionable platitudes about colonialism (the general category)” with a demand that “we account for our positions specifically and contextually, in full recognition that social relations are structures of power and knowledge.”67 Many of these new journals have parallel institutional networks, infrastructures that are often reassuring to an academic publisher because, through membership subscriptions, they guarantee a minimum level of circulation. JAAS is the official publication of the Association for Asian American Studies, founded in 1979, while Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, whose first issue appeared in April 2004, is tied in officially with MESEA, the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas. (Indeed, the existence of this formal link was a precondition of Routledge agreeing to publish the new journal.) Atlantic Studies promises “a new orientation in multi-ethnic studies,” one focused on the Atlantic Ocean but that would “expand beyond the horizon of ethnic studies in the United States to include other geocultural areas having an equally strong multi-ethnic presence.” Much of the work in its first few issues has revolved around slavery, on “looped perspectives,” and on the idea of plumbing “the yet unsounded areas of the circum-Atlantic world.”68 Sometimes the longevity of an academic journal can be compromised if its intellectual terms are defined at the outset too narrowly, with undue emphasis on current theoretical approaches rather than the provision of sufficient space to allow the subject to change and develop over time. In this sense, Atlantic Studies may possibly be overly indebted to the work of Paul Gilroy, who serves on the editorial board and whose “magisterial” book The Black Atlantic is credited by MESEA president Alfred Hornung, in a prefatory message to the journal, with opening up a “new area of research and a corresponding re-definition of area studies.”69 Although Atlantic Studies is edited primarily from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, it is also noticeable that there is a substantial German presence on the editorial and advisory boards, and this may be an indication of how scholars from Germany

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are attempting consciously to gain a wider audience for their generally excellent work on ethnic formations, much of which tended to be overlooked when it appeared in edited collections of Germanlanguage essays during the 1980s and 1990s. Many other journals, though, have used technological advances in publishing and the more widespread availability of different circulation networks to carve out for themselves a niche market, preferring to retain editorial flexibility rather than lock themselves into more rigid institutional structures. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies is one of the most successful examples of this kind of free enterprise, having been set up in June 1999 by Andrew Offenburger, the journal’s founding editor and publisher. The American Studies Association of South Africa had a torrid time in the early 1990s, holding only three annual conferences after its foundation in 1992 before the association collapsed in 1994 amid internal racial frictions and personal animosities. The African Association for the Study of the Americas, set up in the early 1980s to serve the entire African continent, had a similarly abortive career: it held four symposia in different countries, with white South Africans being excluded from the last two, before ceasing to function altogether, and it has now been defunct for more than twenty years. In this context, the institutional independence of Safundi would clearly have come as something of a relief, and the journal has marked out for itself a distinctive territory in the way it compares the treatment of racial issues in South Africa and the Americas. The “patron” of the journal’s editorial board is George Fredrickson, the Stanford scholar who pioneered this kind of comparative racial study, and many of the essays in Safundi draw illuminating comparisons and contrasts between how race is represented in South Africa and the United States; in a 2003 issue, for instance, Adalberto Aguirre and Rubén Martinez provocatively suggest that South Africa is actually ahead of the United States in confronting institutional racism in the twenty-first century, since the post-apartheid society necessarily sees these problems more clearly and so is forced to formulate solutions more explicitly.70 There is always a potential problem with a comparative methodological approach defined so prescriptively as in Safundi: as Offenburger notes in his account of the journal’s development, “comparative scholarship” tends to rely on “the existence of borders and other arbitrary ‘lines’ that encourage differentiation and ‘othering’ rather than objective evaluation.”71 In this particular case, such a

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reification of national differences could lead to an excessive emphasis on questions of civil rights and forms of political activism that can be compared relatively easily across a US-South Africa axis, a preoccupation that would risk failing to give equal consideration to how the collapse of apartheid in the late 1980s might have been at least partly attributable to more complex social and economic pressures, to ways in which globalization ultimately made the preservation of any kind of nationalist autonomy untenable.72 Some articles in Safundi do perhaps verge toward a form of anecdotal sentimentalism, but most of them are conceptually very strong, particularly when they move beyond a strict binary model to encompass the legacy of empire and slavery in other parts of Africa and the Americas. Fernando Rosa Riberio’s attempt in July 2004 to read the history of racial identity in South Africa alongside that of Brazil, an essay published simultaneously in English and Portuguese, epitomizes Safundi’s strengths.73 Another independent journal that follows a relatively narrow comparative method but produces excellent essays of its kind is Symbiosis, whose focus is specifically on Anglo-American literary relations. This trend toward privatization, both academically and institutionally, is also reflected in a growing number of journals put out by affluent individual establishments: in Japan, for example, the Institute for American Studies at Rikkyo University publishes Rikkyo American Studies, Nanzan University sponsors the Nanzan Review of American Studies, and Sophia University in Tokyo produces The Journal of American and Canadian Studies, the latter currently achieving a respectable worldwide circulation of approximately 1,600.74 One of the obvious inferences to be drawn from this everexpanding gamut of publications is that the field of American studies is now too sprawling and variegated to be confined, without excessive simplification, within its traditional institutional parameters. To put this another way, American studies might best be described today as a method rather than a subject, a mode of heterodox juxtaposition and analysis across different cultural formations that can work effectively in many different venues, rather than being an area predicated upon or organized around monolithic national narratives. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (EAS) is an example of a new journal, started in 1997 by the Center for Early American Studies in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Press, that seeks precisely to take advantage of these paratactical methods without seeking to forge any kind of interdisciplinary synthesis. Although the

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AQ editorial board has noted the desirability in principle of featuring more prerevolutionary topics, in practice this has been difficult to achieve when there is so much other pressure on space and when the early period remains a minority interest among AQ readers. EAS, however, has filled this particular gap with aplomb. Its somewhat staid, albeit highly professional appearance gives it a conservative image mirrored in its relatively traditional scholarly direction: all of the distinguished editorial board members are from the United States, though the second volume (Fall 2004) does contain a bitter lament from Hermann Wellenreuther of Göttingen about the unjust neglect of the work of Jürgen Heideking and other German scholars, a situation EAS promises to remedy by offering periodic “reports from people outside the United States and Britain on important work being published about early American history in other languages.”75 EAS certainly leans more toward American history than politics or literature, though it tempers its strict disciplinary approach by including essays addressing ethnicity and other topics having a broader cultural relevance: the first volume, for instance, included a piece by Michael Zuckerman on authority and deference in early America.76 EAS, then, has swiftly carved out for itself a niche market, and another new journal aiming for a niche is the Journal of Transatlantic Studies (JTS), published since 2003 by Edinburgh University Press. This latter publication, however, is oddly named, because its first three volumes have concentrated almost exclusively on politics and international relations within a transatlantic framework, examining the problems of the NATO alliance, and so on; indeed despite JTS’s promotion of itself as “multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary,” it has so far published only one article in the field of literature and culture.77 The Journal of Visual Culture, started in 2002 by Sage, is another specialized journal that contains a wealth of thought-provoking material on contemporary US and transnational visual cultures, including a special issue in 2004 on televisual space and a fascinating piece in 2005 on Jordan Crandall’s visual project Homefront, which draws on “the confluences of media technologies and computerized military programs for tracking, identifying and targeting” to reflect upon the “ontologies of enemy and ally” in the post-9/11 security state.78 The involvement of international publishing houses such as Sage and Routledge in these ventures points to one further reason for the proliferation of independent American studies journals. The advantage to commercial publishers of such enterprises is that a raft of new titles cumulatively establishes a “critical mass,”

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enabling them to exploit the subscription list developed by each journal for other purposes; costs keep falling as more journals are launched, and the lengthening overall subscription list can be raided for cross-marketing publicity purposes. This displacement of the institutional apparatus of American studies journals away from the heart of national organizations is commensurate with the academic evolution of “postnational” American studies around the turn of the new century.79 Both of these developments are also related to the rapid development of internet technology, which has made a significant difference to this field over the past ten years. Safundi was originally conceived as an online community, with an editorial board that meets only through internet conferences, and subscribers to this journal do not receive hard copies but become “Safundi scholars,” enabling them to gain access to “any article or newsletter in the journal’s history” as well as bibliographical databases and a network of academics working in this area. Safundi makes only its most recent issue freely available to all on the web, while the Australasian Journal, by contrast, holds back issues for one year before making the main articles available to be downloaded without charge in PDF files (although web archives for AJAS go back only as far as the July 2002 issue). Peter Bastian, editor of AJAS, has also commented on how the “technological revolution” of the past decade has “gone a long way” to overcoming “the relative geographical isolation [of Australia and New Zealand] from the rest of the world,” so that it is now possible to have coeditors in Australia and New Zealand and a member of the editorial board in Singapore and “still be easily able to work together.”80 As noted above, the Japanese Journal maintains a policy of universal, open web access, while the Journal of American Studies of Turkey follows a similar line in theory, although the journal’s website in June 2005 was three years in arrears on electronic publication, with “funding and administrative difficulties” delaying JAST’s planned switch “to a professional service provider.”81 Financial underwriting from the Fulbright Commission and US government agencies has been a prime agent of this wide dissemination of information on a noncommercial basis, but it would also be true to say that web-based journals have increasingly taken over many of the functions of community bonding that used to be an important aspect of American studies journals in the second half of the twentieth century. The EAAS newsletter and the French TransatlanticA are now produced exclusively online, while several smaller journals designed mainly to offer postgraduates

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an opportunity to publish their work – 49th Parallel, published by the University of Birmingham, and the BAAS Postgraduate Journal, sponsored by the British Association – also appear only in web format. Many of these journals usefully provide a forum offering readers the opportunity for immediate feedback and further online discussion. More intriguingly, though, there are a few journals that have used internet technology in a more radical fashion to problematize the traditional ways in which American studies scholarship has been codified and expressed. Cercles, which began in 2000 under the editorship of Philippe Romanski, is a web journal based in France but written in English that provides open access PDF files for all its material. Although by no means specifically an American studies journal – one of its recent topics, for example, was “Literary and Linguistic Perceptions of Violence in the Middle Ages” – Cercles does nevertheless offer a great deal of interest to Americanists: themes of recent issues have included “British and American Popular Music,”“Recent Scholarship in American Foreign Policy,”“Gender, Race, and Class in American TV,”“Staging A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “Modern American Communities: Suburban, Natural, and Electronic Spaces.” The issue on American television is characteristically scathing about older conceptions of community and location; in his foreword, Georges-Claude Guilbert sets the tone by declaring: “Just so we get the yes-we-do-speak-from-somewhere question out of the way: some of our writers belong to racial and/or sexual minorities, some are ‘simply’ women, several have directly experienced some form of ostracism, and all have enjoyed watching sitcoms.”82 The fluid internet technology of the journal’s form, rejecting the idea of a distinct subject position, thus goes along with a fresh, iconoclastic approach that is theoretically incisive but dismissive of the kind of identity politics that characterized the American studies movement in the late twentieth century. Even more innovatory in this regard is Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, another journal offering free access on the web thanks to sponsorship from the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. Vectors seeks to use information technology to, as the journal says, propose “a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, focusing on the ways technology shapes, transforms, and reconfigures social and cultural relations.”83 The journal is, then, devoted not to new media as such, but to ways

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in which new media might recondition traditional scholarship; the only “straight” essay it has published so far is a piece by N. Katherine Hayles discussing how principles of human narrative intersect with the codes of electronic media.84Vectors is planning its issues around such general topics as “Evidence,”“Ephemera,” and “Perception,” and there is clearly a contemporary political resonance to the journal, with the winter 2005 issue on “Evidence,” for example, being dedicated “to those who have been killed by the ongoing violence in Iraq, whose numbers will never be known, whose remains may never be found, but whose traces should not be lost to history.” But although the editors acknowledge that every day “war is waged and information about it is disseminated using the very technologies that made conceiving this journal possible,” they also creatively exploit this potential, the reconstruction of a virtual reality that exists in dialectical relation to its material antecedent, to revivify forgotten aspects of the historical past.85 Not all of the projects sponsored by Vectors have even tenuous connections with American studies: a piece on “The Unmaking of Markets,” for example, uses multimedia technology to depict the rural communities of medieval Italy. But a truly remarkable contribution by David Saltz, “Virtual Vaudeville,” put together by an interdisciplinary team based at the University of Georgia, uses motion capture, 3D modeling, and video game engines to reconstruct an 1895 vaudeville performance at the Union Square Theatre, New York, featuring a complete act by Jewish comedian Frank Bush, a highly popular performer in late-nineteenth-century America. Bush is shown first portraying an Irishman, then his famous stage Jew, while on-screen sidebars provide additional historical information and explain jokes that might otherwise be lost. Given the fact that vaudeville was such an important form of popular culture in the nineteenth century, and given also that its transitory, performative nature has made it so difficult to analyze, it is easy to appreciate the value for American studies teaching and research of this kind of “live performance simulation system,” which Saltz describes as “a fully generalizable system for simulating live performances from any historical period, from theatrical events . . . to paratheatrical performances” such as political congresses, parades and battles.86 The subtitle of Vectors, promising to examine culture and technology “in a dynamic vernacular,” is curiously reminiscent of those little magazines in the first few decades of the twentieth century – such as The Soil, Contact, and Broom – which were attempting to map out relationships between American culture and society in

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the era of industrialization, the first “machine age.” These little magazines tended to present a progressive view of the United States as the quintessentially modern continent, anticipating a strain of utopianism that has beset American studies throughout its academic lifetime. It is chastening to look back to an article in the first issue of the Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs (JISWA) – relaunched in 1970 as a self-aggrandizing offshoot of the Journal of Inter-American Studies – which described the first landing on the moon as “a historic triumph” for man, “one that must change his future condition and his future international relationships. “JISWA went on ebulliently to predict how this new “space age” would usher in an era of global beneficence and mutual cooperation in areas such as satellite technology and climate control.87 It did not, of course, happen quite like this, and, as Heinz Ickstadt has astutely pointed out, any move to set American studies within an expanded international framework must take care not to underestimate the continuing significance of “national divergences,” their capacity to shape material culture, and their immersion in complicated political power structures and struggles.88 At the same time, it is evident that, in an era when national boundaries have become increasingly porous, the kinds of hydra-headed guerrilla organizations that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri see as endemic to “the age of network struggle” have begun to characterize the world of American studies publishing as well.89 Journals are appearing in many different venues and formats, print and virtual, unconstrained by traditional area studies boundaries or by the patriarchal authority invested in academic organizations based on the exhausted model of a bureaucratic state. Just as in a post-Fordist environment mobility has come to define the entire labor market rather than merely marginal aspects of it, so a versatile shuttling between different theoretical and geographical vantage points has rendered the old organicist models of American studies more or less redundant. This leads, of course, to complex questions around the problems of representation and democracy, since the latter concepts were designed primarily to function within the apparatus of a nation state. These difficulties cannot, however, be solved simply by a return to superannuated forms of corporate representation. Hardt and Negri note that the idea of a state politician representing his or her constituents, a notion “relying on the wisdom of the representatives with no substantial input from the represented,” seems increasingly like an anachronistic formula, as “insulting as the old notion that the

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feudal lord represents the peasants of his estate or the slaveholder his slaves,” especially since the most critical dilemmas confronting people today are no longer susceptible to resolution in local or national terms. The same basic principle could be said to apply to the idea of Americanists being “represented” by their national associations or the journals associated with them.90 Monopoly interests, not only in academia but also in broadcasting, publishing, and other areas, are finding themselves coming under threat within the crosscurrents of global traversal, where a logic of scarcity in production has given way to a logic of multiplicity. New forms of journal publishing cannot in themselves create imaginative new work, of course, but they can often facilitate it, while the entrenched power blocs vested in particular institutional outlets have certainly been known at times to impede it. The world of American studies journal publishing in a postnational era will probably be very different from the way it appeared in the twentieth century: less coherent and easily recognizable, no doubt, but, shorn of its identitarian claims, more open to the idea of American studies as a ubiquitous and hybrid phenomenon, a virtual discipline that cuts across and inflects a multitude of others. 2005 NOTES

1. Fernando Rosa Riberio, “Classifying ‘Race’ and ‘Whitening’ the Nation: Suggestions Towards Comparative Reading of South Africa and Brazil,”Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies 15 (July 2004), 3. 2. In particular, we would like to thank the following for their assistance: Kousar J. Azam, Peter Bastian, Andrew Brown, Barbara Buchenau, Jane Desmond, Sonia di Loreto, Divina Frau-Meigs, Paul Grainge, Michael Heale, Sheila Hones, Alfred Hornung, Gordon Hutner, Keiko Ikeda, Manju Jaidka, Ayse Lahur Kirtunc, Sieglinde Lemke, Julia Leyda, Fumiko Nishizaki, Jopi Nyman, Juro Otsuka, Christopher Saunders, Isabel Soto and Sonia Torres. All responsibility for views expressed in this article rests with the authors. 3. Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,”American Quarterly 33.2 (Summer 1981), 123–39; Margaret McFadden, “Commentary,” in Locating American Studies: The Evolution of Λ Discipline, ed. Lucy Maddox (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 232.

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4. Lucy Maddox, preface, Locating American Studies, viii. 5. Jerusha Hull McCormack, “Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,”American Quarterly 55.4 (Winter 2003), 569–601; David Kaiser, “The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics,”American Quarterly 56.4 (Winter 2004), 851–88. 6. Sune Åkerman, “European Association for American Studies: A Gentlemen’s Club or a Scholar’s Organization?”American Studies in Scandinavia 9 (Winter 1972), 1–2. 7. Max Silberschmidt, review of Transatlantica: Memoirs of a Norwegian Americanist, by Sigmund Skard, American Studies in Scandinavia 11.2 (1979), 86. 8. Marc Chénetier, “Address of the President-Elect,”American Studies in Europe 52 (May 2004), 2. 9. Udo Hebel, preface, Amerikastudien/American Studies 48.1 (2003), 3. 10. Divina Frau-Meigs, e-mail to Paul Giles, May 25, 2005. 11. Divina Frau-Meigs, “Academic Journals and Publications: Mapping the Territories,”Revue Française d'Études Américaines 98 (Dec. 2003), 116, 132–33. 12. Divina Frau-Meigs and Françoise Sammarcelli, “A Word from the Editors,”Revue Française d'Études Américaines 98 (Dec. 2003), 4. 13. W T. M. Riches, “Notes on Contributors,”Irish Journal of American Studies 3 (1994), 162. 14. Jacques Pothier, “Compte Rendu de la Réunion de ASA à Atlanta, 11–14 Nov. 2004,”TransatlanticA: Revue d'Études Américaines 4 (2005); online, http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/TRANSATLANTICA/ 4/asa.html, May 24, 2005 (accessed September 23, 2005). 15. Nick Groom, “Hearing Around Corners,”Times Higher Education Supplement, April 21, 2000, 17. Gilroy returned from Yale to the London School of Economics in 2005. 16. Ernest Wolf-Gazo, “John Dewey in Turkey: An Educational Mission,”Journal of American Studies of Turkey 3 (Spring 1996), 15–42; “Conference Report: The Izmir Cultural Studies Seminar,”Journal of American Studies of Turkey 5 (Spring 1997), 103–5. 17. Journal of American Studies of Turkey produced one of the earliest special issues on 9/11, no. 14 (Fall 2001), though it did not actually appear until 2003. 18. Werner Sollors, “Note to the Editor: Multilingual America and the Longfellow Institute,”Journal of American Studies of Turkey 6 (Fall 1997), 85–87. 19. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies-Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,”American Quarterly 57.1 (March 2005), 34.

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20. David Goodman, “American Studies There and Here,”Australasian Journal of American Studies 22.1 (July 2003), 75. Publication of Comparative American Studies switched from Sage to Maney Publishing in 2007. 21. David Mauk, “Syttende mai Vignettes from Minneapolis-St. Paul: The Changing Meaning of Norway’s Constitution Day in the Capital of Norwegian America, 1869–1914,”American Studies in Scandinavia 33.1 (2001), 32. 22. Per Winther and Arne Neset, “Note from the Editors,”American Studies in Scandinavia 36.1 (2004), 2. 23. “Guidelines for the Assessment Procedure” and “Selection Policy,”Atlantis: A Journal of the Spanish Association for AngloAmerican Studies, online, http://www.atlantisjournal.org, May 10, 2005 (accessed September 23, 2005). 24. Andrzej Kastory, “Policy of the United States Towards Romania in 1945,”American Studies2 (1981), 19–40. For reasons we have not been able to determine, volume 1 of Warsaw University Press’s American Studies was dated 1983, and volume 2 was dated 1981. 25. Janice Radway, “What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Nov. 20, 1998,”American Quarterly 51.1 (March 1999), 1–32; David E. Nye, “What Should American Studies Be? A Reply to Janice Radway’s Presidential Address at the 1998 ASA in Seattle,” H-AMSTDY, online, Dec. 7, 1998. 26. Andrzej Filipiak, “The Struggle for Civil Rights in the United States: From Meritocratism to Egalitarianism,”American Studies 20 (2003), 55. 27. Magdalena Zape˛dowska, “The Event of Interiority: Dickinson and Emmanuel Levinas’s Phenomenology of the Home,”American Studies 20 (2003), 113–28; Franciszek Lyra, “American Studies Beyond Academia,”American Studies 20 (2003), 157–64. 28. Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, “Editorial Note,”Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 1.1 ( 1995), 3–4. 29. Donald E. Morse, “In the Beginning Was the Crown: A Brief History of the Early Years of the Hungarian-American Fulbright Commission,”Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 8.2 (2002), 167–73. 30. John Jablonski, “The Road Taken: Reflections of a Sometime Cultural Attaché,”Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 8.2 (2002), 164–65. 31. Wayne Cole, Virginia Rock, and Robert L. White, “A Tentative Report on ‘American’ and ‘Canadian’ Courses in Canadian University Curricula,”Canadian Review of American Studies 1.1 (1970), 39. 32. Sheila McManus, introduction, “Challenging the Boundaries of Geography: A Roundtable on Comparative History,”Canadian Review of American Studies 33.2 (2003), 139.

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33. Bernard Lemelin, “The Isolationist Sentiment in North Dakota during the Truman-Eisenhower Years,”Canadian Review of American Studies 33.1 (2003), 63–95. 34. Paulo Knauss and Sonia Torres, editorial, Transit Circle: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Americanos, n.s., 1 (2002), 6. This editorial appears in the journal in Portuguese: “tracando rumos comparativos, internacionais, transnacionas e/ou hemisféricos.” 35. Kousar J. Azam, “Globalisation of American Studies after 9/11: Some Ruminations,” Transit Circle, n.s., 1 (2002), 17; Robert A. Gross, “American Studies in an Uncertain World,” Transit Circle, n.s., 3 (2004), 10–29. 36. Jim Levy and Peter Ross, “A Common History? Two Latin Americanists View the Writing of US History in Hemispheric Perspective,”Australasian Journal of American Studies 12.1 (July 1993), 7, 18. The general observation on “Latin American development and underdevelopment” is taken from Ian Tyrrell’s introduction to this special issue, and Levy and Ross acknowledge in a footnote Tyrrell’s crucial influence in shaping their essay: “Indeed, if it were not for the errors for which we assume responsibility, his name should appear as one of the authors” (22). 37. Trevor Burnard, “Ethnicity in Colonial American Historiography: A New Organising Principle?”Australasian Journal of American Studies 11.1 (July 1992), 10–11. 38. Manfred Mackenzie, “American and/or Post-Colonial Studies and The Scarlet Letter,”Australasian Journal of American Studies 13.2 (Dec. 1994), 17–18. 39. Keith Beattie, “It’s Academic: American Studies in a Time of Crisis,”Australasian Journal of American Studies 22.1 (July 2003), 70–73; Goodman, “American Studies There and Here,” 78. 40. Hector Kinloch, “Let Me Turn American Studies Upside Down,”Australasian Journal of American Studies 2.2 (Dec. 1983), 51–55. 41. Ian Tyrrell, “The Future of American Studies in Australia: Problems and Possibilities,”Australasian Journal of American Studies 22.1 (July 2003), 100. 42. Manju Jaidka, “American Studies in India: A Retrospect,”Comparative American Studies 2.4 (Dec. 2004), 464–65. 43. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 8. 44. On the back cover to volume 26 (2001), Prospects describes itself as “a multi-disciplinary journal that explores all aspects of American civilisation. Its prime concern is the presentation of exceptional works of criticism and scholarship that elucidate the essential nature of the American character.”

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45. John Muthyala, “‘America’ in Transit: The Heresies of American Studies Abroad,”Comparative American Studies 1.4 (Dec. 2003), 403. 46. Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1–2. 47. Muthyala, “‘America’ in Transit,” 416–17. 48. Makoto Saito, “On Starting the Japanese Journal of American Studies,”Japanese Journal of American Studies 1 (1981), 3. 49. David Crystal, English as a Global Language, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11, 26. 50. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “ASA-JAAS Project Report 2005,” June 30, 2005, http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/AmericanStudiesAssn/ newsletter/archive/newsarchive/asajaas2005.htm, August 8, 2005. 51. Eiichi Akimoto, “Introduction,”Japanese Journal of American Studies 13 (2002), 5; Fumiko Nishizaki, “Editor’s Introduction,”Japanese Journal of American Studies 16 (2005), 1. 52. Naoki Onishi, “The Puritan Origins of American Taboo,”Japanese Journal of American Studies 10 (1999), 33–53. 53. Cotton Seiler, “Statist Means to Individualist Ends: Subjectivity, Automobility, and the Cold-War State,”American Studies 44.3 (Fall 2003), 5–36. 54. Stuart Levine, “Some Notes on Editorial Policies and Practices,”American Studies 17.1 (Spring 1986), 38. 55. Warren French, response to Hans Galinsky, “Understanding TwentiethCentury America through Its Literature: A German View,”American Studies 8.2 (Fall 1967), 71. 56. Bruce Richardson, “Comments on ‘Using Applied American Studies,’”American Studies 44.1/2(Spring–Summer 2003), 272. 57. Norman R. Yetman and David M. Katzman, introduction, American Studies 41.2/3 (Summer–Fall 2000), 7, 9. 58. Winfried Fluck, “The Americanization of Literary Studies,”American Studies Intemational 28.2 (Oct. 1990), 9–22; Paola Gemme, “Imperial Designs of Political Philanthropy: A Study of Antebellum Accounts of Italian Liberalism,”American Studies International 39.1 (Feb. 2001), 19–51. 59. Muthyala, “‘America’ in Transit,” 396; Davaagyn Tsolmon, “An Historical Outline of Mongol-American Relations and American Studies in Mongolia,”American Studies International 33.2 (Oct. 1995), 71–74. 60. Bernard Mergen, “Senior Editor’s Note,”American Studies Intemational 42.2/3 (June–October 2004): 5–6. 61. Bernard Mergen, “Can American Studies be Globalized?”American Studies 41.2/3 (Summer–Fall 2000), 305–6. 62. See, in particular, the special issues “America Reconstructed, 1840–1940,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988); “New Americanists:

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63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

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Revisionist Interventions into the Canon,”boundary 217.1 (Spring 1990); and “New Americanists 2: National Identities and Postnational Narratives,”boundary 219.1 (Spring 1992). Gordon Hutner, introduction, The American Literary History Reader, ed. Gordon Hutner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), vi–vii. Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,”Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (Spring 1991). 24–44. Lisa Lowe, “The Power of Culture,”Journal of Asian American Studies 1.1 (1998). 5–29. Pei-te Lien, “Public Resistance to Electing Asian Americans in Southern California,”Journal of Asian American Studies 5.1 (2002), 51–72. Tani E. Barlow, “Statement of Purpose” and “Editor’s Introduction,”positions: east asia cultures critique 1.1 (Spring 1993), i–vii. Alfred Hornung, “Message from the President,”Atlantic Studies 1.1 (April 2004), i–ii; editorial, Atlantic Studies 1.2 (Oct. 2004), 121. Hornung, “Message from the President,” i. Adalberto Aguirre and Rubén Martinez, “The Postcolonial University: Racial Issues in South African and American Institutions,”Safundi 12 (October 2003), 1–25. Andrew Offenburger, “The History of Safundi,” http://www.safundi. com/about/history.asp, June 5, 2005 (accessed September 23, 2005). For this argument, see Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 46. Fernando Rosa Riberio, “Classifying ‘Race’ and ‘Whitening’ the Nation: Suggestions Towards Comparative Reading of South Africa and Brazil,” Safundi 15 (July 2004), 1–14. Juro Otsuka, e-mail to Paul Giles, June 17, 2005. It is perhaps a sign of what may occur in the future that the most affluent Asian nation at the present time, Japan, currently has a slew of university sponsored journals of this type, such as English and American Studies, produced by the Graduate School of Kyoto Women’s University; English and English-American Literature, sponsored by Yamaguchi University; and the Nanzan Review of American Studies. Hermann Wellenreuther, “Continental-European Scholarship on Early Modern North America and North Atlantic World: A Report,”Early American Studies 2.2 (Fall 2004), 452–78; William Pencak, “An Interview with Hermann Wellenreuther,”Early American Studies 2.2 (Fall 2004), 447. Michael Zuckerman, “Authority in Early America: The Decay of Deference in the Provincial Periphery,”Early American Studies 1.2 (Fall 2003), 1–29.

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77. “Notes for Contributors,”Journal of Transatlantic Studies 1.1 (Spring 2003), 117; Jo Gill, “‘Exaggerated American’: Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters,”Journal of Transatlantic Studies 2.2 (2004), 163–84. 78. Jordan Crandall (in conversation with John Armitage), “Envisioning the Homefront: Militarization, Tracking and Security Culture,”Journal of Visual Culture 4.1 (2005), 17–18. 79. For an overview of these developments, see John Carlos Rowe, “Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies,” in Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23–39. 80. Peter Bastian, e-mail to Paul Giles, May 26, 2005. 81. Ayse Lahur Kirtunc, e-mail to Paul Giles, May 27, 2005. 82. Georges-Claude Guilbert, foreword, Cercles 8 (2003), 2. 83. Vectors, http://vectors/iml.annenberg.edu/, June 6, 2005 (accessed September 23, 2005). 84. N. Katherine Hayles, “Narrating Bits: Encounters between Humans and Intelligent Machines,”Vectors 1 (Winter 2005). 85. Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson, editorial, Vectors 1 (Winter 2005). 86. David Saltz, “Author’s Statement: Virtual Vaudeville,” Vectors 1 (Winter 2005). 87. Foy D. Kohler and Dodd L. Harvey, “The International Significance of the Lunar Landing,”Journal of lnteramerican Studies and World Affairs 12.1 (Jan. 1970), 3, 19, 28. 88. Heinz Ickstadt, “American Studies in an Age of Globalization,”American Quarterly 54.4 (Dec. 2002), 560. 89. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 62. 90. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 271.

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CHAPTER 5

HISTORICIZING THE TRANSNATIONAL: ROBERT COOVER, KATHY ACKER AND THE REWRITING OF BRITISH CULTURAL HISTORY, 1970–1997

i On the face of it, the move to classify any particular cultural period might seem such a slippery, arbitrary undertaking that the result would almost inevitably appear excessively homogenizing or otherwise misleading. The first use of the term “ Enlightenment” in the English-speaking world was not until 1865, for example, while the notion of literary Romanticism as a discrete historical phenomenon did not emerge until the later part of the nineteenth century, long after Wordsworth and Coleridge had died.1 The more skeptical wing of microhistorians and new historicists would say this merely exemplifies the categorical distance and difference between particular situations and the subsequent rationalizations imposed forcibly upon them. A counterargument, however, might suggest it is only through retrospective mapping of this kind that what Arjun Appadurai calls the “isomorphic” qualities running through particular eras can be brought to light.2 Works or phenomena apparently quite diffuse and unrelated can be brought together in illuminating constellations, thereby suggesting ways in which structural patterns of certain kinds, ideological as well as economic, have helped to shape, if not altogether determine, cultural narratives at particular junctures in history. Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s,” for instance, rigorously eschewed both the anecdotal indulgence and the sentimental forms of nostalgia which have accumulated persistently around that decade through its insistence that history “is necessity, that the 60s had to happen the way it did, and that its opportunities

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and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation.”3 The purpose of this essay is similarly to consider the subsequent decades, between 1970 and 1997, as a period with a distinct historical trajectory, one which was reflected indirectly in specific cultural narratives. In particular, I will consider ways in which this era functioned as a bridge between the middle part of the twentieth century, when the public institutions of nationalism were still in full cry, and the turn of the new millennium, by which time the effects of globalization and postnationalism had become widely prevalent and visible, although, of course, by no means universally admitted. One of the potential hazards in writing national history of any kind involves the customary tendency to reproduce inherent values from within, thereby obscuring the discursive and epistemological parameters within which such narratives are inscribed. In Writing Outside the Nation Azade Seyhan outlines an alternative practice through which the “dialogic and self-reflexive tone of exilic writing . . . registers its distance from social and cultural norms by questioning the logic of the traditions it has inherited.” Such writing, argues Seyhan, engenders an “exteriority” in relation to “a dominant or national culture” through which an aesthetic form of “self-alienation” can effectively question the “representational certainty” of traditional symbolic domains.4 There is, of course, always a danger here of romanticizing the experience of alienation, of attributing to the state of exile a set of privileged insights, particularly when the transgressive impetus of such insights is inextricably entangled with the continuing validity of national frontiers whose conditions of demarcation and exclusion it would seek to breach. In the twenty-first century, when the “global cultural flows” of what Appadurai calls “ethnoscapes,” “mediascapes,” “technoscapes,” “financescapes” and “ideoscapes” have become an almost banal everyday reality, it may not be so easy intellectually to reconstitute that time not so long ago when challenges to national borders and mores seemed to be associated with a dangerous allure of the exotic or forbidden.5 My argument is, however, that the period between 1970 and 1989 comprehensively changed the framework within which the idea of national culture could operate, and that the early 1990s consolidated this process of transformation, at least so far as Britain and the United States were concerned. By focusing in this essay on the work of two American writers, Robert Coover and Kathy Acker, who lived in England during this time of transition, I will suggest ways in which their texts chart, often in

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oblique and circuitous ways, the demise of the national body as a repository of collective wisdom. Coover and Acker both draw upon the exile’s traditional prerogative of estrangement to hollow out the assumptions of national mythologies and all the accoutrements that went along with them. By positioning themselves strategically on the margins of the corporate state, their texts illuminate the increasingly fractious nature of governmental authority and the increasing problems associated with the credibility and coherence of the nation. This in turn enables us to understand transnationalism not as a merely abstract or hypothetical theorem but, instead, as a category with a distinct historical provenance. Jameson finds it “plausible to mark the end of the 60s around 1972–74,” when the “old-fashioned imperialism” represented symbolically by the British Empire was replaced by a “new kind . . . of domination” orchestrated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Indeed, the pressures exerted on domestic politics by crucial changes in international markets around this time served not only to realign the relationship between national and global economies but also, concomitantly, to undermine the idea of the autonomous nation as a source of collective well-being. The 1960s, so Jameson argues, had witnessed in the United States an “immense freeing or unbinding of social energies” predicated upon the utopian prognostication of how “a sense of collective cohesion and identity” might overcome the old divisions and oppressions of “subalternity”; like the New Deal, to which it might be said to bear a generational resemblance, the 1960s sought typically to appropriate mythologies of nationalism and the engines of state to bring about a regeneration of the common welfare. By the early 1970s, though, the chronic oil shortages and quadrupling of prices that followed the Yom Kippur War were inflicting decisive shocks upon US and other Western economies, while the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam in 1973 effectively signaled “the end of the mass politics of the antiwar movement” that had been one of the defining characteristics of the 1960s.6 Watergate broke in the spring of 1973, leading ultimately to President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, and one of the consequences of this scandal, as Stephen Paul Miller has observed, was to undermine confidence in the efficacy of government generally. Americans liberals appeared, oddly enough, to be more powerless after Watergate than before, since the underlying premise of their popular appeal, that the system of central government worked on behalf of the people it represented, had been rudely shattered. Both

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Ford and Carter presided over a downgrading of public expectations in relation to federal functions, with the latter, in a famous act of self-immolation, confessing in 1979 to his keen “appreciation of . . . the limits of government.”7 The transition in 1980 from Carter to President Reagan, which one senior US diplomatic figure described recently as the most significant shift of political direction during his professional lifetime, quickened the pace of government deregulation and largely ceded macroeconomic control to the transnational corporations, a process given additional momentum by the exponential growth in the 1980s of technologies facilitating globalization: CNN was launched as the first all-news television network in 1980, while IBM personal computers began to be mass produced in 1981. It is worth outlining the general trajectory of US history in this way to emphasize how the British social experience, with which it was in many ways cognate, could not be attributed merely to quirks of domestic policy or the idiosyncratic genius of particular politicians. After Edward Heath was elected British prime minister in 1970, he followed the example of Nixon, who had taken the dollar off the gold standard in 1971, by abandoning in 1972 fixed exchange parities and allowing the pound to float, while he took a further step towards placing the British economy on an international footing by entering the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973. This move away from protectionism foreshadowed the end of the Keynesian economy that had sustained Britain during its postwar years of social consensus, when both Conservative and Labour politicians shared a commitment to relatively high levels of taxation together with an interventionist role for the state in supporting public services and employment. This “Butskellite” model of the 1950s and 1960s had drawn inspiration from the country’s experiences during the Second World War, with Sir William Beveridge, architect of the National Health Service, observing in 1943 that “national unity” had been Britain’s great achievement during wartime; indeed, in the eyes of many, the wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, remained a mythic embodiment of these values of national unity and social cohesion. But by the early 1970s, as Kenneth O. Morgan has written, the country’s “cohesive civic culture . . . was beginning to disintegrate.” The effects of the oil crisis which had beset the United States and other Western nations were exacerbated in Britain by a series of national coal strikes which forced the country in 1972 into frequent power cuts and a three-day working week. The Heath government, having called more states of emergency than any other in British

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history, was duly supplanted in 1974 by the return of a Labour government under Harold Wilson, whose attempts to reconcile factional interests within the domestic economy were not so successful as they had been ten years earlier. With the troubles in Northern Ireland adding to the country’s woes, one American politician of this time suggested Britain was becoming “as ungovernable as Chile.”8 In 1976 the nation's debtor status was brutally exposed as the new prime minister, James Callaghan, was obliged humiliatingly to seek recourse to the IMF to shore up a disintegrating social fabric. In return for its assistance, the IMF demanded from Britain public expenditure cuts in the order of £2–3 billion and the curbing of what it regarded as inflationary public-sector wage demands, a policy which Callaghan did his best to implement through the imposition of strict cash limits. In essence, then, Callaghan was pursuing “Thatcherite” policies as early as 1976, with Keynesian doctrines, which took relatively little account of international trade or the balance of payments, coming to seem increasingly outmoded as the economy of Britain, like that of the United States, evolved into one “in which multinational companies and hydra-headed capitalist organizations of all kinds undermined the power and wealth of the worker at the point of production.”9 The Thatcher regime of the 1980s in Britain, like the Reagan years in America, sought overtly to reduce the role of the state in economic planning and social redistribution as industry switched its priorities from labor-intensive to capital-intensive modes of production. The state’s role was thus no longer that of a socially empowering and enabling force, as it had been during the American New Deal or the British Butskellite period; instead, it conceived of itself as, in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, “smaller but stronger,” concerned more specifically with issues of national security.10 The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 marks, for Michael Denning, the symbolic moment when the age of globalization can be said properly to begin, with the corporate states of the Cold War era being superseded by the “beginnings of a transnational cross-fertilization” as peoples, capital and commodities began to flow more freely across frontiers. As Denning notes, area studies in the traditional sense was commensurate with the short half-century between 1945 and 1989 when the world was conventionally divided into discrete, partitioned spaces: capitalist First World, communist Second World, decolonizing Third World. As an intellectual phenomenon, area studies made considerably less sense after IMF interventions and the burgeoning of postnational economies had

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destabilized governments of both the right and the left, de Klerk’s apartheid South Africa as well as Manley’s Jamaica, thereby undermining the legitimacy of national authorities and forcing their territorial autonomy to be repositioned within a global system.11 It is this traducement of national mythologies, the demystification of public iconography into a realm of burlesque, that inspired the imaginations of Coover and Acker during this period of transition between 1970 and 1997. Precisely because of their lack of any inherited investment in British doctrines of class or place, they found themselves empowered to hold up the lineaments of the disintegrating British state to a more detached gaze. Coover’s closest colleague in England at this time was Angela Carter, who also spent time abroad, working for three years in Japan between 1969 and 1972, and who said that to come back to England in the early 1970s was like returning to “a new country. It was like waking up, it was a rude awakening.” As fiction editor of the Iowa Review, Coover helped to make Carter’s work more generally visible by featuring her in a double issue of the journal in 1975, and the two writers shared an interest at this time in aesthetic forms of alterity, in the transliteration of domestic history into ritualistic or anthropological archetypes.12 Despite the immersion of Carter’s fiction in local circumstances, she reiterated in 1977 that she had “always felt foreign in England,” and such a sense of foreignness might be attributed not simply to alienation but, in a more complex way, to a stereoscopic vision where proximate and distant, national and transnational, effectively complicate each other’s singular perspective. This is the burden of Carter’s essays for New Society in the 1970s, where she estranges familiar British cultural practices by subjecting them to a rigorously Gramscian and Foucaldian analysis, one whose abstract, theoretical dimensions project the customs of the country beyond their accustomed orbit.13 In the writings of Coover and Acker the political engagements were never so explicit as this, but, like Carter, they both used forms of structural dislocation and traversal to achieve a way of writing outside the nation, and, as residents of the UK in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, their narratives shed an oblique but illuminating light on how British history of this era developed. ii Coover, born in Iowa in 1932, has strong biographical links with Spain and Italy as well as with England. He met his Spanish wife,

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then a student at the University of Barcelona, on a tour of the Mediterranean with the US Navy, and the Coovers subsequently lived in Spain for several years in the 1960s, when Coover himself became fluent in Spanish. Spanish culture works its way into his fiction of this period through an avowed admiration for Cervantes as a writer who challenged the literary conventions of his age, an hommage which manifests itself most clearly in Pricksongs & Descants (1969), where the American author salutes the author of Don Quixote for his “creation of a synthesis between . . . sanity and madness, the erotic and the ludicrous, the visionary and the scatological”; Coover suggests, in fact, that it was this kind of iconoclastic rupture between spirit and matter that desublimated medieval romance and so “gave birth to the Novel.”14 Coover’s own novels, with their emphasis on embodiment, often involve a quarrel with the dualistic premises of American Puritanism, and this manifests itself particularly in Pinocchio in Venice (1991), a “good part” of which was written in Venice itself, where, amidst carnival scenes on the lagoons, the disjunctions between transcendent spirit and perverse corporeality appear at their most absurd and farcical.15 Coover’s impatience with the realist premises and moral assumptions of American domestic fiction has also made him sympathetic towards the Latin American fabulists: he much admires the labyrinthine fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, while he also wrote an essay in 1977 extolling the “unexpected surreal surfaces” of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which he called “one of my favorite narratives of all time.”16 The involvement of Coover’s own fiction with forms of magical realism has been well chronicled, of course, but what has remained more obscure are the ways in which he might reasonably be thought of, at least during one formative and productive part of his career, as an English writer. After teaching during the mid-1960s at Bard College and the University of Iowa, Coover was awarded in 1969 a Rockefeller grant and came to England, where he began researching in the British Museum in London what was eventually to become The Public Burning (1977). Coover bought his first house in Kingsdownnear-Deal, Kent, and sent his daughters to the nearby Dover Grammar School, where the American girls were educated in an “authoritarian near-Dickensian atmosphere.”17 Apart from spending the 1972–73 academic year in Princeton, he was to remain in England all through the 1970s, before returning to Rhode Island to teach at Brown University in 1979. Although Coover has spent many shorter spells in Spain, Italy and other parts of Europe, during the 1970s he and his

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family were embedded for a whole decade within British life.18 Even now, one of his daughters lives in Warwickshire, while the Coovers still own a flat in London, offering easy access both to their grandchildren and to the West London soccer stadium of Queen’s Park Rangers, a team Coover started supporting in the 1970s when they were among the elite of English football and which he has continued to follow, even though they have now fallen on much harder times. (When not in England, Coover keeps abreast of QPR’s fortunes through commentaries on the internet.) In a 1986 interview to mark the publication of Gerald’s Party, Coover remarked that up until the last part of that novel “I could truthfully say that everything I had written I had written out of the country and after midnight,” with his alienation from the quotidian world on account of his nocturnal working habits being commensurate with the deterritorialized mode of exile. Asked about the advantages of being an expatriate writer, Coover mentioned the positive qualities of “detachment” and “isolation,” the way it furnishes an author with “a cell of his own,” free from “localisms,” “passing trivia” and “transient concerns,” though he also added that “if you’re not careful you can stay away too long and lose touch.”19 This paradoxical interplay between engagement and abstraction also helps to account for the structural tensions informing much of his fiction, particularly The Public Burning, probably his most significant work and one that seems to have been written almost entirely in England. The Public Burning is a dark caricature of the judicial electrocutions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for alleged espionage at the height of the Cold War, but it also functions implicitly to critique the American public sphere during the Vietnam and Watergate era of the early 1970s, with the common thread between these decades being Richard Nixon, Attorney General under Eisenhower in the 1950s and, of course, President between 1969 and 1974. News of Watergate broke as Coover was writing the book, leading him to observe at the time how the novel’s context was changing even as he was in the act of its composition. “The book is continually metamorphosing as though invaded by history as a kind of body-snatcher,” he wrote in Princeton in the summer of 1973, “new meanings are attaching themselves to the book like barnacles, weighing it down, and so causing it to ride less shallowly in the water if also less easefully.” Back in Kent at the end of 1973, he described his final shaping of the novel as being like “racing against History itself.”20 The Public Burning thus deliberately conflates the execution of the Rosenbergs with Nixon’s public disgrace over Watergate, with the book’s title,

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as Coover himself acknowledged, involving a “double entendre, depending on which word one takes to be the noun, which the modifier.” Although The Public Burning refers ostensibly to the public execution of the Rosenbergs, the reversal of the title’s syntax also invokes as a double meaning the burning of the public sphere, the widespread collapse of faith in state institutions that was characteristic of the 1970s more generally. Coover worked on the novel through what his journal describes as the “frequent power cuts” and electricity rationing in England during the early 1970s – “I get neighborly remonstrances through my mailslot about keeping my study lights burning all night,” he wrote in 1972 – while on another occasion in 1976, Heathrow Airport was cleared for a security alert after he absent-mindedly set his briefcase down in the terminal.21 Although the plot of The Public Burning is set in America during the 1950s, its provenance was England during the 1970s, when the traditional public domain in both Britain and the United States was falling into disarray, with security rather than social welfare increasingly becoming the state’s main focus. For American politicians such as Eisenhower and Nixon at the height of the Cold War, by contrast, the destiny of the nation was identified with a form of metaphysical apotheosis. The fate of America was associated, in classic Manichaean terms, with a stark choice between good and evil, spiritual emancipation on the one hand and material corruption on the other: “Freedom is pitted against slavery,” enthuses Coover’s Eisenhower, “lightness against the dark!”22 This is why Nixon declares that paradox is the “one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists” (136), since it threatens to introduce a confusion of categories into the rigid polarities on which exceptionalist beliefs in the United States as a nation set apart were predicated. The burlesque structure of Coover’s novel, however, systematically brings sacred and profane together in such a way that it not only undermines the dignity of Nixon himself but also delegitimates the separatist rhetoric of an American idealist tradition stretching back to the seventeenth-century Puritans. In the climax to the novel, set in Times Square – described here as “the most paradoxical place in all America, and thus the holiest” (164) – we witness scenes of a sexual carnivalesque, of “sacrilege and sodomy,” which are described as “not exactly Cotton Mather’s vision of Theopolis Americana!” (495). The Public Burning, then, uses its scatological comedy specifically to criticize ideologies of American exceptionalism, lampooning the millennial doctrine of a “Liberation

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of Captive Peoples” (462) through its portrayal of the collective paranoia, tinged with anti-Semitism, which would represent the Rosenbergs as “violators of the Covenant, defilers of the sanctuary” (88). (Coover himself in a 2000 interview compared patriotism to “fundamentalist religion.”)23 There is also a broader attack here on the American intellectual tradition of transcendentalism, with its premise of nationalist self-reliance. Nixon reports that the figure of Uncle Sam was urging him “to transcend the confusions, restore the spirit, recreate the society” (234), while Uncle Sam himself echoes the words of Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar” as he lectures Nixon on how “if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come round to him” (363). One of the extraordinary things about the composition of this book is that all of the speeches by historical figures are taken verbatim from their reported words in real life. Coover spent a great deal of time researching this material in the Newspaper Library at Colindale, North London, and the transmission of historical events into mediated forms is crucial to the structure of the narrative since, by switching the Rosenbergs’ execution from Sing-Sing prison (where it actually took place) to Times Square, the author is commenting on ways in which the act of capital punishment became not only in itself a public event but also for the nation a symbolic rite of purgation fueled by the demands of its mass media. Times Square, given its name after the New York Times built the Times Tower on 43rd Street just off Broadway in 1904, becomes the figurative center for an American mythic realm underwritten not by the direct witnessing of history but through its displacement into the omnivorous forms of the corporate media. It is, of course, appropriate that Coover should have been collating and formulating this material in the foreign environment of the Home Counties of England since a central theme of his text is the alienation of representation, the structural disjunction between experience and its narrative embodiment. In addition, many of the legal issues that caused anxieties to publishers and so delayed the novel’s appearance were related to the narrative’s parallel relationship with historical fact, the way it uncomfortably reconfigures actual events for fictional purposes. Coover took these legal difficulties to be another instance of what he described in 1977 as “the multinational corporate takeover of publishing in America and the ‘dictatorship of the market-place,’” and there is an important sense in which, in form as well as content, The Public Burning is

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imbricated within the world of multinational media.24 Ensconced in his Kent retreat, Coover engaged in an extraordinary cut-and-paste exercise in order to reflect American media mythologies as in a defamiliarizing crazy mirror. One of the strengths of The Public Burning, though, is the way it avoids one-dimensional polemics of any kind by transposing history into a form of ontological burlesque which denies autonomy to any particular moral position. Unlike Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953), which critiques the collective paranoia of the McCarthyite era from a distinct ethical perspective, The Public Burning preserves a greater sense of political detachment as it focuses on how the ritualistic processes of public life are constructed more generally.25 One of the curious features of this narrative, as Richard Walsh has observed, is how the Rosenbergs themselves are treated surprisingly unsympathetically, “kept at a cool distance throughout.” Conversely, the text refuses to demonize Nixon, portraying him instead as an outsider to American society, much like Julius Rosenberg, and as a figure who, as time passes, begins to change his own understanding of history and to recognize the unreliability of the teleologies of national destiny he had been brought up to regard as sacred.26 “There is no purpose,” he concludes, “there are no causes, all that’s just stuff we make up to hold the goddamn world together” (436; original emphasis). Coover’s mode of burlesque, like his stylistic emphasis on pun and paradox, thus creates a rhetoric of mobility which oscillates continually between sacred and profane. Unlike satire, which tends to vent a monolithic negative view of a particular scene or person, this form of burlesque postulates a universalism where such ethical polarities cannot be maintained because dualistic structures of all kinds collapse as all spirit is deflated into matter. To emphasize this burlesque aspect of The Public Burning is to deflect attention away from Nixon as legal executioner and to see him instead as a politician caught up within a process he cannot rationalize or control. It is, perhaps, the difference in emphasis between Nixon as Attorney General in 1953 and Nixon as President in 1974; although organized overtly around the fate of the Rosenbergs, The Public Burning also internalizes the contemporary events of Watergate to embrace at a more neutral level this more general sense of a collapse in the efficacy of the public sphere. After Watergate broke in 1973, Coover found that the extensive research he had done into Nixon’s life and “used in clownish ways” was now becoming “the everyday stuff of the news media,” something which convinced him of the need to rethink The Public

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Burning – to “dig deeper, think beyond the pratfalls,” as he put it.27 The final version of the novel refracts the 1950s through the altered conditions of the 1970s, achieving a kind of double vision through which the buffoonery endemic to his portrayal of Cold War America becomes, in an oddly mournful way, simultaneously a recognition of the country’s loss of national purpose during the 1970s. In this sense, The Public Burning should be understood not simply as “a massive parody of Cold-War Manichaean ideology and rhetoric,” as Brian McHale has suggested, but also as a narrative that counterpoints its parody by implying transnationally how American communal rituals work in parallel with those in other societies.28 The year of the Rosenbergs’ execution, 1953, was also the year of Elizabeth II’s coronation in Britain, another kind of public spectacle which is evoked in this text when Nixon thinks of taking his wife to a “film of the British coronation ceremonies which was such a surprise box-office smash. England had spent five and a half million dollars to crown the Queen and now they were going to get it all back in film royalties” (202). Sir Winston Churchill, prime minister of this time and icon of the postwar British state, also plays a role in Coover’s narrative, loyally refusing to intervene with Eisenhower on behalf of the Rosenbergs and being rewarded with an appearance in Times Square at the novel’s climax, when Uncle Sam “coaxes Winnie, who is often confused in the American imagination with W. C. Fields, into coming up on the stage to belt out a few boomers from the Golden Age of the Finest Hour” (421–22). The triumphalist rhetoric of wartime Britain is consequently associated here with the millennial spirit of American exceptionalism, a parallelism reinforced by the burlesque version of Redcoat against Patriot battles in the American Revolution which is subsequently acted out in Times Square, where Churchill, “looking for all the world like John Bull himself,” denounces the rebels as a “race of convicts – a pack of rascals” (423). The effect of all this again is to translate history into burlesque, to hedge around the specific critique of America in the 1950s with a wider recognition of how similar structures of authority permeate social hierarchies in other times and places. The analogies with Britain, in other words, provide a significant sense of distance which sets the scene of The Public Burning in a larger anthropological and ritualistic framework. The aspects of estrangement integral to the book’s composition – the Joyceian image of an exiled author in a foreign library, meticulously reconstructing a simulacrum of his country’s history – emerge finally in the distanced tone of the narrative, which slides out from under

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the “Manichaean” dialectic by its description of national mythography not so much as an immoral but as an absurd phenomenon. The Public Burning represents nationalism in both Britain and the United States as a charade, a form of collective delusion, whose violent and coercive elements are subjected here to the farcical degradations of entropy. Without wishing biographically to adduce any simple causal relationship between life and work, it would nevertheless be true to say that Coover’s residence in Britain during the 1970s gave momentum to a stylistics of alienation that remains implicit in all his writing. The American critic Robert Scholes has tried to claim Coover (a personal friend and colleague of his) for a US tradition of intellectual pragmatism within which myths are invented and imaginatively appropriated according to domestic traditions of flexibility and freedom, but there is something in Coover’s work which seems altogether less cosy, more disquieting than this.29 Perhaps the most obvious example of this darker strain is The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (2002), where the hero acts out roles in a series of pornographic film scenarios, with the physical human body being flattened out into a “virtual image,” a simulacrum of itself. Coover distances himself in this novel from exhausted liberal humanist traditions by portraying pornography as the epitome of an absurd human condition, an inverted state of transcendence, where characters are reduced ascetically to abstract shapes and lusty contortions. This, concludes the author punningly, is genuine hard core material, “what it means to be, the rest all illusion. The radical absurdity at the core. The hard core: black on black.”30 This is a Beckettian space of enclosure and absurdity rather than an American pragmatist realm of ebullient epistemological mobility. Just as Beckett was devoted to cricket as a self-referential universe of Neoplatonic abstraction, where batting card and bowling analysis (unlike the disappointments of life) could be counted upon to match each other perfectly, so many of Coover’s own narratives use metaphors of sport or gaming to hollow out the paraphernalia of liberal humanism and to reconstruct human society as a system of elaborate patterns and geometries.31 Coover saw several Samuel Beckett plays at the Royal Court Theatre in London during the 1970s, confirming an interest in Beckett that had begun while he was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, and the austere dimensions of the exiled Irish writer find an echo in much of Coover’s work.32 Coover has also acknowledged the influence on his writing of Emile Durkheim, who understood civic convention sociologically as a

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secularized version of religious ritual, and this kind of Durkheimian perspective would again tend to explicate the public sphere merely in terms of its formal components, with the boundaries of a sporting contest parodically mirroring the circumference of society’s playing fields more generally.33 The implication here, as the author himself put it, is that these “formal games reflect on the hidden games” permeating the social structures of Western cultures, something he addresses most overtly in his treatment of baseball in The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) and American football in Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears (1987).34 Coover’s 1985 essay “Soccer as an Existential Sacrament” not only chronicles the 1982 World Cup in Spain but also describes the “gripping trancelike nature of the game itself,” interpreting it in the way Aristotle might have understood Greek drama: “theatrical, artistic, communal, ceremonial, mysterious even in its simplicity.”35 As with Beckett, Coover’s enthusiasm for sport involved both emotional and intellectual investments; after one of his editorial disputes over The Public Burning in 1976, Coover recorded finding himself “utterly frazzled, but manage to calm down staring at test match cricket all afternoon on the room telly. England’s in a defensive mode and nothing happens at all, all afternoon. Which is perfect.”36 Again, Coover finds himself attracted to the ritualistic nature of the sporting contest, whose ultimate predictability, its enclosure within clearly demarcated parameters, serves a therapeutic purpose both for the individual and for the community. The abstract quality of musical forms attracts the author for similar reasons. When he was in England Coover was dismissive of “most English fiction, finding it anchored still in the past century,” but he was much more enthusiastic about the BBC classical music station, describing himself as “a daily Radio 3 listener, especially of the vanguard composers’ programs.” Coover in fact now says that music was probably “the most important influence” during his time in England; he attended “ most important new music events” in London and also visited the Cheltenham festival, an annual event specializing in contemporary music.37 Musical motifs have always been widespread throughout Coover’s fiction, which tends to focus more on formal, ludic patterning and systems of repetition than on progressive temporal sequence or ethical content; the 1969 short story collection Pricksongs & Descants, which turns explicitly around musical motifs – children playing “Chopsticks” on the piano in “The Magic Poker,” nursery tunes in “The Gingerbread House,”

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“death-cunt-and-prick-songs” in “The Door” – provides perhaps the most obvious example of this rescoring of human selfhood in terms of musical leitmotif. For Coover, the power of music lies in the way in which, like anthropology, it effectively hollows out the moral assumptions informing domestic societies by transposing them into their formal components. During his time in England Coover took delight in using the techniques of music to reconfigure the ethical and institutional aspects of established English culture in terms of an atonal jeu d’esprit, through which authoritarian postures find themselves recast within self-gratifying aesthetic forms. It is a musical pattern of organization, the idea of returning through a scheme of variations to a dominant chord, that permeates the cyclic structure of Spanking the Maid, a pastiche version of English pornography published in 1982 but researched during the summer of 1977 “in the British Library and the sex shops on Tottenham Court Road.”38 The demystification of patriarchal systems of order and the spoofing of divine administration of justice is made particularly mordant here by the way Coover’s narrative functions as an extended parody of a John Wesley hymn. At regular intervals, the chastised maid dutifully recites the words “Teach me, my God and King, in all things thee to see,” taken from the first lines of George Herbert’s poem “The Elixir,” published in 1633, which was set to music by Wesley in 1738. Herbert’s poem sings the praises of Christian servitude: If done to obey Thy laws, E’en servile labours shine; Hallowed is toil, if this the cause, The meanest work divine.

Coover’s text, of course, rewrites theology as erotics, with the “higher end” here punningly becoming anatomical rather than liturgical, but this intertextual dialogue can be seen both to evoke and to revoke the heavy-handed assumptions of English literary tradition, since Herbert’s “elixir,” that means of alchemy through which the material world is made divine, is blasphemously imitated in Coover’s narrative through a doubled-up fictional process whereby metaphysical devotion is recast as sexual obsession.39 Like Beckett, then, Coover projects a form of parabolic burlesque, where the idea of travesty and defacement becomes an ontological reflection of existential dilemmas. Unlike Beckett, though, Coover also relates this process of abjection to social and cultural affairs. Paul

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Maltby has argued that the power of The Public Burning “resides primarily in the novel’s forceful deconstruction and de-mythification of the ruling historical narratives of Cold War America,” but it would not really be true to suggest Coover is a “dissident” writer in quite the way Maltby suggests here.40 What the author does is not simply to deconstruct mythic narratives but to flatten them; rather than seeking oppositional perspectives, Coover chronicles an increasingly absurd world where the bare lineaments of the social state are rendered visible. Coover has described the state of nationhood as having “seeming correspondences” with a dream state, and in his playful texts the conventional dividing lines between fantasy and reality appear increasingly tenuous, with the public sphere itself seemingly on the verge of dissolution into a bizarre world of nightmare.41 His fiction expresses a situation where mythologies of national identity have been rendered nugatory, where the rhetoric of domestic politics has lost coherence and credibility, and where the communal rituals projected within his fiction are running down to a state of exhaustion. Aesthetically, Coover locates his own writing in that “vibrant space between the poles of a paradox,” adding how he believes “that’s where all the exciting art happens,” and he has also described his narratives as typically juxtaposing “two unexpected elements – structural puns, you might call them.”42 Shuttling as they do between iconography and its dismemberment, between the sacred and the secular, it is appropriate that Coover’s works of fiction should work themselves out according to the paradoxical logic of transnationalism, which both acknowledges the mythological force of the nation state and also ironically empties it out. iii Acker’s engagement with British politics is more explicit than Coover’s and is connected more to the Thatcher years than to the Heath and Callaghan administrations which lurk in the background of The Public Burning. Margaret Thatcher became British prime minister on 4 May 1979 and resigned eleven and a half years later, on 27 November 1990, her term running largely in parallel with the American presidency of Ronald Reagan, which extended from 20 January 1981 until 20 January 1989. It would probably be true to say that many of the key social and economic developments of the 1980s – the growth of information technology, the consequent new mobility of global finance, the shift from a corporate to a market

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economy – would have happened whoever had been in control politically of these countries. Nevertheless, the personalities of Thatcher and Reagan made them particularly easy to caricature and demonize, and in Acker’s work we see an attempt to criticize national conditions through an intense focus on the state’s political figurehead. One of the particularly mordant aspects of Acker’s writing, though, is associated with a collapse of the satiric impulse, with a failure to gain the moral or aesthetic plateau that would enable her effectively to critique the shortcomings of Thatcher’s Britain or Reagan’s America. Her narratives consequently revolve in a kind of dark circle, where the allure of emancipation remains ironically incarcerated within a structural double bind of blasphemy and apostasy. Acker, born in New York in 1947, undertook graduate work in literature and philosophy with Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego, and she was subsequently active in the avantgarde art world of New York City, where she became friendly with, among others, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and rock singer Patti Smith. She was also a particular devotee of William Burroughs, whose dystopian view of the United States as a territory of corporate control is reflected in her writing, and of J. G. Ballard, whom she met after her move to London in 1984 and whom she described in 1993 as “sort of a hero” to her. Discussing her transatlantic migration in a 1986 interview, Acker said she “became very disillusioned with New York,” with the American city becoming in her eyes “more and more a fiction about what happens to capitalism,” leaving her with a desire “to move to something else.”43 But any prospect of an alternative world elsewhere is continually undermined by her fiction, which displaces identity into the Baudrillardian realm of simulacrum and simply reproduces more of the same, testifying to the perception of In Memoriam to Identity (1990) that “All romanticism is stupid.”44 In place of personal identity and moral freedom, Acker’s fiction substitutes versions of pastiche which combine the stylistics of punk with a theoretical basis of deconstruction and which operate so as to empty out the ethical pretensions associated with established cultures and institutions. Great Expectations (1983) accordingly deconstructs the legitimacy of Dickens as a pedagogical instrument through a syntax which is deliberately self-contradictory – “He’s evil. There’s no such thing as evil” – thus subverting the teleologies of cause and effect upon which the Victorian novelist’s moral vision was based. Acker’s Great Expectations sets itself specifically to undermine the idea of sequence, and it also rejects the traditional extrapolation of

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continuity and custom into forms of moral guidance: “Every event is totally separate from every other event,” reports the narrator, “If there are an infinite number of non-relating events, where’s the relation that enables pain?” In this way, Acker presents a revised version of the English literary canon filtered through the post-structuralist theories that circulated widely in the 1980s; the academic journal Semiotext(e) is mentioned in Great Expectations, while her work also cites at different times Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari and other (mainly French) critics.45 One inference to be drawn from this metacritical approach is to see all writing as implicitly an act of reading, to disavow notions of originality and authenticity by recognizing how, in classic post-structuralist fashion, narrative descriptions are positioned as mediated representations of the world rather than as the simple reproduction of a “natural” response to local surroundings. After her move in 1984, Acker lived in England until 1990, witnessing at first hand during this decade British reactions to Thatcher, reactions she saw as metonymic of the kind of passivity before authority that her work systematically reacts against. In Memoriam to Identity specifically contemns “Thatcherite society” and argues that the “dull and proper” English are especially prone to acquiesce in “the habitual, what goes against questioning.” The narrator here continues, “the effect of Christianity is unnerving when it commands respect for every kind of magistrate, such as Thatcher, as well as acceptance of all suffering without any attempt at resistance.” In Memoriam is particularly attuned to the class divisions within British society – it describes London as “a very rich city in a growingly poor country” – and Acker subsequently remarked that during the 1980s she was rethinking her more abstruse New York art school experience in class terms, “taking texts and trying to see what they were really saying in a social, political, and sexual context – which is essentially the program of deconstruction.”46 Writing in 1990, Acker noted the increasing social immobility of both England and the United States, describing them as comprising “a world in which ownership is becoming more and more set: The rich stay rich; the poor stay dead.”47 Categorizing England as “a society defined, even dominated, by class,” she commented in particular on how she had seen it decline in the 1980s from a “political-economic structure” based around “civilized social welfare to a poor imitation of American post-capitalism,” a world “at least partly defined by the multinationals, the CIA, etc.” To put this another way, the traditional English

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emphasis on class, where “differences of birth define human possibility in almost every way,” has been crossed with the multinational labyrinth of Reaganite capitalism, thereby trapping the English poor even more firmly within a system from which the old liberal ethic of individual freedom and self-improvement has been all but squeezed out.48 In a 1989 essay Acker explicitly compares the politics of Reaganism to a ruthless Sadeian mechanism of domination and exploitation: “the Marquis de Sade . . . shed so much light on our Western sexual politics that his name is still synonymous with an activity more appropriately named ‘Reaganism.’” In another essay, written a year later, she related this evisceration of the public body, the “collapse of all social value,” back to “the world of Watergate, where leaders of the polis commit major crimes and their behavior is deemed normal and acceptable.”49 Part of her critical skepticism in In Memoriam to Identity involves an interrogation of the centralized political and media systems which enabled the British government of the 1980s comfortably to exercise authoritarian control over the massed ranks of the people: “The State, England for instance, believes that the lies propagated by all the organs of information on the subject of terrorism are sufficient to inform, that is, control, the whole population, for the population, as a whole, has no other sources of information.”50 This is a direct reference to an event in 1988, when Douglas Hurd, home secretary in the third Thatcher government, wrote to broadcasting authorities in Britain to “request” that they refrain from airing interviews with members of Sinn Féin, the political party of the Irish nationalists. In those final days before the mushrooming of the internet and satellite television such a ban was more effective than it would have been a few years later, and in this sense the more censorious aspects of the Thatcher regime were linked to a quite specific historical period, like McCarthyism in the United States, and would have been impossible to impose with quite the same zeal later on. (The media ban on Sinn Fein was in fact rescinded by Thatcher’s successor, John Major, in 1994.) In Memoriam to Identity thus offers a scathing account of collective forms of repression in the late 1980s, arguing that “England is worse than America cause the people in England who are oppressed don’t even know they’re oppressed,” and suggesting that the “whole country stinks of its own prison which it keeps making smaller.” The dark power of this work derives from its consciously paradoxical application of theoretical cultural models to English domestic

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landscapes which have traditionally resisted such foreign impositions. For Acker, issues of psychic health are integrally connected to control of one’s body – “you can’t lie to yourself sexually,” avows the narrator – and here again the homophobic elimination of “radical otherness” turns England into a bastion of intimidated conformity.51 In a 1990 essay for the New York Village Voice, Acker praised the films of Peter Greenaway for their erotic iconoclasm and challenge to the conservative agendas of British culture, epitomized for Acker once again in the figure of “the black-and-white moralism of the ‘Iron Lady,’ Margaret Thatcher.” As performance artists of different kinds, Acker and Greenaway shared an interest in the aesthetics of surrealism, and they both positioned themselves antithetically to the philistine Thatcherite marketplace, described by Greenaway as “an incredible vulgarian hypocrisy which slams anyone who makes radical moves.”52 At the same time, simply to read Acker in oppositional terms, as endorsing an “inner migration” capable of radically resisting the cultural logic of late capitalism and the debased values of commodity exchange, is too simplistic.53 At some level, Acker’s narratives desperately need their iconic investments – identity, authority, Thatcher – in order to galvanize themselves through rebellion against them. One might think here of Foucault’s suggestion, in “A Preface to Transgression” (1963), that historians would find transgression “as decisive for our culture, as much a part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier time for dialectical thought.”54 But, for Acker, such a pattern of transgression involves not just a psychological or eroticized form of emancipation, as it tended to mean for Foucault in this early period when he was most under the influence of Bataille; rather, her aesthetic structure of traversal turns upon a transatlantic axis through which each side of the equation is crossed with and negates the other. For instance, in Don Quixote (1986) the much-vaunted myths of American freedom are exposed as hollow. The female narrator, a metamorphosed version of Cervantes’s picaresque knight, associates American Cold War identity with a drive for global “economic hegemony,” and relates this domineering impulse back to the world of eighteenth-century Virginian businessmen such as George Washington and Patrick Henry, who are described, contrary to received wisdom, not as democratic heroes but “aristocrats” who “have the country sewn up.”55 The American Revolution, allegedly a war waged on behalf of freedom, is consequently reimagined here in nihilistic terms, as “a mask of death.” This revisionist view

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of US history is narrated under the aegis of the “Angel of Death,” Thomas Hobbes, English author of Leviathan (1651), who pessimistically believed man’s true nature was evil and anarchical and that a natural state would involve a war of “everyone against everyone,” with each distrusting the other and desiring power. This accounts also for the iconoclastic re-reading in Don Quixote of the seventeenth-century Puritan migration, with Acker’s Quixote claiming that “ these New Worlders had left England not because they had been forbidden there to worship as they wanted to but because there they and, more important, their neighbors, weren’t forced to live as rigidly in religious terms as they wanted.” Instead of reading the Puritan migration in terms of John Winthrop’s “model of Christian charity,” then, Acker interprets it within a Hobbesian framework where the spiritual quest for salvation and individual redemption is turned on its head and becomes a quest to ensure social coercion and repression. Rather than endorsing the mythic paradigm whereby the freedom of the New World is counterpointed with the tyranny of the Old, Acker’s narrative suggests how it was a brutish lust for power and control that drove these early religious settlers in America. This effectively takes issue with the binary opposition that sustained myths of America and American studies in the mid twentieth century, when it was imagined the country’s exceptionalist qualities could be played off against the unregenerate nature of less fortunate states. On the contrary, Acker’s bilateral, transatlantic perspective annuls any prospect of alternative scenarios and leads the narrator to suggest that the twentieth-century United States “is exactly as it was started: religiously intolerant, militaristic, greedy, and dependent on slavery as all democracies have been.”56 Intellectually, Acker’s writing presents a world where oppositions have been subsumed into compulsive forms of repetition. This is also why, for all of the vehement protests against Thatcherism in Acker’s texts, the imitative structure of her work paradoxically depends upon such figures of authority to react against, just as it achieves its textual shock effects only through a textual dismembering of Dickens or Cervantes. Politically as well as aesthetically, Acker’s work goes round in a circle. The pastoral corollary to this aesthetic of contradiction involves a sexual sadomasochism whereby violence turns into a form of jouissance, and this thread of eroticism runs through all of Acker’s writing. Just as she describes herself as deploying “the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fiction, of language,” to protest against their institutionalization by the establishment, so her sexual

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performances revolve around forms of structural domination and submission which are then parodied and flung back in the face of the system.57 Yet, as Leo Bersani observed in 1995, this apparently oppositional sexual practice can be construed as “profoundly conservative in that its imagination of pleasure is almost entirely defined by the dominant culture to which it thinks of itself as giving ‘a stinging slap in the face.’” Bersani went on to acknowledge “that those who exercise power generally don’t admit to the excitement they derive from such exercises,” but, he argued, to “recognize this excitement may challenge the hypocrisy of authority, but it certainly doesn’t challenge authority itself.”58 In the terms of Bersani’s argument, Acker’s punk aesthetic might be said to turn back viciously upon itself, with the Sadeian logic of Reaganite corporatism forming a coercive structure of power and domination to which the transgressive thrills of Acker’s narratives pay a reluctant homage. This is why her work, although flamboyantly nihilistic, should be seen as politically pessimistic, since it travesties canonical narratives for no other purpose than to illuminate the aspects of obscenity and defacement it claims are already implicit within them. Blood and Guts in High School (1978) contains a pastiche of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, just as Don Quixote has an episode reworking Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and in both cases Acker highlights the extent to which the fictional heroines are imprisoned by forces of institutional oppression, to such an extent that they surrender, crucially, power over their bodies to authoritarian interests. It is no coincidence that The Scarlet Letter and Jane Eyre both features scenes of social incarceration and humiliation, for this is where Acker’s imagination is located. Surveying both the USA as “a state of fascism and democracy” and a parallel English world of terminal “poverty,” “gentility” and “repression,” the narrator in Don Quixote flirts with motifs drawn from the Nazi experience. “Humans’ most helpful and pernicious characteristic is their ability to adapt to anything,” says the dog to Quixote of conditions in England: “First, Gestapo camps; now, here.” Later on the narrator complains, “The Fascists have taken over,” and she says of one character, “you’re so self-righteous you’d holocaust the universe faster than Margaret Thatcher,” while Don Quixote herself chooses to confront these psychosomatic fears by dressing up as a Nazi captain at “a disgusting club in London.”59 A relationship with the rock journalist Charles Shaar Murray brought Acker back to London in 1996, where she lived again for the last two years of her life before her early death from breast cancer.

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In one of her last works, Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), she again depicts England as a “prison,” a country whose public sphere is being disembowelled – “Mortgage rates were going up all over the place due to the disintegration of government” – but she also represents her heroine as a pirate who seeks “buried treasure” off the coast of “Angleterre.” The text of Pussy, like the cover of the companion CD released by Acker and English punk band the Mekons, is interspersed with maps, as if to emphasize how her quest to subvert conventional social structures necessarily involves a move offshore. Acker’s work is attracted to the realm of piracy because it embodies a principled challenge to the regulated world of state boundaries, a world where “Economic, therefore political, power seemed to be centralizing” because of the way in which “private property, in the form of multinational and extranational capital,” was being “returned to the hands of the few.”60 But the very conceit of offshore piracy, like the idea of transgression in general, carries as its correlative an implicit acknowledgement of and deference towards a world whose judicial and sexual restrictions it is ostensibly breaking. For all of her apparent insouciance about historical precedents, the structural masochism of Acker’s world involves a perpetual search for some form of alterity whose purchase on horizons of difference appears to have been canceled in advance. Her narratives use transatlantic displacement to introduce into the texts a sense of fracture, but then deconstruct this binary opposition to suggest how, in an era when “multinational and extranational capital” has created its own Sadeian labyrinth, such putative antinomies have become coercively equalized. The point about Acker’s transatlanticism is precisely that it does not open up alternative perspectives but generates instead a parallel, self-mirroring structure. Yet these very structures of “repetition upon repetition,” as Pussy puts it, create their own challenge to traditional forms of national identity and the romantic forms of autonomy associated with them.61 Whereas some American critics, swayed by the author’s involvement in the radical San Francisco and New York art scenes, have read her “anarchic imagination” and challenge to “institutional interests” in positively utopian terms, a closer analysis of her British writing and of the transnational imaginary that frames her work would suggest that it should be understood within a less straightforwardly Quixotic context.62 Acker’s work always retains the doubleness inherent in the Cervantes prototype, and to see the author in either case as aligned purely with the desires of their fictional hero is to miss much of the reflexive irony that frames their

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narratives. The dark cultural landscape of Britain in the 1980s and 1990s provides a necessary counterpoint to the traditional romanticism that formed part of Acker’s American inheritance and it served to recontextualize her radical impulses within a much more coercive framework. It was, however, precisely this kind of transatlantic framework that ultimately allowed her transgressive, circular imagination to flourish. iv One of the defining characteristics of this transnational era, then, was the replacement of categorical difference by structural analogy as the basis for transatlantic comparison. The long tradition within area studies of national typology, of playing off American democracy against Old World aristocracy, was effectively superseded by a recognition of how globalization was rendering such dichotomies redundant.63 Along with this dispersal of conceptual antinomies went an elimination of the superior, privileged vantage point traditionally allowed to outside observers, from de Tocqueville through to Henry James and beyond. In the narratives of Coover and Acker, binary oppositions between inside and outside break down completely; in The Public Burning Churchill is a comic stooge of Eisenhower and Nixon, just as in Pussy, King of the Pirates the landscape of Britain has been determined by the labyrinth of Reaganite economics. Projections of exile as a form of transcendent critique give way to an inscription of transatlantic parallelisms. At the same time, this transnational discourse encumbered what Azade Seyhan calls “a sense of self-alienation” that interrogated the “representational certainty” of national mythologies.64 Thinking back in a subsequent interview to his 1970s life in Kingsdown-nearDeal, Coover recalled, “I went back to my little Kent cottage and rarely left it . . . I was completely cloistered inside my own imagination. Or the nation’s.”65 Rather than emerging “naturally” as a result of lived experience, national identity in Coover’s reconstruction takes on the characteristics of a bizarre dream or surreal nightmare. The 1980s, in particular, were a time when British government rhetoric was very keen on marginalizing dissent, on naturalizing the logic of the marketplace and so making alternative scenarios difficult to articulate; indeed, the phrase “there is no alternative” became one of the most successful Thatcher mantras of this time. Both Coover and Acker, however, use a transnational narrative perspective to

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outline a sharper vision of Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, to highlight the erosion of its public sphere and of ways in which its docile population tended to internalize these transformations as normative. Acker’s intertextual renegotiation of the English literary canon in Great Expectations sheds light on Thatcher’s famous invocation of “Victorian values” and suggests ways in which, for all of its apparently staunch empiricism, the success of the British government at this time owed as much to simulacrum and performance as did that of “the Great Communicator” in the White House, whose much-vaunted acting skills had been honed in a more professional Hollywood environment, rendering them more obviously visible. Transnationalism does not, of course, imply the demise of the nation as an instrument of legislative control; rather, it suggests borders should no longer be located on the margins of a national sphere but seen instead as structurally inherent within it. In relation to economics, migration, media and so on, transnationalism constitutes border areas as dispersed everywhere throughout the national territory, thereby problematizing old assumptions about interiority and exteriority.66 In this sense, the events of 9/11 provided a symbolic culmination of pressures that had been building up through the previous decade, when rapid transfers of all kinds across national frontiers had made the boundaries of the nation state increasingly difficult to identify, let alone police.67 Clinton came to power in 1992 with a program designed specifically to relocate the United States within the fabric of a burgeoning global economy, and he signed NAFTA, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, into law in December 1993, the same year that saw the publication of Paul Gilroy’s epochal work The Black Atlantic, a book which emerged characteristically from a professional base in sociology rather than literary or area studies. While NAFTA and The Black Atlantic were, of course, quite different cultural phenomena, their common factor involved a systematic traversal of national space, a rejection of what Gilroy called “tragic . . . ideas about the integrity and purity of cultures,” and a specific refusal of national identity as the basis for epistemological or economic enclosure.68 Indeed, transnationalism as a phenomenon encompassing sociology, economics and political science was well established in the United States by the early 1990s, although, as Claudia Sadowski-Smith has remarked, “cultural work” in this general area related more specifically to questions of aesthetic forms and structures “has lagged somewhat behind comparable discourses” in other fields.69

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Gilroy’s work, though written in Britain, enjoyed its initial success and influence in the American academy of the early 1990s, when there was an intellectual tendency to move away from the rigid dichotomies and identity politics that had previously inspired the subjects of area and postcolonial studies. In Britain itself, however, the transnational matrix took rather longer to become established. The severe disjunction between nostalgia for national autonomy and the new realities of global economic conditions was brutally exposed on “Black Wednesday,” 16 September 1992, when Prime Minister John Major and his inner circle of ministers sat helplessly in Whitehall listening to a transistor radio as financial speculators forced the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, though only after the Bank of England had sold over £30 billion of reserves in twentyfour hours attempting vainly to prop up the nation's currency.70 The hapless Major’s subsequent attempts to reclaim the country’s nativist birthright, his establishment of a Department of National Heritage and his panegyric in 1993 to traditional images of English life, warm beer and old maids bicycling to church, met for the most part with popular derision. This widespread feeling that Major’s government had lost sight of where the country’s vital interests lay contributed a few years later to the worst electoral defeat for the Conservatives since the Duke of Wellington was routed by Earl Grey’s Whig party in December 1832, immediately after the passage of the Great Reform Act. Tony Blair became British prime minister on 1 May 1997, shortly before Acker died in London on 30 November of that year, but by this time a benign multiculturalism had become institutionalized as the official order of the day and transnationalism itself was effectively a fait accompli. Competing ideas about the status and significance of the nation state and its relation to the pressures of globalization have, of course, continued into the twenty-first century, but by the time of Acker’s death the transnational era as a distinct phenomenon, marking the transition of the British public sphere from a postwar condition of state collectivism to a nexus of extraterritorial exchange, had passed into history. 2007 NOTES

1. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamism in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14; Marilyn Butler, Romantics,

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2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 182. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson, eds., The 60s without Apology ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press – Social Text, 1984), 178–209, 178. Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 93, 24. Appadurai, 33. Jameson, 183–84, 208, 189, 205. Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 59–60, 7. Kenneth O. Morgan, Britain Since 1945: The People’s Peace, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–4, 352, 386. “Butskellite” was a composite term conflating the names of R. A. Butler (Conservative home secretary, 1957–62) and Hugh Gaitskell (leader of the Labour Party, 1955–63). Morgan, 390. Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (London: Profile Books, 2004), 161. Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 24, 9, 2–5, 46. Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995), 459–60. For the special issue on Carter edited by Coover see Iowa Review, 6, 3–4 (Summer–Fall 1975). Lorna Sage, “The Savage Sideshow: A Profile of Angela Carter,” New Review, 4, 39–40 (June–July 1977), 53. Robert Coover, Pricksongs & Descants (New York: New American Library–Plume, 1970; first published 1969), 77. “Bob Coover wrote a good part of the book in Venice, and the final part of it while staying in our flat here on the Lido. He told me the ending came to him while riding the vaporetto in the lagoon late in the evening . . . I remember we went to Carnival events together and he took a lot of photos and some of the erotics come from scenes he saw then.” William Boelhower, letter to author, 11 March 2005. Robert Coover, “The Master’s Voice,” America Review, 26 (Nov. 1977), 361–88, 366, 363. Robert Coover, “The Public Burning Log, 1966–77,” Stand, NS, 2, 2 (June 2000), 83. “Europe is my study . . . I’ve spent almost half my adult life here, primarily in Spain and England, but also in France, Germany and Italy.

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19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

[ 135

And I can say, without exaggeration, that about 90 percent of what I’ve written has arisen here.” Robert Coover, “My Europe,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 March 2001. Online. Ruth Elkins, “Robert Coover,” Inspired Minds, www.inspiredminds.de, 11 March 2005. Interview with David Applefield, in Thomas E. Kennedy, Robert Coover : A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1992), 112–18, 114; Larry McCaffery, “Robert Coover on His Own and Other Fictions: An Interview,” in Jackson I. Cope and Geoffrey Green, eds., Novel vs. Fiction : The Contemporary Reformation (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1981), 45–63, 45. Coover, “Public Burning Log,” 79–80. Coover, “Public Burning Log,” 101, 77, 92. Robert Coover, The Public Burning (New York: Viking, 1977), 150. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in the text. Larry McCaffery, “As Guilty as the Rest of Them: An Interview with Robert Coover,” Critique, 42.1 (Fall 2000), 115–25, 116. Coover, “Public Burning Log,” 98. On the comparison between Coover and Miller see Lance Olsen, “Stand by to Crash! Avant-Pop, Hypertextuality, and Postmodern Comic Vision in Coover’s The Public Burning,” Critique, 42.1 (2000), 51–68, 66. Richard Walsh, “ Narrative Inscription, History and the Reader in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning,” Studies in the Novel, 25.3 (1993), 332–46, 332; Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, “Robert Coover’s The Public Burning and the Ethics of Historical Understanding,” International Fiction Review, 23, 1 and 2 (1996), 16–24, 20. McCaffery, “As Guilty as the Rest of Them,” 119; Elisabeth Ly Bell, “The Notorious Hot Potato,” Critique, 42.1 (Fall 2000), 7–17, 7. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 145. Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 209. Robert Coover, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 22, 159; original emphasis. On Beckett and cricket see James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 520. Coover, “Public Burning Log,” 91. On Coover and Durkheim see Lois Gordon, Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 13. Larry McCaffery, “Robert Coover on His Own and Other Fictions,” 56. Robert Coover, “Soccer as an Existential Sacrament,” Close-up, 15.1 (1985), 78–91, 86.

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136 ] 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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Coover, “Public Burning Log,” 92. Robert Coover, letter to author, 11 June 1999. Coover, Pricksongs & Descants, 16, and “Public Burning Log,” 104. Robert Coover, Spanking the Maid (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 54–55. Paul Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists : Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 97. McCaffery, “As Guilty as the Rest of Them,” 124. McCaffery, “Robert Coover on His Own and Other Fictions,” 50, 55. R. V. Branham, “Kathy Acker Interview,” Paperback Jukebox, 15–30 Sept. 1993, 20; R. J. Ellis et al., “An Informal Interview with Kathy Acker on the 23rd April, 1986,” Over Here, 6.2 (Autumn 1986), 1–13, 2. Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity (rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992; first published 1990), 45. Kathy Acker, Great Expectations (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1983), 32, 67, 20. For the claim that Acker wrote Great Expectations in England, even though it was published before she moved there in 1984, see Larry McCaffery, Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors (Philadelphia: University of Pennslyvania Press, 1996), 15. Acker’s literary executor believes she may have written the novel during the course of a brief visit to London in the early 1980s: Matias Viegener, letter to author, 28 Aug. 2003. Acker, In Memoriam to Identity, 95, 71, 49, 78; McCaffery, Some Other Frequency, 28. Acker also mentioned rethinking deconstruction in class terms during her years in London at Soundings : A Conference on American Life, Literature, and Interpretation, University of Oregon, 7 May 1993. Kathy Acker, “Postmodernism,” in idem, Bodies of Work: Essays (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 4–5, 5. Kathy Acker, “Critical Languages” (1990), in Bodies of Work, 81–92, 83–84; “The Meaning of the. Eighties” (1990), in Bodies of Work, 137–42, 142; “A Few Notes on Two of My Books” (1989), in Bodies of Work, 6–13, 13. Acker, “A Few Notes on Two of My Books,” 12, and “Critical Languages,” 85. Acker, In Memoriam to Identity, 52 Ibid., 200, 144, 52. Kathy Acker, “The Color of Myth: The World According to Peter Greenaway,” Village Voice, 17 April 1990, 65, 67, 61. This is the approach of Linda S. Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 227.

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54. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29–52. 55. Kathy Acker, Don Quixote (London: Paladin-Grafton, 1986), 72, 120. 56. Ibid., 114–15, 117–18, 124. John Winthorp delivered his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” in mid-Atlantic in 1630. 57. Acker, “Postmodernism,” 5. 58. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 87–88. 59. Acker, Don Quixote, 187, 26, 45, 131. 60. Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 164, 259, 206, 67, 40. 61. Ibid., 164. 62. Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys, 213. For a typical view of Acker as a feminist utopian writer whose texts “show little nostalgia for the old paternal order” and look “forward” rather than “backward” see Ellen G. Friedman, “Where Are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon,” PMLA, 108 (1993), 240–52, 242–43. 63. For a discussion of this point see Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 13, 202. 64. Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, 24. 65. McCaffery, “As Guilty as the Rest of Them,” 120. 66. Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1–5. 67. On the “deep complicity” between 9/11 and the dynamics of globalization see Jean Baudrillard, “L’Esprit du terrorisme,” trans. Michel Valentin, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101.2 (Spring 2002), 403–15, 404. 68. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 7. 69. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Contesting Globalisms: The Transnationalization of US Cultural Studies,” Postmodern Culture, 10.1 (Sept. 1999), 1–20, 2. 70. Morgan, Britain Since 1945, 513.

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CHAPTER 6

F. O. MATTHIESSEN: COMPARATIVE CRITICISM AND THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE

F. O. Matthiessen was born in California in 1902 and majored in English at Yale University, before coming to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1923. He then applied to do a Ph.D. on Walt Whitman at Harvard, but was told by the authorities there that Whitman was an exhausted topic, so he chose instead to do his doctorate on Elizabethan translations of Greek, Roman and French classics. He began teaching at Harvard in 1929, the same year as his first book on Sarah Orne Jewett was published, and that was followed by The Achievement of T. S. Eliot in 1935, and then by the work for which he is most remembered today, American Renaissance, which appeared in 1941. During the 1940s, Matthiessen also wrote an important study of Henry James, which was the first book to focus on James’s last three novels – The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl – as representing the culmination of the novelist’s aesthetic achievement rather than as a falling-away into senility. He had also nearly completed a book on Theodore Dreiser when he committed suicide on 1 April 1950.1 I should perhaps declare at the outset that I consider American Renaissance to be the best book of American literary and cultural criticism published during the twentieth century. In fact, I don’t think it has any real rivals: perhaps a case could be made for D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), which certainly has the merits of imaginative and creative idiosyncrasy, though it does not have anything like the weight or authority of Matthiessen’s work. There are three things in particular worth pointing out about American Renaissance. The first is its remarkable originality, the

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way it helped to shift critical attention away from Boston Brahmins like James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Matthiessen’s five chosen writers: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman and Melville. It is true this process of literary modernization had been going on piecemeal in American higher education since around the time of the First World War, but Matthiessen was the first to give the subject distinctive shape from within the heart of the American academic establishment. In 1986 Alan Trachtenberg described American Renaissance as “the establishing text of academic American Studies,” and this is the second point to make about Matthiessen’s book: its crucial influence in consolidating and directing the Americanist field during the second half of the twentieth century.2 Matthiessen’s remapping of the subject had already become the norm by 1948, when Robert Spiller published his Literary History of the United States. Even over the last two decades, scholars who have taken issue with Matthiessen have nevertheless recognized his book as seminal in the strict etymological sense, that is, the seed from which other work has developed. One thinks, just to take a couple of examples of this almost at random, of David Reynolds’s Beneath the American Renaissance, published in 1988, which revised Matthiessen’s thesis by introducing more emphasis on popular culture, while Larry Reynolds’s European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance from the same year, brought these American texts more into conversation with political events in Europe at the end of the 1840s.3 But the works of both authors are clearly indebted to Matthiessen’s primary model. The third thing to emphasize about Matthiessen’s book is what Giles Gunn calls its “staggering complexity,” its capacity to interweave close readings of particular authors with the discourses of history, painting, architecture and other contextual areas, so as to create both a cumulative and a synthetic portrait of American culture in the 1850s.4 Though many students know the book only through looking at one particular section, on Melville or Whitman perhaps, to read through its entire 678 pages is to be awe-struck by Matthiessen’s extraordinary range and control. His book was ten years in the making, and it depicts the cultural idealism of the mid nineteenth century both in terms of its own historical moment and also from the retrospective angle produced by the author’s own vantage point in the Depression years of the 1930s. Michael Denning has described Matthiessen’s political collaborations in the early 1940s with other Popular Front figures such as Orson Welles – they joined together to

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support various union radicals like Harry Bridges – and American Renaissance might be seen in some ways as an equivalent to Welles’s Citizen Kane, which also appeared in 1941, and which is another epic production designed to bring together formal innovation with extended cultural critique.5 With any notion of a “canon,” critical or otherwise, there’s always a danger of relapsing into the kind of monumentalism which seeks to intervene politically in the present by reifying an imaginary version of the past. In 1702, for instance, Cotton Mather wrote his hagiography of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, not just in order to pay homage to Winthrop but also, more urgently, in an attempt to establish an elevated sense and religious standard for a colony he saw becoming alarmingly secular. Canonicity, in this sense, typically becomes associated with a process of reaction, with an effort to preserve certain moral or artistic standards against the vulgar incursions of contemporary culture. I want specifically to avoid this kind of nostalgia by thinking about ways in which Matthiessen’s project might now be appropriated for a more progressive critique, of the kind that in my admittedly polemical opinion has more relevance to the direction of contemporary American Studies than most of the work done after the Second World War by the Partisan Review group. As Hugh Wilford has observed, the New York intellectuals were “cultural Modernists” displaced for most of their careers into a world of “post-modernity,” and by the 1980s and 1990s everything associated with the Partisan Review appeared hopelessly reactionary: Norman Podhoretz was advising Republican presidents, Saul Bellow was denouncing multiculturalism and popular culture while endorsing his friend Allan Bloom’s version of a classical intellectual tradition.6 Though the Partisan Review group liked to present themselves as urban progressives, I would argue that the work of the Harvard Professor Matthiessen actually offers more scope for intellectual flexibility and cultural development, and that it is Matthiessen’s scholarly legacy that has been the more enduring. One crucial aspect of this flexibility was Matthiessen’s interest in making connections. He insisted you couldn’t read Stendhal or Balzac in the mid twentieth century without knowing about Proust, or Goethe without knowing about Thomas Mann, and he always resisted the kind of compartmentalization that would seek to insulate past from present, high culture from low culture, or indeed national cultures from one another. Leo Marx, who was taught by Matthiessen at Harvard, recalled on his death in 1950 that “he

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considered it his responsibility to keep up with historical scholarship as well as the latest developments in anthropology, political theory, and philosophy”; and as well as American Literature, Matthiessen also taught courses on such topics as Shakespeare, Drama from Aeschylus to Shaw, and the Criticism of Poetry.7 Indeed, one illuminating prototype for American Renaissance is Matthiessen’s second book, entitled Translation: An Elizabethan Art, which was based on his doctoral thesis and published by Harvard University Press in 1931. Here he focuses on five key translations of the period: Sir Thomas Hoby’s rendition of Castiglione’s The Courtier, which appeared in 1561; Sir Thomas North’s version of Plutarch’s Lives, 1579; John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays in 1603; and Philemon Holland’s versions of Livy in 1600 and Suetonius in 1606. What Matthiessen is interested in here is the business of transposition, the process whereby one culture is translated into another; he emphasizes how his Elizabethan translators were, as he puts it, “popular in the best sense,” because their concern was “naturalizing the qualities of the original, and bringing them out to the full for the English reader.”8 It is not difficult to see a thematic link between this book, where Matthiessen describes how classical literature is reworked through English diction, and the narrative direction of American Renaissance ten years later, where he argues that the nationalist energy associated with the style of the English literary Renaissance has found a new incarnation in mid-nineteenth-century America. American Renaissance is in this light another work of translation, of the alignment of old and new, or the juxtaposition of different cultures; and in this sense it epitomizes the comparative methods of American Studies which Matthiessen increasingly promoted throughout the 1940s. In his work on Henry James, he specifically took issue with Van Wyck Brooks’s popular line that James’s alienation from his native land had brought about a degeneration of his literary style, and, believing that aesthetic criticism inevitably becomes social criticism, Matthiessen was especially concerned at this time with writers of exile such as James, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, all of whom were concerned to relate national situations to the wider circumference of international relations. During the 1940s Matthiessen was very troubled by the War and all of its repercussions, and he deliberately chose during this decade to focus on writers whose relationship with their native countries was contingent and problematical. This again differentiates him sharply from Alfred Kazin, whose book On Native Grounds was

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published one year after American Renaissance. Kazin asserts here that modern American literature is “at bottom only the expression of our modern life in America” (viii), and he accordingly seeks to expel over-elaborate academic theories of naturalism in favor of a simpler notion of osmosis, or “rawness” as he puts it, whereby realism in America is said to have emerged naturally out of “a generation suddenly brought face to face with the pervasive materialism of industrial capitalism.”9 It was Kazin’s style of empathy, through which the relationship between text and context was conceived in nationalist terms as transparent and self-explanatory, that was to become a dominant methodological mode when the American Studies Association was established a few years later, in 1951. Kazin’s explicit rejection of literary “jargon,” which he associated with the overseas school of Zola, in favor of something more home-grown also formed the rationale for the stridently domestic aspect of his book’s title: on native grounds. However, I would argue that Matthiessen’s approach was considerably more sophisticated, insofar as he assimilates what he calls Henry James’s “art of reflection” to his own critical practice, which always involves not just an innocent response to any given text but also a reflexive consideration of how that text has been culturally understood and institutionalized.10 Matthiessen in this sense is a critic for whom the concept of canon becomes an integral part of his interpretative technique. Raymond Williams said in 1986 that he believed the idea of a canon was always, as the term implied, a fundamentally “scriptural” concern, and Matthiessen makes great play in his book on Europe with his own Christian beliefs, declaring that he was “influenced by the same Protestant revival that [was] voiced most forcefully in America by Reinhold Niebuhr.”11 This of course distinguishes him again from Kazin and the Partisan Review group, who came out of a predominantly Jewish heritage and whose outlook was avowedly secular. But I would suggest the critical significance of Matthiessen’s religious impulse is the way it affords him insight into the implicitly metaphysical or metanarrative constraints binding, often in displaced forms, any particular reading of a cultural text. To take just one example of this, Richard Hofstadter in a 1951 review for The Nation snobbishly dismissed Matthiessen’s last work on Dreiser by saying: “Mr Matthiessen . . . seems to have suffered from a compulsion to declass himself intellectually in order to find a meeting ground with Dreiser.”12 But Matthiessen was much more aware than Hofstadter – or Lionel Trilling, who berated Dreiser in

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similar fashion around this time – of ways in which ethnic and class assumptions enter into the consumption as well as the production of literary works, and of how values which these critics of the 1950s tried to present as objective and universal are, in fact, mediated by social differences of all kinds. In this sense, Matthiessen’s readings are always double, or metacritical, being concerned with the canonical formations of American literature, its processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well as with textual detail. This metacritical impulse runs consistently through his work, from a 1929 review of Norman Foerster’s The Reinterpretation of American Literature, where he declares that “it is time for the history of American literature to be rewritten,” through American Renaissance, right up until his Oxford Book of American Verse, published posthumously, where again he reflects upon the construction of the American canon and, in a bold move for 1950, includes a selection of works by W. H. Auden, whom he explicitly classifies alongside Eliot, Stevens, Tate and Lowell as a twentieth-century American poet.13 It is, of course, not difficult from our twenty-first century perspective to see what Matthiessen’s work leaves out. About twenty years ago, in the early 1980s, his work began to be attacked by the New Americanists for its elision of race and gender: Jonathan Arac wrote in 1987 that the “most extraordinary idealization” in American Renaissance is “the diminishment of the Civil War,” which is not even indexed, even though it was to tear the country in two just a few years after the era described in this book.14 Arac consequently accused Matthiessen of dissolving history into myth, of seeking to reconcile all contradictions within a romantic ethos of the sublime that owes something to the neoplatonist aesthetics of Shelley and something also to the organicist methods of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is indeed an important theoretical presence within Matthiessen’s text. In his book on Eliot, Matthiessen talks about the need for “complexity” as well as “unified pattern,” of how the “problem of the artist” is “to emphasize the essential equivalence of seemingly different experiences”; and this kind of dialogue between equivalence and difference is threaded throughout his own critical writing, whose concern with the balancing of tensions does not necessarily have to signify a repressive sense of premature closure.15 There is, then, a barely suppressed sense of contradiction, indeed fragmentation, in American Renaissance and Matthiessen’s other writing which makes his work a fruitful site for the rearticulation of critical discourses directed towards quite different ends. He is always

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interested in violence, for example: he observes the destruction wreaked by the Second World War in his memoir From the Heart of Europe, which grew out of his participation in the Salzburg Seminar on American Studies in 1947; but he also writes about what he calls the “tortured violence” in Hart Crane’s poetry, as well as about the institutional forms of violence associated with the consolidation or disruption of hallowed cultural traditions.16 In a revealing preface to the Oxford Book of American Verse, he declares: “with Longfellow my one aim was to smash the plaster bust of his dead reputation . . . to wring the neck of the kind of rhetoric that overflowed into poetry from the oratory of the day.”17 This flirtation with the rhetoric of creative destruction is commensurate with what Eric Cheyfitz finds as a subliminal discourse within American Renaissance: a glorification of the “imperial male body,” a covert attraction to the aesthetics of Fascism that Matthiessen’s own avowed socialism doggedly opposed.18 My point is not, of course, that Matthiessen was a closet Fascist, but that his critical projects embraced turbulent energies which could never comfortably be domesticated into the New Critical paradigms of ordered tranquility. Matthiessen’s position as a gay man in the homophobic Boston of the 1940s inevitably complicated his attempt to enunciate an integrated poetics of political and psychological emancipation, and in this sense his suicide, like that of Crane eighteen years earlier, might be seen as the logical conclusion to a career whose energy derived from the attempt to reconcile various categories within a vision whose fulfilment could only be projected into a utopian future. But just as the erratic, edgy nature of Crane’s gay poetics have been recuperated in recent years by critics like Lee Edelman and the late Thomas Yingling, so there is, I think, scope for considering Matthiessen’s work as the precursor to contemporary re-readings of the American Renaissance by queer theorists such as Lauren Berlant or Christopher Newfield, whose focus is not so much on containment and orthodoxy but heterodoxy and transgression.19 Again, there is a sharp contrast to be made in this respect with the New York Intellectuals who, as Wilford notes, tended to be much less radical in their sexual orientation. They consistently ignored renegade characters like Henry Miller and Jean Genet, not to mention women writers, and they persistently attacked what they called the stuffiness of “academicism” without acknowledging the reactionary moral agendas underlying their own work.20 In his own tribute to Matthiessen, published in the October 1950 memorial issue of the Monthly Review, Kazin recalled the summer they had

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spent together at the Salzburg Seminar and he generously described Matthiessen as “in every sense the leader of our enterprise,” though he also remembered that he “disagreed profoundly with him on many political questions,” particularly those relating to Russia and Eastern Europe.21 But the tension between Matthiessen and Kazin did not derive simply from the obvious divide between a Stalinist sympathizer and a dedicated anti-Stalinist; as Denning notes, there was also a clash here between an academic theorist on the one hand and on the other a metropolitan critic who prided himself on what Marjorie Garber in a recent book has described as the “mystique of amateurism,” with its concomitant “authenticity effect.”22 The latter became an identifying characteristic of the New York literary world at this time, but it was an allure that Matthiessen’s supposedly more provincial type of scholarship always sought to resist. Matthiessen’s premature death in 1950 has left him in a somewhat misleading position with respect to the subsequent formation of American literary studies. Cheyfitz has written of how American Renaissance inaugurated what he calls a “corporate or consensual” version of American mythic identity in the 1950s and 1960s, predicated upon the classic version of American literature as evoking “a world elsewhere” with which we are by now all too familiar.23 Conversely, Denning – and, to some extent, Arac – want to resituate Matthiessen within the cultural world of the 1930s, seeing the subsequent reputation of American Renaissance as having obscured its affiliations with the Popular Front movements and with Matthiessen’s own commitment to political solidarity. I think, though, that if we look forward as well as backward and see this famous book as of a piece with Matthiessen’s international concerns later in the 1940s – the work on James, the interest in theorists of alienation like Auden and Niebuhr, the fascination with post-war Europe – then the extent to which Matthiessen sought to position himself intellectually on the boundary between America and Europe becomes easier to recognize. When he was in Salzburg, he noted that Austria was at the midpoint between East and West, Russia and America, Communism and capitalism; and he made the same kind of claim in the fall of 1947 when he visited Czechoslovakia, where he made a speech about how the country might become a model for “advance into socialism without the authoritarian coercions of the one-party state,” and so the basis “for possible fusion between the traditions of the East and the West.”24 This was before the Communist putsch in Czechoslovakia that took place in February 1948, which brought in a more authoritarian,

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Soviet-backed regime; and Ernest Simmons in his memorial essay speculated that Matthiessen’s reluctance to change the section of From the Heart of Europe dealing with Czechoslovakia, even though he still had time to do so before the book appeared, amounted to a “psychic symbol of defeat,” a desire to cling to the old illusions of reconciliation between opposing powers even after Czechoslovakia had been drawn firmly behind the Iron Curtain.25 If so, it would not have been the first time that an attempt by Matthiessen to bring together apparently antithetical forces had come under strain: that was, in fact, the perennial pattern of his life and work. Nevertheless, it is worth pausing and considering how the academic evolution of American Studies might have been different if such a massively influential figure had lived through his appointed three score years and ten and died in, say, 1975. I think it is likely that the comparative dimension outlined by C. L. R. James in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, where he implicitly plays off different categories against each other by talking of how the conceptual “sense of expansion” that he experienced on a train journey between Chicago and Los Angeles had “permanently altered my attitude to the world,” would not have seemed so inconsistent with the general directions of American Studies in the 1950s.26 It is likely also that the common constructions of the field in the second half of the twentieth century according to a Cold War ideology of the balance of power – where the values of the United States were held up unproblematically against those of the Soviet bloc – would have come under much more rigorous intellectual scrutiny. For Matthiessen, any notion of a balance of power involved not the complacent objectification of an other as a way of defining the self through a process of mutual exclusion, but, rather, its internalization and putative reconciliation as a means of achieving a balance of power within the problematic subject. In this sense, Matthiessen would probably have been more concerned with a mutation of the balance of power into a subjective phenomenon, a place where alternate strands converged and diverged. One of the consequences of Matthiessen’s early death is that for over half a century his capacious conception of American Studies as a site of systematic translation has been blocked off by nativist agendas, often of the most unreflective kind. However, his legacy is more complicated than we have often been led to believe, and the force of his synthetic imagination remains, in this particular field, unsurpassed. 2001, revised 2009

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1. F. O. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford UP, 1941), Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford UP, 1944), Theodore Dreiser (New York: William Sloane, 1951). 2. Alan Trachtenberg, “American Studies as a Cultural Program,” in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, ed., Ideology and Classic American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 186. 3. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988); Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 4. Giles Gunn, F. O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 81. 5. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 373. 6. Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 246. 7. Leo Marx, tribute to Matthiessen, Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, 2, No. 6 (October 1950), 209. 8. F. O. Matthiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 4, 7. 9. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Reynel and Hitchcock-Overseas Editions, 1942), viii, 309, 13. 10. Matthiessen, Henry James, 1. 11. Raymond Williams, “Media, Margins and Modernity: Raymond Williams and Edward Said,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 183; F. O. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 82. 12. Quoted in M. D. Walhout, “F. O. Matthiessen and the Future of American Studies,” Prospects 22 (1997), 25. 13. Gunn, F. O. Matthiessen, 3; F. O. Matthiessen, ed., The Oxford Book of American Verse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), xvi. 14. Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 165. 15. Matthiessen, Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 35. 16. F. O. Matthiessen, “An Absolute Music: Hart Crane,” in The

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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Responsibilities of the Critic: Essays and Reviews, ed. John Rackliffe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 104. Matthiessen, Oxford Book of American Verse, xviii. Eric Cheyfitz, “Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution,” American Quarterly 41.2 (1989), 354. Symptomatically, Harvard University in 2009 endowed a chair in gay, bisexual and transgender studies named after Matthiessen. Wilford, New York Intellectuals, 75, 21. Alfred Kazin, tribute to Matthiessen, Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, 2, No. 6 (October 1950), 282–83. Denning, Cultural Front, 62; Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 21. Cheyfitz, “Matthiessen’s American Renaissance,” 349; Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, 177–78. Ernest J. Simmons, tribute to Matthiessen, Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, 2, No. 6 (October 1950), 305. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953; rev. ed. 1985), ed. Donald E. Pease (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 159.

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CHAPTER 7

HENRY JAMES ATHWART: DETERRITORIALIZATION IN THE SACRED FOUNT

The “international theme” is one of the most venerable in Henry James criticism, so to address questions of globalization in relation to his fiction is essentially to consider a familiar topic from a new angle. Nevertheless, James’s challenge to conventional assumptions underlying the proprieties of statehood is profound and wide-ranging, involving not simply a matter of playing off national stereotypes against each other but, more significantly, of considering ways in which global horizons dislocate the grounds on which indigenous manners and styles of representation are predicated. In this sense, as John Carlos Rowe has argued, literary scholarship has had to “catch up” with James, whose work modulates local and national affairs through transnational perspectives.1 One of the teasing, perverse pleasures of reading James, in fact, involves an implicit acknowledgment of how difficult it is to circumscribe particular worlds and to demarcate them according to commonly held aesthetic or ethical standards. In this paper, I want to consider the significance of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called “deterritorialization” in relation to The Sacred Fount (1901). Written immediately before the last three great novels of what F. O. Matthiessen called James’s “major phase,” The Sacred Fount has long been regarded as an elliptical, enigmatic work; but my argument is that much of its oblique quality arises from the problem of how knowledge should be organized, whether events ought to be categorized in terms of their own immanent dynamic or whether they become susceptible to reorientation and redescription by a more distant power.2 In Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze and Guattari posit a tension

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between the “despotic State,” which seeks to maintain its territorial control through behavioral codes of one kind or another, and “flows that are increasingly deterritorialized,” notably the “flows of money, commodities and private property” across national borders. Anti-Oedipus thus associates deterritorialization with the growth of a “world-wide capitalist machine.”3 The subsequent volume by Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), links this notion also to the fracturing of the human body, that point at which corporeal components no longer seem to cohere in an organic whole but become fragmented and disjunct. A Thousand Plateaus interestingly discusses James’s tale “In the Cage” (1898) as an example of “deterritorialization,” arguing the heroine there comes to possess so much information that she can no longer apprehend anything; within this radically fissured text the stable rhetorical structures of allegory have become undermined and “it is no longer possible for anything to stand for anything else.”4 I would argue that similar features of spatial dislocation and cognitive dissonance permeate The Sacred Fount to an even greater extent, so that this experimental novel might be understood, among other things, as a theoretical interrogation of the limits of observing human behavior as a method of resolving epistemological dilemmas. In anticipation of The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, James’s concern here is the problematic relationship between abstract ideas and the experience of social life, the extent to which inferences of various kinds can justifiably be made from the ways people behave. One question which constantly perplexes the unnamed narrator of The Sacred Fount is how to “place” people.5 He laments “my original failure to place” Mrs Brissenden when he first encounters her at the train station – “I didn’t place her at first myself,” admits his traveling companion, Gilbert Long (19) – and after they all arrive at Newmarch the narrator finds himself hardly less bewildered: noting on the first day that Long has “changed . . . since the evening before,” he acknowledges that “without his stature and certain signs in his dress, I should probably not have placed him” (50). To “place” here means, on one level, simply to identify; but, as the verb suggests, this process of identification is seen as being bound up with existing in a specific spatial location, with the customary business of being rendered transparent to an observer by particular characteristics of social class and demeanor through which the human physique is embodied. For the narrator, this resistance to being “placed” works not only against mere social recognition but also against the

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possibility of knowledge in a deeper sense. Guy Brissenden, like his wife, also strikes the narrator “as a stranger” – “It was in fact not till I had begun to help him place himself that, correcting my blankness, I knew him for Guy Brissenden” (29) – and it is upon this axis of knowledge and “blankness” that the broader narrative structure of The Sacred Fount rotates. This condition of estrangement, of what the narrator calls “strange relations” (49), arises partly out of the reciprocal influence of the Newmarch party upon each other: as Brissenden appears to grow increasingly old, so his wife seems to become increasingly young, a process which the narrator attempts to elevate into a “law” for human interactions in general (30). As Laurel Bollinger has observed, one metaphorical framework within which such relationships are described is that of capitalist exchange: the narrator talks of how “One of the pair . . . has to pay for the other” (34) and of how paying almost invariably involves borrowing, so that “It was as if these elements might really multiply in the transfer of them; as if the borrower practically found himself – or herself – in possession of a greater sum than the known property of the creditor” (49).6 Along parallel lines runs another metaphorical cycle in this narrative linked to psychoanalysis. Published four years after Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion and just one year after Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, The Sacred Fount is heavily implicated within the attempts to rationalize aberrant psychological behavior that were also of particular interest at this time to Henry’s brother, William James.7 The language of The Sacred Fount circles indirectly around questions of sanity, referring to Newmarch as an “asylum” – albeit an “asylum of the finer wit” (77) – remarking constantly on the narrator’s “obsession” (30), and citing Mrs Brissenden’s final view of him as “crazy” (192). For Deleuze and Guattari, the language of capitalism and the language of schizophrenia are commensurate, since they both exemplify what they describe as the “flows” of deterritorialization, through which individual autonomy is traversed by processes of transfer and exchange. There is also a conceptual overlap with James’s narrative in the way such deterritorialization is associated by Deleuze and Guattari with a movement away from “facialization,” from an emphasis on the human face as the site and sign of human identity.8 Just as Anti-Oedipus is concerned with a radical displacement of the anthropomorphic frame, so The Sacred Fount continually depicts its dramatis personae from a reverse perspective. It is Brissenden’s back, rather than his face, which is said by the narrator

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to be “the most eloquent of his aspects” (140), and a few pages later he remarks: “I seemed perpetually, at Newmarch, to be taking his measure from behind” (159). Even more strikingly, when the narrator, in his final interview with Mrs Brissenden, says of his subjects that he likes “to look them first well in the face,” she replies: “When they have no face, then, you can’t do it!” (206). In the middle years of the twentieth century, The Sacred Fount excited interest primarily as an example of James’s supposed anticipation of modernism. Discussing the novel in 1942, R. P. Blackmur evoked the shades of Woolf, Proust, Kafka and Joyce as he argued that “James had not only predicted the course of a good deal of modern fiction but had indeed actually anticipated a good many of its novelties of form.”9 It is easy enough to see how The Sacred Fount accords with ideas of hermeneutic undecidability, with its subjectivist emphasis on an imperfect narrator and its stylistic shift towards something resembling a stream of consciousness. What complicates this modernist teleology, though, is the way the narrator’s imagination keeps bumping awkwardly into a world of things, solid social entities that refuse to become integrated within his more abstract designs. Gilbert Long is described in the second paragraph as “a fine piece of human furniture” (17), and there is a dialectic throughout this work between mind and matter, intelligence and inertia: the narrator reminds himself in Chapter Six that one can always “rest more on people’s density than on their penetrability” (78). The interpretative strategies of the narrator, then, should be seen not so much as an epistemological basis for the novel, as in the modernist reading, but rather as a particular element within it. There are many references in the text to his penchant for “theory” (143), to his “cleverness” (60), to his “hypotheses” (125); but this English society at the turn of the twentieth century characteristically remains indifferent to psychological “chatter” (158), preferring its own familiar creature comforts. While he is disdainful of the “smug ignorance” (169) and “general, amiable consensus of blandness” that pervades Newmarch (65), the narrator also recognizes how his own interrogative manner, his “indiscreet opening of doors” (72), has the potential to undermine the exclusive charms of this house party, “the marvel of our civilised state” (121). The word “state” is interesting here, for there are contradictory pressures within the narrative both to protect this threatened state – a condition, a location, a nation – and also more ruthlessly to subject it to analytical displacement. After dinner at Newmarch, the party is described as “a series of concentric circles

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of rose-colour (shimmering away into the pleasant vague of everything else that didn’t matter)” (121), as if the luminous materialism of this Victorian “treasure-house” had reasserted its authority and the whole specter of modernist deterritorialization had consequently fallen into abeyance.10 Even in this comparatively late work, then, James is reluctant to abandon that “solidity of specification” leading to an “air of reality” that he advocates as an aesthetic principle in his 1884 essay, “Art of Fiction.”11 Yet we know that James also criticized Balzac in French Poets and Novelists (1878) for an excessive “passion for things – for material objects, for furniture, upholstery, bricks and mortar” – and The Sacred Fount can be seen to mediate uneasily between materialism and idealism, between a reliance on objects as an inherent source of meaning and a desire to reorganize this “human furniture” within the more rarefied categories of philosophical consciousness.12 This leads towards a weird, almost surreal disjunction here between subject and object, since the narrator not only describes an uncertain world but addresses an environment that is skeptical about the value of his whole intellectual enterprise. It is not just a question of formal “ambiguity” which is at stake in this book, but the very susceptibility of its terrain to outside interpretation, the willingness or otherwise of this particular social environment to offer itself up for cultural analysis. The narrator’s most direct contemplation of this dilemma comes in Chapter Nine: I think the imagination, in those halls of art and fortune, was almost inevitably accounted a poor matter; the whole place and its participants abounded so in pleasantries and picture, in all the felicities, for every sense, taken for granted there by the very basis of life, that even the sense most finely poetic, aspiring to extract the moral, could scarce have helped feeling itself treated to something of the snub that affects – when it does affect – the uninvited reporter in whose face a door is closed. I said to myself during dinner that these were scenes in which a transcendent intelligence had after all no application. . . (114)

The emphasis here on a particular “place” and of the social exclusions that go with it – the “snub,” the door closed in the “uninvited” guest’s face – re-emphasize this sense of a social group accustomed to taking its “felicities . . . for granted” and consequently intent upon excluding anyone who might seek to subject them to outside scrutiny.

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This, then, is the double movement in The Sacred Fount. On the one hand, there is an impulse toward deterritorialization arising out of the transposition of social beings into financial and psychosexual commodities, their incorporation within faceless circuits of exchange and desire; on the other hand, there is a defensive reaction dedicated above all to the preservation of social distinctions and niceties of taste. One of the strategies of this narrative is typically to produce a provocative or edgy image – such as when the face of Guy Brissenden is described as being as “recognizable at a distance as the numbered card of a ‘turn’ – the black figure upon white – at a music-hall” (43) – only effectively to blank them out by interposing, after the social manner of Newmarch, the elaborate repressive mechanism of a “screen” (38).13 The Sacred Fount, in other words, is organized systematically around a structure of contradiction, what the narrator calls “the strangest alternatives, as I can only most conveniently call them, of presence and absence” (111), where shades of confusion and instability are raised and proscribed almost simultaneously. Sexual dynamics are of course foregrounded here as a chief source of deviance and displacement, and the book evokes the possibility of dangerous liaisons of all kinds; besides the adulterous pairing of Lord Lutley and Mrs Froome, described by the narrator as “fairly comical in its candour” (116), he speculates relentlessly about a clandestine relationship between Brissenden and May Server, while Adeline R. Tintner, noting how Brissenden is said to be accommodated “by himself, for some reason, in the bachelor wing” (29), similarly raises the possibility of “homoerotic” subterfuges at Newmarch.14 But for all of these tantalizing clues pointing to various kinds of impropriety, and for all of the narrator’s assiduous detective work, the most important outcome here is not any solution to this alleged mystery but rather its nullification, as Newmarch ultimately closes ranks against the inquisitive outsider. In the final interview with Mrs Brissenden, where she insists that his hypothesis about May Server is “crazy” (192), the narrator feels this “last word . . . put me altogether nowhere” and that he needs now to “escape to other air” (219). James himself, in a letter to Mrs Humphry Ward, talked of how Mrs Brissenden’s “false plausibility” in this scene constituted a final “re-nailing down of the coffin.”15 Consequently, the dominant mood here is what the narrator had foreseen as the anticlimax of being “restored to . . . blankness,” a “state of exemption from intense obsessions” (137). Blankness or complexity, transparency or overdetermination: this

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is the dialectical momentum by which The Sacred Fount is driven. The crucial thing in the text is not to solve the mystery but to acknowledge that it must remain unsolved; in this sense it is an anti-detective story, a narrative with plenty of promising leads but no conclusion. This is why the production of a “homosexual” Sacred Fount, like a rabbit out of a hat, is so unconvincing; there is no doubt that homosexuality was an important element within the world James describes here, but no doubt either that this social milieu depended for its efficacy and status on a series of polite gestures and euphemisms, a refusal publicly to admit the prevalence of what might have been commonly known. At the very end of the book, the narrator laments of Mrs Brissenden that while he has “three times her method,” what he “fatally lacked was her tone” (219); and it is this emphasis on tone rather than method, social graces rather than intellectual analysis, which ultimately closes down the novel. There is a displacement, in other words, from hermeneutic inquiry to the circumference of the visible, a deliberate choice of surface over depth, a delegitimation of attempts to excavate hidden depths within this established setting. It is, nevertheless, the surreptitious glimpses of an alternative way of conceptualizing and interpreting society that make The Sacred Fount fascinating. Although on one level this is an English comedy of manners, the narrator is always contemplating how the sacralized nature of place, as understood by these English aristocrats, might be dissolved within a more abstract geometry of commodification and relation. This contributes to the odd topography of the novel, which creates the illusion of private, privileged spaces while at the same time fracturing the magic circle of the setting and repositioning it within a more variegated context. This double helix of enclosure and dispersal begins with the train journey from London to Newmarch, where the narrator finds himself “shut up to an hour’s contemplation” in a railway carriage with Gilbert Long and Mrs Brissenden (96), evoking a paradoxical image of stasis and motion which is taken up again in Chapter 10, when the guests at Newmarch are described as being housed in a “crystal cage, among our tinkling lamps; no more free really to alight than if we had been dashing in a locked railwaytrain across a lovely land” (142). The location of Newmarch itself emerges obliquely, around the edges of the narrator’s initial ruminations about his potential “friends” and “enemies” (17); it is situated between Birmingham (mentioned in the first paragraph of the first chapter) and London Paddington (mentioned in the first paragraph of the second chapter). Though the house has the air of being situated

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within an idyllic landscape of romance – it is described at one point as a “castle of enchantment” – these latent spatial dimensions serve to pull it back ironically from such “wizardry” (97). Nevertheless, with its “great chains” of rooms and the vast expanse of its grounds – “Distances were great at Newmarch and landscapegardening on the grand scale” (70) – this “consecrated nook” (98) is deliberately granted here the illusion of something like infinite space. This kind of spatial topography is not merely coincidental but owes much intellectually to the Aesthetic Movement, by which James was influenced in the 1890s.16 Indeed, the projection of Newmarch has something in common with the kind of elaborate interior dimensions we find in Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), where the perverse and paradoxical supersession of reality by artifice is epitomized by the rearrangement of space within the apartment of Des Esseintes, so that the external world appears compressed and, as it were, magically inverted, seeming to comprise an alternative, autonomous universe. In The Sacred Fount, however, this trompe l’oeil effect is balanced off against disquisitions on the structural limits of representation and on ways in which any given artistic medium involves forms of distortion and misprision. The narrator here is confronted not only by difficulties of personal identification but also by anxieties about his own tendency toward self-aggrandizement and self-delusion. As several critics have observed, his arrogating to himself a “kingdom of thought” (176) is of a piece with his homage to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, “the exclusive king with his Wagner opera” (203), whose final insanity involved the production of Wagner’s mythological world for his own gratification alone.17 The fantasies of solipsism are associated here with a tendency to suppress the ironies of mediation and to misread the represented world as a source of ultimate wisdom, a sacred fount; but it is this nostalgia for origins that the relativistic topography of the narrative implicitly contradicts. At one moment the narrator describes his cherished theory to Mrs Brissenden as “a great glittering crystal palace” (145); the next moment, with his elaborate artifice apparently on the point of collapse, he tells her that the following day he will be “off in space” (151). What is illuminating is how this dynamic interplay between circumscription and deterritorialization ultimately stretches across both the socially exclusive scene of Newmarch and the narrator’s own imaginative reveries. Both parties create intensely in-turned worlds which are held in juxtaposition here so as to dislocate each other, with their mutual incompatibilities rupturing the enclosed hermeneutic spaces of the novel and

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intimating how events can be categorized within alternative frames of reference. Arjun Appadurai has described “the unyoking of imagination from place” as one of the characteristics of transnational modernity (58), and one of the virtues of The Sacred Fount is to suggest the geographically bound and contingent nature of supposedly universal forms of ethics.18 In Love’s Knowledge, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum critiques The Sacred Fount for the way it focuses upon “separation” rather than a “companionship of response and feelings”; she thus argues didactically that James’s novel constitutes “a fascinating example” of what “the world looks like to a man . . . allowing theoretical intellect to determine his relation to all concrete phenomena.”19 But it could be argued that Nussbaum’s imposition of her own moral agenda on the narrative exemplifies precisely the point The Sacred Fount is making about ways in which modes of interpretation inhere within particular social communities; James’s text radically interrogates the grounds upon which any such inference is made and scrutinizes ways in which cognitive understanding is necessarily folded within specific types of discursive practice. In this sense, The Sacred Fount operates in a liminal, uncomfortable zone between the local and the global, a zone where forces of estrangement threaten to impact in a sinister way upon the home territory. In her recent work on US imperialism, Amy Kaplan has argued for a continuum between the sanctification of domesticity in nineteenth-century American literature and the impulse to colonize and domesticate overseas territories, the effort to turn – metaphorically as well as politically – the “imperial nation into a home.”20 The same kind of interpenetration between a protected private sphere and a larger world of commodification also pervades The Sacred Fount, but in James’s highly paradoxical text Kaplan’s symbiotic formula tends to work in reverse: the rationale of Newmarch is based not so much upon linking the local and the global but on repressing such chains of association. One of the structural ironies of James’s work is that the particular value of this English aristocratic society is locked into a willed ignorance of the intellectual complications and conceptual exchanges which encompass it. By finally shutting down abstract inquiry and insisting at the last not on “method” but on “tone” (219), the world of The Sacred Fount sets its face firmly against the incursions of theory and embraces instead a familiar propriety, a proper display of traditional manners. The narrator, however, recognizes in the end how he has “spoiled their unconsciousness” (203),

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and for the reader, as for James himself, it is precisely these tensions between the near and the far, between the seen and the unseen, which lend this novel its peculiar frisson. 2003

NOTES

1. John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 35. 2. F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944). 3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Volume One of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1984), 29, 218, 221, 231. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Volume Two of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), 197, 198. 5. Henry James, The Sacred Fount (1901), introd. Leon Edel (New York: New Directions, 1995). Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text. 6. Laurel Bollinger, “‘Miracles Are Expensive’: The Complicated Metaphors of Subjectivity in The Sacred Fount,” Henry James Review 20 (1999), 51–68. 7. William James praised the “wonderful explorations” of Freud into “subliminal consciousness” in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” lectures, first given at the University of Edinburgh in May 1901. See R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 511. On the significance and visibility of Havelock Ellis at this time, see Lloyd Davis, “Sexual Secrets and Social Knowledge: Henry James’s The Sacred Fount,” Victorian Literature and Culture 26 (1998), 324. 8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 182, 189. 9. R. P. Blackmur, “The Sacred Fount,” Kenyon Review 4 (1942), 330. 10. James famously wrote of Middlemarch that George Eliot’s novel “is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.” Henry James, “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot” (1873), rpt. in Literary Criticism, Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 958. 11. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884), rpt. in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 53. 12. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (1878), rpt. in Literary Criticism, Volume Two: French Writers, Other European Writers, The

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

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Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984). On this theme, see Bill Brown, “A Thing about Things: The Art of Decoration in the Work of Henry James,” Henry James Review 23 (2002), 228–29. On oblique depictions of racial discrimination in James, see Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 109–30. Adeline R. Tintner, “A Gay Sacred Fount: The Reader as Detective,” Twentieth- Century Literature 41 (1995), 225. Jean Frantz Blackall, Jamesian Ambiguity and The Sacred Fount (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 144–45. On James and the Aesthetic Movement, see Jonathan Freedman, Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). On the prominence of Wagner within British Aestheticism, see Heath Moon, “Is The Sacred Fount a Symbolist Novel?,” Comparative Literature 39 (1987), 325, and William Bysshe Stein, “The Sacred Fount and British Aestheticism: The Artist as Clown and Pornographer,” Arizona Quarterly 27 (1971), 166. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 58. For a discussion of how “global thinking permeated the literature of the realist period to an extent that has not been appreciated,” see Thomas Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), x. Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 81. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 50.

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CHAPTER 8

“THE MAGNET ATTRACTING”: DREISER’S LITERARY STYLE

Although the question of Dreiser’s style is a complex one, involving considerations of ethnicity as well as aesthetics, to critics of the Cold War generation the very notion of analysing Dreiser’s formal skills appeared a flat contradiction in terms. Lionel Trilling’s famous discussion of Dreiser in The Liberal Imagination (1950), where he declared that Dreiser “writes badly” and “thinks stupidly,” set the tone within the post-war American academy for the institutionalization of Henry James as a writer of the highest artistic “quality” and the downgrading of Dreiser as a sympathizer with the Communist Party who lacked “flexibility of mind.” Trilling charged Dreiser not only with “vulgar materialism” and a “doctrinaire anti-Semitism,” but also, when he did address the question of style, with a tendency towards “bookishness.” In phrases such as “a scene more distingué than this,” argued Trilling, Dreiser’s style is “precisely literary in the bad sense; he is full of flowers of rhetoric and shines with paste gems.” In his view of Dreiser’s rhetorical inauthenticity, Trilling was explicitly taking exception to what he described as F. O. Matthiessen’s acquiescence in “the liberal cliché which opposes crude experience to mind.”1 Dreiser had been the subject of Matthiessen’s last book, published posthumously in 1951, which, in its portrayal of Dreiser as a forerunner of Popular Front socialism, can be understood as the final instalment of Matthiessen’s effort, begun in American Renaissance (1941), to align American literary culture with a progressive, communitarian spirit. Associations between Dreiser and the representation of “crude experience” also appear, less disparagingly, in Saul

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Bellow’s 1951 comment on the usefulness of Dreiser’s “journalistic habits,” through which, according to Bellow, his fiction “captures things that perhaps could not be taken in other ways – common expressions, flatnesses, forms of thought, the very effect of popular literature itself.” Bellow’s point here was that Dreiser’s “important knowledge” was not what he thought it was: “When he is writing about his principles, in language awkwardly borrowed from Herbert Spencer or Huxley, they are gone the instant he invokes them.”2 Bellow accordingly admired Dreiser more as a chronicler of everyday life than as a philosophical sage, and his focus on the more incidental observations running through the latter’s novels echoes the earliest reviews of Sister Carrie (1900), which praised the work’s “unsparing realism” and its “minute detail.” This is consistent also with the author’s stated ambition, in a 1901 interview with the New York Times, simply to represent “life as it is,” “the facts as they exist.”3 This view of Dreiser as “a newspaperman deepened,” to use Bellow’s phrase, turned him into an honorary literary forefather of Ernest Hemingway, another writer in the tough journalistic mode.4 It also encouraged the myth of Dreiser’s iconoclastic “trampling down the lies of gentility and Victorianism, of Puritanism and academicism,” as Alfred Kazin put it. Kazin, one of Dreiser’s literary executors, placed emphasis in his own influential book, On Native Grounds (1942), on how naturalism for Dreiser was not merely a “literary idea” but an “instinctive response to life,” a direct reaction to the growth of “the great industrial cities that had within the memory of a single generation transformed the American landscape.”5 During the 1950s, Dreiser’s style consequently became the subject of political debate between academics such as Trilling and John Berryman – who, though admiring Dreiser’s “artless” quality, talked also of his stylistic “ineptitude” and suggested he “wrote like a hippopotamus” – and urban intellectuals such as Bellow and Kazin, who extolled Dreiser’s flight from formalist pretension and intellectual snobbery into the more robust world of modern American experience.6 Recent recollections from Paul Lauter on the shape of the academic canon in the 1950s, and Dreiser’s rigid exclusion from it, reinforce this sense of how “caste” and “class” played a major role in the positioning of Dreiser’s literary reputation at this time; for those whose reading skills were honed by the values of New Criticism, a negative response to Dreiser’s labyrinthine style became a necessary touchstone for a certain kind of “literary” sensitivity.7 The disapproval of these academic critics would have been heightened by a proclivity that Dreiser

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never quite overcame for occasionally using the wrong word: “fatuitously” instead of fatuously, “objectional” rather than objectionable, and so on. Such orthographic eccentricties were not remarked upon merely by pernickety Yale or Columbia scholars; back in 1901, in a review of Sister Carrie, the Chicago Daily Tribune commented adversely on Dreiser’s “blunders in English.”8 The author himself tended to be impatient with those who corrected his grammar and spelling rather than attending to the larger scope of his vision, and, obviously enough, one of the major strengths of Dreiser’s work is its capacity to bring into view the new scenes and situations of urban life. These were the scenes – ugly, vulgar, or otherwise lacking in the virtues of gentility – which had been overlooked or occluded in the more rural fictions of late-nineteenth-century writers like, say, Sarah Orne Jewett. In this sense, Dreiser’s style, through its demystification of etiolated romance and sentimental fantasy, specifically refuses the utopian prospect of nostalgic retreat or transcendental escape. Although the characters in his novels move around between various geographical locations, there never seems to be a possibility for them of pastoral retreat into a world of psychological renewal because they are never granted an inner self that is immune from the exigencies of the marketplace. There is a revealing moment near the beginning of Sister Carrie where we are told that as the heroine “contemplated the wide windows and imposing signs, she became conscious of being gazed upon and understood for what she was – a wage-seeker.”9 What is characteristic of Dreiser’s method here is this reversal of perspective, the transposition of the figure in the landscape from a subjective to an objective entity, so that Carrie starts by projecting her surroundings as an aspect of her own imagination before coming to realize, as she looks at herself in the glass window, how her identity has been commodified as part of the cycle of economic supply and demand. From this point of view, Walter Benn Michaels was right to say that the “logic of capitalism” becomes an all-pervasive presence in Dreiser’s work.10 As a journalist working in St. Louis, Toledo, Chicago, New York and other cities during the 1890s, Dreiser witnessed at first hand the exigencies of local power and the pressures on both individuals and institutions to conform. In Newspaper Days (1922), he recalls the obsequious attitude of the Pittsburgh Dispatch toward Andrew Carnegie, whose prepared pronouncements were published unchallenged, while the owners of the newspaper systematically proscribed any “pro-labor news or sympathies.”11

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Dreiser’s novels pride themselves on addressing the less palatable social and economic facts which vested interests would prefer kept under wraps, and in this sense it is easy to see why Norman Mailer (another urban intellectual, of course) considered that Dreiser was a “titan” who “came closer to understanding the social machine than any American writer who ever lived.”12 This is also why Dreiser has often been hailed as a harbinger of the New Journalism and of the fictional works it has spawned; as Clare Virginia Eby has noted, the Trilogy of Desire featuring the character of Cowperwood – The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947) – represents “arguably the most sustained fictional representation of economics written by a United States author.”13 These sprawling narratives set themselves to represent the shapelessness of life, reflecting not what should happen in love or finance, but what actually does: “Life cannot be put into any mold,” avows the narrator in The Financier, “and the attempt might as well be abandoned at once.”14 At the same time, however, Cowperwood is described as someone who if “he had not been a great financier . . . might have become a highly individualistic philosopher,” and this conception of finance itself as “an art” serves to disrupt fixed Victorian oppositions between the harsh world of business and the more protected domain of polite culture.15 George Santayana’s attack on “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” was first published in 1913, the year after The Financier, and Dreiser’s achievement as a literary modernizer, someone intent like Santayana upon exposing the blinkers of the old regime, should not be underestimated. Dreiser’s style, then, involves more than merely issues of fine writing, since the problem of what constitutes his mode of aesthetic “realism” is, in theoretical terms, an issue that manifests itself dialectically rather than transparently. Stuart P. Sherman was right in his essay of 1915 to suggest that Dreiser’s skill in “creating the illusion of reality” is similar to that of Daniel Defoe, consisting in “the certification of the unreal by the irrelevant,” the putative validation of far-fetched conceits by hedging them round with “all sorts of detailed credible things.”16 Just as Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) lent his narrative a pseudo-documentary status by filling in all kinds of details about London hackney coaches and street cleaning, so Dreiser seeks to validate his larger conception of human fate by juxtaposing it with extensive lists of consumer goods and apparel. In Sister Carrie, for instance, Drouet has dinner with Carrie in a restaurant on Monroe Street in Chicago, where not only are the items

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on the menu enumerated but also their prices: “Half-broiled spring chicken – seventy-five. Sirloin steak with mushrooms – one twentyfive” (44). This kind of microscopic picture balances out the novel’s more sententious idiom of moral allegory, a style that presents itself as early as the third paragraph of the book: When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. (1)

And so on. This entire paragraph could have been omitted without the reader feeling that anything crucial to the story was missing. The allegorical chapter titles in Sister Carrie – phrases such as “The Machine and the Maiden: A Knight of To-day” (37) – add to this sense of a dialectic between allegory and realism, spirit and matter. It is, then, not surprising that Sherman should have commented adversely on the curious combination of philosophical hypothesis and hard fact in Dreiser’s literary style. Sherman’s essay, “The Barbaric Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser,” subsequently became notorious in the annals of Dreiser criticism because of its blatant ethnocentrism, its attribution of the lack of “moral value” in Dreiser’s works to their emergence “from that ‘ethnic’ element of our mixed population.” Dreiser’s German background is an issue we shall address later, but Sherman’s dismissal of the idea of a “photographic” reproduction of reality on Dreiser’s part is an important observation, one that anticipates much more recent critiques of his writing, from Amy Kaplan and others.17 If there is any photographic element in Dreiser’s work, it is in the nineteenth-century sense of photography as a magic lantern, a medium for the creation of phantasmagoric chemical illusions, rather than the more typical twentieth-century understanding of it as a means to capture transparently a slice of actuality. Hugh Witemeyer has written of how the motif of the theatre as a magical “Aladdin’s cave” sets a general tone for Sister Carrie, and the landscape of this novel appears to be permeated with transpositions between different ontological spheres, with the oscillation between artifice and disillusionment becoming analogous to a reciprocal interaction between disembodied abstraction and material incarnation.18 It is not simply the collapse of an attenuated idealism but, rather,

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the tantalizing points of transition between one state and another that give this novel its peculiar impetus. This liminal state is signaled symbolically in the first chapter, when Carrie’s train is approaching Chicago at dusk, described here as “that mystic period between the glare and the gloom of the world when life is changing from one sphere or condition to another” (7). This “mystic” side of Dreiser’s work has generally been an embarrassment to his critics, particularly to those urban intellectuals who championed him as an exponent of tough-minded realism. However, an enigmatic dualism permeates the entire corpus of Dreiser’s writings, from Sister Carrie through to the novels published posthumously: The Bulwark (1946), where the “psychic religiosity” of the Quaker hero, Solon Barnes, sees “everything in terms of divine order,” and The Stoic (1947), where the heroine, Berenice Fleming, develops an enthusiasm for Eastern religion and comes to believe that “Brahma, the Reality, is the total Godhead,” an entity which can “never be defined or expressed.”19 These kinds of metaphysical shadows also hover over his drama: in the one-act play Laughing Gas (1914), Vatabeel undergoes an operation under ether to remove a tumor with “First Shadow” expressing doubt “that he can return to the world,” while a character impersonating “The Rhythm of the Universe” reinforces this sense of fatalism by continually saying “Om!” Dreiser himself declared the play to be “the best thing I ever did,” an evaluation which Matthiessen, for one, regarded as “badly mistaken”; nevertheless, it is true that this conception of an in-between state, half spirit and half matter, exemplifies the wider sense of incongruity that is always integral to Dreiser’s style.20 His earliest creative effort was a comic opera, “Jeremiah I,” in which an Indiana farmer was magically transported back to the Aztec empire, where the shocked natives designated him their king; and an equivalent sense of the literary text as a point of mediation for two fundamentally different kinds of discourse continues through into his more mature works as well.21 For instance, the novel Jennie Gerhardt (1911) describes how “the spirit of Jennie” is “caged in the world of the material,” and how “such a nature is almost invariably an anomaly”; and it is precisely this site of ontological “anomaly,” the point of intersection between different discursive spheres, that Dreiser’s texts seek to investigate.22 This is the same impetus that drives the author in Sister Carrie to represent characters as insects or animals, casting Hurstwood in ornithological terms – “Since his money-feathers were beginning to grow again he felt like sprucing

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about” (222) – and describing his wife as “a pythoness in humour” (160). Rather than just understanding these animalistic images in grim Darwinian terms, it is important also to recognize how Dreiser’s style is shot through with aspects of the ludicrous. Dreiser was a great admirer of Charlie Chaplin, with whom he became friendly after his move to Hollywood in 1941, and he shared with Chaplin an interest in the formal strategies of burlesque, where conventional social categories are confused by being redefined in terms of their opposite.23 In Dreiser, as in Chaplin, the epic hero is artistically transmogrified into a comic clown, and vice versa. Although Dreiser liked to think of himself as a realist, then, the way his art embodies this illusion of reality is far from straightforward. Sandy Petrey perceptively noted the existence of “two irreconcilable styles” in Dreiser, the way that “narration and morality assume dissonant écritures”; but he went on to argue, not so convincingly, that the “moral passages stand as formal parodies of the language of sentimentality,” so that Dreiser’s dynamic “social realism exposes sentimental posturing as absurd.”24 This is to postulate an alienation technique whose center of gravity is weighted firmly towards a naturalistic aesthetic, but it ignores the structural hybridity of Dreiser’s idiom, the manner in which it achieves its peculiar effects, as James T. Farrell suggested, from the way “beauty, tragedy, pathos, rawness, sentimentality, clichés – all are smelted together.”25 There is a heterogeneity in Dreiser’s style which makes him reluctant to partition or compartmentalize, and it is this tendency towards universality which ensures that his narratives encompass formal incongruities and logical opposites. There is more than a touch, in early Dreiser especially, of Thomas Hardy: Dreiser is said to have talked about his “enchanted discovery” of Hardy’s work in 1896, and there is a hommage to Hardy in the uncut version of Sister Carrie, when Ames discusses Tess of the D’Urbervilles with Mrs. Vance while recommending The Mayor of Casterbridge to Carrie, thinking that the “melancholia” and the “gloomy” aspect of Hardy’s art would appeal to her “lonely” disposition.26 What we find in Hardy, as in Dreiser, is an aestheticized domain of spirit – “the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess” – a domain which has no necessary purchase on metaphysical or positivistic truth but which serves to displace the autonomy of the fictional characters, so that we as readers are always being forced to observe them from two different perspectives simultaneously.27 Hardy’s style, like Dreiser’s, has been accused of being cumbersome and prolix, particularly in the

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way it mixes Latinate constructions with more colloquial dialects; but this hybrid idiom serves in a curious way aptly to reflect Hardy’s discourse of doubleness, whose ironies derive from the paradoxical intersections of history and fate. Dreiser, not unlike Hardy, uses this idea of celestial power as a vehicle of formal dislocation in order to transform his protagonists from subjects to objects, from entities impelled by emotional consciousness to corporeal entities scarred by the commodified nature of an industrial society, so that Ames, after discussing Hardy’s work with Carrie, can fittingly say to her: “You and I are but mediums, through which something is expressing itself” (485). This implicit dialogue in Dreiser’s novels between materialism and rarefaction is commensurate also with what David Baguley has called naturalist fiction’s “paratextual” procedures, based upon incongruous analogues and parodies of romance. Baguley is among more recent critics who have emphasized the metafictional aspects of naturalism, rather than seeing it as subservient merely to Darwinian or scientific theories, and he has suggested that the naturalist text is typically predicated upon a series of disconcerting effects which are liable to shock readers into reactions of indignation or disgust. Whereas Northrop Frye saw Zola and Dreiser as being intent upon a brutal “accuracy of description,” Baguley argued that their more self-conscious aesthetic strategies seek provocatively to twist round expectations, to juxtapose the sordid and the high-flown, so as to give the impression of “a world in decay.”28 This would help to explain why Dreiser was so keen to exaggerate the censorship difficulties faced by the first edition of Sister Carrie when he organized the glossy publicity for the book’s relaunch in 1907; whatever the truth about Mrs. Doubleday’s objections to the novel when it was first published seven years earlier, it clearly suited Dreiser’s marketing strategy to present his work as transgressive and iconoclastic, as dedicated to exposing facets of the urban world that civic authorities and timid publishers would prefer hypocritically to remain concealed. As a journalist, Dreiser was involved professionally in the business of éxposés, a business which is, of course, given its raison d'être only by the structural censorship endemic to a particular society. In this sense, the idea of a systemic suppression of truth is as central to Dreiser’s style as its revelation, a paradox that is given its fullest expression in An American Tragedy (1925), where the question of exactly what happened when Clyde Griffiths was in the boat with Roberta Alden – whether it was murder, or whether it was an

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accident – is entirely swamped by retrospective legal and media fictions about the event. Dreiser’s style, then, mediates between two different conceptions of truth: the received wisdom of social custom on the one hand and the uncertainties of philosophical agnosticism on the other. His novels skillfully bring into juxtaposition the rhetoric of public, corporate life with the ragged edges of epistemological uncertainty and aesthetic impressionism, and they deliberately veer away from being simply an expression of the author’s own point of view. In keeping with this idiom of impersonality, Dreiser presented himself less as the author of Sister Carrie than its amanuensis: “My mind was blank, except for the name. I had no idea who or what she was to be. I have often thought there was something mystic about it, as if I were being used, like a medium.”29 Such apparent relinquishment of authorial control is entirely consistent with the uncut novel’s contention that its citizens are “more passive than active, more mirrors than engines,” so that in both its formal style and its thematic content Sister Carrie ostensibly abjures the notion of active design and sets itself to reflect instead a heterogeneous world that already exists.30 This image of the mirror is an important one in Sister Carrie, implying a symbiosis between character and culture: Carrie endeavors “to re-create the perfect likeness of some phase of beauty which appealed to her” (117), while other characters see “mirrored upon the stage scenes which they would like to witness.”31 To be “like” something is to place oneself in a mirrored relation to it, and “like,” in both its verbal and conjunctive senses, is a crucial word in Sister Carrie: “Like the flame which welds the loosened particles into a solid mass, his words united those floating wisps of feeling which she had felt, but never believed, concerning her possible ability, and made them into a gaudy shred of hope. Like all human beings she had a touch of vanity” (117; my emphases). As a conjunction, in the way it is used here, like binds the fictional protagonists into a structural similarity and homogeneity, as if Dreiser’s style were a great magnet sweeping everyone into its orbit; the first chapter of this book is actually entitled “The Magnet Attracting: A Waif Amid Forces.” And as a verb – “scenes which they would like to witness” [my emphasis] – it suggests how these characters are impelled by the desire to identify with what they are not, thus again emptying out their interiority and rearticulating them as cogs within the city’s financial machine. Matthiessen noted how the rhythm of “repetition” was one of the defining characteristics of a Dreiser narrative,

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and this again can be related to the impulse of structural homogeneity, since the cumulative power of Dreiser’s works derives from their sense of relentlessness, the way the episodes become increasingly “like” each other.32 When Trilling complained about the “crude” nature of Dreiser’s style, one of his principled criticisms was that the author does not leave sufficient room for the liberal imagination, for the representation of a flexible individual consciousness. But Dreiser in this sense was always a profoundly illiberal writer, not because he was conservative, but because the philosophical basis of his work is centered around analogy and homogeneity rather than contingency or freedom. Such philosophical homogeneity should not, however, be seen as synonymous with political uniformity. Dreiser was always aware of himself as a cultural outsider, and his texts consciously incorporate various aspects of ethnic difference which serve to position his narratives in an oblique relation to the nationalistic imperatives of American life. Such imperatives were, of course, particularly pressing around the time of the First World War, and it is important in this context to remember that Dreiser’s first language was not English but German; his father was a German immigrant who still spoke in his native tongue at home and who insisted on sending his son to a parochial school, where the nuns also gave priority to instruction in German rather than English. The novel which addresses this ethnic heritage most explicitly is Jennie Gerhardt, where Father Gerhardt is said to wear a “knotted and weatherbeaten German” countenance (37), and where, as the narrator makes clear, much of the novel’s dialogue is reported in translation: He sat down calmly, reading a German paper and keeping an eye upon his wife, until, at last, the gate clicked, and the front door opened. Then he got up. “Where have you been?” he exclaimed in German. (58)

Andrew Delbanco has suggested that Dreiser’s German inheritance may be “one reason his sentences often reflect some discomfort with customary English word order,” and it is true that his style seems always to preserve a distance from Anglo-Saxon syntactical norms, hinting at forms of linguistic and cultural defamiliarization.33 There is a tendency toward compound words, as in hyphenated constructions like “race-thought” (403), and toward circuitous grammar rife with subordinate clauses: “This added blow from inconsiderate

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fortune was quite enough to throw Jennie back into that state of hyper-melancholia from which she had been drawn with difficulty during the few years of comfort and affection which she had enjoyed with Lester in Hyde Park” (387). All of this gives the reader the curious impression that the whole of Jennie Gerhardt, and not just Gerhardt’s own speeches, might almost have been translated, a little awkwardly, from the German. Thomas P. Riggio has described Dreiser as a “hidden ethnic,” someone whose German provenance is not always self-evident in his writing, and it is true that we do not automatically identify Caroline Meeber, Sister Carrie, as being from a German-American family, in the way that we see the characters of Ole Rolvaag, for example, as emerging from a manifestly Norwegian-American background.34 Nevertheless, as Stuart P. Sherman observed in his 1915 essay, Dreiser’s outlook does not seem to fit comfortably within an American tradition of moral realism. William Dean Howells was another who was uncomfortable with Dreiser’s work because of its apparent distance from this world of realism, with its concomitant sense of clear ethical choices, which operated for Howells as the epitome and guarantee of a recognizably American literary domain.35 By contrast, for H. L. Mencken and other radical commentators associated with the Seven Arts journal, Dreiser’s detachment from the received patriotic wisdom of this era, along with his acknowledged Anglophobia, became positive sources of approbation. In 1917 Randolph Bourne called Dreiser “a true hyphenate, a product of that conglomerate Americanism that springs from other roots than the English tradition,” adding that though his work was “wholly un-English” it was also “not at all German” but rather “an authentic attempt to make something out of the chaotic materials that lie around us in American life.”36 Bourne’s perception here of Dreiser’s “hyphenate” status points to a thread of doubleness that is indeed a constant factor throughout his narratives; while evading any separatist account of ethnicity, Dreiser’s texts refract American national values aslant, as it were, mimicking the mythologies of US nationalism while reframing them within a different linguistic and cultural context. This again is to highlight the intertextual nature of Dreiser’s work, the way he reconfigures the rags-to-riches paradigm made famous by Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger within a quizzically transnational framework. Dreiser updates and remodels the Alger myth, associating the worldly success of his hero Cowperwood in the Trilogy of Desire not with a straightforward “adherence to orthodox

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middle-class values,” but with a capacity to sail close to the wind, to circumvent business ethics in order to triumph through force rather than virtue.37 Dreiser consequently reproduces the Alger myth while emptying out its moralistic content, reconfiguring it within an estranged realm where the familiar iconography of US nationalism is displaced into a merely formal phenomenon. In this way, as Azade Seyhan has written, transnationalism, like bilingualism, serves to denaturalize inherited assumptions, denying to the represented world the transparency and finality associated with a fait accompli and implying how it might have been organized differently.38 An American Tragedy is, as Matthiessen observed, perhaps the clearest example of Dreiser “taking one of the stock legends of American behavior,” the poor boy who marries the rich man’s daughter, “and reversing its happy ending.”39 The title of the novel also suggests the extent to which Dreiser was seeking here specifically to confront the significance of national identity in a decade, the 1920s, when developments in media and communications technologies – radio, syndicated newspapers, Hollywood cinema, and so on – were ensuring rapid moves towards the consolidation of an American national consciousness. Joseph Karaganis has written of how An American Tragedy turns upon the “limitless extension of the commodity form imaginable in the mid-twenties,” when, as the novel remarks, Clyde Griffiths’s trial could be covered by the media “from coast to coast” and staged as a national event.40 This is the same world as that of The Great Gatsby, with which An American Tragedy is exactly contemporaneous: an “economy of spectacular value,” where “the value of visibility” supersedes the authenticity of any singular event.41 Just as Fitzgerald explores the culture of advertising and mass images, so Dreiser responds to this scene of burgeoning commodification and consumerism by casting himself, once again, less as a traditional author than as a conduit, a medium for the transmission of public information. But while Fitzgerald primarily confines himself in Gatsby to the purlieus of New York, Dreiser takes as his field nothing less than the condition of the United States itself. The enormous bulk and scope of An American Tragedy result partly from Dreiser’s assimilation within his narrative of journalistic materials relating to the murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in Herkimer County, New York, in 1906. Letters from the real-life protagonists, legal speeches and so on are all integrated almost verbatim into Dreiser’s novel, and in this sense again he might be said to anticipate the New Journalism

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of Mailer or Tom Wolfe in his attempt to assert the primacy of brute fact over tenuous fiction. Such a reliance upon primary factual material is also the basis for what Richard Lehan has called the novel’s “block method,” involving “a great mass of accumulated material being arranged into blocks or units, each scene repeating and then anticipating another.”42 Dreiser, that is to say, reflects formally as well as thematically the modular repetitions of American life in the 1920s, with the mutating name of the hero – the original prototype Chester Gillette, the fictional Clyde Griffiths, and Clyde’s pseudonymous variations of Clifford Golden and Carl Graham – seeming to betoken a world where identity itself becomes part of the cycle of barter and exchange. The way Clyde’s individuality is displaced here into a series of parallel selves becomes symptomatic of the larger system of modern American culture, whose emphasis on structural depersonalization and interchangeability Dreiser’s novel impassively records. In the same way as Carrie sees her face reflected in the shop window, so Clyde Griffiths finds his sense of selfhood supplanted by public images reflected and projected back upon him. Just as Jay Gatsby achieves a symbolic aura that transcends his personal idiosyncrasies, so Clyde finds himself objectified into an exemplification of American justice, a cautionary tale where the execution of this public figure becomes necessary for the efficient functioning of the corporate social machine. Despite the reputation of his work as stylistically cumbersome, Dreiser was actually quite knowledgeable about the more technical aspects of literature, and his method of impersonality is a studied affair which does not derive simply from blankness or naiveté. Ford Madox Ford recalled his first meeting with the American writer where they spent “three or four hours” talking of “nothing but words and styles,” with Dreiser offering his opinions on a range of authors from “Defoe and Richardson, to Diderot, Stendhal and Flaubert and so to Conrad and James.”43 As Thomas Strychacz noted, the hostility expressed by Dreiser in 1931 towards Paramount Pictures, against whom he took legal action for attempting to release a supposedly “inartistic” version of An American Tragedy, clearly suggests that he did not believe his stylistic dependence on newspaper articles and other facets of mass culture necessarily involved a forfeiture of his rights to artistic independence.44 There are, of course, many examples of authors in the 1920s negotiating with the language of popular culture while attempting simultaneously to defamiliarize and recontextualize it – one has to think only of James Joyce’s Ulysses

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(1922), or of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, published in the same year as An American Tragedy – and Dreiser, like these authors, is concerned to investigate the increasingly fractious relationship between individual subjectivity and collective consciousness. One stylistic characteristic of An American Tragedy is its emphasis on Clyde’s thought patterns, which are expressed in reported speech, what Donald Pizer calls “free indirect discourse,” as if this vernacular idiom were a reflection of the uneven state of Clyde’s mind: “But how wonderful this invitation! Why that intriguing scribble of Sondra’s unless she was interested in him some? Why? The thought was so thrilling that Clyde could scarcely eat his dinner that night” (326).45 The phrase “interested in him some,” more Clyde’s than Dreiser’s, suggests a desire on the author’s part to reproduce something approximating the style of interior monologue that had become commonplace in avant-garde novels of the 1920s. In similar fashion, the drift toward parenthetical interruptions as a mirror of Clyde’s tortuous mental processes indicates a readiness on Dreiser’s part to balance the rhetoric of public affairs with a more typically modernist sense of linguistic slippage and radical ambiguity: What then of Roberta? What? And in the face of this intimate relation that had now been established between them? (Goodness! The deuce!) And that he did care for her (yes, he did!), although now—basking in the direct rays of this newer luminary—he could scarcely see Roberta any longer, so strong were the actinic rays of this other. Was he all wrong? Was it evil to be like this? His mother would say so! And his father too—and perhaps everybody who thought right about life—Sondra Finchley, maybe—the Griffiths—all. (327)

The multiple hesitancies and open questions in this passage are more reminiscent of William Faulkner than of the lumbering Dreiser of naturalist legend. Thematically, what is at stake here is the failure to marry mind and matter, self and society; and this issue looms large toward the end of An American Tragedy, where the questions become more unanswerable and the disjunctions between subjective impression and objective perception more intense: “Was it possible that by any strange freak or circumstance – a legal mistake had been made and Clyde was not as guilty as he appeared?” (817). Dreiser’s working title for this novel was “Mirage,” and one of the implications of this work is that faith in the justice system itself constitutes

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a collective illusion, with belief in its integrity and validity being impelled more by the political pressures of the day than by any philosophical standard of truth.46 It is, then, not difficult to see how the quality of inarticulacy in Dreiser signifies not merely a stylistic maladroitness but, more importantly, a lack of trust in the fidelity of the relationship between language and object. Even in the first chapter of Sister Carrie the author declares that “words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean” (6); and Dreiser’s sense of the insufficiency of his verbal medium carries right through to his later writings. In A World Elsewhere, subtitled The Place of Style in American Literature, Richard Poirier sharply differentiated Dreiser from Henry James, on the grounds that James pursues the characteristically American method of building a new world through “structures of the mind and . . . analogous structures of language,” while Dreiser, more passive in his rhetorical strategies, seems content to report “a world . . . already existent,” and thus not to “care about achieving through language any shaped social identity.” But the quality of indeterminacy in James’s late style, where his difficult circumlocutions revolve awkwardly around an absent center, is not altogether different in tone from what Poirier recognized as the lack of faith in an authorial “ability to give authoritative shape to words” in Dreiser’s writing. Poirier found it “admirable” that Dreiser “does not in any way compromise himself by subscribing to a bourgeois faith in the reality of language,” but the same thing is equally true of late James, and it indicates the extent to which both American writers in the early twentieth century were responding to a climate of skepticism about the efficacy and interpretative power of language.47 Dreiser’s style is as carefully worked through, in its own way, as that of James or Dos Passos, and the skill of his narratives turns upon the way they represent a world of commodities interacting with and circumscribing the “world elsewhere” of consciousness. Dreiser’s sense of ethnic difference and transnational hybridity, as well as his pronounced mystical inclinations, impel him toward a “paratextual” reconfiguration of social formations, so that his narratives come to refract American traditions and assumptions in an oblique, interrogative manner. His novels are, in the final analysis, concerned less with the plain representation of documentary facts than with a more stylized mediation between alternative versions of truth and different categories of representation. 2004

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1. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; rpt. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951), 11–16, 20. 2. Saul Bellow, “Dreiser and the Triumph of Art,” in Alfred Kazin and Charles Shapiro, ed., The Stature of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Survey of the Man and His Work (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 146–48. 3. Kazin and Shapiro, 62, 53, 59. 4. Bellow, “Dreiser and the Triumph of Art,” 147. 5. Alfred Kazin, introduction, Kazin and Shapiro, 6; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 87–88, 84. 6. John Berryman, “Dreiser’s Imagination,” in Kazin and Shapiro, 152, 150. 7. Paul Lauter, “Caste, Class, and Canon,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, rev. ed., ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 141–43. 8. Clare Virginia Eby, Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 44; Ford Madox Ford, “Portrait of Dreiser,” in Kazin and Shapiro, 31; Donald Pizer, introduction, New Essays on Sister Carrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12. 9. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie: An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1991), 13. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in the text. 10. Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 20. 11. Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 524–25. 12. Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (1966; rpt. London: Andre Deutsch, 1967), 96–97. 13. Eby, 65. 14. Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York: New American Library, 1967), 131. 15. Theodore Dreiser, The Titan (New York: New American Library, 1965), 18; Dreiser, Financier, 120. 16. Stuart P. Sherman, “The Barbaric Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser,” in Kazin and Shapiro, 79. 17. Sherman, “Barbaric Naturalism,” 71–72; Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104–60.

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18. Hugh Witemeyer, “Gaslight and Magic Lamp in Sister Carrie,” PMLA, 86 (1971), 240. 19. Theodore Dreiser, The Bulwark (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946), 110, 90; Theodore Dreiser, The Stoic (New York: New American Library, 1981), 315. 20. Theodore Dreiser, Plays, Natural and Supernatural (London: Constable, 1930), 64; F. O. Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser (London: Methuen, 1951), 177. Dreiser’s only full-length play, The Hand of the Potter, was written in 1916, but he wrote several shorter dramatic works in 1913 and 1914. 21. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 111. 22. Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt, ed. James L. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 16. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in the text. 23. Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1951), 281. 24. Sandy Petrey, “The Language of Realism, The Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie,” Novel, 10 (1977), 102, 110. 25. James T. Farrell, The League of Frightened Philistines and Other Papers (London: Routledge, 1948), 11 26. Robert Shafer, “An American Tragedy: A Humanistic Demurrer,” in Kazin and Shapiro, 120; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. James L. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 481. 27. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (London: Macmillan, 1975), 420. 28. David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 156, 170–72, 197; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 80. 29. Matthiessen, 55. 30. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. West, 78. 31. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. West, 158. 32. Matthiessen, 85. 33. Andrew Delbanco, “Lyrical Dreiser,” New York Review of Books, 23 November 1989, 32. 34. Thomas P. Riggio, “Theodore Dreiser: Hidden Ethnic,” MELUS, 11, No. 1 (Spring 1984), 53–63. 35. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 340–41. 36. Randolph Bourne, “The Art of Theodore Dreiser,” The Dial, 14 June 1917, 509.

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37. Alex Pitofsky, “Dreiser’s The Financier and the Horatio Alger Myth,” Twentieth Century Literature 44 (1978), 285. 38. Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 151–53. 39. Matthiessen, 190–91. 40. Joseph Karaganis, “Naturalism’s Nation: Toward An American Tragedy,” American Literature, 72 (2000), 154; Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: New American Library – Signet, 2000), 779. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in the text. 41. Karaganis, “Naturalism’s Nation,” 174. 42. Richard Lehan, “Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: A Critical Study,” College English 25 (1963), 191. 43. Ford, 29. 44. Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 84. 45. Donald Pizer, “Dreiser and the Naturalistic Drama of Consciousness,” Journal of Narrative Technique 21 (1991), 209. 46. Matthiessen, 189. 47. Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (1966; rpt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), vii, 238–40.

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CHAPTER 9

THE LITERARY CULTURE OF COLONIAL AMERICA: THEOLOGY AND AESTHETICS

Even leaving aside all the complexities of the pre-Columbian world, the period between the settlement of Jamestown at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the emergence of the United States into political independence in the 1780s encompasses a temporal expanse of some 180 years, roughly the same amount of time as the period between the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1960. Not surprisingly, then, the literature and culture of “colonial America” is a vast and multifaceted phenomenon, although its heterogeneous qualities have often been undervalued by subsequent narratives seeking to justify the exceptional qualities of American national identity. One issue indicated by this homogenizing impulse is the historical tendency to conflate American culture with culture of the United States, to regard the political fissure of the 1780s as either inevitable or providential, and so to look back through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the hope of identifying figures who might be said to anticipate American mythic tropes of iconoclastic independence, pastoral westering or millennial idealism. Thus, for Sacvan Bercovitch in 1975, it was the “Puritan myth . . . that every individual reconstitute himself by grace” which “encouraged [Jonathan] Edwards to equate conversion, national commerce, and the treasures of a renovated earth, [Benjamin] Franklin to record his rise to wealth as a moral vindication of the new nation, [James Fenimore] Cooper to submerge the historical dramas of the frontier in the heroics of American nature, [Henry David] Thoreau to declare self-reliance an economic model of ‘the only true America,’” and so on.1 By reading the development of

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American culture typologically, Bercovitch, like Perry Miller before him, was in effect reading it retrospectively, annexing the prehistory of the nation in order to adduce teleological continuities between past and present. Sharp criticism of this “continuities” school, whereby Edward Taylor appears as an avatar of Emily Dickinson or Franklin is said to anticipate Horatio Alger, has emerged more recently from scholars such as William C. Spengemann and R. C. De Prospo, who have argued, particularly in De Prospo’s case, that such grand national narratives have an implicitly imperial sweep to them, a trajectory which tends to occlude diverse forces of resistance and difference.2 Philip F. Gura has also written about the need to restore historical specificity to the study of American literature and culture before 1780, to emphasize regional variations and political crosscurrents rather than simply regarding the emergence of liberty as somehow predestined.3 In fact, as John M. Murrin has argued, the history of liberty in early America is probably something that has been overstudied, too much celebrated and endorsed without sufficient consideration of the ambiguities always attendant upon its incarnation within particular historical circumstances.4 Murrin points out how the American nation emerged on the scene in the late eighteenth century in “an unexpected, impromptu fashion”; in the 1760s Americans saw themselves simply as seeking the common rights of Englishmen, but the political events of the following twenty years hurtled them rapidly into a condition of full independence.5 This in turn suggests how native understandings of the status of colonial culture in the early national period would have been transformed inexorably by what happened during the 1780s, when, as Kenneth Silverman has observed, there was a relentless invocation of the word “American” in all kinds of public contexts.6 David S. Shields has pointed out how the term “America” first came into general use through transatlantic dialogues in the first decade of the eighteenth century, when the notion of America possessing a commercial character distinct from that of Europe was first put forward.7 The conception of America being formed through a dialectical process is, then, not a new phenomenon, but it gathers particular momentum at the end of the century; according to J. C. D. Clark, the idea of American cultural identity in the early modern period was centered not around nationalism as such but around specific codes of law and religion, with a prior Americanism being ascribed only after 1787.8 We see this kind of retrospective

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mythologization taking shape in Royall Tyler’s play The Contrast, first performed in New York in 1787, which sets up an antithesis between European cynicism and vanity on the one hand and “Yankee” frugality and moral seriousness on the other. Although this antithesis had little basis in the world of eighteenth-century culture, it became an increasingly popular framework through which the new United States chose to reinterpret its past, as part of a general consolidation of national identity in the nineteenth-century era of Romanticism. As late as 1957, Benjamin T. Spencer was adhering to the terms of Tyler’s dialectic when he equated “the quest for nationality” in American literature with “a concern for literary integrity – for delivering American writers from the sterile obligation to express what their own experience had not nurtured and what their own society did not require.”9 Spencer was, of course, still working with assumptions drawn from Romanticism counterpointing the “integrity” of indigenous culture to inauthentic, imported modes of artifice. This is the same nationalist emphasis promoted by mid-twentieth-century historians such as Daniel Boorstin, for whom the whole notion of an “Enlightenment” was a foreign concept bearing little relevance to the more pragmatic temper of American experience.10 Such an approach has by now been generally discredited, partly because of the shift towards considering the culture of colonial America more as a transnational phenomenon, partly because of a broader demystification of the binary opposition between public and private spheres recycled by critics of Spencer’s generation. As Jay Fliegelman and others have shown more recently, the imposition of such an opposition on eighteenth-century culture is anachronistic, since the rhetoric of performance and political engagement in the second half of the eighteenth century traversed the line between private and public, with the Declaration of Independence furnishing just one example of how processes of reasoning were intertwined intellectually with affective intuition. Conviction in this age of sensibility became a matter of the heart as much as of the mind, with “public speaking” consequently being “reconceptualized as an occasion for the public revelation of a private self.”11 In declaring independence, that is to say, Jefferson was theatricalizing on the public stage a certain politicized version of the private sphere, predicated upon the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” rather than simply advocating a pastoral withdrawal from the social arena into a more rarefied realm of abstract individualism.12 For Jefferson, as for other eighteenth-century Americans, the idea

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of “liberty” did not mean simply negative freedom, the freedom to ignore social restraints; instead, it implied a protection of political and civil liberties and the right to individual autonomy within a complex legislative framework mandated by the state. All of this means, however, that students of American “culture” before 1780 are left with something of a dilemma. If we acknowledge that the institutionalization of aesthetics as a separate and transcendent realm – as in the philosophical models of Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Ralph Waldo Emerson – postdates colonial America, then how do we read the enormous range of material that was published in the years before political independence? Not infrequently, the eighteenth century in particular has been more or less ignored by literary historians, since the more rationalistic, skeptical tenor of writers like Franklin and Thomas Jefferson has appeared uncongenial to the spirit of Romanticism which is too often equated with American cultural destiny. Emblematic of this is the way Franklin’s Autobiography has been overrepresented in literary anthologies, since its tone of individualism and self-reliance can be made readily to accord with an Emersonian dynamic, whereas Franklin’s dark, vituperative satires of the 1770s have remained relatively underread. “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” (1773) highlights what Franklin took to be the increasingly farcical nature of AngloAmerican relations in the years leading up to the Revolution, and it is the equal of anything by Jonathan Swift in its capacity to unsettle conventional assumptions by pushing them to a logical extreme. Franklin here solemnly lays down guidelines for the incitement of insurrection and the consequent loss of imperial territory, recasting political stupidity within a studious form of textbook rationalism and so implying, through paradoxical inversion, the deeply irrational nature of British actions. As Giles Gunn has remarked, however, such an embittered emphasis on rupture and division has tended not to sit well with the liberal idealism of American critics such as V. L. Parrington or F. O. Matthiessen, who believed their native literature should be above all an expression of optimism and deliverance.13 In this sense, the literature of colonial America marks not only a temporal break but also a philosophical disjunction, a fracturing of the utopian circumference of post-Revolutionary America. The larger significance of such disjunctions has been highlighted recently by the sheer volume of material being recovered from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. There has been in early American studies recently what Shields has called an “archival turn,”

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a greater curiosity about the wealth of writing from this period which still remains to be properly examined by cultural historians and literary critics.14 Writing in 2000, Shields remarked how little attention, critical or otherwise, has been paid to primary sources from preRevolutionary America: “The literary history of Louisiana remains to be written . . . Given the wealth of manuscripts lying unexamined in the family papers section of the New York Archives and the important cultural contribution of the Dutch to American culture (sanitation, companionate marriage, public debt), the absence of any collection of Dutch colonial literary texts since the Civil War is a scandal.”15 With its wide coverage of authors from different areas of the American continent and its emphasis on works in languages other than English, The Literatures of Colonial America anthology edited by Castillo and Schweitzer can be seen as part of this ongoing project of recuperation, the replenishment of early American studies as a rich, varied and regionally diverse field. But such recognition depends, of course, on a willingness to read different kinds of texts without any implicit preconceptions about how they might fit into a larger national narrative, an allowance of negative capability running counter to the retrospective forms of historical appropriation that tended to hold sway in the second half of the twentieth century. Such appropriations were attributable not simply to academic myopia, but were part of the American national consciousness more generally. John Berryman, for example, hailed Anne Bradstreet in his 1953 poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” as the first American confessional poet and thus, by extension, an honorary ancestor of himself, while Adrienne Rich in a 1966 essay celebrated Bradstreet as the first American woman writer to create her own alternative poetic space in opposition to a male-dominated public sphere. In fact, though, Bradstreet’s work is not organized around a simple dialectic between the psychological integrity of the self and refuge in what Rich dismissed as a formulaic world of “rhymed couplets” betokening a hopeless “nostalgia for English culture.”16 Instead, Bradstreet evokes both of these intellectual landscapes simultaneously, so that her typically double-edged, metaphysical enterprise can hardly be understood except in terms of, as she herself puts it in the title of one of her poems, a “Dialogue Between Old England and New.” Granted that history is always in one way or another a form of misprision, it still seems curious that both Berryman and Rich should have chosen to marginalize Bradstreet’s transatlantic provenance in their eagerness to install her as a founding figure of American poetry. Having

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grown up in the household of the Earl of Lincoln, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of an English Renaissance court, Bradstreet creates in her early verse an elaborate style of ritual and artifice indebted to the French poet, Guillaume du Bartas, a style which her later elegies rigorously and reflexively deconstruct. The point is simply that there is always in Bradstreet an implicit (and sometimes explicit) dialogue between pagan culture and Biblical revelation, between classical authority and emotional experience, and that to privilege a reading of Bradstreet from a specifically American cultural perspective is to allegorize her prematurely as a harbinger of national identity. The notion of dialogue or transposition, indeed, is crucial to the culture of colonial America at many different levels. The preface to the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book to be printed in the colonies, worries away at a perceived discrepancy between the “proper sense of David’s words in the hebrew verses” and their refurbishment according to the conventions of “poetical licence,” designating the former a “text” and the latter a form of “translation.”17 Translation always involves a carrying over, a displacement from one order of discourse to another, and it is this conception of an interaction between different spheres that effectively structures the languages of colonial America. Interactions between Anglos and Indians comprise another aspect of this dialogue, with many American writers of this period involved in what William Boelhower, referring to John Smith, has called “the intersection or superimposition of different spacescopes.”18 Just as Smith held Pocahontas up as an idealized fantasy figure in which he recognized an alternative version of himself, so other intellectuals requisitioned Indian culture to further their own ideological ends: John Eliot in 1663 completed his translation of the Bible into an Algonquian language, while Benjamin Franklin, in “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America” (1784), coolly draws an analogy between Native American rules of debate and established procedures of the British House of Commons. Even Christian ministers ostensibly antagonistic to what they saw as the Indians’ diabolical tendencies tended at times to be caught up within a Native American cultural matrix: Cotton Mather, for example, records in one of his sermons how “A Spirit . . . with a wondrous Lustre, made his descent into my Study,” an experience that mirrors the Indian tribal customs of “crossing between the mundane and spiritual planes.”19 The issue here is not one of “influence” in any straightforward sense, but, rather, of ways in which the development of American culture was shaped partially by exposure to and

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misrecognition of these parallel worlds of Indian ritual. In his Key to the Language of America (1643), Roger Williams, one of the first to grapple with this problem, writes of how his Indian friend Wequash speaks with him in “broken English,” a phrase which might be said to epitomize the sense of linguistic traversal and cultural hybridity that permeated colonial America more generally.20 The twentieth-century national narrative of American history which emphasized essential continuities between covenant theology and the revolutionary politics of the early national period has, then, been widely superseded by a recognition of the multifaceted quality of American life before 1776. Rather than simply considering Jonathan Edwards as a bridge between the sinful consciousness of Puritanism and the exalted world of the Transcendentalists, as Perry Miller used to do, we might understand his writing as a cross between Native American culture and the musical accomplishments of his equally complex Calvinist contemporary, J. S. Bach.21 The transatlantic dimensions to Edwards’s reading and writing have been well documented: he studied the works of Isaac Newton in 1717 at Yale, where he also first encountered the philosophy of John Locke, and one of Edwards’s achievements is to marry Locke’s emphasis on empirically verifiable sensations with the theological apparatus of Calvinism, so that phenomena within the natural world appear to be, as he puts it, “images or shadows of divine things.”22 But there is also in Edwards a striking use of images connected to caprice, fortune, and chance, all of which denote a swerve away from strict Calvinist notions of predestination.23 What is most remarkable about Edwards’s writing, then, is not its rationalism per se but its internalization of a state of contradiction, its attempt to bring together reason and faith, light and darkness, and its consequent oxymoronic attribution to God of “a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness.” This leads Edwards towards a rhetoric of excess, where language always appears on the verge of breaking through its own syntactical conventions “like an infinite deluge, or infinite mountains over my head.” His treatises yoke together by syntactic violence terrestrial and spiritual designs, “heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by infinite.”24 Notoriously, his sermons terrified his congregations in the Connecticut River Valley by their extraordinary capacity to incarnate metaphysical conceits in fleshly terms: The God that hold you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully

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provoked . . . And it would be a wonder, if some that are now present should not be in hell in a very short time, even before this year is out. And it would be no wonder if some persons, that now sit here, in some seats of this meetinghouse, in health, quiet and secure, should be there before tomorrow morning.25

Norman Fiering has suggested this dark, cruel aspect of Edwards’s vision owes more to Thomas Hobbes than to Locke, which is certainly quite possible; but the more crucial thing to emphasize is the mixed quality of Edwards’s discourse, its assimilation of influences from a variety of sources, and its skill in ratcheting up language to elicit a wide range of emotional effects.26 Consequently, it is less important to allegorize Edwards – to see him as an exponent of Lockean liberalism or as an avatar of Emersonian transcendentalism – than to attend to the idiosyncratic brilliance of Edwards’s rhetoric itself. This is not to relapse into a purely aestheticized or dehistoricized account of Edwards’s literary style; it is, though, to suggest that while theology and philosophy form the cultural infrastructure of Edwards’s work, that work cannot be explicated in theological or philosophical terms alone. Karl Keller has talked of an “aesthetic of outrageousness” in American writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and certainly many New England writers of this period delight in the representation of various forms of incongruity and distortion, in the violent rupture of conventional social and literary practices.27 Edward Taylor’s poetic meditations are mediated by bizarre images of “Gods Tender Bowells,” of the universe as a “Bowling Alley,” thereby emphasizing the severe disjunction between worldly forms of representation and a divine power which must remain ultimately invisible and inscrutable.28 Similar innovations in aesthetic form manifest themselves in the voluminous writings of Cotton Mather, who has been fatally tarnished for later generations by his involvement in the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s, even though he was in fact not an authoritarian pedant but a learned and civilized scholar, proud of his scientific achievements and his fellowship of the Royal Society. Mather’s ornate literary idiom involves a deliberate attempt to modernize the language of theology, to endow it with a power of animation through elaborate styles of wordplay in an attempt to mirror what he took to be the latent presence of divinity within the material world. For example, in Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), his account of the first generation of Puritan

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settlers, Mather observes how “although Yorkshire be one of the largest shires in England; yet for all the fires of martyrdom which were kindled in the days of Queen Mary, it afforded no more fuel than one poor Leaf; namely, John Leaf, an apprentice, who suffered for the doctrine of the Reformation at the same time and stake with the famous John Bradford.” After punning on “Leaf” in this way – wordplay underlined by the author’s own italicized emphases, as if he were flamboyantly orchestrating his own textual responses – Mather continues his metaphorical conceit of coldness and warmth by describing the “cold country” of England as “too hot” for the reformers, inducing them to seek exile.29 It is an ingenious, one might almost say twisted use of language which takes delight in displacing grammar out of its conventional categories so as to elucidate what Mather took to be the latent metaphysical dimension of both word and world. Eighteenth-century American culture, then, cannot be characterized purely in terms of a binary opposition between a neoclassical gentility inflected by Anglophile traditions and an anti-formalist mode of Christian sermonizing. Making the case for the growth of a specifically American sensibility, Alan Heimert claimed that the sermon entitled “The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry” preached by Gilbert Tennent, a spokesman for the “New Side” Presbyterians, on 8 March 1740 was “probably the most influential utterance of the entire eighteenth century.” Tennent attacked learning without piety as he lambasted the Scotch-trained Presbyterian ministry for its culpable greed and what he called its “moral formalism,” and he postulated instead an idea of spiritual warmth and oratorical prowess that was seen by Heimert as a direct antecedent of the tone of Emerson, Whitman and other writers of the American Renaissance a hundred years later, in the 1850s.30 But even the “Great Awakening,” in which Tennent was a leading figure, was a transnational rather than a purely American phenomenon, inspired partly as it was by Oxford graduate George Whitefield, who made the first of his seven visits to America in 1738, and by his fellow Englishman, George Fox. Ian K. Steele has described the Quaker Atlantic communities in 1740 as “a religious, political, and economic fraternity that demonstrated a level of communication between migrants and their English brethren that had been quite impossible for migrating dissenters half a century earlier,” and in this sense the Quaker religion was no less of a transatlantic phenomenon at this time than was science: there were twenty-three English colonial fellows of the Royal Society between

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1700 and 1740, and indeed it was around the latter time that the term “British Empire” was first coming into use.31 Moreover, writings by eighteenth-century American Quakers such as Elizabeth Ashbridge and John Woolman are notable as much for their implicit textual disjunctions as for their avowed authorial authenticity. While expounding a voice of what Woolman called “inward principle,” of “plainness and simplicity,” both Quaker writers find the haphazard course of worldly events necessarily drives a wedge between spirit and matter.32 Ashbridge’s account of her life conflates different temporal modes, reinterpreting the past in the light of the present as she attempts allegorically to make manifest the hand of providence and so to explain retrospectively how she came to marry a man she “had no Value for.”33 Woolman, likewise, seeks divine solace in a silent place beyond the distortions of language, yet his quest for purity is hardly advanced by his story of a curious exchange with the chief of the Delaware Indians, who conveys through interpreters the enigmatic message: “I love to feel where words come from.”34 The issue here, of course, is not any kind of disingenuousness on the part of these writers, but their imbrication within a world where the ironies of translation, in the broadest sense of that term, necessarily circumscribe the power of pure consciousness. Such forms of structural displacement were particularly prevalent in the eighteenth century, a time when geographical mobility was developing rapidly – Ashbridge casually remarks how her husband in 1740 “Enlisted him Self to go a Common soldier to Cuba” – and they suggest why questions associated with the ironies of representation loom large in any consideration of American culture during the later colonial period.35 The religious revivals of the eighteenth century, then, should not be understood purely in terms of the evolution of a national narrative. After the Revolution, there was an increased tendency to represent American time sequentially, in terms of foreshadowings and providential outcomes, but during the middle part of the eighteenth century colonial America more frequently considered itself synchronically, in relation to what was happening simultaneously in other parts of the world. Arguments over the nature of American exceptionalism are complex and, as Jack P. Greene has observed, the typical anti-exceptionalist method of finding European patterns of behavior replicated in America does not of course mean that such cultural patterns were necessarily being developed in America in exactly the same way.36 Nevertheless, it is clear that eighteenth-century

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America can hardly be understood except in relation to its various dialogues with the imperial centres of Europe. Thomas Jefferson, for one, envisaged such intertextual dialogues in quite literal terms, being so disconcerted by the works of David Hume – especially Hume’s History of England, which Jefferson considered a dangerous counter-manifesto to the Constitution of the United States – that he suggested reprinting Hume with refutations in parallel texts.37 Overall, as the bibliographical researches of David Lundberg and Henry F. May have demonstrated, “genuinely skeptical and radical authors” such as Hume, Voltaire, Gibbon, Chesterfield and Godwin were widely read in eighteenth-century America, and this undermines the legend of the country at this time as intellectually isolated, as a mere mighty fortress of Christian doctrine.38 Such, indeed, was the prevalence at this time of a cosmopolitan ideal, the notion that learning owed its allegiance to universal values and recognized no parochial boundaries, that only one American fellow of the Royal Society, Arthur Lee, thought himself compelled to resign from that body when America went to war with Britain over the question of political independence. Even then, Lee was grandly rebuked by the president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, who declared that natural philosophers were above tawdry political differences in that they belonged to an international “republic of letters, and to the community of man and mind.”39 Characters such as Lee and Franklin were not typical of Americans at this time, of course, any more than Hume or Voltaire were typical of the British or the French; but it would be true to say that eighteenth-century America participated as much as any other country of the time in this wider world of learning associated with the transmission of ideas across national borders. After the Revolution, Franklin and Jefferson shrewdly attempted to reinvent themselves as diligent patriots seeking to interpose an “ocean of fire” between themselves and the corrupt Old World, but for most of their careers they looked at European culture very differently.40 In line with this imitation of European manners, one important aspect of eighteenth-century American culture was its interest in the mores of polite society, epitomized by a half-concealed world of private associations dedicated to the circulation of belles-lettres and other kinds of heterodox material. Associations such as the Tuesday Club in Annapolis, Maryland, of which Alexander Hamilton was the secretary, were significant not only for their evasion of the more public faces of Christian dogma but also for their implicit resistance to the coercive power of the state. Not surprisingly, these cultivated

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circles were stigmatized as impious by the evangelicals and tarred with the brush of anglophiliac frippery after the revolutionary momentum of the 1780s had established a particular form of moral identity for the United States. Nevertheless, American literature of the early and middle parts of the eighteenth century often concerns itself less with moral virtue or with questions of the national sublime than with more proximate worldly conditions. Sarah Kemble Knight’s account of her journey between Boston and New York in 1704 deliberately eschews what it takes to be an old style of religious proselytizing and chooses instead to focus its sharp commentaries on conditions of modern urban life as they were unfolding in the new century. Alexander Hamilton’s Itinerarium, an account of his journey through the northern colonies in the mid-1740s, is openly scathing about religious enthusiasts – “This fellow, I observed, had a particular down hanging look which made me suspect he was one of our New Light biggots” – and it valorizes by contrast the pleasures of curiosity, diversity and the good life. Taking his cue from a reading of Montaigne’s Essays, “which is a strange medley of subjects and particularly entertaining,” Hamilton extols the pleasures of eating, drinking and debate; yet he is always uncomfortably aware of his own provincial situation and of the limitations of his interlocutors. In New York, he begins to exchange views on scientific matters with “my old friend Dr. McGraa,” but their conversation soon stalls: “We had a great deal of talk about attraction, condensation, gravitation, rarification, of all which I found he understood just as much as a goose; and when he began to show his ignorance of the mathematical and astronomical problems of the illustrious Newton and blockishly resolve all my meaning into judiciall astrology, I gave him up as an unintelligent, unintelligible, and consequently inflexible disputant.”41 Although there are of course elements of intellectual snobbery involved here, there is also a strong sense of social tensions deriving from the way Enlightenment values have invaded the American heartland, leading to a collision between worldly scholarship and religious conformity. Hamilton’s narrative also suggests the mixed conditions of American culture at this time, an implicit awareness of the American states as outposts of empire. With Augustan London as the “New Rome,” American intellectuals recognized how the cutting-edge ideas of figures like Newton were reflected only cloudily across the Atlantic; yet many of these writers – Hamilton, Mather Byles, Joseph Green – textually internalize what Shields has called these “imperial

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thematics,” producing narratives of colonial ambivalence which point simultaneously to distant specters of authority and experiential conditions of irony and absence.42 In the texts of Byles and Green, neoclassical poets in mid-eighteenth-century Boston who have been much neglected since the Revolution, there is an elaborate play with the iconography of royal power and an astute awareness of how this is refracted and inverted in the distant pastures of Massachusetts. The first African American poet, Phillis Wheatley, also manipulates this neoclassical style in her Poems on Various Subjects (1773), and, despite the obvious political issues which her work raises, questions about sincerity and authenticity are the wrong ones to be asking in relation to her verse. Influenced directly by Pope and Byles, Wheatley’s style shifts subtly between alternative registers, so that her emphasis in “To Maecenas” on how the Roman author Terence was African by birth, like her paradoxical reshuffling of the categories of diabolism and blackness in “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” implicitly draws attention to the conditions of slavery in the New World. Like Pope, Wheatley works not through autobiographical expressiveness but through ironic intertextuality and the subversion of formal genres, a process entirely consonant with the multidimensional capacities of prerevolutionary America, which traded off its position as a reflexive mirror of more established cultures. One of the most sophisticated expressions of this sense of transatlantic displacement in colonial America can be found in the writings of William Byrd II, which formally refract the idea of division and turn the process of transgression, the movement across a dividing line, into a structural principle. Byrd was born in 1674 the heir to a large Virginia estate, but he was educated in England, where he lived until 1705 (and then again between 1715 and 1726). He thus embodied in his own life as he shuttled between London and Westover the movement between center and province that haunted the imaginations of Americans in this era. On one level Byrd might be seen simply as an imitation English gentleman, reading the Tatler in Virginia as early as 1710 and seeking to introduce the polite manners of the London metropolis into the apparently less propitious surroundings of Westover. But Byrd is much more than merely an Addison manqué, for his History of the Dividing Line (1729), besides being a surveyor’s account of the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, also touches implicitly on various other divisions permeating American life during this period: between the north

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and the south, between Christian virtue and pagan indifference. Byrd’s personal journal of this surveying expedition, subsequently published as The Secret History of the Line, introduces another key opposition: the discrepancy between a respectable public façade and a private realm of insouciance where what he calls the “Bounds of Decency” are merrily broken. Irony thus becomes the axis upon which Byrd’s narratives rotate, and the inherent doubleness of these textual perspectives accords both with his own sense of transatlantic displacement – “I often cast a longing Eye towards England, and Sigh’d” – and, more generally, with his understanding of America not as an autonomous realm but as a province engaged in an increasingly complex relationship with a remote but powerful imperial center.43 As Richard D. Brown has noted, there was a clear awareness in the Tidewater community and similar locations in eighteenth-century America of how new communications technologies were making the world a smaller place.44 The understanding of his own region as a relative construction, a fragment of the larger global environment rather than an entirely self-contained space, is crucial to Byrd’s reflexive remapping of the boundaries of his society. Furthermore, the representation in The Secret History of personal identity as a protoplasmic phenomenon – the play with pseudonyms such as “Firebrand” and “Steddy,” for example – fits with the author’s intuitive sense of a radically unstable, mobile world. Equally, the tendency of Byrd’s characters to slide into an animalistic demeanor – he notes how those who live on pork become “extremely hoggish in their Temper” – suggests a world where the dividing line between soul and body, spirit and matter, is by no means so impermeable as was believed by those Puritans who dominated intellectual life in America fifty years earlier.45 In 1984, Terry Castle published an influential article on “the carnivalization of eighteenth-century English narrative,” where she argued that Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and other English writers introduce “a curious instability into the would-be orderly cosmos of the eighteenth-century English novel” through systematic reversals which cause “ideological destabilization” within “otherwise highly conservative fiction,” and much the same case could be made in relation to eighteenth-century American culture.46 It is true that Byrd’s Augustan pastoral has its more genteel and conventional side, just as Franklin’s narratives can be read as instructional manuals of one kind or another; but there is in these texts, and in those of many other colonial American writers, a more

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self-subverting, surreptitiously carnivalesque dimension which deliberately estranges the narratives from the received ideologies and popular beliefs of their era. One way of thinking about definitions of culture in colonial America would be to consider the development of different types of media and the role they played in challenging institutional orthodoxies. William Byrd had 3,500 books in his library at Westover, itself a provocative gesture at a time when print was only gradually emerging from a period of repression and scarcity. The Puritan authorities in Massachusetts had attempted well into the eighteenth century to restrict the circulation of published materials, unabashedly imposing censorship to ensure that only doctrines approved by themselves could be made public: in 1711, the General Court passed an act which promised fining and pillorying for anyone “composing, writing, printing, or publishing . . . any filthy, obscene, or profane song, pamphlet, libel or mock sermon, in imitation or in mimicking of preaching, or any other part of divine worship.”47 The first newspaper published in Boston, by Benjamin Harris on 25 September 1690, was shut down after just one issue, and it was not until 1704 that the weekly Boston News-Letter appeared. In 1721, James Franklin, Benjamin’s elder brother, displeased Boston’s civil and religious leaders by issuing The New England Courant, after the model of London journals such as the Tatler and the Spectator, and, though Franklin spent a month in prison for his pains, the burgeoning of journalism throughout eighteenth-century America soon became inevitable. The expansion of the population and the development of printing presses in geographical locations remote from New England, in particular the rise of Philadelphia as a business and political center in the eighteenth century, played a particularly important role in loosening these theocratic restrictions. It is important to recognize, though, the deep suspicions still harbored by civil and religious authorities towards these new modes of production and the general extent to which print culture was thought indecorously to be trampling on settled communities and interests. The Great Awakening of the 1740s was, among other things, a reactive attempt to restore the primacy of a traditional oral culture, to re-establish the visceral, immediate link between text and response, articulation and emotion, that appeared to be guaranteed by sermons or other forms of communitarian interaction. For the evangelical revivalists, print betokened a dangerously fragmented world where an unseen and impersonal authorship opened up the threat of more profane, clandestine channels of communication.

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Writers such as Franklin, whose satires ventriloquize a range of voices not the author’s own, skillfully make use of these new media conditions, so it is perhaps a little misleading to suggest, as Michael Warner does, that “republican ideology was also an ideology of print.”48 Warner is undoubtedly correct to suggest the growth of republicanism in late-eighteenth-century America was interwoven inextricably with the dissemination of a more abstract print culture, with the momentum of the patriot cause in 1776 being galvanized by the widespread availability of key written documents: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence,” and other more transitory works. But this is different from the attempt to regard such documents themselves as emblematic of a particular nationalist cause, to hypothesize a symbiotic link between what Thomas Gustafson calls “representative words” and an ideology of the new republic. Of course, the patriots naturally attempted to promote a purified, regenerated version of the apparatus of communication as integral to their cause. “Our political harmony . . . is concerned in a uniformity of language,” said Noah Webster in 1789, and his own lexicographical projects might be seen as an attempt to eradicate the artificial accretions of the English tongue, to renew the language by stripping it of all its old historical baggage while remodeling it as a new, clean American idiom.49 What this ignores, though, is the way in which republican print culture could never be a transparent medium and the extent to which the American Constitution itself was necessarily an act of “framing,” the product of both law and artifice.50 As Jacques Derrida said on the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the whole notion of any “truths” being “self-evident” – that is, existing anterior to their postulation – is a flat contradiction in terms.51 In this sense, Warner’s analysis of literary textuality and ambiguity as an “aesthetic developed to fit the legitimacy of post-republican, liberal society” seems to overlook the extent to which eighteenth-century culture was, as Derrida would say, “always already” saturated in such ambiguities.52 Moreover, the radically inconsistent nature of this culture was heightened in eighteenth-century America, as in England and France, by a social formation that was becoming increasingly stratified, as Enlightenment ethics of skepticism and reason ran alongside popular attachments to more traditional forms of authority. One of the general problems in any consideration of the culture of colonial America is that there have been so few literary critics, as

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opposed to intellectual historians, working in this period. Although cultural historians from Parrington and Miller onward have been very astute in identifying the social and theological contexts within which particular narratives were produced, they have in general been less interested in discussing aspects of the heterodox or inchoate, those textual interstices where the transparent designs of allegory are held in balance with a more profuse sense of excess or political deviance. In Cotton Mather, for example, the structures of theological orthodoxy are always pressing up against the author’s own delight in the intricacies of language, in the possibilities of print and the new book form, which is why his writings cannot readily be assimilated to any narrowly nationalistic impulse or explicated purely in terms of the ideas housed within them. As Jon Pahl has observed, theology was indeed the “predominant mode of public discourse” in colonial America, but many writers treated theological tenets in an idiosyncratic way.53 The most popular composer in eighteenthcentury America, for example, was George Frideric Handel, whose biblical oratorios express the doctrines of Christianity in an aestheticized manner which is not the pure transcendent aesthetics of Romanticism, concerned to internalize its “spirit” within a private sphere of its own, but rather involves a refraction of religious orthodoxy into sumptuous public style.54 Tyler’s dramatic categorization of Handel in The Contrast as part of fashionable English culture merely shows the extent to which national stereotypes had taken hold of the popular imagination in the 1780s. Handel’s deflection of religion into aestheticism is the same phenomenon that we encounter, in a different guise, in the works of Jonathan Edwards, where Calvinist predestination is reconfigured through the animate language of an everyday natural world. David S. Shields has recently suggested the existence in eighteenthcentury America of “communities of appetite and feeling” akin to Jürgen Habermas’s description of an emerging public sphere at this time in England, where the growth of coffee-houses and secular literary periodicals enabled, in Habermas’s words, an “emancipation of civic morality from moral theology.”55 Although this beguiling idea may perhaps overstate the extent to which colonial America had become secularized and modernized, it operates as a welcome counterbalance to the more traditional understandings of colonial America as a cultural wasteland of Biblical zealots, a patronizing misconception that of course circulated widely in Augustan England. One of the virtues of The Literatures of Colonial America is to suggest the

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diversity of constituencies in pre-Revolutionary America, a diversity inflected not just by region and language but also by divisions and inconsistencies within particular texts. To be sure, the narratives of this period are drawn from a wide spectrum of sources – sermons, travel writings, diaries, political treatises, as well as poems – so that narrowly restrictive definition of aesthetic autonomy, of the kind formulated by literary critics such as Coleridge in the early nineteenth century, would carry little relevance to this material. Nevertheless, in terms of its propensity for formal excess and its capacity frequently to resist being entirely locked into allegorical modes of representation, the culture of colonial America bears witness to many startling performances and aesthetic surprises. 2005 NOTES

1. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 185. 2. William C. Spengemann, A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); R. C. De Prospo, “Marginalizing Early American Literature,” New Literary History 23 (1992), 233–65. 3. Philip F. Gura, “Early American Literature in the New Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 57 (2000), 599–620. 4. John M. Murrin, “Magistrates, Sinners, and a Precarious Liberty: Trial by Jury in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in David W. Hall, John M. Murrin, Thad W. Tate, ed., Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History (New York: Norton, 1984), 152. 5. John M. Murrin, “A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, ed., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Williamsburg – Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture – University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 344. 6. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763–1789 (New York: Crowell, 1976), 493. 7. David S. Shields, “Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture,” in Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, ed., A History of the Book in America, Volume One: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press—American Antiquarian Society, 2000), 436.

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8. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47, 60. 9. Benjamin T. Spencer, The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1957), ix. 10. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans, I: The Colonial Experience (New York: Random House, 1958). 11. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 24. 12. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, ed., The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 525. 13. Giles Gunn, Thinking Across The American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 131. 14. David S. Shields, “Presidential Address,” Society of Early Americanists conference, Norfolk, Virginia, 8 March 2001. 15. David S. Shields, “Joy and Dread among the Early Americanists,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 57 (2000), 638. 16. Adrienne Rich, “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet” (1966), in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (London: Virago, 1980), 21–32. 17. Bay Psalm Book: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1640 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), n.p. 18. William Boelhower, “Mapping the Gift Path: Exchange and Rivalry in John Smith’s A True Relation,” American Literary History 15 (2003), 669. 19. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 128. 20. Castillo and Schweitzer, 270. 21. Perry Miller, “Sinners in the Hands of a Benevolent God,” in Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 283. 22. Jonathan Edwards, “Images of Divine Things” (1728), in Castillo and Schweitzer, 412–13. 23. Jon Pahl, Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 94–97. 24. Castillo and Schweitzer, 416, 419. 25. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), in Basic Writings, ed. Ola Elizabeth Winslow (New York: Signet—New American Library, 1966), 159. 26. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Williamsburg – Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture – University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 233.

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27. Karl Keller, “Literary Excess as Indigenous Aesthetic in EighteenthCentury America,” in Paul J. Korshin, ed., The American Revolution and Eighteenth-Century Culture (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 201. 28. Edward Taylor, The Poems, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 18, 387. 29. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702; rpt. Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1853), 108. 30. Alan Heimert, “Jonathan Edwards, Charles Chauncy, and the Great Awakening,” in Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 119. 31. Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 264, 267, 278. 32. Castillo and Schweitzer, 447, 451. 33. Castillo and Schweitzer, 422. 34. Castillo and Schweitzer, 452. 35. Castillo and Schweitzer, 431. 36. Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 204. 37. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 220; Trevor H. Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Williamsburg – Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture – University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 179. 38. David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly 28 (1976), 270. 39. Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 45. 40. Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, 13 May 1797, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Viking Penguin, 1975), 474. 41. Alexander Hamilton, The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, in Wendy Martin, ed., Colonial American Travel Narratives (New York: Penguin, 1994), 182, 191, 239–40. 42. David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 16, 3. 43. William Byrd, The Secret History of the Line by William Byrd II, in Wendy Martin, ed., Colonial American Travel Narratives (New York: Penguin, 1994), 108, 92.

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44. Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 45. Byrd, 96. 46. Terry Castle, “The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative,” PMLA 99 (1984), 904, 910. 47. Jayne K. Kribbs, “Printing and Publishing in America from Daye to Zenger,” in Peter White. ed., Puritan Poets and Poetics: SeventeenthCentury American Poetry in Theory and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), 14–15. 48. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 63. 49. Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 40. 50. Robert A. Ferguson, “Ideology and the Framing of the Constitution,” Early American Literature 22 (1987), 162. 51. Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science, No. 15 (1986), 7–15. 52. Warner, 117. 53. Pahl, 175. 54. Silverman, 475. 55. David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Williamsburg – Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture – University of North Carolina Press, 1997), xvi; Ju˝rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962), trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 43.

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CHAPTER 10

THE ABJECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: JAMAICA KINCAID AND THE GHOSTS OF POSTCOLONIALISM

i To reorient American literature transnationally in relation to different geographical areas of the world it to bring into play the conceptual problem of how this academic domain overlaps or interfaces with the field commonly known as postcolonialism, which has similarly been predicated upon a discursive overlapping of different territorial formations. Over recent years, postcolonialism itself has come to appear such an inchoate phenomenon that any attempt to explicate it in purely theoretical terms would be counterproductive. More useful, perhaps, is the view of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin that postcolonialism, “rather than a discipline or methodology per se,” might be considered “analogous to an area such as feminist studies,” which has become a loose umbrella term for a wide spectrum of cultural theories and practices that have made important differences over the past forty years to various forms of scholarly inquiry.1 The purpose of this essay is to consider ways in which “American literature,” as the subject has historically been conceived and circumscribed, has related institutionally to postcolonial perspectives. Through juxtaposing different kinds of critical narratives, I will suggest some of the ways in which postcolonialism has tended to overlook some of its own intellectual genealogies and so has developed since the Second World War in rather too restrictive a fashion. But I shall also suggest how a paratactic reconstitution of postcolonialism within the academic matrix of American literature would elucidate certain blindspots and ideological limitations about

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how the contours of this Americanist zone have traditionally been mapped out. In The Empire Writes Back, originally published in 1989, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin described the term “post-colonial” as covering “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.” They declared specifically that the “literature of the USA” should be placed in this category, alongside that of Australia, India, the Caribbean countries, and so on, although they acknowledged of the United States that “[p]erhaps because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized.”2 Robert Young subsequently argued that these differential conditions meant the United States could only “technically” be classed as postcolonial, since “it soon went on to become a colonial power itself.”3 Likewise, Elleke Boehmer excluded the United States from her study Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995) on the grounds that the nation “won independence long before other colonial places, and its literature has therefore followed a very different trajectory.”4 The causal logic in this kind of argument, however, seems dubious. If, as Young suggests, postcolonialism is concerned with ways in which “colonial history . . . has determined the configurations and power structures of the present,” then it is not clear why the trajectory of US society over the past 230 years should not be susceptible of consideration within a postcolonial framework.5 The entanglement of the contemporary United States in a cultural rhetoric of race, liberty and rights going back to the eighteenth century is obvious enough, and many cultural historians have written about, for instance, ways in which the commitment to freedom in the work of English philosophers such as John Locke “crucially helped generate American national identity.”6 However, the long aftermath of colonialism, with its murkier legacy of revolutionary violence and insurgency, remains a less palatable topic for US national consciousness, and the extent to which the country’s identity was formed in part by bloody power struggles with foreign powers has not been such a comfortable issue for the “mystic chords of memory” to accommodate.7 One of the reasons critics such as Young and Neil Lazarus prefer to keep US culture and postcolonialism as separate entities is because of their work’s explicit investment in an “interventionist methodology . . . committed towards political ideals of a transnational social justice,” within whose agenda the United States is positioned firmly as the imperial aggressor: “We need to bear in mind,” writes

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Lazarus, “that the stage upon which the immediate post-1945 developments unfolded was that of a pax Americana.”8 If postcolonialism as an intellectual phenomenon is related specifically to the decades after the Second World War, a period in which the drive toward national liberation as articulated by Frantz Fanon and others was shadowed by the geopolitical presence of the United States as “postwar hegemon,” then it is easier to see how, under the aegis of what Benita Parry calls “liberation theory,” US imperialism and postcolonialism should have come to be understood as mutually exclusive terms.9 If, however, we extend the historical range backward and forward, the general picture becomes much more complicated. There has been some interesting work on ways in which nineteenth-century American literature might be seen as postcolonial, and Edward Watts has written compellingly about how, in the immediate aftershock of the revolution, the United States developed a multifaceted, paradoxical position, “both colonizer and colonized at once.”10 Similarly, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the compartmentalization of territorial areas into discrete geopolitical zones has given way to recognition of how international capital and social formations increasingly intersect in what Boehmer and Bart Moore-Gilbert in 2002 called a “zig-zag” fashion, where the United States, as much as anywhere else, becomes a site of multiple traversal. This is the pattern, claim Boehmer and Moore-Gilbert, “which perhaps more accurately characterizes transverse forms of anticolonial nation-making and resistance” in the twenty-first century.11 Globalization has, of course, not brought about any kind of simple homogeneity or elimination of unequal power relations, but, as Bruce Robbins noted, it has made the global seem “ordinary”: the big beasts of colonialism are now of less pressing significance than ways in which local and global cultures are intertwined in complex and often barely identifiable ways.12 This in turn has radically complicated the binary opposition of colonizer and colonized, oppression and emancipation, around which postcolonial narratives in the mid twentieth century tended to revolve. The altered conditions associated with globalization also foreground ways in which postcolonial narratives, like those of the United States itself, have suffered from temporally foreshortened perspectives that have tended to lock them into rigid conceptual positions. Dipesh Chakrabarty has commented on the way postcolonial scholarship has been “committed, almost by definition, to engaging the universals – such as the abstract figure of the human or that of

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Reason – that were forged in eighteenth-century Europe and that underlie the human sciences.”13 It was a notion of emancipation from tyranny, bound up with an Enlightenment conception of the freedom of the subject, that resonated particularly in the late-eighteenthcentury era of national revolutions, and it is easy enough to see how this myth of liberty overlaps with US definitions of political freedom that emerged from the same historical context. Considering America in a hemispheric rather than nationalistic framework, however, Latin Americanist scholar Walter D. Mignolo has commented on how the current regime of postcolonial studies, finding as it does an “imaginary” point of origin in the eighteenth century, effectively marginalizes “a crucial and constitutive moment of modernity/coloniality that was the sixteenth century,” when interrelations between South and North America took very different forms. Since he also understands “the coloniality of power” to be endemic to modernity and to “nation building” more generally, Mignolo finds the term postcolonialism troublingly vague, preferring a more specific designation such as “post-Occidentalism.”14 Casting her eyes back still further, Anne McClintock observed pertinently that the idea of the United States as postcolonial could be construed as “a monumental affront to the Native American peoples.”15 As I have already suggested, to describe a country as postcolonial does not mean it cannot be a colonizing power as well. Nevertheless, it is hard to avoid agreeing with McClintock’s conclusion that recent academic postcolonial writing has produced discourses of “linear, historical ‘progress’” that are “prematurely celebratory and obfuscatory in more ways than one.”16 This is, though, not the same as arguing that postcolonialism is a redundant term that should be deleted from the critical lexicon. The critical problem with postcolonialism is not so much the material it unearths as the intense difficulties in identifying that material with any given subject or agent. For instance, John Carlos Rowe acknowledges that “Americans’ interpretations of themselves as a people are shaped by a powerful imperial desire and a profound anti-colonial temper,” and his book Literary Culture and US Imperialism proceeds to explore contradictions between theory and practice by showing how “[t]he internal colonization of different peoples depended centrally on hierarchies of race, class, and gender to do the work of subjugation and domination.” The premise of Rowe’s work, then, is not that the theory of US liberty itself was partial or contingent, but that there was, in practice, a hypocritical gap between abstraction and empirical event, design

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and deed. To juxtapose postcolonialism with US culture, however, is to raise the more disturbing prospect that this nationalistic design may itself be problematical; certainly it would interrogate the viability and legitimacy of simply expanding US national ideology into a universal value. In relation to issues of civil rights, the shadow of postcolonialism would therefore be viewed as an unwelcome aberration, an impediment to the “rhetoric of ‘emancipation’” that would embrace subaltern groups as full members of the US community, sharing in the nation’s fabled metanarrative of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.17 Simply to follow the emollient liberal design of David Hollinger by expanding “the circle of the ‘we’” to embrace minority groups within the nation’s common bounty is, though, to overlook the sharper edges of postcolonial conflict.18 As Christopher Brown has shown, a large number of African Americans in the late eighteenth century chose with good reason to support the British rather than the nascent US cause. Similarly, many British conservatives of this time who understood social hierarchy as an “organic, not contractual” arrangement were profoundly opposed to both colonial autonomy and American slavery, with hostility to the one exacerbating their hostility to the other. Antislavery campaigners in Britain such as Reverend James Ramsay saw slavery as differentiated by “degrees” and, therefore, as susceptible of reform; this of course differentiated them from the American Patriots, who needed categorically to distinguish freedom from slavery.19 In part this was because the Americans were indebted to a myth of exodus which had correlatives in Protestant Biblical theology.20 Yet the crushing irony is that it was precisely this principled dissociation of freedom from slavery, a dissociation central to galvanizing the fight for US independence, which also helped to keep in place racial segregation afterwards. Cherishing their own emancipation from the slavery of imperial Britain, white revolutionary America guaranteed its own freedom by imposing another kind of slavery on others. Though the circular logic here is discomfiting, it is not, ultimately, surprising; it has by now become a commonplace that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers were keen slaveholders and that, so far from being a mere antiquated hangover from former times, the culture of slavery was deeply embedded in revolutionary America. Abdul R. JanMohamed has written of how “the entire colonialist discursive system” can be seen to function as a “manichean allegory,” wherein the “distance” between master and slave becomes a metaphysical rather than

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political notion, “absolute and qualitative rather than relative and quantitative”; and it is precisely such “manichean dichotomies” that worked powerfully to shape the radical consciousness of the emerging United States.21 We see the same kind of manichean conundrum, “give me liberty or give me death,” working itself out in relation to the Native American Red people, who were associated in the minds of American patriots with the British Redcoats as an equal threat to the success of their revolutionary mission.22 Again, the violent business of establishing “liberty” for the new nation was dependent upon certain forms of pathological exclusion and “death” for others. The point here is that subsequent attempts to draw African American and other subaltern groups into a US national narrative of affirmation and liberation have worked silently to erase postcolonial consciousness by suppressing these brutal paradoxes of power exchange. To acknowledge white power over blacks in the context of post-revolutionary America was, implicitly, also to acknowledge by analogy the continuing power of a British legacy within the United States. Patriotic imperatives, in other words, demanded the suppression of postcolonial narratives with respect to both race and nation; Gayatri Spivak calls nationalism “in many ways . . . a displaced or reversed legitimation of colonialism,” and nowhere is this back-formation more pertinent than in the case of the early United States, where the promotion of nationalism worked specifically to erase colonial memories.23 As Toni Morrison wrote in 1992, this dissemination of freedom as an abstract “concept,” a higher good, was instrumental in enforcing the practices of slavery that allowed such forms of freedom to exist.24 Systematically to exclude postcolonial perspectives from analysis of US culture is thus to relapse into the familiar folly of exceptionalism, to understand America on its own mythic terms as a repository of freedom without taking into account the power structures that have encompassed such designs. As Susie O’Brien has observed, one of the more “disturbing” aspects of recent “New Americanist” criticism has been the way it mimics “the Old Americanist trope of national redemption, whereby the emancipation of a people is figured as a process of individual self-discovery.”25 In these domesticated critical forms, postcolonialism is frequently conflated with more emollient discourses of multiculturalism, the “belief that other cultures need to be approached with the presumption of equal worth.”26 In academic considerations of how the United States relates discursively to postcolonialism, this has led to the recurrence of a “borders school,” a paradigm which, as Malini Johar Schueller

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has noted, begs “the question of what difference postcolonial theory makes to ethnic studies,” since “[i]f the borders school is already postcolonial, what difference does the critical act of naming this convergence make?”27 To subsume postcolonialism under the canopy of ethnic difference is to promote what Hollinger has described as “the principle of civic nationality” within the United States, where the “subnational particularisms” of race, ethnicity and gender no longer appear as an obstacle to full participation in the “American civic community.”28 This model of inclusiveness of course goes back to Crèvecoeur, but what such patriotic sentiments tend to overlook, then as now, is the way the United States did not so much secede from the British Empire as take over from it. Although the new nation fondly liked to imagine itself as categorically different, founded upon a Declaration of Independence involving a moral principle that was indivisible, subsequent history revealed the American conception of freedom to be, in its own way, just as restrictive and contingent as the old British model. As Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf have observed, the global context of the American Revolution has been “too often neglected” in recent times, partly because the new social history focusing on internal affairs has been so influential; but a broader analysis of the power reversals between Britain and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century would suggest ways in which imperialism and postcolonialism were two sides of the same coin, with the United States able to avoid the snares of neither one nor the other.29 Indeed, as David Kazanjian has noted, the national union of the United States forged in the 1780s depended not just upon a “domestic economy” but on “the development of US imperial power,” since both the wage-labor practices of the north and the plantation system of the south were enabled by a matrix of international exchange.30 To reinscribe US culture within a matrix of postcolonialism, then, is not simply to acknowledge how US “freedom” developed as an inherently racialized construction but also to recognize how the abstractions of national formation were symbiotically intertwined with, and contradicted by, systems of subordination that worked themselves out on a transnational axis. Schemes of genealogy, writes Etienne Balibar, depend for their efficacy upon forms of naturalization which typically repress such contradictions, such as “a nationalization of the family, which has as its counterpart the identification of the national community with a symbolic kinship.”31 These fictions of inclusiveness permeate nineteenth-century US literature to a remarkable degree,

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with many anti-slavery narratives – Uncle Tom’s Cabin being a prime example – arguing their case for abolition around a need to eradicate legacies of institutional violence and to reconcile different factions within a domestic environment where the family stands as synecdoche for the nation. For Stowe, of course, the whole fibre of the sentimental novel around the time of the Civil War depended upon elimination of psychological and political contradiction – which she read as duplicity – and on the equation of personal salvation with social and political emancipation. By contrast Judith Butler, writing in the wake of Foucault, has argued how the “temporal paradox of the subject” rests in the way its attachment to subjection becomes part of the psychic condition of the subject’s formation. “Power is both external to the subject and the very venue of the subject,” she writes: “This apparent contradiction makes sense when we understand that no subject comes into being without power.” This does not imply, as Butler points out, merely a masochistic acquiescence in “injury,” but, rather, an active capacity through “the possibilities of resignification” to “rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject formation – and re-formation – cannot succeed.”32 The parallel I want to develop here is between Butler’s concept of “resignification,” which reorients and reconfigures psychic power, and the kind of postcolonial perspective that would reorient and reconfigure the US cultural imaginary, deconstructing its embedded power relations and reformulating them according to a logic not of redemption, as in the sentimental version of national narrative, but of inversion. To reconsider the subject of “American literature” through a postcolonial inheritance is to interrogate its more utopian designs and to refract the subject’s own exceptionalist fantasies through a dark glass of abjection. Abjection, for Julia Kristeva, is that “place where meaning collapses,” where conventional demarcations of subject and object are dissolved by rude matter that transgresses the conventional borders of “identity, system, order.” My argument is that American literature has needed to repress the ghosts of postcolonialism in order to shore up its own purified sense of, as Kristeva put it, the “religious, moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of societies.”33 ii As an example of this fractious relationship between American literature and postcolonialism, I want to discuss the work of Jamaica

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Kincaid, who was born in 1949 as Elaine Potter Richardson on the Caribbean island of Antigua, a British colony until it became selfgoverning in 1967. Kincaid lived in Antigua until 1965, when she went to Scarsdale, New York, to work as an au pair. She subsequently wrote “Talk of the Town” pieces for the New Yorker, changed her name in 1973 – choosing “Jamaica,” so she said, as “symbolic” of the Caribbean – and is now settled in the United States, where she lives in Vermont and teaches writing at Harvard.34 Kincaid has always said that the decision to come to the United States is one she has “never regretted.”35 Even though she declared in 1991 that she would “never become an American citizen,” considering herself “a citizen of Antigua” and so “Caribbean,” she in fact subsequently took US citizenship in 1993, largely because of Bill Clinton, whom in 2006 she still thought to be “as great an American President as I can expect in my lifetime.”36 She also credits the transformative energy of the United States with giving her the temerity to “invent” herself anew, to rebel against the “patriarchal nineteenthcentury English view” of the world with which she was inculcated during her upbringing in the colonial West Indies.37 As Michael Bérubé observed, Kincaid’s “success in mainstream American venues” has led to her being “widely considered to be ‘almost’ an American writer,” though Kincaid herself has long cherished what she calls her “life of contradiction”: “Even as I live in America and can vote and do all the things an American can do, I don’t feel I’m an American in a certain way.”38 Kincaid has said that she does not “consider myself a diaspora writer”; instead, she uses a strategic form of “exile” to triangulate British, Antiguan and US national identities, thereby provoking awkward, uncomfortable questions about how postcolonialism relates to an American cultural context.39 In Kincaid’s early books it is the British colonial inheritance with which the author wrestles most forcibly. Annie John (1985) chronicles the growth and education of a girl in Antigua under the leaden sound of “the Anglican church bell”; she recalls “forming a circle around the flagpole” at her Brownie troupe meetings, where the girls watched “the Union Jack as it was raised up,” before they “swore allegiance to our country, by which was meant England.” Annie is denounced as “arrogant” and “blasphemous” by her teacher for her antipathy toward Columbus, conventionally understood to have discovered Antigua in 1493, but whom the rebellious schoolgirl deems to be a prototype of the colonizing mentality; and, for her insubordination, she is made to copy out the first two books of Milton’s

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Paradise Lost. Annie John thus engages intertextually with English literature in order to valorize the protagonist’s insurrectionary manner; she mentions a painting entitled The Young Lucifer, which “showed Satan just recently cast out of heaven for all his bad deeds,” and the reference at the beginning of Annie John to the eponymous heroine’s childhood in Antigua as a “paradise” exemplifies her selfconscious affiliation with a mode of satanic transgression.40 The arch-rebel is also the inspiration for the name of the central character in Lucy – her mother says she named her “after Satan himself, Lucy, short for Lucifer.” This is another of Kincaid’s literate heroines who has read Paradise Lost as part of her colonial education, along with Wordsworth’s famous poem on daffodils; Lucy says that although she was forced to memorize the Wordsworth poem at the age of ten, she never saw an actual daffodil until she was nineteen and could never regard them as anything other than “a scene of conquered and conquests.”41 Kincaid’s early fiction thus resounds with echoes of traditional English culture: Shakespeare, the King James Bible, even traditionalist children’s writer Enid Blyton, whom Kincaid herself read and who is cited in Annie John.42 On one level, the intertextual references in these early novels might be seen as an attempt deliberately to revise the English literary and cultural canon, pursuing the kind of self-conscious strategy endorsed by J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) in its revision of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. One of the interesting aspects of Kincaid’s narratives, however, is how they swerve away from any simplistic ascription of agency that would, in Judie Newman’s formula, comprehend such intertextuality as a form of “empowerment”; instead, Kincaid’s texts twist round on themselves, so that it becomes difficult to differentiate the colonizers from the colonized.43 The author herself acknowledged ironically how “the people who have been most influential in destroying the psychologically whole me, have also given me the language to understand this,” and this articulates precisely Butler’s argument about power being a ubiquitous rather than a partitioned phenomenon. “You just can’t denounce or hate people,” said Kincaid, “because you get all sorts of things from all sorts of people. Included in the bad things, you get some good things too.”44 This pattern of contradiction and mirroring becomes particularly evident in Kincaid’s scathing account of Antiguan history, A Small Place. Here the wrongs of empire are plentifully enumerated, with the English denounced as a “bad-minded people” who used the

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Caribbean for the trading of slaves and other kinds of economic exploitation; the author points out how many streets in Antigua are named after “English maritime criminals”: Nelson, Hood, Hawkins, Drake and others. But this is not simply a cry of outrage, nor a song of freedom, for Kincaid chronicles here the psychological and political paradoxes at the heart of what she calls Antigua’s “post-colonial” condition. She describes how the islanders, to celebrate their newfound independence from Britain, “go to church and thank God, a British God”; she also describes how, in this “small place” that is apparently contracted in time as well as space, there appear to be no conventional chronological divisions into past, present and future: “they speak of emancipation itself as if it happened just the other day, not over one hundred and fifty years ago.” This is an Alicein-Wonderland world, where temporal boundaries seem to have collapsed, where slavery is still part of the collective imagination, where emancipation and subjugation are simultaneous rather than sequential phenomena. Consequently, the anger in A Small Place is directed not just against the English but also against the Antiguans, herself included, for their willingness to subscribe passively to colonial myths and also their gullibility in romanticizing the island’s slave past as a picturesque “pageant full of large ships sailing on blue water.” Written as a pastiche travel narrative by a supposedly ignorant tourist, A Small Place not only critiques the assumptions inherent in more conventional travel writing but also, crucially, explores the limits of cultural and political agency. The author equates the general narrowness of vision in Antigua with the island’s political smallness: “the people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture,” she writes, so that it is “as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside it were locked out.”45 At the same time, it is precisely this sense of enclosure that becomes the catalyst for the narrative’s frantic anger. Smallness here becomes, in other words, something like an ontological category, the restrictive force that enables the voice of protest against a dominant oppressor, even as its inferior position ironically disallows any prospect of ameliorating such a belittled state. Kincaid herself joked to an interviewer that anger was the source of her literary creativity: “If I ever find myself not getting angry . . . I’ll go to a psychiatrist to regain my anger.”46 In a more structural sense, though, this emphasis on (mental or physical) violence rather than resolution or closure significantly inflects Kincaid’s particular

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version of postcolonialism. In her 1997 essay “In History,” she ponders, as did metahistorian Hayden White, the viability of historical narratives, with their fictitious constructions of beginnings, middles and ends. Her specific theme again is Columbus’s voyage to the New World in 1492, and she takes issue here with the kind of US multicultural pedagogy that, especially around the five hundredth anniversary of his landing, chastised the Spaniard for failing to respect Native American culture. “To cast blame on him now for this child-like immaturity has all the moral substance of a certificate given to a school girl for good behavior,” writes Kincaid: “To be a well-behaved school girl is not hard. When he sees this New World, it is really new to him: he has never seen anything like it before.” Her essay goes on to raise wider questions about the partial perspectives involved in any work of history and the insufficiency of teleology itself as a basis for anything other than self-gratifying institutional wisdom: “When did I begin to ask all this? When did I begin to think of all this and in just this way? What is history? Is it a theory?”47 Such epistemological skepticism lends weight to Alison Donnell’s argument about what she calls a “cultural paralysis in postcolonial criticism,” arising from the difficulty of finding positions from which to articulate voices of protest; Donnell describes A Small Place as “a consummate work of ventriloquism” that uses multiple voices and masks “to debate the values and limitations of the cultural discourses and positions associated with postcolonialism.”48 Although Kincaid’s book savagely demystifies the popular legends by which the people of Antigua are enslaved, it deliberately eschews the kind of ethical platform upon which postcolonialism as a program of “liberation theory,” in Parry’s phrase, has been grounded.49 Postcolonialism for Kincaid thus signifies a realm of the split subject: not simply a mythical transition from one point to another, but a legacy of rupture and violence turned back against the self. This sense of contradiction emerges most obviously in her vitriolic essay “On Seeing England for the First Time” (1991), which vengefully deconstructs the mental image of England as a celestial “Jerusalem” that had been handed down by colonial pedagogues. “I hate England,” she exclaims: “the weather is like a jail sentence, the English are a very ugly people, the food in England is like a jail sentence, the hair of English people is so straight, so dead looking, the English have an unbearable smell so different from the smell of people I know. . .” Intellectually, she justifies this aversion in terms of a general English rudeness and obsequiousness to royalty, along

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with their collective blindness to the legacy of slavery and the fact that, in commemoration of their imperial history, they have “monuments everywhere.” But the way this antipathy is expressed stylistically through a poetics of traversal – inverting the stereotypes applied historically to black people and turning them against the English – suggests how Kincaid’s rhetoric characteristically aspires not to transcend such forms of objectification but to stand them on their head. In this sense, her narrative method self-consciously abjures a progressive or redemptive spirit and rotates instead on an axis where positions of domination can be inverted but not eradicated. The narrator acknowledges how she is “a person full of prejudice,” but the “great feeling of rage and disappointment” inherent in “On Seeing England” derives from the way it represents such “prejudice” as an infinitely reflexive category.50 For Kincaid, prejudice is not an irrational lapse from a state of enlightenment; it is, rather, a transfer of emotion emanating from a position of power which is imposed, characteristically, on a less powerful object. The impetus of her essay involves not an elimination of the colonial impulse but its reversal, with Kincaid licensing her narrator to avenge herself on England, to turn the tables of prejudice so as to recapitulate its incarcerating force by channelling it contrariwise. The prevalence of this kind of circular structure testifies to what Emily Apter has called “the eroticization of power inherent in colonial fictions,” the ways in which postcolonialism is linked psychoanalytically to a dynamic of usurpation, just as colonialism itself, in its most blatant forms, involves “the violent, sadoerotic management of cultural territory and human subjects.”51 Kincaid has remarked sporadically upon the elements of coercion and violence in her own Caribbean childhood, and these painful memories are systematically transposed into the spherical structure of her narratives, which represent an American citizen seeking to avenge the former self imprisoned within a colonial environment.52 In this sense Kincaid’s works tend to be more pessimistic in tone than many of those celebrated in the US literary canon, since her triangulated version of the colonial/ postcolonial dynamic annuls in advance any prospect of transcendence. Whereas classic American literature has typically involved a progressive erasure of postcolonial consciousness, as though the trauma of violent conflict could simply be purified out of the system, Kincaid’s self-lacerating narratives reject that spirit of pastoral regeneration and represent the anger associated with a fissured condition as a prerequisite for the reconstitution of a postcolonial subject. This is

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why Kincaid has deliberately positioned herself in an estranged relation to the institutional assumptions of US culture, taking issue with “that line in the Declaration of Independence, ‘the pursuit of happiness,’” a phrase which she believes “has no meaning at all” since, in her eyes, “you cannot pursue happiness.” Similarly, she attributes “the sorry state of American writing” to the fact that “Americans . . . like to laugh and they like a happy ending,” whereas her own preferred creative mode, she observes drolly, is “to be depressing.”53 Kincaid, then, reconfigures the aesthetic contours of postcolonialism, presenting it as a discursive matrix that highlights the shifting permutations of what she calls the “relationship between the powerful and the powerless . . . the conqueror and the victim.” Kincaid has stated that, in her view, social “corruption” should not be attributed reductively to either colonization or race: “In Zimbabwe they have on their books laws that were put in place by the whites to oppress the blacks. The blacks, when they got power, kept those laws on the books and now use them against each other . . . There is always a ruling power who behaves like the colonial power.” While of course acknowledging how race is embedded within this colonizing structure, Kincaid suggests that “people in America, especially in universities, are so obsessed with race” as a means of identification that their attention can be deflected away from the larger complications of colonization as a form of ontology.54 Indeed, she has specifically criticized various aspects of African American politics, castigating, for example, the 1995 Million Man march as “ridiculous” and commenting on how “people like Jesse Jackson do not help matters”; in her view, these are utopian gestures centered around chimeras of identity which obscure the brute fact that “racialism” is endemic within human societies and how the words “white” and “black” have been used frequently to camouflage more fundamental issues of power and powerlessness.55 While it may be rhetorically comforting to recast global history in partitioned, manichean terms – Columbus versus the Native Americans, white versus black – Kincaid herself prefers to represent smallness as a natural condition, a position of diminution from which it may be possible to travesty or exchange places with the oppressor but where there is no prospect of equitable reconciliation. This constitutes the dilemma of A Small Place, as we have seen, and there is a similar playing with size in Annie John, where the heroine’s description of feeling herself grow “alternately too big and too small . . . so big that I took up the whole street; then . . . so small that nobody could see me” is reminiscent of Lewis

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Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice grows simultaneously too small to reach the key that could provide for her escape and too large to fit through the unlocked door.56 There is a similar kind of structural mise-en-abîme in Lucy, particularly in the surreal scene where the heroine’s dream of falling “down a hole” echoes Alice’s tumble into an alternative universe.57 Kincaid, who describes herself as having “no academic credentials whatsoever,” has always eschewed any self-conscious positioning of herself in relation to intellectual or artistic traditions.58 “I still try to forget everything that I’ve read,” she has said, “and just write.” Nevertheless, despite her reticence, it is not difficult to build up a picture of Kincaid the author – and now Harvard professor, the colleague of, as she calls him, “Skip” Gates – being influenced, through osmosis or otherwise, by various aspects of modernism. She indicated to Allan Vorda that the element of magical realism in her work can be understood at least partially in intertextual terms: “If it went back to anyone,” she admitted, “it would be Lewis Carroll.” She expressed great enthusiasm at the same time for the work of Jorge Luis Borges – “Borges is the kind of writer when I read I’m just absolutely in heaven” – while also acknowledging a predilection for the stylistics of modernist minimalism: she greatly admires the writing of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as well as the lucidly anti-anthropomorphic idiom of Alain Robbe-Grillet.59 She has also commented on her particular interest in Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962), an experimental work consisting of a sequence of still black and white photographs set in a post-apocalyptic Paris, where a soldier is used as a guinea pig in time travel experiments that ultimately lead him back to the moment of his own death, as if to exemplify how, as La Jetée puts it, “there is no way out of time.”60 Kincaid has also put on record that when she was writing Lucy she was reading the Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin, who was, like Carroll, a particular hero of the surrealists because of the way his paintings attempted to disinter aspects of primitivism by juxtaposing interior and exterior worlds in provocative, heterodox ways.61 Much of Kincaid’s own work similarly turns upon the reclamation of buried lives of one kind or another. “I don’t really think I make these distinctions between dreaming and waking,” she remarked in a 1989 interview, thereby suggesting the kind of deliberate elision of conscious and unconscious that would link her work to that of the surrealists.62 Diane Simmons among others has commented specifically on the “surrealistic” stylistic idiom in Kincaid’s

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early short stories (1), particularly those collected in her first book, At the Bottom of the River, with their long, circuitous sentences and fragmentary perspectives, and indeed the author herself suggested this early work had been influenced by the surrealist temper of the Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz.63 She subsequently repudiated this aesthetic style, declaring it was too “unangry, decent, civilized” to be effective, and, characteristically, blaming her English education for trying to smooth away her rough edges and turn her into “their version of a human being.” In this same interview, she remarked on how she was “interested in writing about sex, or smells,” in “being not a decent person”; and she also recommended a collection of stories by French Caribbean women writers as “much more frank, much more exciting” than those of their English counterparts: “These French writers are also unbelievably bold about sex,” said Kincaid, “and of course sex is everything.”64 Conversely, she dismissed the social milieu of Zora Neale Hurston, with its evocation of African American folk culture, as something quite outside her own experiential compass: Hurston’s language, said Kincaid, “makes assumptions about things that I just don’t understand.”65 In disaffiliating herself from Hurston and implicitly aligning herself with a French Caribbean tradition, Kincaid draws attention to the ways in which her writing engages with a hemispheric American idiom, one grounded upon relations between the United States and other cultures, rather than one circumscribed by the nationalist teleology of her adopted country. Kincaid’s texts redescribe postcolonial scenarios through the language of modernism and surrealism, an artistic strategy which demystifies national narratives by turning back reflexively their own ingrained assumptions about native families and the motherland. As the author herself has acknowledged, her work fuses attitudes to colonialism with attitudes toward her own family, returning compulsively to scenes of the Antiguan past from a more overtly emancipated American perspective. But the perennial sense of split loyalties ensures that her writing does not seek simply, as Moira Ferguson argued, to “redress the balance of colonial mystification” and dissolve “the economy of domination”; less formulaically, it also creates a hybrid style which blends a mood of feminist independence with an immersion in repetitious streams of the unconscious.66 Lucy, like Kincaid’s other fictional personae, has a troublesome relationship with her mother, who makes conventional assumptions about gender which the protagonist finds exasperating, but, like Kincaid’s other heroines, she nevertheless finds herself bound

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inescapably to a matrilineal cord. Louise Bernard has written that the title of The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) “playfully” echoes Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); but this association is more than just playful, for the circular idiom of Kincaid’s book follows Stein’s style of patterned repetitions in the way it implies the traumas of memory, both personal and collective, and ways in which the present is linked inexorably to the past.67 In this sense, part of the momentum of Kincaid’s texts involves an atavistic compulsion to link the normative American present back to debased conditions of slavery or other forms of bodily incarceration, to appropriate for aesthetic reasons aspects of the human condition that customarily remain taboo. My Brother (1998) chronicles the slow death of the author’s brother, her alter ego, from AIDS, with Kincaid presenting herself as being pulled back into the orbit of her childhood as she shuttles between her home in Vermont and the hospital in Antigua.68 “The dead never die” is one of the key phrases in this book, whose rhetorical repetitions and reliance on non-sequential conjunctions reflect a recursive structure where logical exposition is superseded by the return of a primordial fate: “And my brother died, for he kept dying; each time I remembered that he had died it was as if he had just at that moment died, and the whole experience of it would begin again.” Kathryn Bond Stockton has commented on how the high prevalence of AIDS in African American communities during the 1990s served implicitly to associate it with the historical trauma of black slavery, and Kincaid’s mordant book is very effective at recording the “shock” of death, both a “worn-out thing” and something “new” each time.69 Read as what Sarah Brophy calls a “self-theorizing document,” My Brother also describes how AIDS engenders fissures within a family domain, irruptions that not only cut across the idea of natural genealogy but also thwart the more linear designs of postcolonialism.70 My Brother, in fact, might be said to outline a queer version of postcolonialism, one in which symbiotic relationships (between brother and family, between postcolonial island and imperial power) have been traversed by alternative currents that expose notions of growth, maturity or emancipation as merely genteel fictions. Yet it is precisely because of the intractability of this corporeal state, the way her brother even when alive looks like a “mummy” who “had died a very long time ago,” that “people from everywhere else” need to preserve the figurative “status” of the United States as a “New World,” an image of inversion, a hypothetical domain of escape from mental and physical bondage.71

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The strength of Kincaid’s work, then, lies not so much in its focus on domestic or psychoanalytical issues per se, but in the way it quizzically scrutinizes the premise of family from an estranged perspective to problematize supposedly natural affiliations of all kinds. Rather than simply promulgating identity politics, Kincaid’s later family narratives read more like those of a postcolonial Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein, where elemental truths of death, time and generation serve to pare down the questions of cultural formation and self-definition by which her earlier fiction was agitated. Mr. Potter (2002) is on one level an elegy to her own absent father – Frederick Potter, an Antiguan taxi driver, who was not part of the Richardson family unit – but it displaces him from a social to a much more abstract context, focussing not on any personal relationship but on his ontological significance as a human being within the physical world. While Potter “had no private thoughts,” she says, his body was an integral part of the Caribbean landscape: “So too would his life be unimaginable without that water, that land, that sky.” This is not so much an autobiography as an anti-autobiography, a hollowing out of her father’s personal identity so that he appears in a kind of Beckettian perspective, as a blank space who becomes part of the “very shape of the earth.”72 In line with her meditations on how the colonial condition relates to terrestrial embodiment, My Garden (Book) (1999) draws parallels between the tending of her private garden in Vermont and the actions of a colonial conqueror reshaping a landscape according to his own will. On one level My Garden operates as a miniaturist parody of the ways in which a colonizing mentality seeks to reorder the world and play god; enclosed within the perimeters of her own landscape, the author as gardener fantasizes about reordering the calendar of the year so that May would extend for “ninety days,” while January, February, and March would merely be “allotted ten hours each.” My Garden interweaves its treatment of horticulture with discussions of such works as Thomas Jefferson’s letters on England (81) and William H. Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, thereby artfully alternating the impulse of territorial possession through a minimalist model of gardening and a maximalist model of empire.73 Kincaid’s aesthetic simulacrum of empire in My Garden thus exposes the fault lines that underlie every construction of environment. The book does not imitate what Susie O’Brien calls “the liberal environmentalist sensibility,” much of it parochial and white, by protectively extolling a specific domestic location; instead, it interrogates processes

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of mapping, and foregrounds ways in which particular geographic domains have been habitually naturalized, turned into privileged small places, by the imaginary erasure of their physical borders.74 In his exploration of what he calls the “cartographic genealogy of the earth in the western imagination,” geographer Denis Cosgrove writes of how globalization, the desire to grasp the whole of the globe as a unity, has been driven throughout history by a lust for universal knowledge, frequently abetted by spiritual desire, from the Apollonian gaze in ancient Greece, to the metaphysics of harmony that postulated an integrated study of earthly and celestial spheres, to the universalist pretensions of imperial Rome as the city of Caesars and popes.75 By contrast, one of the most striking aspects of Kincaid’s Among Flowers (2005) is the way it deliberately traverses and traduces this kind of universalist global mapping through a counternarrative foregrounding the unavoidable nature of bodily incarnation. Among Flowers is a non-fiction account of a hike in the Himalayas, with Kincaid deliberately leaving her home in Vermont to get “far away from everything I had known.” The narrative turns upon a structure of alienation, with the protagonist recording her “love of feeling isolated, of imagining myself all alone in the world and everything unfamiliar”; but, more than this, the Himalayan mountains function for Kincaid as an “ontological laboratory,” within which conventional notions of time and distance seem no longer to apply.76 In Among Flowers, the maps through which we normally position ourselves in relation to global space seem peremptorily to have dissolved; even the time differences in Nepal, where time zones are fifteen minutes out of kilter with the rest of the world, seem both “confusing” and “magical,” and this fits with the narrator’s peculiar sense of moving from the everyday horizontal world, where time and space are measured in terms of the landscapes around you, to a world that unfurls instead in a vertical direction, “an unending series of verticals going up and then going down.” There is a meditation here on grids and boundaries, on how it is a natural tendency of human beings “to think of every place in which you find yourself for longer than a day as home, and to make it familiar,” so that the explorers meticulously set out their knife and fork for dinner in a tent half-way up the mountain; but there is also consciousness, of course, of how topographic perspectives are constantly shifting, how geographic coordinates appear illusory, how when she looks back on where she has come from, as she says, “I did not recognize what I saw.”77 There is, then, a principled emphasis in Kincaid’s texts on

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disorientation, on the suspension of traditional boundaries of custom and security. In Among Flowers, such boundaries are associated not just with the familiar comforts of home but also with protection from a global state of terror; at the outset, the narrator records with portentous capital letters how “The Events of September 11th” delay her planned trip by a year, and the expedition to the Himalayas is itself shadowed by the presence in the background of a group of Maoist terrorists, who do in fact attack the airport at Kanchenjunga just a few days after her party has passed through it. The point here, though, is as much metaphysical as political: Among Flowers is about the stripping away of illusory states of security, the disruption of epistemology, the uncovering of the human condition in its abject nakedness and absurdity. Although this condition of terror is given a particular historical dimension in the months after 9/11, the political situation also illuminates a more general state for which it stands as a metonymic figure. This is why the philosophy of Kincaid’s narrative is intertwined with self-mockery – “huge cackling and laughter,” as she puts it – and also with scatology, as she details how her body reacts to sleeping and urinating outdoors. As so often with the surrealists, this kind of toilet humour is presented as a deliberate form of vulgarity, abjection as a philosophical principle, which functions in an adversarial way to undermine the polite conventions on which established codes of polite society are grounded. Among Flowers is predicated upon a rhetoric of desublimation and trick perspectives, where corporeality traverses abstract global designs and resists their allegories of emancipation: “Not ever did I get used to this – the deceptive nearness of my destinations – not ever did I become accustomed to the vast difference between my expectation, my perception, and reality; the way things really are.”78 iii Kincaid’s queer remappings of time and space, her paradoxical crisscrossing of near and far, help to elucidate the complicated ways in which “American literature” has positioned itself in relation to the intellectual and political agendas of postcolonialism. For David Harvey, one of the characteristics of US imperial culture since the late nineteenth century has been its capacity “to mask the explicitness of territorial gains and occupations under the mask of a spaceless universalization of its own values.”79 The key word here is “spaceless”: while occluding what Harvey called “geographical materialism,”

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US culture has sought to present its conception of freedom as territorially disembodied, as descending from Enlightenment models of liberty rather than being contingent to any specific spatial or temporal domain, but Kincaid’s deliberate twisting of geographic coordinates raises broader questions about relations between abstract conceptualizations of space and their material correlatives.80 Kincaid herself mentioned in an interview that she likes living in the United States because the country does not immediately position her socially in the way Antigua did, and Britain would have done, but instead gives her “the language and the idea to rearrange the world in what I’d think would be a just equation.”81 By remapping US culture in relation to her Caribbean homeland and the British Empire more generally, Kincaid deploys an iconoclastic art of cartographic reinvention, using the idea of America as a negative or virtual space to create alternative semiotic systems which reflexively spoof the established geographic contours of empire building. As Chakrabarty argued, postcolonial scholarship itself has been indebted to the way these theories of self-determination have become naturalized and universalized: an “Enlightenment idea of the human,” he writes, “is now itself a part of the global heritage of all postcolonial thinkers.”82 Because of this heritage, the academic development of postcolonialism as a form of political intervention in the years after the Second World War tended not to pay much heed to ways in which postcolonialism and surrealism were commonly understood to be intertwined radical movements in the middle part of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin’s 1929 essay “Surrealism” influentially reduced the surreal to a spirit of “sabotage” that was, in his eyes, ultimately too conservative, since it served covertly to pay homage to the very limits it was transgressing.83 This Marxist quarrel with surrealism carried through to Sartre’s 1961 preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, which sternly addresses the need to move away from magic and fetish toward dialectic. It is clearly the case, however, that Benjamin’s own radical consciousness was formed partly by a surrealist consciousness, and indeed the necessary entanglement of political and aesthetic concerns was a prime topic of interest in surrealist circles around the time of the Second World War. Aimé Césaire attributed to surrealism a distinct quality of political agency in his own Discourse on Colonialism (1950), a text which can be read as surrealist both in the specific influences it acknowledges – Ducasse, Lautréamont – and in its emphasis on paratactical forms of juxtaposition: “it is,” writes Césaire, “a good thing to place different

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civilizations in contact with each other.” He consequently plans to disrupt the “bourgeois phenomenon” of the nation by exposing it to the idea of “Negritude,” a “plunge into Africa” that would reveal to white France the limits of its colonial borders, both territorial and ideological. Describing surrealism as “a weapon that exploded the French language,” Césaire here brings into alignment the decolonization of society and the decolonization of inner life.84 Without delving into the complications surrounding the transmission of surrealist cultural ideas in the 1940s, the more general point is that, largely because of the specific social and political situation in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, surrealism at this time became intellectually severed from postcolonialism, with consequences that have continued significantly to shape the academic field of postcolonialism today. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), for example, Fanon took his epigraph from Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, described the “Antilles Negro” with specific reference to Breton and Michel Leiris as well as Freud and Lacan, and returned to Césaire toward the end of the book: “Once again I come back to Césaire; I wish that many black intellectuals would turn to him for their inspiration.”85 Fanon picks up here on Césaire’s interest in reading the culture of race psychoanalytically, in terms of split personality and the instability of the intercalated relationship between master and slave, between white mask and black skin. Despite their overt revolutionary commitments, however, the surrealists never quite threw off the stigma of marginalization in the 1930s by the Communist Party, whose charge that surrealism was insufficiently politicized continued to resonate after the fall of Nazism. Sartre’s insistence on relegating negritude to a minor term eventually induced Fanon to acquiesce in the kind of political positivism that his own writings never entirely endorse. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon notes that the “primary Manichaeism” governing colonial society, reducing it tribally to an antinomy between occupants and natives, is reversed but “preserved intact during the period of decolonization,” when “the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown.” He goes on to argue, however, that racialism, hatred, and resentment “cannot sustain a war of liberation”; the emotional investments and entanglements of the colony in the systems of its own oppression create a situation where a ritual overthrow of the colonial masters does not necessarily engender a state of regeneration. Fanon thus acknowledges the multiple paradoxes circumscribing wars of liberation, how the poor and the unemployed

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“do not manage, in spite of public holidays and flags, new and brightly-coloured though they may be, to convince themselves that anything has really changed in their lives.”86 These are the same kinds of paradoxes that Kincaid describes in A Small Place, where she observes how the elimination of British colonialism has brought about similar kinds of coercive management by local Antiguan politicians to fill the power vacuum. Fanon’s emphasis on how a “hatred of self . . . is characteristic of racial conflicts in segregated societies” also speaks to the kinds of divided self and forms of tortured self-loathing that manifest themselves frequently in Kincaid’s narratives.87 This condition of fissure also elucidates more generally the postcolonial matrix in the United States, whose war of national liberation involved not only violence but a subsequent effort to transcend the scrambled memories of such violent rupture, to create the legend of a country descended constitutionally from a myth of Enlightenment reason and sanctified by its own privileged natural space. To move away from the Marxist narrative of postcolonialism as liberation, in other words, and replace it with a surrealist narrative of postcolonialism as repression and misrecognition is to see how the institutional amnesia of the United States with regard to its own colonial past might itself be understood as a form of postcolonial trauma. Considered as a broad discursive practice rather than a narrow artistic manifesto, the disturbing aspect of surrealism is, as James Clifford put it, the way it “openly desires its own disorientation” and therefore holds in suspension the promises of emancipation and agency.88 In his 1997 essay “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Kwame Anthony Appiah attempted to reconstitute a patriotic ethos of emancipation by associating a tolerance for difference with a new form of cosmopolitanism that would reflect “elective affinities rather than state-imposed obligation.” While Appiah’s politics are articulated within an exemplary liberal framework – “The humanist,” he writes, “requires us to put our differences aside; the cosmopolitan insists that sometimes it is the differences we bring to the table that make it rewarding to interact at all” – his strategies for achieving such wisdom are themselves indebted to Enlightenment notions of flexible virtue.89 This new version of cosmopolitanism, in other words, appears uncomfortably to approximate the old eighteenth-century model of cosmopolitan universalism, and the obvious problem in both cases is the same, that it remains a creed of abstract idealism whose paradigm of open-mindedness has no purchase upon those whose instinct

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is simply to ignore it. Appiah is right to talk (in an earlier essay) of postcolonialism as a project of “delegitimation,” but perhaps wrong to insist on grounding this in what he calls “an appeal to an ethical universal.”90 By contrast, to link postcolonialism with surrealism is to delegitimate the conventions of Western culture without seeking to reconcile them within the comfort zones of liberal, cosmopolitan politics. Kincaid exposes the violence and contradictions of colonial tradition and describes how these impact upon the human mind and body, but one of the strengths of her writing is precisely that she does not offer emollient domestic solutions or suggest that power and racialism should be understood simply as peculiarly malevolent phenomena, an odd lapse from educated wisdom. In this sense, the terror in Among Flowers can be seen as a kind of philosophical terror, an incongruous juxtaposition of polite social conventions with the inexorable paradox of impolite bodily incarnation, a tension which introduces the kind of black comedy, the “profane illumination,” that Walter Benjamin in 1929 said was characteristic of surrealism in general.91 Comedy has perhaps been an undervalued trope in postcolonial studies, but Charles Altieri has shown how surrealism tends to demystify the transcendental impetus of disembodied ideals by its incorrigibly materialist emphasis, so that surrealism manifests itself as “a strange interaction among incongruous surfaces and biological energies.”92 By transposing identity into mere adjacency and emphasizing literal rather than figurative meanings, surrealism effectively deconstructs the teleological ethos of allegory and drags the etiolated abstractions of spirit back into a more obdurate realm of matter. It is precisely this admission of incongruity, this resignification of a disembodied global apparatus in the light of corporeal presence within a particular location, that is the focal point for Kincaid’s narratives of traversal. To extend the temporal range of postcolonialism, tracing its intellectual genealogy back through surrealism and modernism, is also to expand its conceptual frame of reference, so that it becomes a useful critical matrix within which to consider questions of power, repression and potentiality more generally. Kincaid is a pertinent representative of the crossover between US culture and postcolonialism, because her emphasis on the abject comedy of corporeal incarnation and her implicit recognition of the ontological limits of the human body place postcolonial questions within a larger and more compelling framework. In the era of globalization, it is no longer so easy to partition the world in terms of discrete social and political zones, to

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disentangle the oppressor from the oppressed, and part of the cathectic charge of Kincaid’s writing involves its admission of psychic fragmentation, where a spirit of emancipation finds itself turning back sharply but disturbingly upon another version of the self. In her essay “The Little Revenge from the Periphery” Kincaid interrogates the received notion of US culture as an idealist phenomenon, demurring from the American mystification of “freedom” even as she acknowledges its legendary power: America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own tradition – that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self. But freedom from yourself and your own traditions is fine . . . for ten seconds. Everyone in every place needs a boundary; in America the boundary is the phrase ‘I am not black!’ 93

Kincaid picks up here on the argument made by Toni Morrison and others about how the celebrated white mythological version of freedom depended implicitly upon blind boundaries, upon a systematic repression of black consciousness. The point to be emphasized here, though, is that another of these boundaries, as Kincaid observes, involves a systematic repression of “place”: “Everyone in every place needs a boundary.” If Morrison, expert at orchestrating the national apparatus of publishing and broadcasting, has produced civic counternarratives indicating how the US ideology of freedom became racialized, Kincaid, working according to a transnational and surrealist logic, rewrites this history of freedom as always interwoven paradoxically with a legacy of colonial domination. As an American author in a double sense – a hemispheric American, with continuing loyalties to the Caribbean, and also since 1993 a citizen of the United States – Kincaid raises intriguing questions about how the field of “American literature” should be described, and what the implications might be of certain kinds of inclusion or exclusion. Historically, it has been the national narrative of emancipation from tyranny, bequeathed to the United States in the late eighteenth century and enshrined in the nation’s constitution, that has made the academic subject so resistant to the forces of geographical materialism, and, consequently, so reluctant to admit its own incorporation within a map of postcolonialism. To interrogate naturalized affinities between American literature and inherent

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rights of freedom – or between American literature and a flight from bondage, which is the same thing from another angle – is thus to redescribe the field as a murkier terrain where colonial power and postcolonial resistance interact with each other in a more amorphous, reciprocal fashion. While the carefully partitioned identity of American literature as an academic domain has perpetuated itself through a programmatic erasure of the specter of postcolonial subjection, a restoration of that subject’s corporeal nature, through an alternative kind of postcolonial genealogy, would effectively help to reposition it within more extensive global currents. 2009 NOTES

1. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 199. 2. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 2. 3. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 3. 4. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4. 5. Young, 4. 6. Gillian Brown, The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4. 7. For ways in which cultural “amnesia” is induced by “a powerful tendency in the United States to depoliticize traditions for the sake of ‘reconciliation,’” see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Random House, 1991), 13. 8. Young, 58; Neil Lazarus, “The Global Dispensation since 1945,” in Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 38. 9. Lazarus, 38; Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), 9. 10. Edward Watts, Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 2. On this theme, see also Lawrence Buell, “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,” American Literary History 4.3 (1992), 411–42. 11. Elleke Boehmer and Bart Moore-Gilbert, “Introduction to Special Issue: Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Resistance,” Interventions 4.1 (2002), 14.

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12. Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 16. 13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000; rpt. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5. 14. Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 62, xi, 43, 37. 15. Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism,’” in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, ed., Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 256. 16. McClintock, 260. 17. John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3, 7, 5. 18. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 66. 19. Christopher L. Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56.2 (1999), 300, 280. 20. Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56–57. 21. Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 83, 89, 98. 22. Patrick Henry gave his famous “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech at the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond on 23 March 1775. William Wirt Henry, Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1891), I, 266. 23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 62. 24. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 38. 25. Susie O’Brien, “New Postnational Narratives, Old American Dreams; or, The Problem with Coming-of-Age Stories,” in C. Richard King, ed., Postcolonial America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 71. 26. Satya P. Mohanty, “Epilogue. Colonial Legacies, Multicultural Futures: Relativism, Objectivity, and the Challenge of Otherness,” PMLA 110.1 (1995), 116.

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27. Malini Johar Schueller, “Postcolonial American Studies,” American Literary History 16.1 (2004), 165. See also Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, “On the Borders Between US Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” in Singh and Schmidt, ed., Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 3–69. 28. Hollinger, 140, 154, 129. 29. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, “Introduction,” in Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, ed., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 2. 30. David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 37. 31. Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (1988), trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 102. 32. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 30, 15, 105. 33. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2, 4, 209. 34. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview,” Callaloo no. 39 (Spring 1989), 400. 35. Gerhard Dilger, “‘I Use a Cut and Slash Policy of Writing’: Jamaica Kincaid Talks to Gerhard Dilger,” Wasafiri 16 (1992), 21. 36. Frank Birsbalsingh, “Jamaica Kincaid: From Antigua to America” (1991), in Frank Birsbalsingh, ed., Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 143. In a letter to the author, 18 June 2006, Kincaid also wrote that she specifically tried to take US citizenship “in time for the 1992 presidential election.” 37. Birsbalsingh, 142. 38. Michael Bérubé, “Introduction: Worldly English,” Modern Fiction Studies 48.1 (2002), 13. 39. Birsbalsingh, 143. 40. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), 13, 115, 82, 94, 25. 41. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (1990; rpt. London: Picador, 1994), 152, 30. 42. Kincaid, Annie John, 51. 43. Judie Newman, The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions (London: Arnold, 1995), 191. 44. Birsbalsingh, 147–48. 45. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (London: Virago, 1988), 23–24, 43, 9, 54–55, 52, 79.

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46. J. Brooks Bouson, Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 91. 47. Jamaica Kincaid, “In History,” Callaloo 20.1 (1997), 1, 4. 48. Alison Donnell, “She Ties Her Tongue: Cultural Paralysis in Postcolonial Criticism,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 26.1 (1995), 107. 49. Parry, 9. 50. Jamaica Kincaid, “On Seeing England for the First Time,” Transition No. 51 (1991), 32, 40, 37. 51. Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xi, 106. 52. Bouson, 39. 53. Marilyn Snell, “Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings,” Mother Jones, Sept-Oct. 1997, online: , accessed 1 June 2006. 54. Allan Vorda, ed., Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists (Houston: Rice University Press, 1993), 86–87, 85, 99. 55. Snell; Eleanor Wachtel, “Eleanor Wachtel with Jamaica Kincaid,” Malahat Review 116 (Sept. 1996), 60. 56. Kincaid, Annie John, 101. 57. Kincaid, Lucy, 14. 58. Birsbalsingh, 139. 59. Vorda, 87, 81, 88. 60. Cudjoe, 402–03. 61. Vorda, 103. 62. Cudjoe, 409. 63. Diane Simmons, Jamaica Kincaid (New York: Twayne, 1994), 1; Moira Ferguson, Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 32. 64. Donna Perry, “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (New York: Meridian, 1990), 499. The book recommended by Kincaid was Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson, ed., Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean (Oxford: Heinemann, 1989). 65. Perry, 508–09. 66. Ferguson, 4, 6. 67. Louise Bernard, “Countermemory and Return: Reclamation of the (Postmodern) Self in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and My Brother,” Modern Fiction Studies 48.1 (2002), 120. 68. “This might have been me, dying young . . . I felt instinctively that of all the lives I might have had, this might have been me.” Kincaid quoted in Bouson, 143.

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69. Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where ‘Black’ Meets ‘Queer’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 179. 70. Sarah Brophy, “Angels in Antigua: The Diasporic of Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother,” PMLA 117.2 (2002), 265. 71. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (1997; rpt. London: Vintage, 1998), 113, 165. 72. Jamaica Kincaid, Mr. Potter (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002), 130, 37, 40. 73. Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (1999; rpt. London: Vintage, 2000), 134, 81, 87. 74. Susie O’Brien, “The Garden and the World: Jamaica Kincaid and the Cultural Borders of Ecocriticism,” Mosaic 35.2 (2002), 173. 75. Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), x–xi. 76. Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (Washington DC: National Geographic, 2005), 3, 7. On Caravaggio’s use of his paintings as an “ontological laboratory,” see Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secret (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press—October, 1988), 59. 77. Kincaid, Among Flowers, 11, 77, 106, 129. 78. Kincaid, Among Flowers, 5, 89, 143. The most famous example of toilet humor in surrealist art is Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, The Fountain (1917). 79. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 47. 80. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 359. 81. Vorda, 105. 82. Chakrabarty, 5. 83. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 186. 84. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955), trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 33, 74, 84, 83. 85. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markham (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 38, 187. 86. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1967), 39, 111, 136. 87. Fanon, Wretched, 250. 88. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

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University Press, 1988), 140. On the way surrealism has often been conceptualized too narrowly, merely in terms of the biographies of its most famous advocates, see Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 6. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (1997), 638–39. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?,” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991), 353. Benjamin, 179. Charles Altieri, “Surrealist ‘Materialism,’” Dada/Surrealism 13 (1984), 95. Jamaica Kincaid, “The Little Revenge from the Periphery,” Transition No. 73 (1997), 72–73.

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CHAPTER 11

CATHOLIC IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN SLAVE NARRATIVES

If I might begin on a personal note, I must confess to feeling something of an interloper writing for an academic journal with the title US Catholic Historian, since I cannot identify myself as an American, nor as a Catholic, nor as a historian. On the other hand, I maintain deep affinities with each of these categories: I lived in the United States between 1987 and 1994, and now continue professionally to study American culture from the vantage-point of United Kingdom; I was born and raised as a Catholic; and I have always been concerned to extend my literary training into the social and historical realm, so as to encompass broader perspectives on particular aspects of art and culture. Such hybrid allegiances are not, I think, especially uncommon in the contemporary academy, or indeed within contemporary culture in general. One of today’s leading theorists of ethnicity, Werner Sollors, takes issue with what he calls a “pastoralization of the in-group,” the notion that only those who speak from a privileged, “authentic” position inside any given community should be qualified to analyze or critique it.l As Sollors says, such nostalgic and romantic forms of identity politics beg any number of conceptual questions: what constitutes community, what constitutes authenticity, what constitutes insiderhood, and so on. Such epistemological dilemmas might, of course, be susceptible of resolution on a metaphysical plane, if one were to believe in an ideal essence of, say, “America” (or “Ireland” or “Bosnia” or “Catholicism” or “Protestantism”), which contingent worldly events serve merely to obscure. Within the current terms of post-structuralist scholarship, however, such essentialist categories

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have been ruthlessly deconstructed, to such an extent that they are, from the widely accepted academic point of view, no longer even open to debate. Whereas the widespread interest in archetypes and mythologies during the 1950s opened the door for Will Herberg to undertake his influential typologies of “Catholic, Protestant, Jew,” the radically demythologizing temper of the 1990s is far less willing to dissolve the material inconsistencies and crosscurrents of history into a sanctified realm of mythic identity.2 From this perspective, all notions of identity necessarily involve external reconstructions rather than internal self-definitions. Any cultural matrix must, therefore, be made up of a series of mutual reflections, within whose dissemination and circulation of signs some kind of fiction of identity becomes staked out. As a consequence, Catholicism, like other social formations, can only be defined, in worldly terms at least, by this reciprocal process through which it watches others watching itself. The cultural significance of religion within America is a massively complex and important subject, but its significance has generally been under-valued in recent years, partly because these old pressures of identity politics have helped produce exclusivist narratives of religious discourse from a position of cultural “insiderism,” in Sollors’s term, partly because such narratives have often been underpinned, implicitly or explicitly, by a commitment to the ontological “truth” of the value systems they were inscribing.3 This is not, of course, to question the integrity or, indeed, the practical usefulness of such narratives in themselves. It is merely to insist that any consideration of how religious systems come to signify within the public sphere – often profoundly influencing the construction of that domain –must be prepared to, as Jacques Derrida would say, “bracket” questions of truth or falsity, leaving them in abeyance, so that issues concerning the religious sedimentation of society can be addressed in a relatively disengaged scholarly fashion. By disentangling religious scholarship from the broader scholarship of religion, it becomes easier to see the wider implications, and immense significance, of religious assumptions within the heterogeneous forms of United States history and culture. Reading David W. Southern’s recent biography of the Jesuit intellectual, John LaFarge, I was struck by the extent to which the issue of “interracialism,” of so much concern to LaFarge, was continually framed within his work by a specifically Catholic ideology whose parameters, oddly enough, he apparently failed to recognize. LaFarge was, of course, always concerned with the education of black Catholics, though he

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much preferred the gradualist approach of black leaders like Booker T. Washington to the spiritual militancy of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois, for his part, retorted in a 1925 issue of Crisis that “the Catholic Church in America stands for color separation and discrimination to a degree equaled by no other church in America, and that is saying a great deal.”4 The point I wish to emphasize is how these opposing positions assumed by LaFarge and Du Bois involve politicized versions of ideas that can be closely affiliated with prior theological concepts. For LaFarge, Catholicism embodied a universality whose “real strength,” as he put it, “is in the ignoring of race.” Southern, in his otherwise highly perceptive analysis, dismisses this as “a rather shallow approach to a deep and enduring problem,” and goes on to criticize LaFarge for his “paternalism and elitism,” the way he “seemed to lack moral passion on the race question.”5 But it is not LaFarge’s moral passions that should concern us here so much as the ideological apparatus that impelled him to take up such a philosophical position. Lafarge rejected what he saw as the excessively Manichaean temper of Du Bois, who abstracted racial tensions into the “double consciousness” of white and black, itself a political correlative to the Puritan binary opposition between spiritual illumination and irredeemable darkness. Averse to such fundamentalist polarities, LaFarge privileged universalism, accommodation, gradualism; racial slavery thus appeared to him as a relative rather than absolute category, a regrettably literalized manifestation (albeit within a grotesquely distorted fashion) of the other kinds of bondage incumbent upon man’s terrestrial pilgrimage. Whereas for the uncompromising Du Bois slavery represented the work of the devil, for LaFarge it epitomized a mere privation of good, a situation susceptible of amelioration according to various beneficent strategies promoted by men of goodwill. I do not, of course, wish to suggest this is the only possible Catholic position on racial discrimination; as Southern himself notes, later theologians like John Courtney Murray and Gustave Weigel, working within different cultural contexts, proposed different kinds of solutions. What does seem important, however, is to avoid dissociating particular social and political positions from their religious or theological subtexts, since it was, ultimately, his theological understanding that crucially determined the basis of LaFarge’s political beliefs. The pattern here is exactly analogous to the ways in which, as Myra Jehlen observes, categories of race, gender and ethnicity enter

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into the constitution of American literature “such that they underlie not only its themes . . . but its very language. The ideological dimension of literary works,” Jehlen went on, “has emerged, therefore, as integral to their entire composition.”6 In this way, the principles of deconstruction can be gainfully employed so as to highlight, in an analytic sense, the partial (rather than impartial) nature of all speech and writing. As Jehlen says, the function of ideological demystification today involves not so much the simple uncovering of false consciousness, as earlier Marxists believed, but rather an appreciation of the “interested” condition of all discursive positions, the ways in which narratives of all kinds necessarily fail to transcend those cultural frameworks from which they originate and within whose toils they remain fatally enmeshed. As Julia Kristeva observes, “all human knowledge, whether it be that of an individual subject or of a meaning structure, retains religion as its blind boundaries.”7 In the light of these interactions between LaFarge and Du Bois, we might reexamine some of the narratives concerned with American slavery in the nineteenth century so as to unpack ways in which this whole argument, so vital to American history and its constitution, was involved at various important levels with a transposition and metaphorical displacement of theological controversies. It was, above all, evangelical Christianity that came to form the “blind boundaries” of the slavery debate in Victorian America, in the sense that it provided the implicit context within which discourses about slavery came to be understood. For many American reformers at this time, the idea of freedom became mystified, in Pauline fashion, and equated not so much with the political subversion of Southern slavery as with the reclamation of an inner “soul,” with the discovery of what Du Bois subsequently called a “mountain path to Canaan.”8 The more perplexing questions about what freedom might mean, and what might happen after it was achieved, were put to one side; as David Brion Davis describes it, the rationalism of the eighteenth century gave way to the abolitionist emotionalism of the nineteenth, and the problem of slavery came increasingly to be judged according to Wesleyan imperatives of ethical regeneration and the “Inner Light.”9 In a legal sense, many of these claims for “higher” laws in the years before the Civil War rested upon hazy and sometimes uninformed generalizations, but they exerted a powerful cultural influence for all that. “There is a higher law than the Constitution,” proclaimed William H. Seward on 11 March 1850; while Theodore Parker looked forward to a time when the eradication of slavery

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would allow God’s blessing to descend upon the land, so that, as he put it, “we shall have a commonwealth based on righteousness.”10 Such an emphasis upon prophetic vision rather than legalistic codes of practice led inevitably towards a rigid Manichaean division between good and evil, the light and the dark. “Slavery is the antipode of liberty,” claimed the black abolitionist James C. W. Pennington in 1842: “No two things can be more directly opposed.”11 Hence the reformers tended to resist complex intellectual arguments around the slavery issue, seeing them as an elitist form of obscuranticism liable to divert attention from the plain moral sense of things. Nor should this dualistic consciousness be seen exclusively as a nineteenthcentury phenomenon: the influential black critic Houston Baker, who in 1988 described the historical formation of black American culture as evoking “Armageddon rather than the New Jerusalem,” was appropriating the same kind of religious terminology and teleology – albeit in reverse, since he was equating black American culture with a hellish inferno rather than with heavenly promise.12 Along similar lines, Eric J. Sundquist wrote in 1993 about “the right of slaves to claim the same moral authority for their own freedom that had served as the foundation of the United States itself,” thereby aligning the question of liberty with the kind of moral (rather than legal) metanarrative which nineteenth-century reformers saw as underwriting the American Constitution.13 The contemporary novelist Jay McInerney expressed the prevalence of this popular idealism within American culture when he described slavery as “our version of original sin.”14 It is important to recognize how this discourse of idealism emerges from, and overlaps with, the intellectual climate of Transcendentalism in mid-nineteenth-century America. Stanley M. Elkins, in noting the conceptual affinity between abolitionism and Transcendentalism, remarked upon how “the simple and harsh moral purity of our own antislavery movement, from the 1830s on, gave it a quality which set it apart from the others.”15 Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson’s elevation of the natural world into a replication of Neoplatonic plenitude is itself mirrored in the way American slave narratives eschew the grey areas of material description in favor of the starker outlines of spiritual allegory. Very often this allegory casts itself within the dualistic typologies of Puritan cultures, resolving the slavery question into an apocalyptic conflict between good and evil: Lucy A. Delaney’s 1891 narrative, for instance, is appropriately entitled From the Darkness Cometh the Light. The subliminal Protestant ethic at work throughout

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these slave narratives is never seen more clearly than in their negative attitudes towards the practices of Catholicism. As David Brion Davis observes, Catholics at this time tended to be more equivocal on the question of abolition, partly because of their historical involvement with feudal and other forms of social hierarchy, partly because their religious traditions of gradation and legalism did not sit comfortably either with millennial notions of liberation or with Quaker reliance upon a self-defining source of “Inner Light.”16 Elkins made a similar contrast between the manifestations of slavery in North and South America, remarking how the Catholic style of the latter tended not to demonize slavery in the same kind of way: “Slavery does not abolish the natural equality of man,” claimed Cardinal Gerdil, an eighteenth-century prelate in South America.17 Although the Jesuits in Brazil did work to eliminate slavery, they were more wary of proclaiming its abolition, being naturally suspicious of any triumphalist idea which would seek to circumvent the “almost infinite variety of gradations” linking black with white society in Brazil. Whereas the Puritan eschatology of the saved and the damned was reproduced within the rigid Manichaean separation of white and black cultures in North America, the Catholic metaphysical conceit of a purgatorial continuum between the light and the dark was embodied materially within the realms of Latin America, where identifications of color and slave status were much more ambiguous and fluid, permitting “a transition from slavery to freedom that was smooth, organic, and continuing.”18 For the abolitionists in North America, such an emphasis upon evolution rather than revolution threatened to suppress the moral dimensions of slavery and to jeopardize the central significance of the Lord God of Battle. What was seen in South America as hybridity appeared in North America simply as duplicity, the time-honored stereotype whereby the Catholic clergy would say one thing and do another. Within anti-slavery writing, analogies between Southern masters and Catholic priests became commonplace, inspired by the fact that so much of the abolitionist dynamic was interwoven with Nonconformist consciousness. William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) is a good example of this: with its strongly Quaker idiom, its disquisition on temperance and its depiction of alcohol as a form of bondage, Brown’s narrative automatically conflates secular and spiritual ideas of liberty by emphasizing how the slave’s desire for freedom is “allied to his hope of immortality . . . the ethereal part of his nature, which oppression cannot reach.” Given this binary opposition between

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enlightenment and enthrallment, it is no surprise Brown’s narrative should inveigh against the “hypocritical priesthood,” whose support for the Fugitive Slave Act can be seen as an implicit rejection of the Quaker conception of personal liberty as an inalienable right.19 Russ Castronovo has written of how Clotel works a variation upon traditional American values, a narrative which transgressively appropriates the legacies of “patrimony” and rewrites the quest for freedom from an African American point of view.20 This is true enough, but such reconfigurations of individualism merely exemplify another aspect of the institutionalization of romanticism within an American cultural framework. The problem here is not so much in identifying various kinds of energies associated with liberation, but in acknowledging how such energies are also paradoxically interwoven with the more sinister designs of human bondage. The extent to which the American antislavery movement, particularly in the decade before the Civil War, became entangled with a rhetoric of anti-Catholicism has not yet been fully explicated. In the early 1850s, according to David M. Potter, “there seemed to be a likelihood that the Catholic or immigrant question might replace the slavery question as the focal issue in American political life.” In the wake of the Irish famine and other troubles in Europe, the official number of immigrants to America between 1845 and 1854 was 2,939,000, a figure which comprised 14.5% of the total population. This, as Potter observed, “struck with severe shock in a society with a very small proportion of foreign-born members,” leading to increased competition for employment and various anti-Catholic riots, some involving a serious loss of life.21 Politically, 95% of these Catholic immigrants aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, giving rise to a native backlash: the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner was formed in 1849, and the Know-Nothing party won several seats in Congress in the election of 1854. All of this is familiar enough, of course; but the ways in which the growth of the Republican Party in the later 1850s was dependent upon embracing or subsuming these nativist impulses is not so apparent. Lincoln himself was not anti-Catholic, but he was quite aware of the political links between nativism and republicanism and so “kept very silent in public about his disapproval of Know-Nothingism.”22 This is conventionally understood as mere expediency on Lincoln’s part, but the real sense of antagonism between Lincoln’s transcendental idealism and American Catholic attitudes to the abolitionist movement should not be so easily glossed over. It is clear American

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popular culture in the northern states made fervid associations between Catholic priests and Southern plantation owners, seeing them both as conspiratorial figures intent upon indulging in all kinds of sexual excess; it is apparent also that the reformers themselves tended often to conflate slave and Catholic cultures as twin embodiments of an outlook they deemed fundamentally un-American. This is not, of course, any kind of attempt to justify the ways of the Old South; it is simply to point out the relatively narrow ideological base which underpinned the Republican movement in the 1850s. Lincoln’s party involved a sublimation and purification of nativist elements which, earlier in the decade, had directed their hostility towards Catholic immigrants. Lincoln’s political skill, of course, lay in the way he succeeded in refocusing this xenophobia in the interests of national unity. Lincoln succeeded in sanctifying an ideal of American freedom that involved a radical misprision of Constitutional formulas which, as Garry Wills observes, in fact said nothing about the kind of democratic principles advanced and mythologized by Lincoln.23 Hence the idiom of anti-Catholicism in the 1850s was successfully translated into a powerful nationalistic rhetoric designed to secure the abolition of Southern slavery. This strategy did, however, have the unfortunate side effect of consolidating certain anti-Catholic influences within American culture. It might also be argued it is this blind abstraction of freedom as a metaphysical principle, a transformation of Puritan idealism, which has contributed to the innumerable racial complications in the United States since the Civil War era. Tracing the threads of anti-Catholicism through nineteenthcentury slave narratives is not difficult. In her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe elaborates metaphorical parallels between Southern slavery and “the torture system of the Inquisition.”24 In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs similarly writes of how “The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.”25 The fullest development of this theme, however, comes in The House of Bondage, by Octavia V. Rogers Albert, first published in 1890 as a series of articles in the South-Western Christian Advocate. Set on a Catholic plantation in Louisiana, the narrative represents Catholicism as an emotionality cold religion, all “beads and crosses” and “no feeling in the heart.”26 In Louisiana, the narrator reports bitterly, not even the Sabbath day is kept holy. While the white rulers here are Catholic, the black slaves are Methodists who aspire to escape to Virginia, where they believe they will be able to worship in

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accordance with their own culture. What is especially interesting in The House of Bondage is the way it makes explicit the religious sensibilities and metaphors that comprise the “blind boundaries” of this slavery question, assumptions that in other texts conceal themselves in a more insidious manner. To give one example of how this cultural relativism becomes foregrounded, the narrator remarks with some puzzlement on how, despite the general support of Catholics for the institution of slavery – “the Pope,” she laments, “was the only power in the world that recognized the Confederacy” – the blacks nevertheless suffer less “caste prejudice” from the Catholic landowners in these Louisiana regions.27 There is, as we noted in comparing the cultures of North and South America, a rational enough explanation for this. Catholics tended to perceive slavery more as a social and political issue, as it was in ancient Rome or medieval Europe; in their anti-typological way, they did not, on the whole, equate political bondage with spiritual bondage, nor take political freedom to be a sign or promise of divine election or special preferment. Hence racial prejudice, qua racial prejudice, was not as strong among the Catholic population; still, their greater acquiescence in slavery as an acceptable fact of social life very often distanced them from the missionary zeal of the Reformers. This would have helped to reinforce the circular affiliations between religious nonconformism, Transcendentalism and abolitionism, thus helping to ensure the continuing conceptualization of American racial issues through stark cultural polarities of freedom and enslavement, polarities which themselves involved projections of a Protestant theological tradition separating the saved from the damned. There is a particularly revealing moment in The House of Bondage when Aunt Charlotte is discussing the death of Ella, the old mistress’s Catholic house-servant: You could always see her with her beads and cross in her pocket. She is in purgatory, I reckon; for the Catholics say the priest can hold mass and get any body out for so much money . . . But I tell you, I believe there is only two places for us – heaven and torment. If we miss heaven, we must be forever lost.28

Consonant with such hostility towards Catholicism was the attempt around this time to transfer blame for slavery onto the corrupt practices of the Old World. Historians like George Bancroft and Theodore Parker pointed to the baleful influences of the early

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Spanish colonizers, as if to deny the possibility of any intrinsic association between this kind of tyrannical enslavement and the purifying energies of the brave new American land. In the mid nineteenth century, then, we see a revival of American exceptionalism. Whereas the Founding Fathers of the Enlightenment era had prided themselves upon cosmopolitan interests and links with Europe, the more evangelical temper of the nineteenth century was more isolationist, more wary of soiling its hands abroad. This intermingling of political with religious considerations testifies to the continuing power of that popular Christianity which the Revolutionary leaders on the whole tended to disdain. Even writers like Emerson and Thoreau, who were not explicitly Christian, nevertheless owed much of their success to an ability to harness this idealizing sensibility and turn it into a secular gospel of human potential. Thoreau’s denunciations of the fugitive slave laws were obviously more politically informed than the sentimental ideals of the slave narratives, but his unproblematic assertion of “freedom” as a self-evident good, and his emphatic dissociation of pure “morality” from the “superficial and inhuman” world of politics, represent another reification of this “natural law” as the American nineteenth century’s supreme cultural fiction. The support of both Thoreau and Emerson for the maverick activities of John Brown – “an Angel of Light”, as Thoreau called him – exemplifies the extent to which the Transcendentalists chose to privilege individual moral perfectionism rather than engage with the complex networks of society in an institutional sense.29 Yet, as David Simpson has argued, these transcendental myths of origin, of the organic wholeness of nature and the authentic selfhood of the individual, always have a tendency to obfuscate and anneal political controversies throughout the nineteenth century. As Simpson put it: “The acceptance of the given terms of the American renaissance has contributed . . . to the continuance of a mythology of exemplary selfhood and cosmic subjectivity.”30 In the same way, the recovery of Catholic subtexts and ideologies within American culture of this era has the effect of fracturing these hegemonic myths of the American renaissance and of interrogating the ideals of national identity that emerged around this Civil War period. The association of the unified American republic with, a “higher,” divinely-ordained purpose can be ironically juxtaposed with Catholic ideologies of gradualism and skepticism that refuse to acquiesce in those standard political typologies linking America’s manifest destiny to the

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“better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln famously put it in his First Inaugural Address. It would be an interesting exercise in comparative religion to play off these triumphalist angels of Lincoln and Thoreau against the antagonism towards “angelism,”‘ the Cartesian tendency towards disembodied idealism, that we see in the work of Catholic neoscholastic writers such as Jacques Maritain.31 Without considering this kind of disjunction in detail, it is clear enough that a recognition of the ways in which Catholic theology becomes displaced into material ideology works effectively to interrupt the privileged realms of cultural and national identity, thereby casting a different light on what we mean by the idea of America. This in turn raises a number of key questions about nineteenthcentury American culture. To what extent did the forces behind the Civil War in the 1860s involve some kind of hostility towards an idea of slavery, both psychological and institutional, that had traditionally been associated in the minds of the Unionists with Catholic immigrants? In what ways did the Civil War surreptitiously displace anti-Catholicism into a more politically acceptable form of anti-racism? Did American Catholic writers and thinkers have the same kinds of problems as Southern intellectuals in repositioning themselves in relation to American federal ideals during the years of Reconstruction and afterwards? These are crucial issues affecting our wider interpretation of American history, and they have not yet been fully answered, so it seems to me, because there has been insufficient critical analysis of American Catholic culture which is prepared disinterestedly to consider its material and ideological chains of significance rather than focusing upon its claims to substantive truth. The academic study of American Catholicism needs to acknowledge how religious discourses intersect, sometimes in radically transformed or disguised ways, with every other aspect of American thought and culture. Given the complexity of such mosaics, it would be inappropriate, and indeed counterproductive, to claim within a scholarly context any kind of primacy for the teleological direction of particular religious narratives. The cultural study of religion appears at its most powerful and influential when its practitioners consciously acknowledge the more amorphous and intangible qualities of their subjects, and when they are prepared to apply Occam’s exemplary razor to metaphysical dilemmas by chastely observing the Wittgensteinian vow of academic humility: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”32 1997

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1. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 31. 2. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City~ N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956). 3. Sollors, 13. 4. David W. Southern, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 1911–1963 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 82. 5. Southern, 93–94, 228. 6. Myra Jehlen, “Introduction: Beyond Transcendence,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1. 7. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1977), trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 124. 8. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1989), 6. 9. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), 307. 10. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 102; Daniel J. McInerney, The Fortunate Heirs of Freedom: Abolition and Republican Thought (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 65. 11. McInerney, 128–29. 12. Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 24. 13. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 9. 14. Richard Williams, “The Second Act,” Guardian Weekend (London), 1 June 1996, 13. 15. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 27. 16. Davis, 167. 17. Elkins, 69. 18. Elkins, 247, 77. 19. William Wells Brown, Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, ed. William Edward Farrison (New York: Carol-University Books, 1969), 156, 193.

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20. Russ Castronovo, Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 199. 21. Potter, 250, 241. For a cogent analysis of political anti-Catholicism of the 1850s, see Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 22. Potter, 253. 23. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 368, and Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). 24. This aspect of Stowe’s ideology is perceptively analyzed in Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 129. 25. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55. 26. Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage, or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 30, 69. 27. Albert, 70. 28. Albert, 30–31. 29. Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle,” in Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 177; Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Reform Papers, 137. 30. David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 259. 31. See, among other works, Jacques Maritain, The Dream of Descartes (London: Editions Poetry, 1946). 32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 74.

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CHAPTER 12

THE INTERTEXTUAL POLITICS OF CULTURAL CATHOLICISM: TIEPOLO, MADONNA, SCORSESE

Our identity is not only something pregiven, but also, and simultaneously, our own project. We cannot pick and choose our own traditions, but we can be aware that it is up to us how we continue them . . . every continuation of tradition is selective, and precisely this selectivity must pass today through the filter of critique, of a self-conscious appropriation of history. – Ju˝rgen Habermas You know that We are living in a material world – Madonna, “Material Girl”

i Recent discussions of cultural ethnicity and religion within the American context have frequently found themselves torn asunder somewhere between the Scylla of essentialism and the Charybdis of performativity. The essentialist approach involves a reification of particular psychological or sociological characteristics in an attempt to identify them exclusively with some particular grouping. In a 1992 interview with Italian Americana, for instance, Camille Paglia claims that her own kind of “combination of the contemplative and hard work” is “very Italian,” an idea that would make John Foxe turn in his grave.1 No less misleading, however, is the notion of ethnicity as a purely discretionary phenomenon, a self-conscious invention of fictional identity through costume, speech, or manners, typically

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re-created ironically through parody or pastiche. Such are the “postmodern modes of ethnicity,” claims Vivian Sobchack, and certainly it is possible to see the relevance of this category to the particular kind of cultural product Sobchack discusses: films such as Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck (1987), and so on.2 Sobchack’s theoretical model owes much to the opposition between descent and consent in Werner Sollors’s influential book, Beyond Ethnicity (1986), in which descent connotes ancestral heritage, and consent connotes a more voluntary or contractual allegiance predicated on radically demystified modes of ethnicity.3 But if Sollors’s view of descent verges toward an archaic form of reification, the kind of essentialism espoused by Paglia, then this notion of consent that Sobchack and others promote would appear to dissolve the burdens of ethnic and religious consciousness within a transposed melting pot celebrating the free and quintessentially American individual. In this sense, the reconstruction of ethnicity in terms of mutable “postmodern” identities would testify, in the most traditional manner, to an American power of unfettered liberty and romantic self-invention. It may be one thing for an actress like Cher to assume a discretionary Italian identity in a film like Moonstruck, however, and quite another for Saul Bellow, for instance, to take on the discretionary mask of an Italian Catholic novelist, or Martin Scorsese to turn into a filmmaker of the Scandinavian school. As Habermas says, we cannot pick and choose our cultural traditions, but we can choose what we make of them by subjecting such traditions to rigorous and self-conscious forms of critique.4 This interrogative stance is necessary because ideas of ethnic or religious identity, as such, have no more or less meaning than questions of personal identity in any other sphere. To ask about the reality or meaning of ethnic and religious background within the consciousness of any given character is immediately to become enmeshed in metaphysical dilemmas about the authenticity of the subject and the ontological coherence, or incoherence, of the self. This is why autobiography, the traditional genre for expressions of ethnic and religious difference, is generally an unsatisfactory medium for this kind of intellectual debate, because it tends to refer conceptual questions inward, to the upbringing of the writer or subsequent issues of personal belief, rather than outward to the more complex business of how such variations become disseminated and inflected within the larger, amorphous structures of culture and society. This subjectivist romanticizing of the differential self also helps to account for a frequently tedious intertwining of

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ethnic discourse with ethical or pedagogical concerns: Gregory Jay, for instance, has written recently of a need to dissociate multiculturalism from identity politics by emphasizing how the “exploration of otherness and cultural identity” should achieve a sense of “strangeness” that problematizes “the history of how my assumed mode of being came into existence.” Such a “pedagogy of disorientation,” as Jay calls it, may be admirable in itself, but its impetus once again involves affiliating a recognition of difference with the liberal project of openness to the other.5 My argument is, however, that by concentrating more on externalized reflections and subliminal manifestations of ethnic and religious difference, it may become possible to shift the terms of the argument away from individual beliefs and personal conscience toward the more material signs of cultural antagonism, those areas within worldly texts where hegemonic and alternative assumptions fail to coincide. To call this a “political” use of ethnicity is not necessarily to demand that it fulfil an oppositional function: it is rather to distinguish ethnicity from its more familiar appearance within ethical situations, where the debate is centered around the integrity of the private soul rather than the disruptive contingencies of a public world. From this perspective, ethnicity necessarily appears not only within channels of hybridity but also within forms of displacement and even disguise. This is one reason why attempting to recognize secularized modes of Catholicism (for instance) within cultural texts appears to be such a tantalizing and difficult business. We need to rescue ethnicity from any lingering associations with pastoral simplicity, what Sollors calls the idealization of “a privileged ‘in-group’ vantage point,” betokening a nostalgic claim for some “authentic” knowledge of any given community; we also need to insist on how ethnoreligious discourse is at its most illuminating and significant when it interrelates with the finished article, the fully grown, worldly product.6 But this is to make life considerably harder for the scholar; it would appear much more problematic to discuss Catholic influences on Donald Barthelme’s fiction, for instance, than on Mary Gordon’s. Even if one senses Catholicism as a ghostly undercurrent in Barthelme’s fiction, it is far from easy to disentangle this particular chain of signifiers from among the many others circulating around Barthelme’s dense and elliptical texts. By transforming themselves into realms of the unconscious – both a textual and a psychological unconscious – the shades of ethnic and religious inheritance typically exile themselves to the margins of cultural works,

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comprising what Julia Kristeva calls the “blind boundaries” of any given text.7 This is why the conceptual significance of ethnic and religious discourse can be recuperated only in formal terms. The focus for this kind of criticism should be not so much what is said, but how it is articulated. One particularly helpful line of approach here is what Ella Shohat calls the principle of “ethnicities-in-relation,” the playing of ethnic discourses off against each other so as to analyze how they function “intertextually through distortion, exaggeration, inversion or elaboration of a preexisting text.”8 The usefulness of this lies in its recognition of how any given enunciation within the field organizes itself formally in relation to the langue of its signifying system. In this way, it becomes possible to reconceive ethnicity as style, understanding style not merely in the sense of a wilful aesthetic performance, but (more crucially) as a strategic arrangement whereby the rhetoric of the text marks itself out as different from how it would be in the absence of implicit ethnic or religious discourses. To reconsider ethnicity through the mirror of intertextual style is to refuse the imposition of an essentialist grid that would simply flatten texts into structural ideologies, while at the same time acknowledging how the unbearable lightness of idiosyncratic genius must always negotiate with a more amorphous matrix of darker and heavier cultural forces. I want to discuss how this cultural Catholicism manifests itself as aesthetic style in the work of an Italian painter, an American popular artist, and, at greater length, an Italian American filmmaker. My earliest example is taken from the world of eighteenth-century Venetian art. Domenico Tiepolo was the son of Giambattista Tiepolo, the more famous Venetian painter renowned for his relatively conventional, devotional themes. Domenico, by contrast, garnered a reputation for more ironic or realistic, even low-life, landscapes; he painted acrobats and carnivals, sliding at times into the scatological or the slapstick. In his 1753 painting The Institution of the Eucharist (Figure 1), we see a perfect example of cultural Catholicism as intertextual style.9 The incongruous manifestation of God as flesh within the material world, the theme and title of this work, is highlighted visually by the unorthodox low viewpoint that serves to make this scene of the Last Supper appear just slightly ludicrous. The backsides of two apostles comprise the most prominent feature in the center of the canvas, introducing a deflating perspective that formally recapitulates an emphasis on the grossly corporeal nature of the human body

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Figure 1 Domenico Tiepolo, The Institution of the Eucharist (1753). Courtesy of the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

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toward which Tiepolo is implicitly drawing the spectator’s attention. Thus Tiepolo projects his religious aesthetics within a mode of intertextual dialogue, reimagining more orthodox Venetian tableaux within a kind of surreal parody. The iconography of his text can be traced within the system of a signifying chain in terms of where it conforms to, or deviates from, a specific set of cultural assumptions. This is not, of course, to claim that earlier forms of Venetian painting lacked religious content; it is simply to point out how the particular kind of theological issue Tiepolo is addressing works in with his predilection for the carnivalesque, so that religious culture here becomes reimagined as aesthetic style. To suggest that ethnic or religious discourses only have critical significance when conceived aesthetically is not to relapse into the free-floating, performative idiom. Tiepolo paints as he does, not simply because he “chooses” to do so, but because his artistic style self-consciously intersects with all the other cultural, historical, and psychological freight that, as Habermas notes, circumscribes the self’s continuation of any given tradition. Ethnic and religious valence, in other words, resides neither in the “soul” nor in the volitional powers of the artist, but in the interstices of the text. It is not an interiorized but an externalized phenomenon, a series of signs that can be interpreted by the observer only in relation to other kinds of worldly events. By rotating the axis of ethnicity from the ethical to the aesthetic, we refuse that self-authenticating essentialism that would reify particular customs into some kind of firm moral code. Rather than connoting an inherent category in itself, ethnicity comes to appear as a way of signifying contingent differences within the material world. From this angle, it becomes possible to appropriate the unstable, tantalizing qualities of ethnoreligious discourse as necessary elements within parallel aesthetic frameworks, rather than, as in the older theoretical models, attempting hermeneutically to decipher ethnic or religious foundations “behind” the veils of textual appearance. An equally provocative interplay between the sublime and the ridiculous manifests itself in my second example of cultural Catholicism as intertextual parody, the work of Madonna, whose aggressively desacralizing materialism plunders the American liberal conscience by turning its soul into flesh. Once again, it seems counterproductive to discuss Madonna by simply positioning her within a system of “Italian pagan Catholicism,” as Camille Paglia tries to do; it would be more illuminating to consider Madonna’s work in

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concrete terms, through an analysis of how it interacts and jars with the values and assumptions of American society.10 Without addressing the Madonna phenomenon in detail here, it seems pertinent that many of her most celebrated productions have involved overt parodies and transformations of more established institutions and the images associated with them. The Catholic Church itself, of course, is travestied in the gleefully blasphemous song “Like a Prayer,” but the singer also (for instance) reconfigures stereotypes of the Hollywood blonde in her famous video of “Vogue.” Parody, as we know from Linda Hutcheon and other theorists, is a double-edged language, which both pays tribute to, and also ironically dissociates itself from, the primary text to which it runs parallel; and in the “Vogue” video we see Madonna both glamorizing and demystifying the legend of the charismatic Hollywood star so as to create a space for her own reinvention of this trope in terms of a more populist mentality.11 Madonna revises the otherworldly projections of cinematic hagiography, moving in and out of a series of poses imitating Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, and others. Through these chameleonic gestures her text renders these icons radically provisional, casting them as fabricated mythologies that appear easily recreated from outside charmed Hollywood circles. This accords with the general theme of the song, which concerns how aesthetic constructs should be seen as a mass, democratic operation. Anyone, claims Madonna’s “Vogue,” can “strike a pose” and turn into a Monroe lookalike: “There’s nothing to it.” (Note the clever pun there: “nothing to it,” it’s easy; but also “nothing to it,” it’s hollow, insubstantial.) With the “truth” or otherwise of this contention I am not concerned here; what is of more interest is how this democratizing of iconography can be affiliated with a discourse of Catholicism, in its most desublimated and culturally heterogeneous form. In the “Vogue” video, an ordinary material girl is seen to be “transubstantiated,” as it were, into the realm of secular saints. Likewise, within the Madonna world generally, the performer’s religious heritage becomes transformed into a materialized Catholicity, a putative universalism that embraces all and excludes none. In this way, Madonna deploys parody so as to both disenfranchise and universalize American institutions, to divest them of their substantive power by transforming them into mere simulacra of themselves. For many people, the most discomforting aspect of Madonna is her capacity to mirror some of the most cherished American values – fame, money, success, self-promotion – while at

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the same time reflecting them in a hyperbolic, surreal, and disturbingly alien manner. The effect uncannily resembles what we see in reactions to the work of Andy Warhol, who similarly holds up a blank glass to the cherished idols of modern America, depriving them of any privileged “aura” or moral spirit. Instead, Warhol, like Madonna, flattens his icons out materialistically, while turning them into emblems of communal ownership. It is noticeable that much recent cultural criticism has been uncomfortable with Madonna, just as it used to flounder around positivistically with Warhol, because in both cases there has been a widespread failure to appreciate the subtext of religious discourse, in however secularized a form, within their works of popular culture. In Madonnarama, a recent collection of essays discussing the star’s work, there is only one brief reference to her ethnic and religious background, and no attempt at all to relate her texts to the work of others similarly negotiating a displaced Catholic idiom.12 Instead, many of the contributors nag away at the old question of whether Madonna’s output is truly feminist and subversive, or whether she has sold out to the empire of commerce – the same tired antithesis that dogged Warhol criticism for so many years. There is a marked reluctance to extend the terms of analysis outward, to position the individual talent within a broader cultural, ethnic and religious tradition. Religious influences, in particular, have become a blind spot within contemporary critical analysis. For the most part, the cultural discourse of religion seems stuck between a rock and a hard place: between a romantic idealization of separatist identities on the one hand, and political criticism’s hardheaded erasure of metaphysical propensities on the other. It would, perhaps, be more valuable to develop a criticism that would treat ethnic and religious discourse as nodes within a conceptual matrix that also includes the pressures of class, gender and race. It would be important also to recognize how the less obvious – sometimes hidden – implications of these discourses come to impact texts in complex aesthetic ways, often through styles of parody or surrealistic distortion that set up rebarbative tensions among different discursive practices and ideologies. ii For my most extended example of religious ethnicity as intertextual practice, I have chosen to focus on three distinctive films by Martin Scorsese: GoodFellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), and The Age of

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Innocence (1993).13 These later works by Scorsese offer a particularly good opportunity to study the ludic displacements of ethnic consciousness, because the director has to some extent been moving away from the ethnic center of Little Italy that framed many of his celebrated earlier narratives. In a 1991 interview, Scorsese remarked on how he wanted “to be able to try some different things, rather than staying with exactly the same stories or same types of characters.” He also said he saw GoodFellas, which revolves around the lives of New York gangsters, as “the end of the trilogy” whose earlier components include Mean Streets and Raging Bull.14 GoodFellas is interesting for the scholar of American ethnicity, because it represents organized crime as a family concern, linked inextricably to community and good fellowship. By portraying the Mob through the narrative perspective of a small-town hoodlum, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), Scorsese achieves a flat, documentary-like tone that seems to normalize these illegal activities without either condoning or condemning them. Partly because he is not of pure Italian blood, Hill always remains to some extent an outsider in this underworld; similarly, the style of Scorsese’s film works through a doubleedged discourse that does not simply observe or empathize with this environment, but rather plays its assumptions off against those of the wider American world. For instance, after Hill’s first criminal conviction, he is greeted outside the courthouse by Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), who rushes Hill off to a party – a “graduation present,” as he describes it – to celebrate the young man’s breaking of “the cherry.” The point here is to provide a parodic counterpoint, to show this community of mobsters setting up an alternative familial structure that darkly shadows normative American values. Again, when chief gangster “Uncle Paulie” Cicero (Paul Sorvino) is sent to the federal penitentiary, he promptly establishes a surrogate ethnic community inside the jail, presiding over the daily rituals of Italian cuisine and buying off any prison guards who threaten to obstruct his gastronomic pleasures. “We owned the joint,” boasts Henry Hill, describing how for these gangsters prison appears almost as a source of pastoral comfort. Thus GoodFellas depicts the easy infiltration and appropriation of national institutions by Italian American racketeers who are, on the whole, also good family men preserving a fierce loyalty to their ethnic clans. Near the beginning of the film, Henry Hill calls the protection business a “police department for wiseguys, for people who couldn’t go to the cops,” and he talks of how this system of tribute works just

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as it used to back in the old country, only now of course they were doing it in America. This, continues Hill, is what the FBI could not understand: to this particular community, the police represent not the compulsions of law as opposed to the attractions of corruption, still less the powers of good confronting evil, but rather a particular kind of ethnic option. For these Italian Americans, the “morality” associated with the American justice system connotes a specific ideological outlook, not any universally valid or binding force. In this way, Scorsese uses the images of Italian Americana to establish a series of dialogues and crosscurrents that suggest how these mobsters are engaged in an unconscious parody of orthodox civic life. Appropriately enough, David Ehrenstein quotes Scorsese as saying his “attitude as a film director has always been . . . provocation”: “I want to provoke the audience. Like in GoodFellas. What these people do is morally wrong, but the film doesn’t say that. These guys are really just working stiffs. They understand that if you cross a certain line it’s death. But that’s ‘business.’ And it is business. In that world it’s normal behavior.”15 Scorsese’s representations here of interactions between Italian American ethnicity and more established social forms provoke his audience into considering how models of good fellowship operate, and how they can manifest themselves in circumstances that most people find alien and repulsive. By showing how good and evil, community and crime, are heterogeneously intertwined, the film undermines any ethnocentric or universalist claims to abstract law and truth. The film’s unstable and parodic style is nicely epitomized right at the end, as the closing credits run over a soundtrack of Sid Vicious singing “My Way,” in his inimitable punk parody of the standard version made famous by Frank Sinatra. Within this parodic structure, ethnicity emerges as a form of intertextuality, a playing with and against inherited traditions so as to demonstrate the divergent assumptions that go with different forms of cultural identity. Ethnicity therefore becomes not an idealized category in itself, but rather a defamiliarizing gesture, a self-conscious bracketing of inherited customs or aesthetic patterns. Scorsese spoke in 1993 about the pleasure he takes in reworking particular film genres – “it’s no fun without the rules of the game,” as he put it – and it is not difficult to see an analogy between these formal codes of film genre and the formal, overdetermined systems of ethnic society that Scorsese is working with.16 In both situations, Scorsese’s tendency is to start with specific codes or formal parameters and then to problematize them, so that his films establish a series of narrative tensions

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between what might be expected and what actually happens. He used this technique particularly effectively in New York, New York (1977), which offers a grimmer, iconoclastic rereading of the spectacular tradition of Hollywood musicals; but in his more recent work such intertextual dexterity has been developed both as the condition of ethnic consciousness and the site of religious difference. A similarly double-edged style manifests itself in Cape Fear (1991), Scorsese’s reworking of a 1962 thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson. In the earlier film, Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) appears as a relatively uncomplicated moral hero who ultimately manages to ward off the threat of Robert Mitchum’s Max Cady. In Thompson’s version, Bowden was the upright prosecutor who put Cady away; in Scorsese’s revision, however, Cady has emerged from a fourteen-year spell in prison to seek vengeance on the man who was his defense attorney. Scorsese’s Sam Bowden is said to have concealed a crucial report concerning the promiscuity of Cady’s victim in the rape and battery case out of his, Bowden’s, own certainty that Cady was in fact guilty as charged. Hence Scorsese’s Bowden, played by Nick Nolte, emerges as far more morally ambiguous than the earlier Gregory Peck character, an ambiguity heightened by the mood of potential transgression that constantly hovers around the margins of his very proper middle-class household. When, for instance, Leigh Bowden, played by Jessica Lange, mentions casually to Sam as they’re getting ready for bed some aspects of incest, necrophilia, and bestiality that have arisen in a recent legal case, he breathlessly asks her to “do that again,” to repeat her wicked words for his own erotic entertainment. Leigh herself wants to hear about the incidents of “rape and aggravated sexual battery” that her husband encounters in his professional capacity, and, initially at least, she appears to welcome the idea of some sinister intruder as a relief from marital boredom. In GoodFellas, Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) uneasily admits she finds herself excited by guns, and though of course the persona of Leigh in Cape Fear is much more understated, still we find the psychological ambiguity associated with her character anticipating the disruptive themes of sexual violence and perversion that make up an increasingly uncomfortable subtext in Scorsese’s reworking of the narrative. Cady (Robert De Niro) joking drunkenly to Lori Davis (Illeana Douglas) about how he hacked his wife into fifty-two pieces is one example of this; Cady handcuffing Lori to the bed is another. Most disturbing of all, however, is the way Bowden quizzes his daughter Danielle (Juliette Lewis) about what happened between her and Cady

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when the latter tracked her down at school. Danielle appears in only her underwear during this scene, and Bowden’s questions – along the lines of “Did he touch you?” – seem to veer at times more toward the prurient than the protective. It is this boundary that Scorsese’s texts are always probing, the ways in which the ethical parameters of conventional society mask elements of hypocrisy and self-deception, how the pressures of conformity can never quite stifle the allure of the forbidden. My point would be that Scorsese’s brand of outsiderhood emerges more strongly through its intertextual relationship with Thompson’s earlier work, where the traditional WASP assumptions were held firmly in place. From this angle, we can see that Scorsese’s treatment of Cape Fear is simultaneously a hommage to Thompson’s film, and a parodic reconfiguration of it through the lens of the director’s own Italian American, Catholic sensibility. The self-consciousness of this relationship is epitomized by the way Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Martin Balsam, the stars of the earlier movie, all play cameo roles in Scorsese’s picture, just as Elmer Bernstein’s music is also a direct reworking of Bernard Herrmann’s original score. The knowledgeable film critic J. Hoberman was consequently moved to call Scorsese’s film “a choreographed hall-of-mirrors, an orchestrated echo chamber,” which in one sense it is; but it would be unrealistic, if not altogether misconceived, to demand that a cinema audience of the 1990s be intimately conversant with a film made back in 1962, even if this kind of detailed comparison would merit study.17 The importance of this “hall-of-mirrors” lies not so much in the film’s technical details as in how its intertextual processes function thematically: Scorsese’s Cape Fear both conforms to its generic prototype and also, at key points, deviates from that standard model. Scorsese uses Thompson’s narrative derivatively, setting up certain hermeneutic expectations, but the brilliance of this new work lies in the way he flaunts and eventually overturns the internal logic of that conventional structure. In Scorsese’s reinterpretation, the crucial character becomes not the hero but the villain. De Niro’s Max Cady is cast as a dark agent of redemption, a negative image empowered paradoxically to reveal what a Catholic mentality would see as the sins of pride and lust, that are almost, but not quite, concealed by Bowden’s comfortable WASP environment. At one point, Cady says to Danielle that he doesn’t hate her father at all: “Oh no. I pray for him. I’m here to help him. I mean, we all make mistakes, Danielle. You and I have. But at least

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we try to admit it, don’t we? But your daddy, he don’t. Every man carries a circle of hell around his head, like a halo. Your daddy too. Every man, every man, has to go through hell to reach his paradise. You know what paradise is? Salvation.” De Niro’s character bears less resemblance to the Max Cady of Thompson’s 1962 film than to the rogues and outcasts in the stories of Flannery O’Connor. The narrative function of many of O’Connor’s central figures – Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” – is to expose those complacencies locked into the materialistic patterns of life in Georgia, and De Niro’s dislocating charisma performs much the same task within Scorsese’s modernized version of the same environment. This is not, of course, to suggest that Scorsese’s film endorses or validates Cady’s crazed beliefs. Fired with the apocalyptic zeal of his backwoods Pentecostal sect, the outlaw delivers his Nietzschean aphorisms about the power of the superman, and duly receives his infernal comeuppance when Danielle douses him with flames in the final, climactic scene on the boat. In a rigorously theological and allegorical interpretation of this film, Robert Casillo associates Cady with a “satanic principle,” betokening a widespread “confusion and subversion of values”; such a reading, however, turns on the assumption within this film of a clear “moral standpoint,” the positing of a metanarrative closure that Scorsese’s aesthetic refraction of religious discourse tends to resist.18 The film follows Catholic instincts rather than Catholic dogma, deliberately positioning itself on the edges of decorum so as to interrogate the moral limits as well as the generic boundaries of conventional, liberal humanist American discourse. The mood here recalls Scorsese’s discussion of Raging Bull back in 1980, when he suggested that the boxer, Jake La Motta, might be “on a higher spiritual level, in a way, as a fighter”: “He works on an almost primitive level, almost an animal level, and therefore he must think in a different way, he must be aware of certain things spiritually that we aren’t, because our minds are too cluttered with intellectual ideas and too much emotionalism.”19 Scorsese’s notion of the “animal level” being “spiritually” preferable to an excessive intellectualism – a familiar idea also within O’Connor’s fiction – involves the ludic reformulation of a tenet in traditional Catholic theology. In Catholic thought, the concept of “angelism,” the proposition that human beings can or should aspire to the disembodied condition of angels, is held to be more dangerous to the spirit than certain more venial kinds of worldly transgression. Toward the end of Cape Fear,

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Cady tells Sam Bowden, ‘‘‘Tonight you’re going to learn to be an animal. To live like an animal and to die like one.” While Bowden does not actually die, such a transformation into animalistic status is exactly what befalls him, as his smug sense of individual dignity is brought low by the need to defend himself against Cady’s naked violence. Apart from this theological subtext or subconsciousness, we also see class and ethnic components emerging within these climactic scenes. At the moment in the plot when Cady has murdered Bowden’s private detective, creating a gruesome bloodbath in the attorney’s pristine home, the director told Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange to go crazy, to shed their civilized inhibitions and act as if they were demented. After reducing the Bowdens to nervous wrecks, Scorsese later boasted to everyone on the set: “Finally I got these WASPS to act like Italians!”20 Perhaps this was a throwaway line from Scorsese, but it does hint at the significant conflict within this film between the values of Protestantism and Catholicism, understanding those terms in a cultural and secular rather than narrowly religious sense. Scorsese introduces his ethnic and religious subtext to defamiliarize the Bowdens’ genteel world; his use of x-ray shots throughout the film acts as a synecdoche of this process, in the way it puts the Bowdens’ domestic landscape into reverse, as it were, building in a kind of two-way mirror that implies the arbitrary nature of their culture. Like a Jesuit inquisitor, Scorsese x-rays the Bodwdens’ assumptions of self-reliance, showing how easily they might be inverted; indeed, the film ends on this note of estrangement, with Danielle intoning, “Things won’t ever be the way they were before he came.” Thus Cady’s brutalities work permanently to subvert the foundations of this community, to expose its half-suppressed lusts and vanities to the gaze of otherworldly judgment. Though Cape Fear generally received favorable reviews, Terence Rafferty, writing in the New Yorker, described Scorsese’s film as “a disgrace: an ugly, incoherent, dishonest piece of work,” whose “sordid” nature aspires to the “consecration of something debased and profane.”21 Rafferty’s reaction is interesting – particularly his complaint about the film’s “profane, corrupt,” and “perverse” aspects – because it does bring into focus the ways in which Scorsese’s cinema is often genuinely disturbing, especially for viewers more at ease with the kind of Protestant cultural world in which dualisms of good and evil, the light and the dark, are kept safely apart. In J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear, it is easy to distinguish the heroes from the

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villains; in Scorsese’s Cape Fear, by contrast, these moral qualities get all intermingled and confused, as the upstanding lawyer falls into temptation while a violent murderer apparently opens up the potential for a state of grace. The Age of Innocence, released in 1993, offers another view of WASP social mores being reexamined through the lens of Scorsese’s Italian American style of Catholicism. Just as Cape Fear plays knowingly on its own intertextual status through the echoes and mirrors that relate it back to Thompson’s earlier work, so Scorsese’s Age of Innocence foregrounds its revisionist perspective by the use of voiceover narration, a strategy that emphasizes that the events on screen are being narrated retrospectively and must therefore be susceptible to reinterpretation. Hence the temporal past – New York in the 1870s, which provides the setting for Edith Wharton’s novel – becomes aligned implicitly with the anteriority of Wharton’s own text, published in 1920, thereby introducing a gap between event and enunciation that Scorsese exploits so as to reorganize his narrative along different ethnic lines. The idiom of Scorsese’s film is designed to exploit its belated quality: Wharton’s belatedness in relation to old New York becomes a parallel to Scorsese’s belatedness in relation to the ethical codes that shape Wharton’s novel. The emphasis in both cases falls on distance, estrangement, and a rearrangement of perspective. Scorsese’s genius, then, is to appropriate The Age of Innocence as his own story, thereby shedding new and unfamiliar light on Wharton’s classic novel. As several reviewers noted, it is not too difficult to draw parallels between the rigid conventions of old New York society and the world of rules, regulations, codes and rituals portrayed by Scorsese in his earlier films set in the New York underworld. As Andrew Delbanco nicely put it in the New Republic, “There is a gangsterish quality to Wharton’s old New York social clique, which, when someone steps out of line, proves as expert at shunning, expulsion and other forms of social murder as any of Scorsese’s mobsters.”22 Some critics, though, found Scorsese’s nervous camerawork too flashy to do justice to the understated, euphemistic atmosphere of Wharton’s culture. John Updike, for instance, writing in the New Yorker, complained that “from the opulent, giddy look of Scorsese’s panning shots, we might be at one of Caligula’s orgies.”23 But Updike’s outlook is nostalgic: his preference would be to bridge the chasm between primary text and its transmission across time, a divide that Scorsese intertextually exploits so as to imbue Wharton’s narrative with other kinds of cultural meaning.

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The pattern of Wharton’s text is to establish a relatively clear dichotomy between the integrity of the heart and the corruptions of society. While not unsympathetic toward May’s trusting naïveté, the novel becomes satirically scornful in its depiction of her enthusiasm for the vacant set pieces of New York social life, which May approaches “with the beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example in conjugal affairs.” Consequently, Wharton represents Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska –and May Archer as well, to some extent – as victims of the stultifying mechanisms of social convention within this supposedly privileged “little world.”24 Updike, faithful to Wharton’s interiorized, novelistic spirit, wrote that the only section of the film he saw as really successful is when Scorsese abjures social tableaux to concentrate more on the book’s psychological aspects, as when Newland realizes his wife has scared off the countess with a premature claim of pregnancy: “the audience was still . . . The terse dialogue is almost exactly Wharton’s; after two hours of visually powerful false flourishes, authentic power arrives from the heart of the novel – from the heart, ultimately, of the little girl to whom her father seemed lonely and unfulfilled and her mother cool and implacably conventional.”25 Without wishing to deny the emotional force of this scene, I would suggest that Updike’s general critique of the film is based on inappropriate premises. For while Wharton posits a clear antagonism between the lovers and society, Scorsese, by contrast, chooses to emphasize how their passion itself arises inextricably out of the repressive codes and customs of this New York milieu. Scorsese has said one of the things that interested him about Wharton’s novel was what he identified as its mood of “repressed emotion, forced restraint, and obsession” – psychological traits he has frequently explored in other contexts, for instance with the character of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.26 In The Age of Innocence, however, these repressions and obsessions become modulated formally into sequences of signs and symbols: when Newland Archer dispatches yellow roses to the countess and then lilies of the valley to his fiancée, the screen is filled first by an eruption of yellow, then by a more benevolent white that dissolves into a shot of Newland escorting May through a white aviary. Hence the emotions of the characters and the themes of the narrative are signified cinematically through abstract forms of iconography; but such iconographic styles are represented by Scorsese as being also the axis on which this New York society turns. Within this world, to send particular kinds of flowers from particular florists

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involves semiotic gestures, coded signs of romance, that indicate how these relationships necessarily work themselves out within a cycle of performative ritual. Whereas Wharton scorns the corruptions of ritual, Scorsese luxuriates in them: whether at the New York opera, or in the Louvre, or during the archery tournament at Newport, Scorsese shows how Newland and May – especially the more conventional May – blend in with these patterned environments. During one of their ritualistic dinner parties in New York, Scorsese even frames the participants within two symmetrical candlesticks, as if they were celebrants at some secular altar. In this way, we can see that Scorsese is less concerned than Wharton with a nonconformist conscience or romantic modes of protest. Wharton places the personal relationship between Newland Archer and the countess at the center of her novel; at the center of Scorsese’s film, however, is ritual, with the individual lovers emerging paradoxically as products of the very circumstances from which they wish to secede. The power of their desires is fueled, as so often in Scorsese’s films, by the director’s scenarios of “repressed emotion” and “forced restraint”; his characters typically are most excited by what they cannot get. This is why, as Lizzie Francke acutely observed, the female characters in this film tend to be “fetishized as works of art, glittering objects of desire . . . significantly, Archer kisses Ellen’s feet as his first expression of devotion towards her, a moment reminiscent of the erotically charged scene in The Last Temptation of Christ in which Christ washes the feet of Mary Magdalene.”27 Wharton’s culture of social indicators and oblique hieroglyphics becomes transformed, in Scorsese’s vision, into a situation where passion is defined less by the heart than by icons, fetishes and obsessions. To the mortification of John Updike, Scorsese in his Age of Innocence recreates the world of Raging Bull all over again. Hence the argument that Scorsese has simply travestied Wharton’s novel is much too simplistic. At least one reviewer, Gabriele Annan in the New York Review of Books, expressed a preference for Scorsese’s impersonal detachment over Wharton’s more engaged satire.28 My purpose here, though, is simply to outline how these are both interesting texts coming from very different cultural and ethnic perspectives. I am not, of course, trying to claim that there is anything “Catholic” about Scorsese’s films in a theological or devotional sense; but I am suggesting that his Italian American style of Catholicism helps move his works in a cultural direction radically different from that of Wharton’s Age of Innocence or Thompson’s

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version of Cape Fear. I would suggest moreover that such ethnic and religious differences manifest themselves most compellingly within this intertextual or parodic form, in which implicit dialogues become established between conventional or generic expectations and various forms of narrative deviance. The attempt to describe religious ethnicity as embodying some kind of idealized or essentialist quality is no longer feasible for any number of theoretical reasons; nor can we simply extrapolate an understanding of the “minority” status of particular texts from the reified conceptions associated with archetypes or essentialisms. The burden of my argument, however, is that it may become possible to consider these questions of religious ethnicity in narrative through more subtle kinds of analysis concerned with thematic discontinuities, ironic or parodic styles of defamiliarization, and other forms of structural difference. 1997

NOTES

1. Christine Bevilacqua, “Interviews: Camille Paglia and Sandra Gilbert,” Italian Americana 11.1 (Fall/Winter 1992 ), 76. 2. Vivian Sobchack, “Postmodern Modes of Ethnicity,” in Lester D. Friedman, ed., Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 342. 3. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5. 4. Peter Dews, ed., Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Ju˝rgen Habermas, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1992), 243. 5. Gregory Jay, “Taking Multiculturalism Personally: Ethnos and Ethos in the Classroom,” American Literary History 6.4 (Winter 1994), 627–28. 6. Werner Sollors, introduction to The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), xix–xx. 7. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1977), trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 124. 8. Ella Shohat, “Ethnicities-in-Relation: Toward a Multicultural Reading of American Cinema,” in Friedman, Unspeakable Images, 238. 9. Jane Martineau and Andrew Robinson, eds., Art in the Eighteenth Century: The Glory of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 338. 10. Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York: Random House-Vintage, 1992), 251.

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11. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of TwentiethCentury Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 61. 12. Lisa Frank and Paul Smith, eds., Madonnarama: Essays on Sex and Popular Culture (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1993). The brief reference to Madonna’s “ever flowing reservoir of Catholic guilt” appears in the essay by John Champagne, “Stabat Madonna” (115). The best discussion to date of Madonna’s religious parodies can be found in Barbara Bradby, “Like a Virgin-Mother?: Materialism and Maternalism in the Songs of Madonna,” Cultural Studies 6.1 (January 1992), 73–96. Bradby demonstrates in detail how the album Like a Prayer embodies a parodic “materialization of the story of the Virgin Mary” (90). 13. These three films appeared too recently for me to consider in the Scorsese section of my book American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 335–50. 14. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas (Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews and McMeel, 1991), 10. 15. David Ehrenstein, The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese (New York: Carol, 1992), 70. 16. Henry Allen, “Marty, Meet Edith,” Washington Post, 19 September 1993, G7 17. J. Hoberman, “Sacred and Profane,” Sight and Sound, n.s., 1, no. 10 (February 1992), 11. 18. Robert Casillo, “School for Skandalon: Scorsese and Girard at Cape Fear,” Italian Americana 12, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 225, 214, 221. 19. Mary Pat Kelly, Martin Scorsese: The First Decade (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Redgrave, 1980), 32. 20. Ehrenstein, 189. 21. Terence Rafferty, “Mud,” New Yorker, 2 December 1991, 156, 158. 22. Andrew Delbanco, “Missed Manners,” New Republic, 25 October 1993, 34. 23. John Updike, “Reworking Wharton,” New Yorker, 4 October 1993, 210. 24. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920; rpt. London: Penguin, 1966), 275, 258. 25. Updike, 211. 26. Francine Prose, “In ‘The Age of Innocence,’ Eternal Questions,” New York Times, 12 September 1993, H29. 27. Lizzie Francke, “Screen Dreams of Beautiful Women,” Observer Review, 16 January 1994, 15 28. Gabriele Annan, “A Night at the Opera,” New York Review of Books, 4 November 1993, 3–4.

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CHAPTER 13

“LIKE A BLACK BELL”: HENRY CARLILE AND THE NEGATIVE THEOLOGY OF PLACE

American literature has traditionally defined itself as “American” in spatial and political terms, through projecting the site of its provenance as different from that of other countries. This is one reason that American literature has had more difficulties than, say, French or German literature with the idea of comparative poetics, since the burden of the Whitmanian romantic tradition is that its specific site of location and articulation is exceptional rather than interchangeable. This does not mean, however, that geographical representations in American poetry have always been the same or can simply be taken for granted. To trace the identification of Oregon poetry, for instance, with a sense of place is to consider not a naturalized but a discursive phenomenon, one whose parameters have interestingly shifted and evolved over time. In this sense, the deliberate circumscription of place in American writing can always be understood reflexively, as a crucial but problematic aspect in the formation of its subject. In his 1935 anthology Oregon Poets, Henry Harrison associated the idea of a literature bounded by region with an ethic of democratic egalitarianism and collectivism, finding space in his book for “the worthy and perhaps not so worthy,” so as to make “this collection both human and complete.” Harrison’s introduction suggested that “a state is very much like a mother, and it must claim its less distinguished children along with the preferred.”1 Thirty years later, in Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest (1964), Robin Skelton eschewed such populist inclusiveness, but, though skirting awkwardly around the idea of a Pacific Northwest “school” of poetry, he

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still found significant common features between the writers he chose to promote – Kenneth O. Hanson, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, William Stafford, and David Wagoner – and various aspects of the “physical environment” they shared: in particular, the influence of Native American culture and of the Orient, along with what Skelton called a “perpetual interpenetration of the savage and the domestic.” This volume also presented its local credentials by a dedication to the memory of Theodore Roethke, who had died suddenly the year before at the age of 55, and to whom the editor’s preface pays fulsome tribute: In the case of the Pacific Northwest, the dominant feature of the poetic environment for a number of years was the presence of Theodore Roethke, and, as a teacher and visionary, he affected the poets of the area in more, and in less superficial, ways than any ‘influence-hunter’ could detect.2

Roethke’s verse, with its abstract harmonies and Neoplatonic symmetries, brilliantly reconstituted the visionary dimensions of William Blake and W. B. Yeats within a New World environment, and Roethke’s poetic meditations on mythic recurrence were to cast a particular spell on the Seattle students he encountered as a professor at the University of Washington. Among these students was Henry Carlile, who, though he was born in San Francisco in 1934, is a long-time resident of the Pacific Northwest, having grown up in Aberdeen and other small towns in Washington, and then worked for over thirty years as a professor of English at Portland State University in Oregon. Roethke taught Carlile as an undergraduate at the University of Washington; indeed, he was, Carlile recalled later, “the first poet to encourage me to write.”3 Carlile had planned to continue to study with Roethke on the MA in Creative Writing at Washington, but Roethke’s fatal heart attack in August 1963 put paid to that scheme; instead, his graduate teachers would be the English poet Henry Reed and Elizabeth Bishop, both of whom were temporarily employed as visiting professors by the University of Washington in the mid-1960s. Bishop, in particular, was skeptical about the influence which the charismatic Roethke continued to exert on his Seattle acolytes, even in his absence. As someone who naturally “disliked hyperbole,” observed Carlile, Bishop was “alarmed” at the students’ propensity for “spiritual bombast,” and at the relative narrowness of their cultural frame

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of reference: “Once when I wrote a too-transcendental line,” said Carlile, “she scratched it out and wrote ‘No’ in the margin.”4 Like Reed, Bishop preferred to emphasize to her writing classes the importance of mastering the more formal elements of poetic composition, and she was particularly skilful at conveying the aesthetic significance of metaphor and simile. Bishop’s own poetry is, of course, permeated with simile as a crucial emblem of her “land of unlikeness,” of a world where any mode of similitude can be imagined only as a form of contingency, as in her famous poem “At the Fishhouses”: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.”5 This makes her poetic idiom of reticence and demurral radically different from that of Roethke, for whom “the Eye altering all” in his poem “Once More, The Round” characteristically creates a unifying symbolic bond between mind and matter, body and spirit, art and environment: Now I adore my life With the Bird, the abiding Leaf, With the Fish, the questing Snail, And the Eye altering all; And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love’s sake; And everything comes to One, As we dance on, dance on, dance on.6

One of the interesting aspects of Carlile’s first book of poems, The Rough-Hewn Table (1971), is the way it reveals both of these influences, Roethke and Bishop, in competition with each other. Featuring on its front cover a photograph of the author looking like an Indian Mohawk, and with an epigraph from Black Elk about truth coming into the world with two faces, The Rough-Hewn Table takes on board Roethke’s inscription of a charmed landscape, but it also subjects the assumptions informing this mythologization of the Pacific Northwest to quizzical, demystifying scrutiny.7 Much of this collection exudes a strong sense of place, with two poems being credited on their final line to specific locations: “The Turkey-Quill Nymph” is located at Davis Lake, Oregon, and “Georgic from Henry’s Lake” at Henry’s Lake, Idaho. All of this is commensurate with close observations here of the natural world – “Three Birds” focuses on a blue heron, a bittern, and a coot – as well as with poems such as “Owl” and

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“Porcupine,” which imitate Native American narratives in the way they ventriloquize the speech of animals. All the time, however, there is also a deliberate meditation on the birthright of the Far West and what it entails. “Three Monuments,” for example, self-consciously observes “Teddy Roosevelt’s statue” and contemplates the complicated historical legacy of the mountain men and the Western settlers, with their “old ironclad / excuse of privilege,” while the book’s following poem, “Changes,” describes an African American student walking out of the narrator’s lecture on Roethke’s poetry.8 “Changes” is, in fact, an important poem in Carlile’s early oeuvre, a point of departure for his reconceptualization of Western values: The wind’s white . . . In the middle of my lecture on Roethke he rose, black, tall and mean, stretched his long basketball-player arms, scratched his Afro and walked out. Greenhouses full of roses mean little to him; the nature he knows best

is human and not to be trusted any more than a blizzard.9

This student’s rejection of the idea of a “white” wind signals a withdrawal from that assumption of natural harmony with which Roethke’s poetry is so enamored. Roethke’s essentialist version of nature involved the incorporation of a popular mythology that could be seen as implicitly racist in the way it excluded cultural difference in favor of Neoplatonic similitude. The question of race has always been one of the most vexed issues within Pacific Northwest culture, since its systematic idealization of an organic state, however politically progressive it might at times appear, has also been interwoven philosophically with doctrines of racial purity and exclusion. One of the Oregon Legislature’s first tasks after its legal constitution in 1848 was to pass a law banning African Americans from establishing permanent residence in the newly declared Oregon Territory, while the Jungian proclivities of Joseph Campbell, a scholar of mythology very popular in Pacific Northwest intellectual circles throughout the twentieth century, were also implicitly racist in their attribution of essentialist qualities to human archetypes. For Carlile in “Changes,”

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however, the dissenting action of this black student offers him the opportunity of “unlearning everything,” of reassessing the intellectual relationship with his former professor: . . . Roethke, teacher, forgive me, when I turned back to the page your words accused me and I could not dance, I could not dance at all.

For Carlile, then, this recognition of blackness becomes more than a matter simply of racial identity politics and cultural difference. Blackness here becomes rather a metaphorical trope, an admission of incongruity, a recognition of the jarring discrepancy between a hypothetical metaphysical fretwork and its actual corporeal embodiment: But remember this: how the score was white, the music black. . . 10

It is this sense of contradiction that comes to resonate most powerfully throughout The Rough-Hewn Table. The book’s title is taken from an image of a “rough-hewn table lost among mountains and waterfalls” in “The Job,” a poem which turns upon the problematic interaction between interior conceptualization and external space.11 Unlike Roethke’s poetic idiom, whose vatic style is characteristically clipped and iridescent, Carlile’s tone and diction tend to be slower and more melancholic, as if the objects being described were too heavy to be suffused with transcendent light. “Georgic from Henry’s Lake” develops what was to become one of the writer’s favorite analogies, between a fishing line and a line of poetry, and it describes how the practice of both activities requires co-ordination, timing, balance, and patience: unless a universal equanimity is created and sustained, any force will provoke a counterforce to defeat you.12

Force, the sheer brutality of power, lurks as an uncomfortable shadow behind much of Carlile’s work, and it implies an adamantine

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state of nature which necessarily involves the poet in a form of resistance, an uneasy mediation of divergent pressures and impulses. The final poem in this first collection, “Narcissus: A Notebook,” can be seen as a summation of this rhetoric of self-contradiction. It is set in a Writing 313 class, where the professor diligently advises his students to “Observe immediate concrete objects.” The narcissus itself is described as “in most regions of the West most valuable / of the springflowering bulbous plants,” and this fits in with the overt homage here to William Carlos Williams: “Daffodil, narcissus, asphodel, Williams’ flower.”13 Williams’s doctrine of “No ideas but in things” becomes, in other words, a pedagogical tool for the disciplined mapping of mind on to matter; but as “Narcissus” proceeds the poet finds this symbiotic interaction becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.14 Williams’s emphasis on the integrity of the eye falls into disrepair as the author of “Narcissus” finds himself “looking for order with a mind in chaos.” The ghoulish image of “a young kingfisher, / ants crawling from its eyesockets” highlights this theme of the failure of vision and light.15 Consequently, the narcissus here swerves away from its organic life as a Western flower toward the projection of a more solipsistic, narcissistic state of mind, where the concrete world finds itself crossed by a garish surrealism. The traumatic dream world, in other words, complicates the objective natural world; narcissus as self is superimposed upon narcissus as flower, creating a series of disruptive double images which undermine the integrity of the poet’s environment. Biographically, part of this trauma involves being haunted by an absent Cuban father, who abandoned his family when Carlile himself was an infant. “The Nightmares,” in Rough-Hewn Table, confronts this event openly: fatherless at age two (and how do you understand that?— it booms like a big drum), successions of violent stepfathers . . . How easy to cultivate your own volcano. How gloomy.16

Many of Carlile’s subsequent poems circle back in one way or another to this primal scene, but what is most interesting artistically are the ways in which this lost father comes to represent more generally an allegory of displacement. The “Blank father, ghost” is a spectral presence throughout Carlile’s second collection, Running Lights (1981), with the poem “My Father” addressing him directly as

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“Prieto the dark one, the dishwasher”; but this image also comes to be associated rhetorically with the difficulties of representing lost or absent objects.17 Thus, “Havana Blues” contemplates the necessary disjunction between full possession of the father and some “small imperfect replica” through which he is memorialized.18 This leaves the narrator stranded fatally in the position of an alien observer, trying to decipher the mutable processes that pervade all aspects of the terrestrial world, as in “Giant Ocean Sunfish”: First, I thought it was a man drowning, but the hand that seemed too casual became a flipper and then a huge forehead with wings, a giant spewed-up misshapen embryo, its mouth little more than a beak. I stared as it slipped past, then left it glaring in my wake like an old dull mirror . . . At night, awash in the ocean’s phosphorus, they bask like moons, separate and lonely.19

The sunfish here eludes the anthropomorphic rationalizations imposed upon it, with the poet left only to stare and “imagine” its “separate,” autonomous existence. Indeed, the typical Carlile poem, particularly in this Running Lights collection, tends to start from a position of jaunty subjectivity and then to reveal the mind relapsing into a state of disintegration, as the anarchy of objects comes to overwhelm the poet’s attachments to order and custom. Paradigmatic of this movement from enclosure to entropy is “Flood Control,” where the lines of human force – again, Carlile uses fishing “lines” punningly as an emblem of poetic creation – find themselves swamped by “real power indifference”: I imagined the floodgates opening on shining water like a giant cash register on the right change. Now I am struck by that vacancy: Objects releasing their strained significance. . . 20

Running Lights takes its title in part from the poem “For a Friend Drowned Off Grays Harbor,” where the victim goes down in a “boat

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without running lights”; and in one sense all of the poems in this collection involve metaphorically a state of drowning, turning as they do upon ways in which mind and body are weighed down by the “heavy earth” into which, as in the poem “In the More Recent Past,” they finally sink.21 “Listening to Beethoven on the Oregon Coast” implicitly plays off the Sturm und Drang of German romanticism against the “wrecks” and “surf wild from a storm miles out at sea,” in a landscape where everything is “broken, torn down, consumed,” with “Each tide a regurgitation of casualties.”22 Such juxtapositions are also the source of the black comedy that permeates Carlile’s work. He is an accomplished and witty exponent of light verse, citing with approbation in a later poem “Auden’s lesson of writing profoundly / in the light manner,” even if he has perhaps not developed this strand of his work as far as he might have done.23 Nevertheless, even in his more somber works he frequently conjures up seemingly incongruous conjunctions, as in “Dodo,” where the poet expresses his sympathy with the fossilized object on display in a natural history museum: Dodo, you look the way I feel, with your sad absentminded eyes and your beak like a stone-age axe. 24

At the same time, these bizarre alignments tend also to contain hints of menace and violence. We see this for example in “Butchering Crabs,” where the colloquial violence visited upon the hapless crabs – “Take that, you buckethead” – becomes turned back ironically upon the character of Hawk, “our best butcher,” who lives in a “shack” and “drove home each night / crabby and skidding.”25 To describe the butcher himself as “crabby” in this way is to position him analogically as a mirror image of the creatures he is destroying, thereby testifying to what one might call the black or inverted transcendentalism that pervades Running Lights. In this book, matter is not subsumed into a realm of ethereal spirit, as tends to happen in Roethke’s work; rather, mind itself is debased into an all-encompassing world of matter. “The New City,” the last poem in Running Lights, returns instinctively to “the feeling of place,” defining “Home” as “the place / never entirely left.” In line with this collection’s trajectory of desublimation, however, the poem deliberately rejects any center of transcendent meaning, subverting the grand utopian gesture of the poem’s title by representing the landscape atavistically as a source of vacancy:

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It makes no difference that both rivers flow into a sea and that the seas connect, so that you can say without mysticism it all comes to one or, as you would put it, it makes no difference.

This obliteration of categorical “difference” is linked to a recognition of how what is “there” exceeds the capacity of the creative intellect to encompass it, however “Human” it may be to want to “picture events / before one’s conception.” Again, the poem ends with an image of life under water, the sea fish “barely visible / beneath its surface,” and in Running Lights the natural world appears as through a glass darkly, with the seen and the unseen, the manifest and the latent, being held together in a sometimes violent tension.26 For Carlile, then, the spirit of place is associated not with an easy domesticity but with the compulsions of atavistic instinct, with things that cannot finally be gainsaid. As Tom Lutz has argued, the more familiar kinds of regional literature in the United States have tended to radiate an “embattled” quality, with the geographical area in question – Hamlin Garland’s Midwest, or Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Maine, or Sarah Orne Jewett’s “country of the pointed firs” – engaged in an implicit dialectic with the centripetal forces it was intent upon shutting out.27 Carlile, however, rejects both pastoral retreat and provincial boosterism; instead, he contemplates place as a kind of ontological boundary, a location that necessarily foregrounds the ironies of embodiment and the limitations of physical incarnation, rather than any abstractions of geopolitical determinism.28 It is appropriate that one of the poems in Running Lights, “Clear Symmetrical Furrows,” bears an epigraph from Gerard Manley Hopkins, for the Jesuit poet’s notions of “inscape,” of a compelling vital force immanent within natural objects, is not too dissimilar from Carlile’s attribution of an unfathomable power to oceans and rivers.29 On the face of it, of course, Hopkins’s religious ecstasies are poles apart from Carlile’s much more somber account of mental vacancy and corporeal attrition. In fact, however, these latter aspects of his work function as a kind of negative theology in the way that, as with Hopkins, they seek austerely to divest the mind of its conventional accoutrements and to pay a severe hommage instead

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to physical dimensions beyond the mind’s compass. Like Hopkins, Carlile eschews the sentiments of romanticism in favor of a more austere style where the domain of creation impacts upon, and all but fractures, the epistemological limits of the self. Carlile himself was baptized a Roman Catholic, and even if – as one of his partners later recalled – “his mother was as cynical about that as he was,” it is nevertheless partly this Hispanic Catholic inheritance that cuts against the grain of Pacific Northwest romanticism in Carlile’s writing.30 The Catholic Hopkins is also an oblique presence in Carlile’s third collection, Rain (1994), where the word “inscape” is used in “Metamorphosis and Marriage”: It wasn’t desertion we intended, more like the fawn that lies so still it becomes a part of the scene, the inscape of its fearful self a vast and dangerous country where loss of camouflage brings grief. 31

This is a kind of ironic, hollowed-out inscape, a hinge through which the “vast and dangerous country” has been transmuted from an external to a depressive psychological phenomenon. The epigraph to Part Two of Rain is taken from the German medieval theologian Meister Eckhart, while that to Part Three is from the Russian mystical philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, as if to testify to the “metaphysics” that the poet in “Winter Raven, Summer Crow” confesses to being “obsessed” by; he also mentions here “Thomas Aquinas,” whom we know Carlile has read, and “The Cloud of Unknowing.”32 These metaphysical inclinations lead the poet toward various meditations upon inherent deficiencies in human cognition, and indeed much of Rain broods mournfully about the absence of objects around which it circles. “For a Fisherman,” ostensibly a poem to the memory of Raymond Carver who died in 1988, laments not only the poet’s friend but also the absence of appropriate ritualistic structures through which to remember him. In this sense memory is represented in “For a Fisherman” as a “deceiver,” where the art of elegy turns paradoxically upon the double consciousness of a simultaneous appropriation and self-abnegation: And the word’s light still darker, graver with its idea of light,

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and of the soul, and memory, that deceiver we hook you with so we can let you go. 33

It is not difficult to see here the shade of the anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, with his austere contemplations on the limits of human consciousness, and in this sense Carlile uses the spirit of negative theology to hollow out the more effusive attachment to place that has become characteristic of American romantic writing. Another influence on this rhetoric of displacement would surely have been Elizabeth Bishop, whose famous elegy “One Art” turns upon a similar paradoxical cycle of mastery and loss: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”34 Rain is also reminiscent stylistically of Bishop in its deliberate use of incongruous similes – in “Off Port Townsend,” for example, “killer whales” are said to be “like a giant string quartet” – as well as in its gawky, macabre sense of humor.35 There are also in this collection more elaborate cultural references – to Ingmar Bergman, Eudora Welty, Humphrey Bogart, as well as to anti-war politics. In part, the appearance of these familiar landmarks of popular culture might be seen as a legacy of Carlile’s years as a university teacher of English, but they also reflect the general cultural influence during the 1980s of postmodernism, upon which the poet broods sardonically in “Camouflage”: There is big business in camouflage these days. We can be anything we want to be at last! A summer wood, an autumn wood, a big beige desert. We can even be dead grass, we can be snow. And let me not fail to mention our latest fashion. Night. Night is very popular these days. 36

In Rain, part of this “camouflage” involves a covering for emotional vulnerability. Running through this collection is an oscillation between the kind of sprightly artifice the poet associates with a world of fashion and a sense of soggy depression under gray Oregon skies. Another aspect of the camouflage, though, involves a constitutional lack of transparency, what the poet takes to be the fundamental impossibility of genealogical mapping. “Dead Reckoning” talks colloquially of the difficulties of any travel by water that moves beyond

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“distinguishing landmarks,” where the very act of “navigation, a way of plotting / the safest course from A to B” becomes hazardous.37 From this perspective, the conversational tone in many of the Rain poems might be said to represent its own form of camouflage, as Carlile’s language circles humorously over the savage immensities it chooses to alight upon only casually. “Winter Raven, Summer Crow” calls poetry “wise / and solitary”: Like a black bell it sometimes clonks high in its hemlock steeple before the long glide home to its roost. 38

This is the “black bell” that sounds repeatedly throughout Carlile’s poetry: a slow, sonorous knell whose fatalistic toll disturbs the picturesque landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. “In Oceans, In Rivers,” the first poem in Rain, is set in “May, at the peak of the spring / salmon run, with cherry trees in bloom,” but it deliberately swerves away from the kind of eulogies to his salmon country with which Roethke became famously associated.39 Instead, Carlile’s poem proceeds to chronicle how the fisherman-poet finds a suicide wrecking his pastoral idyll: A suicide once drifted toward my line, spinning slowly in the frigid river, his black humped back dipping and rising as from an unpurged habit of love. 40

Note that final “as from,” a simile that again betokens the displacement of representation into mere configuration. Not even meaning here can be pinned down, and this absence of explanation reinforces the poem’s sense of inherent alienation. This is an aesthetics of shock, which argues with the rhetoric of transcendentalism and dissolves consciousness into a cloud of unknowing. A medieval framework is evoked even more explicitly in a later uncollected poem, “Davanti a la Ruina,” which takes its title from Dante’s Inferno and describes a scene of modern “Pandemonium,” a grim world of “penance” where the “spiritually emaciated” find there is “Little we can do without God’s help.” This dark strain in

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Carlile’s writing leads him to be generally sardonic about what this poem calls the “Disneyland tunnel of light / and love” endemic to American popular culture.41 Instead, Carlile deliberately inverts the romantic invocation of a new land, an idea that has been so influential within the American poetic tradition from Whitman to Roethke, by recasting this landscape within an older mythological framework of hellish corruption. Similarly, “Talk Show,” published in 2000 and subtitled “For Bill Clinton,” takes issue not just with the hounding of Clinton for his sexual “infidelities,” but, more broadly, with “that oldest of lies, the presumption of innocence” upon which such social outrage was predicated.42 Eschewing what R. W. B. Lewis called “the American Adam,” that constitutional belief in the possibility of a new Eden which was to become part of the American body politic, Carlile’s poetry presents nature rather as a realm of “carnage,” where the pastoral idiom of utopian perfectionism is rigorously demystified.43 According to Hsuan L. Hsu, the “affect” of regional literature does not extend from within any particular domain but is, rather, “constructed from the outside in,” playing off particular forms of empathic recognition (and misrecognition) against wider forces of global displacement.44 In this light, Carlile might be said to express regionalism in a highly theoretical or reflexive manner, since his work aspires to encompass territory and objects that have always already been lost or abandoned. Like Carver, with whom he shared the experience of growing up in poor Washington milltowns, Carlile is sensitive to the volatility and instability of the Pacific Northwest region: the uncertainties of its genealogies and borders, the alternative nature of Indian tribal narratives, the deracinated mobility of many of its citizens. The peculiar quality of his poetry, however, involves endowing these combustible elements with a metaphysical dimension, so that the tensions between home and homelessness become indicative of much wider concerns. The last poem in Rain, “Train Whistles in the Wind and Rain,” takes these issues of mutability – the train travelling through the night, the eternal lost father – and remaps its charged emotional territory in cartographic terms, so that the Cuban father, epitomizing a past equally impossible to remember or to forget, is relocated in “some Havana of the heart.” The image joins together distant geography and emotional affinity, as if the Pacific Northwest were being remapped on a hemispheric scale, with the protected nature of the region finding itself crossed by alien cultural and metaphysical forces. In accordance with these lateral

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movements, the apparently rambling speaking voice within the poem and its extended enjambement create a self-fracturing idiom where positions between center and margin, memory and fantasy, are always susceptible of reversal. The intrusion into this poetic reverie of a rude vernacular – “I leaned off an overpass to stare down / a passing engine’s funnel and got an eyeful” – also serves to heighten this discourse of self-shattering, involving the systematic deconstruction of a romantic mirage which the poem both evokes and revokes in plaintive fashion.45 Carlile’s supermiposition of deliberately strange, mismatched metaphors upon Western landscapes thus endows his native country with surreal qualities, just as in the 2001 poem “Mary,” where, brooding on an old lover in the Midwest, the narrator finds his “sympathy . . . held up like the miles of mountains between us.”46 This is far from being the “vision of people integrated within the natural world” who are intent upon being “healed of some of the old dichotomies of body and spirit,” a New Age cliché that has become a critical commonplace in some of the more folksy writing about Pacific Northwest literature.47 Instead, by displacing cerebral qualities and projecting them upon the natural environment, Carlile effectively reimagines the Western landscape as a disjointed and fractious phenomenon, one where the fault line between mind and matter is always uncomfortably visible. In this sense, he has done for the Pacific Northwest what Elizabeth Bishop did for her preferred geographical locations – Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil – by subjecting the idea of place to a rigorous interrogation, wherein the anomalies of home and exile are systematically interwoven and where the state of displacement becomes a normative condition. The 1996 poem “Oregon” can be seen as an epitome of this quizzical geographical relativism, setting as it does the narrator’s long residence in this particular “place” against his intermittent longings for “a different landscape.” As with many of Carlile’s later poems, the mappings here relate to time as well as space, with “Oregon” recalling nostalgically the “ghosts” of Raymond Carver, William Stafford, his ex-wife, and others: Old age, as Larkin said, is having lighted rooms inside your head with people moving and conversing, ghosts, the friends who died or moved away, their letters fading, their faces forgotten, nothing left but words. . . 48

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The internal quotation is from Philip Larkin’s 1973 poem “The Old Fools,” and Carlile’s own idiom here, with its casual, colloquial enjambement, is in many ways actually more reminiscent of Larkin than of Bishop. This poem also shares with Larkin’s late work what it expresses as a “pure fear of death,” along with an elevation of loss and remorse into art forms. Unlike the determinedly secular English poet, however, Carlile’s landscape continues to resonate with a pointed ontological significance. He puns on the state of Oregon to imply the corporeal “state” of man – “We have / to dig to remember the unrest that brought us / to this state” – while toward the end of the poem he aligns his own rootedness in the Oregon country with salmon spawning in the river, who “would spend / the short remainder of their lives guarding that spot.”49 Whereas the trauma of Larkin’s “Old Fools” involves the increasing alienation of the narrator from his environment – “An air of baffled absence, trying to be there / Yet being here” – the irony of “Oregon,” by contrast, involves the poet’s increasing recognition of how he has become, almost despite himself, embodied and embedded within this landscape.50 It is a remarkable poem, one that bears comparison with Larkin’s great last elegies; but the power of “Oregon” arises from the way it ultimately dissociates itself from Larkin’s unmoored lament, resituating the curmudgeonly voice of “The Old Fools” within a more disciplined and systematic framework, a medieval sense of ontology from which the metaphysics have paradoxically been emptied out. If Carlile’s early work is torn between the influence of Roethke and Bishop, between a blithe romanticism and formalist disjunction, then his later work might be said equally to be torn between Larkin and Bishop, modulating as it does between elegiac ruminations and a more highly wrought sense of surreal dissociation, of the manifold incongruities involved in the mapping of mind on to matter. Back in 1966, when Bishop was teaching graduate writing classes to Carlile at the University of Washington, she surprised her young protégé by only giving him a C for one of her classes: “The quality is fine,” she told him. “The quantity is what concerns me. You have to work harder.” Though Carlile himself later attributed this apparent aberration to the “personal turmoil in Elizabeth’s life” at this time, there is a sense in which what she saw then has turned out to be true: Carlile has only produced three books of poetry since 1971, one per decade.51 But if his corpus is slim, it will be enduring. The genius of his art is to take the Roethke tradition of Pacific Northwest poetry and to stand it on its head, thereby reconfiguring mythic

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transcendentalism through an alternative perspective of negative theology. In this way, Carlile deploys a Cuban Catholic cultural framework to refract his familiar Western landscape of oceans and rivers through a radically disjunctive aesthetic framework, within which the black bell perpetually sounds its ominous echo. The geographical and theological crosscurrents at work in these poems exemplify the limitations of reading American narratives in flatly regional or national terms, while also suggesting ways in which hemispheric and other kinds of perspective can orient the compass of American literature in unexpected new directions. 2007 NOTES

1. Henry Harrison, ed., Oregon Poets: An Anthology of 50 Contemporaries (New York: Henry Harrison, 1935), iii. 2. Robin Skelton, ed., Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), xvi, xiv. 3. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 207. 4. Fountain and Brazeau, 209. 5. Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991), 66, my emphasis. Land of Unlikeness was in fact the title of the first book of poems by Bishop’s friend Robert Lowell, a collection which again plays self-consciously with ideas of similitude and dissimilitude. 6. Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1968), 251. 7. The photograph of Carlile on the cover of The Rough-Hewn Table was taken by the poet Sandra McPherson, who also studied with Elizabeth Bishop at the University of Washington and to whom Carlile was married between 1966 and 1985. 8. Henry Carlile, The Rough-Hewn Table: Poems ([Columbia]: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 49, 51, 28. 9. Carlile, Rough-Hewn Table, 29. 10. Carlile, Rough-Hewn Table, 30–31. 11. Carlile, Rough-Hewn Table, 25. 12. Carlile, Rough-Hewn Table, 50. 13. Carlile, Rough-Hewn Table, 59. 14. Williams first used this phrase in his 1944 poem “A Sort of a Song,” The Collected Later Poems, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1963), 7. 15. Carlile, Rough-Hewn Table, 61–62.

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16. Carlile, Rough-Hewn Table, 22–23. 17. Henry Carlile, Running Lights: Poems (Port Townsend, WA: Dragon Gate, 1981), 16, 15. 18. Carlile, Running Lights, 16. 19. Carlile, Running Lights, 30. 20. Carlile, Running Lights, 49. 21. Carlile, Running Lights, 29, 53. 22. Carlile, Running Lights, 33. 23. Henry Carlile, “Davanti a la Ruina,” Willow Springs 42 (June 1998), 27. 24. Carlile, Running Lights, 41. 25. Carlile, Running Lights, 26–27. 26. Carlile, Running Lights, 63–66. 27. Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 24. 28. On the limitations of “appeals to environmental determinism” in considerations of literary regionalism, see Michael Kowalewski, “Writing in Place: The New American Regionalism,” American Literary History 6.1 (Spring 1994), 183. 29. Carlile, Running Lights, 39. 30. Kim Fortuny, letter to author, 1 May 2007. Fortuny, a native of Oregon, was Carlile’s partner in the early 1990s. She subsequently published a critical study, Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel (University Press of Colorado, 2003), and now works at a university in Istanbul. 31. Henry Carlile, Rain: Poems (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994), 36. 32. Carlile, Rain, 23, 41, 52. “He had read Aquinas” (Fortuny). 33. Carlile, Rain, 73. 34. Bishop, Complete Poems, 178. 35. Carlile, Rain, 21. 36. Carlile, Rain, 17. 37. Carlile, Rain, 18. 38. Carlile, Rain, 57. 39. Carlile, Rain, 11. Roethke’s poem “The Rose,” for example, describes a scene “Where the salmon ease their way into the kelp beds, / And the sea rearranges itself among the small islands” (Collected Poems, 205). Carlile recalls Henry Reed fuming at the ubiquity of salmons in Pacific Northwest poetry (Fountain and Brazeau, 216). 40. Carlile, Rain, 11. 41. Carlile, “Davanti a la Ruina,” 27, 24, 25. 42. Henry Carlile, “Talk Show,” Southern Review 36.4 (Autumn 2000), 738. 43. Henry Carlile, “Nature,” Poetry 170.1 (April 1997), 8. This radically differentiates his version of the natural world from that expounded

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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in R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). Hsuan L. Hsu, “Literature and Regional Production,” American Literary History 17.1 (Spring 2005), 38. Carlile, Rain, 75, 77. Henry Carlile, “Mary,” Poetry 177.4 (February 2001), 312. Nicholas O’Connell, At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest Writers (Seattle: Madrona, 1987), x. Henry Carlile, “Oregon,” Crazyhorse 50 (Spring 1996), 86. Carlile, “Oregon,” 89, 85, 90. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989), 197. Fountain and Brazeau, 220–21.

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CHAPTER 14

THE SPRINGSTEEN AFFECT: RELIGION IN AMERICAN STUDIES

i While all anthropologists know that religion is a field of broad cultural significance too important to be left merely to theologians, it is not an area that has been addressed with any great theoretical subtlety or flexibility in American studies scholarship over the past fifty years. The greatest scholar of the American religious imagination was an atheist, Perry Miller, whose two synthetic volumes The New England Mind (1939 and 1953) deliberately take issue with the kind of social history that was more prevalent in the 1930s by choosing instead to emphasize “intellectual or religious history,” something Miller claimed explicitly in 1933 to be “as legitimate a field for research and speculation as that of economic and political.”1 It is, however, arguable that the study of religious expression in America has not moved on much since Miller’s day. There have, of course, been many treatments of American cultural politics from explicitly religious apologists: for instance, Mark A. Noll, a professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College in Illinois, postulates in America’s God (2002) a special relationship during the nineteenth century between “republicanism and religion,” with “the American exception” being uniquely placed to combine the political benefits linked to the land of the free with the kind of theological emphasis on personal freedom and moral responsibility that was being preached everywhere from church pulpits at this time.2 Yet such equations serve simply to reinforce the association of the United States with an unreconstructed exceptionalism by assuming a

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special providence in the way the New World threw off the Anglican yoke. The metaphorical contours of American exceptionalism have also been complicated by historical parallels between the Exodus myth and the political declaration of a Jewish state in 1948. Indeed, it is also arguable that the institution of Israel as a country predicated upon an exclusive religious identity was intellectually commensurate with a cultural moment in the United States, the middle years of the twentieth century, when the rhetoric of national providentialism was at its height. The American Studies Association was founded in 1951, three years after the establishment of Israel, and despite obvious differences in scale there was in both cases a similar theoretical investment in mythologies of deliverance. Hana Wirth-Nesher, for instance, has written interestingly of “the unique contribution of Jewish-American writing to the evolution of a transnational, multicultural American literary history,” arguing that the “key preoccupations of American Studies currently – transnationalism, translation, hybridity, diasporas and homelands – all characterize Jewish culture.” But despite the pertinacity of the particular examples she adduces, Wirth-Nesher’s larger theoretical claim surely represents a flat contradiction in terms, since it is one of the preconditions of transnationalism to disallow what is assumed to be “unique” or “exceptional” by substituting instead a mode of discursive circulation that would seek to identify patterns of convergence and divergence across different territorial formations.3 Much of the best work in recent years seeking to relate religious cultures to the larger impulse of American studies has taken a deliberately objectivist slant. In his preface to The American Jeremiad (1978), Sacvan Bercovitch cites anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s work on “the shaping influence of religious (or quasi-religious) symbols on society,” and Bercovitch’s own work powerfully traces the typological legacy of apocalypse and regeneration through both temporal and sacred history, what in The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) he calls “secularism and orthodoxy entwined.”4 In Puritan Origins, Bercovitch also argues for a transposition of metaphysical conceits into cultural archetypes: The same Puritan myth, differently adapted, encouraged Edwards to equate conversion, national commerce, and the treasures of a renovated earth, Franklin to record his rise to wealth as a moral vindication of the new nation, Cooper to submerge the historical drama of the frontier

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in the heroics of American nature, Thoreau to declare self-reliance an economic model of ‘the only true America’, Horatio Alger to extol conformity as an act of supreme individualism, and Melville, in Moby-Dick, to create an epic hero who represents in extremis both the claims of Romantic isolation and the thrust of industrial capitalism.5

Although Bercovitch’s thesis of religious transformation acknowledges the ubiquitous nature of religious legacies, one of its more vulnerable points is the way it lays stress on teleological continuity at the expense of synchronic complexity and thus potentially suppresses cultural difference. Bercovitch takes the work of Miller, one of his predecessors at Harvard, in a particular direction, focussing in Puritan Origins on Cotton Mather’s representation of John Winthrop as a belated type of the prophet Nehemiah, who led the Israelites back from Babylon to their promised land; but he places much less emphasis than did Miller on how (for example) medieval theological legacies helped to frame the New England theocracy in the seventeenth century. Other influential work linked to religion has focussed on the dissemination of theological into political forms, as in J. C. D. Clark’s analysis of how Protestant Dissent against the norms of Anglican hegemony became a formative factor in the American Revolution, or Ruth H. Bloch’s account of how a popular millennialism among evangelicals contributed to the revolutionary spirit of “secular utopianism.”6 David S. Reynolds has also considered the implications of theological frameworks for popular nineteenthcentury fiction, arguing that there was an increasingly “widespread tendency to embellish religion with diverting narrative,” with novelists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe (along with her Roman Catholic counterparts such as Jedediah Vincent Huntington) seeking to soften the austere logic of Church doctrines by filtering them through more accessible and agreeable scenes of human life.7 All of these approaches are grounded in what one might call a sociology of religion, where questions of spirit are deflected into anthropological or ritualistic forms. But this kind of work, although valuable, always runs the risk of appearing reductive, since it cannot necessarily account for the emotional power exerted by particular religious forms on the cultural imagination. To trace the historical legacy of the jeremiad is one thing, but to reconstruct the visceral and affective power of a poem such as Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom – purchased by one in thirty-five of the entire New England population in the 1660s, many of whom knew its 224 stanzas off

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by heart – is quite another.8 This is not, of course, to imply the potentially mesmerizing force of religious narratives can be properly explained only by those who happen to subscribe to the particular doctrines expressed therein. It is, though, to suggest that American literary and cultural criticism has, on the whole, not been especially adept at dealing with the kinds of religious dimensions that have been integral to the interior life of the country for over 400 years. As Will Herberg noted long ago, such academic discomfort with religion has arisen partly from the political dissociation of church from state, which has traditionally made American academics reluctant to foreground questions of religious belief in either their teaching or research, for fear that to do so might appear like an unwarranted intrusion into realms of private conscience considered institutionally to be off limits.9 Although of course it is hardly possible to teach literature and culture in any form without impacting upon questions of personal belief, university professors have generally become accustomed for good professional reasons to handling these issues in oblique and understated ways. Rather than being regarded merely as an impediment to the interrogation of religion, though, this separation of church and state should be seen as comprising in itself one of the most striking and unusual characteristics of the US body politic. It is a feature not obviously consistent with most aspects of the country’s political history, from the intolerant Puritan theocracies of New England in the seventeenth century to the Protestant fundamentalism of George W. Bush at the beginning of the twenty-first. Such an institutional dissociation of church from state was, however, shaped crucially by the particular historical idiosyncrasies of the time, the 1780s, when the US Constitution was being debated and framed. The Founding Fathers, cultural aristocrats and classical scholars almost to a man, were generally enamored of the instrumental religious model outlined in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), where religion was represented as a populist phenomenon from which the ruling classes chose privately to keep a wary distance. Despite what are often misleading assumptions about the exclusively Christian tenor of revolutionary America, Henry F. May has pointed out how Gibbon, like the skeptics Hume and Voltaire, was widely read in the colonies towards the end of the eighteenth century.10 Jefferson and Franklin were Deists who thought the Sermon on the Mount the only real highlight of Christ’s career, while Jefferson was always particularly stringent in his rejection of what he often called “priestcraft.”11

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American politicians did not, of course, choose to flaunt their skepticism, but they understood it to be part of their own superior wisdom. When Alexander Hamilton was asked why members of the Philadelphia convention had not recognized God in the country’s Constitution, he replied, somewhat disingenuously: “We forgot.”12 The point to emphasize here is how the US Constitution derived intellectually from an Enlightenment context of philosophical skepticism, within which the displacement of state-sponsored religion was taken to be a sign of philosophical modernity. While acknowledging how there is “no evidence whatsoever that its framers left God out with the intention of boldly repudiating the conventional political assumptions of their era,” Stephen Botein also observes how such disestablishment formed a stark contrast to contemporary events in Great Britain, where an effort to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, which excluded all non-Anglicans from public office, failed in 1790. The elder statesman who had been prime minister when Britain lost its American colonies, Lord North, sought at this time sharply to differentiate the two Atlantic countries by insisting that religious establishment in Britain “was necessary to the happiness of the people and the safety of the constitution.”13 With France also dividing church and state in 1795, in the wake of its political revolution, it is easy to understand how the question of disestablishment was seen during the last two decades of the eighteenth century not merely as an abstruse legal affair, but as a volatile and contentious issue in relation to national politics more generally. May notes how a “surprising number” of “ardent republicans in America” imitated French revolutionary practice by dating their letters “Ventöse” or “Brumaire” and by addressing each other as “citizen,” while Hamilton, in the The Federalist No. 69 (1788), drew a specific contrast between the king of England, who was “supreme head and Governor of the national church,” and the American president, who enjoyed “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.”14 By the turn of the nineteenth century, this kind of clear distinction had already become somewhat blurred. During the 1790s, American Federalist leaders became increasingly suspicious of postRevolutionary France: John Adams declared himself uncomfortable with a republic of thirty million atheists, while George Washington in his 1795 State of the Union address denounced Jacobin clubs as antiAmerican.15 In addition, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the evangelical revival had helped to shift political momentum away from the old Enlightenment philosophes towards symbols of a more popular democracy, and it is unlikely the US Constitution would

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have been ratified in its 1787 form had it been drawn up fifteen or twenty years later.16 Nevertheless, the force of disestablishment came in itself to carry considerable political resonance: a Philadelphia engraving of 1794 suggested a complicity between the despotisms of the British and Ottoman empires, aligning King George with Sultan Mustapha as exemplars of the kind of state-enforced religious tyranny from which the new United States was happily exempt.17 Algiers had been at war with the United States since July 1785, with some 700 Americans being held captive in Muslim states between 1785 and 1815, so this notion of religious fundamentalism as a potential threat to liberty would have been warmly received throughout the United States at this time.18 The consequences of all this were that religion in America came increasingly to be understood as the stuff of individual expression. Although of course churches in the United States remained powerful and influential bodies in themselves, the intellectual expression of religion was not mandated systematically by church or government; instead, religion in American culture came to manifest itself as an expressive phenomenon owing as much to ethnic identity as to conceptions of doctrinal truth, a sentiment based more upon aesthetics than metaphysics. Tocqueville in 1835 described “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty” as “two quite distinct ingredients which anywhere else have often ended in war but which Americans have succeeded somehow to meld together in wondrous harmony,” so that “these two inclinations, despite their apparent opposition, seem to walk in mutual agreement and support.”19 One reason for this peculiar balance, I would suggest, is this constitutional legacy of the dissociation of church and state, which served to deflect religion from systematic or authoritarian frameworks to imaginative or affective narratives. To many traditional church leaders, and certainly to the papacy, this was the source of American theological heterodoxy: its willingness to regard Church law as an optional rather than necessary phenomenon. In his 1849 essay “Catholic Secular Literature,” Orestes A. Brownson suggested that while in America various kinds of “ascetic literature” – “theological works” and “manuals of devotion” – were “rich, varied, and extensive,” the country’s “greatest want” was an absence of “secular culture in unison with the Christian spirit.” The model Brownson had at the back of his mind was the situation of churches in Europe, where the establishment of state religions helped to make “secular” literature as “natural” an expression of Christian faith as its “spiritual” counterpart. Yet even in the historical absence

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of such a symbiotic pattern, Brownson boldly advocated the dissemination in America of a “Christian secular culture” that would exceed the strictures of narrow theological doctrine, arguing that the Catholic church should make “use of poetry and music in celebrating her divine offices, or art in the construction and decoration of her altars and temples.”20 Just as Thomas J. Ferarro has recently described Italian American ethnicity in postmodern terms as a system of “feeling” and emotional affiliation rather than of sociological norms, so Brownson in the nineteenth century regarded American Catholicism as an imaginative response to “the law of nature” rather than as a mode of “formal dogmatizing” or a system grounded primarily upon “ascetic dissertations, exhortations, or admonitions.”21 Brownson of course attracted censure from Church leaders for his willingness to bring spiritual and secular categories into such apparently dangerous juxtaposition, but, like Emerson folding Puritanism into Transcendentalism, he was responding to an American environment where the absence of any civil ecclesiastical authority created an opportunity for religious expression to be conceptualized in new kinds of ways.22 In a context where subjectivist and objectivist elements of religion were creatively entangled, questions of faith could more easily become deflected into questions of imaginative art. ii To exemplify this theme of the epistemological instability of religion within an American cultural domain, I have chosen what may seem in itself like a heterodox subject, the music of Bruce Springsteen. The place of music in general within the academic world of American studies has always been somewhat problematic. Daniel A. Binder in 1989 claimed it was “a frequently missing component in American Studies,” blaming the “elitism and esotericism” of musicology for its tendency to ignore or trivialize a subject with wide cultural significance, while Lawrence Levine’s book Highbrow/Lowbrow, published a year earlier, similarly argued that the popular tone of American musical life had been institutionally repressed by a growing emphasis in the late nineteenth century on cultural hierarchies, whereby opera and other forms of classical music imported from Europe enjoyed greater artistic prestige and social status.23 Cecilia Tichi, who was president of the American Studies Association in the early 1990s, contributed to this debate on musical populism by publishing in 1994 an exposition of country music as synecdochic of the “nation” at large, whereby

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country music did indeed speak for the country.24 This nationalist emphasis has engendered a certain amount of critical sentimentalism around the subject of popular music in general, along with a tendency unproblematically to align it in various forms with the naturalized reproduction of an authentically American democratic idiom. Yet there are many different discursive languages associated with American music, some of them associated with ethnic or religious difference, others quite recondite and unfamiliar in their scope. The almost total absence of any consideration of classical music within the rubric of American studies is even more striking, but this subject would require a distinct level of technical expertise that most Americanists of a more generalist orientation tend to lack.25 One of the particular challenges rock music presents to critical analysis is the way it combines different artistic and cultural elements and cannot comfortably be reduced to any one of them. Christopher Ricks’s work on Bob Dylan, for example, is very perceptive on the intertextual aspects of Dylan’s lyrics, but it completely ignores the relation of the singer’s work to the performing arts and the tendency of rock stars to create their own charismatic weltanschauung; instead, Ricks scrutinizes Dylan within the terms of a New Critical analysis that would now seem anaemic in any intellectual context.26 Hardly more promising is the portentous effort among Springsteen’s fanbase to accredit the musician’s world simply by adducing parallels with the literary canon: “What Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner,” declares June Skinner Sawyers, “what Dublin was to James Joyce, Asbury Park is to Bruce Springsteen.”27 Such implicit deference to more established literary models is both demeaning and counterproductive, since it overlooks ways in which Springsteen’s project involves combining high and low art in a transgressive, potentially radical equation. Methodologically, Springsteen might be understood in one way as a classic case study for the interdisciplinary approach of American studies in the way he mines cultural formations at many different levels, drawing self-consciously on the historical writing of Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, the fiction of Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac and Philip Roth, the photography of Robert Frank, the cinema of John Ford and film noir.28 Yet the particular version of the national narrative that Springsteen inscribes relates only in oblique ways to traditional American studies paradigms, since the effect of his cultural synthesis is to refract US social models through an Italian American Catholic heritage. Indeed, the heterogeneous nature of Springsteen’s cultural influences might

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be seen effectively to mirror the hybrid condition of religious affect that his songs project, with the oscillation between representations of the sacred and the secular becoming analogous formally to transitions between multiple points of reference, a process that is endemic to interdisciplinary method. In this sense, it could be argued that Springsteen’s work draws upon the cathectic force of an alien religion in order to defamiliarize domestic American myths, to reconstitute the charms of American romance within an estranged metaphysical framework. Springsteen has been championed by the Italian American filmmaker Martin Scorsese as an exponent of artistic “epiphany,” a master of delivering his audience “to a new and unexpected place,” a term which of course carries its own specific Catholic resonance.29 The singer was born in New Jersey in 1949 to a predominantly IrishAmerican father (though with a Dutch family name) and an Italian American mother, whose maiden name was Adele Zerilli. He might thus in many ways be said to epitomize Crèvecoeur’s thesis about different ethnic groups in the New World being “melted into a new race of men,” with an official “religious indifference” allowing inhabitants of the United States to “worship the Divinity agreeably to their own peculiar ideas.”30 Springsteen has described himself in interviews as a lapsed ex-Catholic, yet his music is suffused in imagery redolent of a vernacular, vulgate version of Catholicism.31 This extends back all the way to his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ (1973), which features a song “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” through the yearning in Born to Run (1975) for “faith” in the “magic” of “redemption” – “Heaven’s waiting down on the tracks,” he sings in “Thunder Road” – through to the darker overtones of “My Father’s House” in Nebraska (1983), where the narrator laments how “our sins lie unatoned.” The record where this popular sacramentalism manifests itself at its most explicit is Tunnel of Love (1987), which seeks explicitly to negotiate the ontological boundaries of human limitation by focussing on the bounties of a domestic world sub specie aeternitatis. The way in which, on “Tougher than the Rest” and indeed throughout the album, the singer’s voice is carefully modulated against an ominous rhythm of drumbeat and organ epitomizes the way these songs deliberately orchestrate a dialectic between subjective expression and the intransigence of a larger fate. The track “All That Heaven Will Allow” exemplifies this theme by playing intertextually with Douglas Sirk’s film All That Heaven Allows (1955), a film that appropriates Thoreau’s Walden (described in the movie as the

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Rock Hudson character’s “Bible”) in order to critique the false versions of paradise concocted by country-club socialites in small-town America. But whereas Sirk ironically hollows out claims to social forms of utopia by substituting a more romantic version of human perfectionism, Springsteen’s song foregrounds a religious dimension that is, despite its title, conspicuously missing from Sirk’s famous film by the way his song specifically rejects notions of a glamorous early death or self-aggrandizement in favor of a commitment to quotidian incarnation: “’Cause I got something on my mind / That sets me straight and walkin’ proud / And I want all the time / All that heaven will allow.” Whereas Sirk’s film contemplates the scope of human potentiality, Springsteen’s song emphasizes human limitation; whereas Sirk’s film offers a negative account of social conformity, Springsteen’s song celebrates its virtues. Later on Tunnel of Love, “Cautious Man” extols marriage as a sacramental image of divine radiance: “At their bedside he brushed the hair from his wife’s face as the moon shone on her skin so white / Filling their room in the beauty of God’s fallen light.” It is true that the latter songs on this album speak more to a condition of alienation – “Brilliant Disguise” talks of being a “lonely pilgrim,” while “One Step Up” frames domestic disputes in terms of a withdrawal of grace: “Girl in white outside a church in June / But the church bells they ain’t ringin’.” Nevertheless, it is clear that Tunnel of Love is, as the priest and sociologist Andrew W. Greeley noted, centered metaphorically around aspects of the religious “liturgy,” no matter how this “Catholic meistersinger” may choose to position himself consciously in relation to such official doctrines. “Bruce Springsteen’s album Tunnel of Love may be a more important Catholic event in this country than the visit of Pope John Paul II,” concluded Greeley provocatively in 1988 (while insisting that he intended “no disrespect to the Pope or the importance of his trip”); and despite the turbulent priest’s characteristic hyperbole here, there is a sense in which he was acutely identifying aspects of religious engagement at a popular level that traditional analysis, both theological and critical, has tended to overlook.32 In his book The Catholicity of the Church, Jesuit scholar Avery Dulles cites Paul Tillich’s observation that the “weakness of Roman Catholicism” involves what Tillich called “a sacramental objectification and demonization of Christianity,” whose emphasis on transubstantiation “borders on the magical.”33 Leaving aside the issue of Tillich’s obvious ideological prejudice, this kind of “objectification” is precisely what we find in Springsteen’s weltanschauung: a consistent

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emphasis on Church goods that were denounced by Luther as empty commodities, such as blessings and miracles; a fear of abandonment by God; a yearning not so much for inward justification, but for the grace and fortune associated with divine redemption. Springsteen’s 2007 album was actually called Magic, with one of its songs, “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” being set on “Blessing Avenue,” later described as “magic street.” A subsequent track on this album, “I’ll Work For Your Love,” retells the crucifixion narrative in as lyrically explicit a fashion as one could possibly imagine: Pour me a drink Theresa In one of those glasses you dust off And I’ll watch the bones in your back Like the Stations of the Cross. ’Round your hair the sun lifts a halo At your lips a crown of thorns . . . The pages of Revelation Lie open in your empty eyes of blue . . . Your tears, they fill the rosary At your feet, my temple of bones Here in this perdition we go on and on Now our city of peace has crumbled Our book of faith’s been tossed And I’m just out here searchin’ For my own piece of the cross. . .

One of the curious things about Springsteen’s work in general is how easy it is to gloss over such lyrical complexity and philosophical pessimism, and to remember songs only by their more upbeat, reiterative choruses. Despite his exuberant stage personality, Springsteen’s musical world is grounded creatively upon compulsive repetition, a recursive and often nostalgic return to certain central motifs, often of a religious provenance. In this sense, his imaginative output altogether lacks the sense of numinous “otherness” that Giles Gunn, writing out of a Protestant cultural tradition, identified with Reinhold Niebuhr, R. P. Blackmur and what he called “the American imagination”; instead, true to his Catholic roots, Springsteen locates divinity as an immanent force within the world rather than as a transcendent impulse beyond it.34 His songs also noticeably lack the

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verbal complexity of Dylan’s work, and they are not at all susceptible to the kind of dextrous analysis to which Ricks subjected Dylan’s lyrics. Nor is his music oppositional and antagonistic in the way that much British pop music of the punk era tended to be. When he previewed The River on his radio program in 1980, the celebrated British disc jockey John Peel disparaged Springsteen’s record as “powerfully ordinary,” on the grounds that it altogether lacked the spirit of spiky insubordination that Peel prized. But, as Simon Frith observed in 1987, Springsteen’s music is at heart conservative, both formally and emotionally, and despite the political radicalism that becomes increasingly evident on later albums such as The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), the reverence on Springsteen’s part for both cultural tradition and what is domestically “ordinary” differentiates his work sharply from the iconoclasm of the British working-class movement.35 In The American Catholic Experience, Jay P. Dolan described the four “central traits” of American Catholicism as authority, sin, ritual and the miraculous, and all four of these are plentifully represented throughout Springsteen’s opus, where the consistent emphasis on heritage and ancestry – in songs such as “My Father’s House,” “Souls of the Departed,” “My Hometown,” and many others – testify to an imagination that is always recoiling purposefully upon the sources of its own formative energy.36 One of the strangest documents in the Springsteen archive is a “fan letter” written to him in February 1989 by the novelist Walker Percy, who had read Greeley’s article on Springsteen’s “Catholic imagination” that was published in the religious journal America a few months earlier. Congratulating Springsteen on his “superb career,” Percy suggested that “the two of us are rarities in our professions: you as a post-modern musician, I as a writer, a novelist and philosopher.” While he did not respond to Percy at the time, Springsteen wrote a few years later to Percy’s widow, saying he admired the “toughness and beauty” of Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer and that he had just begun reading his collection of essays The Message in the Bottle, with its elaborate consideration of Catholic Existentialist philosophers such as Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel, while on tour in Australia. In a subsequent interview with Percy’s nephew, Springsteen described more of his own literary influences, responding to Walker Percy’s original suggestion about their mutual admiration for Flannery O’Connor by saying he was “deep into O’Connor” just before recording Nebraska in 1982, and that he was also especially interested in the theories of “alienation” advanced in Percy’s

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writing.37 Indeed, as with Percy, part of Springsteen’s artistic project involves the dramatization of a conflict between the kinds of anomie inherent within a world of electronic media and, on the other hand, an existential faith that would attempt to affirm human qualities in the midst of these simulacra. Songs such as “Radio Nowhere,” from Magic, romantically describe a narrator “searchin’ for a world / with some soul” in a manner reminiscent of Percy’s alienated hero in The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling, whose human contacts in his home suburb of Gentilly, outside New Orleans, are similarly supplanted by celluloid replicas of the living flesh. “Radio Nowhere,” which was a hit single in Europe although not in the United States, again masks its thematic tensions by an internal dialectic that emphasizes the song’s upbeat chorus more than its downbeat lyrics, foregrounding a resolutely driving narrative voice rather than its more fatalistic language. This kind of discrepancy has long been characteristic of Springsteen’s music, and the duality was especially apparent on the best-selling album Born in the USA (1984). The iconic status of this record, from its self-evidently patriotic title to the red, white and blue motif of its cover – red cap, white T-shirt, blue jeans – helped to deliver seven top-ten hits, while also securing a commendation from Ronald Reagan who, during his presidential campaign of 1984, saluted Springsteen’s “message of hope” and said that “helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.” Although Springsteen chose quickly “to dissociate myself from the president’s kind words,” it is easy to see how such confusion arose: the title-track “Born in the USA,” despite its resonant patriotic chorus, focuses lyrically on a Vietnam veteran who loses his brother in the war and fruitlessly seeks help from the Department of Veterans Affairs, while “Glory Days,” despite having the tonal qualities of a musical anthem, ironically contemplates within its dramatic narrative the destructive power of nostalgia, in the form of a “big baseball player” looking back in a drunken haze on the “glory days” of his career in high school.38 A cynical appraisal of this kind of ambiguity might conclude that Springsteen is seeking simply to keep his production company happy and to boost the sales of his records, at the same time as not altogether forfeiting his sense of critical detachment; in any case, Frith is surely right in his analysis of the rock industry to say that Springsteen, “a millionaire who dresses as a worker,” has become adept at performing “authenticity” in the approved “post-modern” fashion.39 Yet there is also a sense in which these internal tensions between

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different narrative levels within Springsteen’s songs testify to a larger theatrical conflict between darkness and light, damnation and redemption. Throughout his career, the fatalistic “wages of sin” have tended to be counterpointed stylistically against the possibilities of an existential reaction against such incarceration, and his work flourishes on an implied dialectic between public and private personas. The Rising, expensively produced by CBS in 2002 and marketed as a response to 9/11, as though Springsteen enjoyed the status of some kind of national bard, epitomizes precisely this kind of doubleedged quality. The album was trailed by Springsteen’s performance on the “Tribute to Heroes” telethon broadcast on September 21, 2001 of “My City of Ruins” – a song actually written originally about Springsteen’s hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey, without any specific reference to 9/11 – and on The Rising there is a much greater emphasis musically on the role of choruses, rather than on the kind of complex dramatic monologues more prevalent on his earlier records. On The Rising, large abstract words such as “strength,” “faith,” “hope” and “love,” along with the phrase “rise up,” rotate in concentric, communitarian circles. But it is easy on first listening, or even on repeated listenings, to overlook various discordant elements here: for example, the reference to “Allah’s blessed rain” in “Worlds Apart,” the first verse of which is related by a female suicide bomber, with a chorus sung by the Pakistani qawwali singer Asif Ali and his group. Springsteen said of this track in an interview that he “was trying to look outside the United States and move the boundaries of the record in some fashion,” but, as Alan Light remarked acerbically, “it’s easy to miss that,” since the troubled couple described by the song could have “come straight off Tunnel of Love.”40 The disturbing nature of the narrative content, in other words, is deliberately glossed over by the more emollient nature of its musical form. What such incongruities ultimately suggest, however, are the manifold ways in which tuning in casually to the dynamic rhythms of Springsteen’s music – hearing a song on the radio, say – and attending more closely to his lyrics represent, for the listener, two very different and perhaps jarring kinds of experience. As a performer, Springsteen has always been expert in compressing different worlds into each other and in creating landscapes of montage and juxtaposition, where apparently disparate categories are superimposed meaningfully upon each other. Over recent years, he has explored various aspects of the folk protest tradition, notably in We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006), which pays

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homage to the anthem of the Civil Rights movement that was itself adapted from Charles Tindley’s 1903 spiritual, “I’ll Overcome Some Day.” This interest in folk song speaks to a desire not only to evade the more repressive aspects of corporate America but also to map out an alternative version of the patriotic agenda, one which, like popular music traditions such as gospel, spiritual and jazz, would take account explicitly of ethnic difference. Much of Springsteen’s originality thus consists in the way he seeks to revise hegemonic US narratives: for example, his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad plays intertextually with Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, with its title-track quoting directly the words of Steinbeck’s main character in the form of a dramatic monologue. But whereas Steinbeck tended in an oddly unhistorical fashion to occlude the presence on Californian farms of Mexican and Filipino migrant workers – presumably, as Michael Denning has suggested, in the interests of a “racial populism” that sought to maximize sympathy for these displaced Okies by suppressing any hint that such “noble white Americans” could have a mixed racial provenance – Springsteen, by contrast, foregrounds questions of ethnic and religious difference by rotating Steinbeck’s east-west journey on a north-south axis.41 Whereas Steinbeck’s narrative focuses upon a westward trek from Oklahoma to California, Springsteen’s album is located on the southern border zone between the United States and Mexico. “Sinaloa Cowboys” is set in a small Mexican town where migrant farm workers relocate “north” to California, while the narratives of “The Line” and “Balboa Park” take place on the San Diego-Tijuana border. The song “Across the Border” also attempts through the genre of romance a sentimental reconciliation across national and religious lines – “And may the saints’ blessing and grace / Carry me safely into your arms / There across the border” – but it testifies again to Springsteen’s deliberate attempt to resituate the patriotic aspects of Steinbeck’s communal art within a more ethnically diverse and religiously expansive idiom. iii As J. G. A. Pocock observed in 1975, it “is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it.”42 Yet in retrospect, the obvious intellectual flaw of “myth and symbol” approaches to American studies, which were prevalent from the 1950s through until

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the 1970s, lay in their innocent conflation of such mythic accounts of America with an explanation of the culture as a whole. This had the effect of erasing various aspects of difference – race, gender, ethnicity – in favor of the consolidation of homogeneous national archetypes. Greil Marcus’s attempt in 2006 to reconstitute what he calls “the reality of the myth,” and to recuperate exceptionalism as “an original and fundamental part of American identity,” leads him in The Shape of Things to Come to advocate what seems like a thoroughly anachronistic version of US popular culture: in his acknowledgments, Marcus thanks the “great teachers I had at Berkeley . . . forty years ago,” but his book represents merely an attempt to popularize academic notions prevalent in 1966, with obvious deleterious consequences.43 By contrast, one of the larger achievements of Springsteen’s work is to ironize the tradition of prophetic continuity that Marcus sees as extending unproblematically in America from John Winthrop through Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King. Springsteen complicates the assumptions of such a mythic formula by refracting it through alternative configurations of Italian ethnicity and Catholic sacramentalism, and in this sense he might be said to use religiosity to deconstruct the old ghosts of American exceptionalism. Some of the ambiguity surrounding his performative voice, oscillating as it does between full-throated endorsement of America and a more lyrical dissociation from it, reflects this kind of ethnic and religious double-bind. Despite their unwarranted assumptions of cultural homogeneity, one of the aspects of American culture to which the myth and symbol critics were highly attuned was its capacity to apotheosize empirical phenomena, to find space within American life and art for manifestations of the uncanny. Alan Trachtenberg, for example, wrote in 1965 of how Brooklyn Bridge came to exist in the minds of American poets and artists as a spiritual rather than a merely secular construction.44 Such morphing between different categories can be seen as part of a recognizably American democratic idiom going back as far as Emerson and Whitman; whereas nineteenth-century English writers such as Matthew Arnold tended to seek compensation for the loss of God by substituting art for religion, Whitman preferred boldly to apotheosize his whole culture, describing in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” how the steam-tugs and “living crowd” of New York City were irradiated by “fine centrifugal spokes of light.”45 In this sense, a blurring of boundaries between spiritual and secular might be considered historically as one of the dominant cultural characteristics

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of the United States, a paradoxical correlative in aesthetic terms to the political dissociation of church from state. Charles Taylor writes in A Secular Age of how “immigrant minorities . . . further their own entry into US society through a foregrounding of their religious identities,” and, like Tocqueville, he contrasts this kind of subjective expression with the more coercive institutional regimes in Europe, where such identities tend to operate as “factors of division.” In this way, Taylor links the voluntaristic dimension of US society, to which immigrants choose consciously to belong, with what he calls the “porous boundary” between the social and religious imaginary, where enchantment is a two-way street predicated upon a process of fluidity and reciprocity, rather than one organized through rigid lines of inclusion or exclusion.46 Mark C. Taylor has argued along similar lines that “religion is . . . most interesting where it is least obvious,” and he adduces Las Vegas as “the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth,” a site where the displacement of worldly affairs into a medium of “symbolic exchange” appears at its most luminous. Unlike “the nineteenth-century gesture of translating theology into philosophy and art,” Taylor contends, the virtual reality of Las Vegas exposes the ontological instability of relations between different levels of experience, displacing humanist centers of gravity and mixing them up in heterodox ways with alternative, hypothetical orders of being.47 Donna J. Haraway, though an avowed atheist who declares herself “opposed to Catholicism,” has likewise attributed to the “sacramentalism” of her inherited “Catholic sensibility” an “inability to separate the figural and the literal,” along with a temperamental “allergy to abstraction” in its more disembodied forms.48 For Haraway, as for Springsteen, theological orthodoxy is of less consequence than a meditation on the metamorphic impulse of humankind, its imaginative capacity to mutate between different mental and corporeal states. Religion thus emerges not as a source of philosophical truth but as an emblem of philosophical mobility, a sign of how an individual consciousness can be diffracted, biologically or technologically, within a larger, more enigmatic force field. From this perspective, Springsteen’s eclectic popular narratives, which similarly bring spiritual and secular into paratactic juxtaposition, might be seen as commensurate with the hybrid intellectual forms of American studies, which also bring different cultural formations into dialogue with each other. Just as American studies mixes high art with low culture, so Springsteen, like Haraway, transmutes the theology of Catholicism into its more expansive worldly

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correlatives. James T. Fisher, recalling his own academic experience at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey – “which, like many large, northern state universities, houses a Catholic undergraduate majority” – described Springsteen’s postmodernist “spiritual aesthetic” as involving a “Catholicism of the streets,” a proclivity towards “compassion, acceptance, and resignation.”49 This is both temperamentally and philosophically at odds with the angry voice of apocalypse and regeneration extolled as a national virtue in Bercovitch’s American Jeremiad and handed down, in attenuated form, in Greil Marcus’s work on prophecy. As with contemporary Italian American novelists Anthony Giardina, in whose texts ethnic identity becomes obscure and unmarked, or Rita Ciresi, who displaces her Italian Catholic sensibility into a psychoanalytic language of dreams, the power of Springsteen’s art lies precisely in the latency of its religious affect, and the ways in which he exploits his ethnic heritage to traduce conventional social and academic categories.50 By transliterating theology into aesthetics, and by drawing in a catholic (rather than Catholic) manner on cultural material from many different sources, Springsteen not only confounds intellectual purists but also, in an analogous measure, subverts the mythical claim that Puritanism forms the exclusive “origins of the American self.” No less than Alexander Hamilton, another sometime resident of New Jersey, Springsteen takes delight in the unmooring of religion from established social hierarchies and its reconstitution within realms of expressive play. By disregarding the strictures of theological orthodoxy, Springsteen’s music recalibrates religion in the American grain as a source of emotional power and affective design. 2009 NOTES

1. Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650: A Genetic Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), xi. See also Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). On Miller’s argument with economic historians of the 1930s, see Kenneth B. Murdock’s introduction to the posthumous collection of essays by Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), ix.

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2. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 53, 55. 3. Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), xii, 15. 4. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), xii, and The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 163. 5. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 185–86. 6. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5; Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 188. 7. David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1. 8. Richard Crowder, No Featherbed to Heaven: A Biography of Michael Wigglesworth, 1631–1705 ([East Lansing]: Michigan State University Press, 1962), 120. 9. Will Herberg, foreword, An American Dialogue: A Protestant Looks at Catholicism and a Catholic Looks at Protestantism, by Robert McAfee Brown and Gustave Weigel, SJ (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1960), 11. On the critical need of “confronting religion,” see also Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 69–82. Culler critiques “the strange conviction” that Americans have “a constitutional right to encounter nothing that ridicules or attacks their beliefs” (77). 10. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 226. For Gibbon’s contrast between “pagan civic virtue and Christian fanaticism,” see Oscar Kenshur, Dilemmas of Enlightenment: Studies in the Rhetoric and Logic of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 145. On the interest of the Founding Fathers in classical prototypes, see Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 11. See, for instance, Jefferson’s letter to Joseph Priestley, 21 March 1801, condemning “bigotry in Politics & Religion . . . the barbarians really flattered themselves they should even be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put everything into the hands of power & priestcraft.” Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 33 (17 Feb.–30 April 1801), ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 393. 12. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 330.

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13. Stephen Botein, “Religious Dimensions of the Early American State,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, ed., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Williamsburg, VA – Chapel Hill, NC: Institute of Early American History and Culture – University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 320, 318. 14. May, Enlightenment, 228; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, with Letters of “Brutus,” ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 340–41. 15. May, Enlightenment, 285; Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 (1954), trans. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965), 232. 16. Wood, Radicalism, 365–67. 17. Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31–32. 18. Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 107. 19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835–40), in Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 2003), 55. 20. Orestes A. Brownson, “Catholic Secular Literature” (1849), in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, vol. 19, ed. Henry F. Brownson (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 294, 300, 305, 301, 303. 21. Thomas J. Ferraro, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 3; Brownson, “Catholic Secular Literature,” 304, 300. 22. On Brownson’s conflicts with Archbishop John Hughes of New York and other members of the American Catholic hierarchy, see Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 64–65. 23. Daniel A. Binder, “Music: The Missing Component in American Studies,” American Studies Association, Toronto, 3 November 1989; Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 24. Cecilia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 1. 25. On the institutional status of classical music in the United States, see Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall (New York: Norton, 2005). 26. Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Vision of Sin (London: Viking Penguin, 2003). 27. June Skinner Sawyers, Tougher Than The Rest: 100 Best Bruce Springsteen Songs (New York: Omnibus Press, 2006), 13.

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28. Springsteen read Nevins and Commager’s A Short History of the United States and first “talked politics” at a concert in Paris in 1980; see Eric Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (1999), in June Skinner Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader (New York: Penguin, 2004), 371. Springsteen mentions Ellison and Frank (along with Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason) in Will Percy, “Rock and Read: Will Percy Interviews Bruce Springsteen” (1998), in Sawyers, ed., Racing, 305–20. For Springsteen’s reading of Philip Roth’s late fiction during The Rising tour, see Sawyers, Racing, 411. For the influence of Ford and film noir, especially on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), see Sawyer, Tougher, 48. For Springsteen and Kerouac, see James T. Fisher, “Clearing the Streets of the Catholic Lost Generation,” in Thomas J. Ferraro, ed., Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 89; Fisher here recalls going backstage after an early Springsteen concert “to a half-empty house at New Brunswick’s State Theater” and speaking with Springsteen about Kerouac. 29. Martin Scorsese, foreword, Racing in the Street, ed. Sawyers, xiii. 30. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), ed. Albert E. Stone (New York: Penguin, 1981), 70, 72–73. 31. Sawyers, Tougher, 46. 32. Andrew M. Greeley, “The Catholic Imagination of Bruce Springsteen,” America 158.5 (6 Feb. 1988), 110, 112. 33. Avery Dulles, S.J., The Catholicity of the Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 155. 34. Giles Gunn, The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 23, 201. See also Gabriel Daly, O.S.A., Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 35. Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (Oxford: Polity Press-Blackwell, 1988), 99. 36. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 221. 37. Percy, “Rock and Read,” 319–20, 317. 38. Alan Rauch, “Bruce Springsteen and the Dramatic Monologue,” American Studies 29.1 (Spring 1988), 29. 39. Frith, Music for Pleasure, 95, 97. 40. Alan Light, “The Missing,” New Yorker, 5 Aug. 2002, 79 41. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 267. 42. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 545.

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43. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (London: Faber, 2006), 307. 44. Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). 45. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 309. 46. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 524, 300. 47. Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1, 5, 31. 48. Donna J. Haraway, How Like A Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (New York: Routledge, 2000), 141, 107. 49. Fisher, “Clearing the Streets of the Catholic Lost Generation,” 88, 90, 100. 50. See, for example, Anthony Giardina, White Guys (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), and Rita Ciresi, Sometimes I Dream in Italian (New York: Delacorte Press, 2000).

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INDEX

Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán, 80 abjection, 209, 221, 225–6 abolitionism, 239, 240, 243 The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (Matthiessen), 141 Acker, Kathy, 14, 109–10, 113, 123–4, 130–1 Blood and Guts in High School, 129 Don Quixote, 127–8 Great Expectations, 124–5, 132 In Memoriam to Identity, 124, 125, 126–7 Pussy, King of the Pirates, 130, 131 Adams, John, 289 The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (Coover), 120 Aesthetic Movement, 159 African Americans, 53–4, 206, 207, 215, 217, 218, 226, 235–47, 270–1 African Association for the Study of the Americas, 94 Against Nature (Huysmans), 159 The Age of Innocence (Scorsese), 255–6, 262–4 The Age of Innocence (Wharton), 262, 263, 264 Agee, James, 33 Aguirre, Adalberto, 94 AIDS, 218 Åkerman, Sune, 69

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Albert, Octavia V. Rogers, 242–3 Alger, Horatio, 173, 182, 286 Ali, Asif, 298 alienation Britain/US, 23, 57 Carlile, 278 Carter, 113 Coover, 115, 117, 120 Dreiser, 169 James, H., 144 Kincaid, 220 Larkin, 281 Matthiessen, 148 Springsteen, 294, 296–7 see also self-alienation All that Heaven Allows (Sirk), 293–4 allegory American studies as, 79 colonialism, 206 cultural history, 197 Deleuze and Guattari, 153 of displacement, 272 Dreiser, 167 national, 54, 61 slave narratives, 239 and surrealism, 225 USA as, 56 Allitt, Patrick F., 7, 8 Altieri, Charles, 225 The Ambassadors (James, H.), 141, 153

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America (journal), 296 The American Catholic Experience (Dolan), 296 American Civil War, 146, 209, 238, 241–2, 244, 245 American Historical Review, 9, 68, 74 The American Jeremiad (Bercovitch), 286, 302 American Literary History, 92 American Literature, 49, 92 American Literature and Social Change (Spindler), 25 American Quarterly, 12, 19–20, 39, 66–7, 91 American Renaissance (Matthiessen), 27, 32, 141–2, 146–7, 163–4 American Revolution, 50, 127, 190, 208 American Studies, 77, 88–90 American Studies Association, 20, 66, 145, 286 American Studies Association of Korea, 84 American Studies Association of South Africa, 94 American Studies in Europe, 69 American Studies in Scandinavia, 69, 76 American Studies International, 90–1 An American Tragedy (Dreiser), 170–1, 174–7 Americaís God (Noll), 285 Amerika Kenkyu, 87 Amerikastudien, 70 Among Flowers (Kincaid), 220–1, 225 Amoros, José Antonio Alvarez, 77 Annan, Gabriele, 264 Annenberg Center for Communication, 98 Annie John (Kincaid), 210–11, 215–16 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 152–3, 154 antislavery movement, 206, 241 see also abolitionism anti-slavery writing, 209, 240–1 Appadurai, Arjun, 108, 109, 160 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 224, 225 Apter, Emily, 214 Aquinas, Thomas, 276

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Arac, Jonathan, 146, 148 area studies model, 20–1, 48, 51, 55, 97, 101, 112–13, 132–3 Arnold, Matthew, 300 Ashbridge, Elizabeth, 190 Ashcroft, Bill, 202, 203 At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid), 217 Atlantic Studies, 93–4 Atlantis journal, 70, 77 Auden, W. H., 40, 144, 146, 148, 274 Australasian Journal of American Studies, 75, 82–4, 97 Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, 82–4 autobiography, 249–50 Autobiography (Franklin), 184 The Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid), 218 Azam, Kousar J., 82 BAAS Postgraduate Journal, 98 Bach, J. S., 187 Baguley, David, 170 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 68, 239 Baldick, Chris, 35 Balibar, Etienne, 86, 208 Ballard, J. G., 124 Balsam, Martin, 259 Balzac, Honoré de, 156 Bancroft, George, 243–4 Banks, Joseph, 191 Bartas, Guillaume du, 186 Barthelme, Donald, 250–1 Bassnett, Susan, 74 Bastian, Peter, 97 Bataille, Georges, 125, 127 Baudrillard, Jean, 30, 59, 124, 137n67 Bay Psalm Book, 186 Bayley, John, 1 Baym, Nina, 67 Beat writing, 54 Beattie, Keith, 83 Beckett, Samuel, 45, 46, 120, 122, 219 Bellow, Saul, 56, 77, 143, 163–4, 249 Beneath the American Renaissance (Reynolds, D. S.), 142 Benjamin, Walter, 37, 222, 225

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Index Bercovitch, Sacvan, 25–6, 37, 83, 181–2, 286–7, 302 Berger, John, 53, 57–8 Berkhofer, Robert F., 31 Berland, Lauren, 147 Berlin Wall, fall of, 112, 204 Bernard, Louise, 218 Bernstein, Elmer, 259 Berryman, John, 164, 185 Bersani, Leo, 45–6, 129, 231n76 Bérubé, Michael, 210 Beveridge, William, 111 Beyond Ethnicity (Sollors), 249 Bhabha, Homi, 34, 37 Binder, Daniel A., 291 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 38 Bishop, Elizabeth, 268–9, 277, 280, 281, 282n7 The Black Atlantic (Gilroy), 9, 35, 93, 132 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 223 Blackmur, R. P., 155, 295 Blair, Tony, 133 Blake, William, 268 Bloch, Ruth H., 287 Blood and Guts in High School (Acker), 129 Bloom, Allan, 143 Blyton, Enid, 211 Boehmer, Elleke, 203, 204 Boelhower, William, 134n15, 186 Bollinger, Laurel, 154 Boorstin, Daniel, 183 borders school, 207–8 Borges, Jorge Luis, 114, 216 Born in the USA (Springsteen), 297 Born to Run (Springsteen), 293 Boston News-Letter, 195 Botein, Stephen, 289 boundary 2, 91 Bourdieu, Pierre, 29 Bourne, Randolph, 173 Bowlby, Rachel, 25, 34 Boyer, Ernest L., 10 Bradbury, Malcolm, 21, 24, 56 Bradstreet, Anne, 185–6 Brazil, 82, 95, 240

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Breton, André, 223 The Bridge (Crane), 2 Bridges, Harry, 143 Britain, 50, 111, 125–7, 206, 290 British Americanists, 5, 21–5, 26, 34–8, 40, 46, 72–3 British Association for American Studies, 21, 73, 98 Brooklyn Bridge, 31–2, 300 Brooklyn Bridge (Trachtenberg), 31–2 Brooks, Van Wyck, 32, 33, 144 Brown, Christopher, 206 Brown, John, 244 Brown, Richard D., 194 Brown, William Wells, 240–1 Brownson, Orestes A., 290–1, 304n22 The Bulwark (Dreiser), 168 Burke, Edmund, 27 Burnard, Trevor, 83 Burroughs, William, 124 Bush, Frank, 99 Bush, George W., 53–63, 83, 288 Butler, Judith, 209, 211 Byles, Mather, 192, 193 Byrd, William II, 193–4, 195 Callaghan, James, 112 Calvinism, 187, 197 Cambridge University Press, 3, 6, 7, 86 Campbell, Joseph, 270 Canada, 81, 92 Canadian Review of American Studies, 81 Cape Fear (Scorsese), 255–6, 258–62 Cape Fear (Thompson, J. L.), 258, 259, 260, 261–2, 265 capitalism, 25, 154 Carafiol, Peter, 4 Caribbean, 212, 214, 217 Carlile, Henry, 14, 268–82 Catholicism, 276, 282 Cuban father, 272–6, 279 works: “Butchering Crabs”, 274; “Camouflage”, 277; “Changes”, 270–1; “Clear Symmetrical Furrows”, 275–6; “Davanti a la Ruina”, 278–9; “Dead

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310 ]

Transnationalism in Practice

Carlile, Henry (cont.) Reckoning”, 277–8; “Dodo”, 274; “Flood Control”, 273; “For a Fisherman”, 276–7; “For a Friend Drowned Off Grays Harbor”, 273–4; “Georgic from Henry’s Lake”, 269, 271–2; “Giant Ocean Sunfish”, 273; “Havana Blues”, 273; “In Oceans, In Rivers”, 278; “In the More Recent Past”, 274; “The Job”, 271; “Listening to Beethoven on the Oregon Coast”, 274; “Mary”, 280; “Metamorphosis and Marriage”, 276; “My Father”, 272–3; “Narcissus: A Notebook”, 272; “The New City”, 274–5; “The Nightmares”, 272; “Off Port Townsend”, 277; “Oregon”, 280–1; “Owl”, 269–70; “Porcupine”, 270; Rain, 276–82; The Rough-Hewn Table, 269–72; Running Lights, 272–6; “Talk Show”, 279; “Three Birds”, 269; “Three Monuments”, 270; “Train Whistles in the Wind and Rain”, 279; “The Turkey-Quill Nymph”, 269; “Winter Raven, Summer Crow”, 276, 278 Carnegie, Andrew, 165 Carroll, Lewis, 212, 215–16 Carter, Angela, 113 Carter, Jimmy, 110–11 Carver, Raymond, 276, 279, 280, 305n28 Casillo, Robert, 260 Castillo, Susan P., 185, 197–8 Castle, Terry, 194 Castronovo, Russ, 241 The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 54 Catholic Converts (Allitt), 7 The Catholic Counterculture in America (Fisher), 7 Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America (Allitt), 7 Catholicism 2, 6, 235–45, 248–65 American Civil War, 245

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American culture, 7–8 Carlile, 276, 282 Democratic Party, 241 Dreiser, 172 Italian Americans, 292–3 LaFarge, 236–7 Madonna, 254 and Protestantism, 261 racist allegations, 237 scholars, 7, 8, 9 slavery, 240, 242–3 Springsteen, 292–9, 301–2 The Catholicity of the Church (Dulles), 294 Cecil, David Lord, 1, 36 Centre National du Livre, 71 Cercles, 98 Cervantes, Miguel de, 114, 128, 130 Césaire, Aimé, 222–3 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 204, 222 Chambers, Iain, 36 Chandler, Raymond, 40 Chaplin, Charlie, 169 Chase, Richard, 22 Chénetier, Marc, 69 Chesterfield, Philip, 191 Cheyfitz, Eric, 147, 148 Chicago Daily Tribune, 165 Churchill, Winston, 111, 119 cinema, 12, 21–2, 40, 169, 174–5, 255–65, 292 Ciresi, Rita, 302 Citizen Kane (Welles), 143 civil rights, 53–4, 208 Clark, J. C. D., 182, 287 Clark, Robert, 25 The Clash, 22 class, 54, 56–7 , 61, 125–6, 164 Clifford, James, 34, 224 Clinton, Bill, 55, 132, 210, 279 Clotel (Brown, W. W.), 240–1 The Cloud of Unknowing, 276, 277 Coetzee, J. M., 211 cognitive mapping, 61–2, 65n29 Cold War, 54, 112, 116, 127, 149 Cole, Thomas, 40 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 108, 146, 184, 198

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Index colonial America, 95–6, 181–98, 203, 207 Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Boehmer), 203 Columbus, Christopher, 210, 213 Commager, Henry Steele, 292, 305n28 Common Sense (Paine), 196 Comparative American Studies, 75–6 Conquest of Mexico (Prescott), 219 Conrad, Peter, 23 Constitution (of USA), 191, 288–9 consumerism, 22, 25, 34 continuities school, 182, 187 The Contrast (Tyler, R.), 183, 197 Cooper, James Fenimore, 181 Coover, Robert, 14, 109–10, 113–14 The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 120 Gerald’s Party, 115 Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears, 121 Pinocchio in Venice, 114 Pricksongs & Descants, 114, 121–2 The Public Burning, 114, 115–20, 123, 131 Spanking the Maid, 122 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., 121 Cosgrove, Denis, 220 Cowan, Michael, 27 Crandall, Jordan, 96 Crane, Hart, 1–3, 4, 39, 147 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 37, 208, 293 Crisis, 237 The Crucible (Miller), 118 Crystal, David, 87 Culler, Jonathan, 20, 38, 49, 80, 303n9 A Cultural History of the American Revolution, 31–2 cultural materialism, 36, 38 cultural studies, 8, 35, 37–8, 255, 291–2 The Culture of Redemption (Bersani), 45, 46 Cunliffe, Marcus, 23–4 Czechoslovakia, 148–9

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D’Agostino, Peter R., 9 Dante Alighieri, 278 Davis, David Brion, 238, 240 De Niro, Robert, 256, 258, 259–60 De Prospo, R. C., 182 Decker, Jeffrey Louis, 29 Declaration of Independence, 183, 196, 208 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 288 deconstruction, 4, 45, 125, 136n46, 196, 235–6, 238, 280 defamiliarization, 39–40, 172–3, 175, 265, 293 Defoe, Daniel, 166, 175, 211 Delaney, Lucy A., 239–40 Delbanco, Andrew, 172, 262 Deleuze, Gilles, 152–3, 154 Democratic Party, 241 Den Hollander, Ari N. J., 69 Denning, Michael, 20, 25, 38, 112, 142–3, 148, 299 Derrida, Jacques, 26–7, 28, 35, 125, 196, 236 deterritorialization, 152, 153, 157 Dewey, John, 74 Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 92 Dickens, Charles, 126, 128 Dickinson, Emily, 79, 182 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 222–3 Dolan, Jay P., 296 Don Quixote (Acker), 127–8 Donnell, Alison, 213 Dooley, Thomas A., 8 Dos Passos, John, 176, 177 “double consciousness” (Du Bois), 237 Douglass, Frederick, 35 Doyle, Brian, 36 Dreiser, Theodore, 163–77 aesthetic realism, 166 alienation, 169 allegory, 167 clown qualities, 169 consumerism, 25, 34 defamiliarization, 172–3, 175 ethnicity, 146, 163, 167, 173

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Transnationalism in Practice

Frye on, 170 and James, H. compared, 177 journalistic style, 163, 164, 165–6, 170, 174–5 Matthiessen on, 141, 145–6, 163–4, 171–2 mysticism, 168 realism, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169 Trilling on, 145–6, 163, 164, 172 works: An American Tragedy, 170–1, 174–7; The Bulwark, 168; The Financier, 166; Jennie Gerhardt, 168, 172–3; Laughing Gas, 168; Newspaper Days, 165–6; Sister Carrie, 164, 165, 166–9, 171, 177; The Stoic, 166, 168; The Titan, 166; Trilogy of Desire, 166, 173–4 Du Bois, W. E. B., 237, 238 Dulles, Avery, 294 Durgnat, Raymond, 21–2 Durkheim, Emile, 8, 120–1 Dutch cultural influences, 185 Dutoit, Ulysse, 45–6 Dylan, Bob, 292, 296 Early American Studies, 95–6 Eby, Clare Virginia, 166 Eckhart, Meister, 276 Edelman, Lee, 147 Edwards, Jonathan, 181, 187–8, 197 Eisenhower, Dwight, 116, 119 Eliade, Mircea, 8 Eliot, John, 186 Eliot, T. S., 33, 39, 144, 146 Elizabeth II, 119 Elkins, Stanley M, 239 Ellis, Havelock, 154 Ellis, R. J., 12, 66 Ellison, Ralph, 55–6, 292, 305n28 Ellmann, Richard, 2–3 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 25, 184, 188, 189, 239, 244, 300 Emerson Society Quarterly, 92 emigration histories, 23 The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin), 203 England, 35, 36, 125–7 see also Britain

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English language, 87 Enlightenment Boorstin on, 183 cosmopolitanism, 224–5 ethics, 196 Founding Fathers, 244 freedom, 205, 222 philosophes, 289 as term, 108 Erickson, Charlotte, 23 essentialism, 248, 270 estrangement, 39, 110, 113, 154 see also alienation ethical values, 2–3, 35–6, 46, 196, 259 Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants (Ferraro), 7 ethnicities-in-relation, 251 ethnicity cultural, 248 Dreiser, 163, 173 GoodFellas, 256 politics, 250 postmodernism, 249 religion, 265 Scorsese, 257, 261 self-consciousness, 248–9 Sollors, 235, 249 style, 251 theories of, 7, 8, 83 see also Italian Americans European Association for American Studies, 47, 68–70, 97 European English Messenger, 47 European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (Reynolds, L.), 142 Evans, Walker, 33 exceptionalism and anti-exceptionalism, 190 comparativists, 40 cultural identity, 20 erosion of, 54 Exodus myth, 285–6 Kennedy, 24 lampooned, 116–17 Muthyala, 86

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Index Noll, 285 and postcolonialism, 207 revival of, 244, 300 Silverman, 32 Tyrrell, 9, 84 West, 30 exile, 39, 109–10, 131, 144, 210, 280 false consciousness, 8, 238 Fanon, Frantz, 204, 222–4 Farrell, James T., 6–7, 169 Faulkner, William, 39, 176 The Federalist, 289 Fender, Stephen, 23 Ferraro, Thomas J., 7, 8, 291 Fictions of Capital (Godden), 25 Fielding, Henry, 194 Fields, Barbara, 50 Fields, W. C., 119 Fiering, Norman, 188 Filipiak, Andrzej, 78–9 Film noir, 292, 305n28 The Financier (Dreiser), 166 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 2 Fisher, James T., 7, 8, 29, 30, 302, 305n28 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 74–5, 87 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 39, 174 Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest (Skelton), 267–8 Fliegelman, Jay, 183 Fluck, Winfried, 90 Foe (Coetzee), 211 Foerster, Norman, 146 Ford, Ford Madox, 175 Ford, Gerald R., 110 Ford, John, 51, 292, 305n28 Fortuny, Kim, 283n30 49th Parallel, 98 Foucault, Michel, 28, 29, 30–1, 38, 45, 48, 73, 125, 127, 209 Founding Fathers, 206, 244, 288–9, 302 Fox, George, 189 Foxe, John, 248 France, 71–2, 125, 289 Franchot, Jenny, 7–8

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Francke, Lizzie, 264 Frank, Robert, 292, 305n28 Frank, Thomas, 61 Frank, Waldo, 32 Franklin, Benjamin, 194, 196 as Deist, 288 post-Revolution, 191 rags-to-riches, 173, 181 satires, 196 and Taylor, E., 182 works: “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America”, 186; “Rules by Which a Great Empire”, 184 Franklin, James, 195 Frau-Meigs, Divina, 71–2 Fredrickson, George, 94 freedom American, 20–2, 127, 208, 222, 226–7, 238, 242 American studies, 54–6, 61 democratic, 29, 30, 55 Enlightenment, 205, 222 Kincaid, 226–7 land of, 6 moral, 124 personal, 28, 37–8, 126, 285 slavery, 116, 206, 207, 239–41 see also liberty freedom of expression, 71 freedom of information, 5, 13–14, 126, 195 French, Warren, 89 French Caribbean, 217 French Poets and Novelists (James, H.), 156 Freud, Sigmund, 154, 161n7 Friedman, Thomas, 58, 59 Frith, Simon, 296, 297 From the Darkness Cometh the Light (Delaney), 239–40 From the Heart of Europe (Matthiessen), 147, 149 Frye, Northrop, 170 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 240–1 Fukuyama, Francis, 112 fundamentalism, 31, 58, 187–9, 192, 288, 290

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Transnationalism in Practice

Galinsky, Hans, 89 Gallop, Jane, 28–9 Garber, Marjorie, 148 Gardner, Helen, 36 Garland, Hamlin, 275 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 37, 216 Gauguin, Paul, 216 Geertz, Clifford, 286 Gemme, Paola, 90 gender, 22, 25–7, 67, 127, 146–7, 157–8, 217, 237–8, 300 Genet, Jean, 147 Georgian Journal of American Studies, 72 Gerald’s Party (Coover), 115 Gerdil, Cardinal, 240 Germany, 70–1, 92, 93–4 The Ghost of Tom Joad (Springsteen), 296, 299 Giardina, Anthony, 302 Gibbon, Edward, 191, 288, 303n10 Gilroy, Paul, 9, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 73, 75, 93, 102n15, 132, 133 Gleason, Philip, 19 global history studies, 67, 100 globalization American Revolution, 208 American studies journals, 88–90, 95, 101 as Americanization, 60 and colonialism, 204 Cosgrove, 220 cultural flows, 109 James, H., 152, 160, 162n18 postcolonial, 225–6 technologies, 58, 111 Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears (Coover), 121 Godden, Richard, 25 Godwin, William, 191 The Golden Bowl (James, H.), 141, 153 GoodFellas (Scorsese), 255–7 Goodman, David, 75–6, 84 Gordon, Mary, 250 Gould, Eliga H., 208 Graff, Gerald, 47 Gramsci, Antonio, 29–30 Gray, Richard, 24

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Great Awakening, 189, 195 Great Depression, 33, 142 Great Expectations (Acker), 124–5, 132 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 174 Greeley, Andew W., 294, 296–7 Green, Joseph, 192, 193 Greenaway, Peter, 127 Greene, Jack P., 190 Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ (Springsteen), 293 Griffiths, Gareth, 202, 203 Gross, Robert A., 82 Guattari, Félix, 152–3, 154 Guilbert, Georges-Claude, 98 Gunn, Giles, 20, 27, 142, 184, 295 Gunn, Thom, 40 Gura, Philip F., 182 Gustafson, Thomas, 196 Habermas, Jürgen, 13–14, 197, 248, 249, 253 Hall, Stuart, 38 Hamilton, Alexander (1715–56), 191, 192 Hamilton, Alexander (1755–1804), 288–9, 302 Handel, George Frideric, 197 Hannerz, Ulf, 45 Hanson, Kenneth O., 268 Haraway, Donna J., 301 Hardt, Michael, 62, 100–1 Hardy, Thomas, 169–70 Harris, Benjamin, 195 Harrison, Henry, 267 Hartz, Louis, 8, 54 Harvard Medical Journal, 13 Harvey, David, 55, 221–2 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 83, 129 Hayles, N. Katherine, 99 Heath, Edward, 111 Heideking, Jürgen, 96 Heimert, Alan, 189 Hemingway, Ernest, 39, 164 Henry, Patrick, 228n22 Herberg, Will, 235–6, 288 Herbert, George, 122 Herrmann, Bernard, 259 Highbrow/Lowbrow (Levine), 291

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Index History, Ideology and Myth (Clark, R.), 25 History of England (Hume), 191 History of the Dividing Line (Byrd), 193–4 Hobbes, Thomas, 128, 188 Hoberman, J., 259 Hoby, Thomas, 144 Hockney, David, 40 Hofstadter, Richard, 145 Holland, Philemon, 144 Hollinger, David, 206, 208 Homefront (Crandall), 96 homoeroticism, 3, 157, 158 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 275–6 Hornung, Alfred, 93 The House of Bondage (Albert, O. V. R.), 242–3 Howe, Irving, 55 Howells, William Dean, 173 Hsu, Hsuan L., 279 Hudson, Rock, 294 Hugo, Richard, 268 Hume, David, 191, 288 Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 79–80 Hungary, 79–81 Hunt, Tristram, 57 Huntington, Jedediah Vincent, 287 Huntington, Samuel, 79 Hurd, Douglas, 126 Hurston, Zora Neale, 217 Hutcheon, Linda, 254 Hutner, Gordon, 92 Huysmans, J.-K., 159 Ickstadt, Heinz, 47, 48–9, 100 idealism, 35, 142, 156, 181, 184, 241–2 identity, 20, 182–3, 235–6, 248, 249, 253 identity politics, 60–1, 235, 250 Ideology and Classic American Literature (Jehlen and Bercovitch), 25 Ikenberry, G. John, 58–9 In Memoriam to Identity (Acker), 124, 125, 126–7 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 242

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independence, political, 181, 182, 184 India, 84–5 Indian Journal of American Studies, 85 Indo-American Center of International Studies, 85 information society, 58, 59, 98–9 inscape, 275, 276 The Institution of the Eucharist (Tiepolo), 251, 252, 253 International American Studies Association, 12, 66 International Monetary Fund, 110, 112 Internet, 13–14, 23, 97–9, 126 intertextuality, 173, 193, 211 Intimate Journals (Gauguin), 216 Invisible Man (Ellison), 55–6 Iowa Review, 113 Irish Journal of American Studies, 70, 72 Israel, 286 Italian Americans, 256–7, 291, 292–3 Italian Americans, 248–9 Italy, 92 Itinerarium (Hamilton), 192 Jablonski, John, 80–1 Jackson, Jesse, 215 Jacobin clubs, 289 Jacobs, Harriet, 242 Jacques, Martin, 56 Jamaica, 112–13 James, C. L. R., 149 James, Henry, 25, 152, 163 and Dreiser, 175, 177 homoeroticism, 157, 158 Matthiessen on, 141, 144, 145 placing people, 153–4, 156 on Victorian novels, 48 works: The Ambassadors, 141, 153; “Art of Fiction”, 156; French Poets and Novelists, 156; The Golden Bowl, 141, 153; “In the Cage”, 153; “Middlemarch”, 161n10; The Sacred Fount, 152–61; The Wings of the Dove, 141, 153 James, William, 154, 161n7

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Transnationalism in Practice

Jameson, Fredric, 20–1, 61–2, 65n29, 108, 110 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 206–7 Japan, 87, 95, 106n74 Japanese Journal of American Studies, 87–8, 97 Jay, Gregory, 250 Jefferson, Thomas, 183–4, 191, 196, 206, 219, 288, 303n11 Jehlen, Myra, 25, 26, 237–8 Jennie Gerhardt (Dreiser), 168, 172–3 La Jetée (Marker), 216 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 141, 165, 275 Jewish state, 286 Jewish-American writing, 145, 249, 286 Jewison, Norman, 249 jouissance, 128–9 Journal of American and Canadian Studies, 95 Journal of American Studies, 9, 20, 70, 72–3 Journal of American Studies (Korea), 84 Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 71, 73–4, 97 Journal of Asian American Studies, 92–3 Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 100 A Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe), 166 Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 96 Journal of Visual Culture, 96 journalism, 57, 64–6, 85, 174, 195 see also New Journalism Joyce, James, 2, 39, 119–20, 155, 175–6, 216 Just Looking (Bowlby), 25, 34 Kaiser, David, 68 Kammen, Michael, 227n7 Kaplan, Amy, 68, 160, 167 Karaganis, Joseph, 174 Katzman, David M., 90 Kazanjian, David, 208 Kazin, Alfred, 144–5, 147–8, 164 Keller, Karl, 188 Kennedy, Paul, 24 Kenner, Hugh, 4

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Kerber, Linda, 68 Kerouac, Jack, 7, 54, 89, 292, 305n28 Kerry, John, 59 Key to the Language of America (Williams, R.), 187 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 242 Keynesianism, 111, 112 Kincaid, Jamaica, 209–27 abjection, 221, 225–6 African American politics, 215 in New Yorker, 210 postcolonialism, 209–10, 214–15, 225–6 slavery, 218 surrealism, 216–17 works: Among Flowers, 220–1, 225; Annie John, 210–11, 215–16; At the Bottom of the River, 217; The Autobiography of My Mother, 218; “In History”, 213; “The Little Revenge from the Periphery”, 226; Lucy, 216, 217–18; Mr. Potter, 219; My Brother, 218; My Garden (Book), 219–20; “On Seeing England for the First Time”, 213–14; A Small Place, 211–12, 213, 215–16, 224 King, Martin Luther, 300 King, Richard, 11, 20 Kinloch, Hector, 84 Kizer, Carolyn, 268 Knight, Sarah Kemble, 192 Know-Nothing party, 241 Kolodny, Annette, 27 Korea, 84 Kristeva, Julia, 39–40, 44–5, 125, 209, 238, 251 Kroes, Rob, 56–7 La Motta, Jake, 260 Lacan, Jacques, 29, 45, 125 LaFarge, John, 236–7, 238 Lang, Fritz, 40 Lange, Jessica, 258, 261 Langer, William, 82 Larkin, Philip, 280, 281 The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese), 264

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Index Latin Americanists, 82, 83, 104n36 Laughing Gas (Dreiser), 168 Lauter, Paul, 27, 28, 164 Lawrence, D. H., 37, 141 Lawson-Peebles, Robert, 24 Lazarus, Neil, 203–4 Leavis, F. R., 35–6 Lee, Arthur, 191 Lehan, Richard, 175 Leiris, Michel, 223 Lemelin, Bernard, 82 Lentricchia, Frank, 7 Lenz, Guenter H., 27, 70 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans), 33 Letterature d’America, 92 Leviathan (Hobbes), 128 Levinas, Emmanuel, 79 Levine, Lawrence, 291 Levy, Jim, 83 Lewis, C. S., 1, 36 Lewis, Juliette, 258–9 Lewis, R. W. B., 22, 279 liberal imagination, 54–5, 163 The Liberal Imagination (Trilling), 163 liberalism, 8, 38, 54–5, 56, 63, 188, 206, 224–5, 250, 253, 260 see also neoliberalism liberation theory, 204, 240 liberty, 182, 183–4, 203, 222, 241, 290 see also freedom Lien, Pei-te, 92 Light, Alan, 298 Lincoln, Abraham, 241, 242, 245, 300 Literary Culture and US Imperialism (Rowe), 205 Literary History of the United States (Spiller), 142 The Literatures of Colonial America (Castillo and Schweitzer), 185, 197–8 Locke, John, 187, 188, 203 Lodge, David, 5 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 142, 147 Looka Yonder! (Webster), 25 Louisiana, 242–3 Love’s Knowledge (Nussbaum), 160

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Lowe, Lisa, 92 Lowell, James Russell, 142 Lucy (Kincaid), 216, 217–18 Lukács, György, 25 Lundberg, David, 191 Luther, Martin, 295 Lutz, Tom, 275 Lyotard, Jean-François, 30–1 MacCabe, Colin, 4 McCarthy era, 5, 118, 126 McClintock, Anne, 205 McCormack, Jerusha Hull, 68 McFadden, Margaret, 67 McHale, Brian, 119 McInerney, Jay, 239 MacInnes, Colin, 21 Mackenzie, Manfred, 83 McManus, Sheila, 81–2 McRobbie, Angela, 38 Maddox, Lucy, 67 Madonna, 248, 253–5 Madonna of 115th Street (Orsi), 7 Madonnarama, 255 Magic (Springsteen), 295, 297 Magnalia Christi Americana (Mather), 188–9 Mailer, Norman, 25, 56, 166, 175 Main Currents in American Thought (Parrington), 33 Major, John, 5, 126, 133 Making of the English Working Class (Thompson, E. P.), 25 Maltby, Paul, 122–3 Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), 176 Manichaean dichotomy, 223, 239, 240 manifest destiny, 40, 244–5 Mankiw, N. Gregory, 59–60 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 12, 124 Marcel, Gabriel, 296 Marcus, Greil, 300, 302 Marcuse, Herbert, 124 Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (James, C. L. R.), 149 Maritain, Jacques, 245, 296 Mark Twain Studies journal, 87 Marker, Chris, 216 Márquez, Gabriel García, 114

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Transnationalism in Practice

Martinez, Rubén, 94 Marx, Karl, 24, 25, 26, 224, 238 Marx, Leo, 11, 22, 89, 143–4 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 305n28 Mather, Cotton, 143, 186, 188–9, 197, 287 Matthiessen, F. O., 12, 33, 35, 141–9, 184 on Dreiser, 141, 145–6, 163–4, 168, 171–2, 174 on Eliot, 146 as gay man, 147 on James, 144, 145, 152 works: The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 141; American Renaissance, 27, 32, 141–2, 146–7, 163–4; From the Heart of Europe, 147, 149; Oxford Book of American Verse, 146, 147; Translation: An Elizabethan Art, 144 Mauk, David, 76 May, Elaine Tyler, 74, 289 May, Henry F., 191, 288 Medovoi, Leerom, 54, 55 Mekons, 130 Melville, Herman, 46, 142, 286–7 Mencken, H. L., 173 Mergen, Bernard, 90, 91 Merton, Thomas, 7 MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies), 93 Messbarger, Paul R., 7 Methodism, 242–3 Mexico–US border, 45, 299 Michaels, Walter Benn, 165 microhistorians, 108 Mignolo, Walter D., 205 Miller, Arthur, 118 Miller, Henry, 147 Miller, Perry, 182, 187, 197, 285, 287 Miller, Stephen Paul, 110 Million Man march, 215 Mills, C. Wright, 83 Milton, John, 210–11 Minneapolis-St. Paul, 76 Minnesota, University of, 39 Mitchum, Robert, 258, 259 Miyoshi, Masao, 75

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Moby-Dick (Melville), 46, 286–7 modernism, 4, 33, 39, 143, 155, 175–6, 216–19 Mongolia, 91 Montaigne, Michel de, 192 Montesquieu, Charles de S., 44 Montgomery, Maureen, 5, 70 Monthly Review, 147–8 Moonstruck (Jewison), 249 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 204 Morgan, Kenneth O., 111 Morrison, Toni, 207, 226 Morse, Donald E., 80 The Moviegoer (Percy), 297 Mr. Potter (Kincaid), 219 Mulvey, Christopher, 23 Mumford, Lewis, 33 Murdoch, Iris, 1 Murray, Charles Shaar, 129 Murray, John Courtney, 237 Murrin, John M., 182 music, 12, 187, 253–5, 274, 291–9 Muthyala, John, 86–7, 90 My Brother (Kincaid), 218 My Garden (Book) (Kincaid), 219–20 myth and symbol, 4, 19–20, 22, 32, 40n1, 206–7, 226, 236, 244, 279, 299–300, 302 Acker, 128, 131 Coover, 117, 120, 123, 131 Matthiessen, 146, 148, 149 Springsteen, 293 Nabokov, Vladimir, 40 NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement), 59, 132 Nanzan Review of American Studies, 95 The Nation, 145 National Health Service, 13, 111 national identity, 26–7, 35, 183, 203 National Intelligence Council, 60 nationalism, 120, 206–7, 291–2, 297 Nations Without Nationalism (Kristeva), 44–5 Native Americans, 184–5, 186–7, 190, 205, 207, 268, 270 naturalist fiction, 170

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Index Nebraska (Springsteen), 293, 296 Negri, Antonio, 62, 100–1 Negritude, 223 neoliberalism, 55, 60, 62 Neset, Arne, 77 Nevins, Allan, 292, 305n28 The New American Studies (Fisher), 29 New Americanists, 40n1, 91–2, 146, 207 New Criticism, 147, 164, 292 The New England Courant, 195 The New England Mind (Miller, P.), 285 new historicists, 91, 108 New Journalism, 174–5 New Republic, 262 New Society, 113 New York, New York (Scorsese), 258 New York Intellectuals, 55, 147 New York Review of Books, 264 New York Times, 117, 164 New Yorker, 210, 261, 262 Newfield, Christopher, 147 Newman, Judie, 211 Newspaper Days (Dreiser), 165–6 Newton, Isaac, 192 Nice Work (Lodge), 5 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 145, 148, 295 9/11 effects, 58–9, 63, 132 nineteen-sixties, 108, 110 Nixon, Richard, 55, 110, 115–16, 117, 118 Noll, Mark, A., 285 Nolte, Nick, 258, 261 Nordic Association for American Studies, 76 Norris, Frank, 24 North, Frederick, 289 North, Thomas, 144 North Staffordshire Polytechnic, 6, 12 Norton anthologies, 4 nostalgia, 32, 108, 133 Notoji, Masako, 70 Nottingham, University of, 10, 11 Nussbaum, Martha, 65n22, 160 Nye, David E., 78 O’Brien, Michael, 24 O’Brien, Susie, 207, 219

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O’Connor, Flannery, 260, 296 Offenburger, Andrew, 94 oil shortages, 110, 111 On Native Grounds (Kazin), 144–5, 164 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez), 114 Onishi, Naoki, 88 online journals, 97–9 Onuf, Peter S., 208 Op Cit: Uma Revista de Estudos AngloAmericanos, 70 Oregon Poets (Harrison), 267 Oregon, 6–7, 9–10, 14, 267–70, 274, 277, 280–1 Oriental thought, 49–50, 268 Orsi, Robert A., 7 Ouspensky, P. D., 276 outsourcing, 59 Oxford Book of American Verse (Matthiessen), 146, 147 Oxford, University of, 1–3, 4, 11, 36, 141, 189 Pacific Northwest, 267–8, 270, 278–9 Pacific Northwest American Studies Association, 9, 51 Paglia, Camille, 7, 248–9, 253–4 Pahl, Jon, 197 Paine, Thomas, 196 Parker, Theodore, 238–9, 243–4 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 33, 184, 197 Parry, Benita, 204 Partisan Review, 143, 145 Pease, Donald E., 40n1, 80 Peck, Gregory, 258, 259 Peel, John, 296 Pennington, James C. W., 239 Percy, Walker, 296–7 performativity, 248 personal computers, 111 see also Internet Petrey, Sandy, 169 Phillips, Caryl, 5 photography, 33, 292 Pinocchio in Venice (Coover), 114

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Transnationalism in Practice

Pinsky, Robert, 59, 65n22 Pizer, Donald, 176 PMLA, 68, 74 Pocock, J. G. A., 299 Podhoretz, Norman, 143 Poems on Various Subjects (Wheatley), 193 Poirier, Richard, 177 Poland, 77–9 Polanski, Roman, 40 Polish Journal for American Studies, 70 Pope, Alexander, 193 popular culture, 22–3, 242, 253–5, 277, 279, 291–9 Popular Front, 33, 142–3, 148, 163 pornography, 81, 120, 122 Porter, Carolyn, 25 Portland State University, 4, 6, 9–10, 14, 268 positions: east asia cultures critique, 93 postcolonialism, 45, 202–3, 208–9, 214–5, 222 globalization, 225–6 Kincaid, 212, 215 Marxist theory, 224 queer theory, 218 universals, 204–5 US culture, 206 “The Postmodern Condition Today” (Lyotard), 30 postmodernism, 143, 249 post-national era, 61–2, 97 post-structuralism, 33–4, 125, 235–6 Pothier, Jacques, 72 Potter, David M., 241 Pound, Ezra, 39 Powell’s bookstore, 6–7 power, 29, 48, 50–1, 207, 209, 211, 214 Pratt, Mary Louise, 45 predestination, 187, 197 Presbyterianism, 189 Prescott, William H., 219 Price, Richard, 50 Pricksongs & Descants (Coover), 114, 121–2 print culture, 195, 196 Prospects, 86, 104n44 Protestantism, 239–40, 261, 288

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The Public Burning (Coover), 114, 115–20, 123, 131 public/private spheres, 183, 197 Pultar, Gönu˝l, 74 punk aesthetic, 22, 129 The Puritan Origins (Bercovitch), 181, 286–7 Puritanism, 128, 187, 189, 194, 239, 242, 302 Pussy, King of the Pirates (Acker), 130, 131 Quakers, 28, 189–90, 240, 241 queer theory, 147, 151n19, 218, 221 Rabbit at Rest (Updike), 11 race, 50, 51, 67, 94–5, 162n13, 203, 214, 237–8, 270–1 Radway, Janice, 68, 78 Rafael, Vicente L., 11, 53–4 Rafferty, Terence, 261 Raging Bull (Scorsese), 256, 260, 264 Rahv, Philip, 55 Rain (Carlile), 276–82 Ramsay, James, 206 Reagan, Ronald, 6, 30, 111, 123–4, 125–6, 129, 131, 132, 297 realism aesthetic, 166 and capitalism, 145 Dreiser, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169 magical, 114, 216 moral, 1, 173 social, 33, 169 reception theory, 51 Reed, Henry, 268 Reform Acts, 133 The Reinterpretation of American Literature (Foerster), 146 religion American studies, 28, 30, 285–91, 299–302 Culler, 303n9 cultural studies, 8–9, 251 disestablishment, 289–90 ethnicity, 172, 248–51, 265 as false consciousness, 8 freedom, 285

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Index Kristeva, 238 liberty, 290 parody of, 122, 128, 253–4, 266n12 philosophy, 301 slavery, 238–9 subjectivist/objectivist, 291 see also Catholicism, fundamentalism, Methodism, Quakers Representations, 29, 91 Republican Party, 57, 58, 61, 241 republicanism, 196 Resnais, Alain, 45, 46 Review of English Studies, 36 Revue Française d’Études Américaines, 70–1 Reynolds, David S., 142, 287 Reynolds, Larry, 142 Riberio, Fernando Rosa, 67, 95 Rich, Adrienne, 185 Richardson, Samuel, 194 Ricks, Christopher, 292, 296 Riggio, Thomas P., 173 Rikkyo American Studies, 95 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Kennedy), 24 The Rising (Springsteen), 298 The Rites of Assent (Bercovitch), 37 The River (Springsteen), 296 Rivista annuale, 70 Roads to Rome (Franchot), 7–8 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 216 Robbins, Bruce, 63, 204 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 275 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 211 rock music, 12, 21, 22, 291–9, 301–2 Roethke, Theodore, 268–9, 270, 271, 274, 279, 281 Rogers, Will, 59 Rolvaag, Ole, 173 Romanski, Philippe, 98 Romanticism, 40, 108, 183, 184, 267 in Carlile, 274, 276, 277, 281 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 115, 117, 118, 119 Ross, Andrew, 5, 38, 85 Ross, Peter, 83 Roth, Philip, 292, 305n28

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Rothermere American Institute, 3, 11–12 Rothko, Mark, 45, 46 The Rough-Hewn Table (Carlile), 269–72 Rowe, John Carlos, 152, 205 Royal Society, 189–90 Rumsfeld, Donald, 63 Running Lights (Carlile), 272–6 Russian Formalists, 39 Ryan, Alan, 3 The Sacred Fount (James, H.), 152, 153–61 Sade, Marquis de, 125–6, 129, 130 Sadowski-Smith, Claudia, 132 Safundi, 94–5, 97 Sage publishing, 96 Said, Edward, 9, 63 Saito, Makoto, 87–8 Salinger, J. D., 54, 55 Saltz, David, 99 Salzman, Jack, 86 Sandeen, Eric, 6 Santayana, George, 166 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 222, 223 Sawyers, June Skinner, 292, 305n28 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), 83, 129 Schama, Simon, 57 Scholes, Robert, 120 Schueller, Malini Johar, 207–8 Schulz, Bruno, 217 Schwartz, Delmore, 56 Schweitzer, Ivy, 185, 197–8 science, 68, 189–90 Scorsese, Martin, 12, 249, 257, 261, 293 The Age of Innocence, 255–6, 262–4 Cape Fear, 255–6, 258–62 GoodFellas, 255–7 The Last Temptation of Christ, 264 New York, New York, 258 Raging Bull, 256, 260, 264 Taxi Driver, 263 A Secular Age (Taylor, C.), 301 Seiler, Cotton, 89 self-alienation, 39, 109, 131

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Transnationalism in Practice

Semiotext(e) journal, 125 Seven Arts journal, 32–3 Seward, William H., 238 Seyhan, Azade, 109, 131, 174 The Shape of Things to Come (Marcus), 300 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 146 Sherman, Stuart P., 166, 167, 173 Shields, David S., 182, 184–5, 192, 197–8 Shklovsky, Viktor, 39 Shohat, Ella, 251 Silverman, Kenneth, 31–2, 182 Simic, Charles, 40 Simmons, Diane, 216–17 Simmons, Ernest, 149 Simpson, David, 40, 244 Sinn Féin, 5, 126 Sirk, Douglas, 293–4 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 164, 165, 166–9, 171, 177 Skelton, Robin, 267–8 Sklar, Robert, 32 slave narratives, 239–40, 242–3 slavery, 35, 93, 218, 238–9, 240, 242–3 freedom, 54, 116, 206, 207, 239–41 Slotkin, Richard, 25 A Small Place (Kincaid), 211–12, 213, 215–16, 224 Smith, Adam, 60 Smith, Henry Nash, 22, 32 Smith, John, 186 Smith, Neil, 55 Smith, Patti, 124 Snow, C. P., 31 Sobchack, Vivian, 249 social justice, 78–9, 203–4 social realism, 33, 169 Sollors, Werner, 7, 37, 74, 75, 235–6, 249–50 South Africa, 94–5, 112 South Atlantic Quarterly, 7 Southern, David W., 236–7 South-West Christian Advocate, 242–3 Spanking the Maid (Coover), 122 Spear, Bruce, 10 Spencer, Benjamin T., 183 Spengemann, William C., 4, 37, 182

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Spiller, Robert, 142 Spindler, Michael, 25 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 15, 207 Springsteen, Bruce, 12, 292, 293–302, 294–7 Born in the USA, 297 Born to Run, 293 The Ghost of Tom Joad, 296, 299 Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, 293 Magic, 295, 297 Nebraska, 293, 296 The Rising, 298 The River, 296 Tunnel of Love, 293, 294 We Shall Overcome, 298–9 Stafford, William, 268, 280 Star-Spangled Banner, Order of, 241 Steele, Ian K., 189 Stein, Gertrude, 39, 218, 219 Steinbeck, John, 33, 299 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 218 The Stoic (Dreiser), 166, 168 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 209, 242, 287 Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva), 39–40 Strychacz, Thomas, 175 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), 141 Studs Lonigan (Farrell), 6 subalternity, 110, 207 Sumida, Stephen, 92 Sundquist, Eric J., 239 surrealism Acker, 127 allegory, 225 Altieri, 225 Benjamin, 222, 225 British academics, 21 Carlile, 272, 280, 281 Césaire, 222–3 Crane, 2 Greenaway, 127 James, 156 Kincaid, 216–17 Madonna, 255 postcolonialism, 223–5 Tiepolo, 253

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Index Swift, Jonathan, 184 Sydney, University of, 14–15 Symbiosis, 95 Tallack, Douglas, 42n22 Tatler, 193 Tatsumi, Takayuki, 87 Taxi Driver (Scorsese), 263 Taylor, Charles, 301 Taylor, Edward, 7, 182, 188 Taylor, Helen, 24 Taylor, Mark C., 301 Tennent, Gilbert, 189 Terence, 193 Test and Corporation Acts, 289 Thatcher, Margaret, 4–5, 23, 112, 123–4, 125, 132 theology, 122, 188, 197, 237, 287, 301–2 Aquinas, 276, 283n32 Catholic, 245, 260, 261, 264, 291 negative theology, 51, 275, 277, 282 Protestant, 243, 295 There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Gilroy), 35 Thompson, E. P., 25 Thompson, J. Lee, 258, 259, 260, 261 Thoreau, Henry David, 142, 181, 244, 245, 293–4 Thorpe, Adam, 5 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari), 153 Tichi, Cecilia, 291 Tiepolo, Domenico, 251–3 Tiffin, Helen, 202, 203 Tillich, Paul, 294–5 Time, 85 Tindley, Charles, 299 Tintner, Adeline R., 157 The Titan (Dreiser), 166 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 37, 290, 301 Tompkins, Jane, 27 Trachtenberg, Alan, 31–2, 142, 300 TransatlanticA, 72, 97 Transcendentalism, 26–7, 187, 239, 243 Transit Circle, 82 translation, 144, 186–7, 190

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Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Matthiessen), 144 travel narratives, 23, 192 Trilling, Lionel, 54–5, 145–6, 163, 164, 172 Tsolmon, Davaagyn, 90–1 Tucker, Bruce, 70 Tuesday Club, 191 Tunnel of Love (Springsteen), 293, 294 Turkey, 71, 73–4, 86–7 Tyler, Royall, 183, 197 Tyrrell, Ian, 9, 83, 84, 104n36 Ulysses (Joyce), 175–6 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 209 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (Coover), 121 Updike, John, 11, 262, 263, 264 Vectors, 98–100 Veysey, Laurence, 37 Vicious, Sid, 257 Vietnam war, 110 Village Voice, 127 violence, 128–9, 147, 214 Virgin Land (Smith), 32 visual arts, 12, 251–2 Volksgeist, 44 Voltaire, 191, 288 Von Sternberg, Josef, 40 Vorda, Allan, 216 Wagner, Richard, 159 Wagoner, David, 268 Walden (Thoreau), 293–4 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 60 Walsh, Richard, 118 Walz, Robin, 232n88 Warhol, Andy, 12, 255 Warner, Michael, 196 Warsaw University Press, 77–8 Washington, Booker T., 237 Washington, George, 206, 289 Washington Post, 59 WASP conventions, 259, 261, 262 Watergate scandal, 110, 115–16 Watkins, Susan, 55 Watts, Edward, 204

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Transnationalism in Practice

We Shall Overcome (Springsteen), 298–9 Weaver, Mike, 3 Webster, Duncan, 25 Webster, Noah, 196 Weigel, Gustave, 237 Wellenreuther, Hermann, 96 Welles, Orson, 142–3 Wenders, Wim, 40 Wesley, John, 122, 238 West, Cornel, 27, 28, 30–1 Wharton, Edith, 262, 263, 264 Wheatley, Phillis, 193 White, Hayden, 213 Whitefield, George, 189 Whitman, Walt, 30, 33, 141, 142, 189, 267, 279, 300 Whyte, William, 89 Wigglesworth, Michael, 287 Wilford, Hugh, 143, 147 William and Mary Quarterly, 83 Williams, Charles, 36 Williams, Raymond, 36, 145 Williams, Roger, 187 Williams, William Carlos, 33, 272 Wills, Garry, 242 Wilson, Harold, 111–12 Wilson, Rob, 23, 49–50 The Wings of the Dove (James, H.), 141, 153

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Winters, Yvor, 2 Winther, Per, 76–7 Winthrop, John, 56, 128, 143, 287, 300 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 286 Wise, Gene, 20, 27 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 245 Wolfe, Thomas, 33, 175 Woolf, Virginia, 216, 219 Woolman, John, 190 Wordsworth, William, 108, 211 A World Elsewhere (Poirier), 177 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 222, 223–4 Wright, Richard, 35 Writing Outside the Nation (Seyhan), 109, 131 Yeats, W. B., 10, 268 Yetman, Norman R., 90 Yingling, Thomas, 147 Yom Kippur War, 110 Young, Robert J. C., 203–4 youth culture, 22 Zape˛dowska, Magdalena, 79 Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 92 Zola, Émile, 145, 170 Zuckerman, Michael, 96

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